49.

from her!

"Dear Johannes," wrote Victoria, "when you read this letter I shall be dead....O God, if you knew how I have loved you, Johannes. I have not been able to show it to you, so many things have come in my way, and above all my own nature....If I got well again now I would never be unkind to you any more, Johannes. How I have cried and thought about that! Oh, I would go out and stroke all the stones in the street and stop and thank every step of the stairs as I went by and be good to all....My life is so unlived, I have not been able to do anything for anybody, and this failure of a life is to end now....And to-day I was thinking--how would you take it, I wonder, if I came straight up to you in the street one day when I was nicely dressed, and did not say anything to hurt you as I have done, but gave you a rose which I had bought on purpose? .....Ah, Johannes, I have loved you, loved only you all my life. It is Victoria who writes this and God is reading it over my shoulder."

It is fashionable to-day to ridicule this language. The young writers will tell you that Hamsun is a disgusting romantic. It is true--all this sort of thing is finished to-day. People don't love like this any more, or if they do they hide their heads. But when I come to a declaration like this I weep, and I do not hang my head with shame, I shed my tears publicly, and I pity all this young generation which has nothing but contempt for such romantic love.

I must say that when "Victoria" was put in my hands it was

50.

at a crucial moment in my life. It was when I was taking leave
of my wife after that little journey which I spoke of just a
few moments ago. Perhaps I gave the impression that this en-
counter resulted in nothing more than a sexual feast--for three
days and nights we lay joined like a pair of snakes. I said
that she was abandoned as I had never seen her before. Yes,
but there was a great tenderness in it, too, and more than
anything sorrow. She saw perhaps what I was capable of being
to her were there no influences to thwart our love. She saw
that I was capable of being the best of fathers, that I was
something more than the callous, insensitive being who had
tortured her so relentlessly all the years of our marriage.
God knows what the woman felt for me then--she too was no
longer the woman I had known, the woman whom I said "was wrigg-
ling through life on her belly, making of it a crawling, stink-
ing affair." I think that in both of us there was the sad and
irrevocable knowledge that we had come to know each other too
late, that the past had eaten into us like a poison and could
never be wiped out. As I was saying good-bye to her she slipped
something into my pocket; it was only when I boarded the train
that I recalled her gesture.

I read the book, while the train brought me back to New
York, with tears in my eyes; at the end I was sobbing and I made
no effort to control myself. But was it Blanche, my wife, who
inspired this anguish? Ah, that is the strange thing. I had
forgotten her already. No, it was not Blanche, it was Vic-
toria who made me weep, and Victoria was not a character in a
book but a living being, one whom I felt destined to meet. Vie-

52.

at such a moment, that we rose simultaneously and with no volition and fell on the floor, her hair twisted around my neck, strangling me, and chewing her flesh I remember still the oily taste of her hair, rich, brown, luxuriant hair that entangled me like seaweed and dragged me under, and going down with my eyes wide open and the water pounding in my ears I lost all sensation of form and soul and personality, everything floating away in shreds, everything diffuse, like a glass bell descending on me and severing me in two.

When I sat down to write this which you have just read I had an entirely different set of ideas in my head. I had fallen asleep over my old manuscript and when I awoke I had some such thoughts as this: you are not writing for Americans any more... you ought to give a full picture of your life in America because to the European it is so strange that it is almost incomprehensible...if you can make him see what it is to be brought up among foreigners in such a neighborhood as you were born in he will open his eyes... nor does he know this kind of love you are speaking of...it is not a universal man you are talking of--whatever that may be-- but an American, a peculiar kind of American, a New Yorker, a man surrounded by wops, kikes, Polaks, a man who sees a foreigner only as a caricature...the problems that occupy your mind do not even touch him... be narrow, be sentimental, be idiotic, but be yourself. By God, I said to myself, it is important, if you want him to understand what you're saying, to give him some of this atmosphere which he has never breathed. I know what happens to a book when it is translated, or to a film when it is produced by foreign actors. I want my language to be

53.

understood even if it is read by a Chinaman. And so now I am go-
ing to give you a dream which I discovered in that old manuscript.
I want you to observe how it matches that outer reality of America
which is part of my theme. I recorded this dream immediately
after I awoke; it followed upon the scene I have just described.

"His dream was of such a character as we experience only in
the trammeled depths of a profound stupor. It commenced with a
nightmarish vertigo that sent him hurtling from a dizzy precipice
into the warm waters of the C aribbean. He felt himself swirling
down, down, down in great spiral curves that had no beginning and
promised to end in eternity.

"During this ceaseless descent a bewildering and enchanting
panorama of marine life unrolled before his eyes. Enormous sea-
dragons wriggled and shimmered in the powdered sunlight which
filtered through the green waters; huge cactus plants with hideous
detached roots floated by, followed by sponge-like coral growths
of curious hues, some sullen as ox-blood, some a brilliant ver-
milion or soft lavender. Out of this teeming aquatic life poured
myriads of animalcules, resembling gnomes and pixies, streaming
up in bubbles like a gorgeous flux of star-dust in the tail-
sweep of a comet.

"The roaring in his ears gave way to plangent, verdant mel-
odies; he became aware of the tremors of earth, of poplars and
birches shrouded in ghost-like vapors, bending gracefully to the
caress of fragrant breeze. Stealthily the vapors rolled away ...
he was trudging through a mysterious forest alive with screaming
monkeys and birds of tropical plumage. To his astonishment he

54.

noticed a quiver of arrows in his girdle and a giant golden
bow over his shoulder.

"As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the wood the music became more celestial, the light more golden, and the earth beneath his feet became a carpet of soft blood-red leaves. In trying to grasp its beauty he swooned away. On awaking the forest had vanished; to his befuddled mind it seemed that he was standing before a pale, towering canvas on which a pastoral scene of great dignity had been painted: a mural such as Puvis de Chavannes has given us out of the grave, serpahic void of his dream life. The sedate, sombre wraiths moved with a measured, dream-like elegance that made our awkward earthly movements appear grotesque. He stepped into the canvas and followed a quiet path which led back toward the retreating line of the horizon. A full-hipped figure in a Grecian robe, balancing an urn, directed his foot-steps toward the exx turret of a castle dimly visible above the crest of a gentle knoll. He followed the undulating hips until lost in a dip beyond the distant knoll.

dis

"The figure with the urn had disappeared. But his eyes were now rewarded by a more mystifying sight. It was as though he had arrived at the very end of this habitable earth, at that magic fringe of the ancient world where all the mysteries and gloom and terror of the universe were concealed. About and around him was a vast enclosure whose limits he could only faintly discern. Before him rose the walls of a hoary castle bristling with spears. Pennants wrought with miraculously diabolical emblems fluttered ominously above the crenel-

55.

lated battlements. A sickly green fungus growth choked the broad sweeps leading out from the terrifying portals; the gloomy casements were bespattered with the remains of great carrion birds and the stench they gave off was unbearable.

"But what awed and fascinated him most was the color of the castle. It was a red, but like no red he could recall. The walls, indeed, had a warm blood-like hue, the tint of rich corpuscles laid bare by the knife, but on going closer the illusion vanished--it was a red that preceded the birth of man. Beyond the frontier walls loomed more spectacular parapets and battlements, turrets and spires, each receding rank steeped in more nameless red, until it seemed to his terrified eyes that the whole monstrous spectacle was a butcher's orgy dripping with gore and excrement.

"In horror and fear he had turned his gaze away; it was but a moment, yet when he looked again everything was changed. Instead of the poisonous fungus and the scabby carcasses of vultures he saw a rich mosaic of ebony and cinnamon shadowed by deep purple panoplies from which cascades of cherry blossoms slithered in billoy heaps on the chequered court. Only a few yards away there stood a resplendent couch festooned with royal drapes and pillows of gozzamer loveliness. On this sumptuous bed his wife was reclining languidly, as if anticipating his arrival. It was not a wholly familiar Blanche, though he recognized at once her tiny mouth. He waited expectantly for her usual inanities--instead there issued from her columnar throat a flood of dark music which sent the blood hammering to his temples. It was only then that he became aware that she was

56.

nude, felt the vague, splendid pain of her loins. As he bent
over her to lift her in his arms he recolied with horror-- a
spider was crawling slowly over her breast. Like one possessed
he dropped her and fled toward the castle walls.

"And now a strange thing happened. The huge, rusty hinges groaned and creaked, slowly the towering gates swung open. Once inside he sped swiftly up a narrow path that brought him to the foot of a spiral stair-case. Frantically he climbed the iron steps...higher and higher without ever seeming to reach the top. Finally, when it seemed that his heart must break with the exertion, he found himself at the summit. But the ramparts and battlements, the casements and turrets of the mysterious castle were no longer beneath him. A black, volcanic waste unfolded before his eyes, a waste furrowed with innumerable chasms of bottomless depth. Nothing of plant or vegetable life could be seen. Petrified limbs of gigantic proportions and carbuncled with glistering mineral crustations sprawled there in the void. Gazing more intently he discovered that there was a life below-- a slimy, crawling life that revealed itself in huge coils that wound and unwound about the crazy, dead limbs.

"Suddenly he had a presentiment that the towering steeple
up which he had climbed in panic was crumbling at the foundation,
and that he and this immense spire together hung teetering over
the edge of this loathsome void, to be dashed at any moment into
shattering annihilation. For the fraction of a moment there was
the most profound stillness and then faintly, so faintly that
it was almost inaudible, there came the sound of a voice--a human
voice. Suddenly it rang out boldly, with a weird, moaning accent
and then quickly died, as if it had been choked down in the

57.

sulphurous abyss below. And now he felt the great tower on
which he stood lurching violently and as the tower swooped over
the void like a drunken ship a babble of voices broke out.
Human voices--human as the laughter of hyaenas...the shrill
scream of the lunatic...blood-curdling oaths...the piercing,
horror-laden cachinations of the mad.

"The rail gave way and out into space he was flung, cata-
pulted with meteoric speed. Down, down, down he shot, his
beautiful frail body stripped of its flesh, his very organs
clawed by leprous talons, by beaks crusted with verdigris.
Down, down, stripped and mangled by fang and tusk.

"Now he was no longer hurtling through the void but shooting
down a paraffin incline supported by gigantic columns of human
flesh that bled from every pore. At the bottom he could see
the wide, cavernous maw of an ogre champing its teeth with
fierce delight. Another instant and he would be swallowed up;
his bones crunched and splintered.....

"But at the very moment that he was being swallowed the
monster sneezed and in the explosion **knock** the universe was
snuffed out."

(space)

working f

58.

There has been an interim of several weeks in which I have written nothing, and in that time I have been carrying the magnum opus about inside me, have felt it stirring in me--it has been sprouting quietly all the while. Things have occurred in this interim which I feel impelled to record--the march of history again. I put them down as they occur to me, without sequence; they will weave themselves naturally into the fabric of my tale.

......

A manuscript about Mona (one of Hildred's many names) was put into my hands. It is written by a woman and the words sear me. I can't understand how any one (especially this one who scarcely knows Mona) could write so exhaustively, so penetratingly, about my character. I realize, as I read the manuscript, that there are whole areas in me which are atrophied. The splendor of her language, the cruel, quick divination, leaves me stunned--it is I who should have said all this! Where have I been that all this should have escaped me? With what manner of woman did I imagine I was living all these years? The wisdom and the justice of her words is almost enough to defeat me. I shall be fumbling with my task for eternity. Seized with rage I vow that my explorations will take the bottom from under her book: lay for every city that is uncovered I will unbare another--not one Troy, but seven Troys. Her book is only another clue for me. Ultimately I will have in my possession all the clues. Like Aristotle I shall one day have an army working for me, collecting the facts. But as I write this I realize tragically that the possession of all the facts will yield but a skeleton.

59.

Another day I am translating an article on sadism--"Sadism in Woman". The sadism in woman manifests itself differently, but no less intensely, than in man. If anything, it is more cruel even than man's. (I am repeating from memory). Since woman functions more primitively, the perversion of her instincts gives a flavor to her *mismar* behavior which seems monstrous and repulsive. We have to revert to the insect world for analogies. The sexual appetite, so closely allied to the instinct of nutrition, becomes in the sadistic woman a truly terrifying spectacle: she lulls and soothes in order to destroy. Certain lines out of my novel come back to mind...."like those monsters of the insect world which know exactly where to strike and strike without ever blundering". I am not sure even whether they are my own words--they may be Maeterlinck's. But I was on the right track, then, in my novel: I was following her down into her devouring depths, down to a level unknown to man--the level of the spider, the octopus, that baffling world of monsters whose study never ceases to attract man's attention, nay more, which fascinates him more than any other study, except the stars--why? Is it because there he hopes to discover the secret of his tragic doom? Think of the legends and symbols which have evolved around woman--legends as fearsome and mystifying as that goddess Kali. Woman the sorceress, woman the murderess, woman the abortionist, woman the succubus, woman the night, woman the dead, scarred moon. What lies behind this terrible black symbol woman? Out of woman we are born and through her we die again. Woman the fecundator and woman the destroyer. She creates flowers and crimes; she sacrifices

60.

herself in order to enslave us; she is the slave who tyrannizes over us; she is the evil one through whom we know good, our temptation and our salvation; she is double-faced: she has inspired the greatest works of art and the most heinous crimes; she is almost like Nature herself--without meaning, without history, the blind womb of destiny, the enigma that rolls on mercilessly, devouringly, prolifically. Everything that she creates she effaces; she knows neither why she creates nor what. She is a monster and it is only because of her, because of our great mortal fear of her, that we have invented the God. But God is only a straw that we grasp at. We know in our inmost heart that God cannot save us. Before this which he has created God is powerless. As long as woman exists there will be God--but not one second after!

