Delmore Schwartz
 Story St.
Cambridge, Mass.

TWELFTH NIGHT: OR, WHAT YOU WILL

I pray thee, and I'll pay thee bounteously,
Conceal me what I am; and be my aid
For such disguise as, haply, shall become
The form of my intent.

Simon was told that there would be a half-hour wait between trains. He had come from New York, he was going to Boston and here he was in Providence, R.I. at eleven o'clock in the morning. He could not remember what, exactly, had made him go to Boston by way of Providence, having been so unhappy the previous evening that his emotion blocked the detail and the choice of every action of the previous evening.

Simon seated himself in the waiting room of the railroad station, took out his pipe, and thus permitted, as always, the flood of feeling to rise to his conscious attention. Meanwhile the newspaper-stand, gala with magazine covers and hanging boxes of candy, stood in the path of his vision and he was remotely aware of them.

At this time, two years after his graduation from college, Simon had the job of marketing books for a New York publisher to out-of-town department stores and circulating library chains. It was a question of reprints, Christmas editions and children's books, nothing more than that, but for some college textbooks at the beginning of each college term. Because of this, he was continually setting out for Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Pittsburgh (but not often for Pittsburgh) and then returning to New York. Naturally this involved much that surprised Simon, for travelling lost its holiday, Columbian character, and returning to New York City cease to be a return, for when he was at home he could not conceive of

-2-

having been away, and being away took on the habitual aspect of
being at home.

Yet there was one thing which had been binding together this
routine of departure and return, and it was of that one thing's
conclusion that Simon was thinking in the Providence, R.I. railroad
station waiting room. So this is what it is to be unhappy in love,
he thought, but soon he was thinking less objectively of what had
happened the night before. The crude physical violence, the savage
clumsiness with which he had seized Peggy, in a last effort to
force his love upon her, shocked him now as Peggy had been shocked
then.

## II

A tough-looking kid came up to him, announcing a shoe-shine
for a nickel. Simon consented absent-mindedly, and the process off
the wet black daubed on his shoes replaced the newspaper stand and
station clock as the outside world as Simon permitted the terrible
guilt in him to crowd his mind. Now he could see that the worst
fact was Peggy's angry revelation of her love for "someone else":
"anyone less self-absorbed than you would have understood that long
ago". Peggy had not said this yet it was the plain implication of
her tone. And now the kid had finished scrubbing at his shoes.

He looked happily at his shining shoes for one disinterested
moment. I may be crude, not loved and blind in self-absorption, yet
at least, at this moment, my shoes are beautiful. But Simon
immediately recognized that he was exhausting his minor pleasure,
as always, by too much thought--like a veteran Shakespearean actor,
retired: thus by irony, as always, Simon would try to become
superior to himself.

Clearly he was very unhappy and there was no direction in
which to go to be less unhappy. Nothing in Boston seemed likely

-3-

to be sufficiently interesting to make him forget himself. Each
prospect was neutral and yet contained the brutal shame which had
not once left him. What justification have I ever had for thinking
so well of myself? Thus he became the accuser, but each accusation
fell short of his bleeding humiliation, just as one might call a
moving river many names, commanding it to stop, from the the
transcendence of the great bridge.

Now he rehearsed the past which sustained this moment. Eight
months before this, Simon had discovered that he was in love with
his boss' secretary, the pretty girl who was two years older than
he was, and to whom he had been talking so avidly about books,
pictures and his opinions in general. He had been sucked in and led
on by Peggy's clear and extemporaneous delight in finding that what
he said was not only absorbing and amusing, but also true.

This had occurred often until Simon found himself attached
to his listener in unconscionable, subliminal ways. Just as an exile
discovers his nativity in between sleep and in newspapers two weeks
old and even in a black-barred postage stamp, so Simon discovered
that he was in love while tugging and pumping from the subway, his
mind weaving between the advertisements, and late at night trying
to fit the key into the door, and dressing in the morning, bent to
tie his shoelaces, suddenly aware that he would not see Peggy for
four full days.

