e medals they had decorated him with and to show that he meant
it he ripped them off and threw them out the window; he said if he was ever
in a trench with an officer again he'd shoot him in the back like a dirty
dog, and that held good for General Pershing or any other general. He said a
lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he'd picked up over there, and
nobody opened his trap to gainsay him. And when he got through I felt for
the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was
listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made
him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and
in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric
chair because he had performed his duty towards his fellow men, which was to
deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because
one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity,
peace be with you all. And the second time I experienced the reality of war
was when ex-sergeant Griswold, one of our night messengers, flew off the
handle one day and smashed the office to bits at one of the railway
stations. They sent him to me to give him the gate, but I didn't have the
heart to fire him. He had performed such a beautiful piece of destruction
that I felt more like hugging and squeezing him; I was only hoping to Christ
he would go up the 25th floor, or wherever it was that the president and the
vice-presidents had their offices, and mop up the whole bloody gang. But in
the name of discipline, and to uphold the bloody farce it was, I had to do
something to punish him or be punished for it myself, and so not knowing
what less I could do I took him off the commission basis and put him back on
a salary basis. He took it pretty badly, not realizing exactly where I
stood, either for him or against him and so I got a letter from him pronto,
saying that he was going to pay me a visit in a day or two and that I'd
better watch out because he was going to take it out of my hide. He said
he'd come up after office hours and that if I was afraid I'd better have
some strong-arm men around to look after me. I knew he meant every word he
said and I felt pretty damned quaky when I put the letter down. I waited in
for him alone, however, feeling that it would be even more cowardly to ask
for protection. It was a strange experience. He must have realized the
moment he laid eyes on me that if I was a son of a bitch and a lying,
stinking hypocrite, as he had called me in his letter, I was only that
because he was, which wasn't a hell of a lot better. He must have realized
immediately that we were both in the same boat and that the bloody boat was
leaking pretty badly. I could see something like that going on in him as he
strode forward, outwardly still furious, still foaming at the mouth, but
inwardly all spent, all soft and feathery. As for myself, what fear I had
vanished the moment I saw him enter. Just being there quiet and alone, and
being less strong, less capable of defending myself, gave me the drop on
him. Not that I wanted to have the drop on him either. But it had turned out
that way and I took advantage of it, naturally. The moment he sat down he
went soft as putty. He wasn't a man any more, but just a big child. There
must have been millions of them like him, big children with machine guns who
could wipe out whole regiments without batting an eyelash; but back in the
work trenches, without a weapon, without a clear, visible enemy, they were
helpless as ants. Everything revolved about the question of food. The food
and the rent - that was all there was to fight about - but there was no way,
no dear, visible way, to fight for it. It was like seeing an army strong and
well equipped, capable of licking anything in sight, and yet ordered to
retreat every day, to retreat and retreat and retreat because that was the
strategic thing to do, even though it meant losing ground, losing guns,
losing ammunition, losing food, losing sleep, losing courage, losing life
itself finally. Wherever there were men fighting for food and rent there was
this retreat going on, in the fog, in the night, for no earthly reason
except that it was the strategic thing to do. It was eating the heart out of
him. To fight was easy, but to fight for food and rent was like fighting an
army of ghosts. All you could do was to retreat, and while you retreated you
watched your own brothers getting popped on, one after the other, silently,
mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing to do about it. He
was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and beaten, that
he put his head in his arms and wept on my desk. And while he's sobbing like
that suddenly the telephone rings and it's the vice-president's office -
never the vice-president himself, but always his office -and they want this
man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes Sir! and I hang up. I don't say
anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him and I have dinner
with him and his wife and kids. And when I leave him I say to myself that if
I have to fire that guy somebody's going to pay for it - and anyway I want
to know first where the order comes from and why. And hot and sullen I go
right up to the vice-president's office in the morning and I ask to see the
vice-president himself and did you give the order I ask - and why? And
before he has a chance to deny it, or to explain his reason for it, I give
him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and where he don't like it
and can't take it - and if you don't like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you
can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass -
and like that I walk out on him. I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go
about my work as usual. I expect, of course, that I'll get the sack before
the day's over. But nothing of the kind. No, to my amazement I get a
telephone call from the general manager saying to take it easy, to just calm
down a bit, yes, just go easy, don't do anything hasty, we'll look into it,
etc. I guess they're still looking into it because Griswold went on working
just as always - in fact, they even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a
dirty deal, too, because as a clerk he earned less money than as a
messenger, but it saved his pride and it also took a little more of the
spunk out of him too, no doubt. But that's what happens to a guy when he's
just a hero in his sleep. Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you
up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end
up as vice-president. It's all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a
farce, a fiasco from start to finish. I know it as I was in it, because I
woke up. And when I woke up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same
door that I had walked in - without as much as a by your leave, sir!
