How should I get here? By my two feet, no? He took a step forward. Let me smell your breath! Go way, go way! When have you seen me drunk? When you are too happy—or not so happy. A great pal, Elfenbein, said Reb, slinging an arm around his shoulder affectionately. The Yiddish King Lear, that’s what he is … What’s the matter, the glasses are empty.

Like your mind, said Elfenbein. Drink of the spirit. Like Moses. From the rock gushes water, from the bottle only foolishness. Shame on you, son of Zweifel, to be so thirsty.

The conversation became scattered. Mrs. Essen had got rid of the cats, cleaned up the mess they had made in the hallway, and was once again smoothing her hair back from her brow. A lady, every inch of her. No rancor, no recriminations. Gelid, in that super-refined, ethical-culturish way. She took a seat by the window, hoping no doubt that the conversation would take a more rational turn. She was fond of Mr. Elfenbein, but he distressed her with his Old World talk, his crazy grimaces, his stale jokes.

The Yiddish King Lear was now beyond all bridling. He had launched into a lengthy monologue on the Zend Avestas, with occasional sideswipes at the Book of Etiquette, Jewish presumably, though from the references he made to it it might as well have been Chinese. He had just finished saying that, according to Zoroaster, man had been chosen to continue the work of creation. Then he added: Man is nothing unless he is a collaborator.

God is not kept alive by prayers and injections. The Jew has forgotten all this—and the Gentile is a spiritual cripple.

A confused discussion followed these statements, much to Elfenbein’s amusement. In the midst of it he began singing at the top of his lungs—Rumeinie, Rumeinie, Rumeinie … a mameligele … a pastramele … a karnatsele … un a gleizele wine, Aha!

You see, he said, when the hubbub had subsided, even in a liberal household it’s dangerous to introduce ideas. Time was when such talk was music to one’s ears. The Rabbi would take a hair and with a knife like a razor he would split it into a thousand hairs. Nobody had to agree with him; it was an exercise. It sharpened the mind and made us forget the terror. If the music played you needed no partner; you danced with Zov, Toft, Giml. Now when we argue we put bandages over our eyes. We go to see Tomashevsky and we weep like pigs. We don’t know any more who is Pechorin or Aksakov. If on the stage a Jew visits a bordel—perhaps he lost his way!—every one blushes for the author. But a good Jew can sit in the slaughter-house and think only of Jehovah. Once in Bucuresti I saw a holy man finish a bottle of vodka all by himself, and then he talked for three hours without stopping. He talked of Satan. He made him so repulsive that I could smell him. When I left the cafe everything looked Satanic to me. I had to go to a public house, excuse me, to get rid of the sulphur. It glowed like a furnace in there; the women looked like pink angels. Even the Madame, who was really a vulture. Such a time I had that night! All because the Tzaddik had taken too much vodka.

Yes, it’s good to sin once in a while, but not to make a pig of yourself. Sin with eyes open. Drown yourself in the pleasures of the flesh, but hang on by a hair. The Bible is full of patriarchs who indulged the flesh but never lost sight of the one God. Our forefathers were men of spirit, but they had meat on their bones. One could take a concubine and still have respect for one’s wife. After all, it was at the door of the temple that the harlot learned her trade. Yes, sin was real then, and Satan too. Now we have ethics, and our children become garment manufacturers, gangsters, concert performers. Soon they will be making trapeze artists of them and hockey players…

Yes, said Reb from the depths of his arm-chair, now we are less than nothing. Once we had pride…

Elfenbein cut in. Now we have the Jew who talks like the Gentile, who says nothing matters but success. The Jew who sends his boy to a military academy so that he can learn how to kill his fellow Jew. The daughter he sends to Hollywood, to make a name for herself, as a Hungarian or Roumanian by showing her nakedness. Instead of great rabbis we have heavy-weight prize-fighters. We even have homosexuals now, weh is mir. Soon we will have Jewish Cossacks.

Like a refrain, Reb sighed: The God of Abraham is no more.

Let them show their nakedness, said Elfenbein, but not pretend that they are heathen. Let them remember their fathers who were peddlers and scholars and who fell like chaff under the heels of the hooligans.

On and on he went, leaping from subject to subject like a chamois in thin air. Names like Mordecai and Ahasuerus dropped from his lips, together with Lady Windermere’s Fan and Sodom and Gomorrah. In one breath he expatiated on The Shoemaker’s Holiday and the lost tribes of Israel. And always, like a summer complaint, he came back to the sickness of the Gentiles, which he likened unto eine Arschkrankheit. Egypt all over again, but without grandeur, without miracles. And this sickness was now in the brain. Maggots and poppy seed. Even the Jews were looking forward to the day of resurrection. For them, he said, it would be like war without dum dum bullets.

He was swept along by his own words now. And drinking only Seltzer water. The word bliss, which he had let fall, seemed to cause an explosion in his head. What was bliss? A long sleep in the Fallopian tubes. Or—Huns Without Schrecklichkeit. The Danube always blue, as in a Strauss waltz. Yes, he admitted, in the Pentateuch there was much nonsense written, but it had a logic. The Book of Numbers was not all horse radish. It had teleological excitement. As for circumcision, one might just as well talk about chopped spinach, for all the importance it had. The synagogues smelled of chemicals and roach powder. The Amalekites were the spiritual cockroaches of their time, like the Anabaptists of today. No wonder, he exclaimed, giving us a frightening wink, that everything is in a state of ‘chassos’. How true were the words of the Tzaddik who said: ‘Apart from Him there is nothing that is really clear.’

Oof! He was getting winded, but there was more to come. He made a phosphorescent leap now from the depths of his trampoline. There were a few great souls whose names he had to mention: they belonged to another order. Barbusse, Tagore, Romain Rolland, Peguy, for example. The friends of humanity. Heroic souls, all of them. Even America was capable of producing a humanitarian soul, witness Eugene V. Debs. There are mice, he said, who wear the uniforms of field marshals and gods who move in our midst like beggars. The Bible swarmed with moral and spiritual giants. Who could compare to King David? Who was so magnificent, yet wise, as Solomon? The lion of Judah was still alive and snorting. No anaesthetic could put this lion permanently to sleep. We are coming, said he, to a time when even the heaviest artillery will be caught with spiders’ webs and armies melt like snow. Ideas are crumbling, like old walls. The world shrinks, like the skin of a lichee nut, and men press together like wet sacks mildewed with fear. When the prophets give out the stones must speak. The patriarchs needed no megaphones. They stood still and waited for the Lord to appear unto them. Now we hop about like frogs, from one cesspool to another, and talk gibberish. Satan has stretched his net over the world and we leap out like fish ready for the frying pan. Man was set down in the midst of a garden, naked and dreamless. To each creature was given his place, his condition. Know thy place! was the commandment. Not Know thyself! The worm becomes a butterfly only when it becomes intoxicated with the splendor and magnificence of life.

We have surrendered to despair. Ecstasy has given way to drunkenness. A man who is intoxicated with life sees visions, not snakes. He has no hangovers. Nowadays we have a blue bird in every home—corked and bottled. Sometimes it’s called Old Kentucky, sometimes it’s a license number—Vat 69. All poisonous, even when diluted.

He paused to squirt some Seltzer water in his glass. Reb was sound asleep. He wore a look of absolute bliss, as if he had seen Mt. Sinai.

There now, said Elfenbein, raising his glass, let us drink to the wonders of the Western World. May they soon be no more! It’s getting late and I have monopolized the floor. Next time we will discuss more ecumenical subjects. Maybe I will tell you about my Carmen Sylva days. I mean the cafe, not the Queen. Though I can say that I once slept in her palace … in the stable, that is. Remind me to tell you more about Jacob Ben Ami. He was much more than a voice…

As we were taking leave he asked if he could see us to our door. With pleasure, I said.

Walking down the street he stopped to give vent to an inspiration. May I suggest, he said, that if you have not yet fixed on a title for your book that you call it This Gentile World! It would be most appropriate even if it makes no sense. Use a nom de plume like Boguslavsky—that will confuse the reader still more.

I am not always so voluble, he added, but you, the two of you, are the Grenze type, and for a derelict from Transylvania that is like an aperitif. I always wanted to write novels, foolish ones, like Dickens. The Mr. Pickwick kind. Instead I became a playboy. Well, I will say goodnight now. Elfenbein is my pseudonym; the real name would astonish you. Look up Deuteronomy, Chapter i3. ‘If there arise among you a—. He was seized with a violent fit of sneezing. The Seltzer water! he exclaimed. Maybe I should go to a Turkish Bath. It’s time for another influenza epidemic. Good night now! Onward as to war! Don’t forget the lion of Judah! You can see him in the movies, when the music starts up. He imitated the growl. Thai, he said, is to show that he is still awake.

16.

Why should we always go out of our way to describe the wretchedness and the imperfections of our life, and to unearth characters from wild and remote corners of our country?

Thus Gogol begins Part n of his unfinished novel.

I was now well into the novel—my own—but still I had no clear idea where it was leading me, nor did it matter, since Pop was pleased with all that had been shown him thus far, the money was always forthcoming, we ate and drank well, the birds were scarcer now but still they sang. Thanksgiving had come and gone, and my chess game had improved somewhat. Moreover, no one had discovered our whereabouts, none of our pestilential cronies, I mean. Thus I was able to explore the streets at will, which I did with a vengeance because the air was sharp and biting, the wind whistled, and my brain ever in a whirl drove me on face forward, forced me to ferret out streets, memories, buildings, odors (of rotting vegetables), abandoned ferry slips, storekeepers long dead, saloons converted into dime stores, cemeteries still redolent with the punk of mourners.

The wild and remote corners of the earth were all about me, only a stone’s throw from the boundary which marked off our aristocratic precinct. I had only to cross the line, the Grenze, and I was in the familiar world of childhood, the land of the poor and happily demented, the junk yard where all that was dilapidated, useless and germ ridden was salvaged by the rats who refused to desert the ship.

As I roamed about gazing into shop windows, peering into alleyways, and never anything but drear desolation, I thought of the Negroes whom we visited regularly and of how uncontaminated they appeared to be. The sickness of the Gentiles had not destroyed their laughter, their gift of speech, their easy-going ways. They had all our diseases to combat and our prejudices as well, yet they remained impervious.

The one who owned the collection of erotica had grown very fond of me; I had to be on guard lest he drive me into a corner and pinch my ass. Never did I dream that one day he would be seizing my books too and adding them to his astounding collection. He was a wonderful pianist, I should add. He had that dry pedal technique I relished so much in Count Basie and Fats Waller. They could all play some instrument, these lovable souls. And if there were no instrument they made music with fingers and palms—on table tops, barrels or anything to hand.

I had introduced no unearthed characters as yet in the novel. I was still timid. More in love with words than with psychopathic devaginations. I could spend hours at a stretch with Walter Pater, or even Henry James, in the hope of lifting a beautifully turned phrase. Or I might sit and gaze at a Japanese print, say The Fickle Type of Utamaro, in the effort to force a bridge between a vague, dreamy fugue of an image and a living colored wood-block. I was ever frantically climbing ladders to pluck a ripe fig from some exotic overhanging garden of the past. The illustrated pages of a magazine like the Geographic could hold me spell-bound for hours. How work in a cryptic reference to some remote region of Asia Minor, some little known site, for example, where a Hittite monster of a monarch had left colossal statues to commemorate his flea-blown ego? Or I might dig up an old history book—one of Mommsen’s, let us say—in order to fetch up with a brilliant analogy between the skyscrapered canyons of Wall Street and the congested districts of Rome under the Emperors. Or I might become interested in sewers, the great sewers of Paris, or some other metropolis, whereupon it would occur to me that Hugo or some other French writer had made use of such a theme, and I would take up the life of this novelist merely to find out what had impelled him to take such an interest in sewers.

Meanwhile, as I say, the wild and remote corners of our country were right to hand. I had only to stop and buy a bunch of radishes to unearth a weird character. Did an Italian funeral parlor look intriguing I would step inside and inquire the price of a coffin. Everything that was beyond the Grenze excited me. Some of my most cherished cosmococcic miscreants, I discovered, inhabited this land of desolation. Patrick Garstin, the Egyptologist, was one. (He had come to look more like a gold-digger than an archaelogist.) Donate lived here too. Donate, the Sicilian lad, who in taking an axe to his old man had luckily chopped off only one arm. What aspirations he had, this budding parricide! At seventeen he was dreaming of getting a job in the Vatican. In order, he said, to become better acquainted with St. Francis!

Making the rounds from one alkali bed to another, I brought my geography, ethnology, folk lore and gunnery up to date. The architecture teemed with atavistic anomalies. There were dwellings seemingly transplanted from the shores of the Caspian, huts out of Andersen’s fairy tales, shops from the cool labyrinths of Fez, spare cart wheels and sulkies without shafts, bird cages galore and always empty, chamber pots, often of majolica and decorated with pansies or sun flowers, corsets, crutches and the handles and ribs of umbrellas … an endless array of bric-a-brac all marked manufactured in Hagia Triada. And what midgets! One, who pretended to speak only Bulgarian—he was really a Moldavian—lived in a dog kennel in the rear of his shack. He ate with the dog—out of the same tin plate. When he smiled he showed only two teeth, huge ones, like a canine’s. He could bark too, or sniff and growl like a cur.

None of this did I dare to put into the novel. No, the novel I kept like a boudoir. No Dreck. Not that all the characters were respectable or impeccable. Ah no! Some whom I had dragged in for color were plain Schmucks. (Prepucelos.) The hero, who was also the narrator and to whom I bore a slight resemblance, had the air of a trapezoid cerebralist. It was his function to keep the merry-go-round turning. Now and then he treated himself to a free ride.

What element there was of the bizarre and the outlandish intrigued Pop no end. He had wondered—openly—how a young woman, the author, in other words, came by such thoughts, such images. It had never occurred to Mona to say: From another incarnation! Frankly, I would hardly have known what to say myself. Some of the goofiest images had been stolen from almanacs, others were born of wet dreams. What Pop truly enjoyed, it seemed, was the occasional introduction of a dog or a cat. (He couldn’t know, of course, that I was mortally afraid of dogs or that I loathed cats.) But I could make a dog talk. And it was doggy talk, no mistake about it. My true reason for inserting these creatures of a lower order was to show contempt for certain characters in the book who had gotten out of hand. A dog, properly inspired, can make an ass of a queen. Besides, if I wished to ridicule a current idea which was anathema to me all I had to do was to impersonate a mutt, lift my hind leg and piss on it.

Despite all the foolery, all the shenanigans, I nevertheless managed to create a sort of antique glaze. My purpose was to impart such a finish, such a patina, that every page would gleam like star dust. This was the business of authorship, as I then conceived it. Make mud puddles, if necessary, but see to it that they reflect the galactic varnish. When giving an idiot voice mix the jabberwocky with high-flown allusions to such subjects as paleontology, quadratics, hyperboreanism. A line from one of the mad Caesars was always pertinent. Or a curse from the lips of a scrofulous dwarf. Or just a sly Hamsun-esque quip, like—Going for a walk, Froken? The cowslips are dying of thirst. Sly, I say, because the allusion, though far-fetched, was to Froken’s habit of spreading her legs, when she thought she was well out of sight, and making water.

These rambles taken to relax or to obtain fresh inspiration—often only to aerate the testicles—had a disturbing effect upon the work in progress. Rounding a corner at a sixty degree angle, it could happen that a conversation (with a locomotive engineer or a jobless hod-carrier) ended only a few minutes previously would suddenly blossom into a dialogue of such length, such extravagance, that I would find it impossible, on returning to my desk, to resume the thread of my narrative. For every thought that entered my head the hodcarrier or whoever would have some comment to make. No matter what answer I made the conversation continued. It was as if these corky nobodies had made up their minds to derail me.

Occasionally this same sort of bitchery would start up with statues, particularly chipped and dismantled ones. I might be loitering in some backyard gazing absent-mindedly at a marble head with one ear missing and presto! it would be talking to me … talking in the language of a pro-Consul. Some crazy urge would seize me to caress the battered features, whereupon, as if the touch of my hand had restored it to life, it would smile at me. A smile of gratitude, needless to say. Then an even stranger thing might happen. An hour later, say, passing the plate glass window of an empty shop, who would greet me from the murky depths but the same pro-Consul! Terror-stricken, I would press my nose against the show-window and stare. There he was—an ear missing, the nose bitten off. And his lips moving! A retinal haemorrhage, I would murmur, and move on. God help me if he visits me in my sleep!

Thus, not so strangely, I developed a kind of painter’s eye. Often I made it my business to return to a certain spot in order to review a still life which I had passed too hurriedly the day before or three days before. The still life as I term it, might be an artless arrangement of objects which no one in his senses would have bothered to look at twice. For example—a few playing cards lying face up on the sidewalk and next to them a toy pistol or the head of a missing chicken. Or an open parasol torn to shreds sticking out of a lumberjack’s boot, and beside the boot a tattered copy of The Golden Ass pierced with a rusty jack-knife. Wondering what so fascinated me in these chance arrangements, it would suddenly dawn on me that I had detected similar configurations in the painter’s world. Then it would be an all night task to recall which painting, which painter, and where I had first stumbled upon it. Extraordinary, when one takes up the pursuit of such chimeras, to discover what amazing trivia, what sheer insanity, infests some of the great masterpieces of art.

But the most distinctive feature associated with these jaunts, rambles, forays and reconnoiterings was the realm, panoramic in recollection, of gesture. Human gestures. All borrowed from the animal and insect worlds. Even those of refined individuals, or pseudo-refined, such as morticians, lackeys, ministers of the gospel, major-domos. The way a certain nobody, when taken by surprise, threw back his head and whinnied, would stick in my crop long after I had ceased to remember his words and deeds. There were novelists, I discovered, who made a specialty of exploiting such idiosyncrasies, who thought nothing of resorting to a little trick like the whinnying of a horse when they wished to remind the reader of a character mentioned sixty pages back. Craftsmen, the critics called them. Crafty, certainly.

Yes, in my stumbling, bumbling way I was making all manner of discoveries. One of them was that one cannot hide his identity under cover of the third person, nor establish his identity solely through the use of the first person singular. Another was—not to think before a blank page. Ce n’est pas moi, le roi, c’est l’autonome. Not I, but the Father within me, in other words.

Quite a discipline, to get words to trickle without fanning them with a feather or stirring them with a silver spoon. To learn to wait, wait patiently, like a bird of prey, even though the flies were biting like mad and the birds chirping insanely. Before Abraham was … Yes, before the Olympian Goethe, before the great Shakespeare, before the divine Dante or the immortal Homer, there was the Voice and the Voice was with every man. Man has never lacked for words. The difficulty arose only when man forced the words to do his bidding. Be still, and wait the coming of the Lord! Erase all thought, observe the still movement of the heavens! All is flow and movement, light and shadow. What is more still than a mirror, the frozen glassiness of glass—yet what frenzy, what fury, its still surface can yield!

