reference
collection
book
iqfi? Jansas city
1301 /public library
''' kansascity,
missoun
NEW DIRECTIONS TEN
NEW DIRECTIONS TEN
Edited by James Laughlin
This is the tenth volume in the series of New
Directions in Prose & Poetry. All but the book
for 1942 are now out print, but the most im-
portant material from the complete series was
reprinted in 1947 in the anthology Spearhead,
which is in print.
EW
IRECTIONS
AN ANNUAL EXHIBITION GALLERY OF NEW
AND DIVERGENT TRENDS IN LITERATURE
COPYRIGHT 1948 BY NEW DIRECTIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Publisher wishes to express his thanks for
kind permission to reprint the following selec-
tions to the editors of The Modern Review for
"Existentialism" by Paul Kecskemeti; the London
Daily Telegraph for "Hollywood is a Term of
Disparagement" by Evelyn Waugh; The Harvard
Advocate for "The Walgh-Vogel" by Richard Wil-
bur; The New Mexico Quarterly for "Time's
Rhetoric" by Warren Wirtz; Partisan Review for
"A Distant Episode" by Paul Bowles; Commen-
tary for "America the Beautiful" by Mary
McCarthy; Politics for "Dedication Day" by
James Agee; Furioso for "The Amateurs" by
Howard Nemerov; Delta for poems by Hubert
Creekmore; The Listener for a poem by Julian
Orde; Horizon for "Flesh Farewell" by Donald
Windham and for a poem by Peter Viereck; and
to Accent for a story by Jack Jones. Robert
Duncan's poem "Heavenly City, Earthly City"
was first published by Berne Porter, Berkeley,
California.
MANUFACTURED BY DUDLEY B. KIMBALL
AT THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAIN PRESS,
IN PARSIPPANY, NEW JERSEY, U. S. A,
This volume is dedicated
by its editor to
ALFRED and BLANCHE KNOPF
who, over the years of their publishing,
have so greatly enriched American culture
by providing English translations
of significant European books
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors 9
A Few Random Notes From the Editor .... 17, 510
MARY MC CARTHY: America the Beautiful 23
EVELYN WAUGH: Hollywood Is A Term Of Disparagement , 34
RICHARD EBERHARD: Two Poems 42
ISAAC ROSENFELD: Alpha and Omega . 46
JOHN SENIOR: In Memoriam For A World 85
DONALD WINDHAM: Flesh Farewell . . 94
ROBERT DUNCAN: Heavenly City, Earthly City .... 103
SEYMOUR KRIM: The Hospital 113
LESLIE A. FIEDLER:
A. B. C 125
And We'll All Feel Gay 130
NEW POEMS FROM PERU (A Little Anthology) . . 140
RUTH STEPHAN: Introduction 140
MARTIN ADAN: fragment from Aloysius Acker .... 145
from Sonnets To The Rose 147
XAVIER ABRIL: Elegy To A Rose 148
EMILIO ADOLFO WESTPHALEN: from Abolition of Death . . 149
JORGE EDWARD EIELSON: Six Poems 151
JAVIER SOLOGUREN: Two Poems 154
SEBASTIAN SALAZAR BONDY: The Kangaroo Saves Words . 156
MARIO FLORIAN: Two Poems 157
JOHN H. PORTER: Two Stories
Robinson 159
The Indianapolis Story 162
VERNON WATKINS: Yeats In Dublin ........ 172
BROM WEBER: The Project 183
PETER VIERECK: Three Poems 193
Who Killed The Universe? 197
WILLIAM JAY SMITH: Seven Poems 215
HOWARD NEMEROV: The Amateurs 220
JAMES LAUGHLIN: An Old Schoolbook 236
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: Desire And The Black Masseur . . 239
ELEANOR RUTH HESTHALI Six Poem& * 247
JAMES AGEE: Dedication Day 252
ALEX COMFORT: In Time Of Order 264
PAUL BOWLES: A Distant Episode 266
WARREN WIRTZ:
Thirtieth Centrifuge (A Collection of Poems) . . 278
PAUL KECSKEMETI:
Existentialism: A New Trend m Philosophy . , . 290
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY OF ITALIAN POETRY
RENATO POGGIOLI: Introduction 309
GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI: The Promised Land 314
EUGENIC MONTALE: The Hitler Spring 317
MARIO LUZI: Gothic Notebook 319
TOMMASO GIGLIO: Themes For A Symphony 326
JACK JONES: Two Stories
All About Percival's Father 330
In The Afternoon's Mail At Dark Gardens ... 333
LITTLE ANTHOLOGY OF FRENCH POETRY
RENE CHAR: Six Poems 340
HENRI MICHAUX: Five Sketches 344
PAUL ELUARD: Six Poems 353
JULIEN GRACQ: Four Pieces From "Liberte Grande" . . 363
JACQUES PREVERT: Five Poems 366
PAUL GOODMAN: Two Stories
Little Bert or The Intervention 371
Terry Fleming or Are Yau Planning A Universe? . 373
IR^IN KROENING:
The Next Armistice After The Next 378
Two Essays For My Philosophy Professor . . , 387
HUBERT CREEKMORE: Five Poems 394
"Congratulations Bill" 399
ELLIOTT COLEMAN: Three Poems 409
o, KLAUSNER: The Death Of A Father 412
JULIAN ORDE: Seven Poems 438
LIZ JACOBSON: Three Stories
See, I Am Reading A Letter From A Soldier . . . 443
The Little Thief 449
A Real Dollar Bill 454
RICHARD WILBUR: Six Poems 460
PHILIP SIEKEWITZ: The Petition 465
GEORGE SEFERIS: Argouautica 485
ROBERT PAYNE: The Decoy 487
F. T. PRINCE: from The Solitudes 505
CARSON MC CULLERS: The Mortgaged Heart 509
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
JAMES AGEE is the film critic for The Nation and writes
occasional film criticisms for Time. Previously he worked for
Fortune. He is the author of a book of poems, Permit Me Voy-
age, published by the Yale University Press in 1935. Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, a book with text by Agee and photographs
by Walker Evans, was brought out by Houghton Miffllin in 1941.
LLOYD ALEXANDER was born in Philadelphia in 1924 and
now lives in Drexel Hill, Pa. He was discharged from the Army
in Paris and was given a scholarship to the Sorbonne by the
Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres. In Paris he met Paul Eluard
and with his help began a translation of his poems. Since then
he has done translations of Jean-Paul Sartre's Le Mur and La
Nausee which are to be published by New Directions.
PAUL BOWLES first won recognition as a composer of
music in the modern idiom. He wrote the incidental music for
The Glass Menagerie and his musical settings for Charles Henri
Ford's p6ems have been recorded. He translates from the French
and his version of Jean-Paul Sartre's IVo Exit appeared on Broad-
way. His short stories have been published in the leading literary
magazines, and he will soon publish a novel based on his experi-
ences in North Africa, where he has spent enough time to be able
to speak Arabic.
RENE CHAR, whose poetry is presently enjoying a great
popularity in Paris, is the -sub] feet of a recently published book of
criticism Avez-vous lu Char? lii his early forties, Char hails
from the south of France, and has been a manufacturer of plaster.
He first came to prominence as a follower of Eluard, but his
work is in no sense imitative.
ELLIOTT COLEMAN lives nTBaltimore where he teaches
in the English Department of Johns Hopkins. He is director of
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
the Summer School at Cummington. New Directions will short-
ly publish his 39 Night Sonnets.
ALEX COMFORT has emerged as one of the leaders among
the new English writers who are opposed to war to the extent of
doing something about it. He is a doctor. His novel The Power
House and his poems The Song of Lazarus have been published
in this country by the Viking Press.
HUBERT CREEKMORE, born in Mississippi, has lived for a
number of years in New York, where he worked for New Direc-
tions. He has published four volumes of poems the last one
being The Long Reprieve in 1947 and one novel, The Fingers of
Night. A second novel, The Welcome, has just been issued. At
present he is teaching at the University of Iowa.
ROBERT DUNCAN is a young California poet who has pub-
lished two volumes of verse. His most recent, Heavenly City,
Earthly City, has won wide critical acclaim,
RICHARD EBERHART lives and works in Cambridge. Dur-
ing the war he served as an officer in the Navy. His early vol-
umes of poetry include Reading the Spirit, Song and Idea and
Poems, New and Selected. He has edited with Selden Rodman
an anthology, War and the Poet, and last year his most recent
volume appeared under the title of Burr Oaks.
PAUL ELUARD is probably the most widely known poet of
the Paris Surrealist movement. He lives in Paris and during the
war was active in the French Resistance. He has published many
volumes of verse, and a book of translations of his early poetry,
Thorns of Thunder appeared in London shortly before the war.
Next year New Directions will bring out a book of his poetry-
translated by Lloyd Alexander.
LESLIE FIEDLER has contributed to many literary maga-
zines. He spent almost four years in Navy service in the Pacific
and China, after which he worked at writing on a Rockefeller
Foundation Fellowship. He now teaches at Montana State Uni-
versity. For the Navy he learned to speak Japanese.
PAUL GOODMAN was born in 1911 and educated at City
College, New York, and at the University of Chicago, He now
lives in New York, is married and has two children. He was one
of the Five Young American Poets of 1941, and in the same year
published a novel, The Grand Piano, and a book of plays, Stop
10
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Light Other published works are The Facts of Life, Art and
Social Nature, The State of Nature and Kafka's Prayer. He says
he has about fifteen more books ready for publication,
JULIEN GRACQ is a well-known writer in his native
France. His first novel, the post-surrealist, neo-romantic Cha-
t eau D'Argol, was published in Paris not long before the war and
was enthusiastically received. During the war he served in the
French Army and was a prisoner in Germany. New Directions
is publishing a translation of his second novel, The Dark Stranger,
in the near future. He is also a playwright and critic,
ELEANOR HESTHAL was born in San Francisco in 1911
and still lives there. She graduated from the University of Cal-
ifornia and is now teaching English at the California Labor
School. Last year she received the Phelan Award for Poetry.
LIZ JACOBSON was born in a small town (Kamenetz-Lit-
owski) in Russia and was brought here by her parents as a little
child. She has lived in Cleveland, Ohio ever since and graduated
from a grade school, high school and Western Reserve University
all in that city. She has worked as correspondent, staff writer
and special writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and has written
for many magazines. She once ghost-wrote a book for a promin-
ent Clevelander and "would not do it again for all the money in
the world." At present she is at work on a novel.
JACK JONES has lived most of his life in the New York
suburbs of Scarsdale and White Plains. He was born in Dallas,
Texas, in 1923, and states that he died about 1960 of radio-active
poisoning. He attended Swarthmore College for a year, and has
since worked in a chemical factory in Queens, in a printing plant
in Manhattan and as a reader for Twentieth Century Fox. He
has been working for the last year on a novel.
PAUL KECSKEMETI, born in Hungary in 1901, received
his Ph, D. in philosophy from the University of Budapest. He
has published many articles on philosophical subjects and worked
as a correspondent for The United Press in Germany and France.
He is now working for the War Department on cultural and po-
litical reorientation of occupied areas.
O. KLAUSNER was in school from the ages of six to twenty,
and caught in the depression from twenty until World War II.
He then, served in the Army for three years, during which he
11
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
fought in most of Europe., A play by him. is announced for fall
production by "The Poet's Theatre."
SEYMOUR KRIM was born in New York City in 1922 and
was educated in the public schools of that city and those of New-
ark, New Jersey. He attended the University of North Carolina
fitfully for a year and a half and then came back to New York
where he has been ever since, He is married to Eleanore Goff,
dancer.
IRWIN KROENING is 32 years old and was born in Mil-
waukee, Wisconsin. Since he completed his education he has
worked at an assortment of odd jobs advertising copy-writer,
laboratory assistant, riveter, cocktail-bar pianist, teacher, janitor
and night watchman. He studied psychology at the University
of Wisconsin with particular interest in schizophrenic speech be-
havior. When his wife died of rheumatic heart disease in 1946
he left school and has since been roaming around the country.
JAMES LAUGHLIN is the editor of New Directions, and,
in another world, an inventive writer on subjects connected with
the sport of skiing. A volume of his poems, Some Natural Things,
was published two years ago by New Directions, and a new one,
A Small Book of Poems, appeared this summer in Milan in Gio-
vanni Scheiwiller's Pesce d'Oro Series.
MARY MCCARTHY is well known for her theatrical column
in Partisan Review. She was born in Seattle, Washington,
graduated from Vassar College and has contributed to The New
Republic, The Nation and other periodicals. In 1942 she -pub-
lished a novel, The Company She Ke'eps.
CARSON McCULLERS was born in Columbus, Georgia, in
1917. At the age of seventeen she came to ,New York with the
intention of attending Columbia. University, but, having lost all
her tuition money on the subway, she attended night school in-
stead and worked at odd jobs in the daytime. Her first published
wdrk was a short story in Story Magazine; which appeared in
1934. Her -first novel, The^Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, was pub-
lished by Houghton Mifflin in 1940, and her second, Reflections In
A Golden Eye, in 1941. Her last book, , A Member Of The Wed-
ding, appeared last year. She is married and lives in Nyack.
HENRI MICHAUX, of Belgian origin, will make a trip here
this year. Michaux has become a Parisian, and, after the publi-
cation of some ten boofcs of poetry and prose poetry, rank^-with
12
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Eluard as the greatest living French poet. New Directions will
bring out A Barbarian in Asia, a book which Michaux wrote
about the people of India, China, Japan, etc. following a sojourn
in those regions. It has been translated by Sylvia Beach. Mi-
chaux is also a painter of some renown and a show of his work
is to be held this year in one of the New York galleries.
HOWARD NEMEROV was born in New York City in 1920
and graduated from Harvard in 1941. At present, following war-
time service in the Air Force and marriage to an English girl,
he teaches at Hamilton College. His book of poems, The Image
and the Law y was published last year. He is an editor of Furfoeo.
JULIAN ORDE'S parents are both painters. She was
brought up in London and Paris and was taught to draw at the
Chelsea Polytechnic. Later she studied acting at the Royal Acad-
emy of Dramatic Art and was on the stage for six years. At
present she works as a copy-writer and film manager of a large
advertising agency in London. She has published short stories
and has had seven short films produced. Her first feature film,
The Small Voice, is soon to be shown.
ROBERT PAYNE was born in Cornwall, England, in 1911,
and was educated at various universities and shipyards; he visited
Spain during the Civil War and was an armament officer at Sing-
apore and later a professor in China. He wrote Forever China,
China Awake, and edited a book of Chinese verse translations,
The White Pony, but likes most a novel called The Mountains and
the Stars and his short stories not yet published.
RENATO POGGIOLI, one of, the editors of the Italian lit-
erary quarterly Inventario y is Associate Professor of Slavic and
Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
JOHN H. PORTER has written book reviews for the New
York Times, The New Republic and other publications.
JACQUES PREVERT is best known for his work in the
cinema, notably Les Enfants du Paradis> but he is also one of the
most popular of contemporary French poets. His book Paroles,
published by Bertele, has had an enormous sale and been widely
influential.
F. T. PRINCE is one of the best contemporary English poets,
whose first volume, Poems,, established his reputation when it
13
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
was published in London by Faber and Faber. New Directions
published his Selected Poems.
ISAAC ROSENFELD was born in "Chicago in 1918. He
studied at the Universty of Chicago where he took an MA in
philosophy. Since 1941 he has been living in New York where
he has worked in editorial positions on The New Republic, the
American Jewish Record and the New Leader. He now teaches
night school at New York University and has a Guggenheim Fel-
lowship in creative writing. He has published short stories in
leading national magazines and his novel A Passage from Howie
was published by the Dial Press in 1946. He is married and has
two children.
GEORGE SEFERIS is one of the leaders in the poetic ren-
aissance in modern Greece. His first collection of poems was
published in 1932 and was hailed as a turning point in modern
Greek poetry. He was born in Smyrna in 1900, and was educat-
ed in Athens and afterwards studied law in Paris. He has lived
in England and made a translation of Eliot's Waste Land which
has had a great influence in Greece. A book of Seferis' poetry,
The King of Asine, translated by Lawrence Durrell, Bernard
Spencer and Nanos Valaoritis, with an excellent introduction
by Rex Warner has just been published in England by John
Lehmann Ltd.
JOHN SENIOR, after army service and graduation from
Columbia University, won the Glasscock Memorial Poetry Award
in 1945. Born in 1923, he has contributed articles and reviews
to The, Nation and other periodicals, has written a novel and
taught English at Bard College.
PHILIP SIEKEWITZ began to write while in the Army, and
"The Petition*' is his first published work. He is now a graduate
student at the University of California, working toward a Ph. D.
in biochemistry.
WILLIAM JAY SMITH was born in Louisiana in 1918 and,
being the son of a professional soldier, spent his early years on
Army posts. During the war he was naval liaison officer with the
French Navy and is now a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. In 1945 he
was awarded the Young Poets Prize by Poetry and his work
has also appeared in Chimera ? The New Republic, Furioso and,
most recently, in Horfeon. A first collection, Poems } was pub-
lished last year by the Banyan Press.
14
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
RUTH STEPHAN, who makes her home in Westport, Con-
necticut, is the editor of one of our most original and intriguing
Little Magazines, The Tiger's Eye. Two years ago she paid a
visit to Peru, where she collected the material for her Little
Anthology of Peruvian Poetry.
PETER VIERECK was born in New York in 1916. He stud-
ied at Harvard and at Christ Church, Oxford (as a Henry
Fellow) . He is one of the only Harvard students to win at the
same time the Garrison Medal for the best poetry and the Bow-
doin Prize for the best prose. His first book, a psychological and
historical analysis warning against the Nazi menace, was pub-
lished by Knopf in 1941, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to
Hitler, During the war he served three years overseas as an
enlisted man in the African and Italian campaigns and then
taught history at the G. I. University at Florence. From 1946
to 1947 he was an Instructor at Harvard and this year has been
an Assistant Professor at Smith College.
VERNON WATKINS, like his friend Dylan Thomas, is a
Welshman. He publishes with Faber & Faber, under the critical
eye of T. S. Eliot, and is rated one of the best of the younger
British poets. New Directions recently introduced him to Am-
erica with a volume of Selected Poems, and will follow up next
year with a collection of his translations of German.
EVELYN WAUGH, since Brideshead Revisited, has written
two brilliant short novels, of which The Loved One has recently
appeared in this country with enormous success. His A Hand-
ful of Dust is in New Directions "New Classics Series".
WILLIAM WEAVER, a young poet and an experienced
translator, is now studying, writing and traveling in Italy.
BROM WEBER was born in New York City in 1917. He
had worked at a wide variety of jobs and had contributed to The
Nation, The New Republic, Twice-A-Year and other publica-
tions before reaching full stature with the publication of his
Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study this year. He
is working on a novel and lecturing on modern literature and
writing at the City College of New York and the Rand School of
Social Science.
RICHARD WILBUR was born in New York City in 1921
and grew up on a New Jersey farm. He attended Axnherst Col-
15
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
lege for four years, was in the Army for two years and received
an M. A. from Harvard last year where he is now a Junior Fellow
of the Society of Fellows. He is married and has a young daugh-
ter. His book of poems, The Beautiful Changes, was recently
published.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, since the great success of A
Streetcar Named Desire, has been compared by critics with
Eugene O'Neill: he deserves it, but in the furor over his dramatic
writing it should not be overlooked -that Williams is also a good
poet (see Five Young American Poets: Series HI) and a fine
prose writer (New Directions has just published One Arm, a
collection of his short stories) . Recently Williams has been liv-
ing in Rome, but returned to the States for the staging of his new'
play, Summer & Smoke. A collection of his short one-act plays
is available under the title of 27 Wag OTIS Full of Cotton.
DONALD WINDHAM was formerly an editor of Dance
Index. He has published short stories in the leading literary
magazines and collaborated with Tennessee Williams on the
Broadway play You Touched Me. Recently he has been living
in Europe.
WARREN WIRTZ is equally known for his poetry and his
music. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review and other
literary magazines and he has written a symphony for Dmitri
Mitropoulos. He has composed other symphonic and chamber
music and has served as assistant to Ernst Krenek at Hamline
University in St. Paul. At present he is in Paris on a Woolley
Foundation Fellowship.
16
A FEW RANDOM NOTES
FROM THE EDITOR
DURING the greater part of the year while this volume was being
assembled I had the good fortune to be living, working and trav-
elling in Europe France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany
and England. My journey was a business trip, with three par-
poses: most important, to search for inexpensive printers who
could be used for printing the type of high quality but small sell-
ing books which the inflation of costs here at home has now made
unpublishable on a business basis; secondly, to work out dis-
tribution systems for New Directions books in the European
markets; and finally, to look for new European writers who
might merit translation here.
I'm happy to report that I met with some success on all thesfe
scores. We are now experimenting with the printing of books in
Italy, France, England and Germany. The exhibitions of New
Directions books held in Paris and the cities of Switzerland were
well attended and aroused an eager and intelligent response. A
great many Europeans read English and are hungry for good
American books. While I did not find any extremely promising
new writers in Switzerland and Germany, there are many in
France and Italy. We are now preparing translations of Julien
Gracq, Henri Michaux, the early Sartre, Giuseppe Berto and
EHo Vittorini which will prove that point.
But the internal affairs of New Directions are hardly of in-
terest to many readers. More diverting perhaps are my personal
reactions to the general state of European culture today as it
bears on our own. I had lived several years in Europe before the
War and I returned to it with a rough knowledge of the languages
and a longing to reivisit places where I had been so happy in
the days of youth. I am strongly antipathetic to what I call the
visual and aural vulgarities of the USAthings that so constant-
ly offend the eye (the ugly buildings and almost everything that
17
EDITOR'S NOTES
the automobile has brought us) and the ear (what comes out of
the radio and juke box) . These prejudices were greatly indulged
by Europe. Certain elements in each country are busy copying
our bad habits, but the price of gasoline (about a dollar a gallon
on the average) has so far curtailed their efforts. Except for the
bombed and shelled areas, Europe is just as handsome as it ever
was. In city or country it is bliss to the eye. And I didn't hear
a radio for months at a time. . . .
But the human landscape has changed. The people are only
superficially the same. As you live with them you realize how
much the War has upset their equilibrium. Of course, it is not
the same in each country. Switzerland is a state of mind all unto
itself. Of the countries hurt by the War (Switzerland was both
hurt and helped) Italy seems to me the furthest ahead in her
"recovery." (I did not visit Belgium or Holland, which are both
reported to be coming back strong.) What struck me most was
how almost everyone you meet, regardless of class, would like
to emigrate to America. (I did not talk to many farmers; they
are probably content because they are making so much money.)
If you live in Europe with one of our green passports it is a very
different place than it is for those who know they can't get away
if Russia decides to move West to the Atlantic. (In Trieste,
where I went to see Joyce's brother, Stanislas, and the family
of Italo Svevo, I found out what the Communists do when they
come into a bourgeois city. There was a period of about a month
between the departure of the Germans and the arrival of our
troops, during which the Reds were in control. They were very
efficient. They had lists of all the more solid citizens in the city
and they marched them out back of town and pushed them, into
some deep pot-holes in the ground.) It is not a case of war-scare.
People here at home are far more jittery than they are there.
It is a case of the absence of long-term expectation. All but the
Communists, who swallow what they are told to, realize that the
disease of Statism is in full fever and not likely to be checked in
ten years or even in twenty. American aid can help patch up
the broken-down economies but it does not give Europe the
moral tools to set up forms of government of a liberal type which
can withstand the winds that blow from Moscow. I except from
that statement England, which has a very sound and effective
democracy, perhaps a better one than our own.
Your typical young European city man, even in the oasis of
Switzerland, richest country in the world, unless he has taken
down the Stalinist hook, cannot see much future for his life. By
18
EDITOR'S NOTES
that I don't mean the American dream that he will move from a
Chevrolet to a Buick to a Cadillac. In Europe it is still possible
to be "successful" in terms other than the monetary. What worries
the young European is the prospect of perpetual political and
social unrest, of never being able to settle down to a decade of
work in comparative tranquility. A few writers, of course, thrive
on chaos possibly Sartre is one of them but most want a more
stabilized climate to work in. And certainly publishers and ed-
itors have to have some sense of security to make any long-term
plans. There was a period immediately after the War when book
sales boomed in France and Italy. But now the continuing infla-
tion in France has brought on a book crisis. Sales have col-
lapsed, and most of the new houses founded since the War with
them. In Italy it is only slightly better.
Everywhere I encountered ihe obsession of wanting to get
to America. And since it is impossible in most countries to get a
visa for more than a tourist visit unless you have been on a
waiting list for years the dream exists outside the realm of things
possible and often takes on the characteristics of other unf ulfill-
able desires. Whence arise some strange distortions. People
long for America so hard that they begin to hate it. You will
find writers who have obviously been influenced by modern Am-
erican literature (Hemingway is the great influence in Italy;
Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Caldwell et al. in France) right-
eously attacking our culture. Hollywood, of course, makes a
wonderful whipping boy. And so do trash novels like Forever
Amber, which has been translated into French and sold heavily.
French critics probably resent as much as Amber the fact that
French readers will buy such muck. I'm afraid that there is
some serious danger that French reading tastes could be debased
in the way that has happened here if the same mass marketing
procedures were applied. That is a frightening thought. But it
is still in the future. For the present it can be clearly demon-
strated that the average European reading taste is far above our
deplorable standard.
From our own experience with New Directions books, and
from conversations with publishers of Little Magazines, I have
come to the conclusion that there are about 25,000 readers in the
United Stales who now and then buy or read a "highbrow" book
or magazine. By "highbrow" I mean books on the same level of
literary integrity with say at random Marianne Moore, Saul
Bellow, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams. , . . Twenty-
five thousand in a population of -what is it now? a hundred
19
EDITOR S NOTES
and fifty million? Then turn to a little population such as the
French-speaking Swiss, of whom there are perhaps four million
in all, and you will find that a book club like the Guiide du Livre
has 80,000 members and habitually gives them books which
range, on the scale of value set above, from upper-medium to
highbrow. The Guiide du Livre in recent years has successfully
distributed books by Kafka, Baudelaire, Radiguet, Ramuz, and
even Jarry! That is just one example of the higher European
taste standard. Many more could be brought forward.
How do you account for it? Better education? Possibly.
But that is only part of it. The main thing, I think, is the overall
atmosphere- the respect for the mind and its pleasures. In Eu-
rope a poet is an object of honor, not of derision. And people
are not so constantly on the search for ways of diverting them-
selves that will not require any thought. A writer in Eu-
rope can feel that he is part of the community. He does not have
to apologize for his occupation as he does here unless he makes
a great deal of money. I don't mean to say that Europeans spend
all their leisure with their noses glued to "good" books. Far from
that. Many of them are too hard up to buy books. But, what-
ever their situation in life, they are more likely than not to
respect the idea of books, and to think of books as being some-
thing more consequential than packages of merchandise, and to
have an innate taste for the better in preference to the worse.
Perhaps another way of expressing this is to use the word
tradition. For many centuries good books were held in esteem
by the small educated classes, and this veneration filtered through
to the uneducated classes. In the last hundred years education
has been extended further down the social scale in Europe. But
the extension has been very gradual. It has been so gradual that
the tradition of quality has never been seriously interrupted.
Here in America I would say that the tradition of quality
has been interrupted because we leapt in a few generations from
the small cultivated elite of the Eastern seaboard to a huge mass
of citizens, many of diverse immigrant origin, who have been
taught how to read, but not what to read.
Does that make sense? Or is it too much of a simplification?
At this point, I would urge the reader to take leave of my
opaque colloquialisms and read Mary McCarthy's "America The
Beautiful" which will be found a few pages further on in this
volume. Here he can watch one of our keenest American minds
bite into problems related to those we have just been discussing,
and in a style so beautifully fashioned as to be a joy in itself.
20
EDITORS NOTES
I accept Miss McCarthy's thesis that Americans are not
really materialistic, but with this reservation: most of the "new"
Americans (and a lot of the "old" ones, too) certainly do worship
the possession of money. But I think they worship it for what
it does for them. Europeans are more materialistic than we are
in the sense that they would seldom waste the money we do on
pleasures that leave no physical trace. Few Europeans could
ever bring themselves to blow fifty dollars on an evening in a
nightclub. They would buy something of value with it. Hence
the number of French who put money "into" fine editions and
illustrated books. Could we not say that the "new" American
wants money because of the sense of action and importance it
yields him, and not because he believes in material possessions?,
What do Americans believe in anyway? They believe in
"being happy" "the pursuit of happiness," as if you could run
and throw salt on its tail. Americans are forever thinking up
ways to "be happy," and they feel guilty if they aren't. Euro-
peans have a long inherited history of mostly not being happy and
they seem to have developed the habit of enjoying life whether
they are "happy" or not.
If our American literary culture is, in its wide extension,
debased today, I think it is because two trends, or social situa-
tions, coalesced to its detriment., Movement I: "Education" of
Vast masses so rapidly that the tradition of quality was weakened.
Movement II: The drive to "make" money moving into the field
of mass production of culture. If our masses had been educated
so gradually that the tradition of quality had had time to filter
down from the elite, then the merchants of culture would have
been obliged to market a quality product. Now that the market
for trash has been firmly established it will take a long, long
time (if it is possible at all) to improve its quality.
Can we learn anything from Europe that might help us
raise our broad standard of literary taste? I doubt it. Well . . .
we can learn patience . . . Translating the good European books
for publication Here is important; it injects some new life into
our creative blood stream. But importing them will not materi-
ally alter the reading habits of the masses. That can only be
achieved with timethrough the establishment of a tradition,
sponsored by a cultural elite (which can just as well be an
elite of working people using public libraries as rich patrons in
panelled halls) and through the divorce of high and low culture.
Many readers will bridle at that last statement. I may be
wrong, but I don't think you can ever get the whole reading public
21
EDITOR S NOTES
educated to the point where it can take in The Golden Bowl
Even a GPU couldn't manage that. But I don't see why we should
not be able to develop in three generations an elite literary
taste in 1% of the citizenry. 1% of 150,000,000 is a lot of readers
enough, economically, to support as many really first-rate
writers as we are likely to produce at any one time. Then it
wouldn't much matter what the gross public read, and the hacks
and touts could get as rich as they pleased catering to them.* As
things now stand, the intermixture of high and low culture m
the book world creates a market confusion which prevents the
buying power of the existing elite from being channelled undivid-
edly to the support of the best writers. (To explain, in detail,
exactly how that confusion operates would require a considerable
essay; I touched briefly on the subject in my editorial notes to
this volume last year, and I may likely get back to it next time,)
Yes, I think we can hope to have 1% reading at the level of
Henry James in three generations. But it is not going to come
about through wishful thinking alone. It will require continuous
militant action on the part of all of us who would welcome even
so modest a millenium. By militancy I don't mean that you are
to take out your shotgun and blow the britches off of You-Know-
Whom and his like. Spare yourself the chair and them for a
more lingering punishment. Look for more constructive ways
of fighting the good fight. Above all look for little things that will
support the cause. There are hundreds of ways in which you can
take action, but here are a few modest proposals:
1) If you learn from your children that there is a teacher
doing enlightened work in their school, one who is in-
stilling a love of good reading, go out of your way to let
the teacher know she is appreciated. Teaching is a pretty
thankless profession in the USA. Try to give the good
teachers support on the social level. Make them feel im-
portant.
2) Get your weight behind anyone on the staff of your local
public library who shows signs of enlightenment. So
much can be done at that level. As a taxpayer, you have
some say in what the library buys and displays.
* The high point in big-time hackery seems to have been reached last
year when a public opinion expert opened a branch of his business to
pre-test audience reactions to manuscripts in progress.
(Continued cm page 510)
22
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
(The Humanist In The Bathtub)
Mary McCarthy
A VISITING EXISTENTIALIST wanted recently to be taken to dinner
at a really American place. This proposal, natural enough in a
tourist, disclosed a situation thoroughly unnatural. Unless the
visiting lady's object was suffering, there was no way of satisfying
her demand. Sukiyaki joints, chop suey. joints, Italian table d'-
hote places, French provincial restaurants with the menu written
on a slate, Irish chophouses, and Jewish delicatessens came abun-
dantly to mind, but these were not what the lady wanted.
Schrafft's or the Automat would have answered, yet to take her
there would have been to turn oneself into a tourist and to pre-
sent America as a spectacle, a New Yorker cartoon or a savage
drawing in the New Masses. It was the beginning of an evening
of humiliations. The visitor was lively and eager; her mind lay
open and orderly, like a notebook ready for impressions. It was
not long, however, before she shut it up with a snap. We had no
recommendations to make to her. With movies, plays, current
books, it was the same story as with the restaurants Open City,
Les Enfants du Paradis, Oscar Wilde, a reprint of Henry James
were p&te maison to this lady who wanted the definitive flap-
jack. She did not believe us when we said that there were no
good Hollywood movies, no good Broadway plays only curios,
she was merely confirmed in her impression that American in-
tellectuals were "negative."
Yet the irritating thing was that we did not feel negative.
We admired and liked our country; we preferred it to that
imaginary America, land of the peaux rouges of Caldwell and
Steinbeck, dumb paradise of violence and the detective story,
which had excited the sensibilities of our visitor and of the up-
23
MARY MCCARTHY
to-date French literary world. But to found our preference,
to locate it materially in some admirable object or institution,
such as Chartres, say, or French cafe life, was for us, that night
at any rate, an impossible undertaking. We heard ourselves say-
ing that the real America was elsewhere, in the white frame
houses and church spires of New England; yet we knew that we
talked foolishly we were not Granville Hicks and we looked
ludicrous in his opinions. The Elevated, half a block away, in-
terrupting us every time a train passed, gave us the lie on sche-
edule, every eight minutes. But if the elm-shaded village green
was a false or at least an insufficient address for the genius loci
we honored, where then was it to be found? Surveyed from the
vantage point of Europe, this large continent seemed suddenly
deficient in objects of virtue. The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone
Park, Jim Hill's mansion in St. Paul, Monticello, the blast fur-
naces of Pittsburgh, Mount Rainier, the yellow observatory at
Amherst, the little-theatre movement in Cleveland, Ohio, a Greek
revival house glimpsed from a car window in a lost river-town
in New Jersey these things were too small for the size of the
country. Each of them, when pointed to, diminished in interest
with the lady's perspective of distance. There was no sight that
in itself seemed to justify her crossing of the Atlantic.
If she was interested in "conditions," that was a different
matter. There are conditions everywhere; it takes no special gen-
ius to produce them. Yet would it be an act of hospitality to invite
a visitor to a lynching? Unfortunately, nearly all the "sights"
in America fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno,
the share-croppers homes in the South, the mining towns of
Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy's, the
Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of out liberties, are
spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial
sense of "Didn't he make a holy spectacle of himself?" An
Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor
through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at
least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions.
The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be hum-
iliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress
these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are
spotted with gi-avy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous,
and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patron-
age, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process
rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear. In European
legislation, we are told, a great deal of shady business goes on
24
MARY MCCARTHY
in private, behind the scenes. In America, it is just the opposite,
anything good, presumably, is accomplished in camera, in the
committee rooms.,
It is so with all our institutions. For the visiting European,
a trip through the United States ^ has, almost inevitably, the
character of an expose, and the American, on his side, is tempted
by love of his country to lock the inquiring tourist in his hotel
room and throw away the key. His contention that the visible
and material America is not the real or the only one is more
difficult to sustain than was the presumption of the "other"
Germany behind the Nazi steel.
To some extent a citizen of any country will feel that the
tourist's view of his homeland is a false one. The French will
tell you that you have to go into their homes to see what the
French people are really like. The intellectuals in the Left Bank
cafes are not the real French intellectuals, etc., etc. In Italy,
they complain that the tourist must not judge by the ristorantes;
there one sees only black-market types. But in neither of these
cases is the native really disturbed by the tourist's view of his
country. If Versailles 01" Giotto's bell-tower in Florence do not
tell the whole story, they are still not incongruous with it; you
do not hear a Frenchman or an Italian object when these things
are noticed by a visitor. With the American, the contradiction is
more serious. He must, if he is to defend his country, repudiate
its visible aspect almost entirely. He must say that its parade of
phenomenology, its billboards, super-highways, even its sky-
scrapers, not only fail to represent the inner essence of his
country but in fact contravene it. He may point, if he wishes, to
certain beautiful objects, but here too he is in difficulties, for
nearly everything that is beautiful and has not been produced by
nature belongs to the 18th century, to a past with which he has
very little connection, and which his ancestors, in many or most
cases, had no part in building. Beacon Street and the Boston
Common are very charming in the 18th-century manner, so are
the sea captains' houses in the Massachusetts ports, and the
ruined plantations of Louisiana, but an American from Brook-
lyn or the Middle West or the Pacific Coast finds the style of
life embodied in them as foreign as Europe; indeed, the first
sensation of a Westerner, coming upon Beacon Hill and the gold
dome of the State House, is to feel that at last he has traveled
"abroad." The American, if he is to speak the highest truth
about his country, must refrain from pointing at all. The virtue
of American civilization is that it is unmaterialistic.
25
MARY MC CARTHY
This statement may strike a critic as whimsical or perverse.
Everybody knows, it will be said, that America has the most
materialistic civilization in the world, that Americans care only
about money, they have no time or talent for living; look at radio,
look at advertising, look at life insurance, look at the tired bus-
iness man, at the Frigidaires and the Fords. In answer, the
reader is invited first to look into his own heart and inquire
whether he personally feels himself to be represented by these
things, or whether he does not, on the contrary, feel them to be
irrelevant to him, a necessary evil, part of the conditions of life.
Other people, he will assume, care about them very much: the
man down the street, the entire population of Detroit or 1 Scars-
dale, the back-country farmer, the urban poor or the rich. But
he accepts these objects as imposed on him by a collective "other-
ness" of desire, an otherness he has not met directly but whose
existence he infers from the number of automobiles, Frigidaires,
or television sets he sees around him. Stepping into his new
Buick convertible, he knows that he would gladly do without it,
but imagines that to his neighbor, who is just backing his out of
the driveway, this car is the motor of life. More often, however,
the otherness is projected farther afield, onto a different class or
social group, remote and alien. Thus the rich, who would like
nothing better, they think, than for life to be a perpetual fishing
trip with the trout grilled by a native guide, look patronizingly
upon the whole apparatus of American civilization as a cheap
Christmas present to the poor, and city people see the radio and
the washing-machine as the farm-wife's solace.
It can be argued, of course, that the subjective view is pre-
varicating, possession of the Buick being nine-tenths of the
social law. But who has ever met, outside of advertisements,
a true parishioner of this church of Mammon? A man may take
pride in a car, and a housewife in her new sink or wallpaper, but
pleasure in new acquisitions is universal and eternal an Italian
man with a new gold tooth, a French bibliophile with a new
edition, a woman with a new baby, a philosopher with a new
thought, all these people are rejoicing in progress, in man's power
to enlarge and improve. Before men showed off new cars, they
showed off new horses; it is alleged against modern man that
he did not make the car but his grandfather did not make the
horse either. What is imputed to Americans is something quite
different, an abject dependence on material possessions, an image
of happiness as packaged by a manufacturer, content in a can.
26
MARY MCCARTHY
This view of American life is strongly urged by advertising
agencies. We know the "other," of course, because we meet
them every week in full force in tihie New Yorker or the Saturday
Evening Post, those brightly colored families of dedicated con-
sumers, waiting in unison on the porch for the dealer to deliver
the new car, gobbling the new cereal ("Gee, Mom, is it good for
you too?"), lining up to bank their paycheck, or fearfully
anticipating the industrial accident and the insurance-check that
will "compensate" for it. We meet them also, more troll-like
underground, in the subway placards, in the ferociously com-
placent One-A-Day family, and we hear 1 their courtiers sing to
them on the radio of Ivory or Supersuds. The thing, however,
that repels us in these advertisements is their naive falsity to
life. Who are these advertising men kidding, besides the Euro-
pean tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the stran-
gers around us and these grinning Holy Families, there exists
no possibility of even a wishful identification. We take a vitamin
pill with the hope of feeling (possibly) a little less tired, but
the superstition of buoyant health emblazoned in the bright,
ugly pictures has no more power to move us than the blood of
St. Januarius.
Familiarity has perhaps bred contempt in us Americans:
until you have had a washing machine, you cannot imagine how
little difference it will make to you. Europeans still believe that
money brings happiness, witness the bought journalist, the
bought politician, the bought general, the whole venality of
European literary life, inconceivable in this country of the dollar.
It is true that America produces and consumes more cars, soap,
and bathtubs than any other nation, but we live among these
objects rather than by them. Americans build skyscrapers; Le
Corbusier worships them. Ehrenburg, our Soviet critic, fell in
love with the Check-O-Mat in American railway stations, writing
home paragraphs of song to this gadget while deploring Amer-
ican materialism. When an American heiress wants to buy a
man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materia-
listic people I have ever* met have been Europeans.
The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of
American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are,
from a materialistic point of view, intolerable. What the foreigner
finds most objectionable in American life is its lack of basic
comfort. No nation with any sense of material well-being would
endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the
noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life,
27
MARY MCCARTHY
in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault on the senses
and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness,
precisely, that we bear it.
This republic was founded on an unworldly assumption,
a denial of "the facts of life." It is manifestly untme that all
men are created equal; interpreted in worldly terms, this doctrine
has resulted in a pseudo-equality, that is, in standardization, in
an equality of things rather than of persons. The inalienable
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness appear, in
practice, to have become the inalienable right to a bathtub, a
flush toilet, and a can of Spam. Left-wing critics of America
attribute this result to the intrusion of capitalism; right-wing
critics see it as the logical dead end of democracy. Capitalism
has certainly played its part, mass production in itself demand-
ing large-scale distribution of uniform goods, till the coiisumer
today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a
regiment of products for' which he must make house-room in his
soul. The buying impulse, in its original force and purity, was
not nearly so crass, however, or* so meanly acquisitive as many
radical critics suppose. The purchase of a bathtub was the ex-
ercise of a spiritual right. The immigrant or the poor native
American bought a bathtub, not because he wanted to take a
bath, but because he wanted to be in a position to do so. This
remains true in many fields today; possessions, when they are
desired, are not wanted for their own sakes but as tokens of an
ideal state of freedom, fraternity, and franchise. "Keeping up with
the Joneses" is a vulgarization of Jefferson's concept, but it too
is a declaration of the rights of man, and decidedly unfeasible
and visionary. Where for a European, a fact is a fact, for us
Americans, the real, if it is relevant at all, is simply symbolic
appearance. We are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with
a humanist in very tub. One such humanist I used to hear of on
Cape Cod had, on growing rich, installed two toilets side by
side in his marble bathroom, on the model of the two-seater of
his youth. He was a clear case of Americanism, hospitable,
gregarious, and impractical, a theorist of perfection. Was his
dream of the conquest of poverty a vulgar dream or a noble one,
a material demand or a spiritual insistence? It is hard to think of
him as a happy man, and in this too he is characteristically
American, for the parity of the radio, the movies, and the wash-
ing machine has made Americans sad, reminding them of another
parity of which these things were to be but emblems.
28
MARY MCCARTHY
The American does not enjoy his possessions because sensory
enjoyment was not his object, and he lives sparely and thinly
among them, in the monastic discipline of Scarsdale or the bar-
racks of Stuyvesant Town. Only among certain groups where
franchise, socially speaking, has not been achieved, do pleasure
and material splendor constitute a life-object and an occupation.
Among the outcasts Jews, Negroes, Catholics, and homosexuals
excluded from the communion of ascetics, the love of fabrics,
gaudy show, and rich possessions still anachronistical^ flaunts
itself. Once a norm has been reached, differing in the different
classes, financial ambition itself seems to fade away. The self-
made man finds, to his anger, his son uninterested in money;
you have shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. The
great financial empires are a thing of the past. Recent immigrants
movie magnates and gangsters particularly retain their ac-
quisitiveness, but how long is it since anyone in the general
public has murmured, wonderingly, "as rich as Rockefeller"?
If the dream of American fraternity had ended simply in
this, the value of humanistic and egalitarian strivings would be
seriously called into question. Jefferson, the Adamses, Franklin,
Madison, would be in the position of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisi-
tor, who, desiring to make the Kingdom of God incarnate on
earth, inaugurated the kingdom of the devil. If the nature of
matter is such that the earthly paradise, once realized, becomes
always the paradise of the earthly, and a spiritual conquest of
matter becomes always an enslavement of spirit (conquered Gaul
conquered Rome) , then the atomic bomb is, as has been argued,
the logical result of the Enlightenment, and the land of opportun-
ity is, precisely, the land of death. This position, however, is a
strictly materialist one, for it asserts the Fact of the bomb as the
one tremendous truth: subjective attitudes are irrelevant; it does
not matter what we think 01" feel; possession again in this case is
nine-tenths of the law.
It must be admitted that there is a great similarity between
the nation with its new bomb and the consumer with his new
Buick. In both cases, there is a disinclination to use the product,
stronger naturally in the case of the bomb, but somebody has
manufactured the thing, and there seems to be no way not to use
it, especially when everybody else will be doing so. Here again
the argument of the "others" is invoked to justify our own pro-
cedures if we had not invented the bomb, the Germans would
have; the Soviet Union will have it in a year, etc., etc. This is
29
MARY MCCARTHY
keeping up with the Joneses indeed, our national propagandists
playing the role of the advertising men in persuading us of the
"others" intentions.
It seems likely at this moment that we will find no way of
not using the bomb, yet those who argue theoretically that this
machine is the true expression of our society leave us, in practice,
with no means of opposing it. We must differentiate ourselves
from the bomb if we are to avoid using it, and in private thought
we do, distinguishing the bomb sharply from our daily concerns
and sentiments, feeling it as an otherness that waits outside to
descend on us, an otherness already destructive of normal life,
since it prevents us from planning or hoping by depriving us
of a future. And this inner refusal of the bomb is also a legacy of
our past; it is a denial of the given, of the power of 'circumstances
to shape us in their mold. Unfortunately, the whole asceticism
of our national character, our habit of living in but not through
an environment, our alienation from objects, prepare us to endure
the bomb but not to confront it.
Passivity and not aggressiveness is the dominant trait of the
American character. The movies, the radio, the super-highway
have softened us up for the atom bomb; we have lived with them
without pleasure, feeling them as a coercion on our natures, a
coercion coming seemingly from nowhere and expressing no-
body's will. The new coercion finds us without the habit of
protest; we are dissident but apart.
The very "negativeness," then, of American intellectuals is
not a mark of their separation from our society, but a true ex-
pression of its separation from itself. We too are dissident but
inactive. Intransigent on paper, in "real life" we conform; yet we
do not feel ourselves to be dishonest, for to us the real life is
rustling paper and the mental life is flesh. And even in our
mental life we are critical ind rather unproductive; we leave it
to the "others," the best-sellers, to create.
The fluctuating character of American life must, in part,
have been responsible for this dissociated condition. Many an
immigrant arrived in this country with the most materialistic
expectations, hoping, not to escape from a world in which a man
was the sum of his circumstances, but to become a new sum of
circumstances himself. But this hope was self-defeating; the very
ease with wihich new circumstances were acquired left in-
sufficient time for a man to live into them: all along a great ave-
30
MARY MCCARTHY
nue in Minneapolis the huge chateaux were dark at night, save
for a single light in each kitchen, where the family still sat,
Swedish-style, about the stove. The pressure of democratic
thought, moreover, forced a rising man often, unexpectedly, to
recognize that he was not his position: a speeding ticket from
a village constable could lay him low. Like the agitated United
Nations delegates who got summonses on the Merritt Parkway,
he might find the shock traumatic: a belief had been destroyed.
The effect of these combined difficulties turned the new American
into a nomad, who camped out in his circumstances, as it were,
and was never assimilated to them. And, for the native American,
the great waves of internal migration had the same result. The
homelessness of the American, migrant in geography and on
the map of finance, is the whole subject of the American realists
of our period. European readers see in these writers only
violence and brutality. They miss not only the pathos but the
nomadic virtues associated with it, generosity, hospitality, equity,
directness, politeness, simplicity of relations traits which, to-
gether with a certain gentle timidity (as of unpracticed nomads) ,
comprise the American character. Unobserved also is a peculiar
nakedness, a look of being shorn of everything, that is very
curiously American, corresponding to the spare wooden des-
olation of a frontier town and the bright thinness of the American
light. The American character looks always as if it had just had
a rather bad hair-cut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a
greater humanity than the European, which even among its
beggars has an all too professional air.
The openness of the American situation creates the pity
and the terror; status is no protection; life for the European is a
career; for the American, it is a hazard. Slaves and woman, said
Aristotle, are not fit subjects for tragedy, but kings, rather,
and noble men, men, that is, not defined by circumstance but
outside it and seemingly impervious. In America we have, sub-
jectively speaking, no slaves and no> women; the efforts of PM
and the Stalinized playwrights to introduce, like the first step to
servitude, a national psychology of the "little man" have been,
so far, unrewarding. The little man is one who is embedded in
status; things can be done for and to him genetically by a central
directive; his happiness flows from statistics. This conception
mistakes the national passivity for abjection. Americans will
not eat this humble pie; we are still nature's noblemen. Yet no
tragedy results, though the protagonist is everywhere; dissocia-
tion takes the place of conflict, and the drama is mute.
31
MARY MC CAJRTHY
This humanity, this plain and heroic accessibility, was what
we would have liked to point out to the visiting Existentialist as
our national glory. Modesty perhaps forbade and a lack of con-
crete examples how could we point to ourselves? Had we done
so, she would not have been interested. To a European, the
humanity of an intellectual is of no particular moment; it is the
barber pole that announces his profession and the hair oil dis-
pensed inside. Europeans, moreover, have no curiosity about
American intellectuals; we are insufficiently representative of
the brute. Yet this anticipated and felt disparagement was not
the whole cause of our reticence. We were silent for another
reason: we were waiting to be discovered. Columbus, however,
passed on, and this, very likely, was the true source of our humil-
iation. But this experience also was peculiarly American. We
all expect to be found in the murk of otherness; it looks to us
very easy since we know we are there. Time after time, the
explorers have failed to see us. We have been patient, for the
happy ending is our national belief. Now, however, that the
future has been shut off from us, it is necessary for us to declare
ourselves, at least for the record.
What it amounts to, in verity, is that we are the poor. This
humanity we would claim fat ourselves is the legacy, not only
of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of
European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing
their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of
a stable upper class that is Responsible for much of the vulgarity
of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this
deficiency? The ugliness of American decoration, American
entertainment, American literature is not this the visible ex-
pression of the impoverishment of the European masses, a
manifestation of all the backwardness, deprivation, and want
that arrived hei*e in boatloads from Europe? The immense
popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe
is the unfinished negative of which America is the pr'oof. The
European traveler 1 , viewing with distaste a movie palace or a
motorola, is only looking into the terrible concavity of his con-
tinent of hunger inverted startlingly into the convex. Our civil-
ization, deformed ,as it is outwardly, is still an accomplishment;
all this had to come to light.
America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one
that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would
write the future. Instead, he has written his past. This past, in-
32
MARY MC CARTHY
scribed on billboards, ball parks, dance halls, is not seemly, yet its
objectification is a kind of disburdenment. The past is at length
outside. It does not disturb us as it does Europeans for our rela-
tion with it is both more distant and more familiar. We cannot
hate it, for to hate it would be to hate poverty, our eager ances-
tors, and ourselves.
If there were time, American civilization could be seen as a
beginning, even a favorable one, for we have only to look around
us to see what a lot of sensibility a little ease will accrue. The
children surpass the fathers and Louis B. Mayer cannot be
preserved intact in his descendants. . . . Unfortunately, as things
seem now, posterity is not around the corner.
(This essay first appeared in the magazAne "Commentary.")
33
HOLLYWOOD IS A TERM
OF DISPARAGEMENT
Evelyn Waugh
It may seem both presumptuous and unkind to return from
six weeks' generous entertainment abroad and at once to sit
down and criticise one's hosts. In the case of Hollywood it is
neither.
Not presumptuous: first, because a fortnight is ample time
in which to appreciate the character of that remote community;
there are no secrets under those unflickering floodlights; no
undertones to which the stranger must attune his ear. All is loud,
obvious and prosaic.
Secondly, because Hollywood has made its business the
business of half the world. Morally, intellectually, aesthetically,
financially, Hollywood's entries are written huge in the house-
hold books of every nation outside the U.S.S.R.; largest of all in
those of America but, because of our common language, second
only to them in our own.
Nor is it unkind, for one may say what one likes in perfect
confidence that one is powerless to wound. No game licenses
are issued in the Reserve where the great pachyderms of the
film trade bask and browse complacently. They have no suspi-
cion that in most of America and in the whole of Europe the
word "Hollywood" is pejorative.
Even in Southern California the film community are a peo-
ple apart. They are like monks in a desert oasis, their lives re-
volving about a few shrines half a dozen immense studios, two
hotels, one restaurant; their sacred texts are their own publicity
and the local gossip columns.
The only strangers they ever meet have come to seek their
fortunes; refugees from Central Europe for whom the ease and
plenty and affability of the place, seen against the background
34
EVELYN WAUGH
of the concentration camp, appear as supreme goods, and astute
renegades from the civilisations of the East who knows that flat-
tery is the first step to preferment.
None of these will hold a mirror up to Caliban; all feel their
own security threatened by a whisper of criticism. Artists and
public men elsewhere live under a fusillade of detraction and
derision; they accept it as a condition of their calling. Not so in
Hollywood, where all is a continuous psalm of self-praise.