Another thing.... since there has been a woman in this house there has been nothing but dirt and disorder. It reminds me of my homes with Blanche and with Hildred. Female disorder. The bird fouling its nest--the lovely bird that soars through the streets with gorgeous plumage: if one could only see the nest from which it flew! How did the idea ever originate that woman is tidy and clean? Order and cleanliness--these are masculine symbols. Woman has acquired this sense through the course of civilization: she was brought in from the wilds, like the beast she is, and she was broken to the house--but only by rubbing her nose in the dirt. In the artist you have the great slovenly animal, the slutty bitch that wallows in its own mire. The female artist--personification of dirt and disorder!

61.

Strindberg and Dostoievski! They were the two poles of her axis. I understand a little better now why Hildred enjoyed Strindberg so much. I can see her looking up from her book, after reading a delicious passage, and with tears of laughter in her eyes saying to me-- "You're just as crazy as he is! You want to be punished." What a delight that must be to the sadist when he discovers his masochist! And when the she is a he! When the female sadist studies her own masochism, when she bites herself, as it were, in order to test her teeth! In those days, when Hildred was absorbed in her Strindberg, I was fed up with him, I found him boring at times, and not a little foolish sometimes with his ranting and grimacing. This wild carnival of maggots which makes his literature, it was this which had brought us together. And so swiftly was I sucked down in this vortex that when I came to the surface I could not recognize the world. We came together there in a dance of death and when I found myself loose the music had ceased to beat. And to-day, coming from the library, after I had bathed in the Ganges and studied the signs of the zodiac, I felt that I understood why that inferno which Strindberg experienced in the Pension Orfila--it was no mystery to me any longer that he and others (Dante, Balzac, Rabelais, Gauguin, Van Gogh) had made their pilgrimage to Paris. I was in Paris for exactly the same reasons--reasons unfathomable, reasons so deep and certain that they defy explanation. I understood why it is that Paris attracts the hallucinated, the tortured, the great maniacs of love. I could see why it is that in Paris one can embrace the most fantastic theories, that here one reads again

62.

the books of his youth and the books take on a new meaning,
one for every white hair. And one walks through the streets
knowing that one is crazy or possessed because it is only too
obvious that Paris is an asylum and that its citizens are the
cruel keepers of the demented. Paris has that cold insanity
which breeds dementia; the wildest antics do not disturb her
tranquillity--because she knows the disease. And why is it
that Hildred cannot tolerate Paris longer than a few weeks?
She is possessed, too, is she not? Yes, but there are dement-
ed ones who have the wild fear of animals in their guts when
they come within sight of the walls of the asylum. When Hild-
red comes to Paris she tries to prove that the keepers are
insane. I give you the other picture--Van Gogh walking into
the asylum willingly, almost gratefully, and doing there per-
haps his greatest work. To know that you are mad, to ask of
your own free will to be incarcerated--what a release that is!

And Stavrogin--Stavrogin who is so sane that he cannot
accomplish his madness. How that appeals to Hildred! Because
Hildred too is lucidly mad, in her better moments. Hildred
enjoys her madness because it is not altogether real--she has
deep remembrances, she reels when she thinks of the flights
she has taken. And then there are moments when she feels her-
self soaring, above the void of sanity, higher even than the
highest peaks of insanity, and then she is terrified--her
faith is not enough to support her wings..... For me "The
Eternal Husband" was the great book; for her it was always
"The Possessed". She hugged her tragedy, I hugged mine. At
the North Pole was Strindberg, at the South Pole Dostoievski.

63.

The long interim in which I wrote nothing culminated to-
day in the library, where I felt ill at ease, a little ridicu-
lous, in fact. I had come to read about the Tropic of Cancer,
what it means when we speak of a planet in scientific language, and I
found that cancer (which was once written chancre, too!) goes
back to the Greek meaning crab. And while I was thumbing the
pages of the encyclopaedia a man suddenly tapped me on the
shoulder, and lo, it was my friend, the astrologist. What are
the signs and the constellations that play a part in my horo-
scope? Capricornus, the goat, Scorpio, the scorpion, Libra,
the balance, all of which you will find on the outer rim of
the great circle of the northern hemisphere. And there is
Saturn, too, the great dolorous planet which augurs poverty
and melancholy, the whole nexus of woes and miseries. With
the great dates of my life --the grand conjunctions--in my hand
I survey from a new altitude the fatalistic course I am pur-
suing. Cancer, the crab, and Capricornus the goat--the northern
and southern limits, as it were, of the sun's orbit, the two
points in the heavens at which the great ball of fire arrests
its course and with a crab-like movement turns back on its path.
I know nothing yet about astrology. I do not profess to be
talking the language of this ancient wisdom. I am simply at-
tracted by the nature of these symbols, the correlations be-
tween their significances and the deep laws of my being. At
the most important date in my life, without having dreamed a
word of all this, I commence to write the "Tropic of Cancer",
knowing that it would be followed by the "Tropic of Capricorn".
More than this, stranger than the choice of titles was the
inner illumination, the conviction that took root at the moment
of the book's inception that I was making a big swing backward-

64.

or forward-- to retrace the path which I had covered from the
other important date in my life. I have the possibility, says
the horoscope, to become either a person of great eminence or
a great destructive force, a sensualist, a degenerate. Through
the great oscillations which describe my orbit there is Saturn
the pole star with its weight of grief and melancholy, the
great inert drag of failure and misery. But there is also
Libra, the balance, the sign by which I rise and fall, so that
when I have reached the tipmost end of Cancer I swing away
again through the far-reaching splendor and drama of the stars
to the tipmost end of Capricorn. And there comes a point in
my trajectory when the night equals the day, when the balance
is at rest, and all the signs are for a brief solstice equalled
out. Observe now the significance of my words, words from my
novel, which I inserted under an hallucinatory spell. See
how they parallel this wisdom of the stars, how without even
the most rudimentary instruments I was piloting my course,
charting my destiny......

"What the remembered of his life were the shocks, the seis-
mographic orgasms that said "Now you are living", "Now you are
dying". And the broad tranquil valleys that were coveted was
the cud which cows chewed, was the love which women took between
their legs and masticated, was a bell with an enormous calender
that broke the wind with its bangor. The peaks and the dips--
there was the living, the rush of mercury in the thermometer
of the veins, the pulse without a bridle. The peaks--saints
going up to peep at the hinderparts of God...prophet with
dung in his hands and foaming at the mouth...dervish with music

65.

in the balls of his feet, with snakes squirming in his en-
trails, dancing, dancing, dancing with maggots in his brain.
Not heights and depths, but ecstasy upside down, inside out,
the bottom reaching as far as the top. Abasement not reaching
just to the earth, but through the earth, through grass and
sod and subterranean stream, from zenith to nadir. Everything
that was loved being hated fiercely. Not the cold pricks of
conscience, not the tormenting flagellation of the mind, but
bright, cruel blades flashing, scorn, insult, contumely, not
doubting God but denying him, flaying him, spitting on him.
But always God."

Coming away from the library I noticed the flower-stalls.
It occurred to me immediately that I have never been the least
bit interested in flowers, that I do not care for gardens,
that I detest"a quiet day in the country"; I have never en-
joyed the sight of tilled soil in which things grow. Nature
attracts me only when it is awesome, sublime: lofty mountains,
grand canyons, the desert, the sea. The crater of Kilauea is
to me one of the most inspiring sights in the world; so also
is the strange region of Tierra del Fuego. I love equally the
virgin forests of the tropics (which is death to the white man)
and the teeming metropolises where nature is ruled out. For
the farm lands and vineyards, the great feudal estates and the
cultivated parks, I have not the slightest interest regard. When
I think of travelling I think of the ends of the world, of
peoples and tongues that are incomprehensible. In the library
I picked up a book and the table of contents was filled with
nothing but the names of strange cities: Jaipur, Benares, Co-
lombo, Singapore, Honolulu, Shanghai, Kyoto, Lhassa, Timbuctoo.

66.

I felt at home with this book: it was like a voyage among familiar constellations. And so it is when I read about deep sea life or dream over the insect world--all this seems familiar to me and vital. Was it accident then that placed me once in a position where I dealt with hundreds of people daily, where I had to pick my way through a maze of conflicting nationalities, where I had to discern almost at a glance the worth or the value of an individual? I remember that I had a code by means of which I marked the applications of those I employed, a code which enabled me to trace the correctness or the falsity of my judgment. How excellent were my intuitions! I navigated without instruments, with only the stars to guide me, and I always brought the ship home.

And now behold me after my collision with Hildred. In the space of a few months I am reduced to helplessness; I can neither steer the ship nor propel it. Like a battered wreck I toss idly in a Sargasso Sea. I am at the dead center of those two great currents which flow through the waters of the earth; I revolve slowly in a stagnant whirl, a drifting hulk hemmed in by all the flotsam and jetsam of the seas. Like the men on the Santa Maria I cry out to be saved, but there are no passing boats in this region, nothing but derelicts, nothing but sea-weed, islands and continents of floating debris, and everything that is alive sunk fathoms deep, in a world so monstrous and strange that I would rather deliver myself to the carrion birds above. And when the drama had progressed to its climax, when delivered over hand and foot to these monsters of the deep, I found my voice and I cried out, what

67.

were my first words? I remember the moment well, a moment when
I was most completely at their mercy (I am referring to Hildred
and her Vanya)-- so sure were they of their triumph, so sure
were they of devouring me, that at this moment when I was in
my greatest anguish they laughed, they failed, they mocked me.
"It is good for you, this suffering", they said. "It will
help you to write better". Never were words more truly ut-
tered. I want to thank them now, these monsters, for the f
gift they conferred upon me. Yes, it was necessary that I
should first be paralyzed, that I should be fixed in the grip
of their slimy tentacles and taste the acid of death. In the
supreme agony of that hour I discovered my strength: I made
the choice against surrender, and having made the choice to
live and to triumph, I eventually found the means to escape.
There is something obsessive almost about the pattern of my
conflict. Again and again it has happened to me to find at
the direct moment the source of my strength. And the further
down I am flung the greater is the rebound. At the moment when
there is scarcely a stir of life, when listless and rudderless
my slow rotary movement threatens to end in a fixed calm, then
it is that I flare up again, and with an energy and resolve that
comes from the devil himself I hew my way out.

I could carry these analogies on endlessly, I could
write from now on till doomsday in a hermeneutic tongue. For
example, the atmosphere in which we lived during the great
struggle. What was our home? A cellar in which no ray of
light penetrated from the street. Was it that we were so
poor? No, it was choice. Hildred found the rooms. Like a bat

68.

seeking its lair she flew straight to this dark and evil den.
Inwardly she must have known what a splendid choice she had
made. There was no dissuading her. Guided by her instincts
she realized that in this cellar where the walls dripped with
mould, where night reigned perpetually, she could carry out
unmolested, ideally, as it were, her cruel practises. Here
she dragged her already paralyzed victim; here she tortured
him and wounded him almost to death. Even the bell was dis-
connected. She went about her work as accurately and methodi-
cally as a spider. The walls were painted black, crucifixes
were dug into the backs of the chairs, the plates were put in
mourning, around a cast of her face she draped a crape. Over
a bare wooden table on which a candle burned she looked at
her cards, invoked the fates; not a breath of ventilation in
the place, the chimney choked, the mattress reeking with the
odor of dead cigarettes. And when the food had given out and
not a peny to be found, when the helpless victim roved like
a maniac from one corner of his web to another, then she sang
--mad, ecstatic songs in which her voice broke and grew rusty
as an evil blade. Then her Vanya, inspired by the cruelty of
her adored one, retired to her room and, as if poisoned by
her own virus, gouged her womb.

69.

Amorous tyranny: When I see this phrase in my notes I recall shreds of the past which are still quivering. I recall that when I made note of this expression it was at the very commencement of the drama, perhaps a month or two before we had moved into the cellar. Vanya had only been on the scene a few weeks--she was not living with us yet. But I had sensed already everything that was going to happen, and as if to fortify myself I had begun to reread all the books in my possession which dealt with the pathology of love. Among them were Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia Sexualis" and "The Sexual Question" by Forel. I remember being in bed one night, reading Forel, when Vanya and Hildred walked in on me. Hildred glanced at the book and, seeing certain passages with her name marked opposite, began to read with interest. And after she had read a few passages aloud, Vanya listening with a mocking smile, she tossed the book back to me and said: "Those books are out of date, I'll get you something more interesting." And soon thereafter she came home with Freud and Jung and Stekel and, whenever during her wanderings she encountered a psychologist, she laid herself on the operating table in order that she might astound me with the complexities of her case. And there was my friend, Bunchek, who was studying to be a psychiatrist--as soon as he got wind of the situation he stuck to us like a leech. During the day he poked around in the entrails of cadavers, performed experiments with poisons for his chief, the toxicologist, assisted at the clinic where a more distinguished friend of mine carried out his theories on glandular disturbances by experimenting with mental defectives and criminal-minded patients.

70.

The atmosphere which we created about us was like those stews which the bacteriologist concocts in order to segregate a microbe. It was heavy with suspicion, lies, inquests; it was as though a sewer ran through the house and was poisoning us with its foul gases. It was impossible to be sincere: not a gesture escaped unnoticed. We were trying to deceive one another, to put each other on the wrong track. If we broke down and confessed it was only to vomit forth a more monstrous lie. We were the actors and the audience at the same time. When we were weary from the tautness of it Bunchek was ever there to stir us up, to dip his dirty ladle in the broth. Even he, who was actuated in the beginning by scientific curiosity, could not remain sincere. He lied to all of us, he took sides first with this one and then with that, he professed to understand when he was most perplexed, he contradicted himself, in the morning he had one theory and at night another. He became so involved that Vanya whom he regarded as a freak of nature, whom he regarded as insane, whom he regarded as a hopelessly invert, whom he regarded as a genius, whom he regarded as a criminal, this Vanya whom he tortured like a fly he at last tried to rape.

