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As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently
thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the
evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby.
What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated
me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a
book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real.
Sometimes after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch
fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in
passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacre
Coeur, through the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight. Just a
Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed
of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a
Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But
as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I
meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen
and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are
responsible, more than anything else, for my being here to-day. Most of the
places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps
never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them
in our rambles through the park.
Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and
texture of Lawrence's work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we
were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence's ideas.
Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how
pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence's words. Had I really
understood, my life could never have taken the course it did. Most of us
live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can
say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps
America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open
my eyes wide and full and dear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was
only because I had renounced America, renounced my past.
My friend Kronski used to twit me about my "euphorias". It was a sly
way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow
would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long
stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety,
of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds
strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the
person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree. In the latter mood, for
instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolleycar.
Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment
manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in
one of my states of "euphoria". We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn
Bridge to go to some flat in Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were
waiting to receive us. Hymie had started to talk to me in his usual way
about his wife's ovaries. In the first place he didn't know precisely what
ovaries meant and so I was explaining it to him in crude and simple fashion.
In the midst of my explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and
ridiculous that Hymie shouldn't know what ovaries were that I became drunk,
as drunk I mean as if I had a quart of whisky under my belt. From the idea
of diseased ovaries there germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of
tropical growth made up of the most heterogeneous assortment of odds and
ends in the midst of which, securely lodged, tenaciously lodged, I might
say, were Dante and Shakespeare. At the same instant I also suddenly
recalled my whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle
of the Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word "ovaries" had broken. I
realized that everything Hymie had said up till the word "ovaries", had
sieved through me like sand. What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn
Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, usually when
walking to my father's shop, a performance which was repeated day in and day
out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours,
of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious activity.
Not for years had I thought of this book which I used to write every day on
my way from Delancey Street to Murray Hill. But going over the bridge the
sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the
remembrance of the past set in ... remembrance of going back and forth over
the bridge, going to a job which was death, returning to a home which was a
morgue, memorizing Faust looking down into the cemetery, spitting into the
cemetery from the elevated train, the same guard on the platform every
morning, an imbecile, the other imbeciles reading their newspapers, new
skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in and die in, the boats passing
below, the Fall River Line, the Albany Day Line, why am I going to work,
what will I do to-night, the warm cunt beside me and can I work my knuckles
into her groin, run away and become a cowboy, try Alaska, the gold mines,
get off and turn around, don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck,
river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud,
legs free, fish will come and bite, to-morrow a new life, where, anywhere,
why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death is the solution,
but don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new
friend, millions of chances, you're too young yet, you're melancholy, you
don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on
over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants,
crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts crawling out the same way . .
. Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic,
above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying
sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe
each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to
take it in, to announce myself, anyway each time I passed on high I was
truly alone, and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself,
screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered,
the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never
admitted. If this then was the true self it was marvellous, and what's more
it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop to
continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went
down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen in the dirty
ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and
grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every
object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent
existence. My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking
at Hymie and thinking of that strange word "ovaries", now stranger than any
word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and
Hymie sitting beside me was a bull-frog, absolutely a bull-frog and nothing
more. I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze,
the legs dear and waiting for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through
the heavens, through the solid core of the earth, head down and ramming
through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of
hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was
waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was walking
again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above
him a man was sitting in an aeroplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky.
The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing
she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and
he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the
cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails formed on every
finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toe nail, the tiniest
toe nail imaginable and you could break your head over it, trying to figure
it out. On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing
such a hodge-podge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if
one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on
the other side of the ledger things like toe nails, hair, teeth, blood,
ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of
ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The
bull-frog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat;
they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button
was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary
without benefit of lucubration; lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the
eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink
of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting
for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and
through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his
work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of
rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of
non-comprehension swept dear by gales of laughter. From the hub of the
bull-frog's eye radiated dean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be
annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving
sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bull-frog was an ovarian spud
generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers
had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes
exterminated; for him the twin dries had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge,
the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat
upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the
anaesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the big Bertha which could
destroy what the eye could not see; for him the molecule was broken down and
the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night the stars were
swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of
gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all
movement, be it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets,
expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the high priests of the
de-possessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of
a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making
love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and
out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation
which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which
was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself
became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making
life and killing life at the same time. I could see it going on after death,
like hair growing on a corpse, people saying "death" but the hair still
testifying to life, and finally no death but this life of hair and nails,
the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something still alive,
expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement. Through love
this night happen, or sorrow, or being born with a dub foot; the cause
nothing, the event everything. In the beginning was the Word . .. Whatever
this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it
would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat
God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words - for him who had
become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word
the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never
be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only that which
expressed itself in beginning and end. So, on the ovarian trolley there was
this voyage of man and bull-frog composed of identical stuff, neither better
nor less than Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely
the meaning of anything, the other knowing too precisely the meaning of
everything, hence both lost and confused through beginnings and endings,
finally to be deposited at Java or India Street, Greenpoint, there to be
carried back into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of sawdust
moils with twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety.
What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or
unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or
talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the
separate detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body
or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I
had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to
surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who
made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as
definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of
civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the
thing-in-itself-not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately
passionate hunger, as if in the discarded, worthless thing which everyone
ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.
Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I
attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle
which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the
blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty
of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or
gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me. If this was perverse it was
also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world
which was springing up about me. Soon I too would become like these objects
which I venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society. I was
definitely dated, that was certain. And yet I was able to amuse, to
instruct, to nourish. But never to be accepted, in a genuine way. When I
wished to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum
of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I
chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was
in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism
which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a
clown;
it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I
underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville
entertainer, I would have been famous. People would have appreciated me
precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have
understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief,
to say the least.