Place and people have the aspect of Philo's Alexandria; such,
one thinks in one's first few days, must have been the life there
in the great days of the Mouseion; some such withdrawal of the
arts is necessary everywhere if culture is to survive the present
century.
But this is a whimsy. Things are not really like that. The
seclusion of these hermits is purely one-sided. They live for and
by the outer world of which they know nothing at first hand and
whose needs they judge by gross quantitative standards.
"No film of ours is ever a failure," an executive said to me.
"Some are greater successes than others, but we reckon to get
our money back on everything we produce."
There is the impasse, the insurmountable barrier of financial
prosperity. Behold the endless succession of Hollywood films,
the slick second-rateness of the best of them, the blank fatuity
of the worst and none of them failures! What goes on there?
Three groups are responsible for making a film, the techni-
cians, the players and the writers. (Producers-directors bear the
guilt of all three.)
Of these the least culpable are the technicians. It is they
who make the studio the vast, enchanted toyshop which delights
the visitors.
In only "two respects are the technicians guilty. It is their
fault that the studios are there, 3,000 miles from the world's
theatrical centre in New York, 6,000 miles from the intellectual
centres of London and Paris
They came there because in the early days they needed the
sun. Now almost all photography is done by artificial light. The
sun serves only to enervate and stultify. But by now the thing
has become too heavy to move.
And the technicians are too enterprising. Their itch for in-
vention keeps them always a move ahead of the producers.
Twenty years ago the silent film was just beginning to deve-
lop into a fine art; then talking apparatus set it back to its in-
fancy. Technicolor is the present retarding revolution. Soon no
35
EVELYN WAUGH
doubt we shall have some trick of third-dimensional projection.
Mr. Charles Chaplin, abused everywhere as a "progressive,"
is the one genuine conservative artistically, in Hollywood. The
others allow themselves no time to get at ease with their ma-
terials.
The technicians are almost anonymous. All the devices of
publicity are employed to give exclusive prominence to a few
leading players. They possess the popular imagination and excite
the visitor's curiosity.
What of them? Dramatic critics often ask why the cinema
has produced no actors comparable with the great figures of the
stage, and point to the fact that in many "documentaries" and
Continental films the best performances are given by unknown
and untrained players. Even in Hollywood this year the highest
Academy honours have gone to a man who was chosen simply
because he had been maimed in the war.
The wonder should be that so many stars are able to give
as much as they do, for the conditions of their work are hostile
to dramatic tradition. Certain disabilities seem to be inherent in
the film; others are peculiar to Hollywood; all are exaggerated
there.
There is an essential inhumanity about a film star's life.
Compare it with that of a leading actress of 50 years ago. The
latter worked in the capitals of the world; once her play was
running ^smoothly her days were her own; she lived a life of
leisure and fashion in an infinitely various society of her own
choosing.
The company formed a corporate unit with its own inti-
macies, scandals and jokes; each performance was a separate
artistic achievement; the play was conceived as an artistic whole
which was nightly brought into existence in a sustained and cu-
mulative emotional mood which is the essence of acting.
The players were in direct contact with their audience. Each
audience was different; the manager would nightly visit the
dressing-rooms with news of who was "in front."
Above all, acting was recognized as an art which it took a
lifetime to learn. Almost all great plays were written for mature
players; the "juvenile lead" and the "ingenue" were for young-
sters learning their trade.
The Hollywood star lives in a remote suburb. She sees no
one from one year's end to another except a handful of people
all in the same trade as herself. She remains in purdah in the
studio, inhabiting a tiny bathing-machine, surrounded by satel-
36
EVELYN WAUGH
lites who groom her and feed her until the technicians have fin-
ished with the "stand-in" and require her presence on the set.
When her work begins it consists of isolated fragments, cho-
sen at the convenience of the technicians. It is rehearsal, hour
after hour, for a few minutes of finished acting.
At last in a Trilby-like trance she achieves the expression the
director requires. She is "shot," and they proceed to another,
often unrelated fragment.
And finally she has produced only the raw material for the
"cutter," who may nonchalantly discard the work of weeks or
dovetail it into an entirely different situation.
And she must be young. Her life is as brief as a prize fight-
er's. By the time that she has become a finished actress she is
relegated to "supporting" roles.
The work is physically exhausting and intellectually stultify-
ing and there are no very great material rewards. A myth sur-
vives from past years that film stars live in Petronian luxury. The
salary figures seem dazzling, and, indeed, she does live in a
degree of comfort very enviable by contemporary European
measure.
But it is no more than that. In fact her standard of life is
precisely that of a moderately successful professional English-
man of 50 years ago. That is to say, she lives in a neat little
villa with half an acre of garden; she has three servants, seldom
more, very often fewer. Her antique furniture, collected at vast
expense, would be commonplace in an English rectory.
Her main time of entertainment is Sunday luncheon when
she asks half a dozen professional friends to share her joint of
beef. She has more clothes than her counterpart, but her men-
folk are infinitely worse dressed.
In only one substantial particular does she differ. She has a
swimming pool which can be lit up at night. That is the mark
of respectability, like the aspidistra in the cottage parlour.
And unlike her counterpart it is almost impossible for her to
save money. If she attempted to live in simpler style she would
lose "face" and be rebuked by her studio. She cannot live more
elaborately, for taxation intervenes. She can make this maximum
in one film. After that for the rest of the time she is working
for nothing.
Consequently it is becoming increasingly hard to persuade
her to do any work. Vanity is the sole inducement. She will
therefore take no part in which she, and her male colleague, are
anything less than the whole film.
37
EVELYN WAUGH
She must be on the stage all the time in a continuously
alluring fashion, A play which depends on a team of various
characters has no interest for her. A film must be her personal
romantic adventures and nothing else.
It is a short-sighted preference, for it means that when she
is 50 there will be no adequate parts for her. But no one in
Hollywood considers the possibility of growing up.
The infinite pains taken in Hollywood over all technical mat-
ters renders all the more remarkable their nonchalance when it
is a question of ideas.
Go to the Art Research Department and they will tell you
in a twinkling the kind of inkpot Dante used or the orders worn
by the Duke of Wellington at Queen Victoria's Coronation,
Go on the set and hear the dozen or more experts wrangHng
round the "stand-in" about light and sound; wait until the star
appears and see how men with combs and clothes-brushes, wo-
men with elaborate catalogues, cluster round and perfect her.
You will believe yourself present at one of the great achieve-
ments of human ingenuity and devotion. Then go to a "story
conference" and you find yourself in a world that is at once hap-
hazard and banal.
It is not that they are wrong-headed, that in the interests
of entertainment they deliberately choose to disregard certain
human values and to distort others.
It is not that, as is often suggested, they serve sinister in-
terests aiming to preserve or destroy (according to choice) capi-
talist society and bourgeois morality, to advance American im-
perialism, Jewish internationlism, Catholicism, agnosticism or
what you will
It is simply that they are empty-headed and quite without
any purpose at all. Thus anyone interested in ideas is inevitably
shocked by Hollywood according to his prejudices.
The novelist is shocked by their complete inability to follow
a plain story. For in the cinema, he would think, is the perfect
medium for presenting a straight plot. The effects at which he
labours so painfully may here be achieved with ease. All de-
scriptions are superfluous. Here you have narrative reduced to
its essentials dialogue and action.
A great, simple art should have come into existence. But
nothing of the kind has in fact occurred.
^ Literary considerations are as despised in the film studios
as in those of modern painters. The producers, generally speak-
ing, read nothing. They employ instead a staff of highly ac-
38
EVELYN WAUGH
complished women who recite aloud, and with dramatic effects,
the stories which filter down to them from a staff of readers.
The producers sit round like children while the pseudo-
nannie spins a tale, two or three in an afternoonclassical
novels, Broadway comedies, the Book of the Month, popular
biographies, anything.
"Bags I," says the producer, when something takes his fancy.
"Daddy buy that." Agents negotiate, a price is fixed. And from
that moment the story belongs to the studio to deal with as they
please.
Each of the books purchased has had some individual qual-
ity, good or bad, that has made it remarkable. It is the work of a
staff of "writers" to distinguish this quality, separate it and
obliterate it.
We all know frightful examples of favourite books we have
seen thus sterilized. Perhaps of recent years the most notorious
is Mr, Somerset Maugham's "Christmas Holiday," a brilliantly
original story of an English schoolboy's awakening in Paris to
some of the realities of life, eminently suitable for retelling in a
film, which emerged from the mill as the adventure of an Amer-
ican airman with an escaped gangster.
Why, one wonders, do they trouble to purchase rights? I
cannot believe that any action for plagiarism would lie if they
had produced that film without reference to Mr. Maugham. It is
simply, I think, that they like to have something to work on, and
that the large sum paid to the author is an inconsiderable part of
the total cost of production.
A film costs about $2,000,000. It must please 20,000,000 people.
The film industry has accepted the great fallacy of the Century
of the Common Man epitomised recently in England by Dr.
Summerskill's condemnation of good cheese that a thing can
have no value for anyone which is not valued by all.
In the old days a play which ran 100 nights was a success, a
book which sold 5,000 copies might influence a generation. Even
now a writer who sells more than 20,000 copies, instead of being
elated, begins to wonder what has gone wrong with his work.
But a film must please everyone.
The economics of this desperate situation illustrate the
steps by which the Common Man is consolidating his victory.
It is not the large sums paid to the stars and producers and
authors (the greater part of which, incidentally, goes straight
to the Common Man in taxes) , but the overhead expenses of the
studio which overweight the costs, and these are imposed by the
trade unions and their system of redundant labour.
39
EVELYN WAUGH
It would not be impossible to get together a team of first-
class players and producers and writers who would work for a
fraction of their present salaries if they could take genuine pride
in their art and make a film which appealed only to a limited
audience, but this would barely affect the cost of the film.
Situations which seem fantastic elsewhere are commonplace
in Hollywood. I know a "writer" who wished to put up a map on
the wall of his room and asked for a hammer and four nails. He
was told that all the carpenters would strike if he did the work
himself.
A trade unionist arrived with his tools and found that a
small bookcase had to be moved to another wall. The writer
took one side and invited the carpenter to take the other. But
that was a breach of rules. Two furniture movers had to be
called in.
A special "florist" has to be summoned if, in rearranging a
"set," the director wishes to move a vase of flowers from one
table to another.
The unions determine the numbers to be employed in any
film. If a band of six instruments is required, a dozen men will
arrive and half of them sit idle on full pay.
Impositions of this kind, repeated hourly in a large studio,
fix the exorbitant cost of a film. The capitalist at the head of the
company is concerned solely with profits; the proletariat allow
profits only to those who directly work for their pleasure; in this
miniature class-war the artist vanishes.
The reductio ad absurdum of the principle of universal ap-
peal is not in the intellectual or aesthetic sphere, but in the moral.
The American censors observe no such fruitful distinction as
exists in England between films suitable for children and for
adults. Nor do most American parents enjoy the authority com-
mon in Europe over their children. They cannot prevent them
going to the cinema; all they can hope to do is prevent the cinema
showing films likely to corrupt them. In fact, no one really knows
what will corrupt anyone else.
There has been intense investigation of the question lately.
It must be remembered that children seldom tell the truth to
investigators, and that magistrates are usually sympathetic to the
plea of the juvenile delinquent: "I saw it done in the pictures."
Moreover, it is the spectacle rather than the theme which
impresses a child. That is to say, a boy is excited by the use of
firearms whether in the hands of a gangster or a soldier; an em-
brace is equally inflammatory whether between licit or illicit
40
EVELYN WAUGH
lovers. Americans are devoted to a conception of innocence
which has little relation to life.
But when all this is said it remains broadly true that some
films may be harmless to adults and harmful to children. This,
within all the essential finer distinction, the Americans ignore,
and the function of the Hays Office is to enforce a Code which
forbids the production of any film which can be harmful to any-
one, or offend any racial or religious susceptibility.
No such code is feasible in a heterogeneous society. Logi-
cally applied it would condemn, for instance, almost the whole
of Shakespeare.
The unhappy compromise is evident in all Hollywood films
except those of Mr. Walt Disney. Every attempt is made by in-
nuendo to pack as much lubricious material as possible into every
story, while mature dramatic works intended for a morally
stable, civilised audience have their essential structure hopelessly
impaired.
The vagaries of the Hays Office may be quoted at indefinite
length. One example must suffice here.
A script was recently condemned as likely to undermine
the conception of Christian marriage. The story was of an un-
happy married man and woman who wished to divorce then-
respective partners and remarry one another. They institute
proceedings, but in the end refrain from remarriage precisely
because they come to realise that this would not constitute
Christian marriage.
At the same time the excellent film "The Best Years of
Our Lives" was being acclaimed as the embodiment of healthy
American domesticity. That story depends for its happy end on
the hero being deserted by his Bohemian wife and thus being
free to marry the banker's innocent daughter. This was passed
because it was never specifically stated that a divorce would have
to intervene.
I have attempted to show some of the disabilities under
which Hollywood works. Are they insuperable? I sincerely be-
lieve that they are. As far as the home of a living art is concern-
ed, Hollywood has no importance. It may be a useful laboratory
for technical experiment.
The great danger is that the European climate is becoming
inclement for artists; they are notoriously comfort-loving people.
The allurements of the modest luxury of Hollywood are strong.
Will they be seduced there to their own extinction?
41
TWO POEMS
Richard Eberhart
SESTINA
I die, no matter what I do I die.
Is this the sum of what man has to do?
There is no use to fly to be at ease.
Man flies, but knows not what he does.
It is in war you want to be in peace.
In Heaven, in Heaven I want to be in Hell.
The mortal span to find out Heaven and Hell!
No matter what I have to do I die,
The gods comply to cancel you to peace.
Before this then what is it man should do?
And after, does it matter what he does?
Will Christ-like Christ then put him at his ease?
Will will will him his own, a fabled ease?
Will, some say, is the whole road to Hell.
But man is bound to Hell whatever he does.
No matter what he does he has to die.
It is the dying that you have to do
Defies the hyaline luster of the peace.
Despair has not the end in view of peace
Nor has desire the purposes of ease,
But action, while you live, is what's to do.
Thought is three crossed roads. that lead to Hell,
Your thought is fatal and will make you die,
For thinking kills as much as action does.
42
RICHARD EBERHART
It is not what he thinks, nor what he does
Nor what cold mystery of the Prince of Peace
Avails no matter what I do I die,
May nothing, nothing put me at my ease
Except the reality of Heaven and Hell.
No one told me what I ought to do.
The scriptures told you what you ought to do.
They are unreasonable truth, and what man does
Believe when most he "believes in Heaven and Hell.
That passes understanding, that is peace.
But sky-fallen man will not be put at ease.
I die, no matter what I do I die.
No matter what I do I have no peace.
No matter what man does he has no ease.
Heaven and Hell are changeless when I die.
THE HELLDIFER GUNNER
This is the story of Johnny Dare,
O where did he go?
The dive bombing gunner* of the upper air,
O where did he go, did he go?
He was a good mechanic, he was steady,
His was hard working, and thrifty,
His squadron mates said he was deadly
Behind his well boresighted twin fifties.
He would look through the Mark 9 Sight,
He would give short bursts with his tracers,
By instinct he knew how to fight,
He knew how to sight, and how to place.
He had been in combat, had Johnny Dare,
Far, far from the Iowa farm.
He had been in the melee out there,
Back he had come without harm.
43
RICHARD EBERHART
Others had been shot out of the air,
Hit the sea with a mighty kiss;
And he knew, after the run, high, there.
What was known as a near miss.
Back from the wars came Johnny Dare
For a rest and a time of ease
With his aviation free gunnery mates,
Reading the comics and eating ice cream.
He put in for leave to get him home
To girls and rest instead of guns,
But there was no time to go home,
And he was assigned a new squadron.
They had new 2-Cs, he had a new pilot,
O where did he go?
Johnny Dare kept to his squadron duties,
They kept him on the go.
One day the squadron was revved up
And Johnny got in the rear seat,
He was in the last plane to take off,
It would be the same old beat.
He had on his flight jacket, and gloves,
His goggles and his parachute,
And just before they taxied out
He threw the mechs a salute.
The pilot had to taxi far
Way down to the end of the field
Before turning into the gray wind
And pausing to test his engine's feel.
There were a few trees and bushes there,
All was well and down the runway
Grew the Helldiver to the holding air,
Almost motionless upon the day.
44
RICHARD EBEHHART
Out of sight was out of mind
To all but those in the Operations tower,
They kept the news of weather and wind,
They had the bomber in their radio power.
In due time the squadron circled in
Came settling slow, one after other
Each pilot and each plane came in
All in the usual order.
The pilot of the last plane got out,
Out of the plane got he,
Back he looked, but Johnny Dare
He did not see, not see.
Only one glove on his bucket seat
Left Johnny Dare
When he went off that day
Into the upper air.
And his parachute harness was
Thrown back as over a chair,
Casually, rather gallantly,
Deliberate and debonaire.
45
ALPHA AND OMEGA
Isaac Rosenfeld
If my virtue be a dancer's virtue . . .
verily, that is my Alpha and Omega.
Nietzsche.
1. Introduction. The Postman, his story.
THEY CALL me Little Giant. In the morning, when my work be-
gins, the bag is heavy. I pull it onto my shoulder with a groan.
All day it grows lighter and lighter; my head rises of its own
accord, I take longer, quicker steps, my strength, courage and
good humor return to me. Late in the afternoon, when the bur-
den is gone, I am a new man. But it is late in the afternoon, the
day's work is done, and tomorrow begins a new day.
This has been going on for years. Mind you, I do not com-
plain. 1 am glad to hold my position in the service, the more so as
I am now an old man and can soon expect a pension. There
was a time, not so long ago, when many envied me. Those were
the days when nearly everyone on my route was starving; the
days when, in addition to letters, I used to load my bag with
scraps of bread, meat, cheese, lettuce, the head of a chicken or a
fish, lumps of sugar or candy, anything cheap and edible, and not
always fresh, that I could lay my hands upon. I distributed food
with the mail first, out of pity, and then out of self-regard, by
way of gaining the good will of the people, for the letters I
brought them were, more often than not, notices of dispossess-
ment and eviction and suspension of relief, news of the death of
a relative, nearby or in a distant city. I will not soon forget those
days.
But now only one thing concerns me: what effect has this
work had on my character? Is it only because of my short sta-
ture and broad shoulders, my baggy pants and the rather, on the
whole, ape-like swing of my arms and stoop of my body that I
46
ISAAC ROSENFELD
am called Little Giant? The men in the post office have an
instinct for choosing names: they appear to go only by externals,
but in reality they work much deeper. Thus, lanky Garrity, our
thin man, is called not, as you might expect, Slim, Beanpole,
Reach or 1 Noodle, but Cough Drop, and strangely enough, he
really is very much like a cough drop. There must have been
something of the same order that made them call me as they do.
At least, I like to think so.
My work is somehow similar to that of both angels and hang-
men. These creatures, blessed or damned, have surrendered
their wills they are in service. But why, since neither has a
will of his own, should an angel be held blessed and a hangman
damned? So with myself. What am I then, I who do not even
read the letters I deliver? True, I know, in a manner of speaking,
what they contain. I have developed a sense of content, I can
judge by the size, shape, weight, color and feel of the envelope.
But this merely reminds me that I am an outsider in the very
thing I am most concerned with. For a time I considered steam-
ing open the letters; I could have arranged to do it without danger
of being found out. But I decided against it rather, I resigned
myself not to do so. After all, I am in service, too.
Then how shall I ever know the truth about myself? If there
were a mystic society of postmen, such as, granted the proper
conditions, might have existed in Roman days, we would have
taken the matter up and evolved a rite for ourselves. The mystery
would have its initiates. But now the mystery, poor thing, exists
by itself and no one is instructed in it.
Concretely, this is how it goes:
One of my houses is a four-story tenement. On the first floor
lives a large family. I cannot say how many children it seems
to me that each day I see new faces. The children, ragged and
dirty dressed in burlap and flour sacks, old tennis shoes, galosh-
es, and so dirty they might just have been plucked up out of the
ground rush out to greet me, gather about, cling to my arms
and legs, climb onto iny back and cry, "Mail, mail, mail, the mail-
man's here!" There is never any mail for them, and there hasn't
been any for years not since I brought the family its last relief
check. Times have changed and things are looking up.
On the floor above lives the prostitute. There is never any
mail for her either. Once there was a court order for eviction,
but somehow she got around it. She comes to the window and
looks out, sees the children swarming at my feet. Occasionally
47
ISAAC ROSENFELD
she clears her throat and spits; the gob of spit spatters on the
sidewalk. More often, she gives me a forlorn look. I have no
comment to make, neither of judgment nor condemnation, and
with the direct, unblinking glance that I give her in return, I try
to tell her so.
There are two other tenants. A dancer on the third floor,
and on the fourth floor, a man with watery eyes who, from the
way he drags himself to the window, appears to be a paralytic.
There is always mail for the dancer spicy, fragrant envelopes
in many colors, addressed in back-handed, quaint, irregular,
square, delicate or spidery scripts. Letters often from foreign
countries, from France and Italy, Finland, Canada and Spain,
and from remote corners of our own country such as Curtain
Falls, Onion Terrace and Mahogany Creek. Fluffy letters written
on tissue, bulky letters, clippings all of them, I am sure, in
praise of the dancer.
The man on the fourth floor also gets mail. Large envelopes,
magazines, pamphlets, books, all very scholarly and serious, to
be sure, but never a personal letter. It is strange that the people
to whom I bring the most mail are the ones I know least. The
large family of children and the prostitute I see every day, and
though it is always the same, yet something new always passes
between us. The dancer I also see daily sometimes, barefooted
and wearing her thin dancing costume, she takes the mail directly
from my hand but she is always preoccupied and remote and
never looks at me, so that I do not really know her at all. I very
rarely see the paralytic. He must have a hard time dragging him-
self up and down the stairs.
Such equations, I have noticed, are by no means uncommon:
large families no mail; steady customers (so to speak) un-
known to the postman; occasional customers his best friends.
The supreme touch, I should add, is that I myself seldom get mail.
Precisely what this means I have not been able to find out. But
I imagine it has some meaning, and is of interest, not only to
postmen, but to the world at large.
2. The Pleasures of Family Life. Antontonio Jeveves.
Marthafoglia hung the last stocking on the line. "Zing-zing!
Ding-a-ling! Chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka!" Lugubugu came tear-
ing round the bend, steam up, throttle open, and collided with
the post. The line snapped. All the freshly washed clothes fell
to the ground.
"You watch where you go/' said Marthafoglia, mother of
48
ISAAC ROSENFELD
how many? and picked up the clothes and carried them into the
house to do her washing all over again.
The child screamed several hours. There was a lump as hard
as a stone on his forehead. He kicked out his legs, stiffened,
collapsed, lay like a dead chicken on the ground, groaned and
contorted himself and struck one pose after another, screaming.
His brothers and sisters did not know what to do with him to
make him keep still. They carried him down into the basement
and laid him on the carpenter's bench, his head on the grindstone.
"I know what. Let's play hospital. Lugubugu must be sick.
You must be the nurse. You must be sick too. Lie down in the
wash tub. You must be another nurse. I must be the doctor."
"What can I be?"
"What can I be?"
"You two must take turns being dead and being the under-
taker."
Lugubugu screams, and Ellabella, the eldest, never at a loss,
builds a play about his screaming. Stuck away in her pocket book
is a packet of picture cards movie actors and actresses with
their favorite smiles: Lola Cowley, Mark Thorp, Bucky Ander-
son, Charmaine Charmante. These must wait for another occa-
sion to call them forth, when the child's desire distributes its
other roles: I must be beautiful (Who do I look like?), brave
(Stand back! Stickemup!) , tender (I know, yes, I know, darling,
but we still have each other) , wanton (I'd let you kiss me good
night, but I'm wearing pants) . And the accessories of desire lie
in a heap in the treasure chest, a cheese-box, behind a loose plank
in the wall: a used-up lipstick, discarded high-heel shoes, cap-
pistols, a doll's head, severed from the trunk.
Lugubugu falls asleep and they perform an operation on him
with a rusty shears, snipping the air at his throat, the fuzz of his
ears, and, very delicately, his eyelashes.
Antontonio Jeveves is a janitor with many houses to take
care of and a family of his own in each. He has, all in all, in one
place or another, some sixty children, not counting dead or jailed.
He has three wives, two of them legal: Marthafoglia (see above)
and La Paloma Pigeon; his common law wife is Clarissa Melissa,
now big with child, who still has hopes of marrying him. His
other women are Stella, who lives on Orchard Place in Cleve-
land, Sarah, who lives in Boston, street address unknown, Mary,
Helen, Jewel, Rachel, Pearl, Gertrude, Pima, Pia, Ria, Mia, Nina,
Parthenia, Virginia, Becky, Bessie, Anna, Suzy, Aida, Paula,
49
ISAAC ROSENFELD
Polly, Cookie and Gertrude (known as "the other Gertrude") ,
most of whom give their last names as Smith. Antontonio Jeve-
ves has had children by nearly all of them.
Social workers, who have at one time or another been on
his trail and have learned a little about him (though not, for
instance, that he has more than one wife) , have invariably given
him up as an incorrigible idiot and stricken his name off their lists.
Antontonio holds them in contempt. He made advances to one
of them, a fairly young and, in a bloodless way, pretty woman,
and nearly had himself turned in to the police. He attributed his
failure, the first in many years, to the fact that he had been neg-
lecting his nails, and for several days, waiting for the social work-
er to return, he kept after his nails, digging the dirt out with the
blade of a screw driver. He would very much like to meet this
woman again.
Antontonio knows that there are all kinds of women in this
world (what doesn't he know?) , and that some of them might,
conceivably, have some reason to refuse him. But to tell the
truth, he is eager to encounter one of these women, and for many
years has been in search of her. (The social worker does not
count, because, thinks Antontonio, he met her only in her pro-
fessional capacity, and besides, she was not his type, her hips
were too narrow. Here he performs a little trick, for whenever
he does meet a woman who refuses him, he immediately con-
cludes that she was not his type and therefore doesn't count; just
as another man whose concern, the very opposite, is to find a
woman who will love him, will also say that his failures do not
count. But in spite of his little tricks, Antontonio's reckoning is
substantially accurate in these matters.) He curses the luck
which keeps him a poor man and cuts him off from access to the
upper classes where, he feels sure, he would have no difficulty
in finding a woman to refuse him. But on the other hand, he
reasons, if he had money and could open doors that are now
closed to him, he would again meet his old failure4n~the-form-of~
success, and there he would be, right back at his starting point
Even so, poor as he is, and dirty, ugly (except for his beautiful,
l6ng, straight nose with the delicate nostrils) , scarred and tatter-
ed even so, he has met and enjoyed more than what one would
grant him as his natural share of these women. There is no ac-
counting for the upper classes, thinks Antontonio. What do they
see in him? It all comes from being a janitor, from having work-
ed round their homes. "Oh please, sir, won't you please fix my
faucet?" And Antontonio, a complaisant man, fixes her faucet,
50
ISAAC ROSENFELD
and her daughter's, too. But what's the use of kidding yourself?
Antontonio knows all about such romances, and he resents being
included in the same category of afternoon- or odd-moment lover
with the milkman, the iceman, the vacuum-cleaner- and brush-
salesman. He feels that if he had a somewhat wider space for
his explorations, if he could only move about a bit more freely
in these circles, he would soon find what he is looking for.
Well, true now, there have been women who've said no. But
Antontonio knows these nos, and is thoroughly weary of them.
In each there is a sprout of possibility, just under the surface,
thrusting its way up into the light. It is not a no, dead at the
roots, an outright, absolute blank of a no, the no of a stone, past,
present and future the same. It is the no of an onion (Anton-
tonio eats onions raw) ; peel off the outer layers of negation, the
middle layers of possibility and probability, and you come to the
green core of willingness. Enough of such nos. Antontonio wants
the absolute thing.
Why does he want it? He is as eager for it as another man
would be for the very opposite, for yes and for the same reason.
He wants the truth. He feels that if he could but find a woman
who was thoroughly dead to him, then perhaps he would begin
to understand. He would study her as he studies a bit of ma-
chinery that needs fixing, examine the matter from all sides,
probe into it, this way and that, and cast as much light as he
could on the subject. He would study such a woman until he
found, so to speak, the part that was missing; he would know in
what respect she differs from the other women, and then, precise-
ly because he knew why she does not want him, he would know
why the others do. Then perhaps he would learn why he runs
to them, adding woman to woman and piling up heaps of children,
each with a straight, long nose like his own. Is it because he
wants them or they want him? Or neither; or both? If both, in
what proportion, and if neither, what then? He would very
much like to be able to answer these questions. Now, while hi^
sixty-first child (so far as he knows) is waiting to be born. He
feels it is time.
One night he hit the pregnant Clarissa Melissa over the head
with a beer bottle. (He was feeling rather depressed -at the time,
and some half dozen or so of his children were crying in concert.
Antontonio thought it was because they were hungry, and Claris-
sa, because they were wet. In either case, they had neither food
nor clean diapers to give them, so let them cry.) He hit her, but
not hard enough to break the bottle, (on the return of which
51
ISAAC ROSENFELD
a five-cent deposit could be collected) or to break Clarissa's head.
She did not fall unconscious, so, to occupy his time, he felt he
should hold a conversation with her. He asked her immediately,
without beating about the bush such directness is one of Anton-
tonio's greatest charms he asked her why. Why did she think he
came to her in the first place, why did they go about it the way
they did, and why did they have so many children? Clarissa
Melissa thought it was because they were poor. That, thought
Antontonio, was a good answer, and it increased his respect for
the intelligence of his common-law wife. But on second thought
he saw that it was no answer at all. For if he was what he was
because he was poor, what good did it do him to be told that he
was poor? If he had money, he would no doubt have been able
to answer many questions but then what need would there be
to ask any? Likewise, now, as a poor man, he asked many ques-
tions but how can a poor man answer them? Clarissa Melissa
hadn't much use for such subtleties and told him so, adding that
in her opinion it was high time they were married. Antontonio
hit her over the head again, not very hard he was sensible of
her condition and taking the bottle with him to collect the depo-
sit, he went off to see another one of his women.
In all probability, if Antontonio were ever to find the woman
he is looking for, the woman who could give him the answer to
his questions, he would kill her. Not that he would not be grate-
ful for the enlightenment of a i*efusal; but enlightenment is one
thing and a refusal is another and besides, what could he do
with such a woman after the enlightenment? He has not yet
killed any one, and he has no particular desire to do so. But he
is aware of his own strength and vitality that give him no rest
and enable him to stay alive and well on a diet of onions and
matchsticks, so to speak. So it is entirely possible that he would
be capable of murder. He feels he has already committed deeds
of great violence and daring, so why not another? Murder does
not attract him, but all the same he is sure that he could com-
mit murder very much in the same way that he now loves women
with disastrous consequences, which never catch up with him.
But if he committed murder in the same manner, he would
merely be adding a further fuddle to his present bewilderment,
and would have to go about killing and racking his brains for the
answer to the question why do I kill? Whatever Antontonio does
not know, intrigues him; whatever he has not had in his life, is an
ever-present possibility, requiring study. But Antontonio knows
that he is an insatiable man, and he is careful not to over-stimu-
late his appetite.
52
ISAAC ROSENFELD
Unlike other men, he takes greatest pleasure in his children
not when he comes home to them, but when he leaves. No sight
is as rewarding to him as the sight of his many children, playing
in the alley or the yard at a distance of a- block or more, when
the dreadful noise they make grows dim and pleasant to the ear.
He walks away with his head turned back and his heart filling
with love. Just before turning the corner, he takes a last look,
and there they are, blocks away in the empty lot, the whole
family of them rolled together into one mass, impossible to tell
one from the other. He blows them a kiss and goes proudly on
his way.
Perhaps he does it all for the sake of the children. He loves
children, of course and who knows, maybe even more than
other men do? Ever so much more, to such an extent that it is
something morbid? He can't be sure, for he has so many children,
that even his thick emotions must be stretched thin to cover them
all. If he had only one child, or two at the most, then he would
know for sure. But then, again, the question wouldn't even
come up. There was a time, after all, when he was a father of
only one by his own first, proper, legal wife, Marthafoglia, and
then he never even thought to ask.
But perhaps that's it, who knows? Perhaps it is all for the
sake of filling the world with his stock, neighborhood after neigh-
borhood and city after 1 city, and he still a comparatively young
man with, God willing, many long fertile years before him. Who
knows? Meanwhile, he goes about his work, a regular and decent
man with no bad habits rises early, starts the fire, carries out
the ashes, carries down the garbage, leaves some food outside
the door of the man on the fourth floor, mops the hall and the
stairs and goes on to the next house and the next house, pausing,
mid-day, for beer and a sandwich if he has money, and scratch-
ing his head and his neck if he has not. And when evening comes
depending on where he is, he goes in to one of his women, and if
there happens to be supper, has a bite to eat with her; then takes
her to bed and snorts like a bull and a little while later snores
like a sawmill. And while he sleeps, who can tell? perhaps a seed
has begun to sprout into a child with a long, straight, delicate
nose.
3. The Prostitute, her story.
Allow me my dignity. When I was a child, my (mother, also
a whore, said to me, "Never listen to what others say." I have
followed her advice.
53
ISAAC RQSENFELD
Most things bore me. I no longer derive pleasure from the
so-called pleasant things of life. My plum, must be all lined and
wrinkled like a miser's purse, though if I may be cute for a
moment I have never been miserly with it.
A word on language. By "plum" I mean vulva. Early in life
I formed a strong dislike for the terms of my trade: sexual inter-
course, penis, vagina, prostitution, the various diseases, etc., etc.
There is something terribly vulgar, pedantic, self-conscious and
condescending in these words, and I stammer and feel I am going
to blush when I use them, as from time to time, say in conversa-
tion with a doctor, I find it necessary to do. The synonyms, which
are called four-letter words, though many of the most essential
contain five letters and I can think of one of eleven the syno-
nyms would serve the purpose very well, but their use by a per-
son of sensibility is full of danger. Above all one must be natural
especially in performing what self-conscious or inhibited folk
call the natural functions. The difficulty in the thing is reflected
in the word. A brutish person, a simpleton or a foreigner who is
just learning the language can use "dirty words" (as they are
called) with a clear conscience. But the rest of mankind is com-
promised. And who is not compromised? How well I could ex-
plode the myth of "the healthy truck driver!" But some other
time.
To avoid compromising myself (and as it is, I sometimes
think I am the most compromised of all) I have coined my own
language. Plum is vulva or vagina (also flap and gobbet) ; penis
is whacker, thrucker, dishik; sexual intercourse I call jim-jam,
etc. I do not object to being called a whore, (especially with the
middle-western pronounciation, hoor) but "prostitute" I dislike
and prefer badger. As for the word "prostitution," which I ab-
hor, or the trade itself (as my mother used to say, "das Gescheft
selbst") , I say woodpile.
I've been on the woodpile all my life, ever since I began to
assist my mother. (Her gentlemen called me "Mother's little
helper." Thus it was that I came to regard my work as a kind of
help, given in free will to mankind. It was also from this inno-
cent phrase that I learned to appreciate the beauty of double-
entendre, and not only double, but threefold, fourfold, and so on,
until the whole world blossoms into a garden of hidden mean-
ings.) I regret nothing. I've certainly had my time, and what
with one thing or another, fizz, flapdoodle, stug and caracoca
from here to Borneo and back, I can truly call myself a woman
who left no lesson of life unlearned. God bless it, even now, au
54
ISAAC ROSENFELD
old woman in a creaky bed, bitten by bugs, I can feel it descend
on me with a bang and a wallop, the life I've led! What a clear,
clean conscience and what I value most, a sense of peace.
Soak me in salt water and you won't purify me. Preach at
me, pray, rave, threaten me, pour lye on my flesh but me you
cannot touch, nor can you undo one single thing that I have done.
My life that has put me within reach of all, has also placed me
out of reach, out of reach of the hatred which burns in the gut
of the whole envious pack of you that would raise me from my
fallen estate, as you call it. It gives you no rest; but me it gives
great rest and a deep sleep it is a pillow under my back. I have
plucked many a soft feather, my hearties, to comfort my deserv-
ing backside. What wouldn't you give for one of my secrets?
But the truth is, I have no secrets. I have had nothing that I
have not shared. Ponder that.
All the same, it is wise to have the good will of the public.
So my mother taught me, and so I have learned from my own
experience. There was my colleague, Rosalie, who was stoned,
just as it happened in the Bible. But one moment, please. My
impressions and memories rush at me, and I am entangled in
them, but they shall have to wait. Why do I call Rosalie col-
league? Am I being cute again? The worst thing about whores is
their cuteness. The hats some of us wear, the cunning little
smiles and dresses, the little-girlishness! The angel of death in a
bridal gown, we are incurable romantics. One hag I know, a
real bag of a badger, went to the trouble of painting on her nose
life-like and life-size freckles! Would you believe it? Another
wore a braided pigtail with a ribbon in it all her life. And when
her hair fell out as the result of one of the many occupational
hazards and diseases to which we are subject (see, more of my
cuteness) , she got herself a wig which also had a braided pigtail.
Pouts, sniffles, giggles, even pimples the little girl pursues them.
They think to regain what they have lost. . . . Thank God, I've
had none of that nonsense. But my own affliction, perhaps even
worse, is the cuteness of acuteness my abnormal sensitivity to
words. I've just said that I have a clear conscience, which is
true, I don't consider myself a sinner but I have all the symp-
toms of one, chief of which, in my own case, is a troubled speech.
But the public, its good will . . . Rosalie was stoned one
morning on the way home from the grocery. One stone bruised
her ankle, another cut her cheek, a third hit the bottle of milk
she was carrying and her coat and dress and shoes and stockings
were drenched in milk. She was also cut up by the broken glass,
55
ISAAC HOSENFEU)
but she didn't mind that half so much as the shame of having
to walk down the street in broad daylight, all covered with milk.
Everyone who met her on the way laughed out loud and even
perfect strangers who couldn't have known who she was, it
seemed to her that they, too, knew and were laughing. It was the
grocer's son who did it, a lad of seventeen named Timmie, may
the crut give him no rest Several days before, he had accused
Rosalie, falsely, to his mother, of having offered to cancel her
debt at the store in trade. Because of this accusation, the grocer's
wife drove the weeping Rosalie out of the store with a broom.
But the grocer, a wise father who knew his own son, saw no
reason to believe the charge without also believing that the kid
had accepted the generous offer. And so he beat him with the
same broom in the course of which beating, the son confessed
his lie, and Rosalie's custom, but not her good name, was re-
stored. ... I can't help remarking on the utter ignorance of our
psychology that this episode reveals. The grocer's brat, having
no experience of the world, was in a perfect position to indicate
the depth of the misunderstanding that so-called good and indus-
trious folk have of us. It is never a whore's malice, her venom,
contempt or desire to degrade her alleged betters that would lead
her to make such an offer. The offer itself is rare and if it is
made at all, it is a sign of the whore's own degradation, the
misery and poverty and last extreme to which she has come. But
these good people imagine that we have nothing more to do than
go about plotting and planning to ensnare them sure, run up a
debt and then wipe it out with one job, an easy life. As if they
would ever extend us credit beyond thirty cents* and when they
do it's a sure sign that they want to ensnare us. Which, in fact,
this whole incident proves. They think they have it coming to
them, they want it, the stinking hypocrites, they want it their
own way, which is a whoredom dirtier than our own, and whose
false motive is the cause of the bad name we must bear. We bear
it for the sake of their uncleanness. May the crab sadden their
days and nights.
Another unpleasant run-in with the people this time, my
friend Phyllis taking the rap. She was living decently and quiet-
ly in a semi-retired way in a good neighborhood and paying an
exorbitant rent for her flat. (Landlords, like bugs, can smell your
blood.) One morning she awoke to find her door decorated with
two huge symbols, male and female, joined a competent draw-
ing of considerable detail, in red paint The poor girl worked at
it desperately, for the house was up, but it would not wash away.
56
ISAAC ROSENFELD
By the time she } had run to the hardware store and come back
with turpentine, the landlord and the neighbors had gathered at
her door. The ladies, who had been enjoying themselves tremen-
dously, retreated when Phyllis appeared, slamming their doors
in her face; then opened them a crack and looked on. The men
giggled and passed obscene remarks. The landlord made her
scrub off the offensive drawing with the whole house looking on,
then kicked her down the stairs and would not let her come back
for her belongings. No one said a word in her behalf.
What redress do these poor girls have? None whatsoever.
Some of the girls say, jim-jam the public! This is not my
attitude. Ours is a public calling, and it is useless to pretend that
we can go our own way, taking no heed of the world. True, the
profession amounts to a guild, of sorts, but it does not protect us
or represent us in any way. Our only protection, and it's little
enough, is the fact that we are necessary and ineradicable. I
know, in some countries they register us and inspect us like so
many cattle, and a certain percentage of our earnings goes to the
state. I don't see much hope in that. It is based on a falsehood,
which the whole scheme perpetuates: that we are wild, unprin-
cipled and dangerous, and must be controlled at all costs. It's
not only that this is slavery it's an outright lie. Even if you
were to put us on civil service with competitive examinations,
sick-leave, paid vacations and old age retirement funds so long
as the lie remained that we are outcastes, occupying a special,
degraded position, it would not help one bit. The falsehood would
remain, the people would suffer from it, and we would suffer in
turn. It is our lot to suffer from the evil in other's hearts.
What falseness and evil I have seen! It is evident in men
from the very first moment of their approach. The way they look
at you or talk to you the way even that some avoid talking ^o
you, keeping their mouths shut and pointing or grunting to make
themselves understood but expecting you, of course, to sing
them hymns! There are some, however, whose silence is a bless-
ing. They say nothing because they feel, as I do, that words are
unclean but in their actions, in their look, in the touch of their
hands and in their very bones there is a sweetnes and a purity.
It is these rare men who are our only hope, and the hope of the
world. But the rest! I've seen strong and weak, crippled and
sound, the long and the short, the black, the white and the in-
between and in all of them a fury, a possession as by devils, of
hatred, lust, uncharity, niggardliness, arrogance, stupidity, false
pride and lies, lies, lies. A man's whole nature is expressed in
57
ISAAC KOSENFELD
the simplest act. There is a way of unbuttoning a button which
is as cruel as cutting off a head. And to lie down in bed is to
leave yourself open, wide open to judgment. It's a wonder how
little they realize that we know them and can see deep into
them, clear to the back. And not only we, but the whole sex,
because a man lays himself bare in such an obvious, clumsy way,
poof thing, and doesn't even know that he is known. But we
especially have a power over them that is absolutely implacable.
Perhaps that is why they hate us, or pretend, or feel that they
have to hate us. It is only a strong man who has nothing to fear
that can grant us, with his blessing, our right to exist.
I am reminded of money. Make no mistake, I love money.
Gelt, mazuma, mahoola, kale I can't get enough of the stuff. The
things I have done for mere money I would have done for nothing
else in the world not for, long life, good health, good looks. If
the choice had ever been put to me: either do this, or remain as
ill-favored as you are, I would certainly have refused. But the
trouble is that such choices are never put to us, which is another
reason the world misunderstands us. The choice always is: either
do this, or you will not have this money. I for one always jumped
at the money, promptly went down on my hands and knees, my
knees and elbows, or stood on my head to get it. When it comes
to money, there just is no choice.
And yet, believe me, though I say I love money, I also hate
it, I really do, with all my heart. It embarrasses me, it disgusts
me, it reminds me of the world's disesteem. But more important
than that, it reminds me of the disesteem in which I hold myself.
Money brings out the real whore in me. I am self-conscious in
speech and obsessed with the avoidance of certain words; and un-
easy before money. Quarters, pennies, dimes, dollars they burn
a hole in my hand. Words and money, money and words you
will find them at the bottom of the woodpile, in all its secret, dis-
mal places. But all the same, when it comes to money I will
instantly overcome my fastidiousness (and later hate myself for
it) and there isn't a thing I still wouldn't gladly do for money,
though the strength that some of these things require is now no
longer mine.
Mr. Hubert Jackson is the ugliest man I know. He has been
coming to me for years, and from the very first I wished I could
drive him away. But he has the pertinacity of an old client and,
apparently, a satisfied one. Hub follows me from plabe to place
whenever I move or am forced to move; he has his distinct step
on the stairs, his knock on the door, which I wouldn't mistake
58
ISAAC ROSENFELD
in a thousand. I hear it and immediately, as one would respond
to a lover, something inside me says: It's he! My heart goes faster,
though my hands turn cold and I shrink away in disgust.
Now, praise the Lord, he is too old for the woodpile. But
this is not an unmixed blessing, and grateful though I am for it,
I must say that it makes matters worse. For one, it prolongs his
visits and sometimes, when the caprice seizes him, I am at my
wits end to chase him away. Then, when he sees me squirming
in his presence, he loves to sit down and talk. "You know, we've
both grown old together," he says, more often than not blowing
his nose with a dirty handkerchief, as if to strike the note of
confidence, or, without so much as a by-your-leave, taking a hair-
pin from my dresser and digging the wax out of his ear. He looks
into his handkerchief after he has blown his nose, or if it's wax
he's been after, he holds it up to the light on the hook of the pin
and studies the quarry for a while. He knows how much these
things disgust me. And then, because he knows how much I
hate to recall his share of the past, he repeats, several times,
"Grown old together . . . old together." There is engendered that
false and clammy old-couple sentimentality which I would dislike
with any man, and find absolutely intolerable with him.
But he does not keep on very long at this level. Before long
he has switched onto a more familiar, and what is for me a more
disgusting, plane, and he piles on the intimacy, as thick as slush.
He begins by kidding me. Perhaps the religious pictures that I
have hanging on the walls will catch his eye say the picture of
Him, enlarged, with the open streaming eyes, like a close-up in
the movies, which hangs over the head of my bed. Hubert Jack-
son stops at nothing.
"What's He doing here?" asks Jackson. And when I don't
answer him, he goes on, "Oh yes, I forgot, you told me. He drop-
ped in one night and just stayed on." Or else he will say, "Very
nice and cozy up here, just the two of you. But tell me, some-
times you must look at each other. Who blushes more, you or
Him?"
I have stopped saying, aghast, "Hubert Jackson, don't you
fear God?" It only encouraged his blasphemy. Now I keep still
and hope he'll soon play himself out. But he goes on in this man-
ner, offensive to man and God. Is there no way of getting rid of
such a man?
I tell him he must leave I am expecting someone. He offers
to stay on perhaps he can be of some assistance to me I am,
after all, not as limber as I used to be. Or I tell him I am unwell,
59
ISAAC ROSENFELD
will he please go. He smiles very knowingly, congratulating me
on my prolonged youth. The vileness! What does he want with
me?
A rhetorical question. I know perfectly well what he wants.
He wants to make me play the whore for him, although he is tod
decrepit to do it in the regular and proper way. The last time he
tried it proper, it was such a hideous scene that even Jackson has
not had the courage to try it again. Although he has an abomin-
able pride before God, like all such people, he hasn't even a spark
of dignity in himself but. the scene I am alluding to was too
ugly even for him to bear. He knows, however, that I have too
much decency to remind him of it, which is why he has the cour-
age to face me. Now he is casting about for an opening, some new
trick to catch me on. I know what is corning and shrink back.
Jackson knows me too well.
He begins to speak in the vulgar language that he knows I
detest. The words the old letcher uses! I clap my hands over my
ears, but he goes on. I can see the movements of his lips, form-
ing the obscene words. I shut my eyes, but I know Jackson is
still at it, confident that sooner or later I will look at him again,
I do what he expects me to do, look at him, take away my hands
and ask, "What do you want?"
"I want you to say * .' "
"I won't!"
He takes out his wallet and places it on the table. "C'mon,
girlie, say c .' "
"I absolutely refuse!"
He takes out a dollar bill and lays it before me. "Say * / "
"No!"
U J?
"No!"
" . Come on, little girlie, say ' '!"
At last I give in. " . Now get out of here!"
"Not so fast." He places his hand over the dollar bill "Say
it again. And say ' and ' V
"Again! . . . faster . . . say it again! Say it, girlie, Roll it on
your tongue!"
He excites himself inordinately. I'm afraid that one day
hell pass out on me, die of a stroke. His face grows red, his
hands tremble, his eyes pop out of his head. When he finally
leaves, I feel dragged and spent and put to shame. My only de-
60
ISAAC ROSENFELD
f ense is to take the money, when he has at last had his fill of dirty
words, and to take it with as great a contempt as I can call forth
in myself, exerting every ounce of the whore in me. I make him
feel my disgust, I make him see what he's like, how dirty, mean
and vile, and give him a shot of my insight that penetrates his
shrivelled old-man's loins and sticks like a barb in his spine. I
don't even hide my self-disgust, the better to spew it out in his
face. But he stares back at me in the same contempt, grinning
in malice and triumph, feeling he has won his object, and we
stare at each other in silence and hatred for several minutes
before he leaves.
And he's right, too, the wretch! When he leaves, I feel so
humiliated that I can think of only One to turn to. But I am too
unclean, and I blush at the thought of His seeing me. I lie face
down on the bed, not looking up, but it seems to me that He is
looking down, and He, too, is blushing. . . .
So it goes, from one thing to another. Words, money, the
public all these simple things become complicated and unendur-
ably ugly. Are they ugly in themselves or do I make them so?
I began by suspecting the things, but now I suspect myself. Where
does my clear conscience come in, the fact thaM-xegret nothing,
am glad of it all? But what shall I pin it to? I am reminded of
the game children play and which we played at my birthday
party when I was seven years old and what trouble my dear
mother went to, to get children to come to the party! Pin the
tail to the donkey, it is called. There is the donkey on the wall,
and here I stand, blindfolded, tail and pin in hand, dizzy, having
been spun round and round. Go, grope, look for it, and see, while
everyone laughs, how far you can come from the mark. Fantas-
tic mistakes: the sofa, the clock, the umbrella stand. But now I
know what the trick is. It is to pin the tail to yourself. One sharp
jab and it's over you're fixed up for life.
Hubert Jackson makes fun of me for keeping all these reli-
gious pictures. He thinks, Ah, so this is where you've stuck your
tail! In a way, I don't blame him for laughing. It's so old hat
among us to turn to religion in later life. It's just another one of
the many cliches that rob our life of its freshness. The whore
with a heart of gold, the whore with a daughter in a convent,
with a sick mother, a mad father, a starving brother who is study-
ing law, an ailing uncle, discharged from the police force on ac-
count of bursitis. The whore who goes to church ten times a day,
and, in a single hour, crosses herself enough times to weave a
61
ISAAC ROSENFELD
rug. That's all stupid and trite, and so is the reformed whore,
grown fat and rich, who supports all the local charities, is a pillar
of the parent-teachers' association, keeps a clean house and is a
mother to her girls. The poor things lack sophistication; they
hang the tail in the most obvious place and go away feeling proud
and justified, because they think they've hit the mark. Not one
such whore has ever doubted that shell go to heaven and, I
suppose, rightfully so. We all have, you see, a clear conscience
we just don't know what to do with it.
In my own case well, I could just as easily have made the
same mistakes, and at one time I did: the Last Supper, the
Agony in the Garden, the Stations of the Cross, Christ Crucified
among Robbers and the Descent from the Cross, all of which
scenes hang from thumbtacks on my walls, are a testimonial to
my errors, as are also the pictures of Mary and Joseph in Egypt,
Pontius Pilate Washing his Hands (this over the sink; I said to
myself when I hung it there, "Think well what you wash your
hands of") and Lazarus Raised from the Dead. I have always
had a religious streak a mile and a half wide, and lately you can
tap gallons of tears from me just by saying the word 'suffer/ Of
course, I control myself, I try to remember the difference between
what's true and what's exaggerated. But after all, can you blame
me, or any of us, if we take to it as ducks to the duckpond on a
rainy day?
After all, think, it is natural for us. There's Mary Magdalen,
and the woman who was taken in adultery, and Christ said, "He
that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
Rosalie, who was stoned, wept bitter tears every time she read
this passage, and covered it with kisses; the page on which this is
written she willed me her Bible before she died is smeared
with lipstick. And then when I think of my own life, the things
IVe done, the places I've been to, the men I've known, the lowest
of the low, I think of Jesus, poor among the poor, and Christ in
Hell. I don't mean to compare myself to Him, understand me,
although some will even go so far as to do that. It's rather that
when I begin to look around for something to cover myself with,
any old rag to cover my shame, I hit upon that and it's not a
rag at all, but a piece of the finest silk, and on it is embroidered
a message in red thread, and the message is meant particularly
for me and then I don't feel shame at all.
Didn't He say, take? Take insults, calumnies, misunderstand-
ings, stones, bruises, wounds. Turn the other cheek. I have taken,
and so have we all. I have turned both cheeks at once. And He
62
ISAAC ROSENFELD
said, give, give out. I have given. Give unto Caesar. I have given
unto him. And to Peter and Paul and Tom, Dick and Harry, and
Hubert Jackson. Take in, give out it is the message, the rhythm
of the woodpile and the rhythm of life.
And then as the preacher said who used to come among us,
an old hand at converting the girls, "He was the greatest whore-
master of all. Didn't the Disciples procure for Him, Paul estab-
lish the syndicate, and Peter open the first house?" (He meant
well, Christ forgive him these words, and me for remembering
them.) "Bow down, you sinners, kneel, and then look up with
shining faces to greet the Great Man who is come to call on you!"