"Amorous tyranny", says Forel, "constitutes another variety in the apthology of love. Lovers of this kind constantly tyrannize and torment the object of their passion, by their desires, their observations, their sensitive temper, their contradictions, their exigencies and their jealousy. This atrocious manner of loving is common in both sexes; perhaps more so in woman than in men. There are women who will not allow you to shut yourself in the water-closet

71.

for fear that he will betray them. Other psychopaths are affected with hyperaesthesia, and the least noise, the slightest touch, or any sudden sensation, is enough to throw them into excitement and make them a nuisance both to themselves and to their surroundings....In women, hatred and vengeance, aroused by jealousy, are especially blind and tenacious when the chronic passions of psychopathia intervene; this being due to the perseverance natural to the sex. By the aid of their refined intrigues, by their misrepresented statements due to the illusions of a memory distorted by passion but uttered with a consummate dramatic art, some women play a truly diabolical role, and even deceive a whole tribunal."

The book is out of date, true, but in all that concerns "amorous tyranny" not a word is out of place, especially concerning a Hildred. In the beginning she was simply slavish in her admiration and devotion--there was no sacrifice too great for her to make. I could not leave her alone for five minutes, so attached was she to me. If I had to go on an errand, to the corner merely, she was waiting at the door for me, she would throw herself on me as if we had been separated for a month. If I had only the slightest wish it was instantly fulfilled. She was like Aladdin's lamp which I had but to rub and instantly the desire became real. And when I had no desires-- except to be free for a few minutes-- she invented them for me, and when I protested she wrangled with me and pleaded and coaxed until I was convinced myself that it was my direst need. If she went to the bathroom to pee I had to

72.

go with her because everything she was saying was so important
for me that she could brook no interruption. Everything was
magnified to a scale of colossal proportions. If sometimes
when I was kissing her I happened to glance at an object--any-
thing--out of the corner of my eye she was hurt. A trifle like
that would require hours to be adjusted. It is easy to under-
stand, how with everything so askew, one could go through the
e vents of the day in a dream, how one could sit at the break-
fast table until noon tyring to iron out a little wrinkle, how
one could go into orgies of excess merely to prove that one's
love had not grown cold, how one could listen far into the night
to a trivial tale of childhood suffering because it meant so
much to her. And one can understand how, while the world was
going about its business, everything seemed to stand still with
us. When it was time to go for food the stores were all closed,
when it was time to telephone the clock had stopped, when it
was time to go to bed it was no use going to bed because our
neighbors were just getting up, the world was stirring itself.

"The question is often raised", I read elsewhere in Forel,
"whether a woman can love more than once in her life....it is
certain that a hysterical woman is capable of loving several
times, and very different persons at different periods of her
life. The personality of certain erotic hysterical women is
even so dissociable that they can love with all their strength
several men at the same time.....In woman the hysterical imagi-
nation and dissociation facilitate a polyandrous irradiation of
the sexual appetite, which is otherwise rare in the female sex.

73.

In this respect the sexuality of hysterical women resembles that of men and differs from that of normal women." *Hysteria and memória do que se pensa e seفاia*

When I was reading these things in Forel I was like an adolescent who has just begun to rebel against what the idea of God. Doubt had sprung up....I was going to add "for the first time", but this is not so; no, I had had my doubts before, but they were comfortable doubts, familiar doubts, doubts in which I could navigate without fear of being shipwrecked. But this other doubt, for which I can give no name, but which strikes at the very roots of our being, that formidable and wholly *unbelonging* fruit I had just commenced to taste. It struck terror into me. Never before had I known a fear like this. A more sickening fear than *dreadful things* the thought of death. Now I saw the ground opening up beneath my feet and no matter where I tried to land the bottom fell from under me.

Up to this point I had been practically free from jealousy. My friends used to laugh at me because I was so trusting, so naive. They would ask, when they visited me sometimes--"Where is Hildred?" and I would answer smilingly-- "Why she's out with so-and-so", meaning one of her lovers or admirers. And my friends would shake their heads over my innocence. But was I so innocent as I pretended? *Hysteria* Often when I smiled so carelessly or when I agreed jestingly that at that very moment she might be lying in some one's arms, often, I say, I felt that it was more than a mere possibility. And if, in a spirit of utter truthfulness, I conjured up a scene of this sort, and

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for the space of a few moments experienced torture and grief,
I was always able to dismiss the thought because, said I to
myself, what difference does it make if she is giving herself
to some one else so long as she loves you....it is futile to
worry about the fidelity of your wife.... it is almost better
that she deceives you this way because at least you know that
it is done in love, done for your sake. And so, oftimes, we
had queer scenes in which I pretended to be jealous but my
uneasiness, or lack of uneasiness, was so transparent that
Hildred was enraged and then she would confess to things which
were meant to hurt me, which were truths, no doubt, but which
amused me, which bolstered me up, in fact, because I refused to
believe them. What did it matter to me if she slept every day
with another man so long as she clung to me stubbornly, so long
as she was jealous, so long as she thought of nothing but me
and what she could do for me? I remember too that I was even
solicitous about her admirers; I would urge her to treat them
better, to be more kind, more tender, more thoughtful. I would
remark with astonishment that she had allotted some one a mere
quarter of an hour, and I would add naively that it seemed
inconsiderate, considering all that they were doing for her. I
would stand by her side as she wrote a preposterous note, watch
her give it to the messenger boy, and then say "Can't you be
decent enough to go and get it yourself?" It was hard for me
to understand how the others obeyed her slightest whims and
caprices; it never occurred to me that they were behaving to-
wards her exactly as she was reacting to me. True, I thought
now and then that they were probably being paid for their ser-
vices, but what sort of reward? I worried about these others--

75.

I feared that they were not getting enough.

Understand, we were living like a couple of parasites. I had given up my job (it was too difficult to get out of bed in the morning!) and, at Hildred's instigation, I had begun to write. That had commenced, of course, before I knew her, but sporadically, with great stretches in between of despair and futility. Blanche, my first wife, had pretty definitely convinced me that I would never be a writer; she regarded my writing as a peculiar form of revenge upon her--as an avenue of escape from her tyranny. Hildred, on the other hand, would listen to nothing but a career; having a writer in tow enhanced her own values--she might even prove to be the subject of my inspiration! And at the same time it meant this for her-- that I would be constantly under her surveillance, that I would be dependent on her, that I would be grateful to her and worshipful. And everything turned out exactly as she had hoped--except that the subject did not resemble the sitter and that the gratitude ...but one can well imagine all the rest. But in those early days I was very conscious of all that she was doing for me-- I was almost conscience-stricken. And more especially since I was not doing as well as I had imagined I would. There was no balance between my meagre creations and the toll that I was exacting of her. And the more I thought of this discrepancy the less able I was to rectify it. Sensing my conflict, Hildred would lull me with her easy words: "don't write, don't think, don't worry, don't struggle...let me take care of everything!" Day in and day out I heard that refrain. And day in and day out I said to myself "that's precisely what's the matter! You should write, you should think, you should worry, you should

76.

struggle!" And in my heart I accused her of being the
cause of my failure; for every sacrifice she made I hated
her more and more. And the more I hated her the more I loved
her, the more wretched I became at the thought of her sacri-
fices. And now and then I stood up and rebelled. I would
fight with her like a demon--just for permission to stand on
my own feet again! Had any one, not knowing the cause of
our dissension, heard our words, how strange must they have
sounded! Two people quarreling so violently --in order to
secure the right to sacrifice themselves. It was always
represented as sacrifice...why, why? Why could I not have
been permitted to assume the normal role of man, the role
of provider and protector? Was I really as weak as she
pretended? Was I really incapable? There was the past to
prove that I was not. "But you didn't want that," she would
say. "You did that merely because you had a wife and child."
My wife and child! The moment that subject came up we looked
at each other gravely. It was not only ourselves we had to
look out for but these two which belonged to the past, and
not only these two but others--Hildred's mother, her sick
father. Whereas a moment ago we were quarreling about our
privileges now suddenly the discussion would take a practical
turn, an intensely practical turn, and from this moment on
the battle would be lost for me. Once she said "How are you
going to take care of them?" I became helpless. And without
dwelling on this aspect of the question another moment she
would commence to intrigue me with plans and schemes, all of
her own making, all out to her own pattern, a vast network
of activities that left her free as a bird and me sitting
with shorn wings sitting helplessly, idly in the nest, wait-
ing for her to deliver us.

77.

People talk of sacrifice as if it were some great Christian virtue inculcated only by deep suffering, by some illumination born of rich experience. Perhaps for the great mass of mankind this is so. But for a woman who has the mission of love to accomplish what a facile, what a joyous task is this sacrifice. All her being expands. Every sorrow is but another rose blooming in her heart. The most ignominious surrender, instead of degrading her, exalts her, lifts her to higher and higher levels. Seeing her bloom under her heavy sacrifices I was more than ever paralyzed. If I were to extricate myself I would be destroying her child, I would be committing sacrilege. It was for me to make myself more and more helpless, not to grow up, as a child does, but to grow smaller, younger, each day, until at last I would be back in her womb where she might carry me forever. That was my mission. The only difficulty was that I was a living being, that the laws which controlled me were beyond me, beyond her.

When I think of the life we led, before the big drama set in, when I think of the places we lived in, the people we knew, the situations that were created, the difficulties we had and the damage we created, I don't wonder at all that I found it so difficult to write as I imagined I would. I want to give a brief picture of this period before the big drama set in, before I was jealous, before I had any grave doubts. Before Vanya, in other words.

78.

I give this picture because in a way I want to explain it
again to myself. It was only the other day that I was thinking
of the novel, the circumstances under which it was born, the
places I carried it to, the struggle it was to preserve the
manuscript. I thought of the synopsis I drew up--the barest
sort of outline--which covered twenty-five pages, which when
I examined it more closely seemed to me the basis for five or
six novels rather than one. The day I drew up this outline
Hildred was in Paris with her Vanya--at least, I thought she
was in Paris....I discovered later that she was in Munich. The
drama was over then; I was working in a cemetery, as the assis-
tant to an old boyhood friend. He had rescued me from the
cellar life and made a place for me in the office where he
worked. I was listed on the books as a grave-digger. It was
a political job.

Jimmy Murata was the name of my savior. I shall never
forget him. Over fifteen years had passed when I met him by
chance that day on the street near my home. I looked very much
like a bum, and Jimmy-- Jimmy had a big cigar in his mouth, a
smile from ear to ear, his voice was as hearty as ever, he
grasped my hand warmly, he walked with me to the door. He made
no attempt to conceal his amazement as I related briefly the
nature of my life since leaving school. He said he would like
to help me. I brought him inside and lit a candle. The place
looked as if a cyclone had struck it. We sat on the bed and
talked, and as we talked Jimmy grew more and more sympathetic.
We decided that I was to go to work in the morning--Jimmy had
plenty of work for me to do. He was in the midst of a political
campaign and I was to write his letters, keep in touch with the
newspapers, prepare his speeches, and between times, make reports

79.

for the cemetery officials.

I shall always remember that morning when I first went to work, a Spring morning with traces of mud and snow on the ground, the inscriptions on the tomb-stones, the fresh, yawning graves, the dull, stupid faces in the office, the atmosphere of gambling and killing time, the corrosive routine, the morbid view from the window where I sat writing political speeches. At noon we jumped in Jimmy's car and drove to a tavern where we had a big lunch in the company of his henchmen. We had plenty to drink, we joked, we talked about the Mayor and the Governor as if they were old pals. And as we left Jimmy stuffed some bills in my hand--I was not to worry about a thing, everything was to be O. K. from now on, for life, if Jimmy had anything to say about it.

It was excellent. I was making a new start in life, as a grave-digger! When pay-day came.... No, the day before pay-day.... When I came home for dinner the place was empty. I saw the trunks lying about, half-packed. I saw my picture, which had been hanging in the toilet all along, stuffed away in one of the drawers. I took it out and put it back again in the toilet. I sat down and waited for them to return. At two o'clock I went to bed. I lay in bed wide awake. In about an hour they walked in, strangely elated. "Are you moving?" I asked. Hildred sat down on the bed and held my hand. I don't remember what she said any more--her talk always commenced no-where and ended nowhere-- but I do remember that there was mention of Paris again. I didn't take it seriously; besides I was sick of hearing about Paris. But Hildred was explaining

80.

to me earnestly that the time was drawing near, that she ex-
pected any day now to raise the fare for herself and Vanya.
Vanya already had a passport under an assumed name. "But how
are you going to live when you get there?" I said. She didn't
know abput that, but she had plans, as usual. "I don't want to
listen to all that crap," I said. "I know all about your plans
and schemes... I'm tired... I've got a job now and I've got to
sleep." Before we retired Hildred called me into the bathroom
to show me a sweater and a beret some one had given her. She
became very tender, she put her arms around me and kissed me
passionately. I loved her in that beret. I made her promise
that she would wear it every day. And she agreed. And then
she put her arms around me again and in a coaxing, pleading
voice she said: "You won't be angry if I go to Paris with
Vanya? You'll join me as soon as you, won't you?" I said "Yes"
and kissed her, and then suddenly I pushed her away and I began
to rant and curse. "You're crazy", I said. "You can't go to
Paris on a shoe-string. And what do you think is going to be-
come of me? How am I going to get to Paris--swim over?" We
continued to quarrel in bed, but instead of fighting me she
seemed to be hurt. She did everything to pacify me. She begged
me to take her in my arms, but I pushed her over to the wall
and turned my back on her. I was so riled up--it was the tail-
end of the drama and my nerves were completely gone-- that I
got up out of bed and actually danced with rage. And then
suddenly I vomited.