It was always a source of amazement to me how easily people could
become rued just listening to me talk. Perhaps my speech was somewhat
extravagant, though often it happened when I was holding myself in with main
force. The turn of a phrase, the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the
facility with which the words came to my Ups, the allusions to subjects
which were taboo - everything conspired to set me off as an outlaw, as an
enemy to society. No matter how well things began sooner or later they
smelled me out. If I were modest and humble, for example, then I was too
modest, too humble. If I were gay and spontaneous, bold and reckless, then I
was too free, too gay. I could never get myself quite au point with the
individual I happened to be talking to. If it were not a question of life
and death - everything was life and death to me then - if it was merely a
question of passing a pleasant evening at the home of some acquaintance, it
was the same thing. There were vibrations emanating from me, overtones and
undertones, which charged the atmosphere unpleasantly. Perhaps the whole
evening they had been amused by my stories, perhaps I had them in stitches,
as it often happened, and everything seemed to augur well. But sure as fate
something was bound to happen before the evening came to a dose, some
vibration set loose which made the chandelier ring or which reminded some
sensitive soul of the piss-pot under the bed. Even while the laughter was
still drying off the venom was beginning to make itself felt. "Hope to see
you again some time", they would say, but the wet, limp hand which was
extended would belie the words.
Persona mm grata! Jesus, how clear it seems to me now! No pick and
choice possible: I had to take what was to hand and leam to like it. I had
to learn to live with the scum, to swim like a sewer-rat or be drowned. If
you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated
you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd.
You may dream, if you are dreaming simultaneously. But if you dream
something different you are not in America, of America American, but a
Hottentot in Africa, or a Kalmuck, or a chimpanzee. The moment you have a
"different" thought you cease to be an American. And the moment you become
something different you find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland.
Am I saying this with rancour, with envy, with malice? Perhaps. Perhaps
I regret not having been able to become an American. Perhaps. In my zeal
now, which is again American, I am about to give birth to a monstrous
edifice, a skyscraper, which will last undoubtedly long after the other
skyscrapers have vanished, but which will vanish too when that which
produced it disappears. Everything American will disappear one day, more
completely than that which was Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian. This is one of
the ideas which pushed me outside the warm, comfortable bloodstream where,
buffaloes all, we once grazed in peace. An idea that has caused me infinite
sorrow, for not to belong to something enduring is the last agony. But I am
not a buffalo and I have no desire to be one. I am not even a spiritual
buffalo. I have slipped away to rejoin an older stream of consciousness, a
race antecedent to the buffaloes, a race that will survive the buffalo.
All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are different, are
veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is
different. This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different from the
usual skyscraper a 1'americaine. In this sky" scraper there are no
elevators, no 73rd story windows to jump from. If you get tired of climbing
you are shit out of luck. There is no slot directory in the main lobby. If
you are search-ing for somebody you will have to search. If you want a drink
you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this
building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths. All the other
skyscrapers have what you want! this one contains nothing but what I want,
what I like. And somewhere in this skyscraper Valeska has her being, and
we're going to get to her when the spirit moves me. For the time being she's
all right, Valeska, seeing as how she's six feet under and by now perhaps
picked dean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked dean too,
by the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a different
tint, a different odour.
The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in
her veins. It was depressing for everybody around her. She made you aware of
it whether you wished to be or not. The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact
that her mother was a trollop. The mother was white of course. Who the
father was nobody knew, not even Valeska herself.
Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little
Jew from the vice-president's office happened to espy her. He was horrified,
so he informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a coloured
person as my secretary. He spoke as though she might contaminate the
messengers. The next day I was put on the carpet. It was exactly as though I
had committed sacrilege. Of course, I pretended that I hadn't observed
anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely intelligent and
extremely capable. Finally the president himself stepped in. There was a
short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically
proposed to give her a better position in Havana. No talk of the blood
taint. Simply that her services had been altogether remarkable and that they
would like to promote her - to Havana. Valeska came back to the office in a
rage. When she was angry she was magnificent. She said she wouldn't budge.
Steve Romero and Hymie were there at the time and we all went out to dinner
together. During the course of the evening we got a bit tight. Valeska's
tongue was wagging. On the way home she told me that she was going to put up
a fight; she wanted to know if it would endanger my job. I told her quietly
that if she were fired I would quit too. She pretended not to believe it at
first. I said I meant it, that I didn't care what happened. She seemed to be
unduly impressed, she took me by the two hands and she held them very
gently, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
That was the beginning of things. I think it was the very next day that
I slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her. She read the note
sitting opposite me and when she was through she looked me square in the eye
and said she didn't believe it. But we went to dinner again that night and
we had more to drink and we danced and while we were dancing she pressed
herself against me lasciviously. It was just the time, as luck would have
it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion. I was telling
Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said - "why
don't you let me lend you a hundred dollars?" The next night I brought her
home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed
how well the two of them got along. Before the evening was over it was
agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house the day of the abortion and
take care of the kid. The day came and I gave Valeska the afternoon off.
About an hour after she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the
afternoon off also. I started towards the burlesque on Fourteenth Street.
When I was about a block from the theatre I suddenly changed my mind. It was
just the thought that if anything happened - if the wife were to kick-off- I
wouldn't feel so damned good having spent the afternoon at the burlesque. I
walked around a bit, in and out of the penny arcades, and then I started
homeward.