We kneel, we fling ourselves down, we sigh and cry out and gasp
and clutch with our hands and dig with our nails, sink our teeth
and call on His name. "Open the gates of righteousness, that I
may enter and praise the Lord!" And then, with shining faces, cry
"Sweet Jesus, fam coming! Hold me tight in Thy embrace!" But
spent, let down, ashamed, we think, unworthy, of His Passion,
and like wet, uncomfortable babies, having wet ourselves with
tears, cranky and disconsolate, we whimper, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,"
His sweet name. In the asylum, in the hospital, in jail nurse
Christ, nurse us, doctor Christ, heal us, lawyer Christ, plead for
us. Love us, sweetheart Christ, and father Christ, hear us, and do
Thou weep for us. We have ourselves been dragged up the hill
of skulls. Thy will be done, Jesus Christ, the same today, and
tomorrow and forever. Forgive us, Christ, this humble flesh.
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
But this overdoes it. I don't like blasphemy, I don't mean
to be blasphemous (or blasphemious, as our preacher used to
say) and I don't think I have been. But there's a limit, after all.
To begin with, we are sinners, and though Christ said go and sin
no more, we go and do sin more. Our sin is a mortal one, and
we will burn for it, for sure. What's more, it is gall in His wounds,
and lacerates His poor, hurt flesh. And yet I think He forgives
us for it, for it is a humble sin, the very humblest sin there is,
and done, the way we do it, not at all in pride. We are not like
the rich man who has as much chance to enter heaven as a camel
has to pass through the eye of a needle. *We are not proud, not
rich, nor do we take His name in vain, even when we call upon it
in our beds. Nevertheless, we are sinners, and that leaves us out.
His house is fof whores who whore not, and we, for a fact, do
whore. Now, if because I am a sinner I must be left out, all the
more must I stand outside the gate because I do not even consider
myself a sinner. I don't, and that's all. It's a matter of conscience,
63
ISAAC ROSENFELD
and my conscience, when all is said and done, will not support
the claim. It is too clear and though I am troubled with words
and with money and with the complication of simple things, I
seek not to be troubled, and see no reason to be so.
What then, is this not pride, to say I do not consider myself
a sinner? A remarkable thing, take my word for it, it is not.
That's the way it is, just so, simply so. I say it in simplicity and
humility, humbler flesh has never been, and though I feel a
tickling in my bones, I know it is not the smart of sin I feel, but
a trickle of pleasure in the marrow, now almost dry, and I wish
this trickle could flow and flood again, and it is not in pride that
I wish it to be so, but in simple pleasure in the time I have had,
and in regret that it shall not come again.
I think of my days and do not regret them. Rather, I am
glad, and it does my heart good. I regard it as a plain and a pure
thing, plain as rain and pure as snow. I know why the old Greeks,
or was it the Egyptians or the Hindus? would keep the girls in
their temples, for a pure thing it is. Mary, Mary, white as snow-
but it seems to me that She is proud, not I, and I am pure, not
She. (Forgive me, Mary.) Why is She now so still? I think of
the girls in the temples and I think it would do Her good to have
another Son.
A pure thing it is, pure in itself, unpurified. Just that, and
nothing more. The act without consequence, the word without
meaning, the ritual without belief. That alone. How often, there-
fore, is the bed without a sheet, the pillow without a case, the
lamp without a shade. Even here in my room the bulb hangs,
unshaded, from a chain over the bed, and you either turn it on
or off, behold it or behold it not, and it can burn or just as well
not burn. But when it burns, and seems to sway, -and the bed
moves, and seems to travel far into space, it is that alone, and
we are all strangers.
It is neither a good thing nor evil, but pure, alone, by itself.
And whether with the young man, his first time, and his pimples
bright and round as cherries, or with the old man, dry and wind-
ed, or with that man, best of all, between age and youth, who
knows how it is and how it should be and then, sometimes, it is
no longer sham, but true even so, with one and all, we are all
strangers. The impurity is in Jackson who would make it a
familiar thing, to laugh at, not in myself, who would keep it
strange and stern. It is the thing itself one has to have mind,
heart and courage for, the jim-jam, nothing more. To that of the
insects in the crack of wood, the mice in the pantry, the animals
64
ISAAC ROSENFELD
in the field, the beasts in the jungle and the birds in the air, we
add our own, grounded, unable to fly, but our own, our human
and inhuman thing, to crown them all, the greatest and the best.
Then the thing burns and is cold as ice, words fail and
there is a stream of words in strange languages, one lives and
dies and goes through the stages of life, crying baby, oh boy,
daddy! We are all strangers, mother to son, you and I, and peace
to us all. But suddenly we are strangers no more. Then bang,
and the lights go out and the lights go on, it is all one, the dark-
ness and the flashing lights, and in the act of devotion, the devo-
tion itself, the Son of Man has come and redeems us one and all.
But Christ, I am mocked. My face mocks me, wrinkled and
sagged like an overblown bladder emptied of air. My hair mocks
me, tangled in the comb. My body mocks me, a tired, sticky,
flabby thing, the widow of itself. My eyes mock me, dim, and
not, after all they have seen, clear, the dimness burned out of
them, but dimmer than the landlord's baleful look. And I must
hustle for rent, drag myself up and down these stairs, beg, threat-
en, cheat, dissimulate, blow liar's dust and sneeze mercy on the
saints; crouch, crawl, whimper, simper, fall, pick myself up,
hobble, limp, skip, run, walk, creep, scratch, bleed, cry murder
in broad daylight and Christ at night. Nothing touches me, grown
old, grown cold. Nothing pleases me. I complain, grouch, grum-
ble and scold at the children below, the dancer above they
darken my days. Nothing pleases me, nothing touches me, noth-
ing gives me a bang and a wallop, a thrill, a tickle, an itch any
more. Last night I threw the clock at the door, and broke it,
glass and all I thought I saw an ugly thing there, painted in red
paint. The day before a woman pulled my hair. Sew up the
flap, I'm off the town. Off marbles, off robin's eggs, off bingo and
cabbage and f antail for good. Lights out, roll up the flag. Empty
the ash trays. Carry out the pails. Mop the floor one last time
and lock up. Take off the sign. Closed for alterations, forced to
close out, changed hands, under new management, under six
feet, face to the wall.
But Christ, if the fat could still fry!
4. The Dancer.
Talia springs naked out of bed and puts on her leotard. This
happens every morning. The time is eight thirty, neither one
minute more nor less. She has time to brush her teeth which
she does standing on tip-toe, thereby enabling herself to see the
full reflection of her face in the bathroom mirror, and to engage
65
ISAAC ROSENFELD
in the day's first exercise, the strengthening of her leg muscles
and to drink half a glass of tomato juice, which she has poured
out and set in the ice box the night before, before the arrival of
the morning mail. At the postman's ring, she leaps out the door,
another exercise, and goes bounding barefooted down the stairs,
taking them either two at a time, or jumping down three or four
at each landing, as a schoolboy does. Sometimes she gathers the
mail directly from the postman's hand, and, if she thinks of it,
collects the bulky packages and parcels of the paralytic who lives
on the floor above her. There are always many letters for Talia,
and, inwardly, she is delighted to receive them, although she does
not express her joy, for it is not in accord with her regime to re-
lease emotional energy so early in the morning, before the day's
work has begun. Talia runs up the stairs, gracefully, lightly, two
at a time, and arrives not winded at her door. Then she sits
cross-legged on the floor and opens her mail, pouting at the day's
first disappointment. Her big toes also pout, standing out from
the others, which are turned in toward the soles. There is an
expression something like disappointment on her big, bluish toe
nails. The letter she is waiting for has not yet come. She flings
them all away, frowns and sighs, and would certainly sulk but
by now it is nine o'clock and time to begin the day's routine.
The first record she puts on the phonograph is the time-study
in metronome, which she had recorded, at considerable expense
and trouble, under her own supervision. The beat seems irregu-
lar there are many different cadences, rests, irregular rhythms;
but the beats of the metronomes have a carefully measured rela-
tion, one to the other, and after one has heard the record several
times he perceives the over-all relationship which unites the
single time-patterns into a whole. Talia is convinced that this is
her own personal pulse and beat, the rhythm of her heart and
lungs, the cyclical rhythms, expansions and contractions, the
movement of her thoughts.
She begins to dance to it. Her motions, like the sounds that
accompany them, at first seem unjoined, sporadic, irregular. But
there is also a pattern in her dance, which soon becomes ap-
parent. In the beginning, the movement is concentrated in the
lower part of her body and her legs, which are sturdy, with
square muscles. The toes grip the floor and release it, her feet
working like hands. The big toes no longer suggest disappoint-
ment; but as she has governed her body to make every part of
it expressive, her toes now have a look of something like disdain
about them,
66
ISAAC ROSENFELD
Now it is her thighs and lower trunk that carry out the main
movement of her body. Her feet move in smaller circles, their
rhythm ebbing and coming to rest. Her arms and hands are not
yet involved in motion. It is her thighs that carry the upward
movement, suggesting the rising of water in the tree trunk.
The tree is now rooted, it can only sway, as in wind, which
is brought to mind by the heaving of her belly. But this heaves
like a sail in the wind, as one says, bellying. Then the tree is a
tree no longer, but becomes a mast in full sail. But the mast is
again a tree trunk, not yet cleared of its branches, which are her
arms. The arms protest the transformation of the dance and re-
fuse to bear sails. The fingers express ten alternatives, the wrists
two, the arms and forearms supporting them. But even the pro-
test and the -alternatives are caught up in the transformation, and
enter it, no longer distinct.
Now the movement changes and the image can no longer be
tree or mast or sail. There is the movement only, withdrawn to
itself at its fullest point, full of possibility which it does not dis-
charge. Meanwhile, the rhythm of the record, nearing the end,
goes:
tick-tock tick-tick-tick tock
tick-tick-tick- tick tick-tick tick
tock tick-tock-tock tick- tock-tick-tick- tick
Now the dancer's head rocks from side to side, its motion at
first jerky, then tapering off. Now the body is still and composed,
and the head says 5n its wisdom, slowly nodding, that it is best to
dance in one place. Then, as the record ends, it too comes to rest;
as in the last moment of a spinning top, shudders and stands still,
and what remains of motion, its departing soul, passes out of the
top of her head in a moment of comprehension and silence.
Talia has her other exercises, other dances, other records.
Some she performs, like the time-study, with her attention turn-
ed in to the essence of the dance; then she keeps the curtain
drawn over the full-length mirror that covers one wall of her
room. Other dances require her outward attention; then she
draws the curtain aside and watches herself in the mirror, criticis-
ing her gestures and smiling at whatever is right, subtle or exact
in them.
She pauses for lunch. Today, to suit the purpose of her
dancing, and, as she thinks, the better to regulate her bodily eco-
nomy, she is on a liquid diet. Talia drinks a glass and a half of
67
ISAAC ROSENFELD
pineapple juice and three quarters of a glass of milk. Then she
rests on the couch in a position that she has herself discovered,
after some research, to be the most restful and invigorating. Her
limbs are neither relaxed nor tense, and her weight is so distrib-
uted that she both bears and yields it, sharing it with the couch.
While she rests, she hears the stumbling, dragging noise the pai^a-
lytic makes on the floor above, pulling himself about his apart-
ment, and the noises of the many children in the courtyard. Their
voices are shrill, frequently they quarrel and the younger ones
wail and scream. There is a pattern in everything, the world is
without chaos, and even chaos has an order the order that it has.
This Talia knows in her instinct for order. She has tried, with
some success, to integrate the elements of a simple life the
things she sees daily, the daily events, sounds, rhythms, smells,
feelings into an over-all pattern of the most general proportions,
which pattern she guards like a treasure and in guarding, seeks
to perfect it. But the noises of the children do not fit the pattern
and this has for her a kind of horror, the kind that disorder
calls forth in an orderly mind. Now she listens to the noises in
the courtyard. There is a sound such as a tin tub would make,
dragged over stones. A sound as of marbles rolling on the side
walk, forever. The girls are jumping rope, and there is the noise
of the rope striking the pavement, and the song the girls sing:
Buster Brown
turn around
Buster Brown
touch the ground
Talia listens in pain; a pain, as of the fear of death, which tells
her she will never finish or perfect her work. . . .
It is time to return to the dance; time for three more dances
until the arrival of the afternoon mail She springs up, flexes
her muscles and tenses and relaxes her toes, which are now all
pink, devoid of expression and covered with the dust of the floor.
Again, records and phonograph, again dances, the mirror
covered and uncovered.
The mailman's coming is made known to her by the shouts
of the children in the yard. A glance out the window she sees
them climbing up his legs and back, hanging from his arms, from
the bag, embracing his neck; and he plods on to the mailboxes,
bearing their weight, neither laughing nor annoyed.
As before, she runs barefooted down the stairs, takes her
68
ISAAC ROSENFELD
mail, runs up with it and sits cross-legged on the floor, hastily
going through the letters. And as before, discards them in dis-
appointment and gets up to dance again.
It grows dark, but she is still dancing. Certainly, by now,
she is perspired and exhausted, and what sadness there must be
for her in dancing alone, unseen and not leaving the house, must
have made itself felt; but she has taught herself to incorporate
even her exhaustion and sadness into the dance. So, too, the
noises of this time the whore who lives on the floor below has
several times knocked on the ceiling with a broomstick in protest
against the music and the thud of her feet, and the paralytic has
dragged himself down the stairs to pick up the day's mail, which
Talia has neglected to bring him.
Dinner, two glasses of milk and the remains of the tomato-
and pineapple- juice, and again the dance. Her movements now
are heavy, and severe with self-criticism. But there is no time
to go back, to rehearse, repeat, refine. Each dance is new, and its
execution and perfection must be spontaneous. There is no time
to go back, for now is approaching the climax of the day's effort,
which is the performance of an unrelated act, ungoverned in
movement and uncontrolled.
Talia sees a hook in the woodwork, high up on the wall;
climbs onto a chair to test it and finds it is strong. She puts a last
record on the turn table, takes a rope out of the closet, makes a
noose at one end and ties the other end to the hook; then places
the noose over her head, and holding the slip-knot firmly that it
may not constrict her throat, she kicks the chair away and
dangles from the rope, kicking and squirming, gasping for breath,
and slowly choking. She hangs for the duration of the record,
which like the first consists of metronome beats. When the rec-
ord ends and whirrs and scratches under the needle, she scram-
bles out of the noose, kicks herself free and falls, with a swollen
face, heavily, not gracefully, to the floor, rolling over several
times.
The panic movements of the hanging act have provided the
topic, the theme for tomorrow's dance. Now it is bed time. She
undresses, turns off the light and gets into bed, selecting a posi-
tion which she thinks is best for her, considering the day, the
time, the theme and the pattern. Talia holds this position all
night, neither tense nor relaxed, in her sleep.
5. The Paralytic.
It was not always so. He had, at one time, the full use of his
69
ISAAC ROSENFELD
legs. As a child, he loved to ride his tricycle; as a boy in his
teens, he went on many long hiking trips, and even as a young
man, when he had already begun to limp, he loved to walk about
the city, along the river, in the park and in the country. And he
had full command of his other faculties as well; his health was
always good and he was cheerful and optimistic. Even in those
early days, he had a turn for books and speculation, and loved
to seclude himself but these attacks, which is what his family
took them to be, were only sporadic, and even when he was
seized with his scholarly fits, he remained the gay scholar, good-
natured and bright, who lightened his serious work with walks
and social affairs.
Winniker has suffered a general decline. He is lean, has a
large, square head which no longer fits his neck or shoulders, a
wrinkled, yellow face with watery eyes, and on his forehead and
hands liverish spots have begun to appear, although he is just
fifty. His legs are now almost of no use to him, though he can still
walk with the aid of a stick. The stairs are an ordeal, but he is
forced to live on the top floor (as if in illustration of one of the
many paradoxes which he was all his life propounding) , for he
cannot get about well enough to find another place, and knows
no one who would be kind enough to find better accommodations
for him. Exchanging apartments with the tenants on one of the
lower floors, supposing they would hear of it the dancer, the
prostitute or the janitor is out of the question. He can't ap-
proach them normally, as another in his position might be able to
do, and whenever he meets one of them on the stairs he is over-
come with a shyness that forbids conversation. He stands stock-
still, turns red, averts his eyes and waits until the stairs are clear,
so that no one should see him struggling with his infirmity.
There is besides some satisfaction for him in the fact that he lives
above the dancer. It makes, as it were, for a well established
point.
Winniker has lived what he considers a full life, and there-
fore does not very much regret that he must now live withdrawn
and alone. His youth was not misspent, by which he means that
the pleasures available to his earlier days did not entirely pass
him by. In spite of his studious nature, he had many friends,
among them several women, about whom he felt, as a young man
does, that he knew $11 there was to know. He belonged, in college,
to a rowing club not, to be sure, the famous crew itself which
competed with other colleges but a society, which he had help-
ed organize, in protest against the varsity team, and which ven-
tured onto the river in flat-bottomed boats and tubs. This pro-
70
ISAAC ROSENFELD
test was directed against the abstraction of the athlete from man,
and his development as a separate subspecies. Winniker believed,
and still does, in the primacy of middle nature, the sound crafts-
man, the good worker, and fought to have him recognized as the
true hero and representative of mankind. Eiven when he dis-
covered, shortly after the onset of his disease, that he had his own
genius, and in this respect was, therefore, removed from the
majority of the race, he continued to uphold the value of the re-
presentative man, distinguished not by a highly developed single
capacity, but by the presence in him of all capacities, all things
human, all talents and skills. He had a number of followers in his
youth, young men and women who valued his insight and pat-
terned their own after it, though he discouraged their allegiance
and was fond of saying, "He who follows me steps on my toes."
In so many words though with greater felicity and originality
had all leaders expressed themselves and admonished their fol-
lowers: Zarathustra to his disciples, Buddha to his, and Christ
had told Peter that before the cock had crowed, he would, three
times, deny Him. A paradox, of course, for Winniker, in denying
his followers, but further adopted the selfhood of the leader. But
he was fond of paradoxes, and his desire to be let alone and re-
sponsible only to himself was sincere, even if the attitude in
which he expressed it was not original. Furthermore, he too
much enjoyed what he called without meaning to be condescend-
ing about it, his "lighter self," to care to remain in a public posi-
tion, inconspicuous though it was. There were times when he
devoted all his energy to improvisations of the moment, the more
inconsistent the better. His happiest inspiration of this time was
the wedding present he selected for a cousin of his, a very prim
and prudent girl. Winniker sent her a barber chair.
Now the pleasures and diversions of social life are no longer
available. Sickness and age have cut them off, but Winniker
lives by the afterglow of his golden age, summoning it up, when
he is gloomiest and most dismal, to reassure himself that he has
lived well. But he manages to live pleasantly enough in remem-
bered pleasure, and has even achieved a kind of serenity though
he has enjoyed this serenity only infrequently, and then it was
more like a state of exaltation. He feels that the serenity which
must be achieved, with a life devoted to it, as to an object, is not
of the true kind which comes of itself. But even if his knowledge
of the true serenity is for the most part theoretical, it has on
several occasions come to him as the truth should come: pre-
pared, but not contrived, uninvited, but not unexpected a long-
71
ISAAC ROSENFELB
awaited surprise, a shock of peace. This true serenity is related
to his major work and devotion, and whenever it has come it has
been an expression of his joy in his work.
Winniker studies the dance. He has studied it in every phase
and aspect, in its evolution and retrogression from place to place
and period to period studied its forms, motive, purpose, inspira-
tion, its effect on the individual participant and spectator and on
society at large. It is to him a concrete thing and a vast symbol,
indefinitely abstract; he sees it everywhere in nature and in ima-
gination, a thing prior to life and more primitive, life itself, and
greater than life. And because it is so vast and great, the dance
is to him the most representative activity, everything joining it in
an ever-widening gyre,
Winniker's interest in the dance developed concurrently with
his paralysis. At first he was unaware that the two existed side
by side there was his anxiety over his paralysis, but the dance
was his refuge from anxiety and his forgetfulness. It was the
dance itself that made him realize that there was a connection
between the two states of terror and peace that alternated in his
mind. . . . One night he attended the ballet (so long as he was
able to walk without too great difficulty, he continued to go out,
in fact, "ran about" wildly, from place to place) . During the per-
formance of "Aurora's Wedding" he felt so moved, and was trans-
ported so far out of his anxiety, that he unconsciously began to
express his own joy, and the joy of the ballet, with the motion
of his body. But his feet at the very least, he had wanted to
carry out the gliding rhythm refused to respond as if for the
first time, so great was his surprise; and then he realized the
intimate and terrible relationship between his joy in the dance
and his incapacity for it. He left the theater at intermission; the
shock had so unnerved him that he had temporarily lost even the
degree of control he had hitherto been able to maintain over his
legs, and had to be helped into a cab.
Then began the study that has occupied him ever since. The
first question he asked himself was: Do I love the dance because
I am paralyzed, or am I paralyzed because of my love for the
dance? Winniker posed the question with wonderful subtlety,
turning it this way and that, inverting it and restoring its original
formulation, and arranging the probable and tentative answers in
groups, series, pairs and classes of pairs. He recognized at once
two poles, between which his thought was torn the obvious and
the recondite. Thus he saw that the hypothesis, the love of the
dance is born of paralysis, was too obvious, and that the other
72
ISAAC ROSENPELD
hypothesis, that paralysis was born of the love, was too recondite.
Was there not, he wondered, a third alternative, neither one nor
the other, but nearer than both to the truth? An impossible
necessity, an excluded ground between extremes? In which di-
rection Winniker moved for a while, seeking the ultimate in the
initial venture, the absolute answer at once. But he soon saw
that his way was not prepared and that he must first study.
He began to study himself. No longer as the young student,
grasping everything that came to hand and all the more grasp-
ing in his belief in the value of representativeness but now as
the mature scholar, confident that his isolated interest is universal
in scope. Thus the problem, What am I? became a world problem,
as did also, and above all, the question, What is the dance? But
this last question had first to be answered from within the ques-
tioner, so it became, What is the dance, that I am what I am?
Slowly, gradually, his work began. Winniker studied the
dance and the history of the dance the whole world over. He pub-
lished articles, essays, books and reviews and became known as
an authority; books, periodicals, monographs, doctors' theses,
magazines, reprints, lectures, addresses and miscellaneous papers
were sent to him in the mails, as were also photographs and
films, charts, diagrams, costumes and musical instruments. He
amassed in a short time a valuable library and a veritable mu-
seum, all from the publications and artifacts which other authori-
ties, admiring his work, begged him to accept with their compli-
ments. He soon had the means to work uninterruptedly, the
facilities for study and the double incentive of the desire for
knowledge and greatness, which was renewed and given even
greater force by his work.
But still Winniker was unsatisfied. He did not deprecate his
great accumulation of knowledge, nor was he unaware of its
orderly arrangement in his card files and his mind. It was a trea-
sure which he would be proud to leave to the world. But as yet
it represented only knowledge, which he considered to be but the
first stage of work. After knowledge comes being, and this, he
felt, he had not yet attained.
To be, as well as to know, what one knows! To be the war
dance, the love dance, the rain dance, the bridal dance, the dance
of fertility, of the benevolence and anger of the godsand to have
these dances issue from him, from his instinct, as they had issued
from the instinct of the race. To be in himself that which makes
one say, of one dance, that it is the assurance of immortality, and
73
ISAAC ROSENFELD
of another, that it teaches devastation, the subjection of the world
to death. Then, only then, is the great representation, desired
first in youth, achieved in maturity Winniker, fully human, the
man of all men.
But how does one achieve being? He encouraged all para-
doxes, but had no patience with the scholastic paradox: the his-
torian, lacking historical sense, the Story of Man's Courage, writ-
ten by a coward. Winniker would have to be. He remembered
that in his early adolescence he had come across a learned "Manu-
al of Marriage"; reading it, though he had tried to preserve in
himself the attitude of scientific detachment which the author had
urged on the reader, he had nevertheless become aroused and
felt ashamed of himself for desecrating the proper spirit of the
work. But now he felt, of course one should be aroused! A man
responds with his whole being: the boy, in a furious study, to sex,
and the astronomer to the stars, sucked up through his telescope
to the sky, to become a constellation. And may the dance find
the dancer, with eager feet.
But how? His own being gives no clue, his feet are still. And
the world about him is not congenial the noise, the cramped
quarters, the long stairs to climb and the filth. Even his books
and artifacts, once so highly treasured, have become a clutter of
useless things.
Right now in the courtyard, interrupting his study, the jani-
tor's children are playing a game, the rules of which demand
that they beat the waterspout with a stick. Bang-bang-bang!
Bang-bang-bang! Between blows of the stick he can hear the
words of a conversation conducted by Mandalay and Panteley
Jeveves. They are discussing the question, Are Pregnant Wo-
men Lucky? Mandalay says, Yes, they are, if you turn around
three times when you see them coming. But Panteley maintains,
No, you've got to touch it fjrst
Between Winniker and Talia there has for several years been
an unacknowledged relationship. He met her on the stairs soon
after she moved into the building, and at first had nothing but
contempt for her: he mistook the sound of her metronome re-
cords for tap-dancing. Not that he held anything related to the
dance alien to himself; but associating the young, rather muscular
woman with a pinched face,* whom he continued to meet, to his
embarrassment, on the stairs, with the sound of tap-dancing, he
concluded that her interest in the dance was not serious; and it
was to protect himself from what he imagined would surely be
74
ISAAC ROSENFELD
her scorn of his work, that he scorned hers. Such defensiveness,
unbecoming and inappropriate to an authority of Winniker's
reputation, was, however, the direct result of that reputation.
He wanted to avoid the disappointment of meeting her and find-
ing that she did not know who he was. He was, moreover, by
that time, very bitter though unconscious of his bitterness
toward all healthy and, in particular, athletic people, and ex-
tremely suspicious of them.
But as time passed and he continued to hear without let-up
the metronome beat in the morning and at night, the other re-
cords that accompanied Talia's dancing and the thud and shuffle
of her bare feet, he acknowledged his mistake to himself. Evi-
dently, she was no tap dancer; and since she worked indefatig-
ablv, with only the briefest pauses, and, far from dancing in night
clubs and theaters, never seemed to leave the house, he felt
obliged to admit that she was a serious student. But this, in turn,
led him to the conclusion that she was a mediocrity, and he
devoted a considerable sympathy to her under a general benevo-
lence to honest, sturdy workers, all thighs and no talent, misled
bv unfounded ambitions. And then, her records disturbed him.
All dav long he cursed her music though he had devoted a large
part of his work to a study of the function of music in the dance.
Music and bare feet, bare feet and music and he, Winniker,
must work with their noise always in his head. But in truth, it
was the proximity of the dancer dancing that disturbed him most,
the image of the unseen, active body. He found himself devoting
more and more of his labors to human anatomy a related topic,
certainly, but altogether remote from the theme he was at that
time working on. The longer he studied anatomy in particular
the bony structure and musculature of the legs and feet the
more closely he was drawn back to the preoccupation with his
paralysis, which he had only lately managed to put down. Now
it worked contrary to his instinct to consider the ctance with re-
ference to his incapacity; whether his objectivity, gained at such
great cost, were truly objective, a desire to possess the object and
nothing more, or whether he had thereby adopted merely a me-
thod in the most desperate subterfuge, hitting upon it precisely
in the hope of a cure, he knew that self-concern, at the present
stage of his work, was retrogressive and a danger. Nevertheless,
the image of Talia gave him no rest, and whatever way he deter-
mined to regard her as a serious student, a mediocrity, even as
a fairly gifted dancer whose friendship might prove valuable to
him no sooner had he struck an attitude toward her than he
75
ISAAC ROSENFELD
found himself recoiling against the threat which she somehow
exerted against him into a preoccupation with himself and his
disease.
At last he resolved to put an end to his uneasiness by con-
fronting the thing itself that unnerved him he would have to
see her dance. Then he would be on his guard, no longer vulner-
able and if she proved vulnerable, he would take advantage of
her weakness to put her forever out of his mind; if she proved
strong and, it was to be hoped, truthful and representative in
her dancing then, perhaps, their association, placed on a level
footing in the open, would be of advantage to them both. But he
was incapable of directly presenting himself at her door and ask-
ing permission to watch her dance. It would most likely offend
her. Furthermore, the necessity of descending the stairs and
entering her room on his uncertain legs before her unsympathe-
tic eyes and all the worse if she chose to be sympathetic!
would certainly offend him. There was the possibility, of course,
of inviting her to dance for him in his apartment; but extending
the invitation involved the same difficulties as directly asking to
be admitted to her room. There was no one to employ as an inter-
mediary, except the Jeveves children or Jeveves himself, one of
whom brought him food and a newspaper once a day; but the
Jeveveses were not of reliable intelligence. And he could obtain
no one else to act as intermediary without putting himself out
beyond the limit of his patience, his endurance and his pride. He
considered dangling a note from a string outside her window
until it should come to her attention; but most likely the children
in the courtyard would notice it first and besides, the whole
situation was ridiculous, as was also a variation of it, that he slip
the note under her door. There was evidently no way of ap-
proaching Talia. And to rely on a chance meeting on the stairs
was absolutely out of the question, as this method involved the
embarrassment of all the others, to the highest degree.
Then it occurred to him that it would best suit his purpose
to observe her, unseen. In this way he could take her true
measure, and not have to reckon with her awareness of his judg-
ment. He thought of peeking through her keyhole, of placing
mirrors and reflectors outside her windows, of lowering himself
on a scaffold to the edge of her window and peering in; none of
these procedures was feasible. Fortunately he soon hit upon a
simple expedient, the simplest and most direct. He asked Jeveves
to bring him a drill, and set to work at once, boring holes in the
floor; the holes, when completed, would look down through her
76
ISAAC ROSENFELD
ceiling. The work gave him the immediate satisfaction of know-
ing that he had the solution of a problem in hand; at first it was
not exhausting, and he could turn to it as a rest from his other
activities, or a means of combatting the distraction of the records
and the thudding feet from the apartment below.
But he soon found that it was more exhausting work than
he had expected. He had to bore very carefully and quietly, not
to call attention to himself. It went slowly, with little progress to
show at the end of a week's labor. His arms and back tired easi-
ly, and sometimes, when he had kept at it for an hour or more,
he would find that from great exhaustion he had temporarily
lost the use of his legs altogether. It was difficult enough to bore
through the floor undetected; sinking the holes through the ceil-
ing presented an even greater difficulty, for unless he proceeded
with extreme care, the plaster would crack and chip, fall onto the
dancer's floor and give him away. There were now well over
two dozen holes in the floor, at various parts of the room, to af-
ford a view of the dancer from all angles; before extending these
holes further, he let water down through each hole, a drop at a
time, to seep its way into Talia's ceiling. Then, working very
cautiously, he enlarged the holes in the floor, and before lowering
the drill bit to the ceiling he set his lips to the hole, prepared to
suck up the wood shavings or loose plaster. Winniker was
months at this part of the work, before he completed a few holes.
Through them he could catch a glimpse, now and then, of an
arm or a leg in motion, the gesture of a hand or the top of Talia's
head, but never the whole figure or the whole dance, nor would
his effort be rewarded until he had opened all the holes. Mean-
while, his own floor was covered with plaster and wood shavings,
and the holes that had been opened admitted even more of the
disturbing music and thudding of the girl below.
Talia, all this time, had not been unaware of Winniker. Her
encounters with him on the stairs had greatly excited her curi-
osity, the more so as he would stand stock-still and refuse to move
until she had gone into her apartment. Nor was he deceived by
the mere closing of the door; guarding himself against a crack
left open, he waited until he heard the lock catch before ventur-
ing to move on. By his extreme embarrassment on the stairs, and
the thumping, dragging noise he made above her, she guessed at
his paralysis, and began to feel for him an impersonal pity, for
the most part curiosity. As Talia thought, out of pity, but in real-
ity, to obtain a better view of him than the brief glimpse in the
77
ISAAC ROSENFELD
hall gave her, she began to bring him his mail. But the stratagem
failed. On several occasions he pretended not to be at home; and
when she had at last made unmistakably clear to him the nature
and purpose of her knock at the door, Winniker, in an unexpec-
tedly gruff voice it was the first time she had heard his voice,
and for some reason had imagined that paralytics speak sweetly
ordered her to leave the mail outside his door. Thereafter she
brought him his mail much less frequently, only when impelled
by a very strong curiosity, as when the noise he made, dragging
himself about, claimed more of her attention that she had assign-
ed to it in her patterning of the surrounding world. But even so
her curiosity was limited; she did not know or care to find out
who he was or what he did. His whole existence was contained
for her in the fact that he made a certain kind of noise, which
she found it necessary to relate to other noises.
As soon as Talia began to come to his door, Winniker realized
that his project was in danger. Though he kept his door locked,
he feared that she might some day gain access to his apartment
and discover the means he had devised for observing her. He
therefore instructed Antontonio Jeveves to buy him a rug, and
when the good janitor brought it to him, Winniker spent the
day, in great difficulty, laying it over the holes. He made so
much noise, struggling with the heavy brown paper in which the
rug came rolled, that late that afternoon, when he had finally
succeeded in unrolling it, and had placed books and dishes along
the edge to keep it flat, Talia again brought him his mail. She
knocked at the door.
"Leave it in the hall," said Winniker, in a gruff but weak
voice. He was lying exhausted on the rug, where he had been
trying to think of a simple way of rolling up the rug whenever
he wanted to work on his peep-holes or look through the ones
that were already finished.
But Talia's curiosity, though essentially as superficial as ever,
was very strong that day. She knocked again. Winniker realized
that he had neglected to lock the door after the rug had been
delivered. He pulled himself up and began to shuffle to the lock,
when the door opened. He stood stock-still.
Talia, her face pinched" and her arms laden with parcels,
barefooted and wearing her leotard, said, "I've brought you your
mail, Mr. Winniker." Accustomed to the solitary life, each ac-
quired character and social sense, as if from nowhere, when con-
fronted with the other. The dancer turned sly, the dance author-
78
ISAAC ROSENFELD
ity, contemptuous. They stared at each other.
"Leave it, leave it! I said leave it!"
"May I come in for a moment?"
"You may not. Please go!"
"Where shall I leave these packages?"
"Anywhere. On the floor."
"I can't. My arms are full. You'll have to help me, or 111
drop everything."
"Then drop it, the devil take it! Drop it and get out of here."
"It'll break. This package, here, under my arm, sounds as if
it has glass in it."
Winniker stamped on the floor with his stick. "Will you
please go?"
"In a moment. Here " She came into the room, moving
toward him as if she were about to drop the packages; staggered,
grasped the parcels, lost them and caught them again. "Help me!"
"The devil! Will you get out of here?" Winniker, forgetting
his embarrassment and his rule never to be seen walking by a
stranger, stumbled toward her, holding up his stick.
Suddenly Talia stood still, as if she were the paralyzed one.
The spasmodic movements of her hands and shoulders stopped.
She watched Winniker in great enthusiasm for the quality of his
movements, observing his faltering legs, his head thrust forward
and trembling on his thin neck, the crimp in his back, the twitch-
ing of his shoulders, the excited, spiderlike motion of his fingers,
the stumbling, uncontrolled course of his feet. Her face lighted
up in inspiration and she gave him a brief, satisfied smile; then
flung the packages down on the bed, skipped out of the room and
went bounding down the stairs.
Later that afternoon exhausted though he was, he had
completed several more peep-holes, working with extreme effort
he watched her do an imitation of his walk, executing a dance
about it. She had gained her object, at once satisfying her curi-
osity, and extending the pattern, deriving a theme from his dis-
ease. And while he, too, had gained his object that afternoon
was the first time he had been able to catch more than a few
disconnected glimpses of her dancing it was in great disgust
that he found that the object he had so long been pursuing,
proved, on capture, to be nothing more than himself. Winniker
was furious.
Whether from fury at the futile, senseless interruption of his
work, the months lost in pursuit of a false object, or whether
79
ISAAC ROSENFELD
from the mere passing of time, with no cause other than an inner
and inevitable one, Winniker's paralysis has grown worse. He
has thrown himself back into his work, hoping to regain wasted
time, but he must now work slowly. His arms and hands have
at last been affected, and he now has difficulty in turning pages
and taking notes. He still has voluntary motion in his hands, but
his coordination is poor and the time which elapses between the
conception and execution of a movement reminds him of the
passage of a sluggish nerve impulse in the brain and body of
extinct monsters. He now sits at the table all day, and no longer
drags himself about the room; he limits his movements to the
absolute minimum and has stopped going downstairs for his mail.
Now it is brought to him by the Jeveveses or Talia, when the
parcels and packages have cluttered up the vestibule. Talia no
longer attempts to come in to him, but from time to time she
leaves foolish notes with his mail, such as:
These came for you.
Talia
or
I brought these up.
The notes are written in various inks on colored note paper,
gray, lavender, deep blue, and in white ink on black; the paper
is always scented. It is as if Talia had begun a flirtation with him,
or (he peeped down at her once again and found her dancing the
same paralyzed dance, now elaborated with all sorts of extreme,
disconnected gestures), or it may be that she feels grateful to
him and, too proud and selfish to thank him openly too selfish,
perhaps, even to realize that it is gratitude she feels she has
selected this means of thanking him.
After a week without notes, she left a particularly offensive
one at the door:
Are you ill? Haven't heard you thumping about in
some time.
T.
A few days later, another note:
Worried.
T.
Then another note, which Winniker did not read. She came up
80
ISAAC ROSENFELD
the next day and found that he had not taken in the mail and
note from the day before, or the food and newspaper that Jeveves
had left for him. Talia knocked on the door and got no answer;
tried to open it and it was locked. She ran down the stairs,
alarmed, but nevertheless leaping gracefully at each landing,
with her spine straight, her chest thrown out and her arms out-
spread. The janitor, seeing her burst into his apartment, cleared
the bed for her, knocking off several children who had been
sleeping on it and shoving them into the kitchen. Marthafoglia
was out shopping.
"Hot stuff, all right," said Jeveves, sitting down on the bed
and reaching to pull off his shoes.
"The hot water has been fine all week," said Talia, misunder-
standing him. "It's Winniker. He doesn't answer. We must get
to him."
"Old man. No walk," mumbled Antontonio, hopefully won-
dering if he had the right to consider her words a refusal. He
decided he had not. "No good. Old man."
"Quick, give me the key to his place. Key, key a pass key.
Do you have it?"
"Have got." He removed a huge ring from his pocket, the
keys sticking out like the spines of a radial sea-animal. "Lots
keys. More." He produced another key ring from under the pil-
low, reached for one under the bed, overturned a milk bottle and
a stream of keys poured out. Antontonio swept them all into his
pocket. "We open door."
He tried each key in Winniker's lock. None of them fit. "We
break door," said the janitor, and did so.
Winniker was lying in bed, a sheet pulled up to his chin,
staring dead ahead of him. "Mr. Winniker!" Talia did a split at
the side of the bed. "Are you all right? What's the matter with
you?" He did not answer. "Can you hear me? Do you know
who I am?" Winniker lay still, alive but motionless. Only his
watery eyes moved, glancing at the janitor and at Talia and
quickly looking away. "Can you move?" She pulled his arm out
from under the sheet, raised it and let it go. It fell lifeless to the
bed, rolling a little, as if it were going to fall off.
"Knock out," said Antontonio.
Two days before, as he was working at his desk, he had felt
himself growing heavy and cold, and had just managed to crawl
into bed and pull the sheet over him, when he lost all power of
motion. He had lain there ever since, hearing the children's
81
ISAAC ROSENFELD
noises, the mailman's ring, the janitor bringing food, Talia com-
ing up with the mail and coming again the next day, her knock-
ing and calling his name, the door broken in but he had also
lost the power of speech, and could make no sound in response.
He could move only his eyes and his lips, soundlessly.
"Sick man," said Antontonio, "You stay with him?"
"I can't," said Talia, springing up. "It's late. I must get back
to work."
"Me too. Go fix boiler. We get it old woman, who-ha, she
live second floor, she stay." They went down the stairs together,
Talia running ahead and leaping in very gracefully at her own
door,
Jeveves knocked at the prostitute's door. He told her what
had happened to Winniker and asked if she would sit with him,
which she agreed to do. Watching her climb the stairs, he thought
he might some day ask the question that he asked of all women
but which, for obvious reasons, anticipating no refusal from this
quarter, he had never asked of her.
The prostitute took one look at Winniker, screamed, blessed
herself and ran down the stairs. She came back presently, her
arms laden with religious pictures, and holding a bottle of hair
oil that she had grabbed in her haste. She tacked all the pictures
onto the wall above Winniker's bed, and then sat at his side, won-
dering what else she could do for him. She talked to him, but he
did not answer, touched mm, and he felt dead warm, but dead
and did not respond; she shook her fingers before his eyes, and
they blinked. "Poor man, poor man," she muttered, and began
to say a prayer over him; but she suspected, from the look in his
eyes, that he did not want her to pray for him or perhaps it was
her conscience protesting against prayer. When I die, she thought,
there will be no one to pray for me. But prayer was not neces-
sary, the fact of dying was enough. What you wanted was some-
thing different from prayer, without words. But what was it;
what could you do for another, not knowing what it was, what
could you do, not having learned in your own life what it was?
How will I die, who will do it for me? she thought. Still, she
wanted to do something for him, and after a while she got up and
began to straighten up the house. What a mess it was! All the
books and daggers, knives, shields on the wall, the strange masks
it would have been a good idea to wear a mask on the wood-
pile the dancing costumes, shoes, skirts, scarves. He had these
things on his wall, and she had her pictures it was all a matter
of where you hung your tail. She arranged the books and papers
82
ISAAC ROSENFELD
in neat piles on his desk, aligned the books in the bookcase,
dusted all the objects and swept the rug, laying on the strokes
of the broom with considerable vigor and making the layers of
puffy, dimpled fat dance at her elbows.
At the onset of the stroke, Winniker realized that he was
going to die. Though he left his desk in haste, he left it reluctant-
ly, and for an hour or so, as he lay awaiting death, he regretted
that his work was unfinished, and that he had not stayed with it,
to die at his desk. But when death was delayed in coming, and
he saw that he should still have some time to live suspended
over death, he gave his mind to his work again, thinking he
might use up his remaining time in the best way that he knew,
by following to its conclusion the particular problem he had been
engaged on. But try as he would, he was unable to remember
what he had been working on when the stroke came, and alarm-
ed at the loss of his last power, he tried to get up and go to his
desk, though he knew that he was unable to move, and tried to
call out for help, though he knew that he had lost his voice. Win-
niker struggled with the paralysis, fighting it with greater will
than he had ever done and all night long he lay afraid and strug-
gling with it. But when morning came, he was more at peace
with himself.
All that day, even when the door was broken in, he had
been at peace. Now he considered it no loss that the work he
had been doing remained unfinished. What was it, after all, but
knowledge, further knowledge, a gap stopped' here, a hole plugged
there? The sieve would remain open, for all his effort. What
mattered was that the stage beyond knowledge had not been at-
tained the being of the dance. There was this to regret, this to
regret deeply, and nothing else. But as the day passed, he came
to realize that he had reached the ultimate stage, had all along
been on the edge of it, and had at last entered it wholly. The
realization seized him in joy: it was his disease, growing in
him since early in life and at last overtaking him, it was his
paralysis, to which he had yielded step by step and day by day
until it had achieved its final power it was the paralysis that
represented the ultimate being of the dance. By yielding all mo-
tion to paralysis, he had yielded to the dance and become part of
its being, which was absolute motionlessness, forever at rest. So,
in yielding completely to life, a man dies and knowing this now,
Winniker lay serene, at peace, and no longer afraid to die.
The prostitute had by now dusted and swept and cleaned
83
ISAAC ROSENFELD
everywhere, and was taking up the rug to mop the floor, when
she discovered Winniker's peep-holes. She dropped down on her
hands and knees and peered into the apartment below, where
Talia was dancing to the music of the phonograph. "Well, 111
be!" she exclaimed, but the dance seemed false to her, and did
not please her. Winniker's holes, however, gave her great delight,
and she felt a sudden love for him, as if they shared the secrets
of a common self. She remembered, in tenderness, the days when
she had worked in a peep-show, and it gave her a sense of tri-
umph and achievement to find herself, at last, oft the outside,
looking in.
But one thing Winniker regretted. Now he felt the need
again to have followers and disciples to whom he could impart
what he had learned and have it live in them. To be vouchsafed
being but only for a moment, and not to grow great in it! Not
to expand and explore its plentitude! To take up the dance again
and go on who knows? perhaps even to a further stage, still
higher. To have but one man to whom he could pass on the
truth with his eyes, since words now failed him; perhaps even
to a number of men, perhaps to a generation, perhaps, if it were
not too great a hope, perhaps, eventually, to all mankind, that
they might all know the sublimity of the dance!
84
IN MEMORIAM FOR A WORLD
John Senior
i
The Problem
and what have we inherited?
They have known death before our age.
I think of Shelley lost among
the Euganean hills, half dead
with loneliness, and Arnold's rage
against the waves, weary of wrong.
The hope for death yet lingers
with the dead, we wait for dawn
clowns with tragic faces on.
I run the symbols thru my fingers
sand and straw, a clay for fools
fabric craft the rhymes, rules;
but the body not the soul is there.
Yeats declared a blood stained stair
his symbol, and ancestral tower
a crumbled monument to save
against the hour when Christ would come.
He had the Will but not the power.
We hold this truth to be certain:
We have inherited a grave
twenty years after the second flood
death masque of Byzantium,
descent of the final curtain
on god's great comedy of blood.
85
JOHN SENIOR
II
The Method
We observe this fact:
this man
this boy
this myriad of word and act
which follows without plan
or logical succession.
(There is joy
in remembered pain
pain in passion.)
We must analyze them all again:
prepare the subject
dissect the heart
separate, inspect
each part
synthesize, ennumerate
list them
make them coordinate
within a system.
We must analyze them all again.
(There is pleaure in remembered pain.)
Ill
The Contradiction
We are gathered in this room to honor
a poet; surely there is good in this.
We sit at tables and drink wine together
wearing our love. O here no evil is
surely no sin is here. His eyes have seen
have known defeat to be a victory:
Poet! is it better to have been
in this world, lived out the irony
ironic grin? better to acknowledge
Him and him, being both, not to judge?
or better beat heart's head, heart's blood
on stone?
To be lost is not the worst thing
under this sun, for to be lost implies
having had a home; and he being
lost found loss less; comforted is wise,
86
JOHN SENIOR
wiser than we who had no need of comfort
but only of the loss. No, ours is not
the second lost generation; we fought
a war to find that death is no despot
but a distemper of the mind, a kind
of huge blood-clotted eye turned inward to sense
the huger Death inside blind upon blind
to find the prayer become an insolence.
Let us wear love, then, here have drink and food
enough: a poet famed and honored
out of the logic, live, ununderstood
this moment, then, we have inherited.
IV
The Consultation
If we could only call it madness
wrap the world up in a sheet
if he lapses into sadness
or attempts to masturbate
have him play a game of cards
with cooperative gorillas, have the guards
play doctor and the bars artistic
with coca-cola hypos, the latest comic
books to keep him occupied
but for god's sake don't let him know he's dead.
but who is mad
is wrong is right
and what is bad
is good? we fight
in symbol, go
in sin
not know
which world what's in.
or why.
V
The Debate of Body and Soul
The Body:
I would like to speak for a moment about the atomic bomb.
In the newspapers I read that Laval has been shot, that a Titian
was discovered at a chattel auction. On the radio they say that
87
JOHN SENIOR
Venezuela is in revolt. In the lecture room I watch the blue
bottle. On the streets they walk the way they walked yesterday,
and I am struck with one unshakable conviction: men can never
face the fact of their death.
I recall that discussion of criminal execution by Prince
Muishkin. It is the certainty of the hour, of the moment, of
death that drives the condemned man mad. But I doubt the
thesis. The condemned deny death too. They go to the gallows
with nothing more than a quickening bewilderment; there is as
much wonder as fear and that only in the last minutes.
I walk the streets. But with us it is easier not to wonder
because the moment is uncertain, it is not precisely defined. We
are more in the position of the old man, or the mortally diseased.
Death is in fact always imminent, but we never believe in it. We
have all always been about to die, but the fact is not kinetic. It
is as if we were immortal because there is no other way to do
business.
But there is much more than this. It is not only my death
that impends, or yours. One does not have to believe in his own
death. There is the curse of our age even in this: it is to be
collective; a concerted signature. I always wished to pursue my
own particular pathway to nothingness. There is something man-
agerial about the word "disintegration." And then there has
been the consolatioij: of immortality for those of us who were
never driven to the city of god the immortality that fascinated
the 18th century the kind that Homer has enjoyed for three
thousand years. Homer will be murdered too. That Second
Death which Thomas Hardy talks about will be a part of the
chain Reaction.
Not that the human race does not deserve this death. I am
not one of those who would defend. The fetish of our century
has been its belief in the dignity of the people. If Christs have
lived, it is small reason for pride. They spoke impossible riddles
to a people without ears. The distinction between them and the
Pilates is a microscopic dichotomy; good and evil being differ-
ences in quantity, not in kind.
This instant demands that we look into the mirror quickly
before the image is blurred with our breathing. Look instantly
at the glass and observe how mean and cruel and sick this speci-
men is. We have blamed it on poverty and conditioning and
biology; but the simple secret remains man is a putrefaction
too loathesome to be petty, a cancer 1 top-heavy hideous about to
die without an ounce of dignity deserving neither gods nor tears.
88
JOHN SENIOR
And having seen us, go back to the fantasies of the newspaper
columnists; it is too much truth to be remembered.
I find it difficult to think of Plato in connection with these
things. For example, the Idea of the Good. And where is that
ladder to perfection the Platonist climbs, searching out the singu-
lar in all the plural? We search out the Absolute with long range
direction finders, the infinite extension of Self to be effected by
nuclear brained sons of toothpaste manufacturers. This is to be a
planned judgment day. John spoke of repentence when he was
in this wilderness, and he composed us death-poetry. Now with
the gods of utility and functional altars we have engineered our
own Apocalypse consistent with filing systems and statistics.
And what have we to say? We have been for a few thousand
years, ironic accidents with carbuncular 1 spinal cords. We have
created music and murdered gods, plotted things in our stars and
charted a course of unspeakable misery and ridiculousness to our
destruction. We deserve death. Let no man say he is innocent.
I believe in guilt. Donne spoke about it in the figure of a con-
tinent. There is no justification for further interference on with
the execution.
Now let us return to our particular one of the ten delusions;
or shatter it and run to the next and the next, considering each
change a revelation. We will demand death for Ezra Pound. He
will have his private kind of dying at least. And we will not
understand that this justice is a farce. Who is guilty? We will not
condemn the barbarism of the physicists, and if we do we will
fabricate dignity out of the refusal of those who refused to work.
We will not talk of crimes like the disintegration of an already
beaten enemy, and if we do we will also talk about Karl Marx
and psychoanalysis. Byrnes will prove that lives were saved at
Hiroshima by a logic that jumps out of a hat. We will go to the
lecture rooms and the prizefights. We will find comfort in theo-
logical absurdities convinced that minimum certainty is better
than maximum intelligence. We will love, and in the teeth of
disintegration speak our poems, discovering that even in the final
hour is "time to murder and create."
There is something humorous about tragedy.
The Soul:
Who mood the monad moon manmad
(the moondog moandog madog moon)
Who mode the moonman moanman mad
(the manmoan manmode moon)
89
JOHN SENIOR
Hearo dog that bittiest me(a)n agen thanesalvesinwit and
seer the dark (hark) knightness hawrk
whowhen then f onders skip on skoal or bark to marck
o nightless) bright
on clift the leperds stalesong o
o bran mantastic hightness thu o thu that mokest thrall are
gadness
goad sinlack the flailer on
on me
(perapathetic phalaxy imasculately contraskeptive
condoming distate of graste)
o why o why thou dog geared god hastow forstake in
me
this aplombleastic paranoisium parapall
aboat the sadom
sumuprime fornor whose syn-
temest soles not in progency
but slif e of lidiocrity
waris this race rune rover yes
asouls not form egoneads crowed credooks are mode-
ornode pastheriority *
butt s (h) ark
hark nonce agen the dinwit
bight the zoambat zombat moonen drawnce o witch
wain wampiric sceanse wiltow ban seafurth agein?)
the dark the dark the dark shaff shoves of lightness
scend askend the lock outpeers'd
and moontranced weirs wear seedogsales
knot not infearm dimensity
faleaves but John o lanterns jack-
anights his hillish bonefire bearns to seewyrd
christfire calls the lea . . .
(Jappelauce!) 1
and the dog said:
1 stond afatt my mastefbatch and I, and indeffidately spear my
fingerbales.
It is humor ose henuf to be foney.
Hearo dog the witlesses:
for these ate toments instant hours slantern
lanthorn sorrow teares like windshook rain moonmined blind
the souldrift sifts
soft silent treelass slow
falls adoon. alurk a pennyweys along the dark allone from
90
JOHN SENIOR
mountains wracks and rilling torns
boundborne to morrow rither
the faress treelight fathests of
1 (onely) dreams.
1. at this punkture the sole bows prefusely and pubicly abeises himselv three
times without stooping eviduncmg maslegury of hind over hatler and the
supmority of the blody bole.
VI
The Witnesses
The Fisherman:
The other night when I returned from the sea
footsore, I found a woman kind enough
to wash my feet. What is it to me
if they always demand another proof?
It is a matter of indifference.
I busy myself with nets and tackle, fish
until evening, peddle my catch. The consequence
is neither my concern nor particular wish.