In the morning, as I was leaving, she came to the street
with me and again she was very tender. "To-day is pay-day,"
I said. "I'm going to bring something home for you to-night."
I thought it was strange the way she took this simple remark--
the tears suddenly came to her eyes and she tanked me profusely.

81.

"Don't bother," she said, "I really don't need a thing." As I turned the corner she was waving to me. It was the first time she had done that in years. I was touched. I thought to myself everything will be all right soon....she'll get over that idea of going to Paris.

When I came home that night with the things I had bought for her the house was dark, the trunks were gone. A panic seized me. In a moment I saw a note on my desk, fastened down by her death-mask. She had left a few minutes after we said good-bye......

And now Jimmy proved to be a real friend. He told me frankly that he had no use for Mildred--he couldn't understand a woman doing such things-- but since she was my wife, since I loved her, he would do what he could to help me. She was hardly gone more than three days when I received a snail message from sea saying that she needed money. Jimmy loaned me the money. A few days after she landed in Paris she wired again--"pocket-book stolen". I heard from her regularly, by cable always. A month passed. Two months. At night, after the office was closed, I came back to the cemetery and typed stories which I forwarded to her because she had wired me that there was a market for them in Paris. And to make it easier for her I signed her name to the stories. One day I got a letter, covered with wine stains, saying how much she thought of the stories, how people wept when she read them aloud at a cafe. I wrote more stories, I wrote her letters twenty and thirty pages long, I cabled her when she needed money; I sponged on Jimmy, borrowed from the fellows in the office, stole welfare from my mother's purse, as I used to do when I was younger.

82.

When Lindbergh landed in Paris on his × epoch-making

light I was sick at heart. I was standing in a park, watching
some old men putting up a band-stand; the Commissioner was
going to make a speech that afternoon. Suddenly word came that
Lindbergh had landed safely; the news spread like wild-fire.
People walked around congratulating one another, as if they
themselves had made the × flight. As for myself, I had tears
in my eyes. I couldn't understand what had made me grow so
weak and sentimental. Lindbergh meant nothing to me--except
that I saw in his flight a great gesture, a gesture I had failed
to make myself. Here was a man who had braved every danger--
not for love, but out of a high sense of adventure, out of
sheer courage and will. Had I had only a tenth of that courage
I would have found a way to get to Paris. I would not have
needed to take an aeroplane. But here I was sticking at my
job, making silly little sacrifices, writing to her the most
extravagant letters about my suffering and my love for her, but
doing nothing. I was making literature of my anguish instead
of taking the bull by the horns. What was that life in Paris
on the terrasse? Would I sit some day and listen to some one
read his masterpiece aloud? What sort of life was she leading
there with her crazy friend Vanya who climbed out of windows
like a Romeo at night, who wore pants and a red sash about her
waist, who mentioned celebrities like Brancusi and Hemingway
as if she knocked around with them all day and all night? Sup-
posing I sneaked over there and walked in on them at the Cafe
Dome some night--would I see them sitting in the midst of an
admiring throng, or would they be strolling from bar to bar
like a pair of drunken tars? And I--what was I doing in a cem-

tery? Wasn't Paris the place where I belonged?

I went back to the office that afternoon--it was a holiday-- and I wrote a thing called "Cemetery Idyll" which I dispatched to Paris with a letter saying that if she did not promise to return soon I would commit suicide; I even fixed a limit in which she must reply by cable, and then before she had ever received the letter I wired her to disregard the letter. But that doesn't matter; the important thing is that the very next day I drew up the outline for the book. The fact that I had touched bottom gave me a new lease of life. My suicide I regarded as a *fait accompli*; the drama was finished. And I was certain that she would return--but if she did not return there was the book and the book had already become more important to me than her return.

But as I was saying a while ago, it was in drawing up this skeleton of the past that I began to realize the full complexity of our life, the richness of it. As to the significance of this great tapestry of events, that I must confess was not altogether clear to me. It is only latterly that I have begun to comprehend the nature of this drama. And so I come back again to the beginning in order to pick up the thread. It is only a rapid survey I propose to make, in order to refresh my memory......

85.

See me then as I was when I met her-- a man just turned thirty, with a job for life, and a wife and child to support. The first creditable thing I had accomplished in my life was, almost immediately upon meeting her, to write a story. I was still functioning as personnel director in the corporation I mentioned. The day the idea came to me to write a story I made Blanche, my wife, telephone the office and say that I was ill. I ordered her to make a big breakfast and during the meal I joked with her in a cruel way. I told her I might never go back to the job. I was insanely happy. I decided to go to the country and lie down under a tree to write my story. I was too impatient to make decisions: the first street car that came along I boarded and no sooner did I take my seat than I began making notes. I was insane that day and I wrote insanely. Toward evening, instead of going home I called on my friend, Emil Sluter, who had a studio uptown. I read him what I had written. I read it to him while he painted, and when I had finished I picked up a pencil and began sketching his model, a negress who was posing for him in a pair of striped drawers. I had never attempted to draw before but now it seemed to me that I could do anything--I could build a house if I were asked to. Just before dinner some of his cronies arrived and the bottle was brought out. I talked in my rambling, disconnected way; I insulted his friends which only seemed to make them like me all the more. Finally I got so drunk that they put me under the shower. When we hit the street I was skidding: an automobile was standing at the curb....in two bounds I was on top of the shed dancing a jig. We went to an open air restaur-

86.

ant in the Village. There was more to drink--and there was song and there were women. There was a woman seated a little distance away from me whose husband was lying in bed with paralysis; they told me she was making a martyr of herself for this man. It sounded incredible to me; I made coarse jokes about her husband and finally, under the pretesne of searching for my watch I climbed under the table and ran my hand up her legs. In the morning, when I awoke, I found myself lying on Emil's floor with candles surrounding me; they had lädd me out like a corpse and left me there.

This it started--with a bang. And it continued that way uninterruptedly. I seldom went home for dinner--my nights were too full. On pay-day I borrowed in order to make up the deficit in my salary. When a bonus was distributed I invited my creditors to a banquet and lädd them off; afterwards we went to a burlesque show and after that we went to Hildred's dance hall and we danced with her. Once I took my wife to the theatre; she was so amazed that I asked her out that she almost wept. But it was quickly spoiled for her, because during the intermission, when we strolled out, I pointed to the dance hall and I asked her if she wouldn't like to go with me. "So that's why you took me out?" she said, and I suppose that was the truth of it though I hadn't known it up till then. At any rate she went home alone, with real tears in her eyes, and I went to the dance hall, and later I went to the park near where I lived and while I was lying in the grass grappling with Hildred I saw a cop peering through the bushes, watching us. We got up and tried to walk away nonchalantly and of course he grabbed us. I told him it was

87.

my wife I was wrestling with, but of course he wouldn't believe it, and so I offered to take him home with us, and he accepted the offer. When we got to the door he relented--probably because I had already handed him a five spot. In the bedroom my wife was waiting for me with her dander up; we exchanged a few words and then I cracked her; the baby sat up in the crib and began to scream, and my wife screamed even louder, so that the neighbors came down from upstairs and threatened to take me to the police station. But by that time I was as meek as a lamb and whatever powers of language I possessed I wielded eloquently. And soon after my vacation came round and I moved into my friend Emil's studio in order to write a book, because it annoyed Blanche to see me wasting my time that way. Evenings when we were through work Hildred dropped in with her mulatto friend, Eve, who was the most lascivious little bitch I have ever seen. Between times Camilla was getting after me, and seeing that nothing was of any avail, tried to make me jealous by parading her woman friend, the one with hairs on her chin and breasts that hung to her knees. Blanche knew all the while about Hildred--I had told her everything that Sunday when I returned from Ulmer Park. If she saw me changing my clothes after dinner she would say ""getting ready to meet your sweetheart?" and I'd say "Yeah, I'm getting ready to meet my little whore." And sometimes I'd have to ask her for carefare, as I was going out, and she'd give me a dime or a quarter and chalk it up on the slate. "It's funny," she'd say, "my giving you money to meet your woman." And I'd smile at her and tip my hat respectfully, or pinch her but-

88.

tocks playfully which always made her angry because now she regarded herself as private property. And sometimes when I had been out with the fellows for nights on end, coming home all jazzed up I'd get to feeling sorry for Blanche, and I'd put my arms around her in bed and try to talk to her. But she wouldn't have anything to do with me. "Go to your other woem," she'd say, or else--"What's the matter with your women, don't they treat you right?" And that would make me furious: all night long I'd torment her, not because I wanted her so badly, but because I didn't want her to resist me, to treat me like a leper.

Finally I was caught with my pants down. Very cute the way Blanche trapped me...very cute. Though why she had to trap me when I was begging her constantly to release me is a mystery to me. At any rate, she said to me one day that she was going to the country for a few days to stay with a girlhood friend. I took her and the child to the train and kissed them good-bye. That evening, quite by accident, I brought Hildred home with me. We slept in the marriage bed and in the morning I made breakfast for her. Hildred was walking around in my wife's kimono. We were moving about leisurely, preparing to take a walk. Hildred had removed her kimono and was standing naked before the mirror, brushing her hair. Suddenly the rolling door slid open and there stood Blanche with two neighbors from upstairs. There was no scene. She merely asked me in a quiet, steady voice to escort the woman out as soon as possible. "You might have had the tendency," she said, "not to use my kimono." That was typical

89.

of Blanche, to be disturbed about her kimono.....

I called on her the next day to remove my things and to talk over the practical aspects of the situation. No tears were shed—we confined ourselves to the subject of alimony. Meantime Hildred and I took a furnished room in the home of a Jewish doctor who lived in the Bronx. It was my friend Bunchek who recommended me to the doctor; he had a way of popping up whenever I was in difficulties. The doctor was a very interesting chap, a brilliant man, but his home was like a pig-sty. In the basement he had a billiard room; the walls were stained with urine because it was one of the doctor's theories that children should be allowed to develop naturally. He had all sorts of theories, the doctor, but none of them related to sanitation. When we went to the bathroom to take a shower the walls were alive with cockroaches. The doctor said it was useless to combat them—they would be moving soon to a new home. The doctor kept three servants—it was necessary because all his relatives and his wife's relatives were living with him. We ate in relays, and we ate Kosher food only. One of the servants was a Hindu whom I had once employed as a messenger; he had syphilis now and was writing a history of the world. He watched over Hildred like a faithful dog, brought us our breakfast in bed, loaned us money out of his meagre earnings. Soon my office boy took a room in this menage and fell violently in love with Hildred, as he had fallen in love with Camilla, and with my other secretary before that. He regarded me as an idol—whatever I did was right— and so, taking advantage of that and of his affection for my women,

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I used him as a slave. Once a week I went to see my wife to give her the alimony. Divorce proceedings were pending. We got along well when we met; I would usually call on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, take her and the child to the park, and then go back to the house with her for dinner. We enjoyed these dinners together--there was no longer anything to quarrel about. Sometimes she would ask me wistfully if I intended to marry this woman I had taken--she always said "this woman" rather than mention Hildred by name. And often, when I would be getting ready to leave she would be undressing the child and the child would say innocently "Why don't you stay to-night and sleep with mother?" After a time, whether it was through hearing the child say this or perhaps that it was most natural, or whether it was because we got along so beautifully and there were so many tender recollections that bound us together, at any rate, soon we were going through a storm. I would call on a beautiful afternoon in Summer to find Blanche lying on the couch clad in nothing but a kimono; she would lie there languidly as if inviting me to join her. And when I lay beside her and began to fondle her she would put me away, telling me I had no right to behave that way now, that that was all finished, that I should have thought about such things before, etc. etc. But she would put me off in such a way that I would only struggle harder, and how I struggled! Oftimes, in the midst of our embraces--it was hard to tell whether we were fighting or loving-- I would think to myself how absurd it was that I should want this woman so, this woman whom I had put away from me so cruelly and deliberately. Then, too, in the midst of the conflict the child would come up to me and

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tug at my sleeve. "I want you to play with me!" she would say, and Blanche would reproach me--"you come only once a week and you don't pay any attention to her...I think that's a crime". And like a sentimental idiot I would jump up with tears in my eyes and run to the garden to play with the kid. I remember someone that there was a much older child who used to come and play with my daughter and immediately I saw this girl (I suppose she was twelve or so) I fell in love with her and it must have been very obvious because even my daughter felt the injustice of it--and as for Blanche, Blanche was shocked. I was shocked myself. It was such a thing had never happened to me before, but I did love her, it's true. I used to go away wondering what I should do about it; I felt like a criminal. Here I was deceiving Hildred with Blanche and deceiving my daughter with another child. I had been told that the doctor with whom we were living had a passion for girls under sixteen; I looked upon that as a downright perversion.

During this period at the doctor's home, which lasted but a few months, I became better acquainted with Hildred's companions of the dance hall. It was customary for me to call for Hildred after midnight and take her home; usually we stopped at a restaurant in the theatrical district and chatted for an hour or so with Maureen, her bosom friend. I felt quite at home with her friends though we hadn't a thing in common, nor did Hildred, as far as I could see. I noticed that her friends idolized her, that they took pleasure in putting forward their worst side in order to emphasize the contrast. Hildred never had any friends except those who

92.

admired her extravagantly, who attached themselves to her
servilely and devotedly. This was interesting to me because
in my own case I had always fought strongly to keep free of
such attachments and encouraged my friends to find fault with
me, to ridicule me even. I never demanded loyalty or under-
standing--on the contrary I despised these virtues. But I
think I liked these cheap friends of hers particularly because
they were so natural; they made no pretense to be anything but
the little *tmamp* trollopes they were. And they had a sense of
humor which is rare in women of better taste and learning.

