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Genry Miller. Tropic of Capricorn
Henry Miller was born in 1891 in Brooklyn, New York. He had a variety of
jobs as a young man, including several years working for the Western Union
Telegraph Company. During this time, encouraged by June Mansfield Smith, the
second of his five wives. Miller began to write. Aside from articles,
stories for pulp magazines and prose poems, Miller worked on his first
novels. Crazy Cock and Moloch, and on the copious notes which would
eventually transmute into the notorious 'Tropics' books.
In 1930, Miller went to live in Paris. For the next ten years he
mingled with impoverished expatriates and bohemian Parisians, including
Brassai, Artaud and Anais Nin, with whom he had a much documented affair.
His first published book. Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1934 from the
Obelisk Press in Paris. It was followed five years later by its sister
volume. Tropic of Capricorn. Sexually explicit, these books electrified the
European literary avant-garde, received praise from Eliot, Pound, Beckett
and Durrell, but were almost universally banned outside France.
Miller returned to America in 1940, settling in Big Sur, California.
Here, he wrote the 'Rosy Crucifixion' trilogy - Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953)
and Nexus (1959) but, regarded by many as a writer of 'dirty books', he was
unable to get his major works published in America. In 1961, after an epic
legal battle. Tropic of Cancer was finally published in the States (in
England in 1963). Miller became a household name, hailed by the Sixties
counterculture as a prophet of freedom and sexual revolution. With the
subsequent unbanning of the rest of his books, Miller's work was finally
available in his own country.
He died on June 7 1980.
BY ôîE SAME AUTHOR
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Black Spring
Aller Retour New York
The Cosmological Eye
The Colossus of Maroussi
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Quiet Days in Clichy
Sexus
Plexus
Nexus
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch
The Books in my Life
A Devil in Paradise
The Wisdom of the Heart
My Life and Times
The World of Sex
Crazy Cock
Moloch
MODERN CLASSIC
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Capricorn
With an introduction by Robert Nye
Flamingo
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPuhlishers
Flamingo
An Imprint of HatperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
A Flamingo Modem Classic 1993 98765
Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1966 Reprinted 14 times
First published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) Limited
1964
Copyright 0 Henry Miller 1957 Introduction copyright O Robert Nye 1993
ISBN 0 00 654584 X Set in Plantin
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Caledonian International Book
Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
INTRODUCTION
by Robert Nye
Henry Miller's first book. Tropic of Cancer, was published in Paris in
1934 and was immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. With its
sequel. Tropic of Capricorn (1939), which actually covers an earlier period
in Miller's life, it makes up a running fictional autobiography remarkable
for its candour, gusto, and completeness. The two books have in common a
plain-spoken truthfulness, a good-hearted comedy, and a quality of joy
discovered somewhere on the far side of despair, things that their author
was seldom to match and never to surpass in later self-unravellings.
When the 'Tropics' were at last made generally available in Britain and
America in the Sixties, they were praised as works of sexual liberation.
Since then they have sometimes been attacked as works of sexual misogyny.
All this seems to me rather to miss the point, as does criticism of the two
books for their verbal extravagance and their lack of art. Probably it is no
accident that nobody was ever indifferent concerning Henry Miller. There are
those who love him and there are those who hate him. His work does not allow
of the mild alternatives of liking or disliking. A case could be made that
this itself constitutes a fault, but I prefer to
find a virtue in such passion, and an important one. The Miller that
emerges from the books is, to my mind, an honest and lovable person,
splendidly undefeated by experience, a man with an unquenchable appetite for
the fundamental realities, and an infinite capacity for being surprised by
his own innocence. If there is any message extractable from his work it is
that of someone who - against all the odds and in spite of most of the
evidence - says 'More' to life. This I find honourable.
Even in the 'Tropics' Miller is, of course, an extraordinarily diffuse
and uneven writer. He repeats, paraphrases, and parodies himself with an
abandon that in a lesser spirit would be suicidal. He is sometimes brutal,
he is often sentimental. But having said that, I have said most of what
might be said against him. The best pages here, as in his one other great
work. The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), are white-hot and inspired, both
funny and terrible, a man's attempt to tell the whole truth about the life
that he has known. Miller is one of the few modern writers who can move a
reader to tears, quite simply, by the pressure of his own feeling. He can
also communicate, and induce in the reader, a delicious delight in the fact
of being alive. I never read Miller on song without feeling better, happier,
more myself and less alone, for having done so.
On the ovarian trolley
Foreword to Historia Calamitatum
(the story of my misfortunes)
Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are
soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words. And therefore,
because I too have known some consolation from speech had with one who was a
witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which have
sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is of
himself ever a consoler. This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with
mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of
small account, and so you shall come to bear them more easily.
Peter Abelard
0NCE you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead
certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never
anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in
through the gills. In the sub-strata, where the moon shone steady and
opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord.
In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the
real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There
was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a
child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender
because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved,
substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had
not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure,
ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to
tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me
so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere
sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any
good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the
condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was
convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of
men? Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke.
I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often
said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.
What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me
to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess
these virtues but if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to
be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy
was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or
anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and
everything.
From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything
too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had
need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as
my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I
balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other
words, corrupt from the start. It's as though my mother fed me a poison, and
though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she
weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent, most children rebel,
or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn't give a damn, I was a
philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on
principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me
was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an
effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap.
And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because
I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard
later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out
of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a
nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis?
The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the
gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls
in the kitchen. Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate
zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally
sluggards, naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never
realized that there were "warm" countries, places where you didn't have to
sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and
exhilarating. Wherever there is cold there are people who work themselves to
the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of
work -which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people
were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has
ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness,
to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully dean. But inwardly they
stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never
once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the
dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read
it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed
they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything
was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and
on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one
idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.
In my bitterness I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better
to condemn myself. For I am like them too, in many ways. For a long while I
thought I had escaped, but as time goes on I see that I am no better, that I
am even a little worse, because I saw more dearly than they ever did and yet
remained powerless to alter my life. As I look back on my life it seems to
me that I never did anything of my own volition but always through the
pressure of others. People often think of me as an adventurous fellow;
nothing could be farther from the truth. My adventures were always
adventitious, always thrust on me, always endured rather than undertaken. I
am of the very essence of that proud, boastful Nordic people who have never
had the least sense of adventure but who nevertheless have scoured the
earth, turned it upside down, scattering relics and ruins everywhere.
Restless spirits, but not adventurous ones. Agonizing spirits, incapable of
living in the present Disgraceful cowards, all of them, myself included. For
there is only one great adventure and that is inward towards the self, and
for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.
Once every few years I was on the verge of making this discovery, but
in characteristic fashion I always managed to dodge the issue. If I try to
think of a good excuse I can think only of the environment, of the streets I
knew and the people who inhabited them. I can think of no street in America,
or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on towards the
discovery of the self. I have walked the streets in many countries of the
world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I
think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a
cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away
to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic
wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and
chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane
asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of
the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest
jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness)
but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy. At least I knew
that I was unhappy, unwealthy, out of whack and out of step. That was my
only solace, my only joy. But it was hardly enough. It would have been
better for my peace of mind, for my soul if I had expressed my rebellion
openly, if I had gone to jail for it, if I had rotted there and died. It
would have been better if, like the mad Czolgosz, I had shot some good
President McKinley, some gentle, insignificant soul like that who had never
done anyone the least harm. Because in the bottom of my heart there was
murder: I wanted to see America destroyed, razed from top to bottom. I
wanted to see this happen purely out of vengeance, as atonement for the
crimes that were committed against me and against others like me who have
never been able to lift their voices and express their hatred, their
rebellion, their legitimate blood lust.
I was the evil product of an evil soil. If the self were not
imperishable, the "I" I write about would have been destroyed long ago. To
some this may seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have
happened did actually happen, at least to me. History may deny it, since I
have played no part in the history of my people, but even if everything I
say is wrong, is prejudiced, spiteful, malevolent, even if I am a liar and a
poisoner, it is nevertheless the truth and it will have to be swallowed. As
to what happened ...
Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of
a contradiction. Until the one for whom this is written came along I
imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solutions to
all things. I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of
life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold
of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I
found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach
myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not
looked for - myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to
live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself. I
realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this
which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same
time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even
what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had
stifled every day in order to live. Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no
importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of
effort, I cannot say what I think and feel - that bothers me, that rankles.
From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this spectre, enjoying
nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a
lie - everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that
is pretty much the greater part of my life.
I was a contradiction in essence, as they say. People took me to be
serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless, or to be sincere and
earnest, or to be negligent and carefree. I was all these things at once -
and beyond that I was something else, something which no one suspected,
least of all myself. As a boy of six or seven I used to sit at my
grandfather's workbench and read to him while he sewed. I remember him
vividly in those moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a
coat, he would stand with one hand over the other and look out of the window
dreamily. I remember the expression on his face, as he stood there dreaming,
better than the contents of the books I read, better than the conversations
we had or the games which I played in the street I used to wonder what he
was dreaming of, what it was that drew him out of himself. I hadn't learned
yet how to dream wideawake. I was always lucid, in the moment, and all of a
piece. His daydreaming fascinated me. I knew that he had no connection with
what he was doing, not the least thought for any of us, that he was alone
and being alone he was free. I was never alone, least of all when I was by
myself. Always, it seems to me, I was accompanied: I was like a little crumb
of a big cheese, which was the world, I suppose, though I never stopped to
think about it. But I know I never existed separately, never thought myself
the big cheese, as it were. So that even when I had reason to be miserable,
to complain, to weep, I had the illusion of participating in a common, a
universal misery. When I wept the whole world was weeping -so I imagined. I
wept very seldom. Mostly I was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good
time. I had a good time because, as I said before, I really didn't give a
fuck about anything. If things were wrong with me they were wrong
everywhere, I was convinced of it. And things were wrong usually only when
one cared too much. That impressed itself on me very early in life. For
example, I remember the case of my young friend Jack Lawson. For a whole
year he lay in bed, suffering the worst agonies. He was my best friend, so
people said at any rate. Well, at first I was probably sorry for him and
perhaps now and then I called at his house to inquire about him; but after a
month or two had elapsed I grew quite callous about his suffering. I said to
myself he ought to die and the sooner he dies the better it will be, and
having thought thus I acted accordingly, that is to say, I promptly forgot
about him, abandoned him to his fate. I was only about twelve years old at
the time and I remember being proud of my decision. I remember the funeral
too - what a disgraceful affair it was. There they were, friends and
relatives all congregated about the bier and all of them bawling like sick
monkeys. The mother especially gave me a pain in the ass. She was such a
rare, spiritual creature, a Christian Scientist, I believe, and though she
didn't believe in disease and didn't believe in death either, she raised
such a stink that Christ himself would have risen from the grave. But not
her beloved Jack! No, Jack lay there cold as ice and rigid and unbeckonable.
He was dead and there were no two ways about it. I knew it and I was glad of
it. I didn't waste any tears over it. I couldn't say that he was better off
because after all the "he" had vanished. He was gone and with him the
sufferings he had endured and the suffering he had unwittingly inflicted on
others. Amen! I said to myself, and with that, being slightly hysterical, I
let a loud fart - right beside the coffin.
This caring too much - I remember that it only developed with me about
the time I first fell in love. And even then I didn't care enough. If I had
really cared I wouldn't be here now writing about it: I'd have died of a
broken heart, or I'd have swung for it. It was a bad experience because it
taught me how to live a lie. It taught me to smile when I didn't want to
smile, to work when I didn't believe in work, to live when I had no reason
to go on living. Even when I had forgotten her I still retained the trick of
doing what I didn't believe in.
I was all chaos from the beginning, as I have said. But sometimes I got
so close to the centre, to the very heart of the confusion, that it's a
wonder things didn't explode around me.
It is customary to blame everything on the war. I say the war had
nothing to do with me, with my life. At a time when others were getting
themselves comfortable berths I was taking one miserable job after another,
and never enough in it to keep body and soul together. Almost as quickly as
I was hired I was fired. I had plenty of intelligence but I inspired
distrust. Whereever I went I fomented discord - not because I was idealistic
but because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of
everything. Besides, I wasn't a good ass-licker. That marked me, no doubt.
People could tell at once when I asked for a job that I really didn't give a
damn whether I got it or not. And of course I generally didn't get it. But
after a time the mere looking for a job became an activity, a pastime, so to
speak. I would go in and ask for most anything. It was a way of killing time
- now worse, as far as I could see, than work itself. I was my own boss and
I had my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my
own bankruptcy. I was not a corporation or a trust or a state or a
federation or a polity of nations - I was more like God, if anything.
This went on from about the middle of the war until... well, until one
day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I
needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take
the last job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment
bureau of the telegraph company - the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of
North America - towards the dose of the day, prepared to go through with it.
I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat
books on economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the
job.
The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard.
He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was dear enough from
my application that I had long left school. I had even honoured myself on
the application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Apparently
that passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who
had turned me down. I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I
was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in
certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual
leer and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed thinking
about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on.
The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn't bother me so much,
people didn't offer you jobs because you had a family to support, that much
I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they had rejected me.
Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the
lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn't get over it. In the
morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and
hot-footed it to the subway. I went immediately to the main offices of the
telegraph company ... up to the 25th floor or wherever it was that the
president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles. I asked to see the
president. Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see
me, but wouldn't I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather.
I saw the vice-president's secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of
chap, and I gave him an earful. I did it adroitly, without too much heat,
but letting him understand all the while that I wasn't to be put out of the
way so easily.
When he picked up the telephone and demanded the general manager I
thought it was just a gag, that they were going to pass me around like that
from one to the other until I'd get fed up. But the moment I heard him talk
I changed my opinion. When I got to the general manager's office, which was
in another building uptown, they were waiting for me. I sat down in a
comfortable leather chair and accepted one of the big cigars that were
thrust forward. This individual seemed at once to be vitally concerned about
the matter. He wanted me to tell him all about it, down to the last detail,
his big hairy ears cocked to catch the least crumb of information which
would justify something or other which was formulating itself inside his
dome. I realized that by some accident I had really been instrumental in
doing him a service. I let him wheedle it out of me to suit his fancy,
observing all the time which way the wind was blowing. And as the talk
progressed I noticed that be was warming up to me more and more. At last
some one was showing a little confidence in me 1 That was all I required to
get started on one of my favourite lines. For, after years of job hunting I
had naturally become quite adept, I knew not only what not to say, but I
knew also what to imply, what to insinuate. Soon the assistant general
manager was called in and asked to listen to my story. By this time I knew
what the story was. I understood that Hymie - "that little kike", as the
general manager called him - had no business pretending that he was the
employment manager. Hymie had usurped his prerogative, that much was dear.
It was also dear that Hymie was a Jew and that Jews were not in good odour
with the general manager, nor with Mr. Twilliger, the vice-president, who
was a thorn in the general manager's side.
Perhaps it was Hymie, "the dirty little kike" who was responsible for
the high percentage of Jews on the messenger
force. Perhaps Hymie was really the one who was doing the hiring at the
employment office - at Sunset Place, they called it. It was an excellent
opportunity, I gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to take down a
certain Mr. Bums who, he informed me, had been the employment manager for
some thirty years now and who was evidently getting lazy on the job.
The conference lasted several hours. Before it was terminated Mr.
Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me the boss
of the Works. Before putting me into office, however, he was going to ask me
as a special favour, and also as a sort of apprenticeship which would stand
me in good stead, to work as a special messenger. I would receive the salary
of employment manager, but it would be paid me out of a separate account. In
short I was to float from office to office and observe the way affairs were
conducted by all and sundry. I was to make a little report from time to time
as to how things were going. And once in a while, so he suggested, I was to
visit him at his home on the q.t. and have a little chat about the
conditions in the hundred and one branches of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph
Company in New York City. In other words I was to be a spy for a few months
and after that I was to have the run of the joint. Maybe they'd make me a
general manager too one day, or a vice-president. It was a tempting oner,
even if it was wrapped up in a lot of horse shit. I said Yes.