The Carpenter:
You call me here to find out what it is
I make. That's because of the story
they circulated about a pair of shoes
that cold night, my birthday. Well, for me
it's all a joke. I don't deny a word
of it and for the record I'll tell you
what it is if perhaps you haven't heard,
there's no secret to it, I make toys
in my shop for children nothing new.
Some do important things, but I give boys
and girls toys. If you learned people call
that a crime it's not my fault because
I don't know anything about it at all
because my work has nothing to do with the laws.
The Sheepherder:
If the sheep get away? I don't know,
there are mountains beyond the upland pasture,
there are a thousand places for them to go;
91
JOHN SENIOR
and at night sometimes my dog, it's his nature
to keep warm too, he curls up by the fire
with me. When the snow flies again next year
the same thing will happen; it's not my desire,
I watch, but some are bound to disappear.
The Little Boy:
Gentlemen, it was the stoics who said
Jupiter is the light that men reflect
back to Him again, Him the greater gloried
for man the mirror. And again the intellect
the sceptics say, creates a Jupiter
and kneels before its own image humbly.
Religion is god and man, two mirrors,
looking at each other indefinitely.
This is the paradox I made apparent
that day in the temple when I played the cynic
for the crowd. It was part of the argument
besides, I'm not responsible for logic.
VII
The Judgment
It is midnight
the revellers in the scarlet robes are gone
the final curfew struck, moonlight
hurries along the white edge of the sea alone
wrapping shadows about its thin shoulders
and then the rain
the roll of boulders
down the mountain-
side the sound of stone
rumbles
torrent of tone
the echo tumbles
down the rubble of flat lands
river's of sound to the sea
and the fingers, the long white hands
grasp moonlight, grasp at the writhing river greedily.
It has been thus before
perhaps but words are dubious stars
to hand our fortunes on no more.
92
JOHN SENIOR
The after-image too recedes, the bars
ar'e shut, the rains descend, choke
the gull's cry, the sea is quiet, the river silent
the moonlight safe beneath its cloak.
Night seeks its tent
and steals inside, makes fast
the flap and blows its lantern out, and in the deep
the universe content that it is time at last
curls into itself and falls asleep.
93
FLESH FAREWELL
Donald Windham
DISTANT strings of colored lights danced against the wind. Dusty
Johnson walked along the highway not seeing them, not hearing
the scratch of dry leaves along the concrete. The night was cold,
and he felt the cold against his face and hands, penetrating his
skin, muscles and tissue which covered his bones. He put his
hands into his trouser pockets and walked faster down the high-
way toward the colored lights.
His walk was deliberate and angry, controlled by his cold,
hurt pride. At an opening in the wire fence beside the highway,
he cut off and followed automobile tracks through the pine-
needled woods to the entrance of the fairgrounds. He came out
of the trees by the ticket booth. A lighted empty streetcar stood
at the end of the trolley line which half circled the fairgrounds
and ended at the back entrance. Beneath the low outthrust
trolley of the car he stopped and counted the change in his
pocket; there was more than a dollar so he bought a ticket and
went inside.
The end of the midway where he entered was deserted,
tangled with ropes and rubber cables, but straight ahead a steady
stream of people flowed between the two banks of sideshow
posters. He walked proudly and angrily into the crowd. His
heels were stepped on from behind, and he kicked the shoes of
the people in front of him as he walked looking straight ahead.
At the sideshow facing the rollercoaster, he stopped and looked
about. He smelled the sweet odor of cotton candy in the stand
which people were pushing past him to reach, heard the barkers'
voices and the roar of the crowd, saw the posters picturing the
alligator girl, the two-headed baby and the tattooed man, and
watched the boy across from him tossing baseballs at wooden
milk bottles to win for the girl beside him a mica-splattered pink
94
DONALD WINDHAM
plaster Christ. But he did not see anyone he knew and he
walked on.
The midway thinned uphill into cane and weight-guessing
stands, and at the top of the hill a few people stood around the
dancing pavillion which was open to the night. The girls danced
with their coats on. Dusty crossed to the rail which separated the
pavillion from the midway and leaned on it watching for a parti-
cular face which he did not see. After five or ten minutes, he
still had not seen anyone he knew and he dropped his eyes down
from the dancers' faces to their feet as though no question of
identity existed there. Without looking up, he reached into his
pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and stood smoking. Someone behind
!him laid a hand on his shoulder and said his name. He turned
and faced a boy named Robinson.
By yourself? Robinson asked smiling.
Dusty nodded and turned back to the pavillion. The two of
them leaned on the rail and watched the dancers. Dusty/ was
silent, and Robinson talked about the girls he recognized, telling
unbelievable stories of what he had done with them, speaking
slowly and steadily, more interested in the effect of his story
than in its contents, and watching Dusty's face as though he
would completely change the gist of what he was saying if he
saw that something else would interest Dusty more. His eyes
shifted between the dancers and the boy beside him. Dusty
listened partially, but the drama inside his brain was more real;
and Robinson knew that his attention was divided,
Do you want a drink?
Do you have a drink?
Robinson smiled. He took his time in finding a cigarette
and sticking it between his lips. He spoke without lighting it,
with it wavering up and down in the corner of his mouth.
Look at this.
The right pocket of his windbreaker was fastened with a
safety-pin which he unfastened and took out a flat pint bottle
of rum. He patted his other pocket and smiled.
And there's another one in here!
When the bottle was back in his pocket, he lit the cigarette
and, indicating for Dusty to follow him, walked away from the
pavillion down the steep back of the hill. The incline was so
sharp that to keep from running he walked with his weight thrown
forward on the balls of his feet. Where the ground leveled, he
stopped and waited for Dusty. The midway was above, the
white-fenced racetrack circled the artificial lake beyond. He
95
DONALD WINDHAM
took the bottle out of his pocket, unscrewed the top, and held
it out as Dusty reached him. Dusty took the bottle and drank.
We can go back and pick up something when it's late,
Robinson said.
Not me, Dusty answered. I'm through with girls.
Sure, Robinson agreed. Find them, feel them, fool them,
fuck them, and forget them.
You can say that again, Dusty said.
Sure, Robinson answered. But I'm leaving this town next
week. Really. I've got a job with the F.B.I. The girls may as
well have something to remember.
Dusty did not answer. They walked on to a lunchstand
which was isolated now that the racetrack was closed and they
had another drink with a Coca Cola. They asked for a paper
cup, but the counter-man said that cups went only with orders
of food and refused to give them one. Robinson wanted to argue,
but Dusty walked away.
He was thinking that he would never trust any girl again,
and he did not realize that he had the rum bottle in his hand
until Robinson joined him. With a gesture of independence, self-
sufficiency and defiance, he threw back his head and drank. The
warm sugar flavor of rum filled his mouth, and was followed by
the metallic aftertaste of air. He exhaled through his lips, frosting
the atmosphere. The warm sweet rum flowed with satisfaction
through his stomach and limbs and encouraged him to think
that he would never see the girl again.
He gave Robinson the bottle and looked at him for the first
time. He did not know Robinson well and did not like him
much. But Robinson looked like a friend now.
Do you want to see -a picture of a real bitch? he asked.
He took out his wallet and showed a photograph in it to the
other boy.
She said just wait until tonight. And when I went by, the
place was dark and nobody home. She thinks I'll believe a note
saying she's in town to spend the night with her aunt. But may-
be I'll surprise her. Maybe I'll go back and wait till she gets in
and tell her that I'm through.
Robinson smiled.
She'd like that. She'd know she had you then.
I'm through, Dusty said as though he were defying Robin-
son.
Then you'd better find somebody else to give that proposi-
tion to.
96
DONALD WINDHAM
Not me, I'm through, Dusty said.
The rum filled him with action, and he climbed to the top of
a bank and stood there rubbing his groins till Robinson caught
up with him. They were behind the midway. In front of them
was the back of an amusement where spectators threw baseballs
at a target, and if the balls hit the center, a Negro man who sat
shivering on a suspended board was dumped into a trough of
icy water below. He fell as they were standing behind him, and
they saw him climb back up, dripping and shivering, and sit on
the board again.
Want to see me get him? Dusty asked. Let's find the
front of this damned place.
They were forced to walk to the end of the midway and go
through the exhibition building. By the time they reached the
building they had forgotten about the Negro. They walked the
length of the exhibits between aisles of apples, corn, peaches and
jars of brown preserves. The building was closing for the night
and only the overhead lights remained lit. At the far end, in a
dark corner by the chicken coops, they decided to have an-
other drink.
It smells in here, Dusty said.
Laughing, they went out into the high enclosed arch of the
entrance. The first bottle was empty. They threw it into the
corner and drank out of the second. Dusty watched people pass-
ing through the dark shadow of the building toward the ferris
wheel at the beginning of the midway. Music tinkled. Robinson
was talking again, this time about a special commissibn in the
army; he drew a letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and with
all but the signature covered by his hand, held it out for Dusty
to see.
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
But Dusty was no longer standing beside him. He had
followed a small girl into the midway. The girl stopped in front
of the freak show and listened to the barker. Dusty saw that she
wore no coat, only a cotton dress, and he opened his jacket as
he walked toward her. The colored air of the midway smelled
warm. When he put his hand on the girl's arm, she looked at him
and said something about the fortune teller sitting beside a
stuffed raven on the platform above them. Dusty talked to her,
not caring what he said, and put his arm around her waist, caress-
ing her. She did not stop him or seem to mind, and when he
suggested that they go for a ride she agreed. They pushed out
into the midway but were pushed back along the side of the
97
DONALD WINDHAM
platform into the corner at the end. Dusty took the girl's face
into his hands, feeling the delicate bone of her jaw beneath his
fingers, tilted back her head as unresisting as the hinged lid of
a box, and kissed her long and hard. She did not resist, but
when he stopped she said:
I thought we were going for a ride.
Right, he answered.
He kissed her again, then pushed a path through the crowd
in the midway. The rollercoaster was directly in front of them.
He stopped and stood in line for tickets, and the girl stood beside
him holding his arm. He looked into her face. Her eyes were
childish with the lashes distinct about the edges, her straight
short blond hair faded into her cheeks, and she looked to him
as though she might never have known a boy. He bought the
tickets and put his arm around the girl again as they stood in
line for seats in a car. He could feel the rum inside his body
and the girl against it.
He was smiling down at her when he suddenly heard his
name called from the midway. In the crowd he saw a girl, a
friend of the girl who had tricked him, waving and shouting. All
the warmth drained out of his body, and he became uncomfort-
ably aware of his arm around the waist of the girl at his side.
He was doublecrossed. All evening he had been alone and not
seen anyone he knew, and now that bitch would accuse him of
being out with another girl and he would be the one who had
done wrong. It was not fair. He could say that it was a lie; he
could deny that he had been at the fair at all;- but other people
might have seen him. He hated the girl beside him. He dropped
his arm, but she held on to him. He did not move but he ached
for action. He wanted the last half -hour never to have been, the
girl to be annihilated, and himself to be alone. In his hate, he
closed his eyes.
The train rolled onto the platform creaking and sighing me-
tallicly. The girl pulled him forward. He wanted to run away
toward the entrance, but he followed her, and they sat in one of
the last cars. The attendant came and clamped the iron bar
across them. He was locked in with her, and her loathed flesh
which he renounced was pressed against him. People who were
lined up waiting for seats enviously watched him.
The cars started the ascent slowly, pulled up the incline by
a chain which seemed unequal to the weight it moved. Dusty
felt as though he remained stationary with the earth grinding
and sinking beneath him till he saw all of Lakewood Park spread
98
DONALD WINDHAM
out, and beyond it the green and brown trees, Capital Avenue
with lights and houses along it. He was as high as a skyrocket
which bursts over the lake, and he watched the balls of flame
fall beneath him slower than seemed possible. Then the car was
almost to the top where the track humped in a narrow peak.
I don't want to see, the girl squealed in an ecstasy of fear.
She grasped Dusty's arm. He had almost forgotten her, but
she came back into his consciousness now as the cause of all
his misery. Only one car leveled at the summit of the track
before it plunged, and though their car was still in ascent Dusty
was jerked violently forward as he turned toward the girl. His
face was close to hers, and he saw her eyes wide and helpless.
He saw her close them as the car plunged downward dropping
almost beneath itself. Every person in the rollercoaster screamed
simultaneously. The girl clutched him, wanting him to hold her,
and his stomach revolved as he was pulled up from the seat and
thrown down against it.
I can't look, the girl screamed happily.
Open your eyes, he shouted at her.
The rollercoaster sank in the quick swing of the second dip.
He was pulled away from the girl as he let go of the iron bar and
caught her face in his hands. The car careened in the opposite
direction, and he was thrown against her; but he held onto her
face, determined that she should open her eyes and suffer. He
shouted again:
Open your eyes!
The cars had gone into a long climb, ascending on the mo-
mentum of their last downward drive, moving slower the nearer
they came to the top. Still the girl did not open her eyes, and
Dusty struck her in the face as they dropped out of the sky a
second time. She moaned. His body was thrown almost out of
the car, ripped upward like a flag in the wind, but he held onto
the girl's head and kept his eyes intent on the girl's clenched
eyelids. Sliding toward her, he pulled back his fist and drove it
at her face. She moaned but did not resist. He felt his strength,
saw that the girl's lip was cut and that there was blood on his
hand.
Open your eyes!
The train was tearing downward through a tunnel made by
the supports of a higher track, then racing upward as though
toward certain doom. The speed made him insane. He pounded
at the girl's face hardly aware of her, cursing her and conomand-
99
DONALD WINDHAM
ing her to open her eyes, pounding her as though he were part
of the force hurling them through space.
Then the rollercoaster gaily sailed up and down the several
hills which marked the end of the ride and coasted in toward
the platform. Dusty stopped. The train stopped, and everything
sprang into motion. The crowd in the midway was swarming
and shouting, the music of the carousel was piping and wheed-
ling, and the people in the rollercoaster were "bounding out with
valedictory cries of relief. Dusty felt the girl huddled in the
corner of the car away from him. Without looking toward her,
he leapt free and ran down the wooden ramp to the midway. If
anyone noticed her, he was gone before it happened.
In the crowd he allowed himself to be carried along, passive
and nescient; he was breathless but he tried not to look intent
on losing himself. He let himself drift. At the freak show he
was pushed -across to the entrance so he bought a ticket and
went inside, passing as he entered the tent of the gypsy in the
fortunetelling booth about whom he had spoken to the girl.
Hey. Boy. Cigarette! she called to him.
Self-consciously, without stopping, hoping that she had not
recognized him, and thinking for a moment that he might have
killed the girl on the rollercoaster, he threw the gypsy a cigarette.
He walked slowly so no one would think he was running away.
The inside of the tent was circled with platforms, and the show
took place on one platform at a time. The crowd was at the
far end of the tent now. He was alone, and no one was following
him. Kicking the sawdust, he walked to the outside rim of the
crowd and leaned back against a railing. On the first platform a
girl was being suspended in air by a magician. Dusty tried to
look everywhere at once and he saw nothing. He was dilated,
spread out, exhausted but not satisfied. He needed a sharp sen-
sation to focus himself upon, to make him separate and con-
tained, and his name began to run through his mind as though
he were repeating it under his breath, as though someone were
about to call it aloud.
He spun around, A voice had snarled at him from behind.
Leering down at him from the platform, blowing whiskey breath
in his face, was the tattooed man. He stared at Dusty, sneered,
and pointing to a sign, read it aloud.
Do not lean on this platform!
He stared at Dusty as though he could read his thoughts,
and Dusty stared back without dropping his eyes.
Well, the tattooed man snarled.
100
DONALD WINDHAM
Dusty asked the price of a design. Instead of answering, the
man beckoned for him to come up on the platform. He climbed
the stairs, rising above the earth as he had in the rollercoaster,
and emerged in full sight above the crowd. The tattooed man
gave him a cardboard covered with designs and said that he
could not tell him how much a design costs until he knew which
design he wanted. The girl who had been suspended in air on
the first platform now appeared on the second as the three-legged
lady and wiggled each of her three legs alternately. Dusty chose
a single rose with a scroll around the stem. The tattooed man
spat out the price and told him to pay in advance. He counted
his change and placed it on the table. The tattooed man put the
money away in a box on the floor and, while he was leaning
over, produced a bottle from among a heap of dirty rags and
drank. When he straightened up, he pushed a blank piece of
paper across to Dusty and began to arrange his inks and needles.
Dusty sat staring at the khaki wall of the tent, thinking of
his name, visualizing himself on the platform above the crowd as
clearly as if he were looking into a mirror. He was so intently
aware of this image of his identity that he was unaware of his
actual self and his surroundings.
Name, the tattooed man was repeating to him.
He focused on the man with sudden fear. He was double-
crossed. The man had read his mind and knew what he had
done. He was trapped.
Name, the man repeated. I can't put a name on the scroll
unless you write it down.
He pushed the paper toward Dusty and pointed at it angrily.
Dusty looked down and comprehended. He took the pencil that
lay on the table and wrote down the name of the bitch who had
tricked him, though he no longer thought of her as a bitch. Some-
times people were better than they seemed, and when she saw
her name on his chest everything would be all right.
The tattooed man told him to take off his jacket and shirt.
He obeyed. The chair was cold against his naked back, and the
sharp pencil tracing the design across the hard skin of his chest
tickled him. He was again proud and strong. He looked down
into the crowd that was gathering about the platform to watch
and he saw Robinson among them. Robinson smiled and waved.
Dusty smiled back; he was no longer angry. To appear natural,
he leaned over and spoke to the tattooed man.
At first I thought you meant my name, he said.
The cold needle pricked the skin of his chest until the pain
101
DONALD WINDHAM
became a hot steady cut. He clenched his jaw and smiled to
prove that it did not hurt. Gradually he lost sensation. The girl
who had been the three-legged lady appeared on the next plat-
form and advanced to be sawn in half. The paper on which the
girl's name was written blew off the table. The tattooed man
kept on tattooing the indelible design across the boy's chest.
102
HEAVENLY CITY, EARTHLY CITY
Robert Duncan
Overture
Beauty is a bright and terrible disk.
It is the light of our inward heaven
and the light of the heaven in which we walk.
We talk together. Let our love leaven
and enlighten our talk! O we are dim.
We are dim shadows before our fiery selves.
We are mere moments before our eternities.
The youth of the man I am now has gone.
I have passed from its bright glare into its shadow.
Twenty-seven years have wrought their careful pattern,
worn in my flesh their inarticulate burden,
worn in my animal the mark and strain
of an inward heaven. Some bright and terrible disk
that lighted once this city of my passion
has dimmd and gone. Beauty
is a bright and terrible disk.
It is the light of our inward fire
and the light of the fire in which we walk.
When I see the figure of my lover,
this is the eternal answer that the eye of love
sees in each being then
from the years that have tried my flesh,
in the stain and age that trace in my figure
failure and betrayal of that golden vision,
man's possible beauty, th'eternal fire
in the guise of my manhood burns, burns bright
from the dim of my youth and consumes my youth
in its fiery self.
103
ROBERT DUNCAN
In the dark of my manhood the flamy self
leaps like the sun's hairy image
caught in the black of an obscure mirror 1 .
This is the apish chiaroscuro of our source, the sun.
This is my age, my inward heaven.
The city of my passion is reveald in its beauty.
Earthly city in which I walk, the light, your sun,
is the golden heart of that deep body,
the darkened city that gleams in the tide
of an inward sea. Dumbly, I hear its voices,
voices that merge in a chaos of other voices,
murmur and surge of a bright confusion.
The song, your voice that in my throat
rises in praise of some pure spirit, lonely
and yet lovely human aspiration, breaks
in the chaos of a massd impurity.
So a single bird flying up from its field
claims above the clamor of a dismal century,
asserts, asserts, in its perishable body
the lone clear cry of its perishable beauty.
In the moment of song earthly radiant
city of poetry that golden light
consumes in its focus a world I have suffered,
the darkend city of my perishable age.
Yet never, never, can the heart meet the gaze
of that earthly paradise in which I walk.
It seems to accuse my heart; its quiet
and its song, the dappled mien of light and shade,
are like a beloved face that searches Its reflection
and is torn in the rage of an inward flood.
The heart in the darkness of the city sings.
It answers the song of its source, the sun.
The darkness of the city protests, protests;
there is a throng of angry voices.
The heart in the darkness of the city sings:
104
ROBERT DUNCAN
I have seen the face of my Redeemer,
this is th'eternal figure that appears and disappears
in the human flood. Momentary answer!
Never, never, can I meet the gaze
of that inward angel articulate of love;
and yet He touches me in passing.
His touch seems to penetrate and awaken
some answer, pure in its sleep, and is gone.
And now awakend I lie, dumbly changed,
too late, too late, inarticulate of love.
Could I but dream and dreaming gaze
upon the paradise of his eyes, but they are gone.
He, he is gone; he is gone; and knowing this
I know the heavy change upon the world.
I fear. I fear.
Tell me that my Redeemer will answer.
Tell me that my Redeemer lives.
For there's a kind of world remaining still
tho' he who did make animate and fill that world
be gone.
The voices of the night protest:
O lonely heart, too late, too late.
You cry out as if you were
some innocent, foundling of the angelic orders,
awakened by the passing of your Redeemer
to face the last long night alone.
Betrayer of man's possible beauty,
Thou art awakend to gaze upon thy dead
and speechless self, touchd by that angel
awakener of the dead.
Thou hast no Redeemer,
The ghost that walks in its reflected glimmer
is but the wraith that you call splendor.
O but you are dim before the fiery self
that is gone from your world.
Wrath is the ghost that walks in its glimmer
and pities, pities the lonely dead,
touches them in passing and awakens the heart
to face its death. Too late, too late.
There is no Redeemer.
105
ROBERT DUNCAN
The heart in the darkness of the city sings.
It answers the song of its source, the sun:
I cry out as a child in the dark.
I know that my Redeemer lives.
The rage of my lover meets my cry;
feasts upon my inward hell and shakes,
shakes my spirit in his fury; tears
from me the strain of life,
inviolate song, and mocks my dim
inarticulate heaven. Now in my wilderness
where I have been driven by that blind
Avenger, awakener of the damnd,
betrayed by my Demon shall I in turn
betray my Redeemer? I walk alone
in that inward hell, shaken and riven
from my Beloved, the lover of my inward heaven.
Like Satan fallen in the weight of his pride,
speechless I face that punishing spirit
articulate of my own damnation.
This was the lover who answered my cry
as a wrathful father might answer a child
who, dumb in the strain of the wrath inside,
cried out in fear for the comfort of love.
I know that my Redeemer lives
who loves, who loves my lonely spirit
and seeks in the darkness of my night
to absolve my torture in his passion.
my Beloved, in the night of my soul
1 have thirsted for some passionate wrong.
I have lain in the arms of the destroying angel.
I have heard in hatred's sea the Siren's song and cast
my self upon that strand; held in love's cruel counterpart,
known the warm embrace and the inward cold.
Dumbly, I listen to the Siren's insistent sound,
that brazen counterfeit of song that charms
and fixes the soul upon its destruction:
this is the magnet of a massd impurity.
I walk in the eclipse of my Beloved.
106
ROBERT DTJNCA.N
But O the Earthly city remains.
In my dismal century the Earth replenishes,
replenishes her beauty.
Against the Siren's monotone, the fixed accusing glare,
your voice, Beloved, rises in praise
of that fair spirit, my inward heaven.
I know that my Redeemer lives.
The light, His sun, is the radiant song
that consumes in its focus a world I have suffered,
asserts, asserts, against the Siren counterfeit,
the Earthly paradise in which I walk.
This is the measure of my dismay:
to know its beauty like the face of my Beloved
that is torn in the rage of an inward flood.
II
Pity is the wrath in which we walk.
My heart like a burdend Icarus having struck terror
falls from its universe into the dark.
Then gaze deep upon my lover's gleam, feed my soul
upon the damnd perdition of his eyes.
The inward spark, the flamy self
dies, and its shadow leaps forward.
See, it is a demon lover to fill the abyss
as he falls.
Pity is the wrath in which we walk.
Then gaze deep, deep upon the gleam.
This is the true mirror of my face.
"No/' I say. "No." In the shadowy room
I seek to disentangle myself from his arms.
Dumbly, unmoving he lies, having laid bare
his -wrath, betrayed, he clings to me.
Pity is the gleam of the wrath inside,
a demon light to illuminate t&e face
and betray the heart. Like burdend Icarus
I would fall in the weight of my body
and damaged wings, in my knowledge,
into some dark and forgiving sea.
Pity is the unforgiving sea.
107
ROBERT DUNCAN
Traveler who would bring love's light into hell,
when that shadowy beloved turns from his hell
a face to gaze upon your face; this is a damnd
Eurydice, that catches in her mirroring quest
the gleam of love as a new perdition.
Sweep, then, Orpheus, the wild music from your lyre
as if you sang lost love, but remember
the beauty and charm are hate's machineries,
demonic art that catches the damnation into its disk
and lends to hell its immortal strain.
Sweep, then, Orpheus, the wild love from your lips
and when from the far room your forgiven lover
cries out from the rejection that forgiving is:
remember Eurydice's face because you turnd
is turnd toward her death; remember her cry
cries with love's final breath and is gone;
remember his face as your Eurydice
that was the woman's face in the lunar gleam of sleep.
The damnd in the fires of love wrap round themselves
and shriek. AI AI Orpheus, the brutal lyre,
beauty and charm to turn her face
toward its perdition.
Where is that dark and forgiving sea, flood
of rage or sorrow to sweep thru my body,
vast poem, ocean of the soul's resounding deep,
where falling Icarus falls to his rest?
In the blaze of his blinded eyes
the disk shows black, burnd in his mind
a charcoal sun.
Torn from his flight among the Bacchae of the sun,
those burning women of exaltation's fury,
he is hurld in the weight of wings and knowledge
into the forgiving depths of sleep.
i du tomber de tres haut, de tres haut,
tres haut sur la tete?
Ou e$t mon coeur? OIL est ma tete?
Eurydice, Eurydice.
Que j'ai peur.
How heavy my heart falls with its burden.
There is no world than the world of my dreams
where the weight of my knowledge falls so far.
108
ROBERT DUlSrCA3Sr
Orpheus of the bleeding wings among the beasts
in the shadowy meadows that extend in sleep
sings his sweet strain. Eurydice, Eurydice.
He closes his eyelids and in that inward light
Eurydice's dark face returns and is banished by his gaze
into eternity. Nightmare minister to pain!
Pity is the wrath in which he walks.
The Bacchae, furious women, drunk with lust,
close their eyes like their clenched fists
and see in the glare of their blinded eyes
a myriad burning destruction of the body.
AI AI these are sorrow's witch-like sisters
with their hair in rays like an angry sun; they cry
against earth's shady consolation, inviolate song.
How in our misery the calm of the grove,
and the calm of the evening's air, earth's
loving breath, commiserates and increases our fury.
We shall be redeemd and forgiven in passion,
washd thru by the fires of passion's sun,
and find in our bodies an immaculate quiet.
Pity is the wrath in which we burn.
The Bacchae in pure passion's toar
raise their clenched and violent hands
against the lonely and still singer,
Orpheus, who would sing love's praise.
He I am -who torn in my flesh
return at last to my lost Eurydice,
the inward sea, terror's sister-face,
to receive my Icarus.
The Bacchae tear in my fleshly sleep
fleshly ribbons that gleam like gold.
I lie under the weight of the black water.
Eurydice toward whom I dar'e not look
she is the bright spirit that sleeps in my heart
returns to meet my inward gaze.
Ill
The praise of the sun is a didactic poem.
The ape in his raiment of gold or cloth of fire
109
ROBERT DUNCAN
apes the categories of the spiritual man
and, in the teachings, learns from his raiments
the torturous lesson of his apish form.
What man knows more in his cloth of gold
who fixes his eye upon his source? I know no more
than the fleshly life that clothes in its ardor
the bony rigor of my inward form.
The lineaments of my body are
a didactic poem,
the apish chiaroscuro of my source, the sun.
The praise of the sun is a solitary poem.
The lonely man can turn his skull sunwards
until that glory penetrates
and sears the confines of the bone;
can howl, can whirl his reluctant arms,
and measure his pride against the sun;
can moan in his incompleted image;
can howl for the bliss of his final mate.
He catches the sun in the mirroring heart
and praises that blazing solitude.
Then in the avenues of his earthly city
unearthly presences wink,
unfathomable eyes of an inward vision.
with what pain I watch in my vision
my proud and reluctant animal self
where he sings in his lonely monotone;
he turns his beseeching enraptured eyes
and glares upon the heavenly scene,
cries, cries as if hurt by the surrounding beauty,
and apes the sound of a vaster heart.
He mimics the opulence of the sun,
and in that bright confusion, love,
he burns in exaltation's fires,
clutches, clutches at his animal mate
and whimpers against the pit of dark.
1 watch with pain my hairy self
crouched in his abject sexual kingdom
writhe in that brief ecstatic span
as if he took the sun within himself
110
ROBERT DUNCAN
and became a creature of the sun,
became an illumined body of voices;
as if in the pit of his animal dumb
he heard the counterpoint,
the mimic tum-tum-tum of a vaster heart.
The praise of the sun is a nostalgic poem.
The tum-tum-tum in memory
is like the pounding surf in dreams.
The man in the solitude of his poetic form
finds his self-consciousness defined
by the boundaries of a non-committal sea
that washes, washes the reluctant mind
and carves from its shores its secret coves.
Sometimes our feelings are so mild
they are like a day when rocks
seem mere extensions of the sea
washd in a world of oceanic blue
and continents seem dreams of a watry deep.
Turbulent Pacific! the sea-lions bark
in ghostly conversations and sun themselves
upon the sea-conditiond rocks.
Insistent questioner of our shores!
Somnambulist, old comforter!
You right in passion's storm and passionate calm
your reasonless change and seek to restore
the aspiring man to your green remote.
The individual ape in the human sea
is worn, is worn by a non-committal tide
and shows in his unnecessary watching face
the necessary convolutions of that sea,
the memories of forsaken lands.
The praise of the sun is a nostalgic poem.
Sometimes the sea seems mild and light
as a luminous harp upon which the sun plays
threaded with indolent wires of gold
across the ruddy music of its waves
and its voices merge in a pulsing counterpoint
to sing the wonders of the sun,
the beasts of the sun and the watry beasts.
Ill
ROBERT DUNCAN
Sea leopards cough in the halls of our sleep,
swim in the wastes of salt and wrack of ships,
and sun themselves upon the resounding rocks,
or lie in the thoughtless shallows of the sun.
These are the tides of a poetic sea.
I drift. I drift. The praise of the sun
is purposeless. I dream of those forsaken shores
wrappd in the mind's redeeming haze.
Sea-leopards cough in the halls of our sleep;
disturb the course of the nostalgic sea,
casual hints where harmlessly they swim
of some brooding fear in the fiery deep.
The earth has tides of desolation and of bliss,
of shadows and of amber marbled surfaces,
laments and cries, vague intimations of the sun,
terrors, brightnesses of noon, and groves
of memory: in these her beauty is renewd.
The wandering man returns to his city
as if he might return to earth a light, a joy;
and find his rest in earthly company.
The praise of the sun is a renewing poem.
The earth replenishes, replenishes her beauty
and sings a green praise of her terrible source.
The sea reflects in her evening tides
upon a lavender recall of some past glory,
some dazzle of a noon magnificence.
The evening hour is eloquent of the sun.
This is no dominion of the pure terror
but soothes, soothes. We walk in the light
of beauty's calm; our city lies about us
murmuring, drifts in an evening humanity.
There is a wisdom of night and day,
older than that proud blaze of sun,
in which we rest, a passion, primitive to love,
of perishing, a praise and recreation of the sun.
My earthly city is seen in its beauty.
112
THE HOSPITAL
Seymour M. Krim
IT is Sunday, and I am to ride on the bus. In the terminal a
queue has already formed. I have purchased my round-trip
ticket from the sweating Jewess! imprisoned in the shrill cage,
and now I assume a position at the end of the line.
Poverty informs our little group. Cloaked in shawls, twist-
ing uncomfortably in shiny suits, my fellow-passengers stand
guard over their bursting bundles. These contain rich foods jars
of sweet and sour pickles, smoked salmon, spiced meats the
robust delicacies of a poor man's table. They have been carefully
husbanded for this Sunday voyage, and now they are being pro-
tected with vigilance. As we move forward the bundles are
drawn painfully along; my associates are often allowed only one
arm for this strenuous labor, for the other is laden with magazines
and newspapers tied together in a fury of wild cord-ends. (I carry
only four sliced-chicken sandwiches and a New York Times.)
Our 'warders' patrol the queue. "Only a single line," they
bellow. "No pushing we've got all day, and no one will get on
the bus if there's pushing." We are not patient with this indignity.
Perhaps, in our eagerness to secure a seat (for the journey
is long) , we have jostled one another, breathed hot upon the neck
of a fellow. Perhaps there has even been wrangling in our midst
a muttered word, an accusing eye. But surely this is excusable.
We are agitated with waiting ambivalent in heart and the op-
pressive terminal air has contributed in no small measure to our
discontent.
What right do they have to inflict gratuitous cruelties upon
us? Those gross voices, for example. And the disdain in those
insolent eyes. No we stiffen suddenly no, we will not suffer it!
Our ranks close and we say: "Do you think we are children?
Stop shouting at us!"
113
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
Our protest echoes petulantly. How naive we are they are
not disturbed in the least. In fact, they are rather amused. After
a short pause, one of them booms impersonally: "Any monkey-
business and nobody gets on the bus. That's final."
Ah, their curt brutishness is superb. Surely they are Speng-
ler's Naturmensch and we, bleating Ishmaels, hounded by pique
and perspiration. Yet what can we do? Take another bus? An
automobile, a train? Out of the question. There is absolutely no
other means of transportation. This company, among many vast
holdings, has an exclusive grasp on all roads and byways leading
to and from our destination. We must ride upon the bus of pain,
and we must abide.
At precisely high noon, the first of our party boards the bus
through an aperture in the enclosed terminal. "Poppa! Come
quick!" shrieks the tiny woman in front of me. With savage
emphasis she has taken hold of her ancient father's left arm, and
is hurrying him forward, filthy finger-nails threshing against his
worn Sabbath cloth. The sullen silence which had pervaded our
group has been ruptured; all are now seized with animation.
We have been stationed against the southwestern wall of the
terminal. Our habitat, shadow, our symbols, cloaca and womb,
but now pace quickened we are thrust into the Paging neon
that heralds interior commerce: drug store, luncheonette, boot-
black cubicle. Suddenly, from one of these retail phantoms, comes
a crusty jukebox lament which thumps through the terminal.
At the ticket-window, a sailor boy, strutting and blond, begins to
tease at a dance step by himself. Passengers waiting for other,
more prosaic buses, are caught by the infectious rhythm: they
beat their feet and chant, almost wantonly.
Our moving line stares numbly. These grave faces are un-
yielding in their censure. As the Harlem trumpet flails fortissimo
my companions await their turn to escape this sportive display
and mount the bus. The vehicle has been moored in the runway
outside, adjacent to this obscure exit, and presently those of us
remaining on line shall step out into the afternoon.
I follow close upon the heels of the daughter and patriarch. I
hear him moan softly with the effort as he places his withered
right leg upon the threshold of the bus. He holds grimly with
both hands to the miniature bannisters and, with a supreme ef-
fort, hoists the remainder of his shrunken body onto the bus. I
am prepared to follow when the bus's doors swing shut without
warning. My entrance has been halted while the driver checks
some rudimentary mathematical error I see him fumble irri-
114
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
tably through his till. Behind me a muted cry arises from those
left on the line. You can't turn us away!
"Calm down. Everybody will get a seat."
At once, we are docile as lambs. How acutely our warders
have sensed our insecurity and how shamelessly we show our
gratitude for what, in actuality, is hardly kindness on their part.
The doors open, and this time I am not to be thwarted. I
hand my ticket to the driver who punches what appears to be
an adding machine, then gives me a blue receipt bearing rather
cryptic numerals. As I make my way back into the bus, I am
again struck by the curious darkness of the interior. It is difficult
to determine the precise origin of this phenomenon: perhaps
there is a vast ceiling arched across the runway which obliterates
all light; but if this is so, it has escaped my notice. Possibly the
city's skyscrapers have conspired to seal this tiny avenue from
the sun. But, assuming either of these instances, why then should
the bus dispatchers wear white sun helmets with green visors?
I am cautious as I grope for a seat. I have never really ad-
justed myself to the conditions of our journey: despite more than
a year's experience my attitude, it would seem, is resolutely Vic-
torian. I finally slip into a seat and struggle with the window.
"Weak, hah?" gleefully asks an old man standing in the center
of the aisle.
Before I can answer, he brushes me aside and triumphantly
raises the window. Before I can thank him, the old man disap-
pears in the gloom. My eyes slowly accustom themselves to the
strange light. I see that, as usual, it is mostly older men and wo-
men who sit silently by, waiting for our bus to start. They are
flanked by a scattering of younger women, a brace of lone men
and, finally, the children.
Our 1 departure seems imminent when emerging from dark-
ness limb-by-mountainous-limb, a vast Brunhilde comes march-
ing down the aisle. She grows in immensity with each fearsome
step, and slung about her girth are proliferous parcels of sour-
smelling foods. I contemplate her coming with hostility for the
seat tangent to mine is among the few remaining vacant ones
on the bus.
I had reserved it, in indulgent fantasy, for one young and
comely there is perhaps no greater anodyne for this trip than
the sensual divertissement. And yet, as this unwashed, unblessed
colossus advances toward me, I am deeply ashamed of my erotic
reverie.
115
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
"That seat taken?" she asks bitterly, I having made no ges-
ture to arise and let her in. I smile, "No," to assuage my guilt;
she makes no answer, merely squashes heavily into the seat with
her soiled treasures.
There is now barely room for me to sit on the pinpoint of my
spine. If I were to turn my head a fraction of an inch, it would
nuzzle a right breast three times its size. The woman suddenly
belches, and a foul miasma engulfs me. I should like to change
seats: but can I, justly? Are we not bound by a common know-
ledge not accorded most? And are we not, therefore, committed
to a new tenderness toward each other? For what is man with-
out pity?
Her eyes are dumb, her 1 great arms weary with embracing
burdens: I can not move . . . and then dart to a seat in the dis-
mal rear. The poor woman stares blindly ahead: there are no ulti-
mate humiliations for passengers on our bus.
The doors have closed, we are about to depart. An unseen
hand pummels our flank we can hear the sharp tattoo plainly
and at the signal, our driver puts the bus in motion. We creep
slowly behind another bus nosing out of the runway and on to the
teeming street. Done! In less than an hour we shall arrive at
the hospital.
My comrades glisten painfully as we glide into a flood of
fresh air and sunshine. I see them in what is perhaps a revela-
tory light. It is significant, for example, that they are mostly
southern peoples: Italians, Jews, Spaniards, Negroes. Their Sim-
day clothes are worn with ritual deliberation; the more southern
the heritage, the more lavish, and obviously Sunday, the clothes.
My fellow-passengers are archtypal Latins, all animal and white
teeth; Negresses, competent and grim, next large-boned hus-
bands; an ambiguous blend of Mediterranean brunettes; and old
Jews, disdaining the eliptical Americanese of wives and children,
speaking a fierce Yiddish.
What unites us all is the wound, of course. After the first
trip it is unmistakable: it would be no more apparent if it bled.
Yet it is peculiar, most peculiar, that we are rarely menaced with
memory and remorse during the week.
I speak from my own experience, but from what I have
learned in conversation with other passengers, it would seem to
be borne out generally. We traverse the normal week blithely or
soberly, according to our tastes. I will grant that often before
retiring, or when listening to certain types of music (notably
Stravinsky and Bloch) we are subject to glimpses, fleeting re-
116
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
minders of the inevitable Sunday. But for the most part, even
the most sensitively wrought among us is much too absorbed in
gratifying the appetites to be but faintly disturbed. And is this
entirely fortuitous? We ar"e described as warm-blooded peoples;
however inexact the generalization, I have little doubt concern-
ing our voluptuous inclination. And, in one sense, isn't that why
we are destined (because of our coat of flesh) to know only the
sensation of pain and not its significance?
Even the children on our bus, naturally ebullient, are sub-
dued. When they accidentally jest, or become too animated, they
start up guiltily, then bow their tiny heads. The children how
touching, how ingenuous! often forget their special fate even
while on the bus. We adults are, of course, not spared the duties
of full consciousness.
Our bus rides west toward the river and then turns north
up a great avenue. We pass dilapidated tenements, sprawling
ruins washed by the river's fever. From uncertain windows fly
"victory pennants," a florid display of multi-colored flags cele-
brating the end of the war. From what seems to be the last row
in the bus I hear* a dry female voice exclaim: "Look! Real Ameri-
cans!" The woman's comment is a pistol shot in our flowing
womb of gentle bus murmurs. "Will you look at Old Glory,"
she continues, with harsh pride. The passengers are coldly silent:
there seems to be little doubt that this foolish, rather arid voice
belongs to a newcomer.
The bus streaks northward from the vegetative slum. We
now enter an immaculate neighborhood dominated by stately,
phallic apartment houses. Uniformed doormen can be seen loung-
ing in baroque vestibules.
"Ah," cackles the neophyte, "no flags. They should be asham-
ed of themselves!"
My fellow-passengers can't help but show their scorn. It is
inconceivable to them that anyone who rides our bus should still
be enthralled by such secular devices.
In fact, the little man sitting next to me snorts derisively,
then looks up eagerly for confirmation. He twitches once, like a
coy bird, unable to contain a shrill, effeminate giggle. Then he
bends toward me.
"Have you been making this trip for long?" His voice is con-
spiratorial and knowing.
"For* about a year," I say.
He makes the traditional empathetic response with tongue
and teeth. I smile impersonally, then gaze out of the window at
117
SEYMOUR 3VL KRIM
the portentous thunder-clouds gathering overhead. From the
corner of my eye I see him furtively peeking at me. When our
glances meet he turns away, the abashed schoolboy, his right leg
jerking involuntarily against mine,
It is fitting, I think, that my neighbor should be a homo-
sexual: the guilt that infuses his every gesture, that provides the
intangible scenery for his fitful, tormented skirmishes, is locked
in struggle with a carnivorous passion. And so with the rest of
us, only less concentrated, less intense.
I too am lusting, only more quietly. Directly ahead of me,
sitting next to the window, is a handsome dark-skinned girl,
perhaps a mulatto it is difficult to be sure. Her beauty, however,
is unequivocal. Every now and then she will incline her head
slightly and consent (how lovely!) to a shy, vague smile, almost
as though she is being enchanted by some bit of countryside we
are passing. (The city is far behind us now.) I completely accept
the conditions of our coquetry; her very obliqueness seems high-
ly proper for the occasion, dainty and melancholy.
- There is no opportunity for me to fathom this lovely girl,
however. My ardent companion has spotted a quarry, and he
brandishes his light artillery.
"The new buses are wonderful," he says, smiling up hope-
fully. "Yes indeed, I was on one last week that had marvelous
leather seats and chromium racks for baggage and things."
The dubious virtues of new buses are profaned at this mo-
ment; the heavens have burst, and our bus is transformed into a
tiny craft shuddering in a great sea. A tumultuous wind sucks
us this way and that, while thunder and lightning beat down
from their writhing crucible. The country road we are traversing
is cleft with the discharge: deep incisions are cut into the earth,
and all our driver's skill is called upon to maneuver us through
this battlefield.
My neighbor titters and places his hand upon my arm: "I
used to be terrified of thunder and lightning," he confides, then,
gaining confidence, he takes a further, more daring step. "When I
was a youngster I used to crawl in bed with my brother during
thunder-storms. He was frightened like me."
Our bus is plunged in darkness* We hurtle along in a Stygian
deep pierced only by flashes of lightning which illumine the
immobile faces of my fellow-passengers. The fury of the storm
is surely unprecedented: yet even the children maintain a unique
poise during its climax but then, they know only too well that
118
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
nature doesn't descend to grand guignol for its most significant
judgements.
As the storm subsides, the man at my side reluctantly loosens
his grasp on my arm: under cover of darkness it was a secret
thing, an indulgence we both accepted, but now, as a finger of
light probes this vice, he looks away sadly, and his fingers fall
from my arm one by one, like dead antennae.
Did I get wet? he inquires with tremulous concern. No. Did
I mind that, because of some curious identification, he clutched
my arm in the dark? Of course not. He raises his eyebrows in
arch burlesque and licks his lips. I have a sudden impulse to
shake him until his teeth rattle, to pinion those tailored shoulders
and speak this dogma:
Mr. friend, pain bs a priori. For special reasons,, we have been
selected to know it in this form, It is not pleasant, surely. But
one must go on from there. If your strategy, as it appears, is
gratification at any price, then you have not escaped; for with
every coital spasm, as it were, you are again impaled. Under-
stand: pain is the ring-master, and pleasure the tiger, but when
the whip cracks, they are one and the same. Contain yourself
for God's and your sake!
But if he were to speak truly, and took delight in style, he
would say:
Surely you are not naive or are you? but honestly, where
would be the relish, let alone salvation, without my compulsive
hunt? The Poet says life is a hospital and we are patients who
think the next bed better than this one. I know the value of my
unique bed. In the next lies heart-break and bewilderment.
As it is, I say nothing and he says nothing.
We have reached our destination. The sun shines merrily
on vast grounds that seem to have been untouched by the storm.
As our bus sweeps down the main thoroughfare I am impressed
again by the architectonics of the place. White, sceptic buildings
rise cleanly from the verdant green. On the periphery of the
main grounds is that cluster of neat cottages which always re-
mind one of some suburban culture precise and secure. And
in the face of the majestic anonymity which egulfs them those
glacial steel and concrete walls, that complex of stunning cubes
and squares the cottages seem warm and individual, one can
visualize a dog smelling good things within. They are occupied,
I believe, by the doctors and nurses.
At the first stop which the driver announces as the "ad-
119
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
ministration building" several of the passengers step slowly
from the bus under the weight of their huge bundles. Included
in this group are the dark-skinned girl (who faces me once, can-
did and serene) and my homosexual neighbor. He doffs his hat in
an ironic flourish, then waves good-bye with his left pinkie. The
driver collects the tiny blue receipts from those who leave.
The bus turns down a slight hill and stops a second time
beside a squat, oblong building. In front of this structure, upon
the freshly-mowed lawn, a group of Negroes are having what
seems to be a picnic. I see them quite clearly through the window.
There is great laughter in their midst, and two grey-haired men
are casually throwing a tennis ball to each other. The Negro
farthest from me is laughing softly with enjoyment of the game,
and as he laughs, a five-and-dime necklace quivets about his
throat,
I get off the bus at the final stop and enter the canteen. This
is a vast, low-roofed hall jammed with bare wooden tables and
hundreds of men, women and children. I have to fight my way
through this teeming mass in order to get within sight of the
counter. And even here people are ranged in great density, bar-
gaining with the men behind the counter for soft drinks and ice-
cream. These men, patients who have been selected for the task,
are unusually dextrous. They are neither polite nor are they
rude; they are rather as efficient and impersonal as machines.
With a bold thrust, I manage to reach the counter itself: at once
I smell the odor, sour and pungent. It is indigenous to all the pa-
tients; its ingredients are filth, sperm and perspiration. I buy two
bottles of Spur and make my way back through the howling
crowd.
Now for ihe overland foot journey. The building I seek is in-
accessible even to the bus. As I walk diagonally across a great
expanse of cropped grass I pass small parties sprawled on the
turf. One extremely tall boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, is
dancing about a middle-aged nurse lying on the grass. As he
swoops past her, the boy touches her head quite delicately with a
leaf; and each time he places the leaf upon her head, the woman
purses her lips and makes the sound of a wind instrument, much
to the boy's delight.
After a five-minute walk I arrive at the building. It is simi-
lar to the others except, if possible, more bleak, more implacable.
It has two entrances, I have been told, but in all my trips to the
hospital I have only been able to uncover one. Bearing my mini-
ature bundle, I knock at what is presumably the back door and
120
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
wait fot an answer. After a short pause, an attendant unlocks
the door from within and holds it open for me to enter. When I
am safely inside, he relocks the door with one of the innumerable
keys that dangle from a chain fastened to his belt. The attendant
wears the outfit common to all males who work at the hospital: a
white shirt, with rolled sleeves, a tiny black bow-tie, and dark
blue trousers. I am escorted into a small room bare and func-
tional where a young woman sits at a table littered with charts.
"Ward?" she asks mechanically, without looking up from her
papers.
"Forty-nine."
"Pass?"
I hand her my visitor's pass which she compares with one
of the charts on her desk. On the wall behind her are two signs,
placed about five feet apart. One says, in striking black charac-
ters: VISITORS MUST NOT GIVE MATCHES TO PATIENTS.
The other: TO ENTICE AWAY OR ASSIST A PATIENT TO
ESCAPE FROM THE HOSPITAL IS A MISDEMEANOR PU-
NISHABLE BY LAW. This latter caution is, I gather, required
by the state. It is, however, the merest formality and has little
to do with reality. In fact, I have often noticed the attendants
joking about the incongruity of the sign.
The young woman stamps my pass and says: "You can go
up now." I pass through a narrow exit and begin to mount the
winding metal staircase. At the first landing I turn to the right
and face the prohibitive door which I knock on with my fist. No
answer. I beat it with my foot. I can hear nothing. Finally, I
hear the inevitable rattle of keys and the door opens. A Negro
attendant wearing rimless glasses asks me to wait on one of the
benches.
I am in a huge waiting room. Unpainted tables and benches
are arranged in arithmetic fashion the length of the room. At both
ends of the room opened doors extend into similar rooms. Yet
there is no one room thete are rather a series of doors within
doors and chamber's that have no tangible perimeter.
It is into this labyrinthine network that male patients of all
ages are lead on Sunday afternoons. (Female patients are natu-
rally quartered by themselves; and, of course, they may only
receive female visitors.) The male patients' dress depends on
what is available on any specific Sunday usually a bizarre mis-
mating of blue denim shirts, white duck trousers and thick,
coarse shoes. During the week, in the confines of their cells, the
patients usually go about bare-footed. And even now they do not
121
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
pretend to civilized graces: a patient next to me, with quiet non-
chalance, blows his nose in the sleeve of his shirt.
Wherever I look, patients are eating and smoking. There is
an incessant crinkle of wax-paper being removed, the grating
sound of many jars being unscrewed. These, of course, are the
foods that were transported aboard the bus; they supplement six
days of the most frugal and tasteless fare. And on the tables, in
heaping towers, are the plethora of magazines and newspapers
that were brought for the patients' diversion.
Conversation between the patients and their visitors is spas-
modic, unpredictable. The visitors sit solemnly beside the pa-
tients; they seem embarrassed, shy, and when they smile, it is to
palliate an unknown quantity. The patients are at once oblivious,
cunning and greedy.
Despite the contrast in clothing and expression, it is difficult
for me to distinguish the visitors from the patients. This is especi-
ally true of the children (and, of course, the Negroes). One of
the younger children, a boy of seven or eight with a bright,
scrubbed face, is earnestly talking to his patient not five feet from
where I sit. The patient is uncomprehending he plays idly with
a top that was brought for him and the young visitor raises his
eyes, perplexed and grave, to mine. There is no advice that I can
give him.
At this moment I am signalled from the door by an attendant.
The patient I have come to see has been brought up from below.
I go forward and take his arm, careful to keep my head averted.
We do not look at each other, for it is less painful that way.
"How's the boy," I ask, guiding him to a bench.
"How do you think? Join our little country club for three
hundred years and find out."
I unwrap the chicken sandwiches meager offerings com-
pared to the swollen delights bared on other tables and give him
a bottle of soda.
"You've got to get me out of here," he says furiously. "I'm
annihilated. Don't let them annihilate me!"
I light a cigarette and he rips the pack from my hand. I light
a cigarette for him and he takes three breathless puffs, then lights
another on the bright ash of the first. "Get out your pencil," he
says, "I have two new inventions this week. Patent number one:
an air-conditioned camel made of plastic, for desert travel. Patent
number two: radar, the golden light!"
"That's already been patented," I say.
"No, not radar the golden light!" He puts his mouth to my
122
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
ear and whispers: "My radar will make six highways twinkle,
water-power, motive-power, the banal eye-magic " He breaks
off and becomes silent, for standing in front of our bench is a
young patient who has been listening intently to our conver-
sation.
Suddenly, in one fierce motion, the young patient undoes his
trousers and begins to urinate on my shoe. Two white-shirted
attendants rush over and carry him off. They apologize for the
incident and give me several paper towels to dry my foot. I take
out my pencil and resume the role of amanuensis.
"Go ahead," I say.
"An impetuous monster," he grins, "well let him shower the
naked city." I have learned of course to accept these startling
changes in his conversation. When he was "admitted" to the
hospital or, rather, when I was informed that he had arrived
there a year ago, last July, the physician for Ward 49 frankly
told me to expect just this conduct from him for the next five
years. After that, I was told, his condition would depend entire-
ly on myself.
"There's Uncle Harry," he says, pointing to a middle-aged
patient sitting across the room.
"You're imagining it," I say firmly. "Uncle Harry's in Bos-
ton."
He looks at me shrewdly. "Don't contradict me. I know
Uncle Harry when I see him. Hey," he shouts loudly, "Uncle
Harry! Uncle Harry!" The man pays no attention to him.
"You see," I say softly, "you were imagining it."
He has just about finished the last sandwich when the voice
is heard through the loudspeaker: "Time's up. Time's up."