It's strange how things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly
remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child. You take
the dominoes and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull
the tablecloth on which the battleships are floating until they come to the
edge of the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall on to the
floor. We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got
so sleepy that she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep. The
dominoes were lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor
too. Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down
my throat, my hand between her legs. As I laid her back on the table she
twined her legs around me. I could feel one of the dominoes under my feet -
part of the fleet that we had destroyed a dozen times or more. I thought of
my grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day
that I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as
he pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought of the
attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture of:
Teddy .charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which I used
to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship Maine that floated
over my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral
Dewey and of Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy Yard
which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered that we
had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the doctor's office
I didn't have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings ... We had
hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the
slaughter house. I was still buttoning my fly as I went through the hall to
open the gate. She was as white as flour. She looked as though she'd never
be able to go through another one. We put her to bed and then we gathered up
the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on the table. Just the other night
in a bistrot, as I was going to the toilet, I happened to pass two old
fellows playing dominoes. I had to stop a moment and pick up a domino. The
feeling of it immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they
made when they fell on the floor. And with the battleships my lost tonsils
and my faith in human beings gone. So that every time I walked over the
Brooklyn Bridge and looked down towards the Navy Yard I felt as though my
guts were dropping out. Way up there, suspended between the two shores, I
felt always as though I were hanging over a void; up there everything that
had ever happened to me seemed unreal, and worse than unreal - unnecessary.
Instead of joining me to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge
seemed to break all connections. If I walked towards the one shore or the
other it made no difference: either way was hell. Somehow I had managed to
sever my connection with the world that human hands and human minds were
creating. Perhaps my grandfather was right, perhaps I was spoiled in the bud
by the books I read. But it is ages since books have claimed me. For a long
time now I have practically ceased to read. But the taint is still there.
Now people are books to me. I read them from cover to cover and toss them
aside. I devour them, one after the other. And the more I read, the more
insatiable I become. There is no limit to it. There could be no end, and
there was none, until inside me a bridge began to form which united me again
with the current of life from which as a child I had been separated.
A terrible sense of desolation. It hung over me for years. If I were to
believe in the stars I should have to believe that I was completely under
the reign of Saturn. Everything that happened to me happened too late to
mean much to me. It was even so with my birth. Slated for Christmas I was
born a half hour too late. It always seemed to me that I was meant to be the
sort of individual that one is destined to be by virtue of being born on the
25th day of December. Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was Jesus
Christ . . . perhaps Krishnamurti too, for all I know. Anyway that's the
sort of guy I was intended to be. But due to the fact that my mother had a
clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out
under another configuration - with a bad set-up, in other words. They say -
the astrologers, I mean -that it will get better and better for me as I go
on; the future in fact, is supposed to be quite glorious. But what do I care
about the future? It would have been better if my mother had tripped on the
stairs the morning of the 25th of December and broken her neck: that would
have given me a fair start! When I try to think, therefore, of where the
break occurred I keep putting it back further and further, until there is no
other way of accounting for it than by the retarded hour of birth. Even my
mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. "Always
dragging behind, like a cow's tail" - that's how she characterized me. But
is it my fault that she held me locked inside her until the hour had passed?
Destiny had prepared me to be such and such a person; the stars were in the
right conjunction and I was right with the stars and kicking to get out. But
I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky
not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing
seems clear, however - and this is a hangover from the 25th - that I was
born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a
fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me from early
childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes
passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always
believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were
slapped the more firmly I believed. / believed - and the rest of the world
did not! If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on
believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than
that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground
taken from under your feet. It isn't even treachery, what I have in mind.
Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse,
something less than treachery. It's a negativism that causes you to
overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of
balancing yourself. You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you
totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath
your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of
enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your
love. The more you reach out towards the world the more the world retreats.
Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in
his sacred entrails - that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice.
While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there
is no such thing as blood and no such things as a skeleton beneath the
covering of flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people
live.
If you continue this balancing at the edge of the abyss long enough you
become very very adept: no matter which way you are pushed you always right
yourself. Being in constant trim you develop a ferocious gaiety, an
unnatural gaiety, I might say. There are only two peoples in the world
to-day who understand the meaning of such a statement - the Jews and the
Chinese. If it happens that you are neither of these you find yourself in a
strange predicament. You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are
considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and
durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep
then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That
means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time. It means to
be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this
company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal
conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no
longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the
dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.
In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the
dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and swaying as if by a great
recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole
negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass
to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible. There was
a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have
always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls on,
the stars roll on, but men:
the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image
of the one and only one.
If one isn't crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go
on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then
another curious thing happens. It's as though one had actually died and
actually been resurrected again, one lives a super-normal life, like the
Chinese. That is to say, one is unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy,
unnaturally indifferent. The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a
flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature at the same time.
If your best friend dies you don't even bother to go to the funeral; if a
man is run down by a street car right before your eyes you keep on walking
just as though nothing had happened;
if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you
yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life
becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the
passing show. Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own
included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human
sympathy, a limited sympathy - it is something monstrous and evil. You care
so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything.
At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous
pace. This tool is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar
button just as well as to a cause. There is no fundamental, unalterable
difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of
your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a
diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which
attracts others to you willy-nilly. One thing is certain, that when you die
and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is
yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow;
you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about
you.