Furthermore I was deeply interested in their lives which were
replete with the shadiest adventures: they impressed me always
as being the stuff of Dreiser's women and for Dreiser's very
human, very common, and very unfortunate female creatures I
have always had a strong predilection. It is the type of woman
I feel closest to, so close to that the idea of wooing them
seems repellant--incestuous. They were lax, indolent, lovable,
good-natured whores; they talked about their experiences with
men as easily and naturally as one would talk about yesterday's
football game. Maureen, for example, would relate the most
minute details about her affair with a doctor whom she had
come to know in a professional capacity at first--a *cnmp* dose
of clap and gonorhea at the same time. And while he was treat-
ing her the doctor fell a victim to her wiles; like me he used
often to wait downstairs at the door for her to come out. And
sometimes she would leave him standing there and sneak out by
the back entrance to keep a date with some loafer who owned a
car and could better satisfy her abnormal cravings. Or she
would join us at the restaurant and make sport of the doctor,

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say that he wasn't big enough for her and finish it off by
giving us the dimensions of her large cunt. "I've never found
a man big enough to satisfy me," she would say, throwing her
head back and laughing heartily..... Yes, I liked these early
freinds of Hildred's--much, much better than the later ones.
They reminded me of my childhood days, my life in the Fourt-
eenth Ward which was rough and tumble, where side by side with
the old American stock there grew up a settlement of "foreigners"
who eventually displaced the American element. I saw nothing
in that life of what is called culture or refinement (thank
God!); as a boy of five I was turned loose to roam the streets
as I willed and I conducted myself like a little savage. I
made friends with the worst children in the neighborhood; at
six or seven years of age I was paying my penny, like the other
boys, to fuck (?) a little girl in the cellar. Sunday mornings
I would see her crazy brother standing on the shed masturbating
--the goat of the nieighborhood to whom we fed rotten bananas
and tortured in divers ways, as only children know how to tor-
ture an unfortunate one. I saw the Spanish-American war break
out and the soldiers coming home broken down with dysentery
and drink--the minister's own son standing at the lamp-post in
his wonderful uniform puking up his guts and swearing and
cursing in the vilest tongue. I joined the little rowdies who
found amusement at night in breaking the show-cases of the
"sheenies". I knew what a fairy was at seven years of age and
remember well how I used to wait for a little sissy to pass by
and then pelt him with mud or snow-balls or horse shit, if
nothing else was handy. I remember my life from five to ten
years of age vividly and I'll say always that it was a glor-
ious childhood. In that period I have the remembrance of liv-

94.

ing vitally and that others about me were living vitally, if
crudely, perhaps sottishly. I saw the saloons wide open and
men reeling from the swinging doors; I saw the sailors stand-
ing on line at the burlesque shows and heard their coarse
jokes; I saw the politicians standing on the street corners,
picking their teeth and I heard their talk of Bryan and Mc-
Kinley; I saw the dancehalls packed with toughs and heard the
bottles crash against the mirrors and the sluts screaming and
moaning; I saw the cyclists assembling on Sunday mornings and
the long stream of colored sweaters streaming out in Indian
file along the narrow strip of asphalt against the curb; I
attended the funerals of my grandparents and saw the cheap,
sentimental, hypocritical grief of my relatives, their gluttony
and coarseness in the beer garden adjoining the cemetery when
they downed their beer and sang their melancholy German songs;
I went to the country in the summertime and in bed at night
I buggered my little country friends and instructed them in
the ways of the city; now and then I was packed off to York-
ville where I joined my cousin along the riverfront in rock-
fights with rival gangs, and there I remember I learned things
about girls that I had never dreamed of before, so that when
I returned to my native precincts I was looked upon as a foun-
tain of vice. An invaluable introduction to life, as I dis-
covered later when we moved away from the neighborhood and I
entered upon a dreary adolescence.

All this seemed to be revived in me as I took up my life
with Hildred; I felt the sense of adventure stirring in me
again--not that my life had been tame prior to that, but that

95.

my adventures were going to be of a more reckless, vital
character, entered into with a free will and not produced by
morbidity or starvation or rebelliousness.... They came quickly
enough, and in such doses that I had not the capacity to cope
with them. I had met some one who lived continually in an
atmosphere of adventure, who courted danger as if it were a
necessity, who never stopped to take a breath, as it were.

I am trying to hurry on with this portion of my tale, to
give the barest review of this period leading up to Vanya's
appearance, but the events are so numerous and so turbulent,
and withal so important for an understanding of what followed
that I find myself incapable of proceeding more swiftly. I
find it even necessary to go back now and then to my life with
Blanche because of details which, looking back on it all now,
seem to link themselves with that life which was to come. For
instance, I happen to think of the days when we were first
married, when we were occupying a sedate apartment in a still
more sedate neighborhood; the house was cluttered with furni-
ture which Blanche had collected from her relatives. She had
put in my room all the old chairs which she had no room for
elsewhere. I used to repair to this room in theevening and
read, now and then to write; the sight of these chairs ranged
around the room like the reception room of a dentist's office
infuriated me. I used to beg her to get rid of them, to sell
them, or give them away, but her parsimonious spirit wouldn't
countenance such a thing. As I remarked before, Blanche never
invited any one to the house; she felt uncomfortable in the
presence of people and to make friends was difficult for her.

96.

I, on the contrary, made friends too easily: I had to run away
from them if I wanted a life of my own. And so, after a period
of isolation, during which Blanche and I became more estranged,
I began to think that it would be good to have friends to the
house again. Whenever I looked at those vacant chairs I
thought to myself what a strange son-of-a-bitch I had taken
for a wife, and from looking at those chairs night after night
I grew filled with a desire to see them occupied. One by one
my friends drifted back and with them new ones and all the
chairs were filled and I felt happy again and in my element.
When Blanche protested that she couldn't afford to entertain
on such a scale I nonchalantly informed my friends of the fact
and they very cheerfully paid for their own entertainment.
Which of course put Blanche in a very bad light and made her
even more bitter toward me. But I didn't care what she thought
any longer—I was happy to see the chairs filled, happy to
see the table creaking with food and drink, happy to see this
museum of ours turned to life.

Now different as Hildred was from Blanche, expansive her
nature as Blanche's was confined, I noticed however that they
had this in common—they wanted to rule my friends out. They
wanted me exclusively, Blanche if only to fight with me, and
Hildred because she was hungry for love. But whatever the
motive, to me it amounted to the same thing: they wanted to
make a prisoner of me, and for one of my temperament such an
attitude was not only impossible but disastrous. I was willing
to be the slave to the woman I loved but I also demanded freedom.
And somehow the women I loved never seemed to understand my point
of view.

97.

I am forgetting a certain little scene with Hildred
which is rather important. It was the second or third time
I had met her; we had had a wonderful bout in the vacant
lot opposite her home. As I was about to get up and take her
to the door she grabbed my arm impulsively and pulled me down
beside her. "You're wonderful," she said, "I love you, I
love you." And then almost immediately she gave a queer,
silent laugh, and added brusquely--"And now for the dirt!"
She wanted to know if I could lend her fifty dollars--her
mother had to meet a mortgage on the house. I agreed at once
to get the money for her. It appears to me, as I reflect on
this incident, that she was astonished that I assented so
readily. Certainly I was more astonished by the way she
thanked me; she insisted that I go back to the grass again
and lie down with her, and then as I was leaving she suddenly
threw herself at my feet, and kneeling there in the street,
clutching my legs, she repeated fervently "You're my God....
you're my God!" But I suppose as long as I live I shall
never forget that moment when she said "And now for the dirt!"
Coming from her lips it sounded terribly coarse, terribly
vulgar. It sent a shudder through me. And later on, when she
had commenced to make life miserable for me, when after a
piece of wanton cruelty (or so I interpreted it) she came to me
with such tenderness and humility, I would think of this scene
and these words which I could never erase from my memory, and
I would justify them by saying to myself that at bottom she
was honest, truthful, loyal, that she had always been made to
practise a role which she detested, that she could not bring
herself to beg for things because she herself was the acme of

98.

generosity, and that rather than put herself in a humiliating
light she would prefer to coarsen herself, cheapen herself,
rather than inspire pity she would prefer to invite contempt
or scorn or hatred or disgust. But what makes this situation
almost incomprehensible is that there was no real need to be
making sacrifices for her mother (she was still calling her
aunt); there was no need to ask me for aid since she was then
living with a man who offered her everything she wanted. It
occurred to me long afterwards that she was merely putting me
to a test--she returned the money to me in a few days, as she
had promised. And later I had still another idea: very likely
some one had asked her for a loan of fifty dollars, and being
by nature unable to refuse a request, she had promised it, and
then not knowing what new lie to put to her lover she had
thought of me. And when she realized that I had no money (she
was under the impression the first night that I was well off)
shamfought but that I would borrow or steal it for her she felt
repentant. And perhaps all her previous affairs had been one
of cold barter--herselling herself to the old man was a case
in point, but this I didn't know of then. I knew that there
were several old men and that she was plucking them ruthlessly
but there was never the least hint that she was offering them
anything more in return than the pleasure of her company. And
I remember that it seemed idiotic to me that she should be
content with dribs and drabs when by going the full length
she might once and for all free herself of all worries.

But this was the opening note of a theme that was to be
sounded over and over again.....

99.

And another scene of great importance that I have omitted relating is this----. Shortly after I met her she went to the country, to the Maine woods, where a cabin was put at the idposal of her and her girl freinds by a kind-hearted old gentleman who was interested in their welfare. I had already made the acquaintance of the "kind-hearted old gentleman" at the dance hall; he was a man of about fifty, with prematurely white hair, very vigorous and youthful, a man of some learning and endowed with charming manners. Hildred had represented him to me as a man who had done her a great service when she was ill and destitute. They shared a little home together in the Village. They slept in the same bed but, so she said, they had no relations. And incredible as this story sounds, I swallowed it, even though I had met him and remarked his extreme vitality, even though, as Hildred explained, he had been living apart from his wife for several years--because his wife was so constituted that she could not have physical relations with a man. I understood that the man--Marsden was his name-- loved his wife dearly, that they saw each other regularly. Nevertheless he was going to the dogs, he was drunk every night--because there was some tragedy in connection with his marital relations which Hildred refused to explain to me. "Don't you find it difficult to go to bed with a drunken man every night?" I inquired naively. (I never for a moment questioned her sleeping on the edge of the bed!) The answer to my question was that Marsden had done her a service which she could never repay, that she had determined to cure him of the drink habit, and when he had rehabilitated himself she would leave him. Marsden and I liked each other immediately; we became good friends. At least that was the impression I had-- later I discovered that

100.

he was violently jealous of me, that he had drawn caricatures
of me and after hanging them on the doors he had plunged knives
into them. But when she left for the cabin with her friends,
though I knew Marsden was accompanying them, I had no uneasi-
ness. While she was away I received a letter, a very touch-
ing letter in her illiterate scrawl, saying that she wanted to
be my wife. When she came back she called me up and said that
she couldn't see me immediately because she had promised to
spend a few days at the beach with Maureen and Julia. I was
hurt; I hung up curtly and went to the art studio of my
friend, Emil Sluter. A friend called and we drove to the
country that afternoon. When we got back to town it was after
midnight. There was note from Hildred saying that she had not
changed her mind about going to the beach. She had been sitting
on a stoop opposite my home waiting for me to appear; she sat
there for five hours and then she added a postscript to her
note saying that she was going to the beach after all. The
next evening I got off the train at Edgemere and looked her up.
We went to a hotel and took a room for the night. And then
a strange thing happened: she was unable to "come". I fucked
her four or five times and each time that she arrived at the
point of having an orgasm she was frustrated. She strove so
desperately that I became hysterical. "Oh God, don't laugh!"
she groaned. "You're cruel." But I couldn't help it--I didn't
want to laugh but it seemed so ridiculous: the more she panted
and groaned the more hysterical I became. And yet she wouldn't
give up; it was as if she would die or go crazy if she couldn't
have that orgasm.

101.

In the morning we lay on the beach exhausted; her words were cold and bitter. We had a quarrel and then she melted. She told me a long, rambling story, which I listened to impatiently, about her father whom she worshiped. She said I resembled him a great deal, that I was tender and forgiving, just as he was, that I was also a clown like him, and irresponsible, that I was neat and immaculate like him, that I had the same thin, trim figure and the same fine bones and the same tragic look in my eyes. I was not at all interested in her words, or rather I was irritated because I remembered bitterly that Blanche had the same feelings about her father, the same blind, incestuous worship, though with this difference, that Blanche saw in me the extreme opposite of her father. But I detested people, women especially, who had this slavish admiration, this infantile attachment to their parents. And I hated to be told by a woman that I reminded her of her father or of a lost lover, which was the case with so many women who had fallen in love with me. It is a common thing, of course, to fall in love with an image of some one else; I had done it myself time and again. It was in this spirit that I had made advances to Blanche's own mother when we visited her parents on our honeymoon; I saw a woman of about the same age and disposition as the woman to whom I had been chained for four long years. But the mistake I made with Blanche and with Hildred was to ridicule their relationship; whenever I wanted to make a cruel dig I lampooned the father--often I did it in the presence of others. And though I often ridiculed my own parents it was not the same thing; this sort of injury was never forgiven.

102.

But to go on with the rush of events... We are living on Riverside Drive in the home of an old friend, who is a musician. And Bunchek has also taken a room there; he has married an old know-woman again, a month after his wife committed suicide. He sticks to me now because he is half-mad; he doesn't love his second wife--he merely succumbed to her because she was good to him. He is interested in my life; he is a bit envious of me and he takes occasion whenever possible to chuckle over my discomfiture, to rub his hands gleefully. He gloats over my difficulties, but at the same time he sticks to me loyally and aids me in whatever way he can. I have known Bunchek for some time and I like him extremely; I ridicule him mercilessly, I involve him with other women, I deplore his bad taste, his vile Jewish characteristics, his inability to enjoy himself. But I listen to him attentively, I learn from him, I go to him when I am vitally in need of counsel. We understand each other perfectly; it is almost a love that we have for each other. But that does not prevent him from trying to bitch up my life or me from sparing him the least humiliation. He is hard, Bunchek, and so am I. We appreciate each other.