In a few months I was sitting at Sunset Place hiring and firing like a
demon. It was a slaughter-house, so help me God. The thing was senseless
from the bottom up. A waste of men, material and effort A hideous farce
against a backdrop of sweat and misery. But just as I had accepted the
spying so I accepted the hiring and firing and all that went with it. I said
Yes to everything. If the vice-president decreed that no cripples were to be
hired I hired no cripples. If the vice-president said that all messengers
over forty-five were to be fired without notice I fired them without notice.
I did everything they instructed me to do, but in such a way that they had
to pay for it. When there was a strike I folded my arms and waited for it to
blow over. But I first saw to it that it cost them a good penny. The whole
system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly corrupt and
complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or order
into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against
the whole rotten system of American labour, which is rotten at both ends. I
was the fifth wheel on the wagon and neither side had any use for me, except
to exploit me. In fact, everybody was being exploited - the president and
his gang by the unseen powers, the employees by the officials, and so on and
around, in and out and through the whole works. From my little perch at
"Sunset Place" I had a bird's eye view of the whole American society. It was
like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically,
statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you
examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined
one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed,
the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and
degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it
was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life
- economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically,
statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out
cock. It looked worse than that, really, because you couldn't even see
anything resembling a cock any more. Maybe in the past this thing had life,
did produce something, did at least give a moment's pleasure, a moment's
thrill. But looking at it from where I sat it looked rottener than the
wormiest cheese. The wonder was that the stench of it didn't carry'em off...
I'm using the past tense all the time, but of course it's the same now,
maybe even a bit worse. At least now we're getting it full stink.
By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps
of messengers. My office at Sunset Place was like an open sewer, and it
stank like one. I had dug myself into the first line trench and I was
getting it from all directions at once. To begin with, the man I had ousted
died of a broken heart a few weeks after my arrival. He held out just long
enough to break me in and then he croaked. Things happened so fast that I
didn't have a chance to feel guilty. From the moment I arrived at the office
it was one long uninterrupted pandemon- him. An hour before my arrival -1
was always late - the place was already jammed with applicants. I had to
elbow my way up the stairs and literally force my way in to get there. Hymie
was worse off than I because he was tied to the barricade. Before I could
take my hat off I had to answer a dozen telephone calls. There were three
telephones on my desk and they all rang at once. They were bawling the piss
out of me before I had even sat down to work. There wasn't even time to take
a crap - until five or six in the afternoon. Hymie was worse off than I
because he was tied to the switchboard. He sat there from eight in the
morning, until six, moving waybills around. A waybill was a messenger loaned
by one office to another office for the day or a part of the day. None of
the hundred and one offices ever had a full staff; Hymie had to play chess
with the waybills while I worked like a madman to plug up the gaps. If by a
miracle I succeeded in a day of filling all the vacancies, the next morning
would find the situation exactly the same - or worse. Perhaps twenty per
cent of the force were steady; the rest was driftwood. The steady ones drove
the new ones away. The steady ones earned forty to fifty dollars a week,
sometimes sixty or seventy-five, sometimes as much as a hundred dollars a
week, which is to say that they earned far more than the clerks and often
more than their own managers. As for the new ones, they found it difficult
to earn ten dollars a week. Some of them worked an hour and quit, often
throwing a batch of telegrams in the garbage can or down the sewer. And
whenever they quit they wanted their pay immediately, which was impossible,
because in the complicated bookkeeping which ruled no one could say what a
messenger had earned until at least ten days later. In the beginning I
invited the applicant to sit down beside me and I explained everything to
him in detail. I did that until I lost my voice. Soon I learned to save my
strength for the grilling that was necessary. In the first place, every
other boy was a born liar if not a crook to boot. Many of them had already
been hired and fired a number of times. Some found it an excellent way to
find another job, because their duty brought them to hundreds of offices
which normally they would never have set foot in. Fortunately McGovern, the
old trusty who guarded the door and handed out the application blanks, had a
camera eye. And then there were the big ledgers behind me, in which there
was a record of every applicant who had ever passed through the mill. The
ledgers were very much like a police record; they were full of red ink
marks, signifying this or that delinquency. To judge from the evidence I was
in a tough spot. Every other name involved a theft, fraud, a brawl, or
dementia or perversion or idiocy. "Be careful - so-and-so is an epileptic!"
"Don't hire this man - he's a nigger 1" "Watch out - X has been in Dannemora
- or else in Sing Sing."
If I had been a stickler for etiquette nobody would ever have been
hired. I had to learn quickly, and not from the records or from those about
me, but from experience. There were a thousand and one details by which to
judge an applicant: I had to take them all in at once, and quickly, because
in one short day, even if you are as fast as Jack Robinson, you can only
hire so many and no more. And no matter how many I hired it was never
enough. The next day it would begin all over again. Some I knew would last
only a day, but I had to hire them just the same. The system was wrong from
start to finish, but it was not my place to criticize the system. It was
mine to hire and fire. I was in the centre of a revolving disk which was
whirling so fast that nothing could stay put. What was needed was a
mechanic, but according to the logic of the higher-ups there was nothing
wrong with the mechanism, everything was fine and dandy except that things
were temporarily out of order. And things being temporarily out of order
brought on epilepsy, theft, vandalism, perversion, niggers, Jews, whores and
what-not - sometimes strikes and lockouts. Whereupon, according to this
logic, you took a big broom and you swept the stable dean, or you took clubs
and guns and you beat sense into the poor idiots who were suffering from the
illusion that things were fundamentally wrong. It was good now and then to
talk of God, or to have a little community sing - maybe even a bonus was
justifiable now and then, that is when things were getting too terribly bad
for words. But on the whole, the important thing was to keep hiring and
firing; as long as there were men and ammunition we were to advance, to keep
mopping up the trenches. Meanwhile Hymie kept taking cathartic pills -enough
to blow out his rear end if he had bad a rear end, but he hadn't one any
more, he only imagined he was taking a crap, he only imagined he was
shitting on his can. Actually the poor bugger was in a trance. There were a
hundred and one offices to look after and each one had a staff of messengers
which was mythical, if not hypothetical, and whether the messengers were
real or unreal, tangible or intangible, Hymie had to shuffle them about from
morning to night while I plugged up the holes, which was also imaginary
because who could say when a recruit had been dispatched to an office
whether he would arrive there today or tomorrow or never. Some of them got
lost in the subway or in the labyrinths under the skyscrapers; some rode
around on the elevated line all day because with a uniform it was a free
ride and perhaps they had never enjoyed riding around all day on the
elevated lines. Some of them started for Staten Island and ended up in
Canarsie, or else were brought back in a coma by a cop. Some forgot where
they lived and disappeared completely. Some whom we hired for New York
turned up in Philadelphia a month later as though it were normal and
according to Hoyle. Some would start for their destination and on the way
decide that it was easier to sell newspapers and they would sell them in the
uniform we had given them, until they were picked up. Some went straight to
the observation ward, moved by some strange preservative instinct.
When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he
did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he
explained to me later, if he didn't sharpen the pencils first thing off the
bat they would never get sharpened. The next thing was to take a glance out
the window and see what the weather was like. Then, with a freshly sharpened
pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he kept beside
him and in it he gave the weather report. This, he also informed me, often
turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot thick or the ground
covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not
shuffling the waybills around more speedily, and the employment manager
might also be excused for not filling up the holes on such days, no? But why
he didn't take a crap first instead of plugging in on the switchboard soon
as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery to me. That too he explained to
me later. Anyway, the day always broke with confusion, complaints,
constipation and vacancies. It also began with loud smelly farts, with bad
breaths, with ragged nerves, with epilepsy, with meningitis, with low wages,
with back pay that was overdue, with worn-out shoes, with corns and bunions,
with flat feet and broken arches, with pocket books missing and fountain
pens lost or stolen, with telegrams floating in the sewer, with threats from
the vice-president and advice from the managers, with wrangles and disputes,
with cloudbursts and broken telegraph wires, with new methods of efficiency
and old ones that had been discarded, with hope for better times and a
prayer for the bonus which never came. The new messengers were going over
the top and getting machine-gunned; the old ones were digging in deeper and
deeper, like rats in a cheese. Nobody was satisfied, especially not the
public. It took ten minutes to reach San Francisco over the wire, but it
might take a year to get the message to the man whom it was intended for -
or it might never reach him.