Nothing of this which I am now recording was known to me at the time
that I was going through the great change. Everything I endured was in the
nature of a preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one evening,
I walked out of the office, out of my hitherto private life, and sought the
woman who was to liberate me from a living death. In the light of this I
look back now upon my nocturnal rambles through the streets of New York, the
white nights when I walked in my sleep and saw the city in which I was born
as one sees things in a mirage. Often it was O'Rourke, the company
detective, whom I accompanied through the silent streets. Often the snow was
on the ground and the air chill frost. And O'Rourke talking interminably
about thefts, about murders, about love, about human nature, about the
Golden Age. He had a habit, when he was well launched upon a subject of
stopping suddenly in the middle of the street and planting his heavy foot
between mine so that I couldn't budge. And then, seizing the lapel of my
coat, he would bring his face dose to mine and talk into my eyes, each word
boring in like the turn of a gimlet. I can see again the two of us standing
in the middle of a street at four in the morning, the wind howling, the snow
blowing down, and O'Rourke oblivious of everything but the story he had to
get off his chest. Always as he talked I remember taking in the surroundings
out of the comer of my eye, being aware not of what he was saying but of the
two of us standing in Yorkville or on Alien Street or on Broadway. Always it
seemed a little crazy to me, the earnestness with which he recounted his
banal murder stories in the midst of the greatest muddle of architecture
that man had ever created. While he was talking about finger-prints I might
be taking stock of a coping or a cornice on a little red brick building just
back of his black hat, I would get to thinking of the day the cornice had
been installed, who might be the man who had designed it and why had he made
it so ugly, so like every other lousy, rotten cornice which we passed from
the East Side up to Harlem and beyond Harlem, if we wanted to push on,
beyond New York, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Grand Canyon, beyond the
Mojave Desert, everywhere in America where there are buildings for man and
woman. It seemed absolutely crazy to me that each day of my life I had to
sit and listen to other people's stories, the banal tragedies of poverty and
distress, of love and death, of yearning and disillusionment. If, as it
happened, there came to me each day at least fifty men, each pouring out his
tale of woe, and with each one I had to be silent and "receive", it was only
natural that at some point along the line I had to close my ears, had to
harden my heart. The tiniest little morsel was sufficient for me, I could
chew on it and digest it for days and weeks. Yet I was obliged to sit there
and be inundated, to get out at night again and receive more, to sleep
listening, to dream listening. They streamed in from all over the world,
from every strata of society, speaking a thousand different tongues,
worshipping different gods, obeying different laws and customs. The tale of
the poorest among them with a huge tome, and yet if each and every one were
written out at length it might all be compressed to the size of the ten
commandments, it might all be recorded on the back of a postage stamp, like
the Lord's Prayer. Each day I was so stretched that my hide seemed to cover
the whole world; and when I was alone, when I was no longer obliged to
listen, I shrank to the size of a pinpoint. The greatest delight, and it was
a rare one, was to walk the streets alone ... to walk the streets at night
when no one was abroad and to reflect on the silence that surrounded me.
Millions lying on their backs, dead to the world, their mouths wide open and
nothing but snores emanating from them. Walking amidst the craziest
architecture ever invented, wondering why and to what end, if every day from
these wretched hovels or magnificent palaces there had to stream forth an
army of men itching to unravel their tale of misery. In a year, reckoning it
modestly, I received twenty-five thousand tales; in two years fifty
thousand; in four years it would be a hundred thousand; in ten years I would
be stark mad. Already I knew enough people to populate a good-sized town.
What a town it would be, if only they could be gathered together! Would they
want skyscrapers? Would they want museums? Would they want libraries? Would
they too build sewers and bridges and tracks and factories? Would they make
the same little cornices of tin, one like another, on, on, ad infinitum,
from Battery Park to the Golden Bay? I doubt it. Only the lash of hunger
could stir them. The empty belly, the wild look in the eye, the fear, the
fear of worse, driving them on. One after the other, all the same, all
goaded to desperation, out of the goad and whip of hunger building the
loftiest skyscrapers, the most redoubtable dreadnoughts, making the finest
steel, the flimsiest lace, the most delicate glassware. Walking with
O'Rourke and hearing nothing but theft, arson, rape, homicide was like
listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony. And just as one can
whistle an air of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep with,
so, listening to O'Rourke, I would be thinking of the moment when he would
stop talking and say "what'll you have to eat?" In the midst of the most
gruesome murder I could think of the pork tenderloin which we would be sure
to get at a certain place farther up the line and wonder too what sort of
vegetables they would have on the side to go with it, and whether I would
order pie afterwards or a custard pudding. It was the same when I slept with
my wife now and then; while she was moaning and gibbering I might be
wondering if she had emptied the grounds in the coffee pot, because she had
the bad habit of letting things slide - the important things, I mean. Fresh
coffee was important - and fresh bacon with eggs. If she were knocked up
again that would be bad, serious in a way, but more important than that was
fresh coffee in the morning and the smell of bacon and eggs. I could put up
with heartbreaks and abortions and busted romances, but I had to have
something under my belt to carry on, and I wanted something nourishing,
something appetizing. I felt exactly like Jesus Christ would have felt if he
had been taken down from the cross and not permitted to die in the flesh. I
am sure that the shock of crucifixion would have been so great that he would
have suffered a complete amnesia as regards humanity. I am certain that
after his wounds had healed he wouldn't have given a damn about the
tribulations of mankind but would have fallen with the greatest relish upon
a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of toast, assuming he could have had it.
Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of
his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy. And
this joy of living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which
eventually vitiates the whole world. Whatever is created beyond the normal
limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about destruction.
At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of
Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there
comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen
despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was laid upon
another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One
thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the
streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The
streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of
the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which
are null and void.
In this null and void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a
sandwich, or a collar button. I could study a cornice or a coping with the
greatest curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of human woe. I can
remember the dates on certain buildings and the names of the architects who
designed them. I can remember the temperature and the velocity of the wind,
standing at a certain comer; the tale that accompanied it is gone. I can
remember that I was even then remembering something else, and I can tell you
what it was that I was then remembering, but of what use? There was one man
in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances;
there was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be
me, myself, but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast
of the field. Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men
struggled to earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb
which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a
stone forest the centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead centre, in
the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or
I befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all
stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would
encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no
life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have
meaning. Perhaps in reading this, one has still the impression of chaos but
this is written from a live centre and what is chaotic is merely peripheral,
the tangental shreds, as it were, of a world which no longer concerns me.
Only a few months ago I was standing in the streets of New York looking
about me as years ago I had looked about me;
again I found myself studying the architecture, studying the minute
details which only the dislocated eye takes in. But this time it was like
thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the
evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby.