All about me visitors stand up slowly; they tenderly, yet
with fear and solemnity, embrace their patients. We too arise,
holding hands. He awkwardly lays his head upon my shoulder
and begins to cry.
"No," I whisper, soothing his head with my hand as one
might a child. "Please, my dear."
And now, as always at this time, we may look at each other.
I must not yield (surely this is a mirror, surely a dream) . For,
you see, it is myself. The eyes of tears, the lips I now kiss (as
with Narcissus, out of humility) are mine. Each visitor is, of
course, a patient; and in the great rooms, as far as my eyes can
see, young and old men are kissing goodbye to their lost images.
One child, obviously a newcomer, is terribly embarrassed, and
123
SEYMOUR M. KRIM
all he can bear to do is hold his surrogate's hand at arm's length.
"You've really got to go now," the Negro attendant says to
me. He takes "him" by the upper arm and they walk briskly
away.
Our bus waits for us in the square. We walk down the green
pathways toward it silent, bent. Many of the women and children
are crying. Yet by this evening we shall all have forgotten.
124
ABC
Leslie A. Fiedler
"The slow torture of being a child. . "
Art
Will inherit
Play's etiquette, the use
Of the lie: the child's truce
With use and despair,
But more dear.
Beast
Is the fist's
Ancestor. Be wary, Child; madrigal,
Fast nor prayer can let at all
Your hairless wrath, past innocence,
The dog's inheritance.
Circumcision:
On this derision
Turns, the wolves' clamor, the sneer.
O Child, do not distrust the rite: Here
Your' unfocussed anguish, the imageless dead come,
Are at home.
Dandelions,
Rank, define
The child's disaster, to piss in bed;
Or ruined, will prophesy, broadcast by breath;
Betray, beneath their fringe, the threat of tense,
Their naked glans.
125
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
East
Is the dream's crust,
Seaward the hardening rind. Waked
Out of the dance doll, tower or toy shake
The motiveless morning city, dying
To things.
Fool!
In school
Our first rebel: your dull hoof,
More imperative than order or love,
Stirs our titter. We see the teacher's afraid:
Are betrayed.
Ghosts
Are lusts'
Eternity: the soul's antipodes. In what
We hunted, as in a mirror, caught
Forever. The child's not pure, but ghostless at least
Nearer peace.
Haircut:
Swathed, caught
In the cage of his face, child into boy
Screams. Bloodless circumcision of the goy.
The innocent barber chastens our fur,
Perfumes the scar.
Islands
Are the damned's
Arena. Men beached on the dream of boy or dunce
Survive, possess themselves not peace. But were one once
Immune to childhood, home more fabulous than laughter,
He'd walk the water.
Jew,
Child, is you:
The eye's indelible ghetto: sober,
Whom once God beat like a lover,
Comic, genteel; now pray only for death
Or less.
126
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
Kiss
Is the price
Of the toy, the aunt's revenge; more
Red than cokes, the dream of girls, but more
A strategy, a prayer to come where Moses stood,
Tongued by his Lord.
Lost
Our latest
News always. Around the child's corners
The enormous umbrage of adult mourners,
Who, knowing their names, the names of their street,
Yet also weep.
Medicine,
Now begin
When the kiss fails, to scourge the desire of boys:
The vulgar color of measles, the cough's obvious noise;
Or later, the ulcer's dull bourgeois rancor,
The adult treason of cancer.
Negroes
As nose,
Blue gum or raddled eye,
Betray the face the child's disguise denies:
History-less, unequal to its defeats,
Or bruised by sleep.
Ogre,
Beggar
I am but let me please choose
For this boy rather to lose
Joy than you. Let his sisters
Fear monsters!
Pride,
With its snide
Ambiguous notions of terror,
Is the child's mirror.
He remarks he is rather
<Like his father.
127
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
Quest
Is chaste
For Boy or Greek: Grail or Hesperides
Innocent for all their angelic police.
But if Jew or Man be not infirm
Let him burn!
Return
Will turn
In the end hell's paradox like the rest;
The arch-immaculate garden blur to the breast,
The child's most pious explorer discover
Some lies of his mother.
School
Is not cruel,
Though law for sullied love retrace
The mother 1 in the teacher's face.
Starve! Starve! Eve chose gross bread; my son
Eats stone.
Time
Will define
Our burden of terror. See, the ill-photographed
Father yellows to ancestor. Laugh,
But do not deny whatever dies is killed:
This is your guilt.
"T Tnicorn,
vJ Do not scorn
The obsequious dog, the greasy rabbit
(To fawn for the caress, or between heat and habit
Bear are innocent) , tho sleep betray the boy to choose
Your delicate, unfertile hooves.
Virgin,
Chuck, begin
To fret the sheets, be what, before
You were, you were: goat, goat or whore.
Yet some they say have died, before they died,
White as a Bride,
128
A.
West
Is our 1 itch, lust
For loneliness, hunger for beasts; or your dream,
Boy, the meaningless dead: death between
Men a caress, hero and horse sharing one smell:
The innocence of hell.
x
Is the text's
Inconsequent silence. We
Stutter and doubt and suddenly
The child's anguish, the noise of the poem
Are one.
Youth
Will lose
The child's earnest, be bored, grow hair,
Fear innocence. Beyond this frontier
Estranged, what children come,
Gawk dumb.
Zion:
The last sign
Of estrangement. The child inhabits
Our alien margins. His Sabbaths
Harden underground, crouch like coal
Or the soul.
Christmas 1944.
129
AND WE'LL ALL FEEL GAY
Leslie A. Fiedler
MILLER had despite it all remembered through the morning,
crouched on the rusting top of the truck's cab between the sun
and the shouts of his children, his hands torn a little by the
sappy branches and a disproportionate naif joy in him, the words.
That he had the night before with difficulty and an intermittent
sense of the dark's gravity gone to sleep, the words with him, in
winter; and had waked to another season, to the accomplished
spring, did not matter. He had not been able, it is true, to pick
up his yesterday's work between the washed curtains whose
wrinkles bellied out and were lost in the bland wind, and he had
gone out to where his kids cried back and forth in the hoarse
assumed voices of workers. "Jim" they called each other and
"Jimmy" and he was "Joe" when he appeared to drag the branch-
es newly sawed from the tree in the backyard around the difficult
corner between the garage wall and the angle of the house; to
stack them, their obscure buds black still as the bark, in the truck
body to dry for the eventual fire.
Irwin worked with him, the neighbor's boy with his incom-
prehensible moron's stutter, the comparative peace of his un-
redeemable adolescence; and to his own 'children he payed the
forfeit of attention a mannered, absent acknowledgment of their
soft gray paws thrusting up scraps and twigs; bending from the
satisfaction of the larger bough caught at the precise point of
balance and arched up and over the already difficult mat of
branches. To the movement of muscle under his recent envelope
of fat he responded with a child's pleasure, and he added it for
good measure and congruously enough to the lyrical and dan-
gerous pretense of sharing a child's game.
130
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
"Heave her up here, Jim," he would yell to Karl or "Steady
as she goes, Jimmy," to Ellery; and he would watch in their dis-
proportionate eyes the great laughter of habitual and multiform
paranoia mock his own careful indulgence. His clumsy regard
for children was conditioned by the guilt he always felt before
the shameful discrepancy, his own awful advantage, the gimlck
of adulthood.
"Okay, get a move on, Joe," they hollered back and their
eyes were aware of the perils of insolence: dancing, dancing, the
adult and patent in the sunlit moment merely Joe: "Come on,
Joe," they shouted, "come on!"
That morning Miller, past the mirror that showed between
bed and closet the fading soft belly of peace, the articulation of
back and hip, already in these few months obscured, had carried
his single first gray hair and laid it with precise sentimentality
on the blackest object of the clutter 1 on the dresser's top, an ebony
brush, the gift of his ugliest uncle. The careful piety of the act
was lost a little in memories of the uncle's nose, his narrow-lipped
teasing and the last minute gift of a penny by which he assured
himself that the solemn moment of torture had all been a joke.
But Miller had said over* then as if the discovery of some
appropriate apparatus had made at last possible the completion
of a begrudged ritual, the words: "The touchstone of our age is
lost. . . ." It had sounded, however, even with the obvious slight
monument of decay in his hand and only the two mirrors of closet
door and dressing table to postulate an audience, as he had feared,
dull in the delicate morning. "The touchstone of our age is
lost "
It fiad seemed the night before apt and melancholy, with all
the fragile sense of a sentence in a dream of being a clue. Miller
had been quite drunk and his friends with him, the stubborn ob-
jects of acquaintance with whom each year the nexus of shared
experience became slighter, leaving at last only the residuum of
a common past (the poor memories of adolescence: a first drunk,
the puking together 1 under the quiet shadowy trees in the park,
the seedy ruses of revolt, the shabby meeting hall, the book under
the desk) , an increasingly minor aspect of their being alive and
a concomitant tenderness disproportionate to its causes; what, he
supposed, surprised at its undramatic tone and texture, must be
thought of as love.
They had all got drunk together after these longest unwilled
absences laughing, as they had reduced the remembered into-
131
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
lerable anguish of being young to its just comic dimensions, out-
rageously. And they had passed beyond that laughter for the
first time; not only past the initial reassurance of common me-
mories evoked with the air, tedious and tender, of a ritual; but
even past the second stage, attained rarely enough when their
moods improbably jibed and the liquor was good, the conspiracy
by which, without losing the bond it slimly guaranteed, they were
revenged jointly on their adolescence. They had not lapsed into
the hostility that any commitment of opinion about a play or book
inadvertently serious, could raise like terror, presenting a para-
digm of their 1 divergence and leaving them atomized, each con-
vinced that some deliberate treachery of another had produced
the monstrous disaccord none really willed at all.
Their' disparate skills and vocabularies, the degrees of failure
or adjustment were lost under their boy's names, their election
of hilarity. All the dangers of recollection, even the customarily
bad-tempered joke to which none was wholly immune, the im-
plied rebuke of any old catchword of contempt that a heedless
nostalgia evoked "He has a small circle of friends and drives
around in a Buick" no longer mattered. Each was fixed as his
own most delicate, lost symbol; Larry persisted under the now
habitual mustiness, the uncertainty of regard no longer redeemed
by the old air of the tentative, sat still in the innocent tableau
under a running shower, fully clothed, his hand outstretched in
the sensitive gesture of exploration. "Rain," he said with the old
grace, "rain." No later commitments counted; the others each
wore properly, as in some gentle charade or modest allegory, the
unsuspected metaphor' that fixed him most tenderly for that com-
munity, held for a small blurred while in the symbolic act no
one could quite remember, the essential act of revelation perhaps
never even quite committed.
It was the war, Miller 1 permitted himself to reflect in what
stress of thought was compatible with the deliberate measuring
of drinks, and the war's ending which surrounded them like the
guarantee of a common history, an undistorting medium; they
could see each other through it with an odd, uncompromised
clarity, and Miller frozen in his role of the ambiguous volunteer
(unceitein still whether his motivation had been an inordinate
respect for choice or a kind of quiet treason to his family, a pious
flirtation with irresponsibility) looked through it and the bottom
of his glass at Sid's drying hysteria of evasion, the leg broken like
a transparent plot; at Dave's drying hysteria of allegiance, his
132
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
fine ridiculous hate and loyalty dessicating into the alcoholic joke
drying.
Guilty, guilty, guilty: he cried his difficult secret inside his
head, with a precise and passionate emphasis as if it were a dec-
laration of love. Marred, all the happy passionate faces drowned
in the hesitant light, by the undeclared implications under 1 what-
ever surface avowal or denial; guilty in the end of being alive to
be sure, but linked too in a more obvious murderous complicity,
a shared and ponderable guilt that fit into his head even drunk,
did not evade him like the plausible, difficult abstractions of the
Fall.
"To hell with that," he escaped saying aloud; "that's for the
sober."
Guilty of not being dead; that was there, too and the con-
comitant joy of being alive that was so inexplicably easy to miss.
They all knew at once, and they toasted it unconfessed, that they
could ^afford against this the sentimental pleasure of being for a
while a little maudlin about their age; it was all a gag really, the
surface sorrow offered at a level that never tempted to despair,
to placate the immaculate and alien dead,
"The touchstone of our age is lost . ." Larry had quoted.
"That's what Harry said to me: 'The touchstone of our age is
lost. . .' " He reached for it with an air of immense effort and
looked across to his wife to see if he had quoted right. Right, she
nodded, right, and the motion continued to certify the discussion
absently: Right, right .
"My hair, too!" Lou cried and at the cue they laid their
skulls together with comic accord, exposing the ragged or naked
crown, aware of the quiet decay of teeth in them, postulating the
long implications of line and sag.
"He was so fat, too around the middle," Larry explained,
hunting with them the context.
"Harry was always fat."
"Harry was always fat," he agreed, "but this was different,
a special sogginess around the middle, symbolic not just fat, a
symbol of age."
"And Metzger," Dave cried more drunk than any with his
never quite dissipated, his cumulative, aftermath of alcohol his
essential accomplishment; and everyone in their frantic round of
remembering now the obscure periphery of their time together,
calling them up like myths: "And Harnsberger"; "And Barnett";
"And Hannah."
133
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
But Dave cried above them all. "And Metzger," he said.
"He believes in Relaxation, now. Do you remember his tic?"
aping it of course over the dark remembering anguish of his face;
"Now no tic. He relaxes!" And they all roared with him; un-
accountably it seemed to Miller now, but they had known then;
he had known.
"He used to piss in bed," Phil bellowed when the conversa-
tion had grown for the first time loud enough for his comfort.
His army-thinned body looked like a disguise; only the deaf voice
without nuance, a sort of tonal innocence, confessed him. "His
sheets were always hanging on the line. Now he relaxes?"
"No tic," Dave went on, assured at their center, "but no face.
He asked me if I'd noticed a change and told me no tic; he held
his face up; like wood, like water. How do you do it, I said.
Relaxation. He relaxes. Relaxes." The simple-minded repetition
had taken on all the aspect of some immense unconscionable gag,
lashing them to laughter, almost to tears. Words were of small
account by then, but with the merest half -phrase, the gesture that
had gone with and had come to stand for the phrase, the picture
with all its consequence was there: He relaxes: Metzger, not
wholly alien to them but always disliked, with their special sensi-
tivities, their tokens of marginality raised always to a power of
the ridiculous.
Miller remembered an encounter with him at seventeen;
"You have a face like a donkey's ass," he had told him trying to
provoke a fight at a bar, and now he inherited for all his laughter*
the memory of that violence with the swish and thud of the shuf-
fle board that had been behind them; he resented the unwilled
persistence of the sound that ruined the integrity of the recollec-
tion. "A face like a donkey's ass," he had repeated, the thin soapy
taste of anger in his mouth, senseless, fostered against a kid's
ennui over his beer. He remembered anger easily as a taste and
its failure; in the end Metzger, blinking a scared counterpoint to
his grey twitch, had raised his comic face as explanation and ex-
cuse and had refused to fight.
"He lies on the floor," Dave had concluded, "relaxes one limb
at a time. It's very difficult," he said. "I tried it!" The wry and
sudden confession capped the joke; none of them any longer
could laugh as hard as he wanted to; and all of them, weak in
their chairs, knew that no organized mockery now could achieve
the child's total act of exclusion, make the Fool completely and
without peril the other. They fondled their laughter, its commit-
ment to self-reproach.
134
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
Miller had watched over the heads of his guests, his own
ambiguous drawing of Jesus, hung on an obscure bend of the
wall, trying to temper the delight of his drunkeness in the ridicu-
lous solution, maturity not less absurd than adolescence, salva-
tion as comic as disease "This redeems us for despair," he told
himself and started out of his chair, searching the sensitive face
of his wife to see if he had said it aloud; such surrenders to rhe-
toric he was shamelessly prepared to indulge in silence, but shied
at exposing himself, his need for the platitude of statement,
except furtively, obliquely.
When he stood at the door, moving his head, flushed and slow
almost to the point of sleep, under the last recollections, he felt
oppressed by the gravity of even so trivial a parting. Larry had
been the last to leave, repeating once more, "The touchstone of
our age is lost. . ." and he had answered, "The touchstone of our
age is lost. . ."
The words had lain over the whole party's-end business of
collecting glasses and ash-trays and had ended by marrying the
intimacy, that always in however brief a phrase, sometimes in a
mere caress, was his special bed-time pleasure, of recapitulating
with his wife the day.
"Silly, wasn't it" she had said not untenderly, and yet he had
felt himself in his sudden weight of grief, a little her enemy; but
falling away to sleep beside her warmth he had told himself that
perhaps after all there might be something specious. . .
He had despite it all remembered through the morning,
crouched on the rusting top of the truck's cab between the sun
and the shouts of his children, his hands a little torn by the
sappy branches and a disproportionate naif joy in him, the words.
But the sun, simple flowers and his own sweat and motion had
in the end defeated him.
The morning's work had been vain; the tree pruned nearly
to nakedness, the shadow persisted still on the worthless grey soil
of the yard in which his children searched hopefully for worms.
The garage defined its shape now neatly in shadow, inhibiting the
sun that lay casually on all the neighboring gardens. He laughed
at his own dismay until the children joined him in a wild chorus
and when they caught their breaths, asked him why, he teased
them on with their own word, "Ish kabbible. Ish kabibble," until
his wife came inquiring to the window.
He waved his stained hand at the waste of work and called:
"Silly night last night," and she smiled at their predicament a
135
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
while and said, "Lunch is ready," closing the window and turn-
ing to the cool, dark inwardness of the house.
Miller awoke as he had for these three months with difficulty
and ashamed from the shallow indulgence of his after-luncheon
nap. There was no excuse now, out of the heat and the endless
insult of animal smells, for so much sleep; but the habit had
persisted and he rose shy and startled once more to the intimacy
of his own odors; to make the indifferent attempt at remember-
ing his cagey dreams, or to watch the ceiling ruined by damp,
knowing that he no longer permitted himself the promise of a
drink to cut the muzzy aftermath of this daily surrender. That
decision, renewed each day, carried, he was not quite sure why,
a faint assertion of pride, made some amends for the nap.
His weariness was real enough, the unexpected legacy of
weariness, as real as the compulsive hunger that fed his new, un-
comfortable fat; not merely the obvious device of evasion it
seemed but, vulnerable to exaggerated responses and eccentric
abdications, a continual latent tremor of tiredness.
The gi*ey hair was gone from the dresser top; "I thought it
was mine" his wife said from the kitchen in a rustle of packages
to his shouted question; he no longer believed that he had meant
to save it.
It was almost time to set out after his older boy who had
been going to school afternoons for several weeks. "I'll call for
Karl," he said, hesitating between the red sweater and the green
field jacket, choosing at last, an election of anonymity, the latter.
It seemed important to delay a little the full sense of himself, and
so he continued to wear a shabby assortment of combat clothes
and bright salvaged ties to savor fully the interim, to achieve an
easy aspect of belonging, and to forestall fof a while the entire
obligation of redefinition. That was a way, at any rate, of saying
it. He moved from masquerade to masquerade with a tired irony
at the expected focus of conviction, and no disguise could be
crudet than his exigencies.
"Don't rush me," he protested, "those women will be there."
He realized then for the first time that he was a little embarrassed
at the prospect of being, under the sombre harried regard of the
assembled mothers, the only male without function at mid-day,
rudely displaying his alien freedom. The old reflex that had sent
him for his own mother's sake, those summers when only idle-
ness had been adequate to his adolescence, through the shameful
pretense of job-hunting, kept him now in his symbolic green
136
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
jacket, an explanation, an excuse: "Pardon me, Madame, but you
see I've only just "I haven't yet had time to."
He walked slowly up the lucid dirty streets of the city where
he had not lived for so long, where he would never, after a few
months, live again, and he was glad no one knew him, did not in
the long windows of the stores watch himself.
The kids that had moved at noon slowly in space, holding
carefully a few daffodils, a balloon or book, towards school, were
exploding now in time from the school buildings, flushing the
sidewalks with noise and Miller was all at once in that other
country he had begun to think the mere fantasy of his exile. The
red faces near tears arose like miracles from death and fell again
under the finger's bullets and rose; the cries of revenge and de-
light, the marbles, the shrill futile monsters, the short noises of
despair 1 seemed the mere outward conventions of his own nostal-
gia, the landscape of his most familiar dream.
And when his own son in a haze of laughter broke at last
from the door, dragging a yellow-haired little girl with him to-
ward the improbable kindly cop on the corner and left him to
pick up a loose shoe abandoned in the rush, Miller was oddly and
at last at home.
"Hey, Karl," he yelled "let's go"; and he was scarcely annoy-
ed when swinging about together in a shared quick impulse of
joy, he and the boy had crashed into a large, blonde woman, who
had, in the most extraordinary tone of refinement, snorted at
them: "Bastards!" He was used by now to the extravagant vio-
lence of the civilian world; fresh from the orderly male anger of
war, he had found it at first intolerable, had been unable to
escape a continual sense of oppression under the monstrous ran-
cor, incongruous with its apparent causes, that could make the
subway guard, the streetcar conductor, the clerk, a woman beside
a child suddenly the howling enemy; the seed of wrath in every
passer, the underground, uncriminal terror no apparatus could
track. That he had foolishly hoped of the war in this respect a
wholesale catharsis
"Dad Daddy. Hey, Dad! Listen to me!"
"Yes, Karl," he said.
"Is 'bastard' a bad word, Dad?"
"There are no bad words," he began once more the unsatis-
factory explanation, not even completely convinced of its truth,
but sensing somehow that to be futile in this tegard was impor-
tant, patiently, hopelessly to explain,
137
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
"Is it a man's word, Daddy. A grown-up's word?"
"It is."
"Let's make an agreement. Let's not say it, Dad." They
didn't but went on, hands clasped, into the slightly blemished
afternoon. The children were, after all, still at it: secure in the
blithe evasion of games or high on the jungle bars they committed
their offenseless acts of pride. A small girl hung by her knees
from a high place, her skirt down over her head and they watched
her, through the wire grating of the fence, below them in the
sunken schoolyard.
"I can see her pants, pants, pants/ I can see her pants. I can
see her pants, pants, pants! I can see her pants " Karl howled
and danced the rhythm with his legs flashing thin in the late
sunlight.
"For Christ's sake," Milled cried, "haven't you ever seen
pants before. Please tell me, what's so unusual about pants."
But the boy continued to dance silently now, only the rhythm
and his face persisting in the offense, the face dark and lost with
a sour precocity of knowledge. Dee-dee-dee-dee-duh-duh-duh/
Dee~dee-dee-dee~dti7i/
"Let's get on; it's late " Miller made a show of consulting
his new wrist watch, a futile decoy for the boy's attention; the
afternoon wore badly and the kids grew merely shrill; there was,
perhaps, only one country.
Karl began to move cautiously along the fence, edging side-
wise in the direction his father was walking, but without permit-
ting any space to show between his body and the wire grating;
only his head and feet were free. It was a feat and he performed
with quiet intensity; at the very end of the fence another boy,
belly out, was fixed in the same sort of pose, but motionless, a
half-eaten ice-cream cone in his hand, watching the ball players
below.
Karl stood beside him for a moment their shoulders barely
touching, watching him with a careful and pointless malice, and
suddenly in complete silence knocked the cone to the ground and
kicked it. For a moment his face wore a little absurdly, like his
father's coat, the whole flush of rage and then it all trembled as
he saw the answering anger above him, dissolved.
Against this only love, Miller thought in a kind of thin des-
peration; against this only love, and the word drowned in his
hopelessness, his unfaith. He began to pull the boy roughly, jerk-
ing his arm upward, his own stride getting longer and faster. In a
138
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
moment the child would be in tears; later there would be at home
the solemn game they played at, the casting out of devils. Karl
would lie limp on his bed and he would stroke him gently, call-
ing out all the evil; "I'm sorry, Dad," the child would say at last
as if he had invented the fault but that would be afterward.
Meanwhile he moved forward faster, faster, jerking the thin stub-
born arm. In another minute the boy would be in tears.
139
NEW POEMS FROM PERU
(A Little Anthology)
translated by Ruth Stephan
AN INTRODUCTION TO
MODERN PERUVIAN POETRY
WHEN JOSE Maria Eguren published his book Simbolicas in 1911
he became the unwitting parent of modern Peruvian poetry. He
was the first to turn aside from the formal styles, the oratorical
elegance and the pseudo-Indian prosody in vogue at the turn of
the century to the intrinsic estheticism of an image. There was
not only the difference between the outer and inner world of the
imagination. There was the difference between seeing a man in
court dress at a ball with glitter and crowds and music and hear-
ing him whisper in the dark in a rose garden with fountains
playing, Eguren dropped the obvious trappings of glamor for a
more subtle natural enchantment. Quietly and independently he
adopted the precepts of the French Symbolists and wrote a pure
poetry. His form was lenient, his meanings delicately compli-
cated, his symbols unornamented. Among his contemporaries
he alone had genius comparable to the great European poets.
Although Eguren was seriously inspired by French Symbol-
ism, it was not the single cause for his new direction. Symbolism
was the bicycle and he was the rider. The Peruvian literati have
kept closely in touch with French and Spanish writing, and every
movement of consequence has had its local' disciples. Eguren's
friends were influenced by the Parnassians, later poets by the
Naturalists, the Surrealists or by individuals such as Federico
Garcia Lorca and Rafael Alberti. The European ties were bound
more closely by the expatriation of Cesar Vallejo who left Peru
in 1923, embittered by the injustices of his native provincial town,
to live the rest of his life in Madrid and Paris. Vallejo, the real
140
RUTH STEPHAN
giant of Peruvian poetry, was a passionate humanist, affected first
by his own troubles in Peru and later by the Spanish Civil War,
who combined a singular mysticism with his deep sensitivity to
mortal problems. His vital individuality could not be contained
by any literary movement, least of all by Symbolism. Images
leapt up to propagate his ideas.
Today the poets who use the word "modern" as their parti-
cular epithet are a distinct and a comparatively small group. As
if to compensate for their paucity, they maintain a quickened
esthetic life among themselves and their fellow artists, giving
Lima the air of a slightly Indianrzed little Paris. At a staccato
rate they write poetry, art criticsm, dramas, and essays about
foreign writers and each other. They have only those within
their group as critics for there are no commercial magazine edi-
tors or book publishers to live up to or down to. Poets either
publish their own books or have them published by a friend or as
a supplement to a presently existing magazine or do not publish
their poems at all and let them make the rounds of the literary
underground in manuscript. So divorced is esthetics from com-
mercialism that it is unthinkable for a poet to place his book in
a bookstore. His standing, thus, does not depend on a public taste
but on a private taste.
In such a sympathetic atmosphere a poet is apt to mature
early and to become & national classic by the time he is in his
thirties. The three living leading poets, Martin Adan, Xavier
Abril, and Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, are all under forty-five
years old, Martin Adan (a pseudonym for Rafael de la Fuente
Benavides) , a phenomenon in his work and in his own character,
is a removed member of the literary circle. He lives in an asylum,
insisting it is the only normal place to live in our time, from
which he occasionally "escapes" to see his friends or visit a tavern.
Although he established his reputation almost twenty years ago
with a novel in verse, La casa de carton, which immediately in-
fluenced contemporary literature, and although his poetry has
continued to be an excitement to all who read it, he has published
no other book. Some of his poetry has appeared spasmodically
in magazines but more has been irretrievably lost. One of his
most important pieces, a long poem Aloysius Acker, Adan des-
troyed in a fit of temper so all that remains ar'e the fragments
which had been copied by friends. This year, in another reversal,
this esoteric idol who has lodged on the sky side of a cloud, made
a sudden descent into communal affairs. He submitted his poems
for a government competition which he promptly won.
141
RUTH STEPHAN
Adan is such a master of technique he has a contempt for it.
He calls his sonnets "anti-sonnets" as he modulates their tradi-
tional tone to suit his own tenor. His struggle has been to de-
scribe adequately the arctic metaphyscial area where he wanders.
His poems are like letters from an unfamiliar pole where word
meanings and notes of music have the same vibration. He speaks
in eternal companionship to great abstractions. He, too, is a great
abstraction. He holds the philosopher's stone in his palm and
fears to look at it. *
Xavier Abril is essentially a romantic who has passed through
several poetic phases. In contrast to Adan, he has traveled wide-
ly. He mixed with both Surrealist and non-Surrealist groups in
Paris and eventually was influenced by both. He was a close
friend of Cesar Vallejo and was the one to bring back and edit
Vallejo's poems for a South American edition. Oddly, his poems
have little in common with Vallejo's apart from the spirited use
of images and the complete esthetic sincerity of each. Where
Vallejo saw man as a social being in conflict with mystical tides,
Abril drifts in a sensual dream. Vallejo saw love as the great
arm of humanity, "Love against space and time," he said. Abril
is aware of love as the figure of a woman, saying, "A woman or
her shadow of ivy fills this solitude with empty lamps."
Abril at the wellspring of Surrealism in Paris was not as
affected by it as Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, who never left the
borders of Peru, or the short lived Carlos Oquendo de Amat, a
poet of grace and humor, who ended his career as a political exile.
Westphalen became engrossed in watching the parade of images
in his subconscious. He stood at the crossroads of reality and the
imagination, fascinated with the ambivalence of life to death.
There is a slow moving rhythmical unity to his poems as if he
were swinging along on a never-ending walk. The tokens he
gives ar'e frequently brilliant in their simplicity. Death is abo-
lished, he says, for "I have forsaken my body like a glove to leave
the hand free." Westphalen 's seriousness was like a foil to Oquen-
do de Amat who told his friends to "Take me like open violets
in bloom," no more. There was a careless charm in Oquendo de
Amafs attitude that permeated all his writing. He cared little
what happened to his poems, publishing only a few of them in a
book he called 5 metres de poeraas which pulled out accordion-
fashion to measure just the five meters.
Among the younger poets there is one who is outstanding,
Jorge Eduardo Eielson. Without any apparent apprenticeship he
appeared in 1944 with a long romantic poem, Cancion y muerte
142
RUTH STEPHAN
de Rolando, which indicated the sweep of his talent. The imagina-
tive co-ordination of his succeeding poems is faintly reminiscent
of Jean Cocteau. His vision is a park where he is a surveyor, a
king or a weeping man sensible of seasonal movements and mu-
sic, counting the fantasies of definite objects, seeming, without
turning his head, to look at the same time over the stars, under
the ground and at the hills of the surface horizon.
Javier Sologuren, the most disciplined of the new poets, was
influenced primarily by Martin Adan, then by Westphalen. He is
still uses their forms and rhythms as a trellis for his private
images. Sebastian Salazar Bondy has experimented in verse,
drama and criticism but his puckish humor is most at home in
his surrealistic prose poems.
In a complete anthology many other 1 poets should be includ-
ed. Ricardo and Enrique Peiia, Cesar Moro who is now in Mexi-
co, Rafael Mendez Dorich, Jose Alfredo Hernandez, Luis Fabio
Xammar, Manuel Moreno Jimeno, Carlos Rios, Juan Rios Rey
and Vincent Azar are all interesting poets. More should be includ-
ed, too, of the indigenista poetry which has been inspired by the
Indian life in the Sierras. This poetry of the land, as it is some-
times called, was initiated in 1926 by an educated Indian poet of
Arequipa, Alejandro Peralta, who put the expressions and sound-
ings of the people into a bold free verse. This strong new trend
has become popular as being particularly representative of Peru.
Jose Varallanos with his chola songs, Emilio Vasquez, Luis Niete,
Luis de Rodrigo and Mario Florian are its finest exponents.
Florian, a prolific young poet with an unusual melodious and
sentient quality, has followed closely the beautiful Quechua songs
sung in the Andes.
To translate the words or attempt to convey the spirit of
these poets is not sufficient for their intelligibility, for their poems
are like cosmic puzzles where the last jig-saw piece is an intuition
of the country itself. It is inevitable that common symbols arise
in a country like Peru surrounded by vast margins of desert, sea
and mountainous jungle. Foreign ideas, like travelers, fly in and
out. They may clarify and enrich but they do not change the
basic symbols. To Peruvians, staring year after year at the pale
sand stretching over the horizon, sand and eternity gradually
merge in the mind. As distinctive from the distances of time, a
metaphysical permanence is the flower at hand, a rose. Snow,
found only on inland peaks where it is difficult to reach, }ias an
exotic meaning. And among the Andean Indians the dove is the
person loved or the song of love.
143
RUTH STEPHA3ST
Even the poet who would escape these and other common
symbols cannot do so for they are flags waving continually before
his eyes. If he rejects them or turns purposefully to inner ab-
stractions, they reappear in unsuspected speculums. The stream
of consciousness has not been dammed nor diverted from its an-
cient course by industrialism. There is no super-realization of
science advancing and mechanical change. Peru, in spite of its
new oil cities, still is a hand-made country. The transitions of
love, the apparitions of death, the peregrinations of the spirit are
the great themes of the poets.
Ruth Stephan
144
fragment from ALOYSIUS ACKER
Martin Adan
Death! . . .
Inasmuch as I look upon, I see nothing
Except your ice nose.
What a perfect state!
As if God really would have created! . . .
The not born, death! . . .
Flowers, tears, candles,
Thoughts,
All useless, all useless;
Like the wish. . .
In my fiery shadow within,
Royal as God, in a manner infinite
And sensible, you lie down, dead:
I lie down, dead.
And for you the dog does not cry;
And for you the mother does not howl;
And for you the gravedigger keeps silent and does not wipe off
sweat.
And no one is deafer,
And no one is blinder,
And no one is more no one, more I myself without any you,
You, the found, the refound,
The lost, I or you, if not the time,
And ever, and ever, and never
The you that I am and that is destiny,
The older brother, the little brother. . .
And I must be the life,
the Death.
How shall I be life,
You death! . . .
145
MARTIN ADAN"
He who buys the house,
She who sells her body,
He, she, is the other,
No one but me, the one remaining
Or the gone on the round mat of the blind. . .
But I will dig for what? . . . the grave in the deepest
Of me, in the most tender,
In the blindest,
Where my breath may not go,
Where my voice may not echo,
Where I alone
May go down, dead.
God will follow the winning of me, from afar,
With artifice and human
Frown, like he is; and the event
Will follow with pain; and in mystery;
And the son will be born:
And the grandson will be born;
And the fly will buzz in the summer;
And the rain will drench in the winter.
I will be startled on my couch.
I will correct and publish my verse.
I will wash my body.
I will go Sundays to the sea beach,
To watch the wave and the blowing.
I will write on State paper
Lustrums: "It is evident by the present document. . ."
The rose will open. They will kill the Christ.
More in the house of the dead,
Ay! in the house of the dead,
There where the dead live,
There where no one is and I am the dead
And the one alive is and the one alone and the one sad and the
one eternal,
There only they meet
The penumbra and the event
Of God and his day,
Without night and without object.
146
MARTIN ADAN
fnm SONNETS TO THE ROSE
Thou art not the theory, thy thorn
thrust very deep; nor art thou the teaching
of the rose the rose, since thy spear
opened a road to the moving rose.
Thou art the rose itself, sibylline
master who impedes the prospect
of the perfect rose that does not reach
to learn from the deluding rose.
Rose of rose, identic and sensitive;
to thy example, profound and changeable,
the poet makes the terrible rose.
Indeed thou art the rose eternal whose bough
steals the one who, foreseen, prisoner,
nibbles the rose of the love he loves. . .
147
ELEGY TO A ROSE from The Written Rose
Xavier Abril
Look thee at the pure rose,
Look thee at its death ghost.
How it once was without form,
without a hue, the opened rosel
Look thee, now no whiteness,
Look thee, now it is not real.
How the rose turns in the future
that once was motionless!
Love the rose secure
in the illusion held
or lost within the mind.
Hate the flower that endures
in the temple evanesced
of a rose perhaps repined.
148
from ABOLITION OF DEATH
Emilio Adolf o Westphalen
I have abandoned my head to rest sadly
In this shadow that falls from the noise of your footsteps
It turns to the other margin
Grandiose as the night to deny you
I have abandoned my dawns and the trees rooted in my throat
I have abandoned the star that ran between my bones
I have forsaken my body
Like the shipwreck forsakes the boats
Or like memory at the lessening tide
Some eyes strange on the beaches
I have forsaken my body
Like a glove to leave the hand free
If the merry pulp of a star must contract
You do not hear me lighter than leaves
Because I have freed myself of all the boughs
And the air does not chain me
Nor can the waters against my fate
You do not hear me coming stronger than night
And doors that do not resist my blow
And cities that keep silent so you may not warn them
And the forest that is opened like a morning
Wishing to press the world within its arms
Beautiful bird that must fall in paradise
Now curtains have fallen on your flight
Now my arms have closed the walls
And the branches bent to hinder your passage
Fragile deer dreads the earth
Dreads the noise of your steps on my chest
Now the fences are connected
Now your forehead must fall beneath the step of my eagerness
Now your eyes must be closed over mine
And your sweetness put forth shoots like new horns
And your kindness be outstretched like the ghost encircling me
I have let my head revolve
I have let my heart fall
Now nothing remains so that I am more sure of overtaking you
Because you induce haste and you tremble like the night
149
EMILIO ADOLFO WESTPHALEN
Perhaps I do not have to overtake the other margin
Now that I do not have hands that are caught
By the one resolved for the loss
Nor feet that weigh over so much f orgetfulness
Of dead bones and dead flowers
Perhaps I do not have to overtake the other margin
If now we have read the last leaf
And I have begun music to plait the light in which you must fall
And rivers close the road to you
And flowers call you in my voice
Great rose now is the hour to detain you
Summer sounds like a thaw in hearts
And dawns tremble like trees on awakening
The exits are guarded
Great rose, must you not fall?
150
SIX POEMS
Jorge Eduardo Eielson
ODE TO WINTER
Winter is all fruits and lanterns
forgotten, and sacred skeletons of doves
in the wood. Winter kisses, enamored,
the glorious lips of the grape with his lips
of hail, and falls asleep over her.
Winter can come, one day, gently,
through the valley and, as a match in the hand,
carry a life to his city, like a thief.
Winter en jewels a man with sadness,
winter washes tombs of monarchs
and beggars, and crowns the gilt and aged autumn
with a ray of ashes on the head. Respect
winter, the antiquity of his soles,
his sceptre of dew on the brush; respect
the eternal features of the trees and the wind
of his dominion, when everything around him ceases and he
leans, wormeaten and sonorous, like a piano
in a pond or a death in a tomb.
THE TOMB OF RAVEL
Phantom, you who are in the harp and the ivy,
in bas-reliefs of music or tower, sleeping,
you have made your tomb in a piano, phantom.
Among golden chords, the sonorous faun
Blows your earth eyes to the moon,
and on stairsteps which go down abysmally burdened
to the bottom of the piano, by august moth
encircled, your cymbal head is heard.
No one knows who the horse is that daily
sobs on your obscure gravestone or half opens
the marble fingers of the niche in the shade.
My phantom, on your back has fallen
the funeral fly with wings of glass;
151
JORGE EDUARDO EIELSON
subterraneous pastor of the sun, now whistling,
or seated in veins of ivy, bronze and wood,
you have made your tomb in a piano, phantom.
TO A DEER WOUNDED ANOTHER TIME
Misfortune belongs to the nimble deer, the sky
confined to its glorious antlers,
that air that in fruition, far from the ground,
is like fruits the flight has devoured.
Impetuous descent with blue caution
in such affable winter, bland wound,
crowned with blood and grass and dust,
the buzzing is his palpitating neck.
Who may know the honey of your eyelids,
deer, over your troubled eyes, thus wounded
in the middle of the wood, how it may be
another obscure dee?, dispossessed of himself?
Oh snowy tendril, oh life, oh beauty,
now all a deer that dies of whiteness!
PIANO OF ANOTHER WORLD
(In memory of my dead brother)
You open, youth, crypts of summer, solitary,
pantheon wings posed here; vulture eye,
Norman eye that looks at me, sadly,
wind that is loving me, eye, eye, eye,
forest eye, what do you search for in my eyes
I should say to you solitary youth, permanent and pure?
(Steady lantern the wall dividing and serpents
from the sky enclosed there, and teeth grindings
of misty flora opening your helmet or sinking
your skull into me, by sad, hard blows) .
Is not thfs pure, sinister fern, golden ogre?
Is not this clear, black marsh, serene sky?
There is no one alive nor do I breathe I should say to you
only my hands, they search a face, a happiness.
INTERRED BOOKSTORE
What books are these, Lord, in our abyss, whose starred leaves
Pass through the sky and illuminate us?
152
JORGE EDUARDO EIELSON
Green, immemorial, they are opened in the humus, perhaps
They are drawing a prayer to our lips
Or are hushed lonely in their shadows, like unknowns,
Nature who prays even in them, at their iron signs
Kneels, with flowers on her belly,
For the human who on passing did not see them in the dust,
Did not see them in the sky, in the dampness of her grottos.
And they came down like an enormous block of the gods.
Since then only a green veil stays on them
from armours of be jeweled arms and chargers that returned
To their skeleton nobility between its leaves.
And dejected elm trees, pear cacti of the war, glory and rose,
Sleep too in them, covered with winter rust
And only to its old letters, very quietly,
Comes the subtle remata or the lily of the urine,
And a blue hand that turns its sodium pages
Among the rocks and fans its fish scales to the Death.
Wilt Thou allow me, Lord, to die among these books, from whose
chest,
covered with fragance, flows out the black oil of wisdom?
PARK FOR A SLEEPING MAN
Brain of the night, golden eye,
jingle-bell, which trembles in the pine, listen:
I am he who weeps and writes in the winter,
Doves and snowsteps sink in my memory
and, before my head of thinking blood,
stone dwellings open their feathers, quivering.
Although fallen, among drowsy ice begonias,
I move the hatchet of the rain and bland fruits
and wakeful leaves are iced at my stroke;
I love my skull thus like a balcony
bent over a black precipice of the Lord.
I work stars at my side, oh ice!
and on the table of the lands, the poem
wheels among the deaths and, enflamed, crowns them,
then my shadow goes through all such glory
of bone, wax and humus that I kneel, majestical,
over the beautiful turf, on the burned gods.
I love, thus, this skull of mine, in its ashes, like the world
in whose cold parks eternity is the same
marble man who watches in a statue
or who stretches out, obscure and without love, upon the grass.
153
THE INHABITANT
Javier Sologuren
Resplendent umbel the dream spreads
between pearls which the mud stops:
on slight raising of the face is diffused
the duskiness of fishes' silk.
From the source that silences the steady
weight of the tide: fall, fall,
slowly fall, little cells, deserted
ruddy beings among tenuous green.
See perfect sands the reflections
of ivy in the silence; sediments
of transparent bones in the stone.
See the entire fern on the walls
of bats outstretched, and see
how in that fish time is leveled.
TO DIE
To die like a flower on the breast of two instantaneous waves
before the indecisive splendor of an unexpected and near
good fortune.
To die like a bird that falls among clouds of rose-colored hoops,
among stalks of verbratile eyelashes and goblets of impal-
pable light.
To die in a mercury castle at the radiance of an affectionate
glance.
To die seeing the sun through gaseous hillsides.
To die like a rose cut by the night fire.
To die beneath a rain of silken fh-h-scales.
To die on the fragrant waves of some sensitive temples.
To die on this citadel sculptured on a deserted morning.
To die carried by the sea that breathes against the walls of my
house.
To die on a sudden bubble of love on the point of being not more
than vacuous.
154
JAVIER SOLOGUREN
To die like a small snail that the sea leaves oozing on the white
sands level as a blushing ear covered with summer rays.
To die to find the underground sculpture of an old human dream.
To die where the birds take unknown courses between waves and
the night, between a sumptuous rainbow and the dazzling
maze of a faun in ambush.
To die on the range of your 1 nude body like a shred of inflexible
mother-of-pearl, of lacteous clusters and of sharp passion-
ately gay flowers.
To die alone on the ground at the lukewarm lash of air fallen
with pleasing weight and at the dread contact of a smooth
and recently filled skin.
To die in a fastidious duet of narrow gold flutes at half -water of
your eyes beneath the incandescent earth,
To die fastened to a strong throat on the noiseless froth of the
foliage.
To die joined to a head of hair that sweeps the bottom of mines
of precious flames that must be brilliant gas in the hidden
nocturne of my love.
To die at the level of a delicate smile.
To die in a lake of cold silk where the fiery stones of midday
seethe, in your eyes of little solitary fruits where the after-
noon is a leaf of untrampled honey.
To die on a body embellished by the most remote snow.
To die feeling that on earth blood, disorder and the dream still
are beautiful.
155
THE KANGAROO SAVES WORDS
Sebastian Salazar Bondy
For the villain of tomorrow I write my koran of filth, my
biscuit of orthopedic arms I prepare slowly. I know that the
metropolis will die in gelatin, in a deluge of dwarfs, with all the
sister cousins biting each other and full of muscial injuries, of
words without owners, dry trees and burnt suspensories. Let
them now read my book who may have closed forever the revol-
ving doors, those who await the cruel Sunday without giraffes.
I do not write for anyone especially but listen to what
a water-carrier directs here and there, with his imperishable
angelical, tired of sitting on the stones the river disarranges. And
I speak to him of clay and other rutted songs. I speak of ge-
ography, of eight watchmen and eight ruins. I speak to him of
my country of cubes and tin, of conger eels and black soldiers.
I speak to him about everything. Do you understand me, etymo-
logical sailors, fish of the red-stocking water? Ah, you under-
stand me, obstetricians, Mexicans!
Few words, my friends. To tell lies, few words. The , latest
is privy, is rag, ghost, plough, vomiting necktie. He leaves me
alone, half relative of sweet bran, high and sonorous as metal.
The pus, the celestial pus of the priests, the brown pus of the
lover, the ancient pus of the occult goddess.
156
THE HARD WAY UP
Mario Florian
The hard way up on the road.
To climb it
the strength of the legs
breaks;
froth of weariness
in the throat.
It must be afflicted blood
the dull sweat that drops from us.
By this heroic way
by this pure hard way up
how many times whip, destiny 1
my father must have walked, must have walked
my grandfather, the father of my grandfather
all the river of my race
hurting themselves, falling down, complaining, .
The trees along the edge heard them,
the trees along the edge tell everyone.
Hit strong, fell, bum,
my axe,
destroy bark;
eat trees,
triumph. . .
So, tomorrow,
there will be no tongue
that speaks to my sons, to what men,
if I have slumped, if I have cried,
if I have abolished God,
on this hard way up.
Bent with burdens, with poor home-made sandals,
how many eternally,
will pass by here!
157
MARIO FLORIAN
from INDIAN DOVE
Grieve, spring, that saw so much of her
drinking at your edge and combing her wings.
My little dove has died!
She has died!
Grieve, burning stones of the earth
that, hard, bit her pink feet.
My little dove has died!
She has died!
And you flowers of the evergreens
that left the forests for her love.
My little dove has died!
She has died!
And you full tassels of wheat
that never gave her the sweet rusk of grains.
My little dove has died!
She has died!
And you files of little doves that
encircled he like a thrashing plot.
My little dove has died!
She has died!
And, finally, you wild cooings
that made love to her from winter to summer.
My little dove has died!
She has died!
158
TWO STORIES
John H* Porter
ROBINSON
HE WORE a well-tailored civilian suit, but the monocle and the
ramrod back were a dead give-away. Robinson watched him
out of the corner of an eye. He didn't look at Robinson. When
the waiter came lurching down the aisle of the club-car, he said:
"Waiter! Brandy!" Then he went back to reading his paper with
strict attention and a faint disdain.
Robinson looked out of the window at the fleeing landscape.
He tried desperately not to think, to remember, to go over his
plans. It had all been arranged. There was nothing to do. Tele-
phone poles and trees flashed by the window, houses appeared
in a smudge and were gone, the distant mountains loped like blue
leopards at the end of the plain.
The man in the grey suit turned a page of his paper.
. . . the red earth, thought Robinson, with cotton, with trees
and with rocks. The farmer's house. The farmer's wife with
thick brown hair and nipples the size of my thumb. They scratch
the back of the earth; the earth in gratitude gives forth. When
they die, the priest's robes flap in the wind and the priest says
Oremus Domine. In the early light, they come out to see the
express train whistling along the rails.
Robinson looked around in the club-car; a girl with red hair
smiled at him warmly and the scent of her perfume came to his
nostrils. But the tall man in grey was talking at last.
The reports, he said to the woman who sat beside him. The
reports? Are they in order? The woman was small, and looked
lovely and kind. She handed a sheaf of papers to the man in
grey. Ah, he said, ah yes, the reports. All in good order: Peter-
son, Smith, Robert St. Clair. He thumbed through them care-
fully.
159
JOHN H. PORTER
Robinson's eyes closed tight and the darkness washed in. The
skin on his face began to shrink like the skin on a mummy. He
thought of various poses, cacti, statues, an aluminum chair. Peter-
son had been shot nine days before; no one knew where. Smith,
hanged in the prison. St. Clair, clubbed in an alley. A spike,
thought Robinson, a spike between the rails that's what I should
have been. Still, the voices continued.
This Robinson, said the man in grey. Very interesting. It is
all here, in the files.
Robinson? asked the woman. She was a little astonished, a
little shocked. I hadn't known about Robinson. Why Robinson^
Why Robinson? echoed the man with a shrug in his voice. Why
anything?
Robinson, said the woman. He may be difficult. Perhaps we
should wait. No, purred the man in grey. No. We are shall I
say ready? for Robinson.
Doubt in the woman's voice. He has friends, she suggested.
The man laughed for a long moment, enjoying the laughter. Deli-
cately he said: he has not quite as many friends as he had.
But he has been so resourceful, the woman said. And he
knows the passes. Ah, the passes, said the man with a note of
respect. The mountain passes. Yes. I wonder which pass he
will try if he gets to the passes. It will be quite amusing to see.
The passes. I may profit by the occasion to fish for some moun-
tain trout.
Tentatively, the woman said: Of course we are always right.
We have never been wrong. Ice tinkled in her glass as she lifted
her glass from the table. I should not like to be wrong.
The man laughed indulgently. Really, Alma, he said, you're
delicious. So sympathetic! It's a pleasure to work with you. You
needn't be sorry for this boy, this Robinson. It's all in the files.
There was a rustle of paper. They are reading together,
thought Robinson.
Yes, said the woman, yes, yes, I see. But it is not just the
same as the others. You see, here he was only five. Five, five,
said the man, what does five matter? There are always excuses.
So here he was twelve? The woman murmured. But in Buenos
Aires: twenty, the man continued. Twenty, in Buenos Aires! No
longer a child! But why should we bother? We had the same
story with Peterson.
Robinson opened his eyes.
The man was leaning back in his chair, relaxed and comfort-
able, caressing the woman with a smile. We have often had this
160
JOHN H. PORTER
story. It is part of your charm. And we have never been wrong.
He touched her hand lightly. The woman looked up at him,
melted and pleading. You're not angry? she asked. Not in the
least, not in the least. How could I be angry with something so
special?
But nothing is changed, thought Robinson. The trees flash
by, the moutains lope like leopards. And in the early morning
the peasants watch the train. He looked around the car. He
thought that the look in his eyes was as brittle as the muddler in
a whisky glass, but the concept didn't amuse him. The girl with
the red hair smiled at him, fragrantly. He went over and sat
by her.
You have been a long time, she said, rubbing her back in the
chair like a kitten. You're getting off near the mountain? Near
the mountain, said Robinson. It was part of the plan. The girl
smiled, lifting her short upper lip and revealing her even white
teeth and pink tongue. But how wonderful! she said delightedly.
She stretched and put her arms back of her neck. We can have
the last night together.
The last, Robinson started to say, not the last, but his voice
rattled and was still, like a twig in dry grass. With the woman
on his arm, the man in the grey suit was strolling up the aisle.
He was very tall and elegant and cool. The light from the
afternoon sun broke on his monocle in a thousand splinters. He
walked up the aisle as steadily, as casually as if he were crossing
a lawn at a party, drawing a cigarette from a cigarette case. As
he came up to Robinson, he glanced at a waiter. Brandy? he
asked of no one in particular. Brandy soda? Then, preparing to
sit down, he smiled at Robinson. His smile was courteous and he
tapped his cigarette on his thumb-nail and bowed faintly from
the waist.
Ah, Robinson, he said, Mister Robinson. His smile was broad
and his eyes, amused. We've just been discussing you, he said,
161
JOHN H. PORTER
THE INDIANAPOLIS STORY
ONCE I was in jail in Indianapolis, on account of a watch I really
hadn't stolen at all, and one of my fellow-inmates said: "Christ,
what a town! It's the asshole of the nation!"
That was the first time I'd heard the expression and it had,
then, a fruitiness it's lost a bit since. But except for a certain
lack of anatomical exactness, it's a splendid description of that
city. I couldn't do better myself. Oh, I should feel differently, I
know, after all these years; I should be able to accept Indiana-
polis as a fait-accompii But if it's necessary that Indianapolis
should exist, perhaps it's equally necessary that I should exist to
despise it.
For Indianapolis had a truly overwhelming power to ignore
me. In that, it surpassed all the other cities of the world. Chica-
go? I laugh at Chicago! Indianapolis could have given it spades.
In Chicago, I would have been able to hole in with some little
coterie and there, among the beaded cushions, the tea in glasses,
the reproductions of Matisse, I would have found the bearable
wretchedness I later found in Greenwich Village. I could have
made my misery articulate. But not in Indianapolis. No one
would listen. "Shad-ahp!" said Indianapolis.