Things take place instantaneously, but there's a long process to be
gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the
explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens
according to law - and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole
cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly
prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up
above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around
like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered,
manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for
friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me
like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night,
hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes
a gang of them would be there and it didn't seem to make much difference
whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set.
Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful
of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several
years. We hadn't seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day,
quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an important day in my
life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I had often dreamed
about but never hoped to see. I remember vividly that we were standing on
the comer of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street towards dusk. I remember it
because it seemed utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about
Mt. Aetna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the
comer of Sixth Avenue and 49th St., Manhattan. I remember the way he looked
about as he talked, like a man who hadn't quite realized what he was in for
but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in returning. His
eyes seemed to be saying all the time - this has no value, no value
whatever. He didn't say that, however, but just this over and over: "I'm
sure you'd like it! I'm sure it's just the place for you." When he left me I
was in a daze. I couldn't get hold of him again quickly enough. I wanted to
hear it all over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about
Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend's own lips. It
seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same
environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends - and because he
knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had
travelled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself,
drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future. O'Mara, yes,
he had travelled a bit, almost all over the world - but as a bum, or eke in
the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend Ulric was the
first fellow I had ever met whom I could truly say had travelled. And he
knew how to talk about his experiences.
As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently
thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the
evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby.
What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated
me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a
book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real.
Sometimes after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch
fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in
passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacre
Coeur, through the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight. Just a
Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed
of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a
Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But
as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I
meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen
and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are
responsible, more than anything else, for my being here to-day. Most of the
places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps
never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them
in our rambles through the park.
Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and
texture of Lawrence's work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we
were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence's ideas.
Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how
pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence's words. Had I really
understood, my life could never have taken the course it did. Most of us
live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can
say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps
America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open
my eyes wide and full and dear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was
only because I had renounced America, renounced my past.
My friend Kronski used to twit me about my "euphorias". It was a sly
way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow
would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long
stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety,
of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds
strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the
person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree. In the latter mood, for
instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolleycar.
Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment
manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in
one of my states of "euphoria". We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn
Bridge to go to some flat in Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were
waiting to receive us. Hymie had started to talk to me in his usual way
about his wife's ovaries. In the first place he didn't know precisely what
ovaries meant and so I was explaining it to him in crude and simple fashion.
In the midst of my explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and
ridiculous that Hymie shouldn't know what ovaries were that I became drunk,
as drunk I mean as if I had a quart of whisky under my belt. From the idea
of diseased ovaries there germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of
tropical growth made up of the most heterogeneous assortment of odds and
ends in the midst of which, securely lodged, tenaciously lodged, I might
say, were Dante and Shakespeare. At the same instant I also suddenly
recalled my whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle
of the Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word "ovaries" had broken. I
realized that everything Hymie had said up till the word "ovaries", had
sieved through me like sand. What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn
Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, usually when
walking to my father's shop, a performance which was repeated day in and day
out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours,
of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious activity.
Not for years had I thought of this book which I used to write every day on
my way from Delancey Street to Murray Hill. But going over the bridge the
sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the
remembrance of the past set in ... remembrance of going back and forth over
the bridge, going to a job which was death, returning to a home which was a
morgue, memorizing Faust looking down into the cemetery, spitting into the
cemetery from the elevated train, the same guard on the platform every
morning, an imbecile, the other imbeciles reading their newspapers, new
skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in and die in, the boats passing
below, the Fall River Line, the Albany Day Line, why am I going to work,
what will I do to-night, the warm cunt beside me and can I work my knuckles
into her groin, run away and become a cowboy, try Alaska, the gold mines,
get off and turn around, don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck,
river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud,
legs free, fish will come and bite, to-morrow a new life, where, anywhere,
why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death is the solution,
but don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new
friend, millions of chances, you're too young yet, you're melancholy, you
don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on
over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants,
crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts crawling out the same way . .
. Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic,
above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying
sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe
each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to
take it in, to announce myself, anyway each time I passed on high I was
truly alone, and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself,
screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered,
the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never
admitted. If this then was the true self it was marvellous, and what's more
it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop to
continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went
down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen in the dirty
ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and
grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every
object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent
existence. My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking
at Hymie and thinking of that strange word "ovaries", now stranger than any
word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and
Hymie sitting beside me was a bull-frog, absolutely a bull-frog and nothing
more. I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze,
the legs dear and waiting for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through
the heavens, through the solid core of the earth, head down and ramming
through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of
hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was
waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was walking
again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above
him a man was sitting in an aeroplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky.
The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing
she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and
he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the
cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails formed on every
finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toe nail, the tiniest
toe nail imaginable and you could break your head over it, trying to figure
it out. On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing
such a hodge-podge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if
one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on
the other side of the ledger things like toe nails, hair, teeth, blood,
ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of
ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The
bull-frog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat;
they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button
was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary
without benefit of lucubration; lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the
eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink
of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting
for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and
through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his
work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of
rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of
non-comprehension swept dear by gales of laughter. From the hub of the
bull-frog's eye radiated dean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be
annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving
sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bull-frog was an ovarian spud
generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers
had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes
exterminated; for him the twin dries had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge,
the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat
upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the
anaesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the big Bertha which could
destroy what the eye could not see; for him the molecule was broken down and
the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night the stars were
swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of
gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all
movement, be it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets,
expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the high priests of the
de-possessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of
a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making
love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and
out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation
which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which
was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself
became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making
life and killing life at the same time. I could see it going on after death,
like hair growing on a corpse, people saying "death" but the hair still
testifying to life, and finally no death but this life of hair and nails,
the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something still alive,
expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement. Through love
this night happen, or sorrow, or being born with a dub foot; the cause
nothing, the event everything. In the beginning was the Word . .. Whatever
this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it
would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat
God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words - for him who had
become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word
the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never
be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only that which
expressed itself in beginning and end. So, on the ovarian trolley there was
this voyage of man and bull-frog composed of identical stuff, neither better
nor less than Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely
the meaning of anything, the other knowing too precisely the meaning of
everything, hence both lost and confused through beginnings and endings,
finally to be deposited at Java or India Street, Greenpoint, there to be
carried back into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of sawdust
moils with twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety.
What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or
unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or
talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the
separate detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body
or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I
had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to
surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who
made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as
definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of
civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the
thing-in-itself-not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately
passionate hunger, as if in the discarded, worthless thing which everyone
ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.
Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I
attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle
which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the
blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty
of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or
gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me. If this was perverse it was
also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world
which was springing up about me. Soon I too would become like these objects
which I venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society. I was
definitely dated, that was certain. And yet I was able to amuse, to
instruct, to nourish. But never to be accepted, in a genuine way. When I
wished to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum
of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I
chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was
in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism
which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a
clown;
it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I
underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville
entertainer, I would have been famous. People would have appreciated me
precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have
understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief,
to say the least.