The Y.M.C.A., eager to improve the morale of working boys everywhere in
America, were holdings meetings at noon hour and wouldn't I like to send a
few spruce-looking boys to hear William Carnegie Asterbilt Junior give a
five minute talk on service. Mr. Mallory of the Welfare League would like to
know if I could spare a few minutes some time to tell me about the model
prisoners who were on parole and who would be glad to serve in any capacity,
even as messengers. Mrs. Guggenhoffer of the Jewish Charities would be very
grateful if I would aid her in maintaining some broken-down homes which had
broken down because everybody was either infirm, crippled or disabled in the
family. Mr. Haggerty of the Runaway Home for Boys was sure he had just the
right youngsters for me, if only I would give them a chance; all of them had
been mistreated by their stepfathers or stepmothers. The Mayor of New York
would appreciate it if I would give my personal attention to the bearer of
the said letter whom he could vouch for in every way -but why the hell he
didn't give said bearer a job himself was a mystery. Man leaning over my
shoulder hands me a slip of paper on which he has just written - "Me
understand everything but me no hear the voices." Luther Winifred is
standing beside him, his tattered coat fastened together with safety pins.
Luther is two sevenths pure Indian and five sevenths German-American, so he
explains. On the Indian side he is a Crow, one of the Crows from Montana.
His last job was putting up window shades, but there is no ass in his pants
and he is ashamed to climb a ladder in front ofa lady. He got out of the
hospital the other day and so he is still a little weak, but he is not too
weak to carry messages, so he thinks.
And then there is Ferdinand Mish - how could I have forgotten him? He
has been waiting in line all morning to get a word with me. I never answered
the letters he sent me. Was that just? he asks me blandly. Of course not. I
remember vaguely the last letter he sent me from the Cat and Dog Hospital on
the Grand Concourse, where he was an attendant. He said he repented that he
had resigned his post "but it was on account of his father being too strict
over him, not giving him any recreation or outside pleasure". "I'm
twenty-five now," he wrote, "and I don't think I should ought to be sleeping
no more with my father, do you? I know you are said to be a very fine
gentleman and I am now self-dependent, so I hope ..." McGovem, the old
trusty, is standing by Ferdinand's side waiting for me to give him the sign.
He wants to give Ferdinand the bum's rush - he remembers him from five years
ago when Ferdinand lay down on the sidewalk in front of the main office in
full uniform and threw an epileptic fit. No, shit, I can't do it! I'm going
to give him a chance, the poor bastard. Maybe I'll send him to Chinatown
where things are fairly quiet. Meanwhile, while Ferdinand is changing into a
uniform in the back room, I'm getting an earful from an orphan boy who wants
to "help make the company a success". He says that if I give him a chance
he'll pray for me every Sunday when he goes to church, except the Sundays
when he has to report to his parole officer. He didn't do nothing, it
appears. He just pushed the fellow and the fellow fell on his head and got
killed. Next: An ex-consul from Gibraltar. Writes a beautiful hand - too
beauti- fill. I ask him to see me at the end of the day - something fishy
about him. Meanwhile Ferdinand's thrown a fit in the dressing room. Lucky
break! If it had happened in the subway, with a number on his hat and
everything, I'd have been canned. Next:
A guy with one arm and mad as hell because McGovem is showing him the
door. "What the hell! I'm strong and healthy, ain't I?" he shouts, and to
prove it he picks up a chair with his good arm and smashes it to bits. I get
back to the desk and there's a telegram lying there for me. I open it. It's
from George Blasini, ex-messenger No. 2459 of S.W. office. "I am sorry that
I had to quit so soon, but the job was not fitted for my character idleness
and I am a true lover of labour and frugality but many a time we be unable
to control or subdue our personal pride." Shit!
In the beginning I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the
clamps below. I had ideas and I executed them, whether it pleased the
vice-president or not. Every ten days or so I was put on the carpet and
lectured for having "too big a heart". I never had any money in my pocket
but I used other people's money freely. As long as I was the boss I had
credit. I gave money away right and left; I gave my clothes away and my
linen, my books, everything that was superfluous. If I had had the power I
would have given the company away to the poor buggers who pestered me. If I
was asked for a dime I gave a half dollar, if I was asked for a dollar I
gave five. I didn't give a fuck how much I gave away, because it was easier
to borrow and give than to refuse the poor devils. I never saw such an
aggregation of misery in my life, and I hope I'll never see it again. Men
are poor everywhere - they always have been and they always will be. And
beneath the terrible poverty there is a flame, usually so low that it is
almost invisible. But it is there and if one has the courage to blow on it
it can become a conflagration. I was constantly urged not to be too lenient,
not to be too sentimental, not to be too charitable. Be firm! Be hard! they
cautioned me. Fuck that! I said to myself, I'll be generous, pliant,
forgiving, tolerant, tender. In the beginning I heard every man to the end;
if I couldn't give him a job I gave him money, and if I had no money I gave
him cigarettes or I gave him courage. But I gave! The effect was dizzying.
Nobody can estimate the results of a good deed, of a kind word. I was
swamped with gratitude, with good wishes, with invitations, with pathetic,
tender little gifts. If I had had real power, instead of being the fifth
wheel on a wagon. God knows what I might have accomplished. I could have
used the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America as a base to bring
all humanity to God; I could have transformed North and South America alike,
and the Dominion of Canada too. I had the secret in my hand: it was to be
generous, to be kind, to be patient. I did the work of five men. I hardly
slept for three years. I didn't own a whole shirt and often I was so ashamed
of borrowing from my wife, or robbing the kid's bank, that to get the car
fare to go to work in the morning I would swindle the blind newspaperman at
the subway station. I owed so much money all around that if I were to work
for twenty years I would not have been able to pay it back. I took from
those who had and I gave to those who needed, and it was the right thing to
do, and I would do it all over again if I were in the same position.
I even accomplished the miracle of stopping the crazy turnover,
something that nobody had dared to hope for. Instead of supporting my
efforts they undermined me. According to the logic of the higher-ups the
turnover had ceased because the wages were too high. So they cut the wages.
It was like kicking the bottom out of a bucket. The whole edifice tumbled,
collapsed on my hands. And, just as though nothing had happened they
insisted that the gaps be plugged up immediately. To soften the blow a bit
they intimated that I might even increase the percentage of Jews, I might
take on a cripple now and then, if he were capable, I might do this and
that, all of which they had informed me previously was against the code. I
was so furious that I took on anything and everything; I would have taken on
broncos and gorillas if I could have imbued them with the modicum of
intelligence which was necessary to deliver messages. A few days previously
there had been only five or six vacancies at dosing time. Now there were
three hundred, four hundred, five hundred - they were running out like sand.
It was marvellous. I sat there and without asking a question I took them on
in carload lots - niggers, Jews, paralytics, cripples, ex-convicts, whores,
maniacs, perverts, idiots, any fucking bastard who could stand on two legs
and hold a telegram in his hand. The managers of the hundred and one offices
were frightened to death. I laughed. I laughed all day long thinking what a
fine stinking mess I was making of it Complaints were pouring in from all
parts of the city. The service was crippled, constipated, strangulated. A
mule could have gotten there faster than some of the idiots I put into
harness.
The best thing about the new day was the introduction of female
messengers. It changed the whole atmosphere of the joint. For Hymie
especially it was a godsend. He moved his switchboard around so that he
could watch me while juggling the waybills back and forth. Despite the added
work he had a permanent erection. He came to work with a smile and he smiled
all day long. He was in heaven. At the end of the day I always had a list of
five or six who were worth trying out. The game was to keep them on the
string, to promise them a job but to get a free fuck first. Usually it was
only necessary to throw a feed into them in order to bring them back to the
office at night and lay them out on the zinc-covered table in the dressing
room. If they had a cosy apartment, as they sometimes did, we took them home
and finished it in bed. If they liked to drink Hymie would bring a bottle
along. If they were any good and really needed some dough Hymie would flash
his roll and peel off a five spot or a ten spot as the case might be. It
makes my mouth water when I think of that roll he carried about with him.