The friend we were living with was a Scotchman; he was married to a beautiful Jewess who resembled Hildred in many ways. It was quite natural therefore that my friend Edmund should be attracted to Hildred and I to his wife, Esther. Strange scenes we had there with the house full of Jews and Gentiles, Edmund trying to defend the Jews and yet hanging his head when Esther's relatives came; I ranting against them brazenly, while at the same time admiring Esther inordinately;

104.

and Bunchek sitting back in a corner with a leer on his face
and saying to me quietly, but maliciously-- "So you think that
wife of yours is a Gentile, do you? You poor boob, can't you
see that she's nothing but a kike like we are?" And Hildred,
flaming with rage, could think of nothing more insulting to
hurl at Bunchek than to call him a dirty little kike, which
had not the least effect on Bunchek because he himself was
always calling people "dirty little kikes", but which roused
Esther to great anger and made it extremely difficult for the
poor musician to arbitrate these differences. As for Bunchek
and myself, we enjoyed these squabbles: we enjoyed seeing the
cocky little Scotchman with his fair-mindedness and his cold
logic writhing in the net; we enjoyed the behavior of these
two jealous wives, two beautiful Jewesses married to two ec-
centric Gentiles. But what drove Bunchek almost to ecstasy
was to observe my attitude when I finally learned that Hildred
was indeed a Jewess. Now I both hated the Jews and loved them;
retaining all my old prejudices, which were indefensible, I
added new ones, favorable ones, which were even more extra-
gant, more indefensible than the old ones. I went so far as
to propose that we get married by a rabbi; I even suggested
becoming a convert. I was in earnest and at the same time I
was acting the buffoon. I had never considered myself a
Christian and I knew that I would never become a Jew, but there
was something droll, something piquant, about adopting the
religion of those one despised; it gave me pleasure to think
what a time I might have ridiculing the Jews and then announcing
in the same breath that I had become a convert. It was also a
fine piece of revenge for the xmkak deceit that had been prac-

105.

tised on me, because Hildred did not take to the idea at all;
she regretted that she had ever admitted it to me and threatened
that unless I dropped the subject *in her* she would run away. And
so there was no public declaration of her Jewish blood, no
marriage in the synagogue, no relatives to congratulate me
upon my conversion. She simply wouldn't tolerate the thought
of introducing me to her parents and more than that-- in a very
short time she was speaking about them as if they were Gentiles
and if I reminded her that it was unnecessary to lie to *me* about it she would fly into a rage and look at me as much as
to say-- "but whoever said that it was a lie...you know it's
the truth I'm telling you". And so rather than have a con-
tinuance of scenes I fell in with her lies, I not only never
betrayed her, but I acted as though I myself believed what
she said. Even Bunchek was impressed by the intensity of her
passion on this point; even Bunchek would talk about her English
father and about the racing stables and about Caruso and all
the other clap-trap she had invented, but of course with such
gusto and extravagance that Hildred would soon change the
subject of conversation. And there is this much to be said
for Hildred's attitude--she did sincerely detest and despise
her own kind. She loathed Esther's mother; she loathed Bun-
chek's friends; she loathed everything that smacked of Jewish
blood and Jewish tradition. When it came to discussing the
Jews with Hildred it was I who defended them; I might loathe
them too but I could not deny their virtues.

106.

I must also remark here that my Scotch friend and his wife
had little respect for Hildred's intelligence or for her capa-
bilities. They treated her like one would treat a child--with
an indulgence and a tone of superiority which infuriated Hild-
red. Add to this the undercurrent of jealousy, the rivalry
between the two women, the unpleasant relief in which the Jew
was being shown up, the fear of exposure, the indifference I
displayed about getting married now that we were living together,
and the intimate, harmonious relationship which we three men
displayed, a relationship which seemed to exclude the women
entirely--consider all these disturbing elements and you can
see that it was anything but smooth water were were sailing in.
Frequently I was so involved with her in a discussion with Edmund
and Bunchek that I forgot to go to the dance hall to meet Hildred.
On the one day in the week when she was free I would visit Blanche
and oftimes I overstayed my time or I returned brimming with
inner joy or I dwelled sentimentally on the child or I expressed
remorse that Blanche was having such a difficult time of it.
The result was that every week or so Hildred would pack her
things and threaten to leave me; but she always waited for me
to appear, I noticed, and that amused me and I would treat the
situation callously. Sometimes I would help her pack her be-
longings; we had no valise and each time it came to leave
she would have to hunt for paper and twine, and of course she
could never wrap the bundle. So I would wrap it for her, and
I was not very good at it either--naturally I never intended to
let her get farther than the door. She would march to the
door with that grotesque bundle dragging the floor and I would
adopt my most serious, humble, penitent expression--until she
relented-- and then I would sit down and howl with laughter and

107.

she would laugh herself because what could one do with an im-
becile, a clown, a buffoon on one's hands?

had

Living with Esther, who was a sharp intelligence, who was
a mature woman and a dangerous rival to boot, Hildred began to
become keenly conscious of her status. Esther was a capable
woman, she had had a wide experience, she was no mere wife to
Edmund; and Hildred observed with pain and despair that my
conversations with Esther were on a quite different level than
the ones I had with her. She would remark occasionally, in a
petulant way--"Why don't you talk to me the way you talk to
her?"--and what answer could I make but the inevitable one that
she didn't inspire that sort of conversation. "I know," she
would say, "you think like they do that I'm just a silly child."
And if I said "no, I don't think that at all...I know you're a
woman, and you're a bigger and finer woman than Esther" she
would say that I didn't mean it, that I was trying to apologize
for my behavior. And that would inevitably be followed by a
long discourse on how other men regarded her, the respect they
paid her intelligence. "But don't you see that they're only
flattering you?" I would answer, because it annoyed me when
she tried to defend herself unwarrantably. "I can't lie to
you about your intelligence," I would say. "You are ignorant
about a lot of things, and worse than that," I would add, "you
are not even aware of your ignorance, or else you won't admit
it to yourself. Instead of bickering with me you ought to
listen to me...you ought to listen to Esther too, she could
help you a great deal." But she would not listen to me or
Esther--she would go her own way and she would compel us to

108.

respect her.

She went her own way.... She came home one day and announced triumphantly that she had secured the role of understudy for the leading part in a famous play. Esther received the news with a smile--it was impossible for her to believe that Hildred could even memorize her lines, much less act the part of the great character *Xanxex* whose role had been given her. And I thought to myself that the man who had selected her must either have been an idiot or another dolt who had fallen in love with her at first sight. I was both amazed and pleased, deeply pleased because it had given me painful to see her wasting her time at the dance hall.

109.

The morning I commenced to write this entr'acte of
events I cut my finger; I don't know whether I cut my finger
in order to slow up and write in this easy, unilateral fashion
or whether I was slowed up because I was minus a finger. At
any rate, I am bringing this summary of events to an abrupt
halt; I am thoroughly dissatisfied with it, as method, as
revelation, in every way imaginable. This is not my style;
my style is to turn over sidewise and retrace my course--I
am born under the sign of the great crab, I swing backwards
and forwards, and there is always the heavy weight of Saturn
to remind me of the murk through which my star must roll.

It was after I had finished the last page that I com-
menced to relate a dream of the night before, and when I had
related the dream I began to pour out in a quite unconscious
manner the contents of my thoughts, in order to allocate the
elements of this strange dream. After writing ten pages I
stopped; I stopped with the realization that I could go on
writing indefinitely about the events of one day, with the
further realization that I was writing more honestly and ex-
citingly in this manner than I have been in these preceding
pages. I stopped because I had written the phrase "compron-
ised again"--that is what I have been doing in those last
pages...compromising. I never had any intention, when I set
out to write this book, to make concessions to my readers;
and here for twenty pages or more I have been stringing out a
tale, in unilateral fashion, as I said, because I felt a need
to introduce a measure of intelligibility to my narrative.

110.

"I give this picture because I want to explain it again to myself." Those were the words I used. A lie. I gave this picture because it was easier for me to write this way, because I grew weak and began to think about my readers, and not about my subject, about me.

When I left the house to air my brain last night I was elated. For the first fifteen minutes it was a struggle to not to return; everything that I had been withholding in these last twenty pages or so was crowding into my head, and with such furious insistence that I was like a man possessed. I knew that walking up this side of the street my thoughts would in no way correspond to those on the other side of the street--on my way home. I knew that it was my mission, if I have any mission at all, not to say things as they had been said before, that the more chaotic my book became the more truly it represented me, and not that alone, but that this chaos was the finest symbol of the plight in which the artist finds himself to-day. I was disgusted with myself for having lied so feebly, for telling truths that were not truths but little pieces of fact, incidents divorced from their texture, recollections without any of the emotion that accompanied them. I realized that these memories were unworthy of me, that they bore no resemblance to the memories which Proust summoned and which are the only right memories because they were not summoned but burst upon the mind in full raiment as the result of accident.

It is necessary to understand that the inner events of the last few days were turbulent. For forty-eight hours I

111.

had been immersed in a book on American literature. Certain
things I read shocked me deeply. Above all, I made the dis-
covery that of all our writers the one I esteemed most was
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman, who had heretofore been my
chief idol, was relegated to second place. But as I made
this inward decision I was also formulating a letter to the
author of this volume (Ludwig Lewisohn) attacking him bitterly
for his inadequate handling of Whitman and attacking him still
more bitterly for having done so well by Emerson. The forty-
eight hours prior to the dream I spent in a frenzy of bitter-
ness. The object of my bitterness was Mr. Lewisohn. Because
I disagreed with him? On the contrary--because I was so
heartily in accord with him. They were complex, my feelings
about Mr. Lewisohn--I am not sure that I can even state them
clearly. I admired the way he had presented his material
and in the main I agreed with his judgments, his tastes; but
the more I found myself in agreement with him the more I felt
it imperative to attack him, to甩 wipe him out. It incensed
me, for one thing, that he had left his job standing in that
cold and rather perfect light, that he should have closed, as
it were, all the avenues leading to his thesis; I had the
feeling that the wrong man had said the right thing, that it
was his intelligence which had guided him and not his instincts.
I was annoyed that a Jew had to make this sweeping and almost
final attack upon our sickness--Puritanism. I almost wept to
think that nowhere before had I read such a high and sound
appreciation of Emerson, and here & at last I found some hope:
that where this Jew had left off an American would some day
step in and fill the breach, because it required an American,

112.

an Anglo-Saxon Gentile, if you will, to complete the picture.
But that none had yet appeared, that the Jew with his keen
intelligence, his ferret-like nose, should have been the first,
that rankled in me. And the truth of Mr. Lewisohn's words
could not be denied--what has been lacking all along is a soul
...there have been no great souls in America, no complete beings,
no enthusiasm or courage below the neck. Think of it--our two
greatest literary figures, Emerson and Whitman, the one
a eunuch, the other a homo! What a commentary upon the Ameri-
can life! And these men said things that were inconceivable--
the most daring, the most revolutionary, the most shocking
things! And scarcely any of that has seeped through, penetrated
our lives.

"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or
autobiographies--captivating books, if only a man knew how to
choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really
his experience, and how to record truth truly." These are
Emerson's words. "Life", said Emerson, "consists in what a man
is thinking all day."

Can you see why I pause and turn over on my side? How is
a man to go on writing in the manner of these last twenty pages
when he is confronted by a truth like this? I believe in
Emerson's words implicitly; I believe that if we artists and
writers grasped this truth we would upset the whole American
continent, we would bury everything but a few volumes of the
past and together with all that sterile literature and art
which was created by the crippled and paralyzed we would destroy
our great men, our institutions, our machinery of government,

113.

our educational institutions, etc. I believe that if the torch
which was held by those half-men--Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman--
is ever rekindled it will put to flame the whole American
tradition.....

I have not yet crossed to the other side of the street;
I am still walking up the Avenue de Clichy searching for a cafe
which will permit me to continue my thoughts uninterruptedly.
The volume of Mr. Lewisohn's which I have in my hand I know in
advance I shall not open to-night. I am too full. I do not
need Mr. Lewisohn, nor Emerson, nor Whitman. I have something
more to say than any of these. I am the man that America has
been waiting for, a whole man, who is going to say things that
cannot be ignored, cannot be accepted tranquilly, cannot be
apprehended by the intellect alone, cannot ever be interpreted
by a Jew because a Jew is never a whole man and it is my mission
to appeal to whole men and to be understood by them. It is my
purpose to sow discord and strife and rancor so that by these
differences, by the tremendous resistance that is set up, men
may develop their powers, sharpen their acumen, justify their
choice. It is my aim to take this arid plateau of good health
and by setting loose the germs of disease, of hatred, of con-
flict, to ravage the land, to cause such distress and suffering
that the most colossal war will seem tame by comparison. It is
war that I would create.... but I am getting to the other side
of the street too soon.