It was always a source of amazement to me how easily people could
become rued just listening to me talk. Perhaps my speech was somewhat
extravagant, though often it happened when I was holding myself in with main
force. The turn of a phrase, the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the
facility with which the words came to my Ups, the allusions to subjects
which were taboo - everything conspired to set me off as an outlaw, as an
enemy to society. No matter how well things began sooner or later they
smelled me out. If I were modest and humble, for example, then I was too
modest, too humble. If I were gay and spontaneous, bold and reckless, then I
was too free, too gay. I could never get myself quite au point with the
individual I happened to be talking to. If it were not a question of life
and death - everything was life and death to me then - if it was merely a
question of passing a pleasant evening at the home of some acquaintance, it
was the same thing. There were vibrations emanating from me, overtones and
undertones, which charged the atmosphere unpleasantly. Perhaps the whole
evening they had been amused by my stories, perhaps I had them in stitches,
as it often happened, and everything seemed to augur well. But sure as fate
something was bound to happen before the evening came to a dose, some
vibration set loose which made the chandelier ring or which reminded some
sensitive soul of the piss-pot under the bed. Even while the laughter was
still drying off the venom was beginning to make itself felt. "Hope to see
you again some time", they would say, but the wet, limp hand which was
extended would belie the words.
Persona mm grata! Jesus, how clear it seems to me now! No pick and
choice possible: I had to take what was to hand and leam to like it. I had
to learn to live with the scum, to swim like a sewer-rat or be drowned. If
you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated
you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd.
You may dream, if you are dreaming simultaneously. But if you dream
something different you are not in America, of America American, but a
Hottentot in Africa, or a Kalmuck, or a chimpanzee. The moment you have a
"different" thought you cease to be an American. And the moment you become
something different you find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland.
Am I saying this with rancour, with envy, with malice? Perhaps. Perhaps
I regret not having been able to become an American. Perhaps. In my zeal
now, which is again American, I am about to give birth to a monstrous
edifice, a skyscraper, which will last undoubtedly long after the other
skyscrapers have vanished, but which will vanish too when that which
produced it disappears. Everything American will disappear one day, more
completely than that which was Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian. This is one of
the ideas which pushed me outside the warm, comfortable bloodstream where,
buffaloes all, we once grazed in peace. An idea that has caused me infinite
sorrow, for not to belong to something enduring is the last agony. But I am
not a buffalo and I have no desire to be one. I am not even a spiritual
buffalo. I have slipped away to rejoin an older stream of consciousness, a
race antecedent to the buffaloes, a race that will survive the buffalo.
All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are different, are
veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is
different. This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different from the
usual skyscraper a 1'americaine. In this sky" scraper there are no
elevators, no 73rd story windows to jump from. If you get tired of climbing
you are shit out of luck. There is no slot directory in the main lobby. If
you are search-ing for somebody you will have to search. If you want a drink
you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this
building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths. All the other
skyscrapers have what you want! this one contains nothing but what I want,
what I like. And somewhere in this skyscraper Valeska has her being, and
we're going to get to her when the spirit moves me. For the time being she's
all right, Valeska, seeing as how she's six feet under and by now perhaps
picked dean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked dean too,
by the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a different
tint, a different odour.
The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in
her veins. It was depressing for everybody around her. She made you aware of
it whether you wished to be or not. The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact
that her mother was a trollop. The mother was white of course. Who the
father was nobody knew, not even Valeska herself.
Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little
Jew from the vice-president's office happened to espy her. He was horrified,
so he informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a coloured
person as my secretary. He spoke as though she might contaminate the
messengers. The next day I was put on the carpet. It was exactly as though I
had committed sacrilege. Of course, I pretended that I hadn't observed
anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely intelligent and
extremely capable. Finally the president himself stepped in. There was a
short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically
proposed to give her a better position in Havana. No talk of the blood
taint. Simply that her services had been altogether remarkable and that they
would like to promote her - to Havana. Valeska came back to the office in a
rage. When she was angry she was magnificent. She said she wouldn't budge.
Steve Romero and Hymie were there at the time and we all went out to dinner
together. During the course of the evening we got a bit tight. Valeska's
tongue was wagging. On the way home she told me that she was going to put up
a fight; she wanted to know if it would endanger my job. I told her quietly
that if she were fired I would quit too. She pretended not to believe it at
first. I said I meant it, that I didn't care what happened. She seemed to be
unduly impressed, she took me by the two hands and she held them very
gently, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
That was the beginning of things. I think it was the very next day that
I slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her. She read the note
sitting opposite me and when she was through she looked me square in the eye
and said she didn't believe it. But we went to dinner again that night and
we had more to drink and we danced and while we were dancing she pressed
herself against me lasciviously. It was just the time, as luck would have
it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion. I was telling
Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said - "why
don't you let me lend you a hundred dollars?" The next night I brought her
home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed
how well the two of them got along. Before the evening was over it was
agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house the day of the abortion and
take care of the kid. The day came and I gave Valeska the afternoon off.