What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated
me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a
book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real.
Sometimes after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch
fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in
passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacre
Coeur, through the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight. Just a
Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed
of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a
Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But
as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I
meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen
and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are
responsible, more than anything else, for my being here to-day. Most of the
places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps
never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them
in our rambles through the park.
Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and
texture of Lawrence's work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we
were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence's ideas.
Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how
pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence's words. Had I really
understood, my life could never have taken the course it did. Most of us
live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can
say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps
America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open
my eyes wide and full and dear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was
only because I had renounced America, renounced my past.
My friend Kronski used to twit me about my "euphorias". It was a sly
way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow
would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long
stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety,
of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds
strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the
person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree. In the latter mood, for
instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolleycar.
Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment
manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in
one of my states of "euphoria". We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn
Bridge to go to some flat in Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were
waiting to receive us. Hymie had started to talk to me in his usual way
about his wife's ovaries. In the first place he didn't know precisely what
ovaries meant and so I was explaining it to him in crude and simple fashion.
In the midst of my explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and
ridiculous that Hymie shouldn't know what ovaries were that I became drunk,
as drunk I mean as if I had a quart of whisky under my belt. From the idea
of diseased ovaries there germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of
tropical growth made up of the most heterogeneous assortment of odds and
ends in the midst of which, securely lodged, tenaciously lodged, I might
say, were Dante and Shakespeare. At the same instant I also suddenly
recalled my whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle
of the Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word "ovaries" had broken. I
realized that everything Hymie had said up till the word "ovaries", had
sieved through me like sand. What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn
Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, usually when
walking to my father's shop, a performance which was repeated day in and day
out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours,
of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious activity.
Not for years had I thought of this book which I used to write every day on
my way from Delancey Street to Murray Hill. But going over the bridge the
sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the
remembrance of the past set in ... remembrance of going back and forth over
the bridge, going to a job which was death, returning to a home which was a
morgue, memorizing Faust looking down into the cemetery, spitting into the
cemetery from the elevated train, the same guard on the platform every
morning, an imbecile, the other imbeciles reading their newspapers, new
skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in and die in, the boats passing
below, the Fall River Line, the Albany Day Line, why am I going to work,
what will I do to-night, the warm cunt beside me and can I work my knuckles
into her groin, run away and become a cowboy, try Alaska, the gold mines,
get off and turn around, don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck,
river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud,
legs free, fish will come and bite, to-morrow a new life, where, anywhere,
why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death is the solution,
but don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new
friend, millions of chances, you're too young yet, you're melancholy, you
don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on
over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants,
crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts crawling out the same way . .
. Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic,
above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying
sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe
each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to
take it in, to announce myself, anyway each time I passed on high I was
truly alone, and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself,
screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered,
the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never
admitted. If this then was the true self it was marvellous, and what's more
it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop to
continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went
down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen in the dirty
ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and
grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every
object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent
existence. My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking
at Hymie and thinking of that strange word "ovaries", now stranger than any
word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and
Hymie sitting beside me was a bull-frog, absolutely a bull-frog and nothing
more. I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze,
the legs dear and waiting for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through
the heavens, through the solid core of the earth, head down and ramming
through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of
hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was
waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was walking
again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above
him a man was sitting in an aeroplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky.
The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing
she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and
he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the
cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails formed on every
finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toe nail, the tiniest
toe nail imaginable and you could break your head over it, trying to figure
it out. On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing
such a hodge-podge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if
one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on
the other side of the ledger things like toe nails, hair, teeth, blood,
ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of
ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The
bull-frog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat;
they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button
was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary
without benefit of lucubration; lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the
eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink
of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting
for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and
through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his
work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of
rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of
non-comprehension swept dear by gales of laughter. From the hub of the
bull-frog's eye radiated dean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be
annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving
sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bull-frog was an ovarian spud
generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers
had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes
exterminated; for him the twin dries had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge,
the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat
upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the
anaesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the big Bertha which could
destroy what the eye could not see; for him the molecule was broken down and
the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night the stars were
swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of
gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all
movement, be it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets,
expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the high priests of the
de-possessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of
a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making
love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and
out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation
which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which
was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself
became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making
life and killing life at the same time. I could see it going on after death,
like hair growing on a corpse, people saying "death" but the hair still
testifying to life, and finally no death but this life of hair and nails,
the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something still alive,
expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement. Through love
this night happen, or sorrow, or being born with a dub foot; the cause
nothing, the event everything. In the beginning was the Word . .. Whatever
this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it
would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat
God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words - for him who had
become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word
the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never
be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only that which
expressed itself in beginning and end. So, on the ovarian trolley there was
this voyage of man and bull-frog composed of identical stuff, neither better
nor less than Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely
the meaning of anything, the other knowing too precisely the meaning of
everything, hence both lost and confused through beginnings and endings,
finally to be deposited at Java or India Street, Greenpoint, there to be
carried back into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of sawdust
moils with twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety.
What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or
unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or
talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the
separate detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body
or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I
had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to
surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who
made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as
definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of
civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the
thing-in-itself-not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately
passionate hunger, as if in the discarded, worthless thing which everyone
ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.
Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I
attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle
which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the
blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty
of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or
gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me. If this was perverse it was
also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world
which was springing up about me. Soon I too would become like these objects
which I venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society. I was
definitely dated, that was certain. And yet I was able to amuse, to
instruct, to nourish. But never to be accepted, in a genuine way. When I
wished to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum
of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I
chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was
in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism
which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a
clown;
it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I
underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville
entertainer, I would have been famous. People would have appreciated me
precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have
understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief,
to say the least.