I have found a quiet, unobtrusive spot just across the
street from the Gaumont-Palace. I have found another reason
for the feebleness of the preceding pages; it comes to me now

114.

as I recall the antecedent images of my dream. I wrote it down
myself-- "a fear that when I returned to the house she would be
sitting there waiting for me, perhaps tearing my manuscript to
pieces". Yes, for the last two weeks there has been fear in
my soul, though I did not acknowledge it to myself. "I am join-
ing you soon" she cabled the other day. And for the last two
weeks I have scarcely thought about her coming so thoroughly
did I succeed in dismissing the idea from my mind. I have been
telling myself that she will not come yet, she cannot come yet,
but deep down I know that she is coming and there is a great
dread in this knowledge. And so, though I was not in the least
aware of it, I was hurrying on with my book, gallivanting through
these pages so that I would have a good nucleus to refer to after
the smoke of the batte lifts, for when she comes it will be a
battle, the decisive battle of this seven years' war. Looking
back upon my activities of the past few months I see in them
only toò clearly a preparation for the great conflict; I see
myself as a nation that has been invaded and ravaged again and
again, but which with each defeat has gathered up strength, so
that when the final test approaches the people find themselves
calm and collected, awaiting the dreaded invader with a sure
strength, prepared this time not to defend themselves but to
attack and to slay. And what is born of this conflict will
flower everlastingly. The other struggles bore their fruits;
the last invasion gave birth to the "Tropic of Cancer" which,
in a way, was like a new Bill of Rights, but this invasion
will give birth to a cathedral, the foundations of which I am
already are now being laid in this "Tropic of Capricorn".

as with

115.

And like those great cathedrals which arose in the first
free communes it is possible that the work may go on for cen-
turies, that there may be alterations in the original conception
liad down by those great architects; there may be new truths,
new impulses, brought by the invader which will be utilized in
the course of the cathedral's erection. It may be necessary to
invite the collaboration of other minds; it may be necessary to
die here on the foundations and entrust the work to the genera-
tions succeeding. But here in the foundations, where I am
digging away, lies the secret, the hope for the future. Around
this a village will assemble and later a great city, and the
day will also come, and sad it is to contemplate, when the
cathedral no longer dominates its environment, but is stuck away
like a forgotten relic amid loftier and uglier buildings, build-
ings that have less meaning but more usefulness for their petty
day.

These thoughts are going along and are directly provoked
by a strange incident, an event taking place right under my
nose on the terrasse of the cafe. It is one of the most un-
usual incidents I have witnessed since I am here in Paris and I
am one is who going about with eyes wide open. A little whore
has passed by several times and given me the eye; I haven't
the slightest inclination to talk to a whore now, so absorbed
am I in my thoughts, and yet I cannot but observe that she is
attractive, that there is something very delicate about her and
fragrant. And now she is returning, walking up to this very
terrasse with a stout, well-dressed gentleman and a clochard.
The three of them take a seat directly in front of me. The
stout gentleman puts his arm about the girl in a solicitous,

116.

fatherly way, and bending forward with the same solicitude,
perhaps a little more unctiously but doing his best to repress
his obvious enjoyment, asks the clochard what would he like
best to have. The face and the body of the clochard causes me
intense suffering--the way he sits on the edge of the chair,
his thin legs, the rigidity of his pose, the sombre attention
he pays his benefactor, the deep lines of his face carved as in
stone, the bleak look in his eyes which not even salvation will
soften, his uneasiness, furtiveness, sitting there on the very
edge of the terrasse with a well-dressed gentleman and a poule,
another unfortunate like himself but so infinitely better off
than himself. The incongruousness of it, which he registers so
eloquently in all his gestures, is quickly perceived by the
passers-by, and the way they stop and stare, as only French
people can, tortures me. I am becoming a little mad watching
this trio--it is a situation with such tremendous possibilities,
so un-French, so typical of a Dostoievski theme. I mean not
only in the incongruity of it but in the quiet, pathetically
humorous, grotesque way it opens. I can hear Dostoievski's
words describing this setting, this chance encounter, hear
it rolling on page after page with minute observation, with
reflections, with all the undertones of the tragic misery of
life now touched lightly and humorously and now swelling like
a full organ note until the heart bursts and there is nothing
left of the scene or the characters, nothing but a blinding,
shattering light as if the seeds that were scattered by this
fecundation contained the radiant light of the stars.

117.

But what I would not give, at this moment, to know the
manner in which these three came together; that I will never
know this seems intolerable to me. This is so important to me
--this would shed a great light upon all that is happening before
my eyes. But I shan't know--not unless I go over and question
the stout gentleman--and that will destroy all that is going on
now. I am forced to sit here and watch, to speculate, to go
crazy thinking about it. To know, to know! I am thinking of
half a dozen things at once. I am even beginning to smile as
I watch the stout gentleman's behavior-- this picture of misery
and humiliation is entertaining me. But at the same time I
want to know--I want to know everything--I want everybody to
know everything, everything that is to be known, so that at
this point where knowledge comes to an end, where science con-
fesses its helplessness, at this point I may begin--not the
psychologist, not the realist, but the poet who bursts with
knowledge in order to flame like a rocket in the great heart of
mystery. Oh, the disgust that wells up in me as I see these
French faces taking in the scene, the fever that their callous-
ness creates, the hatred I have for the garcon who remains so
impervious and aloof to this spectacle, who when asked for his
little contribution of sympathy and understanding merely shrugs
his shoulders and throws that blank, helpless, ox-like stare
into his eyes--"his misery, your misery, I am safe for the time
being, my job is to serve you, I am not paid to be sentimental,
I am not expected to be charitable, I have a wife and child, I
am looking after them, leave me alone, that is all I ask, let
me hug my brief, quiet contentment."

118.

The wives and children standing around, who look on without morbidity, squirrels looking on, waiting for a crumb to drop, dirty, niggardly souls, people who make the world go round which is why it wobbles so, people too proud to beg because they do not know how to give, people who parade for old revolutions-- I wish the ground would open up and swallow you! I would rather have only this clochard, this little whore, this sentimental idiot of a stout gentleman with which to start afresh. Everything that you are supporting is a nightmare to me; I don't wonder that you hug it so tightly...what would you do if to-morrow you were made free? I feel an overwhelming pity for you--I know it is not entirely your fault--but what can we do with you, how can we give you organs to sense your misery, your servility, your insuperable supineness? Teach you to know yourselves? What is there to know? The reason I can feel about this trivial incident is because I have shot roots down into my soul and there is no end to my roots and no bottom to touch; it is only the image of an image, the symbol of a symbol, but it is all there is of reality and the proof is that it nourishes me, the proof is that I grow, expand, that I do not live on a plateau and move in unilateral fashion but that I live simultaneously in all directions, with every part of me, and that to understand the least thing I must understand all. I must become so drenched in the complexity of the elements, they must all become so essential, so vital to me, that nothing which you have parcelled out and given name to can satisfy me; your great truths are not lies, they are admissions of your impotency merely.

119.

Just as I am about to continue (there was a break of
twenty-four hours in which I got drunk to relieve the insupport-
able tension) a letter arrives; the letter refers to my dream,
to the events preceding the dream, the inner disturbances which
caused me to unload my unconscious. And when I finish the
letter I give a great shout and stretch myself and look at the
sky without a shred of cloud in it. "Sapristi!" I yell, without
any more reason for that word than Walt had when he made his
ridiculous yawps in French and Italian. But I can understand
why Walt let offsteam that way, why he chose to make an ass of
himself occasionally; I can understand why Melville had his
long interludes in which he foamed at the mouth and for a critic
to take these explosions and deplore them (to harp perpetually
on the "rounded work" which permits of a complete catharsis) is
a lack of sensitivity, an arrant tampering with all that is
divine in the artist. The letter puts me back again on that
plane of exultation which I had forty-eight hours ago when I
sat on the terrasse of the cafe, when I walked home on the
other side of the street saying over and over again, like a
maniac, "my eyes are tired of all this, my eyes are tired, my
eyes are tired", and with that phrase repeating itself obsess-
ively I felt that I had arrived at the last frontier of human
pain and suffering and pity. A strange note I made in my
note-book, standing in the crowded subway, writing illggibly,
the elbows around me pushing my arm so that I wrote like one
of those automatic writers who is handed a slate, who writes
without bidding and reels when he reads what he has written.
Apropos of that walk home, those final groans, those curses

120.

I could no longer put into words--nothing left me but an incoherent babbling, a man in a trench, mortally wounded, lying there in a pool of blood and everything that man had taught him, the highest wisdom, the most ineffable grace, all reduced to ashes, burned to an obsessive animal cry repeated a thousand thousand times--"my God, my God, my God, my God, my God!!"-- his *my God* greater, deeper, wiser, more inscrutable than all the poems ever written and all the poems and paintings and music coming in the end to that piercing scream of agony, hanging there on something between a curse and a prayer, knocking with the last beat of the heart against the forever impenetrable veil of mystery.

This interlude of raving madness, set off by the veriest trifle, I feel justified in inserting with all its contradictions, its wisdom and stupidity, its meanness and glory; this interlude is the pure passion of deliverance, and only this is valuable to the artist and nothing more; and what is valuable to me is valuable to the world because the world is contained in me and what expresses itself through my words, or stands at the threshold of expression, or is distorted in its expression, is the manna which sustains you, that permits you to go mad without losing your sanity because I am going mad for you--it is I who have my hand on the throttle and if I ditch the train it is only to save you because I am the one who sees the fate that is ahead of you and I can only choose between fates, between a bad or a worse one--there is no good fate. *fate* is terrible, ineluctable. *fate* is the word for destiny and the destiny of all is to be broken on the wheel of life.

121.

My note: "the bull's dying thoughts..man the conqueror.. mobility of that agony...his body still strong...all the blood spilled matters little....the spiritual death, the defeat! If that bull were saved, if those last thoughts could be transferred in sex, what kind of issue would spring from those loins?" It seemed tremendously important to me to make this note; everything I had to say was saturated with the emotion clinging to this image; I do not say now that I am inacapable of expanding this thought k--I prefer not to...I prefer to leave it in its sacred fragmentary character. I say this because the fever was so high that to write about the subject with even one degree less fever is to destroy utterly the value of it.

In the corridor, as I was changing trains, I made a further note: I know these interludes mar a work but there is no place elsewhere to tell them...the process is fine for perceiving how the artist adapts his material and circumstances...I am showing you the scaffold as I erect my edifice." And as I walked along k jotting down these fragments I was exasperated by the slow, stolid walk so characteristic of the French. Yes, it is a healthy, normal pace, and I have enjoyed this pace after living in New York, but there should be more nervousness, more excitement, more enthusiasm. In that walk I felt the sturdy, resisting qualities of the French--the whole story of her great history which is nothing more than the story of a great people defending its land, its homes against countless invasions, the story of a great tradition built upon blood and suffering, the story of art whose roots lie in massacre. But now I feel in this walk that France is only making herself more and more impregnable--she does not

122.

impregnate any more! And that is a great pity. The strong,
healthy race which has bloomed in this terrorized soil, this
race has need to express itself, and it is not expressing itself
by erecting walls; it has taken unto itself the great lie of
civilization and all these fine bulwarks, while protecting the
past, permit no egress into the hazardous roads of the future.

But what is the impulse goading me to root myself here in
these unconscious ravings and maunderings? Despair! Despair
in the realization that the greatest that is written bears no
equivalent to the inner reality...a well-known despair over which
it is said the true artist triumphs through his work, but this
is a lie. The only triumph the artist experiences is the mild
and second-rate one of "catharsis"; but the artist does not want
merely to be relieved of his pangs, the artist wants the impos-
sible; it is on this insane wish that he breaks himself. And
what is born of his struggle may liberate others, may give them
their catharsis, but never himself. His finished work, despite
all the clues and threads of the pompous psychologist, remains
a hideous distortion of his reality; the effort to interpret
that reality, by readers and critics and physicians, is the most
vain and deceptive attempt; at bottom it represents the secret
wish of the "others" to annihilate him, because the understanding
is the one destructive weapon left the "others" to combat him.
The mission of the artist is not to reconcile man with the
universe but to put him at war with it, to make man realize his
separateness, his unique loneliness. There is no greater bosh
than those vain efforts to hoist the serene spirits into the
limelight and say "there is the divine artist, the all-encompass-
ing mind, the lofty spirit, the god in man, etc.!"

123.

It pains me therefore beyond words when I see a man of letters, himself an artist, trying to make us *understand* the other artists of his country by reading their works like a physician. I come back to that cafe in which I was sitting, to the moment when the kind-hearted stout gentleman was fingering his wallet, riffling the bills, in order a moment later to bend over magnanimously and thrust something in the hands of the clochard. Is it possible that I could ever--*that any man*--could ever render the poignancy of that moment, as I experienced it? I limit myself to a few bare emotions, the most I can put in words, but how inadequate this is. There was the clochard, holding the sandwich in his trembling fingers; his face was averted, through shame, through scrupulousness, through greed or fear (??). The stout gentleman was stretching that moment to infinity, extracting from it the last ounce of self-satisfaction; the whole beside him was looking at the wallet with the sane, predatory eyes of a whole. One could feel the *mischance* as it ran the circle of these three divided souls--a terrible, primitive drama here, and none of them conscious of it, except superficially. The world without drawn into it, eyes pop-eyed, jaws hanging open like lanterns, tongues protruding, admiration, hatred, pity, scorn expressed in the passing faces, in those who clung to the spot, rooted by the most shameless curiosity, the most blatant indifference for everything except the spectacle, a *free spectacle*, which made it even more savoury, more appetizing.

And my heart beating like thunder--with what?--with the hope that this stout gentleman would do the impossible. The impossible? Yes! That he would unroll those bills, and commencing with a ten franc note, fling them out one after the other, tends, fifties,

124.

hundreds, until people became mad and would pounce on him, smash
the table, kill him to extract every last sou from his pockets.
I could not bring myself to stop--to imagine where he would leave
off. At a thousand, at five thousand? Why? Could there be a
price on what he was receiving now? Everything about this man
proclaimed the fact that it was his highest moment--the biggest,
finest, bravest thing he had ever done in his life! No doubt
about it. It was in the air, it communicated itself to the
dullest souls; it drove me frantic. "I am giving," he was saying
to the world, "I am giving all I possess to this man because he
has made me happy!" He protracted the moment, as I said, to an
ternity, because it was a moment that he would never again be able
to recapture. He knew it. And being an ordinary man, a dull,
prosaic, kind-hearted individual, he did not know what to do with
the moment except to stretch it; it would not fertilize in him...
it would pass simply. Terrible, terrible moment, even for a clod!
The very gates of heaven opening up for him--for a moment only.
The whole story of human hopes and aspirations, of despair and
frustration, in that moment.