Where he got it from I never knew, because he was the lowest paid man in the
joint. But it was always there, and no matter what I asked for I got. And
once it happened that we did get a bonus and I paid Hymie back to the last
penny - which so amazed him that he took me out that night to Delmonico's
and spent a fortune on me. Not only that, but the next day he insisted on
buying me hat and shirts and gloves. He even insinuated that I might come
home and fuck his wife, if I liked, though he warned me that she was having
a little trouble at present with her ovaries.
In addition to Hymie and McGovem I had as assistants a pair of
beautiful blondes who often accompanied us to dinner in the evening. And
there was O'Mara, an old friend of mine who had just returned from the
Philippines and whom I made my chief assistant. There was also Steve Romero,
a prize bull whom I kept around in case of trouble. And O'Rourke, the
company detective, who reported to me at the dose of day when he began his
work. Finally I added another man to the staff - Kronski, a young medical
student, who was diabolically interested in the pathological cases of which
we had plenty. We were a merry crew, united in our desire to fuck the
company at all costs. And while fucking the company we fucked everything in
sight that we could get hold of, O'Rourke excepted, as he had a certain
dignity to maintain, and besides he had trouble with his prostate and had
lost all interest in fucking. But O'Rourke was a prince of a man, and
generous beyond words. It was O'Rourke who often invited us to dinner in the
evening and it was O'Rourke we went to when we were in trouble.
That was how it stood at Sunset Place after a couple of years had
rolled by. I was saturated with humanity, with experiences of one kind and
another. In my sober moments I made notes which I intended to make use of
later if ever I should have a chance to record my experiences. I was waiting
for a breathing spell. And then by chance one day, when I had been put on
the carpet for some wanton piece of negligence, the vice-president let drop
a phrase which stuck in my crop. He had said that he would like to see some
one write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers; he hinted that
perhaps I might be the one to do such a job. I was furious to think what a
ninny he was and delighted at the same time because secretly I was itching
to get the thing off my chest. I thought to myself- you poor old futzer,
you, just wait until I get it off my chest... I'll give you an Horatio Alger
book .. . just you wait! My head was in a whirl leaving his office. I saw
the army of men, women and children that had passed through my hands, saw
them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming,
threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways, the freight trains
lying on the floor, the parents in rags, the coal box empty, the sink
running over, the walls sweating and between the cold beads of sweat the
cockroaches running like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes
or falling backwards in the epileptic frenzy, the mouth twitching, thesaliva
pouring from the lips, the limbs writhing; I saw the walls giving way and
the pest pouring out like a winged fluid, and the men higher up with their
ironclad logic, waiting for it to blow over, waiting for everything to be
patched up, waiting, waiting contentedly, smugly, with big cigars in their
mouths and their feet on the desk, saying things were temporarily out of
order. I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a sick American, mounting
higher and -higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then
chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then trust
magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money god, the
god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven
thousand decimals fore and aft. You shits, I said to myself, I will give you
the picture of twelve little men, zeros without decimals, ciphers, digits,
the twelve uncrushable worms who are hollowing out the base of your rotten
edifice. I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the
Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared away.
From all over the earth they had come to me to be succoured. Except for
the primitives there was scarcely a race which wasn't represented on the
force. Except for the Ainus, the Maoris, the Papuans, the Veddas, the Lapps,
the Zulus, the Patagonians, the Igorotes, the Hottentots, the Touaregs,
except for the lost Tasmanians, the lost Grimaldi men, the lost Atianteans,
I had a representative of almost every species under the sun. I had two
brothers who were still sun-worshippers, two Nestorians from the old
Assyrian world; I had two Maltese twins from Malta and a descendant of the
Mayas from Yucatan; I had a few of our little brown brothers from the
Philippines and some Ethiopians from Abyssinia; I had men from the pampas of
Argentina and stranded cowboys from Montana; I had Greeks, Letts, Poles,
Croats, Slovenes, Ruthenians, Czechs, Spaniards, Welshmen, Finns, Swedes,
Russians, Danes, Mexicans, Porto Ricans, Cubans, Uruguayans, Brazilians,
Australians, Persians, Japs, Chinese, Javanese, Egyptians, Africans from the
Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast, Hindus, Armenians, Turks, Arabs, Germans,
Irish, English, Canadians - and plenty of Italians and plenty of Jews. I had
only one Frenchman that I can recall and he lasted about three hours. I had
a few American Indians, Cherokees mostly, but no Tibetans, and no Eskimos: I
saw names I could never have imagined and handwriting which ranged from
cuneiform to the sophisticated and astoundingly beautiful calligraphy of the
Chinese. I heard men beg for work who had been Egyptologists, botanists,
surgeons, gold-miners, professors of Oriental languages, musicians,
engineers, physicians, astronomers, anthropologists, chemists,
mathematicians, mayors of cities and governors of states, prison warders,
cow-punchers, lumberjacks, sailors, oyster pirates, stevedores, riveters,
dentists, surgeons, painters, sculptors, plumbers, architects, dope
peddlers, abortionists, white slavers, sea divers, steeplejacks, farmers,
cloak and suit salesmen, trappers, lighthouse keepers, pimps, aldermen,
senators, every bloody thing under the sun, and all of them down and out,
begging for work for cigarettes, for carfare, for a chance, Christ Almighty,
just another chance! I saw and got to know men who were saints, if there are
saints in this world; I saw and spoke to savants, crapulous and uncrapulous
ones; I listened to men who had the divine fire in their bowels who could
have convinced God Almighty that they were worthy of another chance, but not
the vice-president of the Cosmococcus Telegraph Company. I sat riveted to my
desk and I travelled around the world at lightning speed, and I learned that
everywhere it is the same -hunger, humiliation, ignorance, vice, greed,
extortion, chicanery, torture, despotism: the inhumanity of man to man: the
fetters, the harness, the halter, the bridle, the whip, the spurs. The finer
the calibre the worse off the man. Men were walking the streets of New York
in that bloody, degrading outfit, the despised, the lowest of the low,
walking around like auks, like penguins, like oxen, like trained seals, like
patient donkeys, like big jackasses, like crazy gorillas, like docile
maniacs nibbling at the dangling bait, like waltzing mice, like
guinea pigs, like squirrels, like rabbits, and many and many a one was fit
to govern the world, to write tile greatest book ever written. When I think
of some of the Persians, the Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the
character they revealed, their grace, their tenderness, their intelligence,
their holiness, I spit on the white conquerors of the world, the degenerate
British, the pigheaded Germans, the smug self-satisfied French. The earth is
one great sentient being, a planet saturated through and through with man, a
live planet expressing itself falteringly and stutteringly;
it is not the home of the white race or the black race or the yellow
race or the lost blue race, but the home of man and all men are equal before
God and will have their chance, if not now then a million years hence. The
little brown brothers of the Philippines may bloom again, one day and the
murdered Indians of America north and south may also come alive one day to
ride the plains where now the cities stand belching fire and pestilence. Who
has the last say? Man! The earth is his because he is the earth, its fire,
its water, its air, its mineral and vegetable matter, its spirit which is
cosmic, which is imperishable, which is the spirit of all the planets, which
transforms itself through him, through endless signs and symbols, through
endless manifestations. Wait, you cosmococcic telegraphic shits, you demons
on high waiting for the plumbing to be repaired, wait, you dirty white
conquerors who have sullied the earth with your cloven hooves, your
instruments, your weapons, your disease germs, wait, all you who are sitting
in clover and counting your coppers, it is not the end. The last man will
have his say before it is finished. Down to the last sentient molecule
justice must be done - and will be done! Nobody is getting away with
anything, least of all the cosmococdc shits of North America.