It was always a source of amazement to me how easily people could
become rued just listening to me talk. Perhaps my speech was somewhat
extravagant, though often it happened when I was holding myself in with main
force. The turn of a phrase, the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the
facility with which the words came to my Ups, the allusions to subjects
which were taboo - everything conspired to set me off as an outlaw, as an
enemy to society. No matter how well things began sooner or later they
smelled me out. If I were modest and humble, for example, then I was too
modest, too humble. If I were gay and spontaneous, bold and reckless, then I
was too free, too gay. I could never get myself quite au point with the
individual I happened to be talking to. If it were not a question of life
and death - everything was life and death to me then - if it was merely a
question of passing a pleasant evening at the home of some acquaintance, it
was the same thing. There were vibrations emanating from me, overtones and
undertones, which charged the atmosphere unpleasantly. Perhaps the whole
evening they had been amused by my stories, perhaps I had them in stitches,
as it often happened, and everything seemed to augur well. But sure as fate
something was bound to happen before the evening came to a dose, some
vibration set loose which made the chandelier ring or which reminded some
sensitive soul of the piss-pot under the bed. Even while the laughter was
still drying off the venom was beginning to make itself felt. "Hope to see
you again some time", they would say, but the wet, limp hand which was
extended would belie the words.
Persona mm grata! Jesus, how clear it seems to me now! No pick and
choice possible: I had to take what was to hand and leam to like it. I had
to learn to live with the scum, to swim like a sewer-rat or be drowned. If
you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated
you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd.
You may dream, if you are dreaming simultaneously. But if you dream
something different you are not in America, of America American, but a
Hottentot in Africa, or a Kalmuck, or a chimpanzee. The moment you have a
"different" thought you cease to be an American. And the moment you become
something different you find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland.
Am I saying this with rancour, with envy, with malice? Perhaps. Perhaps
I regret not having been able to become an American. Perhaps. In my zeal
now, which is again American, I am about to give birth to a monstrous
edifice, a skyscraper, which will last undoubtedly long after the other
skyscrapers have vanished, but which will vanish too when that which
produced it disappears. Everything American will disappear one day, more
completely than that which was Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian. This is one of
the ideas which pushed me outside the warm, comfortable bloodstream where,
buffaloes all, we once grazed in peace. An idea that has caused me infinite
sorrow, for not to belong to something enduring is the last agony. But I am
not a buffalo and I have no desire to be one. I am not even a spiritual
buffalo. I have slipped away to rejoin an older stream of consciousness, a
race antecedent to the buffaloes, a race that will survive the buffalo.
All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are different, are
veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is
different. This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different from the
usual skyscraper a 1'americaine. In this sky" scraper there are no
elevators, no 73rd story windows to jump from. If you get tired of climbing
you are shit out of luck. There is no slot directory in the main lobby. If
you are search-ing for somebody you will have to search. If you want a drink
you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this
building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths. All the other
skyscrapers have what you want! this one contains nothing but what I want,
what I like. And somewhere in this skyscraper Valeska has her being, and
we're going to get to her when the spirit moves me. For the time being she's
all right, Valeska, seeing as how she's six feet under and by now perhaps
picked dean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked dean too,
by the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a different
tint, a different odour.
The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in
her veins. It was depressing for everybody around her. She made you aware of
it whether you wished to be or not. The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact
that her mother was a trollop. The mother was white of course. Who the
father was nobody knew, not even Valeska herself.
Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little
Jew from the vice-president's office happened to espy her. He was horrified,
so he informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a coloured
person as my secretary. He spoke as though she might contaminate the
messengers. The next day I was put on the carpet. It was exactly as though I
had committed sacrilege. Of course, I pretended that I hadn't observed
anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely intelligent and
extremely capable. Finally the president himself stepped in. There was a
short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically
proposed to give her a better position in Havana. No talk of the blood
taint. Simply that her services had been altogether remarkable and that they
would like to promote her - to Havana. Valeska came back to the office in a
rage. When she was angry she was magnificent. She said she wouldn't budge.
Steve Romero and Hymie were there at the time and we all went out to dinner
together. During the course of the evening we got a bit tight. Valeska's
tongue was wagging. On the way home she told me that she was going to put up
a fight; she wanted to know if it would endanger my job. I told her quietly
that if she were fired I would quit too. She pretended not to believe it at
first. I said I meant it, that I didn't care what happened. She seemed to be
unduly impressed, she took me by the two hands and she held them very
gently, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
That was the beginning of things. I think it was the very next day that
I slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her. She read the note
sitting opposite me and when she was through she looked me square in the eye
and said she didn't believe it. But we went to dinner again that night and
we had more to drink and we danced and while we were dancing she pressed
herself against me lasciviously. It was just the time, as luck would have
it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion. I was telling
Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said - "why
don't you let me lend you a hundred dollars?" The next night I brought her
home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed
how well the two of them got along. Before the evening was over it was
agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house the day of the abortion and
take care of the kid. The day came and I gave Valeska the afternoon off.
About an hour after she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the
afternoon off also. I started towards the burlesque on Fourteenth Street.
When I was about a block from the theatre I suddenly changed my mind. It was
just the thought that if anything happened - if the wife were to kick-off- I
wouldn't feel so damned good having spent the afternoon at the burlesque. I
walked around a bit, in and out of the penny arcades, and then I started
homeward.