After he had fingered all the greasy bills, after he had looked out of every corner of his eyes and caught the image of himself with a thousand haloes circling above his head, after he had bathed in the panting breath of the whore who had already crucified and sanctified him, he bent forward and put a five franc note in the man's hand. At that moment it seemed to me that the whole world went to smash, that it was blown to smithereens, and that no god, no accident, could ever assemble again the pieces, the atoms, the trees, the beings, that made this world.

125.

"Now", - I said to myself, "in this generous gesture you French
are showing me the colossal nature of your fix defects." In this
moment I crucified the French for the sins of the world. Not for
nothing have we thought you miserly, cautious, secretive, aloof.
No, all Frenchmen are not this way, but as a nation, as a people,
you have identified yourselves through the ages as a mean people,
as poor in spirit, as cowardly and wanting in grace and generosi-
ty. No one would make this accusation against a Russian or a
German. This is a wholesale accusation, but it is a just one--
the proof is there before me, not in this one incident, but in
thousands of incidents which I have brushed from my mind, which
I have refused to take too deeply, which my understanding would
not accept. But to-night I take it as deep truth--before my
eyes there is the symbol of your defect-- I cannot deny it longer.
Now I will pour out my hatred, my profound disgust for you, my
pity for you, to counteract, to balance the admiration, the
praise, the love I have given you. Now I will denounce your
rounded works, your tradition in which you sit comfortably furred
like a polar bear, your cool reason which permits you too look
on and explain, to be touched without being moved, to guard your
individuality, your privacy because the least breath of fresh air
would destroy it; not even your courage can I defend now because
it is the courage of the coward, the coward's courage that is
greater than bravery, because it is based on fear; and your great
septic irony leaves me, as it must leave all warm, human individ-
uals, cold; it is faith you need and not irony, courage not fear,
danger not security; your virtues stink....you are splendid only
in your defect! Your defect is the epitome of man's defect and
it has blossomed in you to that monstrous degree, that to-night
in this symbol of your mean generosity I feel that you have

126.

blasted all our hopes. I know how extravagant my words are,
I know that the day may come when I will have to eat these words,
but I will never retract them--they are uttered in truth and
conviction--it is for you to wipe them out! "If only a man
knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that
which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly!"
This is my experience, my truth. It is not the rounded expression,
the complete catharsis of the classic man; but I tell you these
classic figures are dead for me, they do not speak to me, they
are incapable of making themselves heard. Goethe, R. Shakespeare,
Dante, Homer--and your great Montagagne-- why don't they compel
me to listen? It is their fault, not mine. Why are they so dead,
so powerless, so tongue-tied? Why don't they answer me? I am
accusing them! I know there are some among you who are saying
what I say now, and perhaps better, but I must say it again, in
my own language, as an American.

Nor will I cease foaming at the mouth even here. Here I
could stay and ejaculate for the rest of my life. Here like a
sadist I could stay forever in the dream of ripping open the
womb...."the man who rapes with a corn-cob!". The sadistic
fury of ripping away without hope of ever finding satisfaction,
the instinct perverted, turned in on itself, and rending one--
not rending the womb, not even ejaculating, but ripping, ripping
ceaselessly for the sheer joy of ripping. When the stout gen-
tleman bent over and asked the clochard if he still had the
five francs and the poor devil pulled it out of his pocket and
exhibited it, oh the ripping that went on in me. All that
science will discover depends on the instruments employed--know-
ledge is the history of the extension of our senses. Futile
quest. The more sublte and powerful, the greater and more com-

127.

plicated the instruments, the bigger eyes grandma that you have
will only be the better to see with, but it is not sight alone
that you need, nor touch, nor smell, nor hearing. When all the
data is classified, arranged, schematized, when you bring to
bear upon it the most powerful weapons at your command, your task
has only begun, or rather it is finished. It is not the inter-
pretation that is wanting, but the possession. When one can
take even the smallest fact and possess it one has already made
infinite strides beyond the boundaries of science. And how is
one to possess a fact? Like one possesses God, like one possesses
a woman in the frenzy of orgasm; one must go at it like the
sacred bull, skidding on all fours, horns lowered, snorting fire;
one must rip and rip and rip, for the sheer joy of it. The date
of experience is cold and lifeless, the telling of it is lying
and distortion, the classifying of it is sheer stupidity, the
interpreting muck is humbug; we are neither gods, nor poets,
scientists or psychologists, we are only men, unique, isolated,
lonely, hungry. We do not marry woman when we fuck her, we do
not get god when we pray, we do not unveil mystery when we probe,
we do not get release when we create. We are doomed, and that is
what is borne in on the bull when he makes his last charge; that
is why the bull-ring is a mighty symbol, why people who kill
bulls have the heroic strain, why the blood and sand of the
arena is more sacred than all the altars men have erected to
the divinity. One hopes that the matador will triumph but one
wishes that the bull should not be defeated. The ritual has
been degraded to a game, a sport, only in the measure that man
has lost his high fervor, that he has turned his face away from
thee his doom; the echo of his fear is heard only in his soul,

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and the more hollow his soul becomes the louder it knunks echoes.

It was a profound despair, I said, which inspired me that
trivial incident at the cafe inspired in me, a despair yes,
but also exultation.... exultation. That I was determined to
arrest my narrative and root myself for a space in this welter
of emotion was due to a realization of two things, first that
it was only in such a state of fever that a man like myself
expresses himself truly, and secondly that for ten or fifteen
years of my life I had repressed these moments when they came
to me; I mean by this latter that before I started seriously
to write I had these visitations often, but I had did not know
what to do about it...I did not even know that I was an artist,
and later when I began to set my thoughts on paper, instead of
embracing these moments and utilizing them, I crushed them
because they interfered with what I had in hand. I mean to say
that from the age of nineteen or twenty I have the vivid rec-
ollection of walking the streets and writing passionately in
my head; I carried on conversations with myself and with others,
I described things as I went along, I went back and corrected
my sentences, improved them, expanded them. I remember that
for a period of a year or more, at this age, I would walk from
Delancey Street and the Bowery to Fifth Avenue and 31st Street,
my route to my father's shop, writing at top speed. And when
I arrived at the shop, which was like a morgue, I would become
a prey to the most terrible depression, to a melancholy verging
on suicide. I had little contact with people of any value to
me. In desperation I would often take my book (usually some

129.

work on philosophy or criticism...I began reading novels much later) and sitting beside the bench in the bushelman's room I would read to the workmen, humble, ignorant men who scarcely spoke English. When I think of how I read to these men from Bergson and Nietzsche, reading aloud the most baffling passages in order that by interpreting it to them I might better understand the work myself, I think I look upon those scenes as among the most touching, in their desperate, frustrate quality, of any I have known in my life. When I think of the letters I wrote from my father's office to my friends, none of whom understood me or shared my feelings, I regard myself as a pitiful, blind wretch. All my life I have been writing letters to people, thousands of letters concerning my spiritual strivings. There is a deep meaning to this and I have been aware of it only in the last few years. But even when I became aware of my inner needs I still did not realize the direction I should take. The more I wrote "for others" the less I revealed of myself, the more urgent it became to pour myself out in letters and it was only in my letters that I wrote what might be called literature. The rest was trash, worse than trash, because it was false, cold, studied, calculated. And the more I tried "to make the grade" the more exasperated I became, the more inhibited, paralyzed, stuttering, until at last I could not write at all and I fled from my work and considered myself a failure. But even then I had fits and starts, something irrepressible welled up in me and urged me to begin anew and so I would write about being a failure, ridicule myself, expose myself shamelessly and more coldly and durell y than could my worst enemy.

130.

This scene at the cafe becomes a tremendous document. The culminating point in a series of revelations and illuminations, which I am about to relate, it marks the high-water mark of the great tides which have swept me on to higher and higher levels, and as that flood-tide recedes I feel myself ebbing away with all the drift and loam of the past, plus a new drift and loam which has been nourishing me of late. At each new level, the registered by these tidal waves there comes a deeper consciousness of what I am, what I represent. In such a moment, for instance, it would make little difference if this book that I am carrying around inside me were destroyed--and how much it means to write this book only I can know. To write a book is to express and communicate one's value, but to know, to feel that blinding illumination, transcends creation.

Back of the cafe scene, back of the dream, back of the train ride and all the glowing red windows, back of Lewisohn's book and my introduction to Keyserling, back of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mary Baker Eddy and Mark Twain and that pronounced and aggressive homosexual, Walt Whitman, back of the sign of the crab, back of "L'Enfer" and of "Salavin", back of the colossal exrescences of Faure, back of Mlle Claude and little Germaine who when she "showed me her pussy" cured me of so many things, back of the pscyhologist and his death instincts.... back, back, back is me, the man with an insatiable hunger, the man who wants to know who and what he is. At twenty-one, when as they say, one comes to manhood, I was sitting on a bench in Union Square Park, so desperate and frustrated, so ignorant of my direction, so helpless that even suicide seemed futile. I had to

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had to know what I was destined for. Taking the last few dollars I had in my pocket I walked into the office of a phrenologist and asked her to read my head. She told me that I would make either a great architect or a corporation lawyer. I was dissatisfied-- I knew that I didn't want to be either of those things. I was in love--my first love-- and I had been cruelly disappointed, or rather, I had deliberately created my own disappointment; not thinking myself good enough for the woman I loved I so jeapoadized my chances that only a miracle could save me. Had I had the least ounce of faith, of self-confidence, the miracle could have been achieved, but I had none. I had already complicated my life by taking up with a woman I didn't love; for three or four years I did nothing but repeat to myself day in and day out "you must run away from her", and the oftener I repeated this the closer I stuck to her. I made it impossible for myself to take the woman I loved; I exulted in my misfortune because it seemed to me that a zero such as I was deserved no better fate.

And about this time when I sat on park benches and debated
whether to kill myself or not I made the acquaintance of Challa-
spiritual
combe. That is the first important spiritual date in my life.
There have been four or five since then and they all bear the
same character--they are concerned with my being, either with
the preservation of my being or the expansion of my being. They
represent the only times in my life when I have had anything like
an adequate realization of what I am. They represent the peaks
and the dips and that is the only living I am aware of--the
rest is a nightmare of biology.

132.

Challacombe was like an unfathomable well; he had read
perhaps no more than half a dozen books in his life, but no
man I have ever met had more wisdom than he. My Before meeting
him I had led a vegetable existence; he changed the whole course
of my life. Had it not been for Challacombe I might have become
a great architect or a corporation lawyer, but the very fact of
his existence made that impossible. Like myself, he was a man
destined to suffer the most harrowing misfortunes; like myself,
he welcomed his misfortunes, knowing that they would nourish him;
like myself, he was obsessed by woman and through her he learned
his greatest lessons; like myself, he had no more than freed himself
of one experience than he was enmeshed in another; like
myself, the worst catastrophes which overtook him were born of
his goodness. What the man did for me was to restore the sense
of life's mystery; by doing that he made me a whole man. All
my efforts since, by which I mean the sum of my experience, has
tendency been to reintegrate myself. I have the tendency, more exag-
erated than is normal in this age, to disintegrate; the violence
of my nature is the expression of this centripetal force. To it
are due the creation of my worlds and these worlds which have
burned out, these dead planets, by the force of their attraction
hold me to my orbit. The pull of them engenders in me the
resistance which keeps me from falling apart.

133.

What I mean to say about Challacombe is that through him the most fecundating experiences came about: the knowledge of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, the exploration of America, the meeting with Benjamin Fay Mills, the evangelist, the meeting with Emma Goldman which enriched my life immeasurably, and above all, the realization of the distinction between wisdom and knowledge. Challacombe was the sort of fellow who, after a lapse of ten years, would begin the conversation at the point where it had been dropped; all that had intervened was only by way of corroborating his central theme, the core of him, which is to say, his philosophy, his attitude toward life. A sage at twenty-eight or thirty, he remained one; experience did not intrigue him, it merely illuminated his wisdom. Such a man is rare to find in America; such a man was above friendship and love. And this man is my double.

Twenty years ago, when I first met Challacombe, I had a deeper understanding of life than at any time until recently. But, as if to test my wisdom, I was subjected to the most cruel examination; as an intellectual and physical being I went through a plethora of experiences; the light that had been kindled in me at twenty-one dwindled and dwindled until the flame was almost extinguished. I might say that I was never alone with myself; the deomn in me seemed to drive me into the world, to divide myself, to share myself with others, to listen to others, guide them, comfort them, incite them to good or bad; a perfect froth of activity which prevented me from coming to grips with myself. If I did extraordinary things, be they good or bad, I took no credit for them: I was scarcely conscious even of doing them. I attached no importance to myself, therefore

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my actions were neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy. I was a moral polyp, I was indifferent, I was untouched, I knew no development. I adjusted myself to the environment in which I happened to find myself; I believed in nothing, I was a nihilist.

It was this attitude which aroused in my friend Edmund, the musician with whom we were living, a profound hostility. He was unable to provoke in me a resistance; he found me dangerous. Others have had the same experience. They have been able to lead me on and on, to the absurd, to the mad, to the vicious, but nothing happened to me. Or else, unobserved by them, I eventually retreated to my central position, quietly, almost like a thief, and they were left high and dry, reeling on the brink of disaster. They had the uncomfortable feeling of being