Up to this point, I have been deceiving you, somewhat. You
think this a story about Indianapolis, but it's really an essay on
fiction. The question is, how does one write about old exper-
iences in the light of a new attitude toward life, a new clutch on
things? It's a problem to be solved.
And so I have told this story a dozen ways, like a school-
boy caught in a lie. I have made phrases to delight you, man
hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere, (I have been high-
ly cultured in my time.)
"There was once," I wrote, "a young man who hated Indian-
apolis because it was hot and flat and far from the sea, because
each spike of grass and clump of bush seemed shrivelled by the
smell of gasoline; because the young man saw so many people
with dull, baked faces walk into the marble monuments through
the shimmering air,"
But these made phrases, well. . . . They are tacked together,
like some montage of tin and felt, and carried about to elicit
admiration from people with a taste for oddity. They do not
grow! And you have heard about the writer being a catalyst.
162
JOHN H. PORTER
But perhaps the trouble is that I am not a writer after all; per-
haps I have become blunted from too much hackwork; and yet,
are writers happy?
To leave the marble monuments alone, Indianapolis is the
asshole of the nation. And so I'll tell you what I did in Indian-
apolis in the effort to escape it altogether.
Of course, you realize one must escape from Indianapolis.
There's no doubt about that. The town did stink of gasoline when
I was there and things looked shrivelled. The air went quiver-
ing. And I swear to God, the faces of the people had a; dull,
baked look, a look of frustration, boredom and perhaps brutality.
It was the sort of clenched expression I have seen on the faces
of alcoholic veterans of the First World War. And then, there
were some vast public buildings I especially loathed. Such enor-
mous nothings! There were tiny people crawling up the stairs.
But this is not an accurate description and has nothing to do with
my reasons for hating Indianapolis, which I hated because I was
desperately alone, like a man on a raft far out at sea.
You know what they promised me before I went to Indian-
apolis? A job on a paper! And that meant: reporting. He who
did not accept such a definition deceived me and was the son of
whores. And reporting, well, it's hard to remember just what I
saw in that. Wearing my hat on the side of my head, for one
thing; letting 'a cigarette droop from a corner of my mouth;
knowing it all; and hanging around with all sorts of sporty girls.
That, and the idea of being on the fringes of literature. Perhaps
I am making this up, but perhaps I am the only man in the
world whose very ambition it was to become a frustrated novelist.
Then the pleasure of scribbling, itselff "A red wheelbarrow
stands in the rain." "Hope for settlement of the week-old truck
strike increased last night " You see, you bang out the words,
things happen on the sheets of paper, and there's a life of sorts.
Jackson, of the Indianapolis Globe/
When I got to Indianapolis, I went to the Globe and found
out that I was to work in the morgue. That's where the news-
paper kept its pictures and mats for me to file and to pass
around. I was bored as the devil, and hot as grease because we
worked under a flat tin roof. Now and then I went out into the
press-room and into the glaring, blue-lit inferno of the engraving
room, where it was cooler, and agreeably weird, and then I
hurried right back, for, in the presence of other people, I tended
to blush and to fall all over my feet.
163
JOHN H. PORTER
The hell of it was, I was such a superior young man; I'd read
Mallarme; I'd travelled; I counted on starting some novels which,
no doubt, I wouldn't finish. And there I was, trotting about with
mats and pictures instead of being a reporter, I envied the re-
porters, of course, but mostly because of the happy love affairs I
was sure they had. In the office, however, they seemed to be
dolts, though I found myself in the contradictory position of
wanting the dolts to admire me.
The greatest ninny of all was a f ellow-alurnnus from a prep-
school in Switzerland. This fellow, the financial reporter, was a
bit older than I and he had all the easiness of manner I loathed
so much in the seniors at school. Good God, if I had to feel such
a worm, why did the others make it worse with their strutting
around? To be sure, the financial reporter didn't strut in the
office; he just sat behind his typewriter and smirked urbanely,
but that was presumption enough. I tried to talk with him; noth-
ing came of it. The fact is, Fd been reading John Maynard
Keynes and his seemed a fine book to discuss with a finanical re-
porter, to make him sit up and take notice. But all he said was:
"I haven't read it!"
And though he appeared willing, in a faint-hearted way, to
introduce me to some of the better families in town and to take
me out drinking with "the boys," we had had our say.
So, mostly, I stayed in my lair, I chaffed a good bit, about
dates and parties, with a buck-toothed young woman who work-
ed alongside of me; and sometimes I even thought of accepting
her invitation to come home to dinner. I pictured a sort of Booth
Tarkington routine, if you know what I'm talking about lawns,
and waltzes, and young girls in muslin, and a creaking swing on
a porch. But, I felt, something was expected of me that I didn't
choose to give. And then those teeth!
My other companion was an old artist who had the adjoining
cubicle and with whom I attempted a few conversations. Only,
my interest was in Art, and his, in pictures and never the twain
could meet.
Eh, ah! I was a mouse in an empty milk-can, thrashing about!
And so the days went by in a scratchy silence, in the heat and
fear, and I waited for the night.
Often, after work, I'd go to the public library and get a book
and read it while I had my dinner in a dog wagon. I'd read any-
thiiig. I guess I felt that if I knew all there was to know I'd be
fine and dandy. I'd seQ in effect how the oak came from the acorn-
JOHN H. PORTER
and dissolved into dust, and how the generations rose and fell,
what all connections were, and how all things were really some-
thing else. I even read The Philosophy of Law. But it was
solitary sledding. I had that trouble in concentrating which the
popular magazines deplore.
No matter how much I prolonged my dinner, there always
came the hour of going home, the dreaded hour. For I was so
ome, do you see? I had the most romantic notions about the
night and I phrased them in the most romantic way, with "The
leafy dark," "The yellow light on the turning leaves," so that
phrases and experience alike could only raise the curtain on an
empty stage.
And for all that I expected so much to come out of this
dark, and despaired so greatly of finding it, I had to go back
to my rooming house after the fruit and the cheese.
Horrible as this rooming house was, it couldn't hold a patch
to the one I'd been in before. The first one was full of a lot of
young garter-snappers just out of college who drank a great
deal of "brew" and called the landlady "Ma." My own room-
mate was musically-inclined but he had the brain of a metro-
nome. And then the college boys used to lock themselves in
their suite once a week with the most bestial intentions. I was
curious, of course. But it was really too much. (Such a way of
expressing hostility!) So I had to depart.
I departed not knowing why, though I know it now, and
there's the problem of fiction I have mentioned before. I departed
full of joy and hope because I was moving to a rooming house
near the University where lived three girls who were studying
art.
Art!
"It seems to me one should paint the soul of things!"
"Yes, Jackson," she says, looking softly into my eyes and
in spite of herself sliding a hand into my trousers, "that's what
we ought to paint!" And I'm in.
Belle, maternelle, gaie, a real Roxanne. What tender, lubri-
cious, wonderfully responsive little artists lived in the Indian-
apolis of my dreams.
The second roominghouse, in which I expected to find these
nymphs was an imitation Swiss chalet, bulging with paranoia,
dizzy with its load of gables, cupolas, dormer windows, bulls'
eyes, turrets and everything else a hypo-manic designer could
load on before his pen ran dry. A porch went teetering along its
165
JOHN H. PORTER
front, crowded with chairs that sagged from the weight of long-
gone, fat-assed landladies. Inside, the parlor, a dark cave, was
jammed with furniture and more dead birds under glass than
you'd think it possible for a few old women to collect in a single
place.
I made my arrangements with the landlady, a red-faced,
eccentric old bitch who told one and all that her husband had
been done in by the city administration, which was why she had
to take in boarders; I settled the questions of soap, sheets, rent,
no loud noises, et cetera; I moved into a room on the second
floor. Soon after, I was introduced to the girls, which is to say
we asked each other how we did, and went our ways. (It may
have been that they had engagements.) I hoped we'd really get
to know each other later on, but the thing that amazed me for
years and years was that we didn't!
Not that I didn't make what I thought were attempts. I
knocked on one of their doors, turned red as a fez, choked, said:
"Uhm!" and stared, as if to announce that here I was and why
didn't they do something about it. The girl dropped her hair-
brush, giggled and called to her room-mate. There was enough
giggling right then and there to last me the rest of my stay in
Indianapolis, and out I slinked, completely crushed. Such idiots!
Artists, eh! They were little fatheads getting ready to teach the
scale in rural schools.
Nevertheless, I tried again a few days later, this time by way
of getting to know the two young men who lived in the house.
This, too, must be counted among my less successful social en-
gagements. We chatted a bit about jobs, prospects, good places
to eat, like a trio of drunk printers mixing up pages from a
"Come to Indianapolis" pamphlet. I thought the young men
rather vicious, simply because they were practical. And gone
was the notion that somehow they might, well, pimp for me in a
nice way, take me out with the girls, get me going on Art, Rim-
baud, Valery. . . .
" Je ne puis plus aimer settlement qu'en dormant. , . ."
And so I was left to face alone these girls who wouldn't even
let me stick a foot in the door. I used to hear them running up
and down the stairs, chattering, cheeping, twittering in their
nasal, flat, but soft girl-voices. I seem to remember a flutter of
white dresses whisking through the hall, pink young faces and
thick dark hair, and a perfume that was sweet and young and of
women. But no rapport! So I moved to the attic.
166
JOHN H. PORTER
One of my notions was that to live in an attic in Indianapolis
would somehow be like living in an attic in Paris; and in an
attic it is so much easier, without thinking or writing, to fancy
oneself a student and artist. And then I was removed from the
sound of the girls and the scent and the doors always opening.
I used to go up to that attic in the early evening and shut
the door and for a moment look out of the tiny window. Almost
anything at all, the faint light on the leaves, the cough of a
starting motor, made me lonely and sorry for myself because I
couldn't say: "See!" or "Listen!" And then I read or wrote in
my journal until it was time to go to bed, a time I approached
with fear and longing and put off for hours by every invention
known to man.
Of course, I considered alternatives, such as the whorehouse
section of the town, of which I'd heard but had never visited. I
was too afraid. Afraid of the night, of thugs, of dirty streets.
Afraid of my lack of luck, so that I couldn't expect a tender
young tart but a shark-hided old hag and a dose to boot. And
how far could I go on my fifteen dollars a week? Nevertheless,
I used to look out of my window at the dark streets and wonder
what sort of joyous thumping was going on where I couldn't
see it and how the whores were making out on their backs, and
then I'd read a few poems and hit the hay coked to the gills on
pure ideas. But not for long.
Man and boy, I'd probably taken enough solo flights with
my look-lively, my hey-you-rascal, my one-eyed-winker to satisfy
King Solomon's harem. I used to pretend the bed was a woman,
and after being seduced long enough, I'd let her have it. I had
them all, art students, models, strip-teasers, whores, the jail-
bait I'd seen on the streets, actresses, "Girl with a Parrot," The
Duchess of Alba. (Thank you, ladies!) And then I felt weak,
despised and cast out. "This is the last," I would say to myself.
I had to stop! My God, I thought, if I could only stop I'd be
powerful, aggressive, scholarly the darling of women. Some-
how, I figured, the pressure would be reduced if I felt more
effective with people. But how be effective in Indianapolis? I
wound up with the idea that I'd be more effective among people
if I didn't need them so much and that's why I took such a shine
to John Cowper Powys' The Philosophy of Solitude.
Essentially, the idea is: there is a common bond between all
animate and inanimate objects, since they're all made of atoms.
Furthermore, there is a "universe," far beyond Indianapolis, out
of which we have come, into- which we can return. The trick is,
167
JOHN H. PORTER
to establish such a feeling of closeness with this inanimate world
that it can stand in the place of all other connections. If you
think that's a whacky idea, let me tell you it's a pisser to put
into practice. I agreed that a madman staring at a dry leaf on
the window ledge of his cell had the means to be at one with
the world, and that I myself needed to look at, fondle, and iden-
tify myself with inanimate objects, to get the hang of the thing.
I, too, used to stare at leaves and trees and bits of rock in the
effort to get in touch with something warm and gentle and under-
standing, outside myself, but I couldn't make it work.
Night after night, I came home, re-ad, scribbled, peered at
a twig; and I went to bed feeling as split off from rock and root
as I did from the girls in the roominghouse, the girls I gave up
so that, in the long run, they'd have me. That total independence
I could never quite reach; the stones in Indianapolis had hearts
like women. If I had really studied metaphysics, I'd have perished
of brain-fag because I was in a philosophical rat-race anyway,
thank you.
All the same, I decided that the idea was all right; the
trouble was I couldn't put it into practice in the roominghouse
that was so loud with distractions. When I read an advertise-
ment for an apartment to rent at a price I could pay, you couldn't
have excited me more had you announced the second coming
of Christ.
The apartment was described as having a bedroom, living
room, bathroom, all furnished, with a piano, for $20 a month!
Already, in my imagination, I played the piano in the twilight.
(I had taken to the piano the way a nightingale takes to song.)
I strolled about in my bathrobe and slippers, book in hand; the
cosmos and I were like two bugs in a rug. The picture was tinged
with sadness, too; I was quite alone. So, lovely young women
would hear about me and come to call, those poetic young women
who fall on their backs if you give them the time of day. All I
needed was the apartment, for the Lord would provide the rest.
And then, the roominghouse people wouldn't be about me
all the time, the men, the girls, the landlady. Roominghouses, I
had always loathed. There were so many possibilities! So many
fears! And in that setting, one's melancholy is played upon so
small a stage. I went to look at my apartment.
It lay an ungodly distance from the center of town, a matter
of one street-car ride, two bus-rides and a ten-minute walk. The
region was desolate, neither residential nor slum nor suburb, but
I didn't care. I was nearing home! I passed one rickety building
168
JOHN H. PORTER
on a corner, somewhat afraid it might be mine, then I hesitated
and turned up an alley, to the right, which meandered towards a
stream between two high, moss-covered walls.
Behind those walls, I thought, there were two charming
girls, young and gay and profoundly read. Their father was a
professor, with flexible ideas. A little man with a beard. He
played the piano while his daughters sang. In the evening, one
of the girls and I would walk in the garden, hand in hand, talk-
ing about things . . , ideas . . . man's loneliness upon the earth.
And then we would embrace in the shadow of the trees whose
thin branches touched the top of the wall.
Thinking this, I came to the stream which, broad and slow,
was moving its phlegmatic, oily, blue-green waters along a bank
that was paved with cobblestones, as I remember. It was as if I
had come out of the nightmare of Indianapolis into a quiet corner
that was Paris by the Seine. And me with my own apartment,
and people I could love! I sat there dreaming for three-quarters
of an hour, closer to the world than I had been in months, tossing
crumbs of cement, or pebbles, into the water, just to hear them
go ker-splash.
Then I roused myself to go back and look at the house on the
corner. The lean-to roof extending over the porch rested its
weight on two sagging pillars, like a drunkard sprawling with
his elbows on a bar. In the doorway stood a pregnant young
woman who stared at me sullenly.
I compared the house number with the address in the ad-
vertisement, and asked to see the apartment,
"Ma!" bawled the young woman in a resentful tone of voice.
She was so unprepossessing I imagined her seducer must be a
long way out of town by now. And yet as I looked at her dark
face again, I thought if worse came to worse
In a moment, a whiskery old crone in a black dress came out
on the porch and blinked at me.
"It's a kinda ole house un the rooms ain't clean yet but you
kun look," she said, whining, and led the way upstairs to the
apartment.
It was appalling. The bed lay dying in the middle of the
floor, its wirey guts springing out at all angles, as if it had been
gored by a bull, a tattered coverlet over its face. There was a
broken chair, a chest of drawers on three legs, and the piano.
That, I saved for the last. I went to look at the other room, a
large, bare closet; and the bathroom, deep in thick, grey dust,
whose plumbing might have been picked up in a junk-yard. All
169
JOHN H. PORTER
the while, the old lady kept up her keening, in a high, flat voice.
The apartment was really O.K. just needed a little teching up un
I could buy a few things if I wanted um then there was this
pianner un all.
I walked back to the front room and tried the piano, which
grinned at the ceiling with its dingy, carious teeth.
"Plunk! Plank! Plink!" the piano said.
I went to the window and looked out at the broad highway
that ran past the house, now loud with the humming of trucks
and passenger cars, and stinking of gasoline. It ran on and on,
until the sidewalks seemed to meet in the distance, past shops and
filling stations and houses as wretched as the one in which I
stood. A hundred yards down the highway, on the opposite side,
a vast storage tank ballooned against its network of cables and
runways, and for a moment I stared at that and at the endless
parade of cars.
A tugging at my elbow broke into the hypnotic trance. "It's
real nice out there," said the old woman, desperately eager to
rent the apartment. She pointed to the window with her other
hand. "You can always find someth'n to see. Why, I could spend
hours just watching them automobiles, because it's like they was
keeping me company. You'd never be lonely if you was to live
here!"
As God is my judge, I could feel the blood ebbing in from my
hands and my feet, leaving them cold with fear and paralysis.
Never be lonely! The traffic roared on in a kind of silence, as if
the cars rushed by on a muted screen and the roaring was in my
ears; and the silence was not the expectation of sound but the
silence in which no human voice is ever heard. I jerked my
elbow free from the bony old gravedigger's grip and threw one
horrified glance around the apartment. There was dust, there
was dust, there was dust! And I fled, without saying a word.
It is not true that I tore out onto the sidewalk, and ran along,
and, seeing a dull, baked face reflected in the dust-smeared win-
dow of a grocery store, hurled a brick at it to discover that the
face was my own. And it would be a pack of lies to say that I
returned to my roominghouse and there collapsed in echolalia, or
burned my bridges, and my book, or studied taxidermy by mail
and became a great success. I merely went back to my room and
hoped that one of the art students on the floor below would think
of me sitting there.
170
JOHN H. PORTER
Ah, Indianapolis, asshole of the nation! Sometimes I wonder
what else went on in the town that day. If life was not bearable
for the others, then when, then where? Did they have any fun?
Did they say hello? Did anyone ever come to help the swollen girl
whose bastard was being born in hatred at the burnt-out end of
the world so few escape?
171
YEATS IN DUBLIN
In memory of W. B. Yeats
Vernon Watkins
A rich lupin-garden,
A long, amber room,
A bronze head, bookshelves
Glittering in that gloom;
And threads, threads, threads of the sea,
Threads of the birds of doom.
Impression of rain- wet, moving leaves.
A dog upon the drive
Casts a questioning shadow
Where secret flower's connive.
A terrible seabird. Folded wings.
Then the gannet's dive.
'From such a treadle of the sea
Your foot may never come,
Never without breaking
The pattern of the loom:
All the ages go to make
The thread around your thumb.'
'O come back*, the seabirds cry,
'To the raindrops' hammerings,
Down to the ignorant Irish sea
Crossed by encircling wings;
Under' the sea dumb grains, great rocks:
Think of these old things.'
172
VERISTON W ATKINS
But Yeats, Yeats the poet
Under Dublin skies,
After the ten years' journey
On which no seagull flies,
After the waves of silence
I look him in the eyes.
Fresh from the shining sunlight
We came on his dark seat,
Shook hands, paused, were dumb there
Fearing to tire him out,
Though his raised head was noble.
His voice firm and sweet.
'Tell me about that young group
Of Welsh writers', he said,
'Whose poems in that paper you sent me
The other day I read.'
An image stands on Carmarthen sands
With the black birds overhead.
'The young poets', he murmured,
'Toil too much. They lay
Something on their table,
And dissect, and wear it away
Till nothing but the grits is left;
But all song is gay.
There must always be a quality
Of nonchalance in the work.
The intellect is impotent
Labouring in the dark,
For a poem is always
A piece of luck.
Who can f or'etell the run of luck
Or where the luck may fall?
Watching the roulette-wheel
We see the spinning ball,
But where it stops and comes to rest
The place is magical.
173
VERNON WATKESTS
The Psychical Research Society
Lately has found
It can experimentally
Foresee that resting-ground
A second before the fall of space
And the death of sound.
Much the treasure-hoarding mind
Values its sum,
But to a breath's vibration
All is held there dumb;
All is reduced to nothing;
Then the luck will come.
Against blinding darkness
A man's blood is thrown,
Striving for that intensity
Which danced before time ran;
That thing, for lack of a better name,
I call 'Eternal Man'.
A poet seeks his deepest thought,
Then finds, when it is made,
A loyalty has held it,
Not by time betrayed,
The very distance measured
By the blood's shade.
In an early poem I set myself
The task to unite
The myths of all ages
In a single night,
To draw iiheir tale, not on the wall
But in the tip of the light.
I might have made it with the myths
Of Ireland alone,
But somewhere in my mind's eye
I saw Priam's throne.
Usna I wanted, and Troy too,
So I put Troy down.'
174
VERNON WATKINS
'Did the idea come slowly,'
I questioned, 'did it unfold
At once, or from the leaves themselves
As from a sculptor's mould?
Was it your mind that saw the words,
Or was your mind told?'
'I made it,' with a slow smile
Said that Irishman,
'Looking at a lady's photograph
Where all those myths began;
So naturally it came slowly.'
And he went on:
'A critic who has pleased me
(Though the best attack)
Says that the style is public
In my latest work;
That near to my youth, with a difference,
Song is going back.
That difference is important
In poem or in play.
Hard as thoughts in the bone to find
Are naked words to say;
Write, get rid of rhetoric;
Cut the dead wood away.
To-day I summon boyhood's reed
But bid that same reed break,
For broken things are powerful
Being bruised and trampled. Blake
And Burns had a public style;
But others found a fake,
The trick and slang of a slippery speech
Trite and second-hand;
Pandering to the popular ear
They did not understand
That truth must cut harder
Than the diamond.'
175
VERNON WATKINS
I asked, had he stirred enmity.
'Yes, my work was banned.
It was the laymen squeaked and squealed
And would not let it stand,
Never the hand of blessing,
Always the felon's hand.
But before my book 'A Vision' appeared
The Bishops began to urge
A ban on its publication
Fearing its views at large;
Then they heard it was a guinea,
And they dropped the charge.
"The Resurrection' would not have been played
But for a general strike.
Men who insist on vessels
Dare not see them break,
Terrified should the dead walk
Or the sleeper wake.
I met, in America,
A holy man who said:
"There will always be miracle
(He raised his old, white head)
There will always be revelation,'
That old saint said.
A saint. I met his follower then.
He professed belief in all
The tenets of the Church's creed,
Mass and ritual,
Except the immortality
Of the human soul.
Another priest I asked which road
To salvation lay.
'Go to Mass, go to Mass,'
Was all that priest would say.
'It will take just twenty minutes.
Go, and you need not pray.'
176
VERNON WATKINS
Then, when I put a question
In salvation's track,
'Read what you like,' the priest replied,
'A great or a holy book.
I take when I go praying
A Dante bound in black.'
Yeats justified the parish priest,
One that could curse and bless,
Especially curse, and blame bad crops
On the peasants' wickedness.
'They must have their magician:
He is neither more nor less.'
We from two countries coming
Took tea, and talked of things,
Behind us threads of sunlight
And the path of wings,
Before us thought and images
Beaten into rings.
Thought, grief-impassioned, drifted
To Coole, and Lady Gregory:
'Have the trees grown a little
Around Thoor Ballylee?'
One by one he raised those names
Between the waves of the sea.
Lionel Johnson, Dowson,
And political men betrayed,
Murdered by their excess of love
Or by a dream they made;
Synge's mighty statements;
The brightness of the shade.
'We have the folk in Ireland;
The English make it up.
How can a country's language thrive
If an abstract shape
Battening on the vigorous man
Sucks the blood-drop?
177
VERNON WATKINS
When I first went to London
I was looking for a technique.
I had the folk behind me,
My food was there to seek,
But without the subtlety London taught
I could not learn to speak.
I got technique from a man who was
A very bad poet indeed.
He taught me to appreciate
The small st&ps of the reed;
The Minutiae of a poem
He first made me heed.
What if the labour all seem vain,
What if years are spent
Chiselling and chiselling
The stubborn element?
All is rewarded on a breath
By an accident.
My quarrel with those Londoners
Is that they try
To substitute psychology
For the naked sky
Of metaphysical movement,
And drain the blood dry.
All is materialism, all
The catchwords they strew,
Alien to the blood of man. '
One ranting slogan drew
That 'Poetry must have news in it':
"The reverse is true/
I questioned him: 'How can there be
A national poetry?
What can we make or what resist
When all is like the sea?'
He said: 'You must resist the stream
Of mechanical apathy/
178
VERNON WATKINS
Speaking of leaders, he affirmed,
'The best is he who knows
The fancy-dress of politics
From his gatden-clothes,
Who understands the popular mask,
Those deceiving shows. 5
He spoke of de Valera,
A charming, cultured man
Who found upon the platform
True culture under ban,
Then uttered out of vehemence
Words he would say to none.
We talked of national movements.
He pondered the chance
Of Welshmen reviving
The fire of song and dance,
Driving a lifeless hymnal
From that inheritance.
I thought of rough mountains,
The poverty of the heath.
'Though leaders sway the crowd,' I said,
Tower is underneath.
The sword of Taliesin
Would never fit a sheath.'
'The leaders and the poets
Are not in unison.
When Hitler struck a medal
He knew that George won,
But he had not served his movement,
So slept in Avalon.'
He questioned my French friend^
And his words remain
Shining like pebbles
Under the flow of the Seine,
Where Synge had walked with him,
Where he had met Verlaine.
179
VERNON WATKINS
Spirits "whirling about us
Were laid by a look,
Ghosts turned in delicate light
To gold on the edge of a book,
Wound in the shroud of a si ill page
Which no man took.
Light in the drawing-room,
Daylight on the lawn,
Book-shadows in the corners
Seemed to have drawn
Spirits from the back of the mind,
From conception's dawn.
Yeats and his wife once more
Asked of the Tower
Where I had stood last year
A dumb, low-breathed hour,
Watching the blade of the grass
And the grass-flower.
Then, as the heron
Raises from the stream,
He raised from the haunted chair
His tall, proud frame
In that dazzling background
Of heroic dream.
Now, as a child sees
Daybreak on a wall,
His image showed me in a flash
Birth and burial,
The trouble of the lovely song,
Parnell*s Funeral.
*I must work' and *I must rest 5
In one breath he said,
Unconsciously, a blind man
By a blind hand led,
All creation hanging
On that double thread.
180
VERNON WATKINS
My friend and I were silent
Witnessing that thing
Which of the sacred rivers
Had touched the secret spring
Making, in the youth of age,
The dumb stone sing.
With visionary footsteps
Slow, he crossed the room,
He who had made the dead lips sing
And celebrate love in doom,
About him the sages
Of Byzantium.
To that broken vision
What could we bring,
Blinded by the shadow
Of the mounting wing?
Had he not loosed the tongue of dust
And made the dead lips sing?
The river that fed his fingers
A pagan sun would parch
Did not the soul throw writing there
On the vaulted arch,
Clash and flash of irrational love:
A Full Moon in March.
Silence falling from the moon
Beating to brass
The towering labours of the sun
Bids Herodias*
Daughter dance more madly
Till all but love must pass.
Words and the flight of images,
That unerring dance,
Passionate love of wisdom,
Hatred of ignorance.
Words laid on silence.
The tragic utterance.
181
VERNON WATKINS
'I am sorry you have come so fat
For so little,' he said.
The music of the mounting wave
Crashed into my head
In which the spray confuses
The living and the dead.
I have seen kindness
In true, loyal eyes.
Who prophesies from the lip of a shell?
What raging water cries?
The blue wave moves beneath me:
Above, the white bird flies.
182
THE PROJECT
Brom Weber
I USUALLY reach the Library between ten and eleven o'clock each
morning. But before entering, I walk along Fifth Avenue, I let
myself be caught up in the crowd that moves up and down the
street. Everyone seems so sure and certain about his direction,
his glances, his smiles.
Some people look into fancy shop windows at imported
jewelry or at the latest books. Others stare upwards through
telescopes at the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. I do
likewise, though there is no real need for me to consider things
to buy or buildings in which to rent an office. Nevertheless, so
strong is my desire to be one of them, that I merge with them.
There walks a girl in bright ballet slippers. She walks confident-
ly, because under her arm is a cover design done for BEfWITCH-
MENT. Here is a man with bright eyes and well-cut moustache.
He has just finished a series of sparkling ads for a liquor concern.
Now he marches along with pay check tucked in his wallet.
With these evaluations, I become a part of the city's life. I am
not outside. I move with it and feel with it.
On this morning, like other mornings, I tore myself regret-
fully out of the promenade and ascended the sprawling marble
steps of the Library building. I never enter the Library on the
Forty-Second Street side. It is so commonplace there. On Fifth
Avenue, the structure is imposing, and resembles one of the solid
banks to be found on Wall Street. And it ties in nicely with my
banker's hours to be entering a building designed to resemble an
intellectual depository. For, after all, my daily visits to the Li-
brary are not just sojourns without meaning. I have a project
to complete, and it requires hours and hours of the most patient
research to gather the necessary facts*
As I climbed the steps to the great bronze doorway, I felt
more and more like a business man calling at his office to a job.
183
BROM WEBER
My portfolio with its paper and pads was tucked securely under
my arm. My hat, while not a Homburg, sat jauntily on top of
my hair. I climbed slowly, so as to enjoy my pleasure to its
fullest extent. There is also my health to consider, for I am
delicate.
I scanned the bronze bas-reliefs on either side of the door-
way while passing through. Just as they were yesterday. That's
good. It gives me a feeling of stability to know that things haven't
changed overnight. The guard stood in his usual spot, near the
turnstile,
"Hello, Joe," I said quietly.
He turned to me, almost as if he didn't recognize me. Then
his lips stretched into a welcoming smile:
"Good morning."
Joe doesn't like to talk much. I've tried more than once to
draw him into conversations. But he persists in keeping quiet,
I concluded some time ago that he's probably ashamed of his
Italian accent.
Without haste, I walked across the marble floor. The room
is made entirely of marble, and I am respectful. I make a special
effort to walk quietly here, since I don't think it's dignified to
draw attention by walking noisily.
Two men were in line ahead of me at the coat checkroom.
I couldn't avoid feeling contemptuous of them. Slightly of course,
because I'm not a snob, but contemptuous. It wasn't that their
coats were shabby, or because one of the men was unshaven, or
that neither of the two had a briefcase or notebook. It was just
that their entire appearance indicated their lack of appreciation
in making use of the Library. These are the people who come
to the Library aimlessly, because they have nowhere else to go.
Here it's warm . , . they doze in large armchairs and dream of
hot lands and busy offices. Despite the fact that I have a job to
do, I waited patiently behind them.
Suddenly, just as the attendant was ready to take my over-
coat and hat, a shrill female voice shattered the peaceful silence.
Startled, I turned around. A small thin-faced woman, clad in a
tight-fitting jersey dress, came running down the steps leading
from the upper floors. Following close behind, seemingly trying
to pacify her, was Joe, puzzled and irritated.
"I'll report him, that's what! I'll report him!" I heard her
say as she ran across the floor. Meanwhile, Joe had taken up his
stand near the doorway*
184
BROM WEBER
The coatroom attendant had been smirking bitterly through-
out the episode, shaking her head from side to side and holding
her hands behind her back. Finally, she lifted up my hat, but
made no effort to take my coat. With what was meant to be a
sympathetic smile, she leaned forward in Joe's direction. As
though in response to her plea, Joe walked over to us. His face
bore a mocking expression.
"They are in love," he announced in his soft voice, "two love-
birds. . . ."
Who are they? I wondered. But Joe didn't enlighten me:
"She claims he spit on her first. He claims she spit on him
first. I always get mixed up in these love-affairs."
Leaning his body over the counter, Joe whispered in the
attendant's ear. I couldn't make out the words. No doubt he was
telling her something about the incident I was more absorbed,
however, in the fact that Joe actually said more to this woman
in a few minutes than he had ever said to me in all the time I
knew him. This puzzled me. Yet, I reflected, the vagaries of
friendship have no equivalent relationship with true values.
Friendship is, after all, only an emotional link in which feeling
plays a more important part than reason. I really couldn't con-
demn Joe too harshly for his attitudes. These two lonely people
needed each other.
After Joe went back to his doorway post, the attendant
picked up my coat and said wryly:
"You get some nuts in this here place."
I made an effort to smile, although I had caught her glance
at my overcoat.
My overcoat is like any other coat. But there is something
about it, something I consider unimportant. In its way, it looks
exactly like the coats of the two men who stood before me in
line, frayed, worn. But it's not torn! I'm proud of that, and
proud of my combed hair and clean shirt! It's not wealth that
marks a man, but the manner in which he keeps those posses-
sions entrusted to him by life.
Poor woman, I thought, she is tired from standing on her
feet all day long. Life must get very tiresome for her. Indeed,
her face did look exhausted, and her fingers gnarled from fasten-
ing and unfastening themselves endlessly on overcoats and hats.
I climbed the steps to the upper floors. At the turn of the
staircase, I saw the male "lover" crouching on his knees. Gesticu-
lating with his hands, his flabby lips quivering with words, he
185
BROM WEBER
appeared to be making an unintelligible effort to persuade me
that it was "she" who had spit on him first: "She ... she first
. . . she." And he spat before him to make himself clear. But
I didn't care. He or she!
I looked down at him from the second floor landing. Bundled
up in his clothes, as though hiding from someone who stood
directly over him, he no longer mumbled. But his yellowed
fingers crawled fantastically in the air as though exercising for a
pianistic exhibition. I burst out laughing as I thought of this
preposterous "love-affair." Joe's satirical use of the expression
amused me as much as the thought of the lovers themselves.
"Such nuts," I exclaimed.
In the Catalog Room, I rested my arms on a table in order
to catch my breath. My eyes closed for a moment. Such relaxa-
tion fortifies my strength. And I needed energy for the day of
work that lay ahead of me.
Turning to the card catalog set in the wall, I picked out a
tray of cards. As I set it firmly on the table, I noticed a girl
standing alongside. Her back was towards me, and she was
shifting her weight from one foot to the other and back again.
I sensed immediately that she was attempting to attract my eyes.
With each movement, her body changed its shape. These flowing
lines were meant to entice me. But how pathetic were her efforts
to be alluring! Even if I were not busy with a project, it would
be impossible for a blatant type like this to attract me. It amazes
me that wherever I go, there is always some girl ogling, twist-
ing, hopeful in the delusion that such is the way to interest me.
They can't seem to understand that their pitiful posturings have
absolutely no effect on me. As though to demonstrate her power,
the girl beside me defiantly tossed her head in the air.
Angrily I averted my gaze and began hastily writing the
titles and authors of the books I needed on the library call slips.
But my fingers kept slipping on the pencil's smooth and shiny
sides, and I erased more than I wrote. The flames of humiliation
began to burn in my cheeks as I realized that she had upset me.
I looked at her again. She had moved closer, still with her back
towards me. What does she look like? I wondered. Are her
eyes green and her nose small? Is her mouth open slightly, so
that her teeth bite into her lower lip as if in passion?
I drew my breath in with dismay as I understood the mean-
ing of my thoughts. Momentarily, I had a vision of the girl whom
I had seen yesterday in the Periodical Room. Her sweet refined
beauty and manner constituted my secret ideal. Had I in any
186
BROM WEBER
way proved myself unworthy by this weakness? I questioned
myself harshly.
Suddenly my hand was jarred and the pencil it held slipped
to the floor. She had deliberately fallen against me. Involun-
tarily, I reached out to prevent her from striking the floor. Her
face was a startled mask as she faced me. In a voice honeyed
with innocence, she said:
"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were behind me."
Angered at this deception, I derided her silly excuses:
"Didn't know you were behind me, did you?"
She pulled herself out of my grasp with surprise.
"I said I was sorry," she gasped.
I fled into the Reading Room, after hurriedly sweeping to-
gether my belongings. My sense of decorum, my reserve, are
attributes on which I pride myself. Furthermore, I had a job to
do and must get on with it. So I resolutely determined that this
synthetic Eve would not be allowed to upset me one bit!
I sat down heavily on a chair in the rear of the Reading
Room. The further back you sit, the better off you are, because
thus you can avoid the draft that slices through the front of the
room. I dried my perspired forehead with a handkerchief. Then
I was appalled to see the call slips clutched in my hand. I had
forgotten to hand them in at the call desk in the Catalog Room.
Now there would be no books delivered to me. Nor was my
pencil in my coat-pocket. It must have been lying on the floor
in the other room. But I didn't want to go back there, either to
hand in the slips or to reclaim my pencil. I didn't want to see
that girl again, nor did I want her to see me. Bitterly I felt
around in my vest pockets and found a pencil stub. It would
have to serve me for the rest of the day.
In order to occupy my time fruitfully, I picked up several
of the books scattered on the table. One had an interesting
title, and I opened it. The book was worn, and its pages dirty
with fingerprints and age. The type was small. How do they
expect anyone to read in the Library? The lamps burn ten-watt
bulbs; books are encrusted with dirt; chairs are hard; no matter
how you squirm, aches gather. Behind your back, the attendants
walk catfootedly in their gray coats . . peering over your shoul-
der and breathing on your Head. As a good citizen, however, I
stopped myself from grouching.
At first glance, the book seemed interesting. Someone called
Bardunius had the brilliant idea of writing on the use of reason.
It's an important subject. If more people were ableto use their
187
BROM WEBER
heads, the world would definitely not be the depressing place it
now is. I myself make a point of treating every problem reason-
ably. I try to understand the good and bad sides of everything,
so that 111 make no mistakes.
But instead of telling you how to use your mind to best
advantage, Bardunius kept on bleating in high-toned language
about "moral responsibility" and "ethical consciousness." All
proper in its place. But is there a practical good to be derived
from such talk? Would it help me, for example, to develop my
brain so that I could forge ahead and complete my project in the
best possible way? Absolutely not! This book had as much real
value as a philosopher in a courtroom!
I don't make a practice of writing in books. However, I've
never thought it fair for an author to be able to provoke his
readers, and yet be so far removed that he remains unaffected
by their complaints. So I sympathize with those impassioned
souls who make a writer prove every implication, every conten-
tion, and who emblazon their approvals and disapprovals on the
very pages of his book. . . .
Someone brushed by my chair and I looked up. The bronze
hands of the big wall clock stood at 2:30. A whole morning and
part of the afternoon was gone, with nothing accomplished. I
strode from the Reading Room, and hurried through the Catalog
Room. In the corridor, I stopped for a moment near the phone
booths. I had no one to call. It was probably time to eat lunch.
I felt for the coins in my pocket. In company with my keys and
pocket-knife, they had sung a comforting, jingling music. Hand-
led now as coins by my fingers, they were pitiably few in num-
ber . . . tokens which would serve me better as carfare during
the next few days.
Eating now was time-consuming anyway, as well as being
costly. One has to stand for hours in the sandwich shops waiting
for service. Far better, I thought, to read some magazines and
make the day count for something after all.
Magazines are very important in my work. At one time, I
used to read only the few specializing in the subject with which
my project is concerned. But I grew uneasy. I worried about
missing articles of importance in neglected magazines. I reflected
that some of this material, all of it unknown to me, might even
be so significant that it could probably cut the time required for
my project by a third ... by a half! In this state of agitation,
each magazine transformed itself into a staring reproach that I
188
BROM WEBER
was not reading ten others. Finally, I'm proud to say, I read
almost every current magazine on the shelves.
The Periodical Room was almost empty. I selected several
magazines and looked around for a seat. Not far from the maga-
zine shelves, I caught sight of the girl whom I had seen yester-
day. I sat down at her table. She was still as sweet and demure
as the girl upstairs had been evil. Today she must talk to me.
Yesterday, I had been sitting dejectedly before a heap of
magazines. My mind was reeling from articles on everything,
ranging from sewage disposal equipment to seal-meat vitamins.
And the stories! Even the accountants' quarterly review carried
a strange tale about the romance of figures. I seemed to be
getting exactly nowhere with my work. My eyelids were dry. My
head ached.
Then this girl had walked gracefully over to my table, her
short round body swaying. She had smiled shyly as she noticed
my interest, and moistening her lips delicately had begun to read.
I knew instantly that this girl would mean a great deal to me.
So I wrote a note to her without delay. Motioning to the
high school boy who replaces discarded magazines on the shelves,
I had folded the note. He had come over unwillingly.
"Yeah?" he had asked.
"Sh. ..." I replied, pulling him closer so that I could whis-
per in his ear. "Give this to the girl sitting across the way." I
pressed the note into his hand.
"Whyn't you give it to her yourself?" he had asked.
"I don't want her to know right away that it's from me," I
told him in a whisper.
He appeared convinced, because he walked off. But he
was back in a few minutes. Flushing, he had thrown the note
onto the table, and said:
"I ain't carrying love letters for anybody!"
Love letters! I didn't even have the temerity to believe that
this girl could possibly love me. I simply wanted her to realize
how much I admired her. But this brat had opened the note
and misinterpreted it. There wasn't an ounce of decency in his
body!
Well, I'd see to it myself that she talked to me today. I
wrote a note again, and placed it in the center of one of the
magazines before me. Then I put the magazine directly on top
of her purse. The girl was so interested in her reading that she
didn't look up. Soon she would probably be reaching for a
pencil or a handkerchief, I thought. She would lift up the maga-
189
BROM WEBER
zine, and my note would fall out onto the table. I expected to
hear her voice shortly thereafter, and I allowed myself to revel
in the ecstasy which her tones would bring me.
I occupied myself meanwhile by opening another magazine.
I wanted her to observe that I was a man who had a job to do
here in the Library. If she asked me later, I would tell her every-
thing about my project. And I felt that I could trust her implic-
itly to keep the details confidential.
The first page of the magazine had an advertisement with a
humorous cartoon. I chuckled, and then I noticed the coupon at
the bottom. It offered a free booklet on molded plastics, no
strings attached. Plastics is an up-and-coming field. Why, they're
even making houses from plastics these days. Despite that, I
made no effort to cut out the coupon. I believe there's always a
good possibility that later readers may be interested in some-
thing on the other side of the coupon. And if that's gone, they
can't read the full page.
I was growing impatient. Still no word from the girl. I'd
wait a little longer, though. She was shy, I knew, and how can
you speak to a stranger just off-hand? Give her some time also
to let the note make an effect upon her, I cautioned myself. Its
words will encourage her. For there could be no misunderstand-
ing their tenderness and devotion.
In this state of excitement, I wanted nothing to distract me.
The atmosphere must be absolutely tranquil. I must hear her
first words as soon as they were spoken. It was almost as if the
pages of my magazine made too much noise in turning, so I closed
it. My body was trembling, and I closed my eyes.
I raised my eyes after what seemed an eternity. Suddenly,
behind the girl's back, appeared the high school boy. His ugly
face, spotted with pimples and covered with down, smirked at
me as he tapped her shoulder. I leaned forward slightly, horri-
fied yet gladdened. Was he going to tell her how much I wanted
her to speak to me? Yet it seemed so crude. Nevertheless, I
wanned to his haggard face, weary from working long hours
after a hard day at school. How can one hate a child for long?
As the girl looked up at him in response to his touch, the
boy placed his hand on the magazine containing my note and
asked:
"Have you finished with this magazine, lady?"
He knew! He had spied on me from some corner, watched
me place my note in the pages of the magazine. Now he was
determined to thwart me, to take away the magazine, before she
190
BROM WEBER
had a chance to read my note. How rudely he had interrupted
her reading, banging her on the shoulder with his grimy paw.
Before she could reply to him, I stood up, feverish and dis-
traught. I gripped my portfolio so violently between my hands
that I felt it give way and tear.
"Let her alone!" I screamed at him.
He retreated, but not before he had grabbed the magazine.
The girl looked up with alarm, her eyes widening.
"People can't read here with the way you bother them," I
shouted. "All you do is crack your heels on the floor, push
against chairs, make of? with magazines before people have finish-
ed reading. What are you being paid for? What do you mean
by smashing people when you ask them a question? Answer
me, you scrawny runt! You rotten pup!"
I could see the boy edging away more quickly as I continued
to shout, but I couldn't stop.
"Haven't you any manners? Can't you see that people are
trying to read, trying to work? Keep quiet, for God's sake!"
Breathlessly I fell back into my chair. The reverberations of
my words in the high-ceilinged room pounded against my ears.
The others stared at me. Let them stare with their worried
squirming eyes! It was high time they heard someone with the
courage and intelligence to express himself when the need arose.
If you stepped on their toes, they groaned and apologized. But
not I. Resolutely I put my belongings in order, straightened my
tie, and buttoned my vest.
Through the open door, Joe walked in. Dancing behind him
in excitement was the boy. The gray guard's uniform dried the
exultant saliva in my mouth, and I lowered my head on my chest.
When the footsteps reached my chair, I looked up at him. His
olive-skinned face was sallow and cold.
"We've had enough complaints about you to fill a book," he
said, and stopped. Someone laughed appreciatively at his little
joke.
"We've seen you tearing pages out of books . . . cutting cou-
pons out of magazines. You've scribbled filthy words on the
lavatory walls, and scratched tables with your pen knife. You
think you're pretty smart. But we've been on to you all along.
Now you've gone the limit . . . insulting girls and fighting with
the Library staff. You're nothing but a bum! Get me?"
"I_I_I i stammered. I wanted to say it was all a lie,
but the words wouldn't form themselves in my throat. He con-
tinued as though I hadn't said anything:
191
BROM WEBER
"I'll tell you this much. Get out of here, or 111 throw you
out. Don't come sneaking back, or well put you where you
really belong. . . ."
I pressed myself down in my chair, overpowered by this
naked revelation of myself. Where would I go tomorrow, and
the day after, when I left the Library never to return? What
would I do? The girl glanced at me with contempt, and turned
away. Tears melted my eyes.
192
J
! *
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HERBERT LIST
THREE POEMS
Peter Viereck
FOR TWO GIRLS
SETTING OUT IN LIFE
(A morality-play)
"The two young ladies separated. Juliette, who wanted to become
a grand lady, how could she consent to be accompanied by a girl whose
virtuous and plebian inclinations might dishonor her social prestige?
And Justine, for her part, how could she expose her good name to the
companionship of a perverse creature who was looking forward to a life
of vile lewdness and public debauchery? They bade each other an eter-
nal adieu, and next morning they both left the convent." Marquis de
Sade, Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue, 1791.
The sick man, though, had wit who thought you up.
Who can not picture you that fatal morning?
Homeless, not even knowing where you'll sup,
You sigh, "Adieu!" and ask yourselves, "What next?"
I sound like old Polonius don't be vexed
If I give too avuncular a warning;
But having scanned your futures in a text,
I gasp at all the ways you'll be misled
(Your nuns behind you and your males ahead)
And want to save you from your author's plot.
When he says, "Follow me," you'd better not!
193
PETER VIERECK
II
Justine, by all means do be virtuous
But not in so provocative a fashion.
Fm being frank; please listen: solely thus
Can you elude that lamentable passion
For which your author lends his name to us.
The night he ties you down in Bondy Wood,
You'll learn -what happens to the gauchely good.
Ill
Yet you'll endure, Justine. Most stubbornly!
To love mankind, to preach tranquility
To Etna or reverse a spinning planet
By bleating trustfully your Pauline tracts
Such supernatural smugness is sheer granite:
No, not eroded by whole cataracts
Of f ondlers groping through beyond your body
To sate in flesh the spirit's old distress
And plunge their seekings in some final sea.
Meanwhile, far off, a certain chic Grand Lady
Half-hears a voice each xiight (too kind for spleen)
That weeps for all her daytime wilfulness:
fc Juliette! Juliette! What have you done to me?
It's I your other self your poor Justine"
IV
And you, Juliette: have fun while doing ill.
Be un-immaculate while yet you may
(I drop this hint to give the plot away) .
But when you dance with sweating stable -lads
Or tired Dukes who giggle at your skill,
Don't think it's you who dance; the ghosts of gods
Who died before our oldest gods were young,
Twirl savagely in your polite salon:
That sofa, where reclining comes so easy,
Is far more haunted than you'll ever guess.
Your lips raise shrines as mystic as Assisi
From whiteness they so piously caress.
O you are very wise (your playful nights,
That seem so casual, are primordial rites)
And very silly (promise me you'll stay
A pretty little girl who'll never spell
194
PETER VIERECK
"Chthonic" nor learn her Freud too sadly well) .
Last week I think I met you on Broadway.
Two truths, two sisters. An obsessive pair:
Serene in their unalterable roles
Whether their frantic author flog or kiss them.
And either truth rebukes our limbo where
Girls are not Bad but merely Indiscreet,
Girls are not Good but merely Very Sweet,
And men are filed in their own filing-system
With frayed manila-folders for their souls
Once labeled GOD'S OWN IMAGE: USE WITH CARE
But now Declassified as OBSOLETE.
VI
Justine! Juliette! We need you, both of you,
'Girls of mild silver or of furious gold*.
Revoke your spat; it is our own feud, too.
You smile? Yet you can bless us if you will.
And then and then identities unveiled,
Tall tales rehearsed and poutings reconciled
Two opposites will find each other
And sob for half a day together;
For heaven and hell are childhood playmates still.
STIFLING OF HEARTS
A HUNDRED TIMES A DAY
'God is dead' Zarathustra
Sometimes a waitress laughing from a window,
To plates a truant and with comet's hair,
Enchants his snakes of longing like a Hindu
Till they sway anciently and learn la chair
Est tfistc.
A tryst?
But plates need slaves: la chere
Est triste, and now from window back to table
All hips strut out of sight and into fable
With Helen's scornand Cindarella's prayer.
195
PETER VIERECK
YOU ALL ARE STATIC;
I ALONE AM MOVING
(a young tree addresses humanity)
You all are static; I alone am moving.
Racing beyond each planted Pullman wheel,
I pity you and long to reel
You through my thousand outstretched ways of loving.
Are you alive at all? Can non-trees feel?
Run while I may, for at my pith gnaws Night.
The winds these are great stacks of anchored air;
I thresh them with my hard-pronged hair;
I jump right through them, roaring my delight.
Live while I may run, run, no matter where.
How marvelous if you but knew is speed!
You all must wait; I am your overtake?.
Striding to green from yellow acre,
I toss you Spring. Each dawn, my tendrils knead
Stats into pancake-suns like a tall baker.
Trudging toward snowtime, I could weep for hours
To think of birds, the birds I leave behind.
Why did the God who keeps you blind,
Instead give sight and sentience to my flowers?
Black questions in my sap outwear my rind.
Humans (I almost envy you your peace)
Are free of this gnarled urge for Absolutes
Which sweetens and saddens all my fruits,
Dragging my twigs down when I'd fly towards bliss
While bugs and diamonds agonize my roots.
196
WHO KILLED THE UNIVERSE?
( A who-dunnit-thriller of that arbitrary
universe of the Existentialist prophets )
Peter Viereck
"Search/ and tell me if thou seest a certain shape or shadow,
making way with wings or chariot fierce to repossess a heaven he lost
erewhile. Yes, there must be a golden victory; there must be gods
thrown down and trumpets blown . . . beautiful things made new, for
the surprise of the sky-children."
Keats, Hyperion
"LISTEN, Mr. Jones, it's not that I mind his staring at my wife.
Staring is no crime. But why did he knock the safety valves off
the boilers this morning?"
Gaylord Jones held the combined job of roving superinten-
dent and Public Good Will expert for an apartment house syndi-
cate in up-state New York, autumn of 1949. His flabby plump-
ness was noticeable only at second glance; at first glance it was
neutralized by his imposing tallness. This afternoon he had
been urgently summoned to the advertising man's apartment; he
had just arrived but had already stopped listening as his sum-
moner continued,
"Why does he talk so full of f haths' and 'damnations' like the
Bible? If I were his boss, I'd force him to talk janitor talk. Where
will it end if janitors start talking long-haired? But above all,
I called you here because of those radiators. Why doesn't he send
us tenants some heat up, like you promised he would?"
Mr. Jones answered as affably as ever, Yes I guess you ad-
mitted it in your own words: staring is no crime. So now we
can say goodbye in a spirit of friendly agreement. I'd better get
back to my own little nest, that oil-heated little mansion the
syndicate gave me when I won the Economy Prize for cutting
197
PETER VIERECK
heating costs in their other buildings." The portly superintend-
ent began edging towards the door of the advertising man's
apartment, while continuing to talk rapidly. "All day I'm slug-
ging away for the rights of the tenants; so I just don't have the
resistance left to stand the cold here. Can't expect me to turn
into an icicle just to listen to a lot of undermining remarks about
my janitors and radiators."
"Who said that anybody minded his damn maddening star-
ing," resumed the advertising man, "or his mumbling either?
The cold radiators, that's what I minded when today I caught
him telling his parrot, Death by freezing for the pagan ad man,
but one more chance for his betrayed wife. Oh, why do they all
laugh together behind my back? 'At it again!' I shouted from
behind, real loud to scare him; 'You're always mumbling against
the tenants in secret, but now I've caught you at it red-handed;
you're always at it.' He didn't even try to weasel out of it, just
answered with a funny word I don't understand: 'Armageddon
tonight! Well, I don't mind all that so much as I do when the
two of you not to mention that Great Dane of his, that dog's up
to no good either and the parrot, he's also to blame, distracts
him from the radiators all my sinus and all your promises, and
also when ."
Gaylord. Jones had disappeared.
There was a reason why the mumbler in the basement, the
little janitor of the big cold house, could spare no time for the
steam heat He was busy writing page after page in a cardboard-
covered book labeled Dear Diary. For example, last summer:
"Proclamation: NO MORE MOSQUITOES; all top-ranking
archangels please note." Or this autumn: "The real trouble is
finding a cobra with guts enough to crawl up the radiator pipes."