When it came time for my vacation -1 hadn't taken one for three years,
I was so eager to make the company a success! -1 took three weeks instead of
two and I wrote the book about the twelve little men. I wrote it straight
off, five, seven, sometimes eight thousand words a day. I thought that a
man, to be a writer, must do at least five thousand words a day. I thought
he must say everything all at once - in one book - and collapse afterwards.
I didn't know a thing about writing. I was scared shitless. But I was
determined to wipe Horatio Alger out of the North American consciousness. I
suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written. It was a colossal
tome and faulty from start to finish. But it was my first book and I was in
love with it. If I had the money, as Gide had, I would have published it at
my own expense. If I had had the courage that Whitman had, I would have
peddled it from door to door. Everybody I showed it to said it was terrible.
I was urged to give up the idea of writing. I had to learn, as Balzac did,
that one must write volumes before signing one's own name. I had to leam, as
I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but
write, that one must write and write and write, even if everybody in the
world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you. Perhaps one
does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real secret lies in making
people believe. That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad, terrible, as they
said, was only natural. I was attempting at the start what a man of genius
would have undertaken only at the end. I wanted to say the last word at the
beginning. It was absurd and pathetic. It was a crushing defeat, but it put
iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to
fail. I knew what it was to attempt something big. Today, when I think of
the circumstances under which I wrote that book, when I think of the
overwhelming material which I tried to put into form, when I think of what I
hoped to encompass, I pat myself on the back, I give myself a double A. I am
proud of the fact that I made such a miserable failure of it; had I
succeeded I would have been a monster. Sometimes, when I look over my
notebooks, when I look at the names alone of those whom I thought to write
about, I am seized with vertigo. Each man came to me with a world of his
own; he came to me and unloaded it on my desk; he expected me to pick it up
and put it on my shoulders. I had no time to make a world of my own: I had
to stay fixed like Atlas, my feet on the elephant's back and the elephant on
the tortoise's back. To inquire on what the tortoise stood would be to go
mad. I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts".
To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one
doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have
your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a
human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be
carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common
denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from
the very roots of your being. One can't make a new heaven and earth with
"facts". There are no "facts" - there is only the fact that man, every man
everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long
route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his destiny in
his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and
patient. In my enthusiasm certain things were then inexplicable to me which
now are dear. I think, for example, of Carnahan, one of the twelve little
men I had chosen to write about. He was what is called a model messenger. He
was a graduate of a prominent university, had a sound intelligence and was
of exemplary character. He worked eighteen and twenty hours a day and earned
more than any messenger on the force. The clients whom he served wrote
letters about him, praising him to the skies; he was offered good positions
which he refused for one reason or another. He lived frugally, sending the
best part of his wages to his wife and children who lived in another city.
He had two vices - drink and the desire to succeed. He could go for a year
without drinking, but if he took one drop he was off. He had deaned up twice
in Wall Street and yet, before coming to me for a job, he had gotten no
further than to be a sexton of a church in some little town. He had been
fired from that job because he had broken into the sacramental wine and rung
the bells all night long. He was truthful, sincere, earnest. I had implicit
confidence in him and my confidence was proven by the record of his service
which was without a blemish. Nevertheless he shot his wife and children in
cold blood and then he shot himself. Fortunatdy none of them died; they all
lay in the hospital together and they all recovered. I went to see his wife,
after they had transferred him to jail, to get her help. She refused
categorically. She said he was the meanest, cruellest son of a bitch that
ever walked on two legs - she wanted to see him hanged. I pleaded with her
for two days, but she was adamant. I went to the jail and talked to him
through the mesh. I found that he had already made himself popular with the
authorities, had already been granted special privileges. He wasn't at all
dejected. On the contrary, he was looking forward to making the best of his
time in prison by "studying up" on salesmanship. He was going to be the best
salesman in America after his release. I might almost say that he seemed
happy. He said not to worry about him, he would get along all right. He said
everybody was swell to him and that he had nothing to complain about. I left
him somewhat in a daze. I went to a nearby beach and decided to take a swim.
I saw everything with new eyes. I almost forgot to return home, so absorbed
had I become in my speculations about this chap. Who could say that
everything that happened to him had not happened for the best? Perhaps he
might leave the prison a full-fledged evangelist instead of a salesman.
Nobody could predict what he might do. And nobody could aid him because he
was working out his destiny in his own private way.
There was another chap, a Hindu named Guptal. He was not only a model
of good behaviour - he was a saint. He had a passion for the flute which he
played all by himself in his miserable little room. One day he was found
naked, his throat slit from ear to ear, and beside him on the bed was his
flute. At the funeral there were a dozen women who wept passionate tears,
including the wife of the janitor who had murdered him. I could write a book
about this young man who was the gentlest and the holiest man I ever met,
who had never offended anybody and never taken anything from anybody, but
who had made the cardinal mistake of coming to America to spread peace and
love.
There was Dave Olinski, another faithftil, industrious messenger who
thought of nothing but work. He had one fatal weakness - he talked too much.
When he came to me he had already been around the globe several times and
what he hadn't done to make a living isn't worth telling about. He knew
about twelve languages and he was rather proud of his linguistic ability. He
was one of those men whose very willingness and enthusiasm is their undoing.
He wanted to help everybody along, show everybody how to succeed. He wanted
more work than we could give him - he was a glutton for work. Perhaps I
should have warned him, when I sent him to his office on the East Side, that
he was going to work in a tough neighbourhood, but he pretended to know so
much and he was so insistent on working in that locality (because of his
linguistic ability) that I said nothing. I thought to myself - you'll find
out quickly enough for yourself. And surely enough, he was only there a
short time when he got into trouble. A tough Jew boy from the neighbourhood
walked in one day and asked for a blank. Dave, the messenger, was behind the
desk. He didn't like the way the man asked for the blank. He told him he
ought to be more polite. For that he got a box in the ears. That made him
wag his tongue some more, whereupon he got such a wallop that his teeth flew
down his throat and his jaw-bone was broken in three places. Still he didn't
know enough to hold his trap. Like the damned fool that he was he goes to
the police station and registers a complaint. A week later, while he's
sitting on a bench snoozing, a gang of roughnecks break into the place and
beat him to a pulp. His head was so battered that his brains looked like an
omelette. For good measure they emptied the safe and turned it upside down.
Dave died on the way to hospital. They found five hundred dollars hidden
away in the toe of his sock. ... Then there was Clausen and his wife Lena.
They came in together when he applied for the job. Lena had a baby in her
arms and he had two little ones by the hand. They were sent to me by some
relief agency. I put him on as a night messenger so that he'd have a fixed
salary. In a few days I had a letter from him, a batty letter in which he
asked me to excuse him for being absent as he had to report to his parole
officer. Then another letter saying that his wife had refused to sleep with
him because she didn't want any more babies and would I please come to see
them and try to persuade her to sleep with him -. I went to his home - a
cellar in the Italian quarter. It looked like a bughouse. Lena was pregnant
again, about seven months under way, and on the verge of idiocy. She had
taken to sleeping on the roof because it was too hot in the cellar, also
because she didn't want him to touch her any more. When I said it wouldn't
make any difference now she just looked at me and grinned. Clausen had been
in the war and maybe the gas had made him a bit goofy - at any rate he was
foaming at the mouth. He said he would brain her if she didn't stay off that
roof. He insinuated that she was sleeping up there in order to carry on with
the coal man who lived in the attic. At this Lena smiled again with that
mirthless batrachian grin. Clausen lost his temper and gave her a swift kick
in the ass. She went out in a huff taking the brats with her. He told her to
stay out for good. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out a big Colt. He was
keeping it in case he needed it some time, he said. He showed me a few
knives too, and a sort of blackjack which he had made himself. Then he began
to weep. He said his wife was making a fool of him. He said he was sick of
working for her because she was sleeping with everybody in the
neighbourhood. The kids weren't his because he couldn't make a kid any more
even if he wanted to. The very next day, while Lena was out marketing, he
took the kids up to the roof and with the blackjack he had shown me he beat
their brains out. Then he jumped off the roof head first. When Lena came
home and saw what happened she went off her nut. They had to put her in a
straight-jacket and call for the ambulance... There was Schuldig the rat who
had spent twenty years in prison for a crime he had never committed. He had
been beaten almost to death before he confessed; then solitary confinement,
starvation, torture, perversion, dope. When they finally released him he was
no longer a human being. He described to me one night his last thirty days
in jail, the agony of waiting to be released. I have never heard anything
like it; I didn't think a human being could survive such anguish. Freed, he
was haunted by the fear that he might be obliged to commit a crime and be
sent back to prison again. He complained of being followed, spied on,
perpetually tracked. He said "they" were tempting him to do things he had no
desire to do. "They" were the dicks who were on his trail, who were paid to
bring him back again. At night, when he was asleep, they whispered in his
ear. He was powerless against them because they mesmerized him first.