About an hour after she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the
afternoon off also. I started towards the burlesque on Fourteenth Street.
When I was about a block from the theatre I suddenly changed my mind. It was
just the thought that if anything happened - if the wife were to kick-off- I
wouldn't feel so damned good having spent the afternoon at the burlesque. I
walked around a bit, in and out of the penny arcades, and then I started
homeward.
It's strange how things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly
remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child. You take
the dominoes and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull
the tablecloth on which the battleships are floating until they come to the
edge of the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall on to the
floor. We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got
so sleepy that she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep. The
dominoes were lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor
too. Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down
my throat, my hand between her legs. As I laid her back on the table she
twined her legs around me. I could feel one of the dominoes under my feet -
part of the fleet that we had destroyed a dozen times or more. I thought of
my grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day
that I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as
he pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought of the
attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture of:
Teddy .charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which I used
to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship Maine that floated
over my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral
Dewey and of Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy Yard
which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered that we
had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the doctor's office
I didn't have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings ... We had
hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the
slaughter house. I was still buttoning my fly as I went through the hall to
open the gate. She was as white as flour. She looked as though she'd never
be able to go through another one. We put her to bed and then we gathered up
the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on the table. Just the other night
in a bistrot, as I was going to the toilet, I happened to pass two old
fellows playing dominoes. I had to stop a moment and pick up a domino. The
feeling of it immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they
made when they fell on the floor. And with the battleships my lost tonsils
and my faith in human beings gone. So that every time I walked over the
Brooklyn Bridge and looked down towards the Navy Yard I felt as though my
guts were dropping out. Way up there, suspended between the two shores, I
felt always as though I were hanging over a void; up there everything that
had ever happened to me seemed unreal, and worse than unreal - unnecessary.
Instead of joining me to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge
seemed to break all connections. If I walked towards the one shore or the
other it made no difference: either way was hell. Somehow I had managed to
sever my connection with the world that human hands and human minds were
creating. Perhaps my grandfather was right, perhaps I was spoiled in the bud
by the books I read. But it is ages since books have claimed me. For a long
time now I have practically ceased to read. But the taint is still there.
Now people are books to me. I read them from cover to cover and toss them
aside. I devour them, one after the other. And the more I read, the more
insatiable I become. There is no limit to it. There could be no end, and
there was none, until inside me a bridge began to form which united me again
with the current of life from which as a child I had been separated.
A terrible sense of desolation. It hung over me for years. If I were to
believe in the stars I should have to believe that I was completely under
the reign of Saturn. Everything that happened to me happened too late to
mean much to me. It was even so with my birth. Slated for Christmas I was
born a half hour too late. It always seemed to me that I was meant to be the
sort of individual that one is destined to be by virtue of being born on the
25th day of December. Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was Jesus
Christ . . . perhaps Krishnamurti too, for all I know. Anyway that's the
sort of guy I was intended to be. But due to the fact that my mother had a
clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out
under another configuration - with a bad set-up, in other words. They say -
the astrologers, I mean -that it will get better and better for me as I go
on; the future in fact, is supposed to be quite glorious. But what do I care
about the future? It would have been better if my mother had tripped on the
stairs the morning of the 25th of December and broken her neck: that would
have given me a fair start! When I try to think, therefore, of where the
break occurred I keep putting it back further and further, until there is no
other way of accounting for it than by the retarded hour of birth. Even my
mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. "Always
dragging behind, like a cow's tail" - that's how she characterized me. But
is it my fault that she held me locked inside her until the hour had passed?
Destiny had prepared me to be such and such a person; the stars were in the
right conjunction and I was right with the stars and kicking to get out. But
I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky
not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing
seems clear, however - and this is a hangover from the 25th - that I was
born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a
fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me from early
childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes
passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always
believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were
slapped the more firmly I believed. / believed - and the rest of the world
did not! If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on
believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than
that. Instead of being punished you are un