Or still more recently: "Dear Diary, when I think what's going
to happen this week to Tempter Jones, sometimes I almost feel
sorry."
Gray. The janitor exuded grayness: the nice old guy,
loyally incompetent, with eyes harassed but acquiescent, the
eternal conscientious bore to whom people ought to say, "Little
man, what now?"
What now? Can a blank cartridge blow up or a mouse roar?
Can grayness redden into a will-to-power? Mr. Jones never
glimpsed the spark nor heard the sputtering fuse of one ex-
plosive forgotten little brain-cell just below the janitor's con-
198
PETER VIERECK
sciousness. This made the misunderstanding mutual, for in
turn the janitor never glimpsed the grayness of the scarlet
villain of his diary.
Superintendent Jones symbolized in Dear Diary all the
thwarting Powers Of This World. In contrast with the janitor,
he was everywhere treated as an official and a gent. " J. Gaylord
Jones" he signed his checks. Always tipped a nickel more than
ten per cent. Had a wife who respected him. Made his barber,
whom he called by his first name, cut rather than shave the hair
just behind his ears so that it wouldn't look fresh from the
hairdresser. Supervised at serenely unhurried intervals the
whole chain of apartment houses owned by the corporation
syndicate. Soothed in a friendly infuriating manner the ruffled
clients, such as the advertising man, who now brought to a final
crisis the mystery of the mumbling janitor.
Like a turtle's cozy shell gone soft in one spot, so did the
invulnerable normalcy of Mr. Jones contain one lone and fatal
eccentricity: vain about his qualities of tolerance and under-
standing, he dabbled in collecting amiable fuddy-duddies and
harmless old crackpots as his janitors. "My characters," he
would call them patronizingly. "Say, you should get a look at my
mumbling janitor."
In order that Gaylord Jones might wake up each morning
with such a smile of well-being on his face, it was necessary,
thousands of years ago, that a famine took place east of the Ural
mountains. Necessary that a geological accident hung peculiar
peninsulas on the northern shore of the Mediterranean. And
necessary that apartment syndicates paid good salaries in a New
World city which would not have been built if nomads in Asia
on shaggy ponies had not shifted some trade routes.
The final product of all these varied centuries and aspirations
was J. Gaylord Jones, strolling home to his wife from a celebra-
tion of "Be Kind To Trees Week," with a slightly audacious
feather in his quiet datk hat. To him the cosmos, with all the
known and unknown results of its particular diffusion of atoms,
was a family restaurant, the sort of restaurant where beer was
preferred jovially to coffee and prudently to whiskey, where
reliable investment councilors argued tolerantly with suburban
commuters and remarked in well-modulated voices:
"Very worthwhile."
Yet in this man's own solar system and own city and in his
very own apartment house, a small gray janitor was tinkering
with the boder in order to murder him.
199
PETER VIERECK
The lingo of the janitor's will-to-power derived from two
books. He knew every sentence of both by heart The first
was the Apocalypse, the Revelation of St. John the Divine. The
second was an English translation of Fourier's long forgotten
prophecies. These had prophesied the transformation of the
salty ocean into free lemonade and of ferocious lions into kindly
"anti-lions," who would purr and carry children on their backs.
As prerequisite to such civic-spirited transformations, Fourier
had demanded that the earth stop exuding what he called the
Stench of Immorality, which was poisoning the perfumed har-
mony of all the other planets.
Continuing logically where Fourier had timidly left off,
the janitor reasoned in his nightly jottings:
"Whatever lives, misbehaves. Only one cure for the Stench
of Immorality: to abolish all living things. Memo: the ribbon
on my little finger is to remind me about the new T.N.T."
Some years ago, with clerkish efficiency, he had circled a
specific date on his calendar and labeled it "Doomsday and
Armageddon". The years passed, and this week the date was
due. "Dear Diary: Doomsday very, very soon; and I'm. as
nervous as the day I addressed my high-school forum on Saintly
Meekness. Just like then, I keep asking myself: will I bungle
Hie job, will I forget any little detail, will the angels Michael and
Gabriel say I was a FLOP? Memo: to try to remember what
I meant with that ribbon on my finger."
During this ultimate week, the janitor was revising his last
will and testament. His will was quite a separate document
from his diary. Imaginary slights provoked ceaseless new wills.
Each will changed the proportions in which he allotted his non-
existent millions to his nephew named Boone, to a manicure girl
named Mimi, to his parrot who had no name, and to his dog, a
Great Dane named Sitting Bull. The parrot was green and talk-
ative. Nobody knows what color Sitting Bull was originally;
his habit of napping in the basement coal-bin gave him a hue
which made the children of the tenants whimper in their sleep.
The large kindly animal was smudged coal-black from snout
to tip of tail except for his eyes. Friendly and sad and just a
little reproachful, the eyes of the Great Dane became flamingly
blood-shot from the irritating coal dust, so that to the non-
veterinary they appeared red with rage. Every Sunday eve-
ning the advertising man from upstairs would tell his wife, who
did not know the janitor was always out Sunday evenings, that
he must go to the basement to complain about the cold radiators.
200
PETER VIERECK
One day Anna-Maria, the young Sicilian masseuse who used to
meet the ad man in the coal bin, failed to show up for their* usual
Sunday tryst there, although up to now her enthusiasm had
even exceeded his own. Ever after, she spent her Sunday eve-
nings in church and became the apartment house's most lavish
contributor to the League of Decency fund. Pressed for an
explanation by her disappointed Sunday friend, Anna-Maria
would only shake her pretty head at him, crossing herself and
sobbing hysterically:
"Malocchio . . . red in the dark, red and black . . . Dio mio
sends diavolo with the Evil Eye to punish me . . . red in the coal
bin ... oh malocchio, malocchio ..."
Quite a different young lady was Mimi, the peroxide blonde
manicurist. Reserved, business-like, and not over-rouged, she
worked in the hairdresser shop on the next block and once had
been listed in the janitor's will. Her unevenly dyed hair lacked
that skill and good taste which adorn an unsoundly spent life.
Stars of red ink in the margin of the janitor's diary marked the
day when she suddenly ceased to be named "Mimi," being
rechristened "the Great Whore of Babylon" happy phrase
coined by Saint John.
The janitor had never met Mimi, had seen her only at a
distance. Nor was she ever to have any inkling of his existence.
Once on a windy morning he had peeked upward at her from his
basement window as she was skipping wholesomely along the
street, humming:
"Mama don't want no rice, no peas, no cocoanut oil."
Of course, she did not notice him next day when they
accidentally entered the same streetcar.
Not notice him? After yesterday's intimacy, not to recognize
him today? Betrayal! Mistakenly he assumed she was only
pretending not to know him.
A whole month he devoted to brooding over the Mimi in-
cident. This was the historic month when he proclaimed a new
fast for ascetics: "O noble Great Dane, give me the strength
never to touch breakfast foods that crackle." Month of neglected
.furnaces during his spiritual trial. Month of lonely experiments
with black and white magic, of bitter renunciation, and of final
hard-won rebirth. Month of self-purification when he wove his
omnipresent hak-shirt out of the small strings he salvaged
from trash-baskets.
Truth at last! Suddenly Mimi's identity was revealed to
him in a vision sent from a more sweet-smelling planet. "O
201
PETER VIERECK
Fourier, truth is bought with suffering; how Lonely but how
Great we are!" The very flames she thwarted on the streetcar
were, it now appeared, flames she had fanned in him on purpose:
by wildly disporting herself above his basement window. Why?
To distract him from his mission! "Listen, parrot who hath no
name: this this this body of hers ah, how blind I have
been!" He had never known what the word "fleshpot" meant,
so recurrent in his readings, and had never dared look it up in the
dictionary. But obviously this body of hers "Dear Diary, how
clearly I see. life now!" was one of those vast, gaping fleshpots
of the Wild Parties of Egypt about which the Good Book had so
many things to say.
His hands trembling with moral zeal, the janitor recorded
his new discovery. At Armageddon his diary would unveil ex-
actly who it was who lurked behind her camouflage. How the
world would gasp if only it knew! Each night he jotted down
some new strategem for warning a complacent solar-system
against her plots of interplanetary pollution.
"Hell's proud empress of beauty and damnation," he lyric-
ally raged against her, more attracted to her than he had ever
been during her more demure role as Mimi the manicurist.
"O Sitting Bull," he intoned in that inconsistent hybrid
diction of his, one-third Apocalyse, one-third Fourier's romantic
19th-century diction, and one-third janitor-argot. "O Bullsie-
pupsie, you big innocent beast of woodsy Nature, lend me the
simple wisdom of your brooks and trees against my passion.
And say, don't let no more devils of Babylonian temptation go
hanging around my bed tonight while I sleep. You just bark at
them, see, bark and nip them; there's a good pup."
? AE that night the loyal coal-black animal whined in sym-
pathy beneath his master's cot, hearing him groan again and again
into his pillow:
"Mimi, you ratted on me."
The beneficiaries of Mimi's unmasking were the nephew
named Boone, the Great Dane named Sitting BuE, and the parrot
who had no name. To them the janitor transferred in his will,
in ever fluctuating proportions, her former share of his im-
aginary estate.
The nephew, an orphan since boyhood, was being sent to the
local college by the generosity of his bachelor uncle, who was
poor but nepotist-minded. The boy's first name had been given
202
PETER VIERECK
him by his parents in honor of Daniel Boone. The great back-
woodsman had been their favorite American hero in their Good
Citizenship class in highschool. This common historical interest
was what first brought them together. Later as scholarly zeal
ripened into a more tender sentiment, they exchanged their
first kiss behind their secret rendez-vous, a brass statue of the
pioneer erected by the Junior Chamber of Commerce and la-
beled: "In reverent memory of our Danny Boone, blazer of new
trails for the Youth of America."
At the christening of the first fruit of their married love,
Boone's parents insisted that every one, including the con-
gregationalist pastor, wear a Daniel Boone masquerade costume.
After weakly protesting, the pastor declared, "The way I figure
it, fellows, the eleventh and chief Commandment is to be a Good
Sport." With these words he donned has big furry Boone cap
with the rest of the revelers and ever afterwards referred to the
occasion as "the most glamorous night of my life."
Boone's mother was promoted to assistant secretary of the
local Y.W.C.A. the same year that his father rose to the rank of
calisthenics instructor at the Y.M.C.A. Taking these new honors
not as selfish privileges but as a spur to new duties, the happy
pair organized a community rally which successfully raised funds
for a new gymnasium, called "The Daniel Boone Fireproof Gym."
Soon came the gala inauguration of the new structure; their
loftiest dream was about to be fulfilled. Out of sheer excitement
over the great day, Boone's fattier lit the first and last cigarette
of his life, exclaiming "Wheel" There ensued the first and last
quarrel ever to trouble their affectionate comradeship when
Boone's mother knocked the offending commodity from her hus-
band's lips. It fell amid the open gasoline cans left by the
chauffeurs.
As the Congregationalist pastor put it in his simple and
dignified funeral sermon, their ever cheerful service to the youth
movement had accomplished so much good in so short a time
that their lives were full and rich even though their passing was
tragically young.
"And at least," he concluded, "they passed away on the
same night, always together up to the end; and I, as their
spiritual adviser at the christening of their first-born, can assure
you that this is how they would have wished to go: together."
When the orphan reached his sixteenth birthday, he was
solemnly invited to his uncle's apartment-house basement.
There, with one hand reposing on the head of the Great Dane
203
PETER VIERECK
named Sitting Bull and the other hand on his nephew's shoulder,
the janitor looked Boone straight in the eye and said:
"Boone, you'rfe going to be a man now. That means you'll
meet girls; and especially when you go to college with all those
cocktail parties after football games, you'll have to face strange
and new temptations, just as the earlier folks did at Babylon.
Since your Dad and Mom are no longer 1 with us, it's my job to
warn about that side of life. Read the books of Fourier and the
Apocalypse. I kind of can't put into words what I mean by
temptation and by being well, clean-limbed; there's things
we know and never talk about; but when you're older you'll
catch on to what I mean, get me?
"Well, every time you meet temptation and you feel as
how you can't control yourself one minute more, that's the time
to ask yourself just one simple question, which'H never fail you,
and that question is: Would Daw&el Boone have done it? If
you'll never forget that question, you'll always be a young gent,
like your Dad would've been proud of if he was here today and if
only he hadn't touched tobacco during that awful Babylonian
party at the opening of the Boone Gym."
In the autumn in which the janitor was to proclaim Arm-
ageddon, Boone was beginning his Freshman year. He despised
his uncle for being what Boone's room-mate called "bourgeois."
The janitor was always too conscientiously busy (as Boone com-
plained to his room-mate) at some homely domestic task, such
as tinkering with a grim smile at the safety valves of the'
boiler system or jotting things in that prosaic-looking diary into 1
which no one ever bothered to glance.
"I'm not like my uncle/ 5 Boone would boast in front of his
mirror; "I'm a Free Spirit; I defy all sorts of conventions."
In contrast, the janitor regarded Boone, the last of his clan,
wifli hero-worship. Doubtless there were gloomy moments when^
the uncle considered the nephew too recklessly advanced in his
mildly agnostic views on religion. But the janitor, too, as he
mellowly remembered, he, too, had doubted the Apocalypse in
his youth. What of it? In the end at Armageddon, such a rosy-
cheeked Prodigal Son would undoubtedly see the light and
join the shock-troops of the angels. So the uncle, with -the tol-
erant smile of Us Who Know, refused to worry even when he
received the following letter from Boone:
"Uncle, I want you to know I have become an ICONO-
QLAST. I feel completely emancipated from medieval supersti-
204:
PETER VIERECK
tions. Progress is all that matters, and we American youth
should wake up and race in its front ranks."
Soon thereafter 1 , as the uncle had hoped, Boone wrote a
hasty correction to this letter:
Dear Uncle,
In my last letter I was an intellectual. But anything be-
comes extreme if it goes too far. So my philosophy now is:
sound mind in sound body. On account of this philosophy about
being sound in body as well as intellectual, I'm going to take up
football.
I don't mean I'll really play it, but I'll watch it from our
new stadium. For this a fellow needs a pennant. Too bad I
don't have enough money to buy one. Also a fellow needs la
coat. It sure would be nice to have one.
Your loving nephew,
Boone.
P.S.I. I looked at the works of that foreign writer whom
you told me to read: Fourier 1 . Deep stuff; makes a fellow think.
Just like Kipling's poem about "If."
P.S.2 Thanks for all those pages you sent me from the
Apocalypse about "the Beast that was, and is not, and yet is."
I've put both Fourier and the Apocalypse at the top of my "must"
list, the way I would any book you so kindly suggest. I am look-
ing forward awfully to reading both of them just as soon as I
get free time again: say, after I graduate. College keeps me too
busy to read books.
And still more recently:
"Dear uncle, I am taking a course in government I am get-
ting ever mo?e Liberal, and it feels wonderful. It all ties up
with what is called the Industrial Revolution, which alone
caused free government by the man in the street without losing
sight of the fact that commerce is the lif eblood of trade. Natur-
ally by 'liberty' I mean true liberty, not the kind which is always
debunking but the kind which is sound,"
As a postcript to this last letter:
"I'm so emancipated I don't mind at all that my own uncle
is only a janitor. Naturally I won't go too far out of my way to
mention it at my frat house. But don't think for a moment I'm
ashamed of it. I believe in equality and in ignoring class lines."
The small gray janitor replied to this postscript with the
205
PETER VIERECK
most magnificent gesture of his life. He sent his nephew a check
to buy a racoon coat.
The uncle's profound understanding of the academic world
derived from the movies. Over twenty years ago this source had
informed him that all unperverted young gentlefolk are panting
to become "collegiate" by wearing a "coonskin coat." Hollywood
found in these oversized coats the same magic that totemistic
savages find in the beast-skins used during puberty rites. The
coats conveyed a borrowed virility to the young campus war*
riors who could afford to pay for them. The janitor's mysticism
responded joyously to this shaggy pageantry of football rallies.
In his basement he prayed for the day when his nephew, attain-
ing manhood, might join in the great furry ritual, preferably
accompanied by a torchlight parade under a full moon. Mean-
while, America's coonskin folklore died out even in Hollywood
with the death of the 1920s but not in the mind of the gray
janitor, for he saw no new movies after that era.
His last movie, a romance about higher education in a speak-
easy, widened his esthetic horizon by introducing him to a dare-
devil musical discovery called "syncopation." This sang out at
him through a tireless young lady in short skirts with a boyish-
bob hair-do and a hat shaped like a flower pot Snuggling with
hip flasks and fellow scholars in the rumble seat of a fast car,
defying the gods at a speed of 40 miles an hour, she was raced
from saxophone serenades to dance marathons and spent her
spare time sitting on flagpoles or swallowing goldfish. Blushing
prettily, the janitor recalled for the rest of his life every word
of one of her songs in America's new music:
If it's naughty to rouge your Zips,
Twist your shoulders and shake your hyps;
Let a lady confess, "I wanna be ba-a-a-ad/^
"Dear Diary, never again a movie," he had written after
staggering home from this; "they'll get theirs all right at Arma-
geddon. Tobaccogindamnation."
The check for Boone's raccoon coat (plus certain more fur-
tive expenditures for nitroglycerin) used up the janitor's modest
bank account. Liberated from these material bonds of the uni-
verse, he decided to bring about its spiritual climax at once:
doomsday. If only somebody would first make a martyr of him
by doing him some monstrous or even petty injustice! For mar-
tyrdom was the surest and most traditional route to sainthood.
206
PETER VIERECK
In the past he had tried to provoke martyrdom by muttering
insults to his superintendent. Each time, the only reaction of
the latter, who never listened carefully to such blurred mum-
blings, was to force a cigar upon the mumbler and call him "my
pet character." Mr. Jones was proud of "my tolerant under-
standing temperament."
How the pious gray janitor prayed and prayed for persecu-
tion at the hands of Gaylord Jones! Always had prayed for it
but today more than ever because this evening Mr. Jones was
scheduled to inspect the basement. "Dear Diary: here I sit,
waiting for Goliath to storm my basement and thinking maybe
it's been plain petty of me to bear grudges. I'll forgive him,
that's what I'll do, and save his life and call off The Explosion
at the last minute if only hell do me that one little favor of mar-
tyrizing me. But if he still refuses to persecute me. . ."
The little janitor was not an authority on blowing up build-
ings. He had never blown up any buildings before. So he
played safe or, rather, unsafe by using all possible methods at
the same time.
First and simplest, he began feeding the boilers to the burst-
ing point this evening, removing all safety valves. But this would
not have done enough damage alone. For more than twenty
years, with the money he saved by giving up movies, he had
found subtle ways of buying and hiding explosives. He included
dynamite because the dramatic connotations of its name appealed
to him. He included other varieties with more prosaic chemical
names but even more deadly. Each seedling of doomsday he
nursed with the same impartial gentleness. "My roses of wrath,"
he called them in his diary. At other times, more often of late,
he called them "God's roses of wrath."
While waiting for Mr. Jones this evening (an event heralded
in Dear Diary with initial captials as "the Descent to the Base-
ment"), the janitor killed time by piling angry roses into an
unflaming corner of the furnace. There the fire would not reach
the explosives until after a time^span, a span long enough to
coincide neatly with the time needed for the steam to blow up
the boiler system. He calculated that this assault on two fronts
would storm even so Satan-protected an apartment house.
,At this moment, as the janitor stood at the furnace calculat-
ing, J. Gaylord Jones made his long awaited Descent He was
pondering the advertising man's demand for hot radiators and
was thinking to himself something like this;
207
PETER VIERECK
"Oh these tenants! You'll never know what they'll quibble
about next; when it isn't the cold, it's the cockroaches. Want to
live like sultans; think they're too fancy for ceilings that leak
even a tiny bit and wiring that gives them even the tiniest elec-
tric shocks and good old pipes that flood their kitchens not even
an inch deep. But I show 'em; the landlord still has a few demo-
cratic rights left; I let 'em wait a full month each time before I
phone any plumber or electrician. Ha! might as well enjoy this
housing shortage while it lasts."
To his surprise Mr. Jones found the boiler's already glowing
with heat. Tonight was the night: ecstatically the janitor was
heaping ever more coals into the furnace as if officiating in some
orgiastic ceremony, a fire-god frenzy. Perched on his left shoul-
der was the parrot who had no name, shrieking at the flames,
while the Great Dane trotted back and forth at his master's side
with ever more excited yelps.
Normally the superintendent was observant. But so amazed
was he to discover heat in any of his agency's apartment houses,
that he overlooked two related facts. First, all safety valves
were missing. Second, none of this heat reached the complaining
advertising man or any other apartments; for days the janitor
had been sawing the connecting pipes in half and soldering them
shut.
"That's the spirit we like to see, busy as a honey bee,"
rhymed the superintendent to break the conversational ice. "Just
thought I'd drop by for a gab-fest. The corporation likes me to
be kind of a big brother to its personnel. Any favor I can do for
you?"
"So Lucifer has come to spy on God again," was the quick
reply. "Martyrize me; that's the only favor I need. Persecute
me right now; I stand ready. The oceans will taste like lemon-
ade. Everywhere lots of anti-lions, all around."
The mumbling was so faint and slurred that, as usual, Mr.
Jones could not understand it. But politely he pretended to;
"Certainly, certainly, whatever you say. And I suppose
you'd like me to stroke Sitting Bull. Children and dogs always
love me."
The Great Dane growled so malevolently and the parrot
screamed so warningly that Mr. Jones hastily withdrew his hand.
"I feel like browsing around a bit, instead. See you've painted
two posters on the walls. I'm a great one for art myself, and
inspiration, and all those things. If there's one thing I can't
stand, it's a Babbitt; that's why I always lived in the State of
208
PETER VIERECK
New York; you couldn't drag me with ten horses to the Middle
West The pen is mightier than the sword any day of the week."
Getting no response, he began assessing the janitor's two
drawings esthetically, speaking half to himself:
"Now, I go for paintings I can feel. They've got to hit me
where I LIVE. This first poster really hits the jackpot with those
gold and white sketches of harps and wings. Mind if I read what
it says underneath? Ha, it says: 'List of the Saved. First, Boone.
Second, Setting Bull. Third, the parrot who hath no name/
Very nice, very nice. But hmmm, under the flaming red poster
on the other wall you've written: "List of Those Who Die To-
night. First and most of all, the superintendent. Second, Mimi,
the Great Whore of Babylon. Third, myself in her repentent
arms. Fourth, the advertising man because of all those giggles in
my coal bin. Fifth, the universe.* Hmmm, wonder which super-
intendent you mean; must be that has-been whose job I got as
reward for my secret report on how I caught him mollycoddling
the tenants. Well, I'll always back a practical joke to razz some
has-been; your' second poster, the humorous one, suits me even
better than the first."
"A Beast will rise up out of the sea," recited the janitor,
"having seven heads and ten horns and the name of blasphemy.
War in heaven. And a Sign, great and marvelous. Seven angels
victorious over the Beast, singing the song of the Lamb."
Inside the janitor's skull, the overlooked little restless cell
had now conquered all the other 1 brain cells, which no longer
dared hold back its will-to-power.
"The sea; sure, the lamb and the sea. Chin up, man; easy
does it," oozed the superintendent, having no inkling of what
was up but wanting to soothe the nice little fellow. "I must say
I've never seen a boiler puff so with heat. More than they de-
serve upstairs. Better not give 'em too much service, or they
might forget who's holding the whip-hand this year, we or they."
The soldering-shut of pipes and removal of safety valves and
excess of fuel and steam were creating an eerie atmosphere of
vast pressure, striving and pushing and ever hotter. Pressing
and puffing.
"Since your bad nerves come from overworking for them,"
continued Gaylord Jones, "you'll always find me out there slug-
ging for the rights of the basement against all the upper floors.
I've my own ways of finding out the income of everybody up-
stairs, and beLIEVE me, -they're all duds. I've also ways of
rewarding your personal loyalty to me. I'll have your basement
209
PETER VIERECK
air-conditioned while you enjoy a paid vacation in a sunny cheer-
ful nerve-clinic."
The superintendent beamed with relief. Surely his white-lie
promises of air-conditioning and paid leave had now ended the
crisis.
"Uh huh," replied the small gray janitor, reverting from his
Apocalyptical tone to a tone of respectful meekness. "Uh huh.
Pardon me, Sir, while I keep the fire from going down." Into an
unflaming sector of the furnace he threw a thick wooden box.
Unknown to his visitor, the box contained an additional batch of
assorted explosives.
"Guess I'll be trudging along now." Nonchalantly the sup-
erintendent was strolling toward the cool safety of the basement
door.
In an instant the janitor's small body was shielding the door-
knob. Contemptuously the towering Mr. Jones shoved him aside.
But at once the still more gigantic Great Dane bounded to his
master's aid with a roar of rage. A pair of enormous jaws closed
upon the visitor's right ankle. The fangs closed with coy self-
restraint, not quite drawing blood but with just enough pressure
to hint what they could do.
"Greatwhoreofbabylon," commented the shrieking parrot
who had no name, "Doomdoomdoomsday. Iwantacracker."
During the rest of the conversation, Sitting Bull kept his
strategic grip on the ankle. Every time the arude's owner tried
to escape, the jaws began tightening. Meanwhile, the practical-
minded janitor bolted the thick basement door. Through it no
shout for help could reach the apartments upstairs, where the
freezing ad man was at this moment opening a new package of
paper handkerchiefs.
Mr. Jones resorted to applied psychology, confident, patient,
persuasive:
"Of course, you know you don't mean to harm anybody.
Only a bit tired. The old nerves need a once-over; every new-
model streamlined janitor knows it's smarter to see a saw-bones
than to be pushing up the daisies. Here, smoke one of my Ha-
vanas, and let's talk it over man to man as two old colleagues of
the little old housing game."
"Visions, visions, seven heads, the breaking of nations. Who
dares to laugh at me now behind my back? Who'll try to boss me
around in my basement? For tonight I officially predict the
explosion of Satan Jones and myself and the whole universe
except for Boone and Sitting Bull and the parrot who hath no
210
PEIE* VJERECK
name. Everything is completely official. Whoever is not with
me is against me."
Boone had missed the great game.
The unusual expense of the raccoon coat, so difficult to or-
der, so utterly out of fashion, used up the check from his uncle.
After the nephew had also bought the football pennant on which
he set his heart, not a penny was left to buy a ticket to the foot-
ball game itself. But he vowed to act afterwards as if he had at-
tended. He planned to lose himself among the spectators after
the game and to act as if he belonged among them and to wave
his pennant with neither more nor less fervor than they. What if
he ran into any girls he knew and they stared at him with scorn
or half -suspicion? Well then, he would say, "Some game!" and
stare right back, just as normally as ever you please, as if to say:
"You can plainly see MY conscience is clear. But what
about YOURS?"
How proud the uncle would have been, had he seen the
nephew today! How splendid was Boone's splendor as he waited,
haughty and raccoon-decked, outside the barred ticket-gate,
wistfully hearing the football cheers inside the stadium! Un-
bowed, there he stood in his outer darkness, not with gnashing
of teeth but like an emperor lordly even in exile.
At last the game was over. Boone's college happened to
be the winner. He waved his pennant, yelled, and infiltrated
into the core of the crowd leaving the stadium. Sincerely he
felt himself into the role of the well-seated patriot who has been
watching every pigskin nuance and yelling all afternoon. Sound-
ing convincingly hoarse kept him too busy to wonder why the
crowd seemed interested in other questions than whether he had
seen the game.
Back to the campus he marched with the victors. There he
paced haughtily up and down the soggy lawns. For hours.
Though cold, the day was not yet cold enough for such a weighty
overcoat. But functionalism be damned! Half smothered, he
had been wearing it until evening now, so furry and sleek and
black and imperial, up and down the campus for all to behold.
"Cracker!" the parrot was shrieking at this very same mom-
ent. "Beastlambwhore. Bab-bab-babylon."
"I understand," the understanding superintendent was say-
ing. "So we disagree. Let's be frank about it. But let's be
reasonable about it also; let's agree to disagree, like in the Brit-
211
PETBR VIERECK
ish parliament. But say, it's getting late; must be time for me
to hit the old feedbag again. You know how wives are, haha,
about waiting late with hot grub; guess I'll head for home now
and call it a day. OUCH, get that damn dog off my leg!"
By now, both men were talking past each other; but by
talking alternately, they still kept up the convention of address
and reply. It was the janitor's turn, and he "replied" to the sup-
erintendent:
"A new calendar! You are now listening to an official an-
nouncement. No more seven days in the week. No more seven
anywhere. Because the Beast has seven heads. A new national
holiday to celebrate my parrot's birthday. He who hath no name.
No months allowed more than 29 days each unless they pay tri-
bute to my nephew. Sitting Bull as Santa Glaus, dressed in a
red robe with sleigh bells that jingle. No anti-lions allowed to
swim in the lemonade if they laugh at me openly or in secret."
"Seven days; so that's it? Your health, your hmmm
mental hygiene, can't stand working all seven days? Why didn't
you tell me sooner? From now on I need your work only six
days a week. In fact, you've my permission to go away right
now. This very minute."
Back and forth paced the nephew, from lawn to lawn. The
football game was long over. It was a nipping evening in late
autumn, ever cooler. Perhaps cool enough, after all, to justify
his coat.
"Big unclean Fleshpot of Babylon. Destroy, destroy. Mani-
curist across the street Kill and kill. They're sending thought-
waves against me from the fourth dimension. Whore, whore,
whore of Babylon. Kill, kill, kill."
"Kinkillkillacracker. Cxackerofbabylon. Iwantawhorewhore-
whore. Iwantacracker crackercracker . ' '
"How about Atlantic City? A really long rest. For as long
as you feel like it. Now, hold on; don't worry about expenses.
Old J.G-J. takes care of such details. The stork never blest my
wife and me with little packages from heaven so I like to think
of all my little janitors and their Great Danes also and their
parrots, too; that is, if they have parrots the way I would think
of my own dear children. Now if you and that nice hard-working
dog will only let me get out of this building quick, then I can get
you all that parrot, too that parrot's playing on your team,
too, isn't he? can get you all a whore; no, I mean a cracker
no, I mean can buy you some presents, yes presents, wonderful
presents; excuse my nervousness, slip of the foot I mean, slip of
212
PETER VIERECK
tongue; losing my foot on things I mean, losing my grip on
things, but the pain in my foot, those sharp HELP! those teeth
again."
The flames were at last penetrating the wooden boxes in the
far* end of the furnace. The pressure in the basement grew ever
intenser as the steam in the boilers seemed to be racing with the
dynamite in the furnace as to which would explode first.
"Kill and kill. Armageddon. Mimi, my thoughts are with
you in this hour. In a couple of minutes the building blows up."
Up and down strode the nephew. Lonely orphan of that
famous fire in the Daniel Boone Gym. Waving his football pen-
nant with corybantic abandon.
Why couldn't he run into any girls he knew? Why did no-
body pay attention to his shaggy new coat? It felt so wonderful
to be a Free Spirit, a Lone Wolf and young, instead of being a
slave of Bourgeois Convention like his cautious gray uncle. To
Boone, furrily triumphant, this was the greatest day in history.
"Doomsday right now. The greatest day in history. Will
you still gyp me out of being a martyr? In one minute the steam
in the boilers blows up. In one minute the dynamite in the fur-
nace explodes; universe likewise. I'll explode also but not
Boone. I also: even God must end"
"End," echoed the parrot who had no name. "Iwantadooms-
daycracker. End. End."
The Great Dane named Sitting Bull, so formidable a minute
before, began whining and cringing like a scared puppy, as if his
canine nervous system were feeling the sudden increase of pres-
sure in the bursting boiler's. Feeling the animal's grip relax, the
superintendent regained his usual composure.
"Why, the way you're talking," he chided archly, "I'd almost
think you're going to blow your top."
"Oh my God!" he added a second later, noting for the first
time that the dial of the boiler system was really and truly at the
explosion point. "Then you really mean what you're saying?
And you'd rather be a martyr and pretend you're God or some-
thing than get dandy presents like an air-conditioned basement?
Oh, I'll do anything you say if you can stop the explosion. I
swear I'll make you a martyr. I'll be very tactful and under-
standing about it. Yes, yes, my friend, YOU'RE GOD"
The minute ended. The boilers exploded. The furnace ex-
ploded. The explosives exploded. The apartment house came
to an end. So, of course, did the universe (because in an arbi-
213
PETER VIERECK
trary cosmos a little gray janitor did happen to turn out to be
God).
The whole universe and all things in it. The end. No more
stench of earth to excruciate the perfumed stars. No more stars
either. End of all, with one inscrutable exception: up and down
strode the unharmed nephew of God, heeled by an ethereal parrot
and the wraith of a Great Dane. Triumphant in his raccoon-
skin coat, round and round he strode on the empty air where
once had been a campus. Round and round and up and down.
Forever now, through an eternity of repetition,
In his sleek and glossy new coat.
214
SEVEN POEMS
William Jay Smith
ELEGY
For Bateman Edwards, died September 1, 1947
I stood between two mirrors when you died,
Two mirrors in a dimly lighted hall,
Identical in all respects.
Two mirrors face to face reflecting endlessly
Reflection's end.
The wind had blown a few faint notes upon a pipe,
And died away, or seemed to die.
I stood between two mirrors in the hall.
Outside, the wheels had cut the gravel, and the sun-
Flower* nodded to the sun; the air was still.
The deer that browsed upon a distant hillside
Lifted his antlers like a coral tree
Forgotten in midsummer undersea.
And from the delicate dark bridges which the spider
Spun from branch to branch,
In desolation hung
One leaf, announcing autumn to the world.
The world that evening was a world of mirrors
Where two great dragons from opposing caves,
Mirror their eyes and mirror all the scales
Of their long bodies and their giant tails,
Emerged. And all that had seemed hum#n was confined
In terror in the limits of the mind,
And coiled, uncoiled within my memory.
In, your sudden dying you became the night
Which I must add to darkness now
215
WILLIAM JAY SMITH
To make the morning bright,
To have day break, and daybreak
Melt the mirrors. But I know
You cannot hear me, hear me, O
Dear friend, good morning and good night.
CHRYSANTHEMUMS
I had, here in the room before you came,
A dark delight announcing as with drums,
Your coming, and the closing of the door,
Upon a table top, obese and tame,
These lion-headed flowers,
Four chrysanthemums.
A painter would have loved them, and been glad
To have them within reach: to see
Is mad, and madness teaches
Nothing if not love.
Great kings lay murdered in the flower beds:
1 had, upon a table in this room,
Their 1 four crowned heads.
In life we are often lonely, wanting death,
A kind of love, not quite
Like this, a somnolence of light,
A glory which is native to the sun,
A poem in the landscape brooded on.
Dark springs, how dark;
And from the world's four corners, flowers
Like the heads of shaven Danes,
Huge and listless lions' manes,
Look down upon us where we lie
In darkness now, and overpowered die
Of love, of love.
216
WILLIAM JAY SMITH
BALLAD FROM BEDLAM
'Let Huldah bless with the &lkworm the ornaments of the
Proud are from the bowells of their Betters, 3
Christopher Smart
The firefly corresponds in urgent letters;
He is repaid in the notes of the nightingale.
The gullet of the shark rides out the gale:
Our ornament derives from the bowels of our betters.
My grandfather, Billy Smith, had an Irish setter's
Piercing eye, and a temper quicker than quail.
Our ornament derives from the bowels of our betters.
Faith was the name of his wife; she was hard as a nail:
Undertakers are the real go-getters;
Give me the Glory Road, the Oregon Trail,
A worm to clothe the Proud, a peak to scale:
Our ornament derives from the bowels of our betters-
God bless the hermit crab, the Veteran
Of Foreign Wars, the intestine of the whale,
The old man's rattle, and the infant's wail:
Our ornament derives from the bowels of our betters.
WATER COLOR
The boy in swimming is out to prowl,
Break wind and water round the orange rind,
Naked trip and nip the homing owl,
Not unlike the hawk, unlike the hind.
In cobwebbed caves lie poisoned arrowheads;
The sunlight strikes the water like a gong.
Marigolds are reeling in their beds;
All the clocks in Switzerland are wrong.
Bobbypins for little Goldenlocks,
And for the happy fisherman a fly.
The coffee bubbles over on the rocks:
Draw the shade against the morning sky.
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE SUNSET
Heir apparent, prince of purest majesty,
His throat a fine and fluent question mark
217
WILLIAM JAY SMITH
Of eloquent and almost aquiline intensity,
The swan invades the pool, the polar dark,
And glides into a hall of mirrors, all
Reflecting him: the world is destitute.
Let every eye then follow him forever
Down marble passages, in golden rooms,
Until this work of reverence is done.
All one can remember is a river,
And a mother who must mourn a dear, dead son,
Summer and the swan, the cold, white plumes.
HER ARRIVAL
On ocean's peacock blue, on seas of flame,
Across the cold Atlantic, crowned, and foam-
Encircled, comes the girl who bears my name,
Now moves my love toward England, and toward home.
Halyards leap with signal, time, and tide,
Ships their courses keep in claret sounds,
While earthward moves my life, my wife, my bride,
Over the sea my huntress and her hounds.
Diana, darling, quickly, death must die,
And absence, meaning death, give life, give birth.
Then let me live forever in your eyes:
They are the darkest corners of the earth.
SEASCAPE
Each abandoned shell
A habitation and a cell,
Abode and refuge to a desert band,
My eye moves with them, and the beach tonight
Goes forth to greet the solemn anchorite,
The hermit crab out walking on the sand,
Bonsoir, Bernard 1 J Ermite.
218
WILLIAM JAY SMITH
Tonight there are other lovers in our bed,
And those are skeletons upon the shelf.
I I am a stranger here myself,
Ben Franklin in a cap of marten fur
Among Europe's powdered heads.
A wind from the sea; the crab darts
Back into his hole, and home is where one starts,
The barbarous ocean breaking on the reef,
All that internal structure of belief.
The world that is outside that is the heart's.
219
THE AMATEURS
Howard Nemerov
"OF COURSE something must be done. That could have been said
six months ago." Anna jingled her golden bracelet, pulling it by
one of its bangles round and round her wrist. "You all sit here
and say something must be done, somebody has to do something
no wonder his life's a mess, for he does get to hear about it,
you know."
"Will you stop rattling that bracelet, please?"
"Does it make you nervous, Osmin? You've been very easily
upset, since you started working for Time/'
"Me nervous? Ha. I've noticed that compulsive little ges-
ture of yours with the bracelet, Anna, I've seen it for a long time
now. You're sure you're all right? I mean, quite certain, are
you?" Osmin, a lean young man, dark-complected and with silky
black hair, settled back in the corner of the sofa. His insolent
smile seemed to suggest that he had scored a hit, a very palpable
hit with his remarks; but no, it was only the smile he automati-
cally assumed after every sentence, and his friends had long since
stopped looking for the profundity which, it was implied, lay hid-
den in every trivial observation.
"Why not beat me, dear," said Anna, twirling the bracelet.
"I only do it to annoy."
"If you would only stop it," said Malibron, turning as he
always did a silver ring on his fat little finger, "we could get back
to the question of Allan. While it's certain that nothing will be
done," he added, "I think our concern for our friend is kind and
amusing, in a grubby sort of way."
"A wife, or a mistress or even a job . . ." Nancy suggested
vaguely. She frowned, then smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
"Oh yes, yes indeed " Malibron picked up her words. "But
that's typical, absolutely typ-ic-al. The wife, the mistress, the
220
HOWARD NEMEROV
job or the needle, the bottle, the grand tour. And let me say
I've seen it happen before. You don't know, none of us know,
what would be good really good for him. So like a grand shop
window, we offer the stock solutions, the ready-made things that
are valuable in case of troubles like his. And like the manager,
well-disposed on Christmas Eve, we come out, very grand, rub-
bing our hands together, and we say to this poor, poor urchin,
who is rubbing his nose on the glass, 'well, son, what do you
want? Just say the word, 'anything at all for we are God, you
know, we are very grand and we want to treat you right*. And
the poor bloody little urchin "
"I think, somehow, we've heard this before," Anna said, pre-
tending to yawn.
"In somebody's book, wasn't it?" asked Osmin.
After a silence, Anna said, "We might give him Angel.
Would you like that, Angel? YouVe never met him, have you?"
"Never met Allan Hastings, Angel?" asked Osmin. "My God,
you've got a treat coming. Do you like simple people I mean,
but really simple?"
Angel uncoiled herself slightly at the other end of the couch.
"I don't know," she said. "It's so long since I've met any." This
got a laugh, for Angel was still 'new' enough in this little circle
to be taken for a wit, a phase that would not last long, since she
was undeniably as serious as she was beautiful. Also she was
younger than the rest, and already their appreciation of her be-
gan to give way to their somewhat fussy pedantry, which they
called 'introducing her to things' and 'making arrangements'.
"Well, you'll meet one tonight," Osmin said. "Presently hell
come in through that door "
"Osmin will now favor us with a 'character'," muttered
Nancy, getting up. "I'll go in the kitchen, Anna, and fix drinks."
She turned to Angel. "When you've heard this as often as I
have, dear "
"He'll come in through that door," said Osmin loudly. "Hand-
some as a somewhat decayed Greek god, neatly and not at all
originally dressed you won't suspect in the least, until he slides
on the throw-rug in the entrance " he pointed to the rug. "He
won't fall down, not quite, but as he recovers he will smile
apologetically, take off his hat and look at it as though it had
suddenly been invented in his hands. He will say nothing. He
will sit down, still with that smile on his face, and he will listen.
Like a spectator at a tennis match he will turn his face to the
person who has the "ball at every instant The quality of his
221
HOWARD NEMEROV
listening is respect, even devotion, coupled it seems with the
most imbecile lack of understanding "
"That's about enough, Osmin," said Anna.
"Oh, no. Enough? Never. He is simple exquisitely but
deep, you know, profound. And when he does say something,
everyone attends, deeply, profoundly. 'What about death?' he
will say, possibly, 'what about that?' And this, in our complex
little group, is a triumph, is a success. 'Ah,' someone will say,
'why didn't I think of that?' Oh, he has, Hastings has, the secret,
the key, to all things. He calls Satan by his first name, whatever
that may be, he appears the confidant of angels no pun, darling,
was intended the familiar of principalities, thrones and domina-
tions, the friend of seraphim, the toady and sycophant and cour-
tier of God himself all because he has said, 'what about death'."
"Aren't you getting somewhat bitter, Osmin?" asked Anna.
It was true that Osmin had become very serious in delivering
his 'character' more, even, than serious. His breath came faster,
his little smile broadened disclosing sharp, even radulate teeth
altogether his expression seemed fit as much for biting as for
speech.
"And after all," said Nancy, who had come back from the
kitchen in time to hear the last remarks, "he is so right. What
about death, indeed?"
"But when Nancy says it," Osmin laughed, "it's not nearly
so impressive, it hasn't got that je ne sais quoi " he kissed his
hand mockingly up at the ceiling, and said in a basso prof undo:
"What about death, what about that? That's the way it should
be done."
"My God, Osmin," said Nancy quietly, "how I should enjoy
watching your death agony." She set down a tray of drinks on
the coffee table, conscious that everyone was staring at her. That
sort of remark, everyone silently agreed, was carrying things just
too far. After all, you had to know where the game leaves off
and becomes something entirely different.
"Well, really," said Osmin at last, "that's a revelation, isn't
it?" Osmin had always, if the truth be told, been frightened of
Nancy. A year ago, he had been "very serious," as the phrase
goes, about her. But something no one of their friends knew
just what had happened to break that up decisively and in an
instant. And what it was, actually, was that Nancy, who was
taller and stronger than Osmin, had hit him one evening as the
climax to a disagreeable interview which he had intended for a
seduction. The blow had been more ways damaging than he
222
HOWARD NEMEROV
cared to recall. Her ring had torn his cheek slightly but worse,
she had stood over him and dared him to strike back. A matter
for quick decision, and he had decided for prudence and regret-
ted it nightly ever since.
Now he stood up. "You have that quiet bestial charm," he
said, and his smile stretched itself to its automatic suggestion of
the greatest profundity "the sort of thing that Orpheus was
able to tame, O virgin and brute." And before any reply could
be made Osmin bowed slightly and retired to the bathroom,
where he noted without surprise that his hands were trembling
terribly.
Of the friends, only Nancy fully appreciated Osmin's remark
as referring not to the immediate scene but to an evening fully
a year removed in time; thus through her local resentment she
admitted a gratitude almost tender to him for this insight deeper
for being accidental into the heart of another, into, as she put
it, a 'foreign power'. She saw at this moment, she felt, deeply
into Osmin.
"Like certain saints," she said with prim lightness, "who
posthumously reveal the image of the Virgin imprinted on their
livers, in color." This too, was very imperfectly understood by
the company.
"You see," said Malibron to Angel, "this is entirely the result
of talking about Hastings. We never behave this way when we
talk about other people."
Angel, however, looked very serious and said, "Why did you
say that, Nancy?"
"Oh, why does one say anything? I don't know."
"But it was unkind. He might just be very frightened of
dying." Angel made this remark with the most unaffected simplic-
ity of voice and manner.
"God," Anna said softly. "Another one."
"The perfect match for Hastings," said Malibron. Angel
blushed. "How charming," Malibron said. "To blush, I mean.
When was it, Anna ten years ago at least the last time some
one blushed in this room?"
"Oh, please," Anna cried in a kind of disgusted supplication.
"Please stop." And then, to Angel: "You don't understand, I
know. But it's a fact that no one else understands either, and I
think no one really wants to."
"About Hastings?" Angel asked.
"Yes, about Hastings," Nancy broke in. "And that's enough.
Night after night, and week after week, for six months now. Soon
223
HOWARD NEMEROV
he'll walk in. And then next week Angel will have something
to say, she'll have her opinion of Hastings too. Then will you be
happy?"
"You see," Anna said, still to Angel, "he was, well, a quite
ordinary person until one night "
"Oh nonsense," said Malibron. "He was never ordinary. He
simply did the things you expected from "
"How absurd. Are you going to pretend he was some kind
of genius, then?"
"No, simply a person who "
"Well, what's wrong with the word ordinary then?"
"Oh, never mind. Go right ahead."
"Critic," Anna threw him the word with fastidious loathing.
"As I said," she went on, "a quite ordinary person. Then, one
night. . . ." She paused and looked at Nancy and at Malibron,
with a look that seemed to say: I hadn't really intended to go
through all this again.
At this point Osmin came in again, apparently as perky as
ever. He sat down next to Angel, took her hand and said in a
conspirator's hoarse whisper: "Whatever they tell you will be a
lie. You see, I really know him."
And now the doorbell rang.
While Anna went to answer the door, Nancy stepped back
into the kitchen. They could hear, now, deliberate steps upon the
stair, ascending. Malibron looked steadily at Angel, who had
simply let her hand remain in Osmin's possession, but entirely as
though unaware. She was, he considered, a remarkably beautiful
girl, tall and very thin, with a serious face and golden hair. For a
moment Malibron, who was not usually sensitive to such things,
felt a tension in himself, an anxiety, a perturbation, a fear. It
was indescribable. She is so ... uncontaminated, he put it melo-
dramatically to himself ^so unknown. For what, after all, do we
know about her?
She came so much they knew of a rich Boston family.
She had run away to New York, and Angel was not her real
name. She lived with another girl in what must have been the
most unmitigated povetty, and gave lessons in needlework
where and when she could get them. Nancy had met her through
friends whose children took lessons of her, and under these aus-
pices Angel had been introduced into the circle. But that was all.
No one, except perhaps Nancy, knew where she lived, she never
met any of them singly but only in the group, where she seemed
invariably affable though slightly abstracted, as if thinking of
224
HOWARD NEMEROV
something that had to be done later, when she left them.
Just now it seemed to Malibron oddly important that the
scene should be as it was, with Osmin holding Angel's hand, with
the heavy steps coming up the stairs, with Anna impatiently
twisting the door knob, waiting. If I knew, now, he thought, I
could say to them; This is the last time that but though he felt
this with almost obsessive intensity he could not make out what
it was that seemed so ominous, what sort of "last time" he meant.
With a sigh, between boredom and desperation, he threw the
whole situation (whatever that meant to him) away. I don't want
anything to change, he thought finally. I know we're trivial,
and foolish, and even bored a good deal of the time with each
other's company and talk: but I don't want anything to change.
When people open doors, the world walks in. It tracks dirt on
the carpets, doesn't remove its hat, sits heavily on pathetic little
chairs, says the wrong thing at once. You feel you've been accus-
tomed to insolence, but this is new. Compared to this, Osmin is
a harmless child. Having said so much to himself, Malibron felt
rather stupid. One knows so well, he added, that nothing will
change.
Osmin meanwhile looked down at Angel's hand, that rested
so limply in his. He noticed with revulsion that the nails were
dirty not much but a little, which to him was worse than if they
had been coal black. He could not repress a shudder. Then he
saw the red weal of a recent burn that went the length of the
girl's thumb, and this seemed to him pathetic, beautiful, he want-
ed to weep over it. He really did, very much, want to weep. But
as the scream of a man wounded and in agony may, out of con-
trol, issue in a sound like laughter, Osmin knew himself for one
capable of producing, from the deepest and most genuine feelings,
only some cheap travesty, a sneer perhaps, immediately to be
misunderstood. Angel had made a lucky guess about his fear of
death: it was true, and every slur, every embarrassment, the
slightest sign of violence, at once related itself for him to his own
death, which was a confused vision in his mind both of a time
when he should not be, when his body should rot in the grave,
and of the terrible last moments when he should feel the sheets
grow cold around his legs, and be scarcely able to breathe: this
last scene appeared to him with terrible intensity and frequency
in dreams.
Our hands, he thought now, are like feeble monsters that
we send into the world, to get, and be damaged. How they take
the beatings that our greed deserves!
225
HOWARD NEMEROV
Anna pulled open the door, and Allan Hastings stood in the
entrance, smiling uncertainly. Angel could not for the moment
see what the fuss had been about. He was indeed fairly good-
looking, quite tall but not slender almost powerfully built in
fact. And he did not, as he came in, trip or slide in the least,
though he did hold his hat somewhat (she thought) apologeti-
cally for so large and masterful a person. In his left hand he held
a brown paper bag, clutched it really as an object of the utmost
fragility and importance. Finally, still smiling, he gave the hat
to Anna it was funny, actually, she curtsied mockingly as she
took it, but he didn't notice and said Hullo Richard, to Mali-
bron, then Hullo Osmin, I hope you're well. And then his eyes,
which seemed to Angel somehow vague and unfixed in their
regard, took in and tried to focus on her hand in Osmin's. She
felt, guiltily, at this moment, that meanings were "being drawn,
alliances and divisions made, all very falsely, but it would have
been too much, now, to take her hand away. And it did not last
long; in a moment Anna had come up and introduced them. If
he was surprised at finding a stranger there, a new person, it
did not show. Unless, she thought, he's just a shade too normal,
too ordinary; and she called to mind some ridiculous bit from a
farce, about a half-wit who was coached for the first minute of an
interview the hello, the how are you, the delighted I'm sure
and kept repeating these formulae while his vis-a-vis became
more and more desperate.
"How are you," Hastings said to Nancy, who had just re-
entered the room; and Angel, as soon as he had turned round,
removed her hand abruptly from Osmin's, while he, also, moved
decorously further away.
"You're quite late," said Anna.
"Yes. I've been walking." A slight emphasis on the last
word made the reply seem to Angel the least bit pompous, as of
a person who, without saying so much, wished you to under-
stand that all his activity was significant and remarkable. Osmin
possibly felt this too, for he could not resist saying: "from going
to and fro in the eartE, and walking up and down in it."
"Forgive our literary man," Malibron brought out after a
space of silence. "What's in the paper bag?"
"Oh." Hastings seemed surprised and pleased that it should
be noticed. "Fd forgot. A present for Anna." And he gave it to
her. "It's best to bring presents," he said. "I know how it is.
Times are hard."
"Thank you, darling," Anna said, opening the bag. She look-
226
HOWARD NEMEROV
ed inside, then around at the company but especially at Osmin.
Just one word, just one smile, her glance said to him. Then she
took the bag into the kitchen. It contained a dozen eggs, six
fresh sprats, and about a pound of chop-meat. She put it all back
in the bag, which she stuffed into the refrigerator. Then, shrug-
ging her shoulders helplessly, she returned to her friends. It was
nothing, really, nothing. Times are hard. Well, what was wrong
with that? Times were hard. But people didn't bring you eggs
and fish and meat, here, to your house, did they? So plausibly,
so naturally, with such an air of humble apology for the times,
which were hard? They brought, others brought anyhow, cakes,
pastry if they came to dinner, brought something excessive and
luxurious which you wouldn't have bothered with; they didn't
come with the basic elements, did they? picturing, perhaps, the
eggs cooked morning after morning for the sullen, lonesome
breakfast, the fish she hated fish staying till they stank and
had to be thrown out?
"You forgot the bread," she couldn't" help saying as she
passed his chair. But he was listening to Nancy, and didn't hear.
Osmin heard, though, and looked sharply at her.
Nancy had been talking quietly but intensely to Hastings.
In general silence they heard her say decisively, "You've been
wasting it, all of it, letting yourself go it's like a living death. If
you don't want it, if holy poverty is what you're after, give it to
me, give it to us do something with it."
"How nice!" said Osmin bitterly, "how lovely."
Nancy sat up straight and said: "He must realize the posi-
tion. I don't care how you interpret it What he's doing is a
crime."
"And what is he doing?" This from Anna.
"His money. He gives it to people, strangers. He's just con-
fessed as much."