But Peggy had explained to him with great good humor and
friendliness that she was not for him, that she did not love him.
This she had done repeatedly, late in the evening in the hallway,
and during a quiet drink after a concert. Each time her statement
had a more precise tone. She refused to become explicit about her
simple avowal "that she did not love him", although Simon demonstrated
with a great simulation of irony that her words were too used and

-4-

too general to offer him much instruction. He thought after a while
that her rejection came from her feeling that his cares and concerns
were too one-sided: he was too "intellectual".

III

But last night after a little drinking she had been more
vivacious, and more touching in her tipsiness, than he could
remember, and she had been careles in brushing aside his slight
embraces, so that at the end of the evening his tenderness rose
to concentrated desire, a harsh request for welcome.

He had seized her crudely, then she had become very angry when,
when gently pushed away, he only tried again and again with less
restraint and even greater clumsiness, even greater clumsiness and
shameless daring, because he had felt that he might as well, must,
settle everything once for all, and then she had burst out with
the shocking news that she was in love with someone else, and this,
only this, made him stop.

Then she was apologetic and he was sorry and she began to blame
herself for trying to keep his friendship being in love with another,
he being in love with her and he had refused to let her blame herself.
But by this time both of them were very tired of standing in the dim
hallway, and of having been awake so long, and he had taken himself
off numbly, without in any way securing remission for his unspeak-
able obscene effort.

Whereupon Simon returned to the external world from his waiting
room bench to discover that it was twelve o'clock, a half-hour too
late for one Boston train, a half-hour too early for the next Boston
train. Like a man on a treadmill, he thought, I have not even
progressed in time, but I am exactly where I was a half-hour ago,
just as unhappy. Well! and then he noticed the advertisement, Providen-
ce-New York-Washington, Excursion Rates, tacked upon the information

-5-

desk.

Is there any good reason why I should hesitate to take the train to Washington? There is no good reason. And the idea began to assume warm colors as he reflected that he had never been to Washington. The capital of the United States of America! And I have never been there! And it is undoubtedly a white city, much like its heart, the Capitol. Apple-trees in blossom along the Potomac, as in the newsreel--but unfortunately this is autumn. To go to an unknown Southern city for no good reason is, well, whatever it is, I can be as unhappy there as elsewhere. Whereupon Simon bought himself a ticket for Washington, and ate a cheese sandwich and a malted milk at the station soda fountain: this healthy food, he thought, and I must take care of myself.

## IV

Simon sat relaxed on the Pullman plush and watched an autumn rain fall will-lessly from the close sky. The train slipped steadily past the unpainted backyard fences of the poor, past the dead look of factories, across small bridges Gothic and erect upon marshy streams, into dairy farm country, into neat small towns, hurrying at right angles to waiting autos in their sudden suspense before the dominating train: Jersey! thought Simon, and again and again he was moved as the train passed a busy avenue and a man came out of a cigar store with a newspaper under his arm, as a child bounced a ball on the sidewalk on a quiet street, as a boy stuffed newspapers into doors. Their lives move in small, expected, habitual paths, while I take my sorrow to Washington for no good reason. What a great distance between us. How extraordinary that they should be content to be where they are. But I myself have been rejueted as insufficient and one-sided, and I have done something ugly, obscene and brutal, which I cannot forget nor

-6-

run away from, anymore than I can run away from my childhood.

V

At midnight the train arrived in Washington and Simon was taken by the cab-driver to the Hotel Bristol. In paying the driver Simon noticed that he had only a few cents left, except for the hundred dollar money order which he had been given the day before. Clearly he would have to cash this, if he was to have breakfast in the morning.

The hotel desk clerk greeted him with much deference and extended a pen and the register to him. And then, at that moment, Simon thought of the ingenious conceit of signing another name on the register. At the moment it was merely the broken memory of a book he had read in which the hero signed himself as Theodore Aquinas, Saunders Botticelli, and Manuel Kant, but rapidly it became a delightful projection, and as he signed himself Samuel Malebranche, 73 Elm St., Montreal, Canada, a nervous happiness rose up out of his tiredness.