Sometimes they placed dope under his pillow, and with it a revolver or a
knife. They wanted him to kill some innocent person so that they would have
a solid case against him this time. He got worse and worse. One night, after
he had walked around for hours with a batch of telegrams in his pocket, he
went up to a cop and asked to be locked up. He couldn't remember his name or
address or even the office he was working for. He had completely lost his
identity. He repeated over and over - "I'm innocent... I'm innocent." Again
they gave him the third degree. Suddenly he jumped up and shouted like a
madman - "I'll confess ... I'll confess" - and with that he began to reel
off one crime after another. He kept it up for three hours. Suddenly in the
midst of a harrowing confession, he stopped short, gave a quick look about,
like a man who has suddenly come to, and then, with the rapidity and the
force which only a madman can summon he made a tremendous leap across the
room and crashed his skull against the stone wall... I relate these
incidents briefly and hurriedly as they flash through my mind; my memory is
packed with thousands of such details, with a myriad faces, gestures, tales,
confessions all entwined and interlaced like the stupendous reeling facade
of some Hindu temple made not of stone but of the experience of human flesh,
a monstrous dream edifice built entirely of reality and yet not reality
itself but merely the vessel in which the mystery of the human being is
contained. My mind wanders to the clinic where in ignorance and good-will I
brought some of the younger ones to be cured. I can think of no more
evocative image to convey the atmosphere of this place than the painting by
Hieronymus Bosch in which the magician, after the manner of a dentist
extracting a live nerve, is represented as the deliverer of insanity. All
the trumpery and quackery of our scientific practitioners came to apotheosis
in the person of the suave sadist who operated this clinic with the full
concurrence and connivance of the law. He was a ringer for Caligari, except
that he was minus the dunce cap. Pretending that he understood the secret
regulations of the glands, invested with the powers of a mediaeval monarch,
oblivious of the pain he inflicted, ignorant of everything but his medical
knowledge, he went to work on the human organism like a plumber sets to work
on the underground drainpipes. In addition to the poisons he threw into the
patient's system he had recourse to his fists or his knees as the case might
be. Anything justified a "reaction". If the victim were lethargic he shouted
at him, slapped him in the face, pinched his arm, cuffed him, kicked him. If
on the contrary the victim were too energetic he employed the same methods,
only with redoubled zest. The feelings of his subject were of no importance
to him; whatever reaction he succeeded in obtaining was merely a
demonstration or manifestation of the laws regulating the operation of the
internal glands of secretion. The purpose of his treatment was to render the
subject fit for society. But no matter how fast he worked, no matter whether
he was successful or not successful, society was turning out more and more
misfits. Some of them were so marvellously maladapted that when, in order to
get proverbial reaction, he slapped them vigorously on the cheek they
responded with an uppercut or a kick in the balls. It's true, most of his
subjects were exactly what he described them to be - incipient criminals.
The whole continent was on the slide - is still on the slide - and not only
the glands need regulating but the ball-bearing, the armature, the skeletal
structure, the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the coccyx, the larynx, the
pancreas, the liver, the upper intestine and the lower intestine, the heart,
the kidneys, the testicles, the womb, the Fallopian tubes, the whole
god-damned works. The whole country is lawless, violent, explosive,
demoniacal. It's in the air, in the climate, in the ultra-grandiose
landscape, in the stone forests that are lying horizontal, in the torrential
rivers that bite through the rocky canyons, in the supra-normal distances,
the supernal arid wastes, the over-lush crops, the monstrous fruits, the
mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects, beliefs, the
opposition of laws and languages, the contra-dictoriness of temperaments,
principles, needs, requirements. The continent is full of buried violence,
of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries
which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the
soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything
comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano
whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly
dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same
story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental
urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine,
upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are
filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.
Often it happened, as in Russia, that a man came in with a chip on his
shoulder. He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon. Nine times out
often he was a good fellow, a fellow whom everybody liked. But when the rage
came on nothing could stop him. He was like a horse with the blind staggers
and the best thing you could do for him was to shoot him on the spot. It
always happens that way with peaceable people. One day they run amok. In
America they're constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for
their energy, for their blood lust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America
is pacifistic and cannibalistic. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful
honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work;
inwardly it's a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbour and
sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold,
masculine world; actually it's a whorehouse run by women, with the native
sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody
knows what it is to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the
films where everything is faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent
is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place.
Nobody could have slept more soundly than I in the midst of this
nightmare. The war, when it came along, made only a sort of faint rumble in
my ears. Like my compatriots, I was pacifistic and cannibalistic. The
millions who were put away in the carnage passed away in a cloud, much like
the Aztecs passed away, and the Incas and the red Indians and the buffaloes.
People pretended to be profoundly moved, but they weren't. They were simply
tossing fitfully in their sleep. No one lost his appetite, no one got up and
rang the fire alarm. The day I first realized that there had been a war was
about six months or so after the armistice. It was in a street car on the
14th Street crosstown line. One of our heroes, a Texas lad with a string of
medals across his chest, happened to see an officer passing on the sidewalk.