"And whose business is that?"
"Nancy's, obviously," Osmin said.
"I think we'd better leave this subject," said Malibron. "In-
teresting as it might prove to be,"
Nancy got up. "You don't any of you understand," she said.
"Not just little money. Big money. Hundreds of dollars, thou-
sands in a day all to people in the streets, to anyone."
Everyone now turned to stare at Hastings.
"Obviously," said Malibron, "we must all try to run into you
in the street as often as possible."
"And quite possibly," Osmin added, "one or two of the
227
HOWARD NEMEROV
people he meets in the course of a day belong to the deserving
poor."
Then a strange thing happened. Hastings took out his wallet,
opened it and handed Nancy a hundred dollar bill. He did this
gravely, without the least irony or condescension.
"Oh Jesus," said Osmin. "This is too much. Nicely begged,
Nancy, well whined for." He turned to Hastings. "Who are you,
anyhow? God? St. Francis feeding the birds? You're mad, you
know. I suppose you do know that? Do you think I'm going to
ask you for a hundred dollars? Do you want me to ask you for a
hundred dollars? That would suit you, wouldn't it?"
Quietly Hastings opened the wallet and extended a bill
between his fingers. Osmin looked at it without moving. He
laughed.
"The eccentric millionaire! Mass-produced loaves and mecha-
nized fishes!" Then, more quietly, "What is it you're trying to
buy, Allan? Give me that." He snatched the note from the ex-
tended fingers and, with the elaborate motions of the stage ma-
gician, bowing and smiling to the audience, he began tearing it
up. Pieces fluttered to the floor, while all stared and were silent.
"Don't, please," whispered Nancy. Osmin laughed again, tore
up the last of the note and ostentatiously washed his hands in
the air. "I come," he said, "at a higher price."
Malibron stared at the floor. "It was a thousand dollars," he
said quietly.
Osmin looked as if he had not understood, then turned very
pale and began to shudder uncontrollably. Then, "It doesn't
matter," he said. "Not in tHe least." And he spat on the floor
where the torn note lay.
"Bravo, bravo," cried Angel.
"Oh shut up," said Anna. "I've had enough. These are my
rooms, you are my guests either behave or get out." She turned
away and spoke more to herself than to them: "One of them
spits and the other yells bravo," she said with vast resentment.
This summary made the whole episode modulate quickly into
absurdity. Malibron laughed uncertainly, then Nancy, then even
Osrnin. Finally they all laughed except Hastings.
The laughter was succeeded, nevertheless, by a prolonged
and uncomfortable silence. Then at last Malibron spoke, with
effort and obviously painful sincerity:
"Maybe it would be a good thing, Allan, if you told us
tried to tell us what all this is about. What it means to you.
I was going to say; that we're all your friends, but since a moment
228
HOWARD NEMEROV
ago I've had some doubt of that Still, if we could . .. . do any
thing . . , understand, even if we could . . ." He left ofi help-
lessly, making odd gestures as if weighing things in his hands.
"It would be better if we forgot all this as quickly as pos-
sible," Anna said.
"No," Nancy said. "He owes us an explanation."
"He owes . . ." Osmin laughed once, in her face.
"Well, why not!" Nancy turned on him. If the hundred dol-
lars is what's bothering you, remember that you tried to buy me
for less. You think it's greed, I know, and to you that changes
everything. Well, it's not greed, it's not It's something . . . it's
. . ." her tone of controlled fury gave way to vagueness. "It is
greed," she said in a faint voice. "It is, oh it is."
"That's right, tell me your troubles." said Osmin. "Right this
way, folks," he declaimed, "this way to the sin eater's where you
will see wonders worked, miracles performed. Come, Allan
slip that camel through that needle's eye."
The sarcasm of the invitation seemed quite lost on Hast-
ings. He sat with his head slightly bent forward, hands on his
knees, and began to speak.
"It's hard to explain," he said. "You'll probably laugh. I
don't mind that, and I can't argue with you." He took a deep,
labored breath. "I'm quite well off, as you know "
"You surprise me." Osmin sniggered.
"And that may have been a lucky thing," Hastings imper-
turbably continued, "because as you also may know, I'm not very
quick or clever I haven't anything like your mind, Osmin."
"A tribute! Thank ye kind sir."
"Because I'm so slow, then, ah," he cried, "it's nothing to
be explained. I just, one day, woke up. You people, you're
clever enough when someone says to you, "The World" in
that awful and disapproving voice you know? why, you're
able to surround it quickly with thoughts. Here's a dissatisfied
creature, you say, or, Why does he tell this to me? why not to the
priests, or the kings, or the senators? But I couldn't get all that
on my tongue. And besides, really, no one said anything."
It was comprehensible. That, to them, was the worst. Despite
his incoherence there could be no pretending that he did not
make himself understood. And it grew worse. Hastings rocked
gently back and forth in his chair, as though wrestling to bring
up some poison that sickened him inwardly; but all that issued
was the word, the jagged, uncut phrase which landed among
them as though he spat rocks.
229
HOWARD NEMEROV
"I saw a blind man. My own blindness, I said to myself.
Blind men are angelic, they have merciful faces. I always
thought that. He tapped his stick in the gutter, and his face was
malicious, was guileful. The evil innocence of the face, like
some awful child. Very fat. This was a rainy day, and I stood
there. As if somebody had Said The World, in that disgusted
voice, and suddenly you felt it. You would never forget, never.
"I can't explain. It was an infection. Everything I ate tasted
hot, wicked and dirty. For weeks I could only take water and a
little bread. I went to doctors. But it always came to this:
that they were puzzled, and I had to explain. Then I knew they
were laughing. They sympathized, but they were laughing. And
I too, I was laughing at them because they were so helpless. We
never said anything, but they must have known."
Speech seemed to become more and more difficult; his
breathing, even, was rapid and unnatural.
"I said, we must cut it out, cut it away, get rid of it all. Burn
all the junk and go down in the waters, I said. Burn. I said "
He stopped, seemed to search for a word. His mouth hung
open helplessly.
"I don't know, I don't know ... I don't know."
Although Hastings had been speaking quietly enough, what
he said was evidently costing him much, in strength, even in
humility, since as so often occurs, the belief that was held with
such courage and modesty, such chastity in silence, became in
speaking of it outrageous, vulgar and illogical, absurd.
"But you don't stop, do you?" cried Nancy. "You don't
kiU yourself?"
"It's difficult to explain," he muttered. "I said that before."
He had been sitting with his head somewhat bowed. Now he
raised his face to Angel, and it could be seen that he was passing
into some phase of crisis. The muscles of his jaw were set as
though in paralysis, there was sweat on his forehead. His eyes,
Angel thought, might have been a blind man's eyes, unfocused as
though in irrelevant and universal concern,
"You mustn't ask me questions." he said, "because I'm not
good at explaining. I only know what is right ... for me." The
last words were spoken in a whisper.
"Into the fold," said Osmin with a triumphal sneer. "The
bloody Catholics have got him."
"Now that's good," said Malibron heavily. He stared at the
little crucifix on the wall, and stared at it until the others
turned to look. Anna said nothing.
230
HOWARD NEMEROV
"Osmin, you're a cheap miserable little bitch." This from
Nancy.
"But it's not enough!" Hastings suddenly said, and got to his
feet. He stood there and repeatedly struck his fist into his other
hand; yet it was not a gesture of anger or even of resentment, but
rather somehow of the conipletest helplessness. "Something de-
finite, final, conclusive . . . the end." He began to walk up and
down among them, repeating "the end" at every step. He came
to a halt finally before the crucifix almost he clicked his heels
together or made a slight bow, but this might have been uninten-
tional. "Some pain, some pain' 3 he said, with the utmost emphasis.
Malibron got up and stood behind him, expecting obviously
that he would collapse in a moment and Hastings did in fact
look like a person on the edge of some hysteria: he seemed to
struggle for breath, and his whole body trembled slightly and
incessantly.
"Some conclusive pain." He brought this out with dif-
ficulty. The others were frightened now, not knowing what to
expect. Eccentricity had definitely gone over the edge, but into
what land, what territory none of them wanted to say or know.
It was very well to talk of madness he's mad, absolutely mad,
they said when a person did something quaint and amusing;
but this eccentricity and odd humor of the blood was a joke they
had no taste for it. So that at first they were curiously grateful to
Osmin for laughing.
'Tain you talk about pain," Osmin cried. "That's a differ-
ent thing, a pain, a real pain, you understand not just the sharp
sting in the pocketbook which is the morbid essence of your affair
with Lady Poverty. But pain" he stood up and pointed at the
crucifix "the spear in your side. Allan, the nails. Do you think
you could stand up to the nails, Allan?"
"Yes, pain, what do you know of pain?" Angel cried, and
Osmin glanced gratefully at her. "Or poverty either? Have you
ever been poor? Answer me, have you ever been poor?" She
too seemed struck by a curious enthusiasm, elation, difficult to
understand or explain. There was such an excitement in her
voice as she threw him her question.
"Believe me," Osmin went on. "Believe me I know pain.
I know how to bear it"
Nancy said something aside, obviously vulgar.
"It's not bearing it that's not the thing," Hastings said in
a low voice.
I could stand that pain, even that!" Osmin said. "Even His
231
HOWARD NEMEROV
pain." Obviously he meant it, theatrical as he was. "You could
truly drive a nail through this hand." He held up his right
hand, pointed to the palm with his cigarette; then, with no more
ado, drove the burning tip into the hand and ground it out
there.
"Schoolboy stuff," said Nancy distinctly. "We did it for
amusement, winter nights at Vassar."
And there the thing might have should have ended. Osmin
was so absurd, standing there with his burnt hand still raised,
but looking otherwise white and drawn and ready to faint.
But Angel said, almost in a whisper, her eyes burning, "That
was wonderful. How many of you could stand that?" Her voice
was intense with admiration, even with love.
"If you two damnable little perverts will stop " said Anna,
just as Nancy struck Angel across the mouth.
"Look, please!" said Malibron. "That's about enough, isn't
it? Here, Osmin, I'll get some burn ointment. Where is the
burn ointment, Anna?" He hurried into the bathroom.
"Damn the burn ointment," Osmin said. "I meant every
word."
Hastings took a slow step towards him.
"You would?" he asked. "A nail?"
"I've said so," Osmin replied.
"Bluff," said Nancy. This word did it. Or would it perhaps
have gone on anyhow? At any rate, like a vault that opens to a
password in the owner's voice alone, Osmin swung to smoothly
and at once.
He knew (he said) what they thought of him; he knew
especially what Nancy thought of him. He was a buffoon, he
played the fool, he let her beat him yes, all this came out,
greatly exaggerated it was because they were unchristian, had
no charity in their hearts, they didn't realize how miserable
life was, how often he had thought of ending it, how he had
endured pain like Prometheus (yes, this famous comparison
also was used), how he studied, learned pain, was one of its
graduate students, its proficients, because in charity, in humility,
in self -loathing and abasement, turning the other cheek . . . and
so on. "You all measure your pride in pains inflicted," he said.
"You count it a good day when you come one over another
person; but I am proud of suffering pain. I will to suffer pain."
"Sexy little brute, isn't he?" said Nancy with critical ad-
miration, as though she were, in some proprietary sense, ex-
hibiting him*
232
HOWARD NEMEROV
"Do you mean it the nail?" Hastings asked harshly.
"Yes, of course I mean it. Are you frightened? Look, peo-
ple," Osmin said "I will take the pain, but he is the one who's
frightened."
"You will teach this lesson?"
"No." Anna said decisively. "No."
"Oh, yes, yes," cried Angel almost gaily. "I know where
there's a hammer and nails." She ran into the kitchen before
anyone could stop her, if anyone had proposed to do so.
Anna shook Hastings by the arm. "You don't mean it, you
don't mean to do it." He did not reply. "I won't let you do it."
"Do what?" Malibron had returned. "I couldn't find any
ointment." Just then Angel came in with a small metal hammer
and a nail. "Oh my God!" breathed Malibron. "Is this still go-
ing on?"
Hastings took the hammer and nail without looking at Angel.
Indeed he and Osmin had all this time simply stared at one
another across a space of perhaps five feet; and this silent regard
began almost to hypnotize the others.
If it had been simply drunkenness, Anna thought, it would
be easy. We'd take away the hammer, we'd have a little fight,
but it could be done. Everyone would be relaxed. But no one is
drunk, and there's nothing childish about it. They are going to do
it
The realization had by now struck them all and it seemed
to produce a paralysis. Malibron said, plaintively, "What will
it prove? What is it going to prove?" and sinking into a chair he
continued to say just this, this formula, in a voice that was be-
coming no more than a moan. Angel was evidently and horribly
ready to enjoy herself; she accompanied Osmin, holding his un-
injured hand, as he backed to the wall. Anna looked away,
looked at the crucifix. Only Nancy seemed either unaware or
incapable of believing in what would happen.
"They won't do it, it's a joke," she assured everyone in con-
fident tones; then she too began to repeat the phrase as if it were
a prayer.
Allan Hastings towered over Osmin. His face was impassive,
his eyes dull and without 'expression. He held the nail in one
hand and, in the other, the ridiculously small, dainty-looking
hammer,
Osmin put up his right hand to the wall. He was smiling,
for this scene represented, perhaps, an ultimate ambition with
him. The smile was strained, grimace-like, but the intention to
smile was unmistakably there.
233
HOWARD NEMEROV
"For you, I do it for you," he whispered to Angel, and she
whispered, "yes, I understand."
"Begin, then," Osmin cried with an awful insolence. "What
are you waiting for? I forgive you, you know. I forgive you,
I forgive all of you." More quietly, he said to Hastings: "You
called it a lesson. That's right. My God, how you will learn
from this. And me " he brought back his hand and touched
his breast dramatically "a minute of pain, and then I'll spend
my lifetime laughing while you learn about pain. I'll even let
you give me the thousand dollars again for the tuition."
"Stop." Hastings said. "Well talk about that later."
"What is it, hate? Do you hate each other?" Malibron
groaned. "What will it prove, even if he does stand up to it,
what will it prove?"
Osmin threw his hand back against the wall, and Hastings
set the nail against it.
He struck gently at first, and the nail went in easily enough.
Then it hit a bone, and Hastings seemed to go completely to
pieces. He smashed with increasing force, sometimes not touch-
ing the nail but letting the hammer thud directly on the flesh.
Osmin's eyes were open and very bright.
But it did not take long. Soon, with three final blows, given
with more strength and less accuracy than was needed, the nail
was driven fully in.
"All right," Anna said, as firmly as she could. "That's
enough. Now draw it out"
"No." Osmin said. "Let it stay a minute." He was evidently
in terrible pain, perhaps only now (as his elation subsided)
realizing the pain. "Let him look. Look, Allan. The nail. Look,
ffarr>T\ you."
Hastings had turned away, shuddering terribly. The hammer
fell to the floor.
"It's not a claw hammer," Malibron remarked. "It's not got
anything to draw nails out."
"Oh Jesus." Nancy began to laugh. It didn't seem a hysterical
laugh; but rather brilliant, bold and pertinent. Anna went to the
kitchen to get lord knows what, pliers perhaps. But before
she got out of ihe room, the plaster about the nail gave way and
Osmin simply fell in a bundle on the floor. The back of his hand
was bloodied and raw. Angel went at once to her knees and
began to fuss tenderly over him. Now that the crisis had passed,
her fierce and perverse exaltation seemed to have gone too;
she was almost matronly, there on the floor, and when she raised
her face she was crying.
234
HOWARD NEMEROV
"I'll phone a doctor," Anna said. But Malibron looked in-
tently at her and she stopped.
Hastings was standing in a far corner a neutral corner,
Anna said later with his back to the room. His fists were
clenched at his sides, his posture rigid and strained, his head
thrcfwn back.
"He's dead/' Malibron said. "Anyone can see he's dead." He
knelt by Osmin and took up the wrist, with the nail still in the
hand. "He's dead." The wrist fell stupidly back to the floor.
"Obviously dead."
They all looked at Hastings. He turned round to face them.
He seemed gripped by some spasmodic internal constriction, his
face was red, he struggled to breathe, to speak: "My God. Six
Hours. Until the ninth hour. And this. Oh my God!"
And now, unbelieving, they saw what it was inside him
that struggled, that had perhaps struggled all evening, or all his
life, to come forth. Laughter. It came up chokingly at first, then
in stronger surges it poured forth like blood from the mouth.
Helplessly, holding his stomach as if in pain, he roared with
deep, healthy laughter.
235
AN OLD SCHOOLBOOK
James Laughlin
Principles of Geometry
a long time and patiently
you have been waiting for me
to understand your lesson
are your margins still
nervous with, my messy scrawl
yes there's the square
head of my roommate Henry
Barkhausen and that one must
be Dick Pinkham who payed
me eighty cents a week
to do his Cicero and there's
fat old Mr Kenington himself
scratching his stomach on
the corner of his desk
during his lectures to us
on the figures that we never
understood but learned
236
JAMES LAtJGHUN
by rote to parrot back
to Mm in daily tests and if
we got tliem wrong we used
to run back to the classroom
during lunch fc change the
papers in his desk be-
fore he marked them marks
marks I hungered and I
yearned and burned for marks
the way the other boys
craved girls or being on the
hockey team nothing could
stop me nothing did until
I was head boy in school and
now here is my book a-
gain here after twenty
years principles of geometry
turning these pages now i
think I understand the
figures look at these paral-
lelograms & squares these
hollow shapes aren f t they
the spaces empty spaces that
spread out through all
237
JAMES LAUGHLIN
the grown-up lives we waited
for with, such desire &
see the lines that cut a-
cross the spaces are they
not the things the women and
the money the ambition
and the wars & all the false
ideas that destroy our
life & eat into our soul?
238
DESIRE AND THE BLACK MASSEUR
Tennessee Williams
FROM HIS very beginning this person, Anthony Burns, had be-
trayed an instinct for being included in things that swallowed
him up. In his family there had been fifteen children and he the
one given least notice, and when he went to work, after graduat-
ing from high school in the largest class on the records of that
institution, he secured his job in the largest wholesale company
of the city. Everything absorbed him and swallowed him up and
still he did not feel secure. He felt more secure at the movies than
anywhere else. He loved to sit in the back rows of the movies
where the darkness absorbed him gently so that he was like a
particle of food dissolving in a big hot mouth. The cinema Ikked
at his mind with a tender, flickering tongue that all but! lulled
him to sleep. Yes, a big motherly Nannie of a dog could not have
licked him better or given him sweeter repose than the cinema
did when he went there after work. His mouth would fall open
at the movies and saliva would accumulate in it and dribble out
the sides of it and all his being would" relax so utterly that all the
prickles and tightening of a whole day's anxiety would be lifted
away. He didn't follow the story on the screen but watched the
figures. What they said or did was immaterial to him, he cared
about only the figures who warmed him as if they were cuddled
right next to him in the dark picture house and he loved every
one of them but the ones with shrill voices.
The timidest kind of a person was Anthony Burns, always
scuttling from one kind of protection to another but none of them
ever being durable enough to suit him.
Now at the age of thirty, by virtue of so much protection, he
still had in his face and body the unformed look of a child and
he moved like a child in the presence of critical elders. In every
move of his body and every inflection of speech and cast of ex-
.239
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
pression there was a timid apology going out to the world for 1 the
little space that he had been somehow elected to occupy in it.
His was not an enquiring type of mind. He only learned what he
was required to learn and about himself he learned nothing. He
had no idea of what his real desires were. Desire is something
that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded
by the individual being, and this was especially true in the case of
Anthony Burns. His desires, or rather his basic desire, was so
much too big for him that it swallowed him up as a coat that
should have been cut into ten smaller sizes, or rather there should
have been that much more of Burns to make it fit him.
For the sins of the world are really only its partialities, its
incompletions, and these are what sufferings must atone for, a
wall that has been omitted from a house because the stones were
exhausted, a room in a house left unfurnished because the house-
holder's funds were not sufficient these sorts of incompletions
are usually covered up or glossed over by some kind of make-
shift arrangement. The nature of man is full of such make-shift
arrangements, devised by himself to cover his incompletion. He
feels a part of himself to be like a missing wall or a room left un-
furnished and he tries as well as he can to make up for it. The
use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of
art, is a mask he devises to cover his incompletion. Or violence
such as a war, between two men or among a number of nations,
is also a blind and senseless compensation for that which is not
yet formed in human nature. Then there is still another com-
pensation. This one is found in the principle of atonement, the
surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of
thereby clearing one's self of his guilt. This last way was the one
that Anthony Burns unconsciously had elected.
Now at the age of thirty he was about to discover the instru-
ment of his atonement. Like all other happenings in his life, it
came about without intention or effort.
One afternoon, which was a Saturday afternoon in Novem-
ber, he went from his work in the huge wholesale corporation
to a place with a red neon sign that said "Turkish Baths and
Massage." He had been suffering lately from a vague sort of
ache near the base of his spine and somebody else employed at
the wholesale corporation had told him that he would be relieved
by massage. You would suppose that the mere suggestion of such
a thing would frighten him out of his wits, but when desire lives
constantly with fear, and no partition between them, desire must
become very tricky, it has to become as sly as the adversary,
240
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
and this was one of those times when desire out-witted the enemy
under the roof. At the very mention of the word massage, the
desire woke up and exuded a sort of anesthetizing vapor all
through Burns' nerves, catching fear 1 off guard and allowing
Burns to slip by it. Almost without knowing that he was really
going, he went to the baths that Saturday afternoon.
The baths were situated in the basement of a hotel, right at
the center 1 of the keyed-up mercantile nerves of the downtown
section, and yet the baths were a tiny world of their own. Secrecy
was the atmosphere of the place and seemed to be its purpose.
The entrance door had an oval of milky glass through which you
could only detect a glimmer of light. And even when a patron
had been admitted, he found himself standing in labyrinths of
partitions, of corridors and cubicles curtained off from each
other, of chambers with opaque door's and milky globes over
lights and sheathings of vapor. Everywhere were agencies of
concealment. The bodies of patrons, divested of their clothing,
were swathed in billowing tent-like sheets of white fabric. They
trailed barefooted along the moist white tiles, as white and noise-
less as ghosts except for their breathing, and their faces all wore a
nearly vacant expression. They drifted as if they had no thought
to conduct them.
But now and again, across the central hallway, would step
a masseur. The masseurs were negros. They seemed very dark
and positive against the loose white hangings of the baths. They
wore no sheets, they had no loose cotton drawers, and they moved
about with force and resolution. They alone seemed to have an
authority here. Their voices rang out boldly, never whispering
in the sort of apologetic way that the patrons had in asking direc-
tions of them. This was their own rightful province, and they
swept the white hangings aside with great black palms that you
felt might just as easily have seized bolts of lightning and thrown
them back at the clouds.
Anthony Burns stood more uncertainly than most near the
entrance of the bath-house. Once he had gotten through the
milky-paned door his fate was decided and no more action or will
on his part was called for. He had paid two-fifty, which was the
price of a bath and massage, and from that moment forward had
only to follow directions and submit to care. Within a few mo-
ments a negro masseur came to Burns and propelled him onward
and then around a corner where he was led into one of the cur-
tained compartments.
Take off your clothes, said the negro.
241
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
II
The negro had already sensed an unusual something about
his latest patron and so he did not go out of the canvas^draped
cubicle but remained leaning against a wall while Burns obeyed
and undressed. The white man turned his face to the wall away
from the negro and fumbled awkwardly with his dark winter
clothes. It took him a long time to get the clothes off his body,
not because he willfully lingered about it but because of a dream-
like state in which he was deeply falling. A far-away feeling en-
gulfed him and his hands and fingers did not seem to be his own,
they were numb and hot as if they were caught in the clasp of
someone standing behind him, manipulating their motions. But
at last he stood naked, and when he turned slowly about to face
the negro masseur, the black giant's eyes appeared not to see him
at all and yet they had a glitter 1 not present before, a liquid
brightness suggesting bits of wet coal.
Put this on, he directed and held out to Burns a white sheet.
Gratefully the little man enveloped himself in the enormous
coarse fabric and, holding it delicately up from his small-boned,
womanish feet, he followed the negro masseur 1 through another
corridor of rustling white curtains to the entrance of an opaque
glass enclosure which was the steam-room. There his conductor
left him. The blank walls heaved and sighed as steam issued from
them. It swirled about "Burns naked figure, enveloping him in a
heat and moisture such as the inside of a tremendous mouth, to
be drugged and all but dissolved in this burning white vapor
which hissed out of unseen walls.
After a time the black masseur returned. With a mumbled
command, he led the trembling Burns back into the cubicle
where he had left his clothes. A bare white table had been
wheeled into the chamber during Burns' absence.
Lie on tibis, said the negro.
Burns obeyed. The black masseur poured alcohol on Burns'
body, first on his chest and then on his belly and thighs. It ran
all over him, biting at him like insects. He gasped ja little and
crossed his legs over the wild complaint of his groin. Then with-
out any warning the negro raised up his black palm and brought
it down with a terrific whack on the middle of Burns' soft belly.
The little man's breath flew out of his mouth in a gasp and for
two or three moments he couldn't inhale another.
Immediately after the passing of the first shock, a feeling of
pleasure went through him. It swept as a liquid from either end
of his body and into the tingling hollow of his groin. He dared
242
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
not look, but he knew what the negro must see.
The "black giant was grinning.
I hope I didn't hit you too hard, he murmured.
No, said Burns.
Turn over, said the negro.
Burns tried vainly to move but luxurious tiredness made
him unable to. The negro laughed and gripped the small of his
waist and flopped him over as easily as he might have turned a
pillow. Then he began to belabor his shoulders and buttocks
with blows that increased in violence, and as the violence and the
pain increased, the little man grew more and more fiercely hot
with his first true satisfaction, until all at once a knot came loose
in his loins and released a warm flow.
So, by surprise is a man's desire discovered, and once dis-
covered, the only need is surrender, to take what comes and ask
no questions about it: and this was something that Burns was
expressly made for.
in
Time and again the white-collar clerk went back to the negro
masseur. The knowledge grew quickly between them of what
Burns wanted, that he was in search of atonement, and the black
masseur was the natural instrument of it. He hated white-skinned
bodies because they abused his pride. He loved to have their
white skin prone beneath him, to bring his fist or 1 the palm of his
hand down hard on its passive surface. He had barely been able
to hold this love in restraint, to control the wish that he felt to
pound more fiercely and use the full of his power. But now at
long last tHe suitable person had entered his orbit of passion. In
the white-collar clerk he had located all that he longed for.
Those times when the black giant relaxed, when he sat at the
rear of the baths and smoked cigarettes or" devoured a bar of
candy, the( image of Burns would loom before his mind, a nude
white body with angry red marks on it. The bar" of chocolate
would stop just short of his lips and the lips would slacken into
a dreamy smile. The giant loved Burns, and Burns adored the
giant.
Burns had become absent-minded about his work. Right in
the middle of typing a factory order, he would lean back at his
desk and the giant would swim in the atmosphere before 1 him.
Then he would smile and his work-stiffened fingers would loosen
and flop on the desk. Sometimes the boss would stop near him
and call his name crossly. Burns! Burns! What are you dream-
ing about?
243
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Throughout the winter the violence of the massage increased
by fairly reasonable degrees, but when March came it was sud-
denly stepped up.
Burns left the baths one day with two broken ribs.
Every morning he hobbled to work more slowly and pain-
fully but the state of his body could still be explained by saying
he had rheumatism.
One day his boss asked him what he was doing for it. He
told his boss that he was taking massage.
It don't seem to do you any good, said the boss.
Oh, yes, said Burns, I am showing lots of improvement!
That evening came his last visit to the baths.
His right leg was fractured. The blow which had broken
the limb was so terrific that Burns had been unable to stifle an
out-cry. The manager of the bath establishment heard it and
came into the compartment.
Burns was vomiting over the edge of the table.
Christ, said the manager, What's been going on here?
The black giant shrugged.
He asked me to hit him harder.
The manager looked over Burns and discovered his many
bruises.
What do you think this is? A jungle? he asked the masseur.
Again the black giant shrugged.
Get the hell out of my place! the manager shouted.
Take this perverted little monster with you, and neither of
you had better show up here again!
The black giant tenderly lifted his drowsy partner and bore
him away to a room in the town's negro section.
There for a week the passion between them continued.
This interval was toward the end of the Lenten season.
Across from the room where Burns and the negro were staying
there was a church whose open windows spilled out the mount-
ing exhortations of a preacher. Each afternoon the fiery poem
of death on the cross was repeated. The preacher was not fully
conscious of what he wanted nor were the listeners groaning and
writhing before him. All of them were involved in a massive
atonement.
Now and again some manifestation occurred, a woman stood
up to expose a wound in her breast. Another had slashed an
artery at her wrist.
Suffer, suffer, suffer, the preacher shouted! Our Lord was
nailed on a cross for the sins of the world! They led him above
244
TENNESSEE 'WILLIAMS
the town to the place of the skull, they moistened his lips with
vinegar on a sponge, they drove five nails through his body, and
he was The Rose of the World as He bled on the cross!
The congregation could not remain in the building but tum-
bled out on the street in a crazed procession with clothes torn
open.
The sins of the world are all forgiven, they shouted!
IV
All during this celebration of human atonement, the negro
masseur was completing his purpose with Burns.
All of the windows were open in the death-chamber.
The curtains blew out like thirstly little white tongues to
lick at the street which seemed to reek with an overpowering
honey. A house had caught fire on the block in back of the
church. The walls collapsed and the cinders floated about in the
gold atmosphere. The scarlet engines, the ladders and powerful
hoses, were useless against the purity of the flame.
The negro masseur leaned over his still breathing victim.
Burns was whispering something.
The black giant nodded.
You know what you have to do now? the victim asked him.
The black giant nodded.
He picked up the body, which barely held together, and
placed it gently on a clean-swept table.
The giant began to devour the body of Burns.
It took him twenty-four hours to eat the splintered bones
clean.
When he had finished, the sky was serenly blue, the passion-
ate services at the church were finished, the ashes had settled,
the scarlet engines had gone and the reek of honey was blown
from the atmosphere.
Quiet had returned and there was an air of completion.
Those bare white bones, left over from Burns' atonement,
were placed in a sack and borne to the end of a car-line.
There the masseur walked out on a lonely pier and dropped
his burden under the lake's quiet surface.
As the giant turned homeward, he mused on his satisfaction.
Yes, it is perfect, he thought, it is now completed.
Then in the sack, in which he had carried the bones, he drop-
245
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
ped his belongings, a neat blue suit to conceal his dangerous
body, some buttons of pearl, and a picture of Anthony Burns as
a child of seven.
He moved to another city, obtained employment once more
as an expert masseur. And there in a white-curtained place,
serenely conscious of fate bringing toward him another, to suffer
atonement as it had been suffered by Burns, he stood impassively
waiting inside a milky white door for the next to arrive.
And meantime, slowly, with barely a thought of so doing, the
earth's whole population twisted and writhed beneath the mani-
pulation of night's black fingers and the white ones of. day with
skeletons splintered and flesh reduced to pulp, as out of this
unlikely problem, the answer, perfection, was slowly evolved
through torture,
April 1946.
246
SIX POEMS
Eleanor Ruth Hesthal
JOURNEY TOWARD TRANSFIGURATION
There are other signs tonight:
St. Elmo's light nibbling and flicking
Honey phosphor on the javelin mast
Which, for meaning, pierces the sky
As I with words inthorn my thought.
There are other signs.
The fish with their Byzantine scales
In the boat-side seas
Float in white lustre,
Belly-up, myriad, shining,
And dead.
Other signs. Falling barometer,
Roar-bodied storm, winds enwintering air,
Rail of lightning, anger sufficient for death.
But the ship accomplishes the night
To incite the cockle tide
One day more.
And on the ocean haven docks.
Signs also on the sun.
247
ELEANOR RUTH HESTHAL
&RIDOLIN
Fridolin lives but his mouth hangs down at the corners;
The flood has passed over and gone, and his kin
Are as safe as were Noah's and even
The cat and the dog have dried out by the fire.
The storm has passed over and Fridolin lives,
And the live birds come back
To the marsh-footed trees.
And the house was loosened and floated down
The strange Ohio: a Charon's boat
On the mistful river, unhappy house
With watery windows, upon whose roof
The children and Mary and Fridolin
Crossed the Ohio and entered Hell.
It is strange that there was no weeping
And no Judge,
No thunder-brained limbo, no rejected,
Earth-spumed sorrows, no depleted,
Weather-withered human breast,
No undecipherable, cried-out words, no woe,
No twilight and no sun
Nor any night.
Only this: that time himself was there
With Hell and Heaven equal in his hands
Like North and South or any dual thing.
His substance was of lark-song, colored gray,
And all earth's meadowed hills piled to his feet.
And life and death here loved each other
And as one
Caressed the humming-bird and blessed the gull
And sea-wise cormorant, and over all
Was such a quietude as windless space
Conceals between the stars at early dawn.
But Fridolin and Mary did not see
But felt their seeing with immortal eyes.
And they came back alive with children safe
And warm by fires that burned out fear* and night
248
ELEANOR RUTH HESTHAL
But Fridolin withdraws, and jaw in hand
Sits at the flood's white edge, seducing death,
Like Hamlet loosening time from Yorick's skull.
SESTINA
The sparrow splashes the pool; the ferns arrange
Their fronds upon day's going, going whole
And one into the west. The winds that come
Puffing upon the fingers of the sky,
Hurling aside the dusk's most passionate hand,
The winds blow draughts along the night.
And man holds marking scales to measure night.
He squares all runes, sees firmaments arrange
One little trillionth star. He feeds the whole
Appetite of law, sees soul-larks come.
God stares upon it all: reveals the sky
In comet-lustres flashing from his hand.
And knowledge spreads a many-fingered hand
As lawyer-prophets justify the night,
Dissecting circumstance. While men arrange
The stench and rite of war, seer's harvest whole
Acres of reality, see the ripe fruits come
And coming lightnings frost upon the sky.
The sparrow fog pecks seedling stars from sky,
And wet, the darkness floods on every hand.
The black begins, begins now all the night,
Lonely, while the hawk-head men arrange
Carrion catastrophe, mankind whole
And healthy, cracks the sky for worlds to come.
Time winds man's waste away and griefs that come
Transfix in ice our tears. The wordless sky
Converses through man's throat only. Avid the hand
Stretched out for understanding in this night,
What scholarship shall chaos so arrange
That beauty springs to form and stands here whole?
249
ELEANOR RUTH HESTHAL
The dark is going. Sparrow-dawn takes whole
Disasters on his wing and lifting come
The sucking sun-mists out of fen to sky.
And hope is of the spring. Man's unlocked hand
Lets go the wars. He brims the day and night
With solace while the continents peace arrange.
In dreams revival, loam and sky arrange,
Whole-orbited, the spring that sets the hand
Of peace upon night's sill when mornings come.
LITTLE JACK HORNER
Between the line of bone and sun,
Rock and cloud, tense and liquid
What agitations! What syllables!
Stone aflood with tides of art!
Into that dough from which all hills
Are kneaded, spiced with bulbs,
With grass faiinaed, with sugar winds
To delight the frosting with a cloud,
Time has put his finger and pulled out
The nodule of all wisdom lucky plum!
What is such a taste to our flesh-wise appetite?
Let's stand back and listen with our harsh and thirsty ear,
And see, through tears, but faintly with our hungry, light-deaf
eye
The juice upon the lip
The crunch of fruit
The sucked stone spit out
The finger licked
ON A NEW-FOUND TRUTH
Integrity, with no lines on which to write
The symbol of its image, strikes the air
With new wisdoms suffered out of May-wept tear's
Cried under the willows of the never years
For never dreamed-out dreams and never grace.
250
ELEANOR RUTH HESTHAL
Among the hedges wanders truth,
Looking into the marrow of the trees.
Inspecting the license of spring, weighting,
Weighting and lighting, the fleece of earth.
So to rear and float
With the air let in
And the light turned on.
NIGHT FEAR
The deadly carousel of shadows round a mountain
Riding in angles, in the shapes of beasts,
Terrifies the watchers who watch from the valley.
They rouse light to their 1 windows,
Rush noise to pace silence,
Defend, defend with laughter,
But the great shades march the hill.
Heart praise for heroes does not avail.
Pride is in flight. The hill-birds are asleep.
Forsaken by fame, without longing or trust,
The watcher's are watching, in envy of day.
But the stars begin. But the moon springs up.
Leaves return to their night-lost branches.
The rocks are recognized. Elegies uttered
In terror are murmured now by birds.
Subdued is the pant and quiet the throat-pulse.
Day-rise, and fear goes home.
251
DEDICATION DAY
Rough Sketch for a Moving Picture
James Agee
On an afternoon in the early spring of 1946, in the noble
space between the Washington Obelisk and the Lincoln Mem-
orial, crowds, roped off from a great square, watched the states-
men, diplomats, military officials, scientists, clergymen, college
presidents, newsreel cameramen and Life photographers who had
assembled upon special platforms, under the unsteady sunlight,
and under the uneasy motions of the flags of nearly all nations,
to dedicate the heroic new Arch which was for 1 all time to come
to memorialize the greatest of human achievements.
The Arch, which had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright,
was the master-builder's sole concession to the Romanesque; at
that, he had made it proof against frost, earthquakes, and the in-
scription and carving of initials. Glistering more subtly than
most jewels for it was made not of stone but of fused uranium
it stood behind the billowing, rainbow-shaded veil which as yet
concealed its dedicatory legend, like some giant captive royal
slave of antiquity, face masked, the body nude.
From loudspeakers fairly successfully concealed within the
Arch, or sprouting tall above the wide, renewing lawns like rigid
quartets of zinc morning-glories, poured a special performance
of the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in a
new translation by Louis Aragon and Harry Brown, done under
the supervision of Robert E. Sherwood, conducted by Arturo
Toscanini in Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Centre, where an invited
audience watched the dedication ceremony on the screen of
television's first major hookup.
Even by still not wholly perfected television, it was a stirring
sight. The many preliminary speeches, to be sure, had been ra-
ther more protracted and less satisfying than speeches on great
252
JAMES AGEE
occasions generally are; for it was not clear either to the speakers
or to the listeners precisely why or to what purpose or idea the
Arch had been raised, and was to be dedicated: they labored,
rather, purely under an irresistible obligation both to indicate
their recognition of a great event by erecting a permanent altar to
it, and to sign their names to the moment in a few authorized
words as is still found necessary by many people, for instance,
when a dead man is buried. The speeches, accordingly, were more
notable for resonance, eloquence, and on every speaker's part
a most scrupulous courtesy and optimism, than for understand-
ing, far less communication of understanding. But once the
speeches wefe over, the ceremony was a peculiarly simple one
and achieved, as several Europeans and many of the more sophis-
ticated natives were afterward to agree in semi-privacy, a level
of good taste hardly to be expected of ordinary Americans.
All it amounted to, in the long run, was a moment of silence,
during which only the restive flags and the sighing of the great
veil especially distracted the eye. It involved, on the part of
Maestro Toscanini (who was playing as even he had never played
before), a Grand Pause, just before that majestic instant in
Beethoven's Symphony in which the basses, endorsed by trom-
bones and emulated by soprani, intones the lines
I embrace ye, O ye Millions!
Here's a kiss for all the World!
lines upon which, after earnest discussion whether to sub-
stitute for the somewhat fulsome and perhaps over-Teutonic
word kiss the sturdily alliterative, more Whitmanesque and
manly, more comradely, altogether healthier word wink, the re-
translator's had agreed that it was impossible to impove. During
this pause, also, it was possible to hear the subdued rattle of
Latin as four ravenous Cardinals raced towards the Consecra-
tion in all but perfect unison, their voices blended with that of
the Pontifical Benediction, relayed from Rome; a group of emin-
ent Protestant clergymen, each, between his closed eyes, pinching
the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as if adjust-
ing an invisible pair of pince-nez, knelt each on one knee at the
spread center* of a new lawn handkerchief; the most prominent
and progressive of American Reformist Rabbis all but inaudibly
intoned Eli, Eli, intimately, into a neat small microphone; the
twenty best [Allied marksmen of the Second World War pre-
sented their rifles; and many members of many national bands
lipped their reeds and mouth-pieces or, heads bowed to deft
fingertips, tested their drum-heads and ravanastrons.
253
JAMES AGEE
The climax was simple indeed. Dressed in white organdie,
an exquisite little girl, recently judged the healthiest three-year-
old in the United States (for it had been quickly and courteously
agreed, shortly after the termination of lend-lease and Mr. Her-
bert Lehman's three hundred and seventy-first appeal to Cong-
ress in regard to U. N. R. R. A.'s more urgent needs, that no other
nation should enter competitors), upon receiving a soft shove
from her mother, a former screen star, and a whispered "Now,
Lidice", toddled alone into the open, along the sulphur-pale
grass, towards the great Arch, bearing in her right hand a taper
which had been lighted from a light which had been taken from
the light which burns eternally in Paris, above the tomb of the
Unknown Soldier. At the same moment, from a small hole at
dead center of the pavement beneath the Arch, (an orifice bound
by a platinum facsimile of Martha Washington's wedding ring) ,
and from the center, as well, of an embossed lucite medallion
which, within a zodiacal wreath, indicated the direction of, and
the air mileage to, the capital city of every civilized nation, shyly,
rather the way the early worm might try the air in an especially
lyrical Disney cartoon, stood up a few inches of gleaming white
cord. As the child approached, her bladder a trifle unstabilized
by privilege, the Cardinals, and the Monsignori and Papal
Knights who served as their acolytes, could not perfectly restrain
the sideward sliding of their eyes; among the Protestant clergy-
men there were several who saw what happened through the
rainbow swarming of their eyelashes; the Rabbi's vocal chords
thickened, necessitating a slight clearing of the throat, during
which he forgot to turn from his microphone; a few even of the
superbly disciplined riflemen (and women) uncrossed their eyes
from the muzzles of their weapons; one of the musicians permit-
ted his instrument, a tuba, to emit a strangled expletive; a boy
on the outskirts of the great crowd could be heard hawking Good
Humors, which were not moving very satisfactorily, for the day
was chilly; a woman, moaning, fainted, falling double over 1 the
rope; and an Eagle Scout, masterfully brocaded with Merit
Badges fiercely repeating to himself his terrifying last-minute
change of instructions (for it had been decided only in after-
thought, in bitter and desperate haste) , No! No! Not Taps! Not
Taps!", raised his bugle to his beardless, though freshly, and
electrically, shaven lips.
And now the child stooped, in one of the more rudimentary
postures of ballet, and, extending her sanctified taper, touched
the bright cord with the flame; and in the exquisite silence there
254
JAMES AGEE
began, audible even to the distant boy who stopped saying Good
Humor in the middle of the first syllable, a faint, searching, rust-
ling noise, not unlike that which a snake elicits as he retires
among dead leaves. And now, while the musicians poised their
instruments and the marksmen slanted their rifles upward; and
while the Cardinals slowed or accelerated a little as need be, in
order to reach their genuflections, and the threshing of the bells,
at the precisely proper moment; and while, in New York, the
Maestro held one hundred and seventeen instruments and nine
hundred and forty-three pairs of eyes suspended as by one
spider-thread from the tip of his baton; and while the woman
who had fainted was softly and quickly shunted toward the rear
of the crowd; and while the voice of America's Number One
Commentator continued its description, in such expert unobtrus-
iveness that although he was thrillingly audible to every one
among the millions in his unseen audience, not a single person
among the onlookers could hear a word he said, though nearly
all were straining with all their strength, in order that they might
know what was happening before they read it in the late editions,
which were even now being purchased along the periphery of
the crowd; while all these things were transpiring, or held them-
selves balanced intense in readiness, trembling, the chosen Scout,
who in innumerable rehearsals had perfected a rendition of Taps
so heartrending that, in recorded form, with hummed accompani-
ment by Bing Crosby, the Andrew Sisters, the Ink Spots, and the
Westminster Choir, it had already sold better than a million
disks, did as best he could, disconsolately, lacking reheasals, with
Reveille, which he had had no occasion to play since Camp broke
up the previous summer, and which many people agreed he man-
aged really very prettily, considering the circumstances. As his
last note melted, the twenty marksmen fired the first of their
twenty-one salutes, flicking the silver-gilt padlocks from a long
rank of cages which exhaled a brilliant flock of homing doves,
somewhat frustrated in their breathing by wired-on imitation
olive-branches, and banded With appropriate messages with
which, after wheeling briefly, luminous against the clouds, they
set off in haste for the several and all-inclusive quarters of the
globe; the Cardinals genuflected; their bells threshed; the Rabbi
collapsed his microphone stand and smoothed his hair; the woman
who had fainted opened her eyes, gazed up the sharp chins of
sympathizers and, with a heartsick groan, miscarried; the clergy-
men rose from their knees and carefully folded and pocketed
their handkerchiefs; the Good Humor salesboy resumed busi-
255
JAMES AGUE
ness; and in perfect synchronization the military bands of forty-
six nations and the National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra
and the Westminster Choir attacked respectively their respective
national anthems and their continuation of the Choral Symphony,
all somewhat modified, in the interests of euphony, by Morton
Gould, but virtually all still recognizable to the untrained ear;
and the iridescent veil, its release cords pulled, on a signal from
James Bryant Conant, by the President of the United States,
Charles De Gaulle, a reluctant veteran of the Chinese Purchas-
ing Commission, and undersecretaries from the Embassies of the
other two of the Big Five, sank laboring on the March air from
the crest of the Arch, revealing, in Basic English, the words:
THIS IS IT
A soft cheer of awe moved upon the crowd; then a flowering
of applause like the rumination of leaves before rain: for this
secret had been successfully kept, and very few of those on the
outskirts had managed to buy extras until the veil fell.
Below the legend, the Eternal Fuse continued to exude and
to consume itself, one inch above the pavement at the rate of one
inch per second. The fuse was chemically calculated continu-
ously somewhat to intensify the noise of its consumption, enough
to be distinguishable to anyone who kept attentive vigil for so
much as twenty-four hours; at the end of precisely one hundred
years, it was further calculated, this penetrating whisper, grown
continuously more acute never dynamically more loud, would
become audible at the point most distant from its origin, on the
planet. Some stayed, now, and held vigil; others, many, listened
a half hour, even an hour, then lost patience; slowly, towards
the early neons, the crowd dissolved. Few were left, at dusk, to
witness the lowering and folding of the flags.
During the earlier 1 stages of planning the Memorial there
had been considerable discussion whether the fuse should burn
down at the rate of an inch per hour, or even per day; but an
inch per second had ultimately been agreed on not only as pep-
pier and somehow more in keeping, but also because this rate of
consumption measureably helped solve, or at least proved aware-
ness of, certain delicate social and economic problems. Some
7,200 feet of the fuse would be consumed each day; approximately
4,897.6 miles, which amounted to roughly 322.17 bales of cottoi
each year. The cotton would be the finest Egyptian long-staple,
grown by members of a Sharecropper's Rehabilitation Project
in one of the richest of the condemned areas of the Delta* Bales
256
JAMES AGEE
would be furnished, alternately by a white and a Negro family,
and would be purchased at cost, the cash to be applied against the
interest on Rehabilitation Loans. The purchase of the chemicals
used in impregnating the fuse, a mere few tons of those sub-
stances so recently and abruptly rendered obsolete for military
use, was to be sure a mere token, but as such it assured various
embarrassed manufacturers of archaic munitions of the Gov-
ernment's enduring sympathy, and concern for their welfare.
Moreover, the manufacture of the fuse itself made gainful and
honorable employment available to a number 1 of persons other-
wise unemployable, and added no little not only to the symbolic
dignity but also to the human warmth of the entire Project For
beneath the Arch, in a small, air-conditioned, irradiated work-
shop so ingeniously contrived by Norman Bel Geddes that it was
possible for those who found it more efficient to do their share
from hospital beds or even, a few of them, from streamlined bas-
kets, the fuse was manufactured on the spot. Its creators, who
were by unanimous agreement among those in charge of the
Memorial called Keepers of the Flame, worked perpetually,
wheeled in and out, as shifts changed, through silent tunnels of
tile and plastic, by women physicians who had been rendered re-
dundant by the termination of hostilities. They were at all times
visible even while they slept, to tourists who used other tunnels,
through thick walls of polarized glass. The tourists' admission
fees, even though ex-servicemen and children in arms were to be
passed at half price for the next two years, would clearly better
than pay both the initial cost and the maintenance of the Project;
the surplus monies were to be applied toward the relief of those
who should have neglected to redeem their War and Victory
Bonds by 1950.
One of these twelve-hour shifts (for the work was light)
was composed of such disabled winners of the Distinguished
Service Cross, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and the Navy
Cross, as did not wish to be a burden on their communities or
to languish in Veterans' Hospitals, and as were alert to the im-
mense therapeutic value of honest work. It was required of them
only that they wear their 1 uniforms and decorations, during work-
ing hours, and, as a reminder and incentive to youth, show their
wounds, scars, or stumps. They were paid whatever 1 their rank
and injury entitled them, in pension. The other shift was com-
posed of depreciated but surviving collaborator's in the experi-
ments at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who had been forgiven, and
were, indeed, aside from a few unfortunate incidents which
257
JAMES AGEE
marred the course of their journey across the less progressive
reaches of the nation, treated with marked civility, even being
permitted to shake hands with Secretaries of State and of War,
who laughingly apologized, through an interpreter, for wearing
radiation-proof gloves and masks throughout the little ceremony.
There had at first been some talk of accepting, for this work, only
such Japanese as embraced Christianity, but it was generously
decided, in the interests of religious toleration, that this should
not be required; indeed, a number of the Nagasaki colleagues,
formerly Christian, were known to have renounced Christianity;
it was an open secret, even, that two of them were privately
practicing the out-lawed Shintoism. This too (though care was
taken that the fact should not become known among the general
public) was smilingly disregarded, on the grounds that in their
present occupation, and distance from the homeland, and fewness
in number not to mention the efficiency of the magnificently
trained Project Guardians no great harm was likely to come
of these atavist diehards. It was required of the Japanese only
that they keep on display, during working hours, those strange
burns which have excited, in Americans, so much friendly curi-
osity an exposure necessarily limited, of course, in a number
of cases, in the interests of decency. These Japanese were paid
the wages customary for prisoners of war (the funds were depos-
ited in their names in a Subtreasury vault, their board and keep
being deductible) and, in accordance with the rulings of the
Geneva Convention, were required, in their eating, to fare neither
better nor worse, nor other, than men in our own armed services,
being forced, in fact, to ingest one can of K Rations, two four-
pound porterhouse steaks, one carton of Camels, eight squares
of Ex-Lax, two boxes of Puffed Rice, the juice of twelve oranges,
a tin of Spam, a cup of Ovaltine, a prophylactic, a tube of nation-
ally advertised toothpaste, and macerated or liquified overseas
editions of Time, Readers* Digest and the New Testament, each,
per day, plus roast beef, apple pie and store cheese on Sundays
and proper supplements, including third helpings, spoonlickings
and ejaculations of "Gosh, Mom," of the special dishes tradition-
ally appropriate to the major Holidays; all to be administered
orally, rectally or* by intravenous injection, as best befitted the
comfort of the individual patient a task which many of the little
fellows found so embarrassing, and which the tourists found so
richly amusing to watch, that even after the first few days, feed-
ing time created something of a traffic problem.
It was agreed that in due course these invalids would be sup-
258
JAMES AGEE
planted at their jobs by their children if they should prove cap-
able of breeding and bearing them, and that such children, if
their behavior should prove unexceptionable up to the age of 21
years, would be granted the privileges of American citizenship
and of absentee voting. The male children of those veterans
capable of siring them would be offered their choice between the
same lifetime guarantee of gainful employment, and a scholarship
at Peddie. In that event as to some people seemed quite con-
ceivable that this turnover 1 plan too rapidly diminished the
personnel, it had already been arranged that the Japanese and
'American ranks be filled out respectively by Mission converts to
any one of the accredited Christian faiths, and by divinity stu-
dents, who would receive fullcourse seminarial credits for their
services per year, tuition halved.
Raw materials were conveyed to these workers each mid-
night, promptly, by armored truck. Before the day of the
ceremony they had produced a spool of fuse so thick that it was
decided to give them a holiday. In the morning, on the White
House Back Lawn, there was a picnic, with a sack race, and a
baseball game (won, amusingly enough, by the Japanese). In
the afternoon they were all brought to reserved areas (segre-
gating, however, the Japanese and Americans) at the very brink
of the ropes, to witness the Dedication.
One pathetic incident marred this otherwise perfect day.
One of the more elderly of these scientists who contributed their
genius towards the perfecting of the bomb he shall, in these
columns at least, remain nameless had begun, not long after
the Japanese surrender, to strike his colleagues as a little queer
in the head. He was known to have attended Mass, at first sec-
retly, then quite openly; later, to have spent several evenings
of silence among the Friends; later, to have sought out a poet of
his acquaintance, of whom it had been learned, he asked Mahat-
ma Gandhi's postal address, whether a letter might be kindly
received, and answered, and approximately how far into the East
it might be advisable to journey, insofar as possible on foot, or on
his knees ("perhaps to Lhasa?" he asked), in what he called
"atonement." The poet, according to his own account of this
singular interview, merely laughed uproariously, murmuring
some obscurantist figure of speech which with great amusement
he repeated, when questioned by friends of the scientist about
"'locking the stable after the horse had been stolen". It was not
long after this early in October that plans for the Arch began
to develop. Once the scientist learned of the idea of the under-
259
JAMES AGEE
ground personnel he did not r 