I am now a Canadian, he told himself joyously, and will have to conduct myself in a mode becoming to that great people. Perhaps I shall speak with an accent, since I am a French Canadian; perhaps I shall request God Save The King from the string trio in the dining room tomorrow evening. I may even speak of my relatives in France and go so far as to say that I was not born on this continent, but in Lyons, the silk centre, on the Rhone (I think). This amused Simon profoundly.

And then, as the bell-boy took his suit-case and his room-key, Samuel had a sudden feeling of disaster. He would not be able to cash his money, with his name changed. Immediately he recovered: he could indorse the money order with his own name, and then again with his new name. He did this at the writing-desk and then

-7-

presented his piece of paper to the hotel clerk who assured him
that a hundred dollars in cash would be waiting for him at the
desk in the morning. As Simon collapsed into sleep like a sinking
balloon, the question of why he had come here and what this would
lead to troubled him a little, but only a very little, vaguely, like
street-lamps in the fog.

VI

The next afternoon, Samuel was having lunch with a
middle-aged man from St. Louis, Missouri. Samuel Pomper had engaged
him in conversation in the hotel lobby, while Samuel was considering
the morning newspaper. They had spent two hours of the morning
together, walking about on a driveway and in a park, and yet mostly
talking. Samuel had constructed himself as a liquor salesman from
Montreal, Canada, a young man of the world who knew about lonely
wives and stepped deftly thru episodes which were definitely
picaresque. Some of these he related with careless ease, waiting
impatiently to resume while his middle-aged friend had his own
say about his family, his business and his home town. With embarass-
ment which Samuel attributed to the subject under discussion, Mr.
Pomper mentioned his two daughters.

Samuel was enjoying himself thoroughly, and only briefly
did he feel the appalling gash inside, pressing his teeth together
and humming to drive the thought away. Again, he would for a moment
be troubled about what he was going to do next. The prospect of
the long return to Boston appeared as vacant and dead as the moon's
face, but from such questions he hurried on to talk some more about
what had happened one night in late August in Saratoga Springs.
Samuel even consumed the food he was enjoying so much without
paying much attention to it.

And then as they rose from the table, Pomper, with great

-8-

difficulty and with embarassed eyes, said that he would like very much to meet some of Samuel's lady friends, of course, he was kind of an old bird, but still knew what a good time was like, although he never managed to get about much in the home town; "It's kind of an old habit and I guess I'd like to break it this once", he said, as Simon grew panicky and blushed and looked at his wrist watch, jabbered about an engagement, shook hands and hurriedly departed, cursing himself because he had no lady friends in Washington, D.C., nor anywhere else, for that matter, except for a girl who had found him as insufficient as Samuel Pomper was now finding him.

## VII

Simon decided to go back to New York City as the hotel elevator lifted him to his floor like a gasp, but between the elevator doors and his room door he changed his mind and decided to visit an old school friend of his who had often invited him to come unexpectedly to his hunting lodge in the Pocono Mountains any time during the fall. Simon had not seen this friend for three years. Simon had just finished calling up for a ticket to Stroudsburg, Pa., and was packing his grip with unnecessary and chaotic haste when some one, some two, rapped loudly on the door.

Two plain clothes men entered and asked him what his name was.

"Samuel Malebranche", said Simon, feeling the beginning of panic.

"Yeah, that's what we thought," said on eof them, while the other began to poke about in his suitcase and dresser, "Got anything to identify yourself?"

"Well, the fact fact of the matter is--", began Simon, "What's up, anyway?"

-9-

"That money order is good", said Simon, sure that all
was now lost, that it would take any number of years to explain
his way out of this mess.

"It had the same handwriting for both signatures, young
fellow. Just what were you trying to do?"

Simon seated himself on the bed, and started to explain
that it was all a joke, that his real name was Simon Lessing,
that he worked for a New York publisher and was merely amusing
himself by taking another name. And immediately he saw that
amusement was a mistake, something the cops would never understand,
and everything was only becoming more hopeless.

"A fine joke, passing funny checks. Can't you get your
laughs any other way?" said the cop.

"I was just feeling down on my luck and this occurred
to me", said Simon, realizing at every moment that he was never going
to communicate to anyone thereasons for his behavior.

"What were you doing in Washington, anyway? Have you
anything to show who you are?", said the cop.