I wish that you would kindly have the men of the Park Department prune, trim and pare off all the dead wood, twigs, sprigs, stumps, stickers, shooters, sucker-pieces, dirty and shaggy pieces, low, extra low and overhanging boughs and branches from the good trees and to prune them extra close to the bark and to have all the good trees thoroughly and properly sprayed from the base to the very top parts and all through along by all parts of each street, avenue, place, court, lane, boulevard and so on … and thereby give a great deal more light, more natural light, more air, more beauty to all the surrounding areas.

That was the sort of message I should like to have dispatched at intervals to the god of the literary realm so that I might be delivered from confusion, rescued from chaos, freed of obsessive admiration for authors living and dead whose words, phrases, images barricaded my way.

And what was it prevented my own unique thoughts from breaking out and flooding the page? For many a year now I had been scurrying to and fro like a pack-rat, borrowing this and that from the beloved masters, hiding them away, my treasures, forgetting where I had stored them, and always searching for more, more, more. In some deep, forgotten pit were buried all the thoughts and experiences which I might properly call my own, and which were certainly unique, but which I lacked the courage to resuscitate. Had some one cast a spell over me that I should labor with arthritic stumps instead of two bold fists? Had some one stood over me in my sleep and whispered: You will never do it, never do it! (Not Stanley certainly, for he would disdain to whisper. Could he not hiss like a snake?) Who then? Or was it that I was still in the cocoon stage, a worm not yet sufficiently intoxicated with the splendor and magnificence of life?

How does one know that one day he will take wing, that like the humming bird he will quiver in mid-air and dazzle with iridescent sheen? One doesn’t. One hopes and prays and bashes his head against the wall. But it knows. It can bide its time. It knows that all the errors, all the detours, all the failures and frustrations will be turned to account. To be born an eagle one must get accustomed to high places; to be born a writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, humiliation. Above all, one must learn to live apart. Like the sloth, the writer clings to his limb while beneath him life surges by steady, persistent, tumultuous. When ready plop! he falls into the stream and battles for life. Is it not something like that? Or is there a fair, smiling land where at an early age the budding writer is taken aside, instructed in his art, guided by loving masters and, instead of falling thwack into mid-stream he glides like an eel through sludge, mire and ooze?

I had time unending for such vagaries in the course of my daily routine; like poplars they sprang up beside me as I labored in thought, as I walked the streets for inspiration, or as I put my head on the pillow to drown myself in sleep. What a wonderful life, the literary life! I would sometimes say to myself. Meaning this in-between realm crowded with interlacing, intertwining boughs, branches, leaves, stickers, suckers and what not. The mild activity associated with my work not only failed to drain my energy but stimulated it. I was forever buzzing, buzzing. If now and then I complained of exhaustion it was from not being able to write, never from writing too much. Did I fear, unconsciously, that if I succeeded in letting myself go I would be speaking with my own voice? Did I fear that once I found that buried treasure which I had hidden away I would never again know peace, never know surcease from toil?

The very thought of creation—how absolutely unapproachable it is! Or its opposite, chaos. Impossible ever to posit such a thing as the un-created. The more deeply we gaze the more we discover of order in disorder, the more of law in lawlessness, the more of light in darkness. Negation—the absence of things—is unthinkable; it is the ghost of a thought. Everything is humming, pushing, waxing, waning, changing—has been so since eternity. And all according to inscrutable urges, forces, which, when we recognize them, we call laws. Chaos! We know nothing of chaos. Silence! Only the dead know it. Nothingness! Blow as hard as you like, something always remains.

When and where does creation cease? And what can a mere writer create that has not already been created? Nothing. The writer rearranges the gray matter in his noodle. Ho makes a beginning and an end—the very opposite of creation!—and in between, where he shuffles around, or more properly is shuffled around, there is born the imitation of reality: a book. Some books have altered the face of the world. Re-arrangement, nothing more. The problems of life remain. A face may be lifted, but one’s age is indelible. Books have no effect. Authors have no effect. The effect was given in the first Cause. Where wert thou, when I created the world? Answer that and you have solved the riddle of creation!

We write, knowing we are licked before we start. Every day we beg for fresh torment. The more we itch and scratch the better we feel. And when our readers also begin to itch and scratch we feel sublime. Let no one die of inanition! The airs must ever swarm with arrows of thought delivered by les homines de lettres. Letters, mind you. How well put! Letters strung together with invisible wires charged with imponderable magnetic currents. All this travail forced upon a brain that was intended to work like a charm, to work without working. Is it a person coming toward you or a mind? A mind divided into books, pages, sentences replete with commas, periods, semicolons, dashes and asterisks. One author receives a prize or a seat in the Academy for his efforts, another a worm-eaten bone. The names of some are lent to streets and boulevards, of others to gallows and almshouses. And when all these creations have been finally read and digested men will still be buggering one another. No author, not even the greatest, has been able to get round that hard, cold fact.

A grand life just the same. The literary life, I mean. Who wants to alter the world? (Let it rot, let it die, let it fade away!) Tetrazzini practising her trills, Caruso shattering the chandeliers, Cortot waltzing like a blind mouse, the great Vladimir horrorizing the keyboard—was it of creation or salvation they were thinking? Perhaps not even of constipation … The road smokes under your horses’ hooves, the bridges rumble, the heavens fall backwards. What is the meaning of it all? The air, torn to shreds, rushes by. Everything is flying by, bells, collar buttons, moustachios, pomegranates, hand grenades. We draw aside to make way for you, you fiery steeds. And for you, dear Jascha Heifetz, dear Joseph Szigeti, dear Yehudi Menuhin. We draw aside, humbly—do you hear? No answer. Only the sound of their collar bells.

Nights when everything is going whish whoosh! when all the unearthed characters slink out of their hiding places to perform on the roof-top of my brain, arguing, screaming, yodeling, cart-wheeling, whinnying too—what horses I—I know that this is the only life, this life of the writer, and the world may stay put, get worse, sicken and die, all one, because I no longer belong to the world, a world that sickens and dies, that stabs itself over and over, that wobbles like an amputated crab … I have my own world, a Graben of a world, cluttered with Vespasiennes, Miros and Heideggers, bidets, a lone Yeshiva Bocher, cantors who sing like clarinets, divas who swim in their own fat, bugle busters and troikas that rush like the wind … Napoleon has no place here, nor Goethe, nor even those gentle souls with power over birds, such as St. Francis, Milosz the Lithuanian, and Wittgenstein. Even lying on my back, pinned down by dwarves and gremlins, my power is vast and unyielding. My minions obey me; they pop like corn on the griddle, they whirl into line to form sentences, paragraphs, pages. And in some far off place, in some heavenly day to come, others geared to the music of words will respond to the message and storm heaven itself to spread unbounded delirium. Who knows why these things should be, or why cantatas and oratorios? We know only that their magic is law, and that by observing them, heeding them, reverencing them, we add joy to joy, misery to misery, death to death.

Nothing is so creative as creation itself. Abel begot Bogul, and Bogul begot Mogul, and Mogul begot Zobel. Catheter, blatherer, shatterer. One letter added to another makes for a word; one word added to another makes for a phrase; phrase upon phrase, sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph; chapter after chapter, book after book, epic after epic: a tower of Babel stretching almost, but not quite, to the lips of the Great I Am.

Humility is the word! Or, as my dear, beloved Master explains: We must remember our close connection with things like insects, pterodactyls, saurians, slow-worms, moles, skunks, and those little flying squirrels called polatouches. But let us also not forget, when creation drags us by the hair, that every atom, every molecule, every single element of the universe is in league with us, egging us on and trimming us down, all to remind us that we must never think of dirt as dirt or God as God but ever of all combined, making us to race like comets after our own tails, and thereby giving the lie to motion, matter, energy and all the other conceptual flub-dub clinging to the asshole of creation like bleeding piles.

(My straw hat mingles with the straw hats of the rice-planters.)

It is unnecessary, in this beamish realm, to feast on human dung or copulate with the dead, after the manner of certain disciplined souls, nor is it necessary to abstain from food, alcohol, sex and drugs, after the manner of anchorites. Neither is it incumbent upon any one to practise hour after hour the major and minor scales, the arpeggios, pizzicati, or cadenzas, as did the progeny of Liszt, Czerny and other pyrotechnical virtuosi. Nor should one slave to make words explode like firecrackers, in conformance to the ballistic regulations of inebriated semanticists. It is enough and more to stretch, yawn, wheeze, fart and whinny. Rules are for barbarians, technic for the troglodytes. Away with the Minnesingers, even those of Cappadocia.

Thus, whilst sedulously and slavishly imitating the ways of the masters—tools and technic, in other words—my instincts were rising up in revolt. If I craved magical powers it was not to rear new structures, not to add to the Tower of Babel, but to destroy, to undermine. The novel I had to write. Point d’honneur. But after that…? After that, vengeance! Ravage, lay waste the land: make of Culture an open sewer, so that the stench of it would remain forever in the nostrils of memory. All my idols—and I possessed a veritable pantheon—I would offer up as sacrifices. What powers of utterance they had given me I would use to curse and blaspheme. Had not the prophets of old promised destruction? Had they ever hesitated to befoul their speech, in order to awaken the dead? If for companions I had never aught but derelicts and wastrels, was there not a purpose in it? Were not my idols also derelicts and wastrels—in a profound sense? Did they not float on the tide of culture, were they not tossed hither and thither like the unlettered wretches of the workaday world? Were their daemons not as heartless and ruthless as any slave driver? Did not everything conspire—the grand, the noble, the perfect works as well as the low, the sordid, the mean—to render life more unlivable each day? Of what use the poems of death, the maxims and counsels of the sage ones, the codes and tablets of the law-givers, of what use leaders, thinkers, men of art, if the very elements that made up the fabric of life were incapable of being transformed?

Only to one who has not yet found his way is it permitted to ask all the wrong questions, to tread all the wrong paths, to hope and pray for the destruction of all existent modes and forms. Puzzled and perplexed, yanked this way and that, muddled and befuddled, striving and cursing, sneering and jeering, small wonder that in the midst of a thought, a perfect jewel of a thought, I sometimes caught myself staring’ straight ahead, mind blank, like a chimpanzee in the act of mounting another chimpanzee. It was in this wise that Abel begot Bogul and Bogul begot Mogul. I was the last of the line, a dog of a Zobel with a bone between my jaws which I could neither chew nor grind, which I teased and worried, and spat on and shat on. Soon I would piss on it and bury it. And the name of the bone was Babel.

A grand life, the literary life. Never would I have it better. Such tools! Such technic! How could any one, unless he hugged me like a shadow, know the myriads of waste places I frequented in my search for ore? Or the varieties of birds that sang for me as I dug my pits and shafts? Or the cackling, chortling gnomes and elves who waited on me as I labored, who faithfully tickled my balls, rehearsed my lines, or revealed to me the mysteries hidden in pebbles, twigs, fleas, lice and pollen? Who could possibly know the confidences revealed by my idols who were ever sending me night messages, or the secret codes imparted to me whereby I learned to read between the lines, to correct false biographical data and make light of gnostic commentaries? Never was there a more solid terra firma beneath my feet than when grappling with this shifting, floating world created by the vandals of culture on whom I finally learned to turn my ass.

And who, I ask, who but a master of reality could imagine that the first step into the world of creation must be accompanied with a loud, evil smelling fart, as if experiencing for the first time the significance of shell-fire? Advance always! The generals of literature sleep soundly in their cosy bunks. We, the hairy ones, do the fighting. From that trench which must be taken there is no returning. Get thee behind us, ye laureates of Satan I If it be cleavers we must fight with, let us use them to full advantage. Faugh a balla! Get those greasy ducks! Avanti, avanti!

The battle is endless. It had no beginning, nor will it know an end. We who babble and froth at the mouth have been at it since eternity. Spare us further instruction! Are we to make green lawns as we advance from trench to trench? Are we landscape artists as well as butchers? Must we storm to victory perfumed like whores? For whom are we mopping up?

How fortunate that I had only one reader! Such an indulgent one, too. Every time I sat down to write a page for him I readjusted my skirt, primped my hair-do and powdered my nose. If only he could see me at work, dear Pop! If only he knew the pains I took to give his novel the proper literary cast. What a Marius he had in me! What an Epicurean!

Somewhere Paul Valery has said: What is of value to us alone (meaning the poets of literature) has no value. This is the law of literature. Iss dot so now? Tsch, tsch! True, our Valery was discussing the art of poetry, discussing the poet’s task and purpose, his raison d’etre. Myself, I have never understood poetry as poetry. For me the mark of the poet is everywhere, in everything. To distil thought until it hangs in the alembic of a poem, revealing not a speck, not a shadow, not a vaporous breath of the impurities from which it was decocted, that for me is a meaningless, worthless pursuit, even though it be the sworn and solemn function of those midwives who toil in the name of Beauty, Form, Intelligence, and so on.

I speak of the poet because I was then, in my blissful embryonic state, more nearly that than ever since. I never thought, as did Diderot, that my ideas are my whores. Why would I want whores? No, my ideas were a garden of delights. An absent-minded gardener I was, who, though tender and observing, did not attach too much importance to the presence of weeds, thorns, nettles, but craved only the joy of frequenting this place apart, this intimate domain peopled with shrubs, blossoms, flowers, bees, birds, bugs of every variety. I never walked the garden as a pimp, nor even in a fornicating frame of mind. Neither did I invest it as a botanist, an entomologist or a horticulturist. I studied nothing, not even my own wonder. Nor did I christen any blessed thing. The look of a flower was enough, or its perfume. How did the flower come to be? How did anything come to be? If I questioned, it was to ask—Are you there, little friend? Are the dewdrops still clinging to your petals?

What could be more considerate—better manners!—than to treat thoughts, ideas, inspirational flashes, as flowers of delight? What better work habits than to greet them with a smile each day or walk among them musing on their evanescent glory? True, now and then I might make so bold as to pluck one for my buttonhole. But to exploit it, to send it out to work like a whore or a stock broker—unthinkable. For me it was enough to have been inspired, not to be perpetually inspired. I was neither a poet nor a drudge. I was simply out of step. Heimatlos. My only reader … Later I will exchange him for the ideal reader, that intimate rascal, that beloved scamp, to whom I may speak as if nothing had any value but to him—and to me. Why add—to me? Can he be any other, this ideal reader, than my alter ego? Why create a world of one’s own if it must also make sense to every Tom, Dick and Harry? Have not the others this world of everyday, which they profess, to despise yet cling to like drowning rats? Is it not strange how they who refuse, or are too lazy, to create a world of their own insist on invading ours? Who is it tramples the flower beds at night? Who is it leaves cigarette stubs in the bird bath? Who is it pees on the blushing violets and wilts their bloom? We know how you ravage the pages of literature in search of what pleases you. We discover the footprints of your blundering spirit everywhere. It is you who kill genius, you who cripple the giants. You, you, whether through love and adoration or through envy, spite and hatred. Who writes for you writes his own death warrant.

Little sparrow,

Mind, mind out of the way,

Mr. Horse is coming.

Issa-San wrote that. Tell me its value!

17.

It was about ten A.M. of a Saturday, just a few minutes after Mona had taken off for the city, when Mrs. Skolsky knocked on the door. I had just taken my seat at the machine and was in a mood to write.

Come in! I said. She entered hesitantly, paused respectfully, then said: There’s a gentleman downstairs wants to see you. Says he’s a friend of yours.

What’s his name?

He wouldn’t give his name. Said not to bother you if you were busy.

(Who the hell could it be? I had given no one our address.)

Tell him I’ll be down in a minute, I said.

When I got to the head of the stairs there he was looking up at me, with a broad grin on his face. MacGregor, no less. The last man on earth I wanted to see.

I’ll bet you’re glad to see me, he piped. Hiding away as usual, I see. How are you, you old bastard?

Come on up!

You’re sure you’re not too busy? This with full sarcasm.

I can always spare ten minutes for an old friend, I replied.

He bounded up the steps. Nice place, he said, as he walked in. How long are you here? Hell, never mind telling me. He sat down on the divan and threw his hat on the table.

Nodding toward the machine he said: Still at it, eh? I thought you had given that up long ago. Boy, you’re a glutton for punishment.

How did you find this place? I asked.

Easy as pie, he said. I phoned your parents. They wouldn’t give me your address but they did give me the phone number. The rest was easy.

I’ll be damned!

What’s the matter, aren’t you glad to see me?

Sure, sure.

You don’t need to worry, I won’t tell anybody. By the way, is what’s her name still with you?

You mean Mona?

Yeah, Mona. I couldn’t remember her name.

Sure she’s with me. Why shouldn’t she be?

I never thought she’d last this long, that’s all. Well, it’s good to know you’re happy.

I’m not! I’m in a jam. One hell of a jam. That’s why I came to see you. I need you.

No, don’t say that! How the hell can I help you? You know I’m…

All I want you to do is listen. Don’t get panicky. I’m in love, that’s what.

That’s fine, I said. What’s wrong with that?

She won’t have me.

I burst out laughing. Is that all? Is that what’s worrying you? You poor sap!

You don’t, understand. It’s different this time. This is love. Let me tell you about her … He paused a full moment. Unless you’re too busy right now. He directed his gaze at the work table, observed the blank sheet in the machine, then added: What is it this time—a novel? Or a philosophical treatise?

It’s nothing, I said. Nothing important.

Sounds strange, he said. Once upon a time everything you did was important, very important. Come on, what are you holding back for? I know I disturbed you, but that’s no reason to clam up on me.

If you really want to know, I’m working on a novel.

A novel? Jesus, Hen, don’t try that … you’ll never write a novel.

Why? What makes you so sure? Because I know you, that’s why. You haven’t any feeling for plot.

Does a novel always have to have a plot? Look, he countered, I don’t want to gum up the works, but…

But what?

Why don’t you stick to your guns? You can write anything, but not a novel.

What makes you think I can write at all?

He hung his head, as if thinking up an answer.

You never thought much of me as a writer, said I. Nobody does.

You’re a writer all right, he said. Maybe you haven’t produced anything worth looking at yet, but you’ve got time. The trouble with you is you’re obstinate.

Obstinate?

Obstinate, yeah! Stubborn, mule-headed. You want to enter by the front door. You want to be different but you don’t want to pay the price. Look, why couldn’t you take a job as a reporter, work your way up, become a correspondent, then tackle the great work? Answer that!

Because it’s a waste of time, that’s why.

Other men have done it. Bigger men than you, some of them. What about Bernard Shaw?

That was O.K. for him, I replied. I have my own way.

Silence for a few moments. I reminded him of an evening in his office long ago, an evening when he had flung a new review at me and told me to read a story by John Dos Passes, then a young writer.

You know what you told me then? You said: ‘Hen, why don’t you try your hand at it? You can write as good as him any day. Read it and see!’

I said that?