It's strange how things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly
remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child. You take
the dominoes and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull
the tablecloth on which the battleships are floating until they come to the
edge of the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall on to the
floor. We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got
so sleepy that she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep. The
dominoes were lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor
too. Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down
my throat, my hand between her legs. As I laid her back on the table she
twined her legs around me. I could feel one of the dominoes under my feet -
part of the fleet that we had destroyed a dozen times or more. I thought of
my grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day
that I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as
he pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought of the
attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture of:
Teddy .charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which I used
to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship Maine that floated
over my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral
Dewey and of Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy Yard
which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered that we
had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the doctor's office
I didn't have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings ... We had
hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the
slaughter house. I was still buttoning my fly as I went through the hall to
open the gate. She was as white as flour. She looked as though she'd never
be able to go through another one. We put her to bed and then we gathered up
the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on the table. Just the other night
in a bistrot, as I was going to the toilet, I happened to pass two old
fellows playing dominoes. I had to stop a moment and pick up a domino. The
feeling of it immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they
made when they fell on the floor. And with the battleships my lost tonsils
and my faith in human beings gone. So that every time I walked over the
Brooklyn Bridge and looked down towards the Navy Yard I felt as though my
guts were dropping out. Way up there, suspended between the two shores, I
felt always as though I were hanging over a void; up there everything that
had ever happened to me seemed unreal, and worse than unreal - unnecessary.
Instead of joining me to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge
seemed to break all connections. If I walked towards the one shore or the
other it made no difference: either way was hell. Somehow I had managed to
sever my connection with the world that human hands and human minds were
creating. Perhaps my grandfather was right, perhaps I was spoiled in the bud
by the books I read. But it is ages since books have claimed me. For a long
time now I have practically ceased to read. But the taint is still there.
Now people are books to me. I read them from cover to cover and toss them
aside. I devour them, one after the other. And the more I read, the more
insatiable I become. There is no limit to it. There could be no end, and
there was none, until inside me a bridge began to form which united me again
with the current of life from which as a child I had been separated.
A terrible sense of desolation. It hung over me for years. If I were to
believe in the stars I should have to believe that I was completely under
the reign of Saturn. Everything that happened to me happened too late to
mean much to me. It was even so with my birth. Slated for Christmas I was
born a half hour too late. It always seemed to me that I was meant to be the
sort of individual that one is destined to be by virtue of being born on the
25th day of December. Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was Jesus
Christ . . . perhaps Krishnamurti too, for all I know. Anyway that's the
sort of guy I was intended to be. But due to the fact that my mother had a
clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out
under another configuration - with a bad set-up, in other words. They say -
the astrologers, I mean -that it will get better and better for me as I go
on; the future in fact, is supposed to be quite glorious. But what do I care
about the future? It would have been better if my mother had tripped on the
stairs the morning of the 25th of December and broken her neck: that would
have given me a fair start! When I try to think, therefore, of where the
break occurred I keep putting it back further and further, until there is no
other way of accounting for it than by the retarded hour of birth. Even my
mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. "Always
dragging behind, like a cow's tail" - that's how she characterized me. But
is it my fault that she held me locked inside her until the hour had passed?
Destiny had prepared me to be such and such a person; the stars were in the
right conjunction and I was right with the stars and kicking to get out. But
I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky
not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing
seems clear, however - and this is a hangover from the 25th - that I was
born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a
fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me from early
childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes
passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always
believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were
slapped the more firmly I believed. / believed - and the rest of the world
did not! If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on
believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than
that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground
taken from under your feet. It isn't even treachery, what I have in mind.
Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse,
something less than treachery. It's a negativism that causes you to
overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of
balancing yourself. You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you
totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath
your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of
enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your
love. The more you reach out towards the world the more the world retreats.
Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in
his sacred entrails - that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice.
While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there
is no such thing as blood and no such things as a skeleton beneath the
covering of flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people
live.
If you continue this balancing at the edge of the abyss long enough you
become very very adept: no matter which way you are pushed you always right
yourself. Being in constant trim you develop a ferocious gaiety, an
unnatural gaiety, I might say. There are only two peoples in the world
to-day who understand the meaning of such a statement - the Jews and the
Chinese. If it happens that you are neither of these you find yourself in a
strange predicament. You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are
considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and
durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep
then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That
means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time. It means to
be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this
company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal
conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no
longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the
dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.
In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the
dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and swaying as if by a great
recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole
negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass
to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible. There was
a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have
always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls on,
the stars roll on, but men:
the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image
of the one and only one.
If one isn't crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go
on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then
another curious thing happens. It's as though one had actually died and
actually been resurrected again, one lives a super-normal life, like the
Chinese. That is to say, one is unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy,
unnaturally indifferent. The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a
flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature at the same time.
If your best friend dies you don't even bother to go to the funeral; if a
man is run down by a street car right before your eyes you keep on walking
just as though nothing had happened;
if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you
yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life
becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the
passing show. Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own
included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human
sympathy, a limited sympathy - it is something monstrous and evil. You care
so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything.
At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous
pace. This tool is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar
button just as well as to a cause. There is no fundamental, unalterable
difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of
your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a
diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which
attracts others to you willy-nilly. One thing is certain, that when you die
and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is
yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow;
you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about
you.
Nothing of this which I am now recording was known to me at the time
that I was going through the great change. Everything I endured was in the
nature of a preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one evening,
I walked out of the office, out of my hitherto private life, and sought the
woman who was to liberate me from a living death. In the light of this I
look back now upon my nocturnal rambles through the streets of New York, the
white nights when I walked in my sleep and saw the city in which I was born
as one sees things in a mirage. Often it was O'Rourke, the company
detective, whom I accompanied through the silent streets. Often the snow was
on the ground and the air chill frost. And O'Rourke talking interminably
about thefts, about murders, about love, about human nature, about the
Golden Age. He had a habit, when he was well launched upon a subject of
stopping suddenly in the middle of the street and planting his heavy foot
between mine so that I couldn't budge. And then, seizing the lapel of my
coat, he would bring his face dose to mine and talk into my eyes, each word
boring in like the turn of a gimlet. I can see again the two of us standing
in the middle of a street at four in the morning, the wind howling, the snow
blowing down, and O'Rourke oblivious of everything but the story he had to
get off his chest. Always as he talked I remember taking in the surroundings
out of the comer of my eye, being aware not of what he was saying but of the
two of us standing in Yorkville or on Alien Street or on Broadway. Always it
seemed a little crazy to me, the earnestness with which he recounted his
banal murder stories in the midst of the greatest muddle of architecture
that man had ever created. While he was talking about finger-prints I might
be taking stock of a coping or a cornice on a little red brick building just
back of his black hat, I would get to thinking of the day the cornice had
been installed, who might be the man who had designed it and why had he made
it so ugly, so like every other lousy, rotten cornice which we passed from
the East Side up to Harlem and beyond Harlem, if we wanted to push on,
beyond New York, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Grand Canyon, beyond the
Mojave Desert, everywhere in America where there are buildings for man and
woman. It seemed absolutely crazy to me that each day of my life I had to
sit and listen to other people's stories, the banal tragedies of poverty and
distress, of love and death, of yearning and disillusionment. If, as it
happened, there came to me each day at least fifty men, each pouring out his
tale of woe, and with each one I had to be silent and "receive", it was only
natural that at some point along the line I had to close my ears, had to
harden my heart. The tiniest little morsel was sufficient for me, I could
chew on it and digest it for days and weeks. Yet I was obliged to sit there
and be inundated, to get out at night again and receive more, to sleep
listening, to dream listening. They streamed in from all over the world,
from every strata of society, speaking a thousand different tongues,
worshipping different gods, obeying different laws and customs. The tale of
the poorest among them with a huge tome, and yet if each and every one were
written out at length it might all be compressed to the size of the ten
commandments, it might all be recorded on the back of a postage stamp, like
the Lord's Prayer. Each day I was so stretched that my hide seemed to cover
the whole world; and when I was alone, when I was no longer obliged to
listen, I shrank to the size of a pinpoint. The greatest delight, and it was
a rare one, was to walk the streets alone ... to walk the streets at night
when no one was abroad and to reflect on the silence that surrounded me.
Millions lying on their backs, dead to the world, their mouths wide open and
nothing but snores emanating from them. Walking amidst the craziest
architecture ever invented, wondering why and to what end, if every day from
these wretched hovels or magnificent palaces there had to stream forth an
army of men itching to unravel their tale of misery. In a year, reckoning it
modestly, I received twenty-five thousand tales; in two years fifty
thousand; in four years it would be a hundred thousand; in ten years I would
be stark mad. Already I knew enough people to populate a good-sized town.
What a town it would be, if only they could be gathered together! Would they
want skyscrapers? Would they want museums? Would they want libraries? Would
they too build sewers and bridges and tracks and factories? Would they make
the same little cornices of tin, one like another, on, on, ad infinitum,
from Battery Park to the Golden Bay? I doubt it. Only the lash of hunger
could stir them. The empty belly, the wild look in the eye, the fear, the
fear of worse, driving them on. One after the other, all the same, all
goaded to desperation, out of the goad and whip of hunger building the
loftiest skyscrapers, the most redoubtable dreadnoughts, making the finest
steel, the flimsiest lace, the most delicate glassware. Walking with
O'Rourke and hearing nothing but theft, arson, rape, homicide was like
listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony. And just as one can
whistle an air of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep with,
so, listening to O'Rourke, I would be thinking of the moment when he would
stop talking and say "what'll you have to eat?" In the midst of the most
gruesome murder I could think of the pork tenderloin which we would be sure
to get at a certain place farther up the line and wonder too what sort of
vegetables they would have on the side to go with it, and whether I would
order pie afterwards or a custard pudding. It was the same when I slept with
my wife now and then; while she was moaning and gibbering I might be
wondering if she had emptied the grounds in the coffee pot, because she had
the bad habit of letting things slide - the important things, I mean. Fresh
coffee was important - and fresh bacon with eggs. If she were knocked up
again that would be bad, serious in a way, but more important than that was
fresh coffee in the morning and the smell of bacon and eggs. I could put up
with heartbreaks and abortions and busted romances, but I had to have
something under my belt to carry on, and I wanted something nourishing,
something appetizing. I felt exactly like Jesus Christ would have felt if he
had been taken down from the cross and not permitted to die in the flesh. I
am sure that the shock of crucifixion would have been so great that he would
have suffered a complete amnesia as regards humanity. I am certain that
after his wounds had healed he wouldn't have given a damn about the
tribulations of mankind but would have fallen with the greatest relish upon
a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of toast, assuming he could have had it.
Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of
his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy. And
this joy of living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which
eventually vitiates the whole world. Whatever is created beyond the normal
limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about destruction.
At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of
Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there
comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen
despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was laid upon
another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One
thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the
streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The
streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of
the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which
are null and void.
In this null and void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a
sandwich, or a collar button. I could study a cornice or a coping with the
greatest curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of human woe. I can
remember the dates on certain buildings and the names of the architects who
designed them. I can remember the temperature and the velocity of the wind,
standing at a certain comer; the tale that accompanied it is gone. I can
remember that I was even then remembering something else, and I can tell you
what it was that I was then remembering, but of what use? There was one man
in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances;
there was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be
me, myself, but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast
of the field. Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men
struggled to earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb
which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a
stone forest the centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead centre, in
the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or
I befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all
stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would
encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no
life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have
meaning. Perhaps in reading this, one has still the impression of chaos but
this is written from a live centre and what is chaotic is merely peripheral,
the tangental shreds, as it were, of a world which no longer concerns me.
Only a few months ago I was standing in the streets of New York looking
about me as years ago I had looked about me;
again I found myself studying the architecture, studying the minute
details which only the dislocated eye takes in. But this time it was like