Simon looked thru his wallet and found nothing. He started
to say: "I've just felt like coming to Washington. I've never been
here before", but obviously that was even worse, for one cop began
to sneer. Reaching desperation as he saw that the other cop had
finished with his suitcase and both were now ready to take him to
the police station, Simon told them to call up his boss in New York
City. Now he would lose his job and everyone in New York would
know how absolutely insane he was.

"What! Spend all that money on an out-of-town call?
You're off your nut, Sammy", said one cop.

"Simon", said Simon, wearily.

"Sammy", said the other cop, and then wearily than he

-10-

had ever been before, Simon started to persuade the cops that it
would be much less of a nuisance to arouse him, than to call up.

One cop informed Simon that their duty was their duty, but
finally they consented, and while the call to Simon's boss was bei
being put thru, one cop kept telling Simon that he ought to have a
better story next time, for no one just came to Washington, for
nothing, changed his name for nothing, signed two names to a money
order for nothing.

The other cop held onto the phone, and finally the
connection was made. The cop asked for Simon's boss, was told
that he was out to lunch, news that was immediately conveyed to
Simon.

"Ask for his secretary", said Simon, genuinely wishing
that he were dead.

The cop asked for Peggy, was told that this was she, and
asked her whether she thought she could identify Simon's voice.
She said she could, and Simon took the phone.

"Hello, Peggy".

"Who is this?

"This is Simon, Peggy."

"You'll have to speak louder".

"For God's sakes", Simon shouted, "can't you
recognize my voice by this time", and he trembled, in despair.

"What in the world are you doing in Washington, Simon?"

"I'll write you a letter about it. Tell the cop who I
am. I'll be back in New York tomorrow."

Simon's identity was confirmed and the cops departed
after awhile, one cop still a little dubious. Simon seated himself
on the bed, exhausted, and feebly compared himself to a banana
peel.

VIII

-11-

VIII

Three hours later, Simon was on the train for New York City and as the train beat happily thru a golden autumn evening, past small white towns, into the gentlest dusk and the mildest evening sky, Simon lifted himself from his seat and walked backwards to the MEN'S ROOM, jolted by the train's motion into constantly steadied steps.

Here he ban to wash his hands with great precision, and then,
looking up, he unexpected met his own face in the mirror, whereupon
he grimaced at himself and then looked at himself seriously. Well!
he thought, I may as well get used to the sight, for it will be
keeping me company for a long time. You will go with me whether I
go to Cincinnati, Ohio, or Louisville, Kentucky, or St. Louis, Miss-
ouri, or New Orleans, or El Paso, or Santa Fe, or Albuquerque, or
San Diego, or Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or Honolulu, or Tokio,
or Peiping, or Benares, or Teheran, or Baghdad, or Alexandria, or
Smyrna, or Florence, or Vienna, or Paris, or London, or home to
New York City.

TWELFTH NIGHT; OR WHAT YOU WILL

Simon was told that there would be a half-hour wait between trains. He had come from New York, he was going to Boston and here he was in Providence, R.I. at eleven o'clock in the morning. He could not remember, what had made him go to Boston by way of Providence, having been so unhappy the previous evening that his emotion blocked the detail and the choice of every action of the previous evening.

He seated himself in the waiting room of the railroad station, took out his pipe, and thus permitted, as always, the flood of feeling to rise to his conscious attention. Meanwhile, the newspaper-stand, gala with magazine covers and hanging boxes of candy, and also, vast clock above the train gates, stood in the path of his vision, and he was remotely aware of them.

At this time, two years after his graduation from college, Simon had the job of marketing books for a New York publisher to out-of-town department stores and circulating library chains. It was a question of reprints, Christmas editions and children's books, nothing more than that, but for some college textbooks at the beginning of each college term. Because of this, he was continually setting out for Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Pittsburgh (but not too often for Pittsburgh) and then returning to New York. Naturally this involved much that surprised Simon, for travelling lost its holiday, Columbian character, and returning to New York City ceased to be a return, for when he was at home he could not conceive of having been away, and being away took on the habitual aspect of being at home.