Yes. Don’t remember, eh? Well, those words you dropped so carelessly that night stuck in my crop. Whether I’ll ever be as good as John Dos Passes is neither here nor there. What’s important is that once you seemed to think I could write.

Have I ever said any different, Hen?

No, but you act different. You act as if you were going along with me in some crazy escapade. As if it were all hopeless. You want me to do like every one else, do it their way, repeat their errors.

Jesus, but you’re sensitive I Go on, write your bloody novel! Write your fool head off, if you like! I was just trying to give you a little friendly advice … Anyway, that’s not what I came for, to talk writing. I’m in a jam, I need help. And you’re the one who’s going to help me.

How?

I don’t know. But let me tell you a bit first, then you’ll understand better. You can spare a half-hour, can’t you?

I guess so.

Well then, it’s like this … You remember that joint we used to go to in the Village Saturday afternoons? The place George always haunted? It was about two months ago, I guess, when I dropped in to look things over. It hadn’t changed much … still the same sort of gals hanging out there. But I was bored. I had a couple of drinks all by myself—nobody gave me a tumble, by the way—I guess I was feeling a little sorry for myself, getting old like and all that, when suddenly I spied a girl two tables away, alone like myself.

A raving beauty, I suppose?

No, Hen. No, I wouldn’t say that. But different. Anyway, I caught her eye, asked her for a dance, and when the dance was over she came and sat with me. We didn’t dance again. Just sat and talked. Until closing time. I wanted to take her home but she refused to let me. I asked for her phone number and she refused that too. ‘Maybe I’ll see you here next Saturday?’ I said. ‘Maybe,’ she replied. And that was that … You haven’t got a drink around here, have you?

Sure I have. I went to the closet and got out a bottle.

What’s this? he said, grabbing the bottle of Vermouth.

That’s a hair tonic, I said. I suppose you want Scotch?

If you have it, yes. If not, I’ve got some in my car.

I got out a bottle of Scotch and poured him a stiff drink.

How about yourself?

Never touch it. Besides, it’s too early in the day.

That’s right. You’ve got to write that novel, don’t you?

Just as soon as you leave, I said.

I’ll make it brief, Hen. I know you’re bored. But I don’t give a damn. You’ve got to hear me out … Where was I now? Yeah, the dance hall. Well, next Saturday I was back waiting for her, but no sign of her. I sat there the whole afternoon. Didn’t have a single dance. No Guelda.

What? Guelda? Is that her name?

Yeah, what’s wrong?

A funny name, that’s all. What is she … what nationality?

Scotch-Irish, I imagine. What difference does that make?

None, none at all. Just curious.

She’s no Gypsy, if that’s what’s on your mind. But there’s something about her that gets me. I can’t stop thinking about her. I’m in love, that’s what. And I don’t think I’ve ever been in love before. Not this way, certainly.

It sure is funny to hear you say that.

! know it, Hen.. It’s more than funny. It’s tragic.

I burst out laughing.

Yes, tragic, he repeated. For the first time in my life I’ve met some one who doesn’t give a shit about me.

How do you know? I said. Did you ever meet her again?

Meet her again? Man, I’ve been dogging her steps ever since that day. Sure, I’ve seen her again. I tracked her home one night. She was getting off a bus at Borough Hall. Didn’t see me, of course. Next day I rang her up. She was furious. What did I mean telephoning her? How did I get her number? And so on. Well, a few weeks later she was at the dance hall again. This time I had to literally get down on my knees to wangle a dance out of her. She told me not to bother her, that I didn’t interest her, that I was uncouth … oh, all sorts of things. I couldn’t get her to sit with me either. A few days later I sent her a bouquet of roses. No results. I tried phoning her again, but as soon as she heard my voice she hung up.

She’s probably mad about you, I said.

I’m poison to her, that’s what.

Have you found out what she does for a living?

Yes. She’s a school teacher.

A school teacher? That beats everything. You running after a school teacher! Now I see her better—kind of big, awkward creature, very plain but not homely, hardly ever smiles, wears her hair…

You’re close, Hen, but you’re off too. Yes, she is sort of big and large, but in a good way. About her looks I can’t say. I only see her eyes—they’re china blue and they twinkle…

Like stars.

Violets, he said. Just like violets. The rest of the face doesn’t count. To be honest with you, I think she has a receding chin.

How about the legs?

Not too good. A bit on the plump side. But they’re not piano legs!

And her ass, does it wobble, when she walks?

He jumped to his feet. Hen, he said, putting an arm around me, it’s her ass that gets me. If I could just rub my hand over it—once—I’d die happy.

She’s prudish, in other words?

Untouchable.

Have you kissed her yet?

Are you crazy? Kiss her? She’d die first.

Listen, I said, don’t you think that perhaps the reason you’re so crazy about her is simply because she won’t have anything to do with you? You’ve had better girls than her, from what I gather about her looks. Forget her, that’s the best thing. It won’t break your heart. You haven’t got a heart. You’re a born Don Juan.

Not any more, Hen. I can’t look at another girl. I’m hooked.

How did you think I could help you then?

I don’t know. I was wondering if … if maybe you would try to see her for me, talk to her, tell her how serious I am … Something like that.

But how would I ever get to her—as an emissary of yours? She’d throw me out quick as look at me, wouldn’t she?

That’s true. But maybe we could find a way to have you meet without her knowing that you’re my friend. Work your way into her good graces and then…

Then spring it on her, eh?

What’s wrong with that? It’s possible, isn’t it?

Everything’s possible. Only…

Only what?

Well, did you ever think that maybe I’d fall for her myself? (I had no such fear of course, I merely wanted his reaction.)

It made him chuckle, this absurd notion. She’s not your type, Hen, don’t worry. You’re looking for the exotic. She’s Scotch-Irish, I told you. You haven’t a thing in common. But you can talk, damn it! When you want to, that is. You could have made a good lawyer, I’ve told you that before. Try to picture yourself pleading a cause … my cause. You could come down from your pedestal and do a little thing like that for an old friend, couldn’t you?

It might take a little money, I said.

Money? For what?

Spend money. Flowers, taxis, theatre, cabarets…

Come off it! he said. Flowers maybe. But don’t think of it in terms of a long-winded campaign. Just get acquainted and start talking. I don’t have to tell you how to go about it. Melt her, that’s the thing. Weep, if you have to. Christ, if I could only get into her home, see her alone, I’d prostrate myself at her feet, lick her toes, let her step on me. I’m serious, Hen. I wouldn’t have looked you up if I wasn’t desperate.

All right, I said, I’ll think it over. Give me a little time.

You’re not putting me off? You promise?

I promise nothing, I said. It needs thinking about. I’ll do my best, that’s all I can say.

Shake on it! he said, and put out his hand.

You don’t know how good it makes me feel to hear you say that, Hen. I had thought of asking George, but you know George. He’d treat it as a joke. It’s anything but a joke, you know that, don’t you? Hell, I remember when you were talking of blowing your brains out—over your what’s her name…

Mona, I said.

Yeah, Mona. You just had to have her, didn’t you? You’re happy now, I hope. Hen, I don’t even ask that—to be happy with her. All I want is to look at her, idolize her, worship her. Sounds juvenile, doesn’t it? But I mean it. I’m licked. If I don’t get her I’ll go nuts.

I poured him another drink.

I used to laugh at you, remember? Always falling in love. Remember how that widow of yours hated me? She had good reason to. By the way, what ever became of her?

I shook my head.

You were nuts about her, weren’t you? Now that I look back on it, she wasn’t such a bad sort. A little too old, maybe, a little sad looking, but attractive. Didn’t she have a-son about your age?

Yes, I said. He died a few years ago.

You never thought you’d get out of that entanglement, did you? Seems like a thousand years ago … And what about Una? Guess you never did get over that, eh?

Guess not, I said.

You know what, Hen? You’re lucky. God comes to your rescue every time. Look, I’m not going to keep you from your work any longer. I’ll give you a ring in a few days and see what’s cooking. Don’t let me down, that’s all I beg of you.

He picked up his hat and walked to the door. By the way, he said, grinning, and nodding toward the machine—What’s the title of the novel going to be?

The Iron Horses of Vladivostok, I replied.

No kidding.

Or maybe—This Gentile World.

That’s sure to make it a best seller, he said.

Give my best to Guelda, when you phone her again!

Think up something good now, you bastard! And give my love to…

Mona!

Yeah, Mona. Ta ta!

Later that day there came another knock at the door. This time it was Sid Essen. He seemed excited and disturbed. Apologized profusely for intruding.

I just had to see you, he began. I do hope you’ll forgive me. Chase me away, if you’re in the midst of something…

‘Sit down, sit down, I said, I’m never too busy to see you. Are you in trouble?

No, no trouble. Lonely, maybe … and disgusted with myself. Sitting there in the dark I was getting glummer and glummer. Almost suicidal. Suddenly I thought of you. I said ‘Why not see Miller? He’ll cheer you up.’ And like that I up and left. The boy is taking care of the shop … Really, I’m ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t stand it another minute.

He rose from the divan and walked over to a print hanging on the wall beside my table. It was one of Hiroshige’s, from: The Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido.

He looked at it intently, then turned to gaze at the others. Meanwhile his expression had changed from one of anxiety and gloom to sheer joy. When he finally turned his face to me he had tears in his eyes.

Miller, Miller, what a place you have! What an atmosphere! Just to stand here in your presence, surrounded by all this beauty, makes me feel like a new man. How I wish I could change places with you! I’m a rough neck, as you know, but I do love art, every form of art. And I’m particularly fond of Oriental art. I think the Japanese are a wonderful people. Everything they do is artistic … Yes, yes, it’s good to work in a room like this. You sit there with your thoughts and you’re king of the world. Such a pure life! You know, Miller, sometimes you remind me of a Hebrew scholar. There’s something of the saint in you too. That’s why I came to see you. You give me hope and courage. Even when you don’t say anything. You don’t mind my running on like this? I have to get it off my chest. He paused, as if to summon courage. I’m a failure, there’s no getting round that. I know it and I’m reconciled to it. But what hurts is to think that my boy may think so too. I don’t want him to pity me. Despise me, yes. But not pity me.

Reb, I said, I’ve never looked upon you as a failure. You’re almost like an older brother. What’s more, you’re kind and tender, and generous to a fault.

I wish my wife could hear you say that.

Never mind what she thinks. Wives are always hard on those they love.

Love. There hasn’t been any love, not for years. She has her own world; I have mine.

There was an awkward pause.

Do you think it would do any good if I dropped out of sight?

I doubt it, Reb. What would you do? Where would you go?

Anywhere. As for making a living, to tell the truth I’d be happy shining shoes. Money means nothing to me. I like people, I like to do things for them.

He looked up at the wall again. He pointed to a drawing of Hokusai’s—from Life in the Eastern Capital.

You see all those figures, he said. Ordinary people doing ordinary everyday things. That’s what I’d like—to be one of them, to be doing something ordinary. A barrel-maker or a tinsmith—what difference? To be part of the procession, that’s the thing. Not sit in an empty store all day killing time. Damn it, I’m still good for something. What would you. do in my place?

Reb, I said, I was in exactly your position once upon a time. Yes, I used to sit all day in my father’s shop, doing nothing. I thought I’d go crazy. I loathed the place. But I didn’t know how to break loose.

How did you then?

Fate pushed me out, I guess. But I must tell you this … while I was eating my heart out I was praying too. Every day I prayed that some one—God perhaps—would show me the way. I was also thinking of writing, even that far back. But it was more a dream than a possibility. It took me years, even after I had left the tailor shop, to write a line. One should never despair…

But you were only a kid then. I’m getting to be an old man.

Even so. The years that are left you are yours. If there’s something you really want to do there’s still time.

Miller, he said, almost woefully, there’s no creative urge in me. All I ask is to get out the trap. I want to live again. I want to get back into the current. That’s all.

What’s stopping you?

Don’t say that! Please don’t say that! What’s stopping me? Everything. My wife, my kids, my obligations. Myself, most of all. I’ve got too poor an opinion of myself.

I couldn’t help smiling. Then, as if to myself, I replied:

Only we humans seem to have a low opinion of ourselves. Take a worm, for example—do you suppose a worm looks down on itself?

It’s terrible to feel guilty, he said. And for what? What have I done?

It’s what you haven’t done, isn’t it?

Yes, yes, of course.

Do you know what’s more important than doing something?

No, said Reb.

Being yourself.

But if you’re nothing?

Then be nothing. But be it absolutely.

That sounds crazy.

It is. That’s why it’s so sound.

Go on, he said, you make me feel good.

In wisdom is death, you’ve heard that, haven’t you? Isn’t it better to be a little meshuggah? Who worries about you? Only you. When you can’t sit in the store any more, why don’t you get up and take a walk? Or go to the movies? Close the shop, lock the door. A customer more or less won’t make any difference in your life, will it? Enjoy yourself! Go fishing once in a while, even if you don’t know how to fish. Or take your car and drive out into the country. Anywhere. Listen to the birds, bring home some flowers, or some, fresh oysters.

He was leaning forward, all ears, a broad smile stretched across his face.

Tell me more, he said. It sounds wonderful.

Well, remember this … the store won’t run away from you. Business won’t get any better. Nobody asks you to lock yourself in all day. You’re a free man. If by becoming more careless and negligent you grow happier, who will blame you? I’ll make a further suggestion. Instead of going off by yourself, take one of your Negro tenants with you. Show him a good time. Give him some clothing from your store. Ask him if you can lend him some money. Buy his wife a little, gift for him to take home. See what I mean?

He began to laugh. Do I see? It sounds great. That’s just what I’m going to do.

Don’t make too big a splurge all at once, I cautioned. Take it slow and easy. Follow your instincts. For instance, maybe one day you’ll feel like getting yourself a piece of tail. Don’t have a bad conscience about it. Try a piece of dark meat now and then. It’s tastier, and it costs less. Anything to make you relax, remember that. Always treat yourself well. If you feel like a worm, grovel; if you feel like a bird, fly. Don’t worry about what the neighbors may think. Don’t worry about your kids, they’ll take care of themselves. As for your wife, maybe when she sees you happy she’ll change her tune. She’s a good woman, your wife. Too conscientious, that’s all. Needs to laugh once in a while. Did you ever try a limerick on her? Here’s one for you…

There was a young girl from Peru,

Who dreamt she was raped by a Jew,

She awoke in the night,

With a scream of delight,

To find it was perfectly true!

Good, good! he exclaimed. Do you know any more?

Yes, I said, but I’ve got to get back to work now. Feel better now, don’t you? Tomorrow we visit the darkies, eh? Maybe some day next week I’ll ride out to Bluepoint with you. How’s that?

Would you? Oh, that would be dandy, just dandy. By the way, how is the book coming along? Are you nearly finished with it? I’m dying to read it, you know. So is Mrs. Essen.

Reb, you won’t like the book at all. I must tell you that straight off.

How can you say that? He was fairly shouting.

Because it’s no good.

He looked at me as if I were out of my mind. For a moment he didn’t know what to say. Then he blurted out—Miller, you’re crazy! You couldn’t write a bad book. It’s impossible. I know you too well.

You know only a part of me, I said. You’ve never seen the other side of the moon, have you? That’s me. Terra incognita. Take it from me, I’m just a novice. Maybe ten years from now I’ll have something to show you.

But you’ve been writing for years.

Practising, you mean. Practising the scales.

You’re joking, he said. You’re over modest.

That’s where you’re mistaken, I said. I’m anything but modest. I’m a rank egotist, that’s what I am. But I’m also a realist, at least with myself.

You underrate yourself, said Reb. I’m going to hand you back your own words—don’t look down on your-self!

O.K. You win.

He was heading for the door. Suddenly I had an impulse to unburden myself.

Wait a moment, I said. There’s something I want to tell you.

He trotted back to the table and stood there, like a messenger boy. All attention. Respectful attention. I wondered what he thought I was about to tell him.

When you came in a few minutes ago, I began, I was in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a long paragraph. Would you like to hear it? I leaned over the machine and reeled it off for him. It was one of those crazy passages which I myself couldn’t make head nor tail of. I wanted a reaction, and not from Pop or Mona.

I got it too, immediately.

Miller! he shouted. Miller, that’s just marvelous! You sound like a Russian. I don’t know what it means but it makes music.

You think so? Honestly?

Of course I do. I wouldn’t lie to you.

That’s fine. Then I’ll go ahead. I’ll finish the paragraph.

Is the whole book like that?

No, damn it! That’s the trouble. The parts I like nobody else will like. At least, not the publishers.

To hell with them! said Reb. If they won’t take it I’ll publish it for you, with my own money.

I wouldn’t recommend that, I replied. Remember, you’re not to throw your money away all at once.

Miller, if it took my last cent, I’d do it. I’d do it because I believe in you.

Don’t give it another thought, I said. I can think of better ways to spend your money.

Not me! I’d feel proud and happy to launch you. So would my wife and children. They think very highly of you. You’re like one of the family to them.

That’s good to hear, Reb. I hope I merit such confidence. Tomorrow, then, eh? Let’s bring something good for the darkies, what?

When he had gone I began pacing up and down, quietly, containedly, pausing now and then to gaze at a woodblock, or a colored reproduction (Giotto, della Francesca, Uccello, Bosch, Breughel, Carpaccio), then pacing again, becoming more and more pregnant, standing still, staring into space, letting my mind go, letting it rest where it willed, becoming more and more serene, more and more charged with the gravid beauty of the past, pleased with myself to be part of this past (and of the future too), felicitating myself on living this womb or tomb sort of existence … Yes, it was indeed a lovely room, a lovely place, and everything in it, everything we had contributed to make it habitable, reflected the inner loveliness of life, the life of the soul.

You sit there with your thoughts and you’re king of the world. This innocent remark of Reb’s had lodged in my brain, given me such equanimity that for a spell I felt factually knew what it meant—to be king of the world. King! That is, one capable of rendering homage to high and low; one so sentient, so perceptive, so illumined with love that nothing escaped his attention nor his understanding. The poetic intercessor, in short. Not ruling the world but worshiping it with every breath.

Standing again before the everyday world of Hokusai … Why had this great master of the brush taken the pains to reproduce the all too common elements of his world? To reveal his skill? Nonsense. To express his love, to indicate that it extended far and wide, that it included the staves of a barrel, a blade of grass, the rippling muscles of a wrestler, the slant of rain in a wind, the teeth of a wave, the backbone of a fish … In short, everything. An almost impossible task, were it not for the joy involved.

Fond of Oriental art, he had said. As I repeated Reb’s words to myself suddenly the whole continent of India rose up before me. There, amidst that swarming beehive of humanity, were the palpitating relics of a world which was and will ever remain truly stupefying. Reb had taken no notice, or had said nothing if he did, of the colored pages torn from art books which also adorned the walls: reproductions of temples and stupas from the Deccan, of sculptured caves and grottoes, of wall paintings and frescoes depicting the overwhelming myths and legends of a people drunk with form and movement, with passion and growth, with idea, with consciousness itself. A mere glance at a cluster of ancient temples rising from the heat and vegetation of the Indian soil always gave me the sensation of gazing at thought itself, thought struggling to free itself, thought becoming plastic, concrete, more suggestive and evocative, more awe-inspiring, thus deployed in brick or stone, than ever words could be.

As often as I had read his words, I was never able to commit them to memory. I was hungry now for that flood of torrential images, those great swollen phrases, sentences, paragraphs—the words of the man who had opened my, eyes to this stupefying creation of India: Elie Faure. I reached for the volume I had thumbed through so often—Vol. II of the History of Art—and I turned to the passage beginning—For the Indians, all nature is divine … What does not die, in India, is faith … Then followed the lines which, when I first encountered them, made my brain reel.

In India there came to pass this thing: that, driven forth by an invasion, a famine, or a migration of wild beasts, thousands of human beings moved to the north or to the south. There at the shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain, they encountered a great wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite; in its shadows they lived, loved worked, died, were born, and, three or four centuries afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed the mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hollowed out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand horrible or charming figures, gods without number and without name, men, women, beasts—a tide of animal life moving in the gloom. Sometimes when they found no clearing in their path, they hollowed out an abyss in the center of the mass of rock to shelter a little black stone. It is in these monolithic temples, on their dark walls, or on their sunburnt facade, that the true genius of India expends all its terrific force. Here the confused speech of confused multitudes makes itself heard. Here man confesses unresistingly his strength and his nothingness…

I read on, intoxicated as always. The words were no longer words but living images, images fresh from the mould, shimmering, palpitating, undulating, choking me by their very excrescence.

…the elements themselves will not mingle all these lives with the confusion of the earth more successfully than the sculptor has done. Sometimes, in India, one finds mushrooms of stone in the depths of the forests, shining in the green shadow like poisonous plants. Sometimes one finds heavy elephants, quite alone, as mossy and as rough skinned as if alive; they mingle with the tangled Vines, the grasses reach their bellies, flowers and leaves cover them, and even when their debris shall have returned to the earth they will be no more completely absorbed by the intoxication of the forest.

What a thought, this last! Even when they have returned to the earth … Ah, and now the passage…

…Man is no longer at the center of life. He is no longer that flower of the whole world, which has slowly set itself to form and mature him. He is mingled with all things, he is on the same plane with all things, he is a particle of the infinite, neither more nor less important than the other particles of the infinite. The earth passes into the trees, the trees into the fruits, the fruits into man or the animal, man and the animal into the earth; the circulation of life sweeps along and propagates a confused universe wherein forms arise for a second, only to be engulfed and then to reappear, overlapping one another, palpitating, penetrating one another as they surge like the waves. Man does not know whether yesterday he was not the very tool with which he himself will force matter to release the form that he may have to-morrow. Everything is merely an appearance, and under the diversity of appearances, Brahma, the spirit of the world, is a unity … Lost as he is in the ocean of mingled forms and energies, does he know whether he is still a form or a spirit? Is that thing before us a thinking being, a living being even, a planet, or a being cut in stone? Germination and putrefaction are engendered unceasingly. Everything has its heavy movement, expanded matter beats like a heart. Does not wisdom consist in submerging oneself in it, in order to taste the intoxication of the unconscious as one gains possession of the force that stirs in matter?

To love Oriental art. Who does not? But which Orient, the near or the far? I loved them all. Maybe I loved this art so very different from our own because, in the words of Elie Faure, man is no longer at the center of life. Perhaps it was this leveling (and raising) of man, this promiscuity with all life, this infinitely small and infinitely great at one and the same time, which produced such exaltation when confronted with their work. Or, to put it another way, because Nature was (with them) something other, something more, than a mere backdrop. Because man, though divine, was no more divine than that from which he sprang. Also, perhaps, because they did not confound the welter and tumult of life with the welter and tumult of the intellect. Because mind—or spirit or soul—shone through everything, creating a divine irradiation. Thus, though humbled and chastened, man was never flattened, nullified, obliterated or degraded. Never made to cringe before the sublime, but incorporated in it. If there was a key to the mysteries which enveloped him, pervaded him, and sustained him, it was a simple key, available to all. There was nothing arcane about it.

Yes, I loved this immense, staggering world of the Indian which, who knows, I might one day see with my own eyes. I loved it not because it was alien and remote, for it was really closer to me than the art of the West; I loved the love from which it was born, a love which was shared by the multitude, a love which could never have come to expression had it not been of, by and for the multitude. I loved the anonymous aspect of their staggering creations. How comforting and sustaining to be a humble, unknown worker—an artisan and not a genius!—one among thousands, sharing in the creation of that which belonged to all. To have been nothing more than a water carrier—that had more meaning for me than to become a Picasso, a Rodin, a Michelangelo or a da Vinci. Surveying the panorama of European art, it is the name of the artist which always sticks out like a sore thumb. And usually, associated with the great names, goes a story of woe of affliction, of cruel misunderstanding. With us of the West the word genius has something of the monstrous about it. Genius, or the one who does not adapt; genius, he who gets slapped; genius, he who is persecuted and tormented; genius, he who dies in the gutter, or in exile, or at the stake.

It is true, I had a way of infuriating my bosom friends when extolling the virtues of other peoples. They asserted that I did it for effect, that I only pretended to appreciate and esteem the works of alien artists, that it was my way of castigating our own people, our own creators. They were never convinced that I could take to the alien, the exotic, or the outlandish in art immediately, that it demanded no preparation, no initiation, no knowledge of their history or their evolution. What does it mean? What are they trying to say? Thus they jeered and mocked. As if explanations meant anything. As if I cared what they meant.

Above all, it was the loneliness and the futility of being an artist which most disturbed me. Thus far in my life I had met only two writers whom I could call artists: John Cowper Powys and Frank Harris. The former I knew through attending his lectures; the latter I knew in my role of merchant tailor, the lad, in other words, who delivered his clothes, who helped him on with his trousers. Was it my fault, perhaps, that I had remained outside the circle? How was I to meet another writer, or painter or sculptor? Push my way into his studio, tell him that I too yearned to write, paint, sculpt, dance or what? Where did artists congregate in our vast metropolis? In Greenwich Village, they said. I had lived in the Village, walked its streets at all hours, visited its coffee shops and tea rooms, its galleries and studios, its bookstores, its bars, its dives and speak-easies. Yes, I had rubbed elbows, in some dingy bar, with figures like Maxwell Bodenheim, Sadakichi Hartman, Guido Bruno, but I had never run into a Dos Passes, a Sherwood Anderson, a Waldo Franck, an E.E. Cummings, a Theodore Dreiser or a Ben Hecht. Nor even the ghost of an O’Henry. Where did they keep themselves? Some were already abroad, leading the happy life of the exile or the renegade. They were not in search of other artists, certainly not raw novices like myself. How wonderful it would have been if, in those days when it meant so much to me, I could have met and talked with Theodore Dreiser, or Sherwood Anderson, whom I adored I Perhaps we would have had something to say to one another, raw as I then was. Perhaps I would have derived the courage to start sooner—or to run away, seek adventure in foreign lands.

Was it shyness, timidity, lack of self-esteem which kept me apart and alone throughout these barren years? A rather ludicrous incident leaps to mind. Of a time when, cruising about with O’Mora, searching desperately for novelty and excitement, anything for a lark, we went one night to a lecture at the Rand School. It was one of those literary nights when members of the audience are asked to voice their opinions about this author and that. Perhaps that evening, we had listened to a lecture on some contemporary and supposedly revolutionary writer. It seems to me that we had, for suddenly, when I found myself on my feet and talking, I realized that what I was saying had nothing to do with what had gone before. Though I was dazed—it was the first time I had ever risen to speak in public, even in an informal atmosphere such as this—I was conscious, or half-conscious, that my audience was hypnotized. I could feel, rather than see, their upturned faces strained to catch my words. My eyes were focused straight ahead, at the figure behind the lectern who was slumped in his seat, gazing at the floor. As I say, I was utterly dazed; I knew not what I was saying nor where it was leading me. I spouted, as one does in a trance. And what was I talking about? About a scene from one of Hamsun’s novels, something concerning a peeping Tom. I remember this because at the mention of the subject, and I probably went into the scene in detail, there was a slight titter in the audience followed immediately by a hush which signified rapt attention. When I had finished there was a burst of applause and then the master of ceremonies made a flattering speech about the good fortune they had had in hearing this uninvited guest, a writer no doubt, though he was regretfully ignorant of my name, and so on. As the group dispersed he jumped down from the platform and rushed up to me to congratulate me anew, to ask who I was, what I had written, where did I live, and so forth and so on. My reply, of course, was vague and non-committal. I was in a panic by this time and my one thought was to escape. But he clutched me by the sleeve, as I turned to go, and in utter seriousness said—and what a shock it was!—Why don’t you take over these meetings? You’re much better equipped for it than I am. We need some one like you, some one who can create fire and enthusiasm.

I stammered something in reply, perhaps a lame promise, and edged my way to the exit. Outside I turned to O’Mara and asked—What did I say, do you remember?

He looked at me strangely, wondering no doubt if I were fishing for a compliment.

I don’t remember a thing, said I. From the moment I rose to my feet I was out. I only vaguely know that I was talking about Hamsun.

Christ In he said, What a pity I You were marvelous; you never hesitated a moment; the words just rolled out of your mouth.

Did it make sense, that’s what I’d like to know.

Make sense? Man, you were almost as good as Powys.

Come, come, don’t give me that!

I mean it, Henry, he said, and there were tears in his eyes as he spoke. You could be a great lecturer. You had them spell-bound. They were shocked too. Didn’t know what to make of you, I guess.

It was really that good, eh? I was only slowly realizing what had happened.

You said a lot before you launched into that Hamsun business.

I did? Like what, for instance?

Jesus, don’t ask me to repeat it. I couldn’t. You touched on everything, it seemed. You even talked about God for a few minutes.

No! That’s all a blank to me. A complete blank.

What’s the difference? he said. I wish 7 could go blank and talk that way.

There it was. A trifling incident, yet revelatory. Nothing ever came of it. Never again did I attempt, or even dream, of opening my mouth in public. If I attended a lecture, and I attended many in this period, I sat with eyes, mouth and ears open, entranced, subjugated, as impressionable and waxen a figure as all the others about me. It would never occur to me to stand up and ask a question, much less offer a criticism. I came to be instructed, to be opened up. I never said to myself—You too could stand up and deliver a speech. You too could sway the audience with your powers of eloquence. You too could choose an author and expound his merits in dazzling fashion. No, never any such thoughts. Reading a book, yes, I might lift my eyes from the page upon the conclusion of a brilliant passage, and say to myself: You could do that too. You have done it, as a matter of fact. Only you don’t do it often enough. And I would read on, the submissive victim, the all-too-willing disciple. Such a good disciple that, when the occasion presented itself, when the mood was on me, I could explain, analyze and criticize the book I had just read almost as if I had been the author of it, employing not his own words but a simulacrum which carried weight and inspired respect. And of course always, on these occasions, the question would be hurled at me—Why don’t you write a book yourself? Whereupon I would close up like a clam, or become a clown—anything to throw dust in their eyes. It was always a writer-to-be that I cultivated in the presence of friends and admirers, or even believers, for it was always easy for me to create these believers .

But alone, reviewing my words or deeds soberly, the sense of being cut off always took possession of me. They don’t know me, I would say to myself. And by this I meant that they knew me neither for myself nor for what I might become. They were impressed by the mask. I didn’t call it that, but that is how I thought of my ability to impress others. It was not me doing it, but a persona which I knew how to put on. It was something, indeed, which any one with a little intelligence and a flair for acting could learn to do. Monkey tricks, in other words. Yet, though I regarded these performances in this light, I myself at times would wonder if perhaps it was not me, after all, who was behind these antics.

Such was the penalty of living alone, working alone, never meeting a kindred spirit, never touching the fringe of that secret inner circle wherein all those doubts and conflicts which ravaged me could be brought out into the open, shared, discussed, analyzed and, if not resolved, at least aired.

Those strange figures out of the world of art—painters, sculptors, particularly painters—was it not natural that I should feel at home with them? Their work spoke to me in mysterious fashion. Had they used words I might have been baffled. However remote their world from ours, the ingredients were the same: rocks, trees, mountains, water, theatre, work, play, costumes, worship, youth and old age, harlotry, coquetry, mimicry, war, famine, torture, intrigue, vice, lust, joy, sorrow. A Tibetan scroll, with its mandalas, its gods and devils, its strange symbols, its prescribed colors, was as familiar to me, some part of me, as the nymphs and sprites, the streams and forests, of a European painter.

But what was closer to me than anything in Chinese, Japanese or Tibetan art was this art of India born of the mountain itself. (As if the mountains became pregnant with dreams and gave birth to their dreams, using the poor human mortals who hollowed them out as tools.) It was the monstrous nature, if we may speak of the grandiose as such, yes, the monstrous nature of these creations which so appealed to me, which answered to some unspoken hunger in my own being. Moving amidst my own people I was never impressed by any of their accomplishments; I never felt the presence of any deep religious urge, nor any great aesthetic impulse: there was no sublime architecture, no sacred dances, no ritual of any kind. We moved in a swarm, intent on accomplishing one thing—to make life easy. The great bridges, the great dams, the great skyscrapers left me cold. Only Nature could instill a sense of awe. And we were defacing Nature at every turn. As many times as I struck out to scour the land, I always came back empty-handed. Nothing new, nothing bizarre, nothing exotic. Worse, nothing to bow down before, nothing to reverence. Alone in a land where every one was hopping about like mad. What I craved was to worship and adore. What I needed were companions who felt the same way. But there was nothing to worship or adore, there were no companions of like spirit. There was only a wilderness of steel and iron, of stocks and bonds, of crops and produce, of factories, mills and lumber yards, a wilderness of boredom, of useless utilities, of loveless love…

18.

A few days later. A telephone call from MacGregor. You know what, Hen? No, what?

She’s coming round. All on her own too. Don’t know what’s come over her. You didn’t go to see her, did you?

No. In fact I’ve hardly had a chance to think about her.

You bastard! But you brought me luck, just the same. Or rather your pictures did. Yeah, those Japanese prints you had on your wall. I went and bought a couple, beautifully framed, and I sent them to her. Next day I get a telephone call. She was all excited. Said they were just what she always longed for. I told her that it was from you I got the inspiration. She pricked up her ears. Surprised, I guess, that I had a friend who cared anything about art. Now she wants to meet you. I said you were a busy man, but I’d call you and see if we could come to your place some evening. A queer girl, what? Anyway, this is your chance to fix things for me. Throw a lot of books around, will you? You know, the kind I never read. She’s a school teacher, remember. Books mean something to her … Well, what do you say? Aren’t you happy? Say something!

I think it’s marvelous. Watch out, or you’ll be marrying again.

Nothing would make me happier. But I have to go easy. You can’t rush her. Not her! It’s like moving a stone wall.

Silence for a moment. Then—Are you there, Hen?

Sure, I’m listening.

I’d like to get a little dope from you before I see you … before I bring Guelda, I mean. Just a few facts about painters and paintings. You know me, I never bothered to brush up on that stuff. For instance, Hen, what about Breughel—was he one of the very great? Seems to me I’ve seen his stuff before—in frame stores and book shops. That one you have, with the peasant ploughing the field … he’s up on a cliff, I seem to remember, and there’s something falling from the sky … a man maybe … heading straight for the ocean. You know the one. What’s it called?

The Flight of Icarus, I think.

Of whom?

Icarus. The guy who tried to fly to the sun but his wings melted, remember?

Sure, sure. So that’s it? I think I’d better drop around some day and have another look at those pictures. You can wise me up. I don’t want to look like a jackass when she starts talking art.

O.K., I said. Anytime. But remember, don’t keep me long.

Before you hang up, Hen, give me the name of a book I could make her a present of. Something clean—and poetic. Can you think of one quick?

Yes, just the thing for her: Green Mansions. By W. H. Hudson. She’ll love it.

You’re sure?

Absolutely. Read it yourself first.

I’d like to, Hen, but I haven’t the time. By the way, remember that book list you gave me … about sewn years ago? Well, I’ve read three so far. You see what I mean.

You’re hopeless, I replied.

One more thing, Hen. You know, vacation time is coming soon. I’ve got a notion to take her to Europe with me. That is, if I don’t cross her up in the meantime. What do you think?

A wonderful idea. Make it a honeymoon trip.

It was MacGregor, I’ll bet, said Mona.

Right. Now he’s threatening to bring his Guelda some evening.

What a pest! Why don’t you tell the landlady to say you’re out next time there’s a call?

Wouldn’t do much good. He’d come around to find out if she were lying. He knows me. No, we’re trapped.

She was getting ready to leave—an appointment with Pop. The novel was almost completed now. Pop still thought highly of it.

Pop’s going to Miami soon for a brief vacation.

That’s good.

I’ve been thinking, Val … I’ve been thinking that maybe we could take a vacation too while he’s away.

Like where? I said.

Oh, anywhere. Maybe to Montreal or Quebec.

It’ll be freezing up there, won’t it?

I don’t know. Since we’re going to France I thought you might like a taste of French life. Spring is almost here, it can’t be so very cold there.

We said nothing more about the trip for a day or two. Meanwhile Mona had been investigating. She had all the dope on Quebec, which she thought I’d like better than Montreal. More French, she said. The small hotels weren’t too expensive.

A few days later it was decided. She would take the train to Montreal and I would hitch hike. I would meet her at the railway station in Montreal.

It was strange to be on the road again. Spring had come but it was still cold. With money in my pocket I didn’t worry about lifts. If it was no go I could always hop a bus or a train. So I stood there, on the highway outside Paterson N. J., determined to take the first car heading north, no matter if it went straight or zigzag.

It took almost an hour before I got the first lift. This advanced me about twenty miles. The next car advanced me fifty miles. The countryside looked cold and bleak. I was getting nothing but short hauls. However, I had oodles of time. Now and then I walked a stretch, to limber up. I had no luggage to speak of—tooth-brush, razor, change of linen. The cold crisp air was invigorating. It felt good to walk and let the cars pass by.

I soon got tired of walking. There was nothing to see but farms. Burial grounds, they looked like. I got to thinking of MacGregor and his Guelda. The name suited her, I thought. I wondered if he’d ever break her down. What a cheerless conquest!

A car pulled up and I hopped in, without questioning the destination. The guy was a nut, a religious nut. Never stopped talking. Finally I asked him where he was heading. For the White Mountains, he replied. He had a cabin tip in the mountains. He was the local preacher.

Is there a hotel anywhere near you? I asked.

No, they had no hotels, nor inns, nor nothing. But he would be happy to put me up. He had a wife and four children. All God loving, he assured me.

I thanked him. But I hadn’t the least intention of spending the night with him and his family. The first town we’d come to I’d hop out. I couldn’t see myself on my knees praying with this fool.

Mister, he said, after an awkward silence, I don’t think you’re much of a God-fearing man, are you? What is your religion?

Ain’t got any, I replied.

I thought so. You’re not a drinking man, are you?

Summat, I replied. Beer, wine, brandy…

God has compassion on the sinner, friend. No one escapes His eye. He went off into a long spiel about the right path, the wages of sin, the glory of the righteous, and so on. He was pleased to have found a sinner like myself; it gave him something to work on.

Mister, I said, after one of his harangues, you’re wasting your time. I’m an incurable sinner, an absolute derelict. This provided him with more food.

No one is beneath God’s grace, he said. I kept mum and listened. Suddenly it began to snow. The whole countryside was blotted out. Now I’m at his mercy, I thought.

Is it far to the next town? I asked.

A few more miles, he said.

Good, I said. I’ve got to take a leak bad.

You can do it here, friend. I’ll wait.

I’ve got to do the other thing too, I said.

With this he stepped on the gas. We’ll be there in a few minutes now, Mister. God will take care of everything.

Even my bowels?

Even your bowels, he replied gravely. God overlooks nothing.

Supposing your gas gave out. Could God make the car go just the same?

Friend, God could make a car go without gas—nothing is impossible for Him—but that isn’t God’s way. God never violates Nature’s laws; he works with them and through them. But, this is what God would do, if we ran out of gas and it was important for me to move on: He would find a way to get me where I wanted to go. He might help you to get there too. But being blind to His goodness and mercy, you would never suspect that God had aided you. He paused to Jet this sink in, then continued. Once I was caught like you, in the middle of nowhere, and I had to do a poop quick. I went behind a clump of bushes and I emptied my bowels. Then, just as I was hitching up my pants, I spied a ten dollar bill lying on the ground right in front of me. God put that money there for me, no one else. That was His way of directing me to it, by making me go poop. I didn’t know why he had shown me this favor, but I got down on my knees and I thanked Him. When I got home I found my wife in bed and two of the children with her. Fever. That money bought me medicine and other things that were sorely needed … Here’s your town, Mister. Maybe God will have something to show you when you empty your bowels and your bladder. I’ll wait for you at the corner there, after I do my shopping…

I ran into the gas station, did a little pee, but no poop. There was no evidence of God’s presence in the lavatory. Just a sign reading: Please help us keep this place clean. I made a detour to avoid meeting my Saviour and headed for the nearest hotel. It was getting dark and the cold was penetrating. Spring was far behind here.

Where am I? I asked the clerk as I signed the register. I mean, what town is this?

Pittsfield, he said.

Pittsfield what?

Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he replied, surveying me coldly and with a tinge of contempt.

The next morning I was up bright and early. Good thing, too, because cars were fewer and farther between, and no one seemed eager to take an extra passenger. By nine o’clock, what with the miles I had clicked off on my own two feet, I was famished. Fortunately—perhaps God had put him in my path—the man next to me in the coffee shop was going almost to the Canadian border. He said he would be happy to take me along. He was a professor of literature, I discovered after we had traveled a ways together. A gentleman too. It was a pleasure to listen to him. He talked as if he had read about everything of value in the English language. He spoke at length of Blake, John Donne, Traherne, Laurence Sterne. He talked of Browning too, and of Henry Adams. And of Milton’s Areopagitica. All caviar, in other words.

I suppose you’ve written a number of books yourself, I said.

No, just, two, he said. (Textbooks, they were.) I teach literature, he added, I don’t make it.

Near the border he deposited me at a gas station owned by a friend of his. He was branching off to some hamlet nearby.

My friend will see to it that you get a lift to-morrow morning. Get acquainted with him, he’s an interesting chap.

We had arrived at this point just a half hour before closing time. His friend was a poet, I soon found out. I had dinner with him at a friendly little inn and then be escorted me to a hostelry for the night.

At noon next day I was in Montreal. I had to wait a few hours for the train to pull in. It was bitter cold. Almost like Russia, I thought. And rather a gloomy looking city, all in all. I looked up a hotel, warmed myself in the lobby, then started back to the station.

How do you like it? said Mona, as we drove off in a cab.

Not too much. It’s the cold; it goes right to the marrow.

Let’s go to Quebec to-morrow, then.

We had dinner in an English restaurant. Frightful. The food was like mildewed cadavers slightly warmed.

It’ll be better in Quebec, said Mona. We’ll stay in a French hotel.

In Quebec the snow was piled high and frozen stiff. Walking the streets was like walking between ice-bergs. Everywhere we went we seemed to bump into flocks of nuns or priests. Lugubrious looking creatures with ice in their, veins. I didn’t think much of Quebec either. We might as well have gone to the North Pole. What an atmosphere in which to relax!

However, the hotel was cosy and cheerful. And what meals! Was it like this in Paris? I asked. Meaning the food. Better than Paris, she said. Unless one ate in swell restaurants.

How well I remember that first meal. What delicious soup! What excellent veal! And the cheeses! But best of all were the wines.

I remember the waiter handing me the carte des vins and how I scanned it, utterly bewildered by the choice presented. When it came time to order I was speechless. I looked up at him and I said: Select one for us, won’t you? I know nothing about wine.

He took the wine list and studied it, looking now at me, now at Mona, then back at the list. He seemed to be giving it his utmost attention and consideration. Like a man studying the racing chart.

I think, he said, that what you should have is a Medoc. It’s a light, dry Bordeaux, which will delight your palate. If you like it, to-morrow we will try another vintage. He whisked off, beaming like a cherub.

At lunch he suggested another wine—an Anjou. A heavenly wine, I thought. Followed next lunchtime by a Vouvray. For dinner, unless we had sea food, we drank red wines—Pommard, Nuits Saint-Georges, Clos-Vougeot, Macon, Moulin-a-Vent, Fleurie, and so on. Now and then he slipped in a velvety fruity Bordeaux, a chateau vintage. It was an education. (Mentally I was doling out a stupendous tip for him.) Sometimes he would take a sip himself, to make certain it was up to par. And with the wines, of course, he made the most wonderful suggestions as to what to eat. We tried everything. Everything was delicious.

After dinner we usually took a seat on the balcony (indoors) and, over an exquisite liqueur or brandy, played chess. Sometimes the bell hop joined us, and then we would sit back and listen to him tell about la doulce France. Now and then we hired a cab, horse drawn, and drove around in the dark, smothered in furs and blankets. We even attended mass one night, to please the bell hop.

All in all it was the laziest, peacefulest vacation I ever spent. I was surprised that Mona took it so well.

I’d go mad if I had to spend the rest of my days here, I said one day.

This isn’t like France, she replied. Except for the cooking.

It isn’t America either, I said. It’s a no man’s land. The Eskimos should take it over.

Towards the end—we were there ten days—I was itching to get back to the novel.

Will you finish it quickly now, Val? she asked.

Like lightning, I replied.

Good! Then we can leave for Europe.

The sooner the better, said I.

When we got back to Brooklyn the trees were all in bloom. It must have been twenty degrees warmer than in Quebec.

Mrs. Skolsky greeted us warmly. I missed you, she said. She followed us up to our rooms. Oh, she said, I forgot. That friend of yours—MacGregor is it?—was here one evening with his lady friend. He didn’t seem to believe me at first, when I told him you had gone to Canada. ‘Impossible!’ he exclaimed. Then he asked if he could visit your study. I hardly knew what to say. He behaved as if it were very important to show your room to his friend. You can trust us,’ he said. ‘I know Henry since he was a boy.’ I gave in, but I stayed with them all the time they were up here. He showed her the pictures on the wall—and your books. He acted as if he were trying to impress her. Once he sat down in your chair and he said to her: ‘Here’s where he writes his books, doesn’t he, Mrs. Skolsky?’ Then he went on about you, what a great writer you were, what a loyal friend, and so on. I didn’t know what to make of the performance. Finally I invited them downstairs to have some tea with me. They stayed for about two hours, I guess. He was very interesting too…

What did he talk about? I asked. Many things, she said. But mostly about love. He seemed infatuated with the young lady.

Did she say much?

No, hardly a word. She was rather strange, I thought. Hardly the type for a man like him.

Was she good-looking?

That depends, said Mrs. Skolsky. To be honest, I thought she was very plain, almost homely. Rather lifeless too. It puzzles me. What can he see in a girl like that? Is he blind?

He’s an utter fool! said Mona.

He sounds quite intelligent, said Mrs. Skolsky.

Please, Mrs. Skolsky, said Mona, when he calls up, or even if he comes to the door, will you do us the favor of saying that we’re out? Say anything, only don’t let him in. He’s a pest, a bore. An absolutely worthless individual.

Mrs. Skolsky looked at me inquiringly.

Yes, I said, she’s right. He’s worse than that, to tell the truth. He’s one of those people whose intelligence serves no purpose. He’s intelligent enough to be a lawyer, but in every other respect he’s an imbecile.

Mrs. Skolsky looked nonplused. She was not accustomed to hearing people talk that way about their friends.

But he spoke of you so warmly, she said.

It makes no difference, I replied. He’s impervious, obtuse … thick-skinned, that’s the word.

Very well … if you say so, Mr. Miller. She backed away.

I have no friends any more, I said. I’ve killed them all off.

She gave a little gasp.

He doesn’t mean it quite that way, said Mona.

I’m sure he can’t, said Mrs. Skolsky. It sounds dreadful.

It’s the truth, like it or not. I’m a thoroughly unsocial individual, Mrs. Skolsky.

I don’t believe you, she replied. Nor would Mr. Essen.

He’ll find out one day. Not that I dislike him, you understand.

No, I don’t understand, said Mrs. Skolsky.

Neither do I, said I, and I began to laugh.

There’s a bit of the devil in you, said Mrs. Skolsky. Isn’t that so, Mrs. Miller?

Maybe, said Mona. He’s not always easy to understand.

I think I understand him, said Mrs. Skolsky. I think he’s ashamed of himself for being so good, so honest, so sincere—and so loyal to his friends. She turned to me. Really, Mr. Miller, you’re the friendliest human being I ever knew. I don’t care what you say about yourself—I’ll think what I please … When you’ve unpacked come down and have dinner with me, won’t you, the two of you?

You see, I said, when she had retreated, how difficult it is to make people accept the truth.

You like to shock people, Val. There’s always truth in what you say, but you have to make it unpalatable.

Well, I don’t think she’ll let MacGregor bother us any more, that’s one good thing.

He’ll follow you to your grave, said Mona.

Wouldn’t it be queer if we were to run into him in Paris?

Don’t say that, Val! The thought of it is enough to spoil our trip.

If that guy ever gets her to Paris he’ll rape her. Right now he can’t even lay a hand on her backside…

Let’s forget about them, will you, Val? It gives me the creeps to think of them.

But it was impossible to forget them. All through the dinner we talked about them. And that night I had a dream about them, about meeting them in Paris. In the dream Guelda looked and behaved like a cocotte, spoke French like a native, and was making poor MacGregor’s life unbearable with her lascivious ways. I wanted a wife, he lamented, Not a whore! Reform her, will you, Hen? he pleaded. I took her to a priest, to be shrived, but as things turned out we found ourselves in a whorehouse and Guelda, the number one girl, was in such demand that we couldn’t get a squeak out of her. Finally she took the priest upstairs with her, whereupon the Madame of the whorehouse threw her out, stark naked, with a towel in one hand and a bar of soap in the other.

Only a few weeks now and the novel would be finished. Pop already had a publisher in mind for it, a friend of his whom he had known in the old country. He was determined to find a legitimate publisher for it or do it himself, according to Mona. The bugger was feeling good these days; he was making money hand over fist on the stock market. He was even threatening to go to Europe himself. With Mona, presumably. (Don’t worry, Val, I’ll give him the slip when the time comes. Yes, but what about that money you were to put in the bank? I’ll square that too, don’t worry!)

She never had any doubts or fears where Pop was concerned. It was useless to attempt to guide her, or even make suggestion: she knew far better than I what she could do and what she couldn’t. All I knew of the man was what she told me. I always pictured him as well-dressed, excessively polite, and carrying a wallet bulging with greenbacks. (Menelik the Bountiful.) I never felt sorry for him, either. He was enjoying himself, that was clear. What I did wonder about sometimes was—how could she continue to keep her address secret? To live with an invalid mother is one thing, to keep the whereabouts of this manage a secret quite another. Perhaps Pop suspected the truth—that she was living with a man. What difference could it make to him whether it was an invalid mother or a lover or a husband—as long as she kept her appointments? Perhaps he was tactful enough to help her save face? He was no dope, that was certain … But why would he encourage her to leave for Europe, stay away for months or longer? Here, of course, I had only to do a bit of transposing. When she said Pop would like to see me go to Europe for a while, I had only to turn it around and I could hear her saying—to Pop: I want so much to see Europe again, even if only for a little while. As for publishing the novel, perhaps Pop hadn’t the slightest intention of doing anything, either through his friend, the publisher (if there were such a one) or on his own. Perhaps he fell in with her there to satisfy the lover or husband—or the poor invalid mother. Perhaps he was a better actor than either of us!

Maybe—this was a random thought—maybe there had never passed a word between them about Europe. Maybe she was just determined to get there again, no matter how.

Suddenly Stasia’s image floated before me. Strange, that not a word had ever been received from her! Surely she couldn’t still be wandering about in North Africa. Was she in Paris—waiting? Why not? It was simple enough to have a box at the Post Office, and another box somewhere else, in which to hide the letters which Stasia may have written. Worse than meeting MacGregor and his Guelda in Paris would be to run into Stasia. How stupid of me never to have though of a clandestine correspondence! No wonder everything was running smoothly.

There was only one other possibility: Stasia could have committed suicide. But it would be hard to keep that a secret. A weird creature like Stasia couldn’t do herself in without the story leaking out. Unless, and this was farfetched, they had wandered far into the desert, got lost, and were now nothing but a heap of bones.

No, she was alive, I was certain of it. And if alive, here was another angle. Perhaps she had found some one else in the meantime. A man, this time. Maybe she was already a good housewife. Such things happen now and again.

No, I ruled that out too. Too unlike our Stasia.

Fuck it all! I said to myself. Why worry about such things? To Europe, that’s the thing! So saying I thought of the chestnut trees (all in bloom now, no doubt) and of those little tables (les gueridons) on the crowded terraces of the cafe’s, and of bicycle cops wheeling by in pairs. I thought of the Vespasiennes too. How charming to take a leak outdoors, right on the sidewalk, while peering at all the beautiful dames strolling by … Ought to be studying French … (Ou sont les lavabos?)

If we were to get all that Mona said we would, why not go places … Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Copenhagen, Rome, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Sofia, Bucharest? Why not Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco? I thought of my old Dutch friend who had slipped out of his messenger uniform one evening to go abroad with his American boss … writing me from Sofia, no less, and from the waiting room of the Queen of Roumania, somewhere high up in the Carpathians.

And O’Mara, what had become of him, I wondered? There was one fellow I would dearly love to see again. A friend, what! What a lark to take him to Europe with us, Mona willing. (Impossible, of course.)

My mind was circling, circling. Always, when I was keyed up, when I knew I could do it, could say it, my mind would start wandering in all directions at once. Instead of sitting down to the machine and letting go, I would sit at the desk and think up projects, dream dreams, or just dwell on those I loved, the good times we had had, the things we said and did. (Ho ho! Haw haw!) Or trump up a bit of research which would suddenly assume momentous importance, which must be attended to immediately. Or I would conceive a brilliant chess manoeuvre and, to make certain I wouldn’t forget, I would set up the pieces, shuffle them around, make ready the trap that I planned to set for the first comer. Then, at last ready to tickle the keys, it would suddenly dawn on me that on page so-and-so I made a grievous error, and turning to the page I would discover that whole sentences were out of kiltre, made no sense, or said exactly the opposite of what I meant. In correcting them the need to elaborate would force me to write pages which later I realized might just as well have been omitted.

Anything to stave off the event. Was it that? Or was it that, in order to write smoothly and steadily, I had to first blow off steam, reduce the power, cool the motor? It always seemed to go better, the writing, when I had reached a lower, less exalted level; to stay on the surface, where it was all foam and whitecaps, was something only the Ancient Mariner could do.

Once I got under wing, once I hit my stride, it was like eating peanuts: one thought induced another. And as my fingers flew, pleasant but utterly extraneous ideas would intrude—without damaging the flow. Such as: This passage is for you, Ulric; I can hear you chuckling in advance. Or, How O’Mara will gobble this up! They accompanied my thoughts, like playful dolphins. I was like a man at the tiller dodging the fish that flew over his head. Sailing along with full sails, the ship precariously tilted but steady on her course, I would salute imaginary passing vessels, wave my shirt in the air, call to the birds, hail the rugged cliffs, praise God for his savin ‘and keepin’ power, and so on. Gogol had his troika, I had my trim Cutter. King of the waterways—while the spell lasted.

Ramming the last pages home, I was already ashore, walking the boulevards of the luminous city, doffing my ht to this one and that, practising my S’il vous plait, monsieur. A votre service, madame. Quelle belle journee, n’est-ce pas? C’est moi qui avais tort. A quoi bon se plaindre, la vie est belle! Et caetera, et caetera. (All in an imaginary suave francais.)

I even indulged myself to the extent of carrying on an imaginary conversation with a Parisian who understood English well enough to follow me. One of those delightful Frenchmen (encountered only in books) who is always interested in a foreigner’s observations, trivial though they may be. We had discovered a mutual interest in Anatole France. (How simple, these liaisons, in the world of reverie!) And I, the pompous idiot, had seized the opening to make mention of a curious Englishman who had also loved France—the country, not the author. Charmed by my reference to a celebrated boulevardier of that delightful epoch, la fin de siecle, my companion insisted on escorting me to the Place Pigalle, in order to point out a rendezvous of the literary lights of that epoch—Le Rat Mort. But monsieur, I am saying, you are too kind. Mais non, monsieur, c’est un privilege. And so on. All this flubdub, this flattery and flanerie under a metallic green sky, the ground strewn with autumn leaves, siphons gleaming on every table—and not a single horse with his tail docked. In short, the perfect Paris, the perfect Frenchman, the perfect day for a post-prandial ambulatory conversation.

Europe, I concluded to myself, my dear, my beloved Europe, deceive me not! Even though you be not all that I now imagine, long for, and desperately need, grant me at least the illusion of enjoying this fair contentment which the mention of your name invites. Let your citizens hold me in contempt, let them despise me, if they will, but give me to hear them converse as I have ever imagined them to. Let me drink of these keen, roving minds which disport only in the universal, intellects trained (from the cradle) to mingle poetry with fact and deed, spirits which kindle at the mention of a nuance, and soar and soar, encompassing the most sublime flights, yet touching everything with wit, with malice, with erudition, with the salt and the spice of the worldly. Do not, O faithful Europe, do not, I beg you, show me the polished surface of a continent devoted to progress. I want to see your ancient, time-worn visage, with its furrows carved by age-long combat in the arena of thought. I want, to see with my own eyes the eagles you have trained to eat from your hand. I come as a pilgrim, a devout pilgrim, who not only believes but knows that the invisible face of the moon is glorious, glorious beyond an imagining. I have seen only the spectral, pitted face of the world which whirls us about. Too well do I know this array of extinct volcanoes, of arid mountain ranges, of airless deserts whose huge cracks distribute themselves like varicose veins over the heart-breaking heartless Void. Accept me, O ancient ones, accept me as a penitent, one not wholly lost but deeply erring, a wanderer who from birth was made to. stray from the sight of his brothers and sisters, his guides, his mentors, his comforters.

There stood Ulric, at the end of my prayer, exactly as he looked that day I met him on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street: the man who had been to Europe, and to Africa too, and in whose eyes the wonder and the magic of it still glowed. He was giving me a blood transfusion, pouring faith and courage into my veins. Hodie mihi, eras tibi! It was there, Europe, waiting for me. It would always be the same, come war, revolution, famine, frost or what. Always a Europe for the soul that hungered. Listening to his words, sucking them in in big draughts, asking myself if it were possible (attainable) for one like me, always dragging behind like a cow’s tail, intoxicated, groping for it like a blind man without his stick, the magnetic force of his words (the Alps, the Apennines, Ravenna, Fiesole, the plains of Hungary, the lie Saint-Louis, Chartres, the Touraine, le Perigord … ) caused a pain to settle in the pit of my stomach, a pain which slowly spelled itself out as a kind of Heimweh, a longing for the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. (Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home.)

Yes, Ulric, that day you planted the seed in me. You walked back to your studio to make more bananas and pine-apples for the Saturday Evening Post and you left me to wander off with a vision. Europe was in my grasp. What matter two years, five years, ten years? It was you who handed me my passport. It was you who awakened the sleeping guide: Heimweh. Hodie tibi, cras mihi.

And as I walked about that afternoon, up one street and down another, I was already saying good-bye to the familiar scenes of horror and ennui, of morbid monotony, of sanitary sterility and loveless love. Passing down Fifth Avenue, cutting through the shoppers and drifters like a wire eel, my contempt and loathing for all that met my eye almost suffocated me. Pray God, I would not have long to endure the sight of these snuffed out Jack-o’-Lanterns, these decrepit New World buildings, these hideous, mournful churches, these parks dotted with pigeons and derelicts. From the street of the tailor shop on down to the Bowery (the course of my ancient walk) I lived again the days of my apprenticeship, and they were like a thousand years of misery, of mishap, of misfortune. A thousand years of alienation. Approaching Cooper Union, ever the low-water mark of my sagging spirits, passages of those books I once wrote in my head came back, like the curled edges of a dream which refuse to flatten out. They would always be flapping there, those curled edges … flapping from the cornices of those dingy shit-brown shanties, those slat-faced saloons, those foul rescue and shelter places where the bleary-eyed codfish-faced bums hung about like lazy flies, and O God, how miserable they looked, how wasted, how blenched, how withered and hollowed out! Yet it was here in this bombed out world that John Cowper Powys had lectured, had sent forth into the soot-laden, stench-filled airs his tidings of the eternal world of the spirit—the spirit of Europe, his Europe, our Europe, the Europe of Sophocles. Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, Ibsen. In this same area other fiery zealots had appeared and addressed the mob, invoking other great names: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Engels, Shelley, Blake. The streets looked the same as ever, worse indeed, breathing less hope, less justice, less beauty, less harmony. Small chance now for a Thoreau to appear, or a Whitman, or a John Brown—or a Robert E. Lee. The man of the masses was coming into his own: a sad, weird-looking creature animated by a central switchboard, capable of saying neither Yes nor No, recognizing neither right nor wrong, but always in step, the lock step, always chanting the Dead March. Good-bye, good-bye! I kept saying, as I marched along. Good-bye to all this! And not a soul responding, not even a pigeon.—Are you deaf, you slumbering maniacs?

I am walking down the middle of civilization, and this is how it is. On the one side culture running like an open sewer; on the other the abattoirs where everything hangs on the hooks, split open, gory, swarming with flies and maggots. The boulevard of life in the twentieth Century. One Arc de Triomphe after another. Robots advancing with the Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. Lemmings rushing to the sea. Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war … Hurrah for the Karamazovs! What gay wisdom! Encore un petit effort, si vous voulez etre republicains!

Down the middle of the road. Stepping gingerly amidst the piles of horse manure. What dirt and humbug we have to stumble through! Ah, Harry, Harry! Harry Haller, Harry Heller, Harry Smith, Harry Miller, Harry Harried. Coming, Asmodeus, coming! On two sticks, like a crippled Satan. But laden with medals. Such medals! The Iron Cross, the Victoria Cross, the Croix de guerre … in gold, in silver, in bronze, in iron, in zinc, in wood, in tin … Take your pick!

And poor Jesus had to carry his own cross!

The air grows more pungent. Chatham Square. Good old Chinatown. Below the pavement a honeycomb of booths. Opium dens. Lotus land. Nirvana. Rest in peace, the workers of the world are working. We are all working—to usher in eternity.

Now the Brooklyn Bridge swinging like a lyre between the skyscrapers and Brooklyn Heights. Once again the weary pedestrian wends his way homeward, pockets empty, stomach empty, heart empty. Gorgonzola hobbling along on two burned stumps. The river below, the sea gulls above. And above the gulls the stars invisible. What a glorious day! A walk such as Pomander himself might have enjoyed. Or Anaxagoras. Or that arbiter of perverted taste: Petronius.

The winter of life, as some one should have said, begins at birth. The hardest years are from one to ninety. After that, smooth sailing.

Howeward the swallows fly. Each one carrying in his bill a crumb, a dead twig, a spark of hope. E pluribus unum.

The orchestra pit is rising, all sixty-four players donned in spotless white. Above, the stars are beginning to show through the midnight blue of the domed ceiling. The greatest show on earth is about to be ushered in, complete with trained seals, ventriloquists and aerial acrobats. The master of ceremonies is Uncle Sam himself, that long, lean striped-like-a-zebra humorist who straddles the world with his Baron Munchausen legs and, come wind, hail, snow, frost or dry rot, is ever ready to cry Cock-a doodledoo!

19.

Sailing out one bright and lovely morning to take my constitutional, I find MacGregor waiting for me at the doorstep.

Hi there! he says, switching on his electric grin. So it’s you, in the flesh? Trapped you at last, eh? He puts out his hand. Hen, why do I have to lay in wait for you like this? Can’t you spare five minutes occasionally for an old friend? What are you running away from? How are you anyway? How’s the book coming along? Mind if I walk a ways with you ?

I suppose the landlady told you I was out?

How did you guess it?

I started walking; he fell in step with me, as if we were on parade.

Hen, you’ll never change, I guess. (Sounded frighteningly like my mother.) Once upon a time I could call you any hour of the day or night and you’d come. Now you’re a writer … an important man … no time for old friends.

Come on, I replied, cut it. You know that’s not it.

What is it then?

This … I’m done wasting time. These problems of yours—I can’t solve them. No one can, except yourself. You’re not the first man who’s been jilted.

What about yourself? Have you forgotten how you used to keep me up all night bending my ear about Una Gifford ?

We were twenty-one then.

One’s never too old to fall in love. At this age it’s even worse. I can’t afford to lose her.

What do you mean—can’t afford?

Too hard on the ego. One doesn’t fall in love as often now or as easily. I don’t want to fall out of love, it would be disastrous. I don’t say that she has to marry me, but I’ve got to know that she’s there … reachable. I can love her from a distance, if necessary.

I smiled. Funny, you saying a thing like that. I was touching on that very theme the other day, in the novel. Do you know what I concluded ?

Better to become a celibate, I suppose.

No, I came to the same conclusion that every jackass does … that nothing matters except to keep on loving. Even if she were to marry some one else, you could keep on loving her. What do you make of that?

Easier said than done, Hen.

Precisely. It’s your opportunity. Most men give up. Supposing she decided to live in Hong Kong? What has distance to do with it?

You’re talking Christian Science, man. I’m not in love with a Virgin Mary. Why should I stand still and watch her drift away? You don’t make sense.

That’s what I’m trying to convince you of. That’s why it’s useless to bring me your problem, don’t you see? We don’t see eye to eye any more. We’re old friends who haven’t a thing in common.

Do you really think that, Hen? His tone was wistful rather than reproachful.

Listen, I said, once we were as close as peas in a pod, you, George Marshall and me. We were like brothers. That was a long, long time ago. Things happened. Somewhere the link snapped. George settled down, like a reformed crook. His wife won out…

And me?

You buried yourself in your law work, which you despise. One day you’ll be a judge, mark my words. But it won’t change your way of life. You’ve given up the ghost. Nothing interests you any more—unless it’s a game of poker. And you think my way of life is cock-eyed. It is, I’ll admit that. But not in the way you think.

His reply surprised me somewhat. You’re not so far off the track, Hen. We have made a mess of it, George and myself. The others too, for that matter. (He was referring to the members of the Xerxes Society.) None of us has amounted to a damn. But what’s all that got to do with friendship? Must we become important figures in the world to remain friends? Sounds like snobbery to me. We never pretended, George or I, that we were going to burn up the world. We’re what we are. Isn’t that good enough for you ?

Look, I replied, it wouldn’t matter to me if you were nothing but a bum; you could still be my friend and I yours. You could make fun of everything I believed in, if you believed in something yourself. But you don’t. You believe in nothing. To my way of thinking one’s got to believe in what he’s doing, else all’s a farce. I’d be all for you if you wanted to be a bum and became a bum with all your heart and soul. But what are you? You’re one of those meaningless souls who filled us with contempt when we were younger … when we sat up the whole night long discussing such thinkers as Nietzsche, Shaw, Ibsen. Just names to you now. You weren’t going to be like your old man, no sir! They weren’t going to lasso you, tame you. But they did. Or you did. You put yourself in the strait-jacket. You took the easiest way. You surrendered before you had even begun to fight.

And you? he exclaimed, holding a hand aloft as if to say Hear, hear! Yeah, you, what have you accomplished that’s so remarkable? Going on forty and nothing published yet. What’s so great about that?

Nothing, I replied. It’s deplorable, that’s what.

And that entitles you to lecture me. Ho ho!

I had to hedge a bit. I wasn’t lecturing you, I was explaining that we had nothing in common any more.

!From the looks of it we’re both failures. That’s what we have in common, if you’ll face it squarely.

I never said I was a failure. Except to myself, perhaps. How can one be a failure if he’s still struggling, still fighting? Maybe I won’t make the grade. Maybe I’ll end up being a trombone player. But whatever I do, whatever I take up, it’ll be because I believe in it. I won’t float with the tide. I’d rather go down fighting … a failure, as you say. I loathe doing like every one else, falling in line, saying yes when you mean no.

He started to say something but I waved him down.

I don’t mean senseless struggle, senseless resistance. One should make an effort to reach clear, still waters. One has to struggle to stop struggling. One has to find himself, that’s what I mean.

Hen, he said, you talk well and you mean well, but you’re all mixed up. You read too much, that’s your trouble.

And you never stop to think, I rejoined. Nor will you accept your share of suffering. You think there’s an answer to everything. It never occurs to you that maybe there isn’t, that maybe the only answer is you yourself, how you regard your problems. You don’t want to wrestle with problems, you want them eliminated for you. The easy way out, that’s you. Take this girl of yours … this life and death problem … doesn’t it mean something to you that she sees nothing in you? You ignore that, don’t you? I want her! I’ve got to have her! That’s all you’ve got to answer. Sure you’d change your ways, you’d make something of yourself … if some one were kind enough to stand over you with a sledgehammer. You like to say—’Hen, I’m an ornery sort of bastard,’ but you won’t raise a finger to make yourself a wee bit different. You want to be taken as you are, and if one doesn’t like you the way you are, fuck him! Isn’t that it?

He cocked his head to one side, like a judge weighing the testimony presented, then said: Maybe. Maybe you’re right.

For a few moments we walked on in silence. Like a bird with a burr in his craw, he was digesting the evidence. Then, his lips spreading into an impish grin, he said: Sometimes you remind me of that bastard, Challacombe. God, how that guy could rile me I Always talking down from his pedestal. And you fell for all that crap of his. You believed in him … in that Theosophical shit…

I certainly did! I answered with heat. If he had never mentioned anything more than the name Swanii Vivekananda I would have felt indebted to him the rest of my life. Crap, you say. To me it was the breath of life, I know he wasn’t your idea of a friend. A little too lofty, too detached, for your taste. He was a teacher, and you couldn’t see him as a teacher. Where did he get his credentials and all that? He had no schooling, no training, no nothing. But he knew what he was talking about. At least, I thought so. He made you wallow in your own vomit, and you didn’t like that. You wanted to lean on his shoulder and puke all over him—then he would have been a friend. And so you searched for flaws in his character, you found his weaknesses, you reduced him to your own level. You do that with every one who’s difficult to understand. When you can jeer at the other fellow as you do at yourself you’re happy … then everything comes out even … Look, try to understand this. Everything’s wrong with the world. Everywhere there’s ignorance, superstition, bigotry, injustice, intolerance. It’s been so since the world began most likely. It will be so to-morrow and the day after. So what? Is that a reason to feel defeated, to go sour on the world? Do you know what Swami Vivekananda said once? He said: There is only one sill. That is weakness … Do not add one lunacy to another. Do not add your weakness to the evil that is going to come … Be strong!

I paused, waiting for him to make mince meat of this. Instead he said: Go on, Hen, give us some more! It sounds good.

It is good, I replied. It will always be good. And people will go on doing the very opposite. The very ones who applauded his words betrayed him the instant he stopped speaking. That goes for Vivekananda, Socrates, Jesus, Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Krishnamurti … name them yourself! But what am I telling you all this for anyway? You won’t change. You refuse to grow. You want to get by with the least effort, the least trouble, the least pain. Every one does. It’s wonderful to hear tell about the masters, but as for becoming a master, shit! Listen, I was reading a book the other day … to be honest, I’ve been reading it for a year or more. Don’t ask me the title, because I’m not giving it to you. But here’s what I read, and no master could have put it better. The sole meaning, purpose, intention, and secret of Christ, my dears, is not to understand Life, or mould it, or change it, or even to love it, but to drink of its undying essence.

Say it again, will you, Hen?

I did.

To drink of its undying essence, he mumbled. Damned good. And you won’t tell me who wrote it?

No.

Okay, Hen. Go on! What else have you got up your sleeve this morning?

This … How are you making out with your Guelda?

Forget it! This is much better.

You’re not giving her up, I hope?

She’s giving me up. For good, this time.

And you’re reconciled to it?

Don’t you ever listen to me? Of course not! That’s why I was laying in wait for you. But, as you say, each one has to follow his own path. Don’t you think I know that? Maybe we haven’t anything in common any more. Maybe we never did, have you ever thought that? Maybe it was something more than that which held us together. I can’t help liking you, Hen, even when you rake me over the coals. You’re a heartless son of a bitch sometimes. If any one’s ornery it’s you, not me. But you’ve got something, if you can only bring it out. Something for the world, I mean, not for me. You shouldn’t be writing a novel, Hen. Any one can do that. You’ve got more important things to do. I’m serious. I’d rather see you lecture on Vivekananda—or Mahatma Gandhi.

Or Pico della Mirandola.

Never heard of him.

So she won’t have anything more to do with you?

That’s what she said. A woman can always change her mind, of course.

She will, don’t worry.

The last time I saw her she was still talking of taking a vacation—in Par is.

Why don’t you follow her?

Better than that, Hen. I’ve got it all figured out. Soon as I learn what boat she’s taking I’ll go to the steamship office and, even if I have to bribe the clerk, I’ll get a stateroom next to hers. When she comes out that first morning I’ll be there to greet her. ‘Hi there, sweetheart! Beautiful day today, what?’

She’ll love that.

She won’t jump overboard, that’s for sure.

But she might tell the captain that you’re annoying her.

Fuck the captain! I can handle him … Three days at sea and, whether she likes it or not, I’ll break her down.

I wish you luck! I grasped his hand and shook it. Here’s where I take leave of you.

Have a coffee with me! Come on!

Nope. Back to work. As Krishna said to Arjuna: ‘If I stopped work for a moment, the whole universe would…

Would what?

Fall apart, I think he said.

Okay, Hen. He wheeled around and, without another word, went off in the opposite direction.

I had only gone a few steps when I heard him shouting.

Hey Hen!

What?

I’ll see you in Paris, if not before. So long!

See you in Hell, I thought to myself. But as I resumed my walk I felt a twinge of remorse. You shouldn’t treat any one like that, not even your best friend, I said to myself.

All the way home I kept carrying on a monologue. It went something like this…

So what if he is a pain in the ass? Sure, every one has to solve his own problems, but—is that a reason to turn a man down? You’re not a Vivekananda. Besides, would Vivekananda have acted that way? You don’t snub a man who’s in distress. Nor do you have to let him puke over you either. Supposing he is acting like a child, what of it? Is your behavior always that of an adult? And wasn’t that a lot of shit, about not having anything in common any more? He should have walked away from you then and there. What you have in common, my fine Swami, is plain ordinary human weakness. Maybe he did stop growing long ago. Is that a crime? No matter at what point along the road he is, he’s still a human being. Move on, if you like … keep your eyes straight ahead … but don’t refuse a laggard a helping hand. Where would you be if you had had to go it alone? Are you standing on your own two feet? What about all those nobodies, those nincompoops, who emptied their pockets for you when you were in need? Are they worthless, now that you no longer have need of them?

No, but…

So you have no answer! You’re pretending to be something which you’re not. You’re afraid of falling back into your old ways. You flatter yourself that you’re different, but the fact is you’re only too much like the others whom you glibly condemn. That crazy elevator runner was on to you. He saw right through you, didn’t he? Frankly, what have you accomplished with your own two hands, or with that intellect you seem so proud of? At twenty-one Alexander started out to conquer the world, and at thirty he had the world in his two hands. I know you’re not aiming to conquer the world—but you’d like to make a dent in it, wouldn’t you? You want to be recognized as a writer. Well, who’s stopping you? Not poor MacGregor, certainly. Yes, there is only one sin, as Vivekananda said. And that is weakness. Take it to heart, old man … take it to heart! Come down off your high horse! Come out of your ivory tower and join the ranks! Maybe there’s something more to life than writing books. And what have you got to say that’s so very important? Are you another Nietzsche? You’re not even you yet, do you realize that?

By the time I reached the corner of our street I had beaten myself to a pulp. I had about as much spunk left in me as a stoat. To make it worse, Sid Essen was waiting for me at the foot of the steps. He was wreathed in smiles. Miller, he said, I’m not going to take up your valuable time. I couldn’t keep this in my pocket another minute.

He pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. What’s this? I said.

A little token from your friends. Those darkies think the world of you. You’re to buy something with it for the Missus. It’s a little collection they made among themselves.

In my crestfallen state I was on the verge of tears. Miller, Miller, said Reb, throwing his arms around me, what are we ever going to do without you?

It’ll only be a few months, I said, blushing like a fool.

I know, I know, but we’re going to miss you. Have a coffee with me, won’t you? I won’t keep you. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.

I walked back to the corner with him, to the candy and stationery shop where we had first met.

You know, he said, as we took a seat at the counter, I’ve almost a mind to join you. Only I know that I’d be in the way.

Somewhat embarrassed, I replied: Guess most everybody would love to go to Paris for a vacation. They will too, one day…

I meant, Miller, that I’d love to see it through your eyes. He gave me a look that melted me.

Yes, I said, disregarding his words, one day it won’t be necessary to take a boat or a plane to get to Europe.

All we need to learn now is how to overcome the force of gravitation. Just stay put and let the earth spin round under your feet. It travels fast, this old earth. I went on in this vein, trying to overcome my embarrassment. Engines, turbines, motors … Leonardo da Vinci. And we’re moving like snails, I said. We haven’t even begun to use the magnetic forces which envelop us. We’re cave men still, with motors up our bung holes…

Poor Reb didn’t know what to make of it. He was itching to say something, but he didn’t want to be impolite and head me off. So I rattled on.

Simplification, that’s what we need. Look at the stars—they have no motors. Have you ever thought what it is that keeps this earth of ours spinning like a ball? Nikola Tesla gave a lot of thought to it, and Marconi too. No one has yet come up with the final answer.

He looked at me in utter perplexity. I knew that whatever it was that was on his mind it wasn’t electromagnetism.

I’m sorry, I said. You wanted to tell me something, didn’t you?

Yes, he said, but I don’t want to…

I was only thinking out loud.

Well, then … He cleared his throat. All I wanted to tell you was this … if you should get stranded over there, don’t hesitate to cable me. Or if you want to prolong your stay. You know where to reach me. He blushed and turned his head away.

Reb, I said, nudging him with my elbow, you’re just too damned good to me. And you hardly know me. I mean, you’ve known me only a short time. None of my so-called friends would do as much, that’s a bet.

To this he replied—You don’t know what your friends are capable of doing for you, I’m afraid. You’ve never given them a chance.

I fairly exploded. I haven’t, eh? Man, I’ve given them so many chances they don’t even want to hear my name.

Aren’t you a bit hard on them? Maybe they didn’t have what to give.

That’s exactly what they said, all of them. But it’s not true. If you don’t have you can borrow—for a friend. Right? Abraham offered up his son, didn’t he?

That was to Jehovah.

I wasn’t asking them to make sacrifices. All I asked for was chicken feed—cigarettes, a meal, old clothes. Wait a minute, I want to modify what I said. There were exceptions. There was one lad I remember, one of my messengers … this was after I had quit the telegraph company … when he learned that I was up against it he went and stole for me. He’d bring us a chicken or a few vegetables … sometimes only a candy bar, if that was all he could lay hands on. There were others too, poor like him, or nuts. They didn’t turn their pockets inside out to show me they had nothing. The guys I traveled with had no right to refuse me. None of them had ever starved. We weren’t poor white trash. We all came from decent, comfortable homes. No, maybe it’s the Jew in you that makes you so kind and thoughtful, pardon the way I put it. When a Jew sees a man in distress, hungry, abused, despised, he sees himself. He identifies immediately with the other fellow. Not us. We haven’t tasted enough poverty, misfortune, disgrace, humiliation. We’ve never been pariahs. We’re sitting pretty, we are, lording it over the rest of the world.

Miller, he said, you must have taken a lot of punishment. No matter what I may think of my own people—they’ve got their faults too, you know—I could never talk about them the way you do about yours. It makes me all the more happy to think you’re going to enjoy yourself for a while. It’s coming to you. But you’ve got to bury the past!

I’ve got to stop feeling sorry for myself, you mean. I threw him a tender smile. You know, Reb, I really don’t feel this way all the time. Deep down it still rankles, but on the surface I take people pretty much as they come. What I can’t get over, I guess, is that I had to worm it out of them, everything I got. And what did I get? Crumbs. I exaggerate, of course. Not every one turned me down cold. And those who did probably had a right to act as they did. It was like the pitcher you bring once too often to the well. I sure knew how to make a nuisance of myself. And for a man who’s willing to eat humble pie I was too arrogant. I had a way of rubbing people the wrong way. Especially when asking for help. You see, I’m one of those fools who think that people, friends anyway, ought to divine the fact that one is in need. When you come across a poor, filthy beggar, does he have to make your heart bleed before you toss him a coin? Not if you’re a decent, sensitive being. When you see him with head down, searching the gutter for a discarded butt or a piece of yesterday’s sandwich, you lift up his head, you put your arms around him, especially if he’s crawling with lice, and you say: ‘What is it, friend? Can I be of any help?’ You don’t pass him up with one eye fastened on a bird sitting on a telegraph wire. You don’t make him run after you with hands outstretched. That’s my point. No wonder so many people refuse a beggar when he accosts them. It’s humiliating to be approached that way: it makes you feel guilty. We’re all generous, in our own way. But the moment some one begs something of us our hearts close up.

Miller, said Reb, visibly moved by this outburst, you’re what I’d call a good Jew.

Another Jesus, eh?

Yeah, why not? Jesus was a good Jew, even though we’ve had to suffer for two thousand years because of him.

The moral is—don’t work too hard at it! Don’t try to be too good.

One can never do too much, said Reb heatedly.

Oh yes he can. Do what needs doing, that’s good enough.

Isn’t it the same thing?

Almost. The point is that God looks after the world. We should look after one another. If the good Lord had seeded help to run this world He would have given us bigger hearts. Hearts, not brains.

Jesus, said Reb, but you do talk like a Jew. You remind me of certain scholars I listened to when I was a kid and they were expounding the law. They could jump from one side of the fence to the other, like goats. When you were cold they blew hot, and vice versa. You never knew where you stood with them. Here’s what I mean … Passionate as they were, they always preached moderation. The prophets were the wild men; they were in a class apart. The holy men didn’t rant and rave. They were pure, that’s why. And you’re pure too. I know you are.

What was there to answer? He was simple, Reb, and in need of a friend. No matter what I said, no matter how I treated him, he acted as if I had enriched him. I was his friend. And he would remain my friend, no matter what.

Walking back to the house I resumed the inner monologue. You see, it’s as simple as that, friendship. What’s the old adage? To have a friend you must be a friend.

It was hard to see, though, in what way I had been a friend to Reb—or to anybody, for that matter. All I could see was that I was my own best friend—and my own worst enemy.

Pushing the door open, I had to remark to myself—If you know that much, old fella, you know a lot.

I took my accustomed place before the machine. Now, said I to myself, you’re back in your own little kingdom. Now you can play God again.

The drollery of addressing myself thus stopped me. God! As if it were only yesterday that I had left off communing with Him, I found myself conversing with Him as of yore. For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son … And how little we had given in return. What can we offer thee, O Heavenly Father, in return for thy blessings? My heart spoke out, as if, veriest nothing that I was, I had an inkling of the problems which confronted the Creator of the universe. Nor was I ashamed to be thus intimate with my Maker. Was I not part of that immense all which He had made manifest expressly, perhaps, to realize the unlimited bounds of his Being?

It was ages since I had addressed Him in this intimate fashion. What a difference between those prayers wrung out of sheer despair, when I called on Him for mercy—mercy, not grace!—and the easy duos born of humble understanding! Strange, is it, this mention of earthly-heavenly discourse? It would occur most often when my spirits ran high … when there was little reason, mark this, to show any sign of spirit. Incongruous as it may sound, it was often when the cruel nature of man’s fate smote me between the eyes that my spirit soared. When, like a worm eating his way through the slime, there came the thought, crazy perhaps, that the lowest was linked to the highest. Did they not tell us, when we were young, that God noted the sparrow’s fall? Even if I never quite believed it, I was nevertheless impressed. (Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh—is there anything too hard for me?) Total awareness! Plausible or implausible, it was a great reach of thought. Sometimes, as a kid, when something truly extraordinary occurred, I would exclaim: Did you see that, God? How wonderful to think that He was there, within calling distance! He was a presence then, not a metaphysical abstraction. His spirit pervaded everything; He was of it all and above it all, at one and the same time. And then—thinking about it I assumed an almost seraphic smile—then would come times when, in order not to go stark, raving mad, one simply had to look upon it (upon the absurd, monstrous nature of things) with the eyes of the Creator, He who is responsible for it all and understands it.

Tapping away—I was on the gallop now—the thought of Creation, of the all-seeing eye, the all-embracing corn-passion, the nearness and farness of God, hung over me like a veil. What a joke to be writing a novel about imaginary characters, imaginary situations! Hadn’t the Lord of the Universe imagined everything? What a farce to lord it over this fictitious realm! Was it for this I had beseeched the Almighty to grant me the gift of words?

The utter ridiculousness of my position brought me to a halt. Why hurry to bring the book to a close? In my mind it was already finished. I had thought out the imaginary drama to its imaginary end. I could rest a moment, suspended above my ant-like being, and let a few more hairs whiten.

I fell back into the vacuum (where God is all) with the most delicious sense of relief. I could see it all clearly—my earthly evolution, from the larval stage to the present, and even beyond the present. What was the struggle for or toward? Toward union. Perhaps. What else could it mean, this desire to communicate? To reach every one,: high and low, and get an answer back—a devastating thought! To vibrate eternally, like the world lyre. Rather frightening, if pushed to its furthest implications.

Perhaps I didn’t mean quite that. Enough, perhaps, to establish communication with one’s peers, one’s kindred spirits. But who were they? Where were they? One could only know by letting fly the arrow.

A picture now obtruded. A picture of the world as a web of magnetic forces. Studding this web like nuclei Were the burning spirits of the earth about whom the various orders of humanity spun like constellations. Due to the hierarchical distribution of powers and aptitudes a sublime harmony reigned. No discord was possible. All the conflict, all the disturbance, all the confusion and disorder to which man vainly endeavored to adjust was meaningless. The intelligence which invested the universe recognized it not. The murderous, the suicidal, the maniacal activity of earthly beings, yea, even their benevolent, their worshipful, their all too humane activities, were illusory. In the magnetic web motion itself was nil. Nothing to go toward, nothing to retreat from, nothing to reach up to. The vast, unending field of force was like a suspended thought, a suspended note. Aeons from now—and what was now?—another thought might replace it. Brrrr! Chilling though it was, I wanted to lie there on the floor of nothingness and forever contemplate the picture of creation.

It came to me presently that the element of creation, where writing was concerned, had little to do with thought. A tree does not search for its fruits, it grows them. To write, I concluded, was to garner the fruits of the imagination, to grow into the life of the mind like a tree putting forth leaves.

Profound or not, it was a comforting thought. At one bound I was sitting in the lap of the gods. I heard laughter all about me. No need to play God. No need to astound any one. Take the lyre and pluck a silvery note. Above all the commotion, even above the sound of laughter, there was music. Perpetual music. That was the meaning of the supreme intelligence which invested creation.

I came sliding down the ladder in a hurry. And this was the lovely, lovely thought which had me by the hair … You there, pretending to be dead and crucified, yon there, with your terrible historia de calamitatis, why not reenact it in the spirit of play? Why not tell it over to yourself and extract a little music from it? Are they real, your wounds? Are they still alive, still fresh? Or are they so much literary nail polish? Comes the cadenza…

Kiss me, kiss me, again. We were eighteen or nineteen then, MacGregor and I, and the girl he had brought to the party was studying to become an opera singer.

She was sensitive, attractive, the best he had found so far, he ever would find, for that matter. She loved him passionately. She loved him though she knew he was frivolous and faithless. When he said in his easy, thoughtless way—I’m crazy about you!—she swooned. There was this song between them which he never tired of hearing. Sing it again, won’t you? No one can sing it like you. And she would sing it, again and again. Kiss me, kiss me, again. It always gave me a pang to hear her sing it, but this night I thought my heart would break. For this night, seated in a far corner of the room, seemingly as far from me as she could get, sat the divine, the unattainable Una Gifford, a thousand times more beautiful than MacGregor’s prima donna, a thousand times more mysterious, and a thousand thousand times beyond any reach of mine. Kiss me, kiss me, again! How the words pierced me! And not a soul in that boisterous, merry-making group was aware of my agony. The fiddler approaches, blithe, debonair, his cheek glued to the instrument, and drawing out each phrase on muted strings, he plays it—softly in my ear.

Kiss me … kiss me … a … again. Not another note can I take. Pushing him aside, I bolt.

Down the street I run, the tears streaming down my cheeks. At the corner I come upon a horse wandering in the middle of the street. The most forlorn, broken-down nag ever a man laid eyes on. I try to speak to this lost quadruped—it’s not a horse any more, not even an animal. For a moment I thought it understood. For one long moment it looked me full in the face. Then, terrified, it let out a blood-curdling neigh and took to its heels. Desolate, I made a noise like a rusty sleighbell, and slumped to the ground. Sounds of revelry filled the empty street. They fell on my ears like the din from a barracks full of drunken Soldiers. It was for me they were giving the party. And she was there, my beloved, snow-blonde, starry-eyed, forever unattainable. Queen of the Arctic. No one else regarded her thus. Only me.

A long ago wound, this one. Not too much blood connected with it. Worse to follow. Much, much worse. Isn’t it funny how the faster they come, the more one expects them—yes, expects them!—to be bigger, bloodier, more painful, more devastating. And they always are.

I closed the book of memory. Yes, there was music to be extracted from those old wounds. But the time was not yet. Let them’ fester awhile in the dark. Once we reached Europe I would grow a new body and a new soul. What were the sufferings of a Brooklyn boy to the inheritors of the Black Plague, the Hundred Years War, the extermination of the Albigensians, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Huguenots, the French Revolution, the never ending persecution of the Jews, the invasions of the Huns, the coming of the Turks, the rains of frogs and locusts, the unspeakable doings of the Vatican, the irruption of regicides and sex-bedeviled queens, of feeble-minded monarchs, of Robespierres and Saint Justs, of Hohenstauffens and Hohenzollerns, of rat chasers and bone crushers? What could a few soulful haemorrhoids of American vintage mean to the Raskolnikovs and Karamazovs of old Europe?

I saw myself standing on a table top, an insignificant pouter pigeon dropping his little white pellets of pigeon shit. A table top named Europe, around which the monarchs of the soul were gathered, oblivious of the aches and pains of the New World. What could I possibly say to them in this white pouter pigeon language? What could any one reared in an atmosphere of peace, abundance and security say to the sons and daughters of martyrs? True, we had the same forbears, the identical nameless ancestors who had been torn on the rack, burned at the stake driven from pillar to post, but—the memory of their fate no longer burned in us; we had turned our backs upon this harrowing past, we had grown new shoots from the charred stump of the parental tree. Nurtured by the waters of Lethe, we had become a thankless race of ingrates, devoid of an umbilical cord, slap-happy after the fashion of syntheticos.

Soon, dear men of Europe, we will be with you in the flesh. We are coming—with our handsome valises, our gilt-edged passports, our hundred dollar bills, our travelers’ insurance policies, our guide books, our humdrum opinions, our petty prejudices, our half-baked judgments, our posy spectacles which lead us to believe that all is well, that everything comes out right in the end, that God is Love and Mind is all. When you see us as we are, when you hear us chatter like magpies, you will know that you have lost nothing by remaining where you are. You will have no cause to envy our fresh new bodies, our rich red blood. Have pity on us who are so raw, so brittle, so vulnerable, so blisteringly new and untarnished! We wither fast…

20.

As the time for our departure drew close, my head full of streets, battlefields, monuments, cathedrals, Spring waxing like a Dravidian moon, heart beating wilder, dreams more proliferous, every cell in my body was shouting Hosanna. Mornings when, intoxicated by the fragrance of Spring, Mrs. Skolsky threw open her windows, Sirota’s piercing voice (Reizei, rezei!) was already summoning me. It was no longer the old familiar Sirota but a delirious muezzin sending forth canticles to the sun. I no longer cared about the meaning of his words, whether a curse or a lament, I made up my own. Accept our thanks, O nameless Being divine … ! Following him like one of the devout, my lips moving mutely to the rhythm of his words, I Swayed to and fro, rocked on my heels, fluttered my eye-lashes, splattered myself with ashes, scattered gems and diadems in all directions, genuflected, and with the last eerie notes, rose on tip toe to fling them heavenward. Then, right arm raised, tip of forefinger lightly touching the crown of my head, I would slowly revolve about the axis of bliss, my lips making the sound of the Jew’s harp. As from a tree shaking off its wintry slumber, the butterflies swarmed from my noggin crying Hosanna, Hosanna to the Highest! Jacob I blessed and Ezekiel, and in turn Rachel, Sarah, Ruth and Esther. Oh how warming, how truly heartening, was that music drifting through the open windows! Thank you, dear landlady, I shall remember you in my dreams! Thank you, robin red breast, for flaming past this morning! Thank you, brother darkies, your day is coming! Thank you, dear Reb, I shall pray for you in some ruined synagogue! Thank you, early morning blossoms, that you should honor me with your delicate perfume! Zov, Toft, Giml, Biml … hear, hear, he is singing, the cantor of cantors! Praise be to the Lord! Glory to King David! And to Solomon resplendent in his wisdom! The sea opens before us, the eagles point the way. Yet another note, beloved cantor … a high and piercing one! Let it shatter the breast-plate of the High Priest! Let it drown the screams of the damned!

And he did it, my wonderful, wonderful cantor cantati-bus. Bless you, O son of Israel! Bless you!

Aren’t you slightly mad this morning?

Yes, yes, that I am. But I could be madder. Why not? When a prisoner is released from his cell should he not go mad? I’ve served six lifetimes plus thirty-five and a half years and thirteen days. Now they release me. Pray God, it is not too late!

I took her by the two hands and made a low bow, as if to begin the minuet.

It was you, you who brought me the pardon. Pee on me, won’t you? It would be like a benediction. O, what a sleepwalker I have been!

I leaned out the window and inhaled a deep draught of Spring. (It was such a morning as Shelley would have chosen for a poem.) Anything special for breakfast this morning? I turned round to face her. Just think—no more slaving, no more begging, no more cheating, no more pleading and coaxing. Free to walk, free to talk, free to think, free to dream. Free, free, free!

But Val, dear, came her gentle voice, we’re not staying there forever, you know.

A day there will be like an eternity here. And how do you know how long or short our stay will be? Maybe war will break out; maybe we won’t be able to return. Who knows the lot of man on earth?

Val, you’re making too much of it. It’s going to be a vacation, nothing more.

Not for me. For me it’s a break through. I refuse to stay on parole. I’ve served my time, I’m through here.

I dragged her to the window. Look! Look out there! Take a good look! That’s America. See those trees? See those fences? See those houses? And those fools hanging out the window yonder? Think I’ll miss them? Never! I began to gesticulate like a half-wit. I thumbed my nose at them. Miss you, you dopes, you ninnies? Not this fella. Never!

Come, Val, come sit down. Have a bit of breakfast. She led me to the table.

Okay then, breakfast! This morning I’d like a slice of ‘Watermelon, the left wing of a turkey, a bit of possum and some good old-fashioned corn pone. Father Abraham’s ‘done ‘mancipated me. Ise nevah goin’ back to Carolina. Father Abraham done freed us all. Hallelujah!

What’s more, I said, resuming my own natural white trash voice, I’m done writing novels. I’m a member elect of the wild duck family. I’m going to chronicle my hard-earned misery and play it off tune—in the upper partials. How do you like that?

She deposited two soft-boiled eggs in front of me, a piece of toast and some jam. Coffee in a minute, dear. Keep talking!

You call it talk, eh? Listen, do we still have that Poeme d’Extase? Put it on, if you can find it. Put it on loud. His music sounds like I think—sometimes. Has that far off cosmic itch. Divinely fouled up. All fire and air. The first time I heard it I played it over and over. Couldn’t shut it off. It was like a bath of ice, cocaine and rainbows. For weeks I went about in a trance. Something had happened to me. Now this sounds crazy, but it’s true. Every time a thought seized me a little door would open inside my chest, and there, in his comfy little nest sat a bird, the sweetest, gentlest bird imaginable. Think it out! he would chirp. Think it out to the end! And I would, by God. Never any effort involved. Like an etude gliding off a glacier…

As I was slooping up the soft-boiled eggs a peculiar smile hovered about my lips.

What is it? she said. What now, my crazy one?

Horses. That’s what I’m thinking. I wish we were going to Russia first. You remember Gogol and the troika? You don’t suppose he could have written that passage if Russia was motorized, do you? He was talking horses. Stallions, that’s what they were. A horse travels like wind. A horse flies. A spirited horse, anyway. How would Homer have rushed the gods back and forth without those fiery steeds he made use of? Can you imagine him manoeuvering those quarrelsome divinities in a Rolls Royce? To whip up ecstasy … and that brings me back to Scriabin … you didn’t find it, eh? … you’ve got to make use of cosmic ingredients. Besides arms, legs, hooves, claws, fangs, marrow and grit you’ve got to throw in the equinoctial precessions, the ebb and flow of tide, the conjunctions of sun, moon and planets, and the ravings of the insane. Besides rainbows, comets and the Northern lights you’ve got to have eclipses, sun spots, plagues, miracles … all sorts of things, including fools, magicians, witches, leprechauns, Jack the Rippers, lecherous priests, jaded monarchs, saintly saints … but not motor cars, not refrigerators, not washing machines, not tanks, not telegraph poles.

Such a beautiful Spring morning. Did I mention Shelley? Too good for his likes. Or for Keats or Wordsworth. A Jacob Boehme morning, nothing less. No flies yet, no mosquitos. Not even a cockroach in sight. Splendid. Just splendid. (If only she would find that Scriabin record!)

Must have been a morning like this that Joan of Arc passed through Chinon on her way to the king. Rabelais, unfortunately, was not yet born, else he might have glimpsed her from his cradle near the window. Ah, that heavenly view which his window commanded!

Yes, even if MacGregor were to suddenly appear I could not fall from grace. I would sit him down and tell him of Masaccio or of the Vita Nuova. I might even read from Shakespeare, on a frangipanic morning like this. From the Sonnets, not the plays.

A vacation, she called it. The word bothered me. She might as well have said coitus interruptus.

(Must remember to get the addresses of her relatives in Vienna and Roumania.)

There was nothing to keep me chained indoors any longer. The novel was finished, the money was in the bank, the trunk was packed, the passports were in order, the Angel of Mercy was guarding the tomb. And the wild stallions of Gogol were still racing like the wind.

Lead on, O kindly light!

Why don’t you take in a show? she said, as I was making for the door.

Maybe I will, I replied. Don’t hatch any eggs till I get back.

On the impulse I decided to say hello to Reb. It might be the last time I’d ever set foot in that ghastly place of his. (It was too.) Passing the news stand at the corner I bought a paper and left a fifty cent piece in the tin cup. That was to make up for the nickels and dimes I had swiped from the blind newsie at Borough Hall. It felt good, even though I had deposited it in the wrong man’s cup. I gave myself a sock in the kishkas for good measure.

Reb was in the back of the store sweeping up. Well, well, look who’s here! he shouted.

What a morning, eh? Doesn’t it make you feel like breaking out?

What are you up to? he said, putting the broom aside. Haven’t the faintest idea, Reb. Just wanted to say hello to you.

You wouldn’t want to go for a spin, would you? I would, if you had a tandem. Or a pair of fast horses. No, not to-day. It’s a day for walking, not riding. I pulled my elbows in, arched my neck, and trotted to the door and back. See, they’ll carry me far, these legs. No need to do ninety or a hundred.

You seem to be in a good mood, he said. Soon you’ll be walking the streets of Paris.

Paris, Vienna, Prague, Budapest … maybe Warsaw, Moscow, Odessa. Who knows? Miller, I envy you. Brief pause.

I say, why don’t you visit Maxim Gorky while you’re over there?

Is Gorky still alive?

Sure he is. And I’ll tell you another man you ought to look up, though he may be dead by now. Who’s that?

Henri Barbusse.

I’d sure like to, Reb, but you know me … I’m timid. Besides, what excuse would I have for busting in on them? Excuse? he shouted. Why, they’d be delighted to know you.

Reb, you have an exalted opinion of me. Nonsense I They’d greet you with open arms.

Okay, I’ll keep it in the back of my noodle. I’m toddling along now. Paying my last respects to the dead.

So long!

A few doors distant a radio was blaring away. It was a commercial advertising Last Supper tablecloths, only two dollars a pair.

My way lay along Myrtle Avenue. Dreary, weary, flea-bitten Myrtle Avenue striped down the middle with a rusty Elevated line. Through the ties and the iron girders the sun was pouring shafts of golden light. No longer a prisoner, the street assumed another aspect. I was a tourist now, with time on my hands and a curious eye for everything. Gone the atrabilious fiend listing to starboard with the weight of his ennui. In front of the bakery where O’Mara and I once lapped up egg drop soup I paused a moment to inspect the show window. Same old crumb cakes and apple cakes in the window, protected by the same old wrapping paper. It was a German bakery, of course. (Tante Melia always spoke affectionately of the Kondittorei she visited in Bremen and Hamburg. Affectionately, I say, because she made little distinction between pastry and other kind-hearted beings.) No, it wasn’t such a god-awful street after all. Not if you were a visitor from that far off planet Pluto.

Moving along I thought of the Buddenbrooks family and then of Tonio Kruger. Dear old Thomas Mann. Such a marvellous craftsman. (I should have bought a piece of Streuselkuchen!) Yes, in the photos I’d seen of him he looked a bit like a storekeeper. I could visualize him writing his Novellen in the back of a delicatessen store, with a yard of linked sausages wrapped around his neck. What he would have made of Myrtle Avenue! Call on Gorky while you’re at it. Wasn’t that fantastic? Easier far to obtain an audience with the King of Bulgaria. If there were any calls to be made I had the man already picked: Elie Faure. How would he take it, I wonder, if I asked to kiss his hand?

A street car rattled by. I caught a glimpse of the motor-man’s flowing moustache as it rushed by. Presto! The name leaped to mind like a flash. Knut Hamsun. Think of it, the novelist who finally earns the Nobel Prize operating a street car in this God-forsaken land! Where was it again—Chicago? Yeah, Chicago. And then he returns to Norway and writes Hunger. Or was it Hunger first and then the motorman’s job? Anyway, he never produced a dud.

I noticed a bench at the curb. (Most unusual thing.) Like the angel Gabriel, I lowered my ass. Ouf! What was the sense in walking one’s legs off? I leaned back and opened my mouth wide to drink in the solar rays. How are you? I said, meaning America, the whole bloody works. Strange country, isn’t it? Notice the birds! They look seedy, droopy, eh what what?

I closed my eyes, not to snooze but to summon the image of the ancestral home carved out of the Middle Ages. How charming, how delightful it looked, this forgotten village! A labyrinth of walled streets with canals running serpent wise; statues (of musician only), malls, fountains, squares and triangles; every lane led to the hub where the quaint house of worship with its delicate spires stood. Everything moving at a snail’s pace. Swans floating on the still surface of the lake; pigeons cooing in the belfry of the church; awnings, striped like pantaloons, shading the tesselated terraces. So utterly peaceful, so idyllic, so dream like!

I rubbed my eyes. Now where on earth had I dug that up? Was it Buxtehude perhaps? (The way my grandfather pronounced the word I always took it for a place, not a man.)

Don’t let him read too much, it’s bad for his eyes.

Seated at the edge of his work bench, where he sat with legs doubled up, making coats for Isaac Walker’s menagerie of fine gentlemen, I read aloud to him from Hans Christian Andersen.

Put the book away now, he says gently. Go out and play.

I go down to the backyard and, having nothing more interesting to do, I peek between the slats of the wooden fence which separated our property from the smoke house. Rows and rows of stiff, blackened fish greet my eyes. The pungent, acrid odor is almost overpowering. They’re hanging by the gills, these rigid, frightened fish; their popping eyes gleam in the dark like wet jewels.

Returning to my grandfather’s bench, I ask him why dead things are always so stiff. And he answers: Because there’s no joy in them any more.

Why did you leave Germany? I ask.

Because I didn’t want to be a soldier.

I would like to be a soldier, I said.

Wait, he said, wait till the bullets fly.

He hums a little tune while he sews. Shoo fly, don’t bother me!

What are you going to be when you grow up? A tailor, like your father?

I want to be a sailor, I reply promptly. I want to see the world.

Then don’t read so much. You’ll need good eyes if you’re going to be a sailor.

Yes, Grosspapa. (That’s how we called him.) Goodbye, Grosspapa.

I remember the way he eyed me as I walked to the door. A quizzical look, it was. What was he thinking? That I’d never make a sailor man?

Further retrospection was broken by the approach of a most seedy looking bum with hand outstretched. Could I spare a dime, he wanted to know.

Sure, I said. I can spare a lot more, if you need it.

He took a seat beside me. He was shaking as if he had the palsy. I offered him a cigarette and lit it for him.

Wouldn’t a dollar be better than a dime? I said.

He gave me a weird look, like a horse about to shy. What it is? he said. What’s the deal?

I lit myself a cigarette, stretched my legs full length, and slowly, as if deciphering a bill of lading, I replied: When a man is about to make a journey to foreign lands, there to eat and drink his fill, to wander as he pleases and to wonder, what’s a dollar more or less? Another shot of rye is what you want, I take it. As for me, what I would like is to be able to speak French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, possibly a little Arabic too. If I had my choice, I’d sail this minute. But that’s not for you to worry about. Look, I can offer you a dollar, two dollars, five dollars. Five’s the maximum—unless the banshees are after you. What say? You don’t have to sing any hymns either…

He acted jumpy like. Edged away from me instinctively, as if I were bad medicine.

Mister, he said, all I need is a quarter … two bits. That’ll do. And I’ll thank you kindly.

Half rising to his feet, he held out his palm.

Don’t be in a hurry, I begged. A quarter, you say. What good is a quarter? What can you buy for that? Why do things half-way? It’s not American. Why not get yourself a flask of rot gut? And a shave and hair-cut too? Anything but a Rolls Royce. I told you, five’s the maximum. Just say the word.

Honest, mister, I don’t need that much.

You do too. How can you talk that way? You need lots and lots of things—food, sleep, soap and water, more booze…

Two bits, that’s all I want, mister.

I fished out a quarter and placed it in his palm. Okay, I said, if that’s the way you want it.

He was trembling so that the coin slipped out of his hand and rolled into the gutter. As he bent over to pick it up I pulled him back.

Let it stay there, I said. Some one may come along and find it. Good luck, you know. Here, here’s another. Hold on to it now!

He got up, his eye riveted to the coin in the gutter.

Can’t I have that one too, mister?

Of course you can. But then, what about the other fellow?

What other fellow?

Any old fellow. What’s the difference?

I held him by the sleeve. Hold on a minute, I’ve got a better idea. Leave that quarter where it is and I’ll give you a bill instead. You don’t mind taking a dollar, do you? I pulled a roll out of my trousers pocket and extracted a dollar bill. Before you convert this into more poison, I said, closing his fist over it, listen to this, it’s a real good thought. Imagine, if you can, that it’s tomorrow and that you’re passing this same spot, wondering who’ll give you a dime. I won’t be here, you see. I’ll be on the Ile de France. Now then, your throat’s parched and all that, and who comes along but a well-dressed guy with nothing to do—like me—and he flops down … right here on this same bench. Now what do you do? You go up to him, same as always, and you say—’Spare a dime, mister?’ And he’ll shake his head. No! Now then, here’s the surprise, here’s the thought I had for you. Don’t run away with your tail between your legs. Stand firm and smile … a kindly smile. Then say: Mister, I was only joking. I don’t need no dime. Here’s a buck for you, and may God protect you always! See? Won’t that be jolly?

In a panic he clutched the bill which I held in my fingers and struggled free of my grip.

Mister, he said, backing away, you’re nuts. Plain nuts.

He turned and hurried off. A few yards away he stopped, faced about. Waving his fist at me and grimacing like a loon, he shouted at the top of his lungs: You crazy bugger! You dirty cocksucker! Piss on you, you goon! He waved the bill in the air, made a few dirty faces, stuck his tongue out, then took to his heels.

There you are, I said to myself. Couldn’t take a little joke. Had I offered him six bits and said, ‘Now try to imitate a stench trap in a soil pipe,’ he would have been grateful. I reached down and salvaged the quarter that was in the gutter. Now he’ll really get a surprise, I murmured, placing the coin on the bench.

I opened the newspaper, turned to the theatre section, and scanned the bill of fare. Nothing to rave about at the Palace. The movies? Same old chili con carne. The burlesque? Closed for repairs.

What a city! There were the museums and the art galleries, of course. And the Aquarium. If I were a bum, now, and some one handed me a thousand dollar bill by mistake, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Such a wonderful day too. The sun was eating into me like a million moth balls. A millionaire in a world where money was worthless.

I tried to summon a pleasant thought. I tried to think of America as a place I had only heard about.

Open, in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!

And it opened like the door of a hidden vault. There it was, America: the Garden of the Gods, the Grand Canyon of Arizona, the Great Smokies, the Painted Desert, Mesa Verde, the Mojave Desert, the Klondike, the Great Divide, the Wabash far away, the great Serpent Mound, the Valley of the Moon, the great Salt Lake, the Monongahela, the Ozarks, the Mother Lode country, the Blue Grass of Kentucky, the bayous of Louisiana, the Bad Lands of Dakota, Sing Sing, Walla Walla, Ponce de Leon, Oraibi, Jesse James, the Alamo, the Everglades, the Okifinokee, the Pony Express, Gettysburg, Mt. Shasta, the Tehachipis, Fort Ticonderoga.

It’s the day after to-morrow and I’m standing at the taffrail aboard the S. S. Buford … I mean the Ile de France. (I forgot, I’m not being deported, I’m going to have a holiday abroad.) For a moment I thought I was that beloved anarchist, Emma Goldman, who, as she was approaching the land of exile, is reported to have said: I long for the land (America) that has made me suffer. Have I not also known love and joy there…? She too had come in search of freedom, like many another. Had it not been opened, this blessed land of freedom, for every one to enjoy? (With the exception, to be sure, of the redskins, the black skins and the yellow bellies of Asia.) It was in this spirit my Grosspapas and my Grossmamas had come. The long voyage home. Windjammers. Ninety to a hundred days at sea, with dysentery, beri-beri, crabs, lice, rabies, yellow jaundice, malaria, katzenjammer and other ocean going delights. They had found life good here in America, my forbears, though in the struggle to keep body and soul together they had fallen apart before their time. (Still, their graves are in good condition.) They had come some decades after Ethan Allen had forced Ticonderoga open in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. To be exact, they had come just in time to witness the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Other assassinations were to follow—but of lesser figures. And we have survived, we crap shooters.

The boat will be pulling out soon. Time to say goodbye. Will I too miss this land that has made me suffer so? I answered that question before. Nevertheless, I do want to say good-bye to those who once meant something to me. What am I saying? Who still mean something! Step forward, won’t you, and let me shake you by the hand. Come, comrades, a last handshake!

Up comes William F. Cody, the first in line. Dear Buffalo Bill, what an ignominious end we reserved for you! Good-bye, Mr. Cody, and God speed! And is this Jesse James? Good-bye, Jesse James, you were tops! Good-bye, you Tuscaroras, you Navajos and Apaches! Good-bye, you valiant, peace-loving Hopis! And this distinguished, olive-skinned gentleman with the goatee, can it be W. E. Burghardt Dubois, the very soul of black folk? Good-bye, dear, honored Sir, what a noble champion you have been! And you there, Al Jennings, once of the Ohio Penitentiary, greetings! and may you walk through the shadows with some greater soul than O’Henry! Good-bye, John Brown, and bless you for your rare, high courage! Good-bye, dear old Walt! There will never be another singer like you in all the land. Good-bye Martin Eden, good-bye, Uncas, good-bye, David Copperfield! Good-bye, John Barleycorn, and say hello to Jack! Good-bye, you six-day bike riders … I’ll be pacing you in Hell! Good-bye, dear Jim Londos, you staunch little Hercules! Good-bye, Oscar Hammerstein, Good-bye, Gatti-Cassazza! And you too, Rudolf Friml! Good-bye now, you members of the Xerxes Society! Fratres Semper! Good-bye, Elsie Janis! Good-bye, John L. and Gentleman Jim! Good-bye, old Kentucky! Good-bye, old Shamrock! Good-bye, Montezuma, last great sovereign of the old New World! Good-bye, Sherlock Holmes! Good-bye, Houdini! Good-bye, you wobblies and all saboteurs of progress! Good-bye, Mr. Sacco, good-bye, Mr. Vanzetti! Forgive us our sins! Good-bye, Minnehaha, goodbye, Hiawatha! Good-bye, dear Pocahontas! Good-bye, you trail blazers, good-bye to Wells Fargo and all that! Good-bye, Walden Pond! Good-bye, you Cherokees and Seminoles! Good-bye, you Mississippi steamboats! Goodbye, Tomashevsky! Good-bye, P. T. Barnum! Good-bye, Herald Square! Good-bye, O Fountain of Youth! Goodbye, Daniel Boone! Good-bye, Grosspapa! Good-bye, Street of Early Sorrows, and may I never set eyes on you again! Good-bye, everybody … good-bye now! Keep the aspidistra flying!