Страница:
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.
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.