-2-

one thing's conclusion that Simon was thinking in the Providence,
R.I. railroad station waiting room. So this is what it is to be
unhappy in love, he thought, but soon he was thinking ~~less~~ about
objectively ~~some~~ of what had happened the night before. The
crude physical violence, the savage clumsiness, with which he
had seized Peggy, in a last effort to force his love upon her,
shocked him now as Peggy had been shocked then.

II

A tough-looking kid came up to him, announcing a shoe-shine
for a nickel. Simon consented absent-mindedly, and the process
of the wet black daubed on his shoe replaced the newspaper-stand
and the station clock as the outside world as Simon permitted
the terrible guilt in him to crowd his mind. Now he could see
that the worst fact was Peggy's angry revelation of her love
for"someone else": "anyone less self-absorbed than you would
have understood that long ago". Peggy had not said this, yet it
was the plain implication of her tone. And now the kid had finished
scrubbing at his shoes.

He looked happily at his shining shoes for one disinterest-
ed moment. I may be crude, not loved, and blind in self-absorption,
yet at least, at this moment, my shoes are beautiful. But Simon
immediately recognized that he was exhausting his ~~satisfaction~~, as always, by too much thought--like a veteran Shakespearean
actor, retired: thus by irony, as always, Simon would try to
become superior to himself.

Clearly he was very unhappy and there was no direction
apparent to go to be less unhappy. Nothing in Boston seemed
likely to be sufficiently interesting. Each prospect ~~seemed~~ was neutral
and yet contained ~~~haunted by the brutal shame which had not once left him. What~~
justification have I ever had for thinking so well of myself?
Thus he became the accuser, but each accusation fell short of

-3-

his bleeding humiliation, just as one might call a moving river
many names, commanding it to stop, from the transcendence of the
great bridge.

Now he rehearsed the past which sustained this moment. Eight
months before Simon had discovered that he was in love with the
his boss' secretary, 2 years older than he was
pretty girl to whom he had been talking so avidly about books,
pictures and his opinions in general. He had been sucked in and
led on by Peggy's clear and extemporaneous delight in finding
that what he said was not only absorbing and amusing, but also
true, and in looking at a picture, felt the same way.

This had occurred often until Simon found himself attached
to his listener in unconscionable, subliminal ways. Just as an exile
discovers his nativity in between sleep and in newspapers two
weeks old and even in a black-barred postage stamp, so Simon
discovered that he was in love while he was hanging around and
swinging with the subway strap, his mind weaving between the advertisements
and late at night trying to fit the key into the door, and dress-
ing in the morning, bent to tie his shoelaces, suddenly noting
that he would not see Peggy for four full days.

But Peggy had explained to him with great good humor and
friendliness that she was not for him, that she did not love
him. This she had done repeatedly, late in the evening in the
hallway, and during a quiet drink after a concert. Each time
her statement had a more precise tone. She refused to become
explicit about her simple avowal "that she did not love him",
although he demonstrated with a great simulation of irony that
her words were too used and too general to offer him much instruct-
ion. He thought after a while that her rejection came from her
feeling that his cares and concerns were too one-sided: he was
"too intellectual".

-4-

III

But last night after a little drinking she had been more vivacious, and more touching in her tipsiness, than he could remember, and she had been careless in brushing aside his slight embraces, so that at the end of the evening his tenderness rose to a concentrated desire, a harsh request for welcome.

Then she was apologetic and he was sorry and she began to blame herself for trying to keep his friendship being in love with another, he being in love with her, and he had refused to let her blame herself. But by this time both of them were very tired of standing in the dim hallway and of having been awake so long, and he had taken himself off numbly, without in any way securing remission for his unspeakable, obscene effort.

Whereupon Simon returned to the external world from his waiting room bench to discover that it was twelve o'clock, a half-hour too late for one Boston train, a half-hour too early for the next Boston train. Like a man on a treadmill, he thought, I have not even progressed in time, but I am exactly where I was a half-hour ago, just as unhappy. Well! and then he noticed the advertisement at the information desk: Providence-New York-Washington, Excursion Rates.

Is there any good reason why I should hesitate to take the train to Washington? And the idea began to assume warm colors as he reflected that he had never