The sight of the officer enraged him. He was a sergeant himself and he
probably had good reason to be sore. Anyway, the sight of the officer
enraged him so that he got up from his seat and began to bawl the shit out
of the government, the army, the civilians, the passengers in the. car,
everybody and everything. He said if there was ever another war they
couldn't drag him to it with a twenty mule team. He said he'd see every son
of a bitch killed before he'd go again himself; he said he didn't give a
fuck about the medals they had decorated him with and to show that he meant
it he ripped them off and threw them out the window; he said if he was ever
in a trench with an officer again he'd shoot him in the back like a dirty
dog, and that held good for General Pershing or any other general. He said a
lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he'd picked up over there, and
nobody opened his trap to gainsay him. And when he got through I felt for
the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was
listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made
him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and
in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric
chair because he had performed his duty towards his fellow men, which was to
deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because
one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity,
peace be with you all. And the second time I experienced the reality of war
was when ex-sergeant Griswold, one of our night messengers, flew off the
handle one day and smashed the office to bits at one of the railway
stations. They sent him to me to give him the gate, but I didn't have the
heart to fire him. He had performed such a beautiful piece of destruction
that I felt more like hugging and squeezing him; I was only hoping to Christ
he would go up the 25th floor, or wherever it was that the president and the
vice-presidents had their offices, and mop up the whole bloody gang. But in
the name of discipline, and to uphold the bloody farce it was, I had to do
something to punish him or be punished for it myself, and so not knowing
what less I could do I took him off the commission basis and put him back on
a salary basis. He took it pretty badly, not realizing exactly where I
stood, either for him or against him and so I got a letter from him pronto,
saying that he was going to pay me a visit in a day or two and that I'd
better watch out because he was going to take it out of my hide. He said
he'd come up after office hours and that if I was afraid I'd better have
some strong-arm men around to look after me. I knew he meant every word he
said and I felt pretty damned quaky when I put the letter down. I waited in
for him alone, however, feeling that it would be even more cowardly to ask
for protection. It was a strange experience. He must have realized the
moment he laid eyes on me that if I was a son of a bitch and a lying,
stinking hypocrite, as he had called me in his letter, I was only that
because he was, which wasn't a hell of a lot better. He must have realized
immediately that we were both in the same boat and that the bloody boat was
leaking pretty badly. I could see something like that going on in him as he
strode forward, outwardly still furious, still foaming at the mouth, but
inwardly all spent, all soft and feathery. As for myself, what fear I had
vanished the moment I saw him enter. Just being there quiet and alone, and
being less strong, less capable of defending myself, gave me the drop on
him. Not that I wanted to have the drop on him either. But it had turned out
that way and I took advantage of it, naturally. The moment he sat down he
went soft as putty. He wasn't a man any more, but just a big child. There
must have been millions of them like him, big children with machine guns who
could wipe out whole regiments without batting an eyelash; but back in the
work trenches, without a weapon, without a clear, visible enemy, they were
helpless as ants. Everything revolved about the question of food. The food
and the rent - that was all there was to fight about - but there was no way,
no dear, visible way, to fight for it. It was like seeing an army strong and
well equipped, capable of licking anything in sight, and yet ordered to
retreat every day, to retreat and retreat and retreat because that was the
strategic thing to do, even though it meant losing ground, losing guns,
losing ammunition, losing food, losing sleep, losing courage, losing life
itself finally. Wherever there were men fighting for food and rent there was
this retreat going on, in the fog, in the night, for no earthly reason
except that it was the strategic thing to do. It was eating the heart out of
him. To fight was easy, but to fight for food and rent was like fighting an
army of ghosts. All you could do was to retreat, and while you retreated you
watched your own brothers getting popped on, one after the other, silently,
mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing to do about it. He
was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and beaten, that
he put his head in his arms and wept on my desk. And while he's sobbing like
that suddenly the telephone rings and it's the vice-president's office -
never the vice-president himself, but always his office -and they want this
man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes Sir! and I hang up. I don't say
anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him and I have dinner
with him and his wife and kids. And when I leave him I say to myself that if
I have to fire that guy somebody's going to pay for it - and anyway I want
to know first where the order comes from and why. And hot and sullen I go
right up to the vice-president's office in the morning and I ask to see the
vice-president himself and did you give the order I ask - and why? And
before he has a chance to deny it, or to explain his reason for it, I give
him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and where he don't like it
and can't take it - and if you don't like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you
can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass -
and like that I walk out on him. I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go
about my work as usual. I expect, of course, that I'll get the sack before
the day's over. But nothing of the kind. No, to my amazement I get a
telephone call from the general manager saying to take it easy, to just calm
down a bit, yes, just go easy, don't do anything hasty, we'll look into it,
etc. I guess they're still looking into it because Griswold went on working
just as always - in fact, they even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a
dirty deal, too, because as a clerk he earned less money than as a
messenger, but it saved his pride and it also took a little more of the
spunk out of him too, no doubt. But that's what happens to a guy when he's
just a hero in his sleep. Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you
up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end
up as vice-president. It's all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a
farce, a fiasco from start to finish. I know it as I was in it, because I
woke up. And when I woke up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same
door that I had walked in - without as much as a by your leave, sir!
Things take place instantaneously, but there's a long process to be
gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the
explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens
according to law - and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole
cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly
prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up
above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around
like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered,
manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for
friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me
like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night,
hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes
a gang of them would be there and it didn't seem to make much difference
whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set.
Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful
of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several
years. We hadn't seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day,
quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an important day in my
life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I had often dreamed
about but never hoped to see. I remember vividly that we were standing on
the comer of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street towards dusk. I remember it
because it seemed utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about
Mt. Aetna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the
comer of Sixth Avenue and 49th St., Manhattan. I remember the way he looked
about as he talked, like a man who hadn't quite realized what he was in for
but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in returning. His
eyes seemed to be saying all the time - this has no value, no value
whatever. He didn't say that, however, but just this over and over: "I'm
sure you'd like it! I'm sure it's just the place for you." When he left me I
was in a daze. I couldn't get hold of him again quickly enough. I wanted to
hear it all over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about
Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend's own lips. It
seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same
environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends - and because he
knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had
travelled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself,
drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future. O'Mara, yes,
he had travelled a bit, almost all over the world - but as a bum, or eke in
the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend Ulric was the
first fellow I had ever met whom I could truly say had travelled. And he
knew how to talk about his experiences.
As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently
thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the
evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby.
What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated
me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a
book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real.
Sometimes after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch
fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in
passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacre
Coeur, through the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight. Just a
Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed
of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a
Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But
as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I
meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen
and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are
responsible, more than anything else, for my being here to-day. Most of the
places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps
never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them
in our rambles through the park.
Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and
texture of Lawrence's work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we
were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence's ideas.
Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how
pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence's words. Had I really
understood, my life could never have taken the course it did. Most of us
live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can
say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps
America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open
my eyes wide and full and dear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was
only because I had renounced America, renounced my past.
My friend Kronski used to twit me about my "euphorias". It was a sly
way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow
would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long
stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety,
of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds
strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the
person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree. In the latter mood, for
instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolleycar.
Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment
manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in
one of my states of "euphoria". We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn
Bridge to go to some flat in Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were
waiting to receive us. Hymie had started to talk to me in his usual way
about his wife's ovaries. In the first place he didn't know precisely what
ovaries meant and so I was explaining it to him in crude and simple fashion.
In the midst of my explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and
ridiculous that Hymie shouldn't know what ovaries were that I became drunk,
as drunk I mean as if I had a quart of whisky under my belt. From the idea
of diseased ovaries there germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of
tropical growth made up of the most heterogeneous assortment of odds and
ends in the midst of which, securely lodged, tenaciously lodged, I might
say, were Dante and Shakespeare. At the same instant I also suddenly
recalled my whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle
of the Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word "ovaries" had broken. I
realized that everything Hymie had said up till the word "ovaries", had
sieved through me like sand. What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn
Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, usually when
walking to my father's shop, a performance which was repeated day in and day
out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours,
of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious activity.
Not for years had I thought of this book which I used to write every day on
my way from Delancey Street to Murray Hill. But going over the bridge the
sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the
remembrance of the past set in ... remembrance of going back and forth over
the bridge, going to a job which was death, returning to a home which was a
morgue, memorizing Faust looking down into the cemetery, spitting into the
cemetery from the elevated train, the same guard on the platform every
morning, an imbecile, the other imbeciles reading their newspapers, new
skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in and die in, the boats passing
below, the Fall River Line, the Albany Day Line, why am I going to work,
what will I do to-night, the warm cunt beside me and can I work my knuckles
into her groin, run away and become a cowboy, try Alaska, the gold mines,
get off and turn around, don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck,
river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud,
legs free, fish will come and bite, to-morrow a new life, where, anywhere,
why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death is the solution,
but don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new
friend, millions of chances, you're too young yet, you're melancholy, you
don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on
over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants,
crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts crawling out the same way . .
. Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic,
above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying
sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe
each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to
take it in, to announce myself, anyway each time I passed on high I was
truly alone, and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself,
screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered,
the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never
admitted. If this then was the true self it was marvellous, and what's more
it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop to
continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went
down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen in the dirty
ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and
grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every
object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent
existence. My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking
at Hymie and thinking of that strange word "ovaries", now stranger than any
word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and
Hymie sitting beside me was a bull-frog, absolutely a bull-frog and nothing
more. I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze,
the legs dear and waiting for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through
the heavens, through the solid core of the earth, head down and ramming
through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of
hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was
waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was walking
again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above
him a man was sitting in an aeroplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky.
The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing
she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and
he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the
cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails formed on every
finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toe nail, the tiniest
toe nail imaginable and you could break your head over it, trying to figure
it out. On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing
such a hodge-podge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if
one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on
the other side of the ledger things like toe nails, hair, teeth, blood,
ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of
ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The
bull-frog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat;
they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button
was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary
without benefit of lucubration; lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the
eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink
of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting
for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and
through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his
work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of
rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of
non-comprehension swept dear by gales of laughter. From the hub of the
bull-frog's eye radiated dean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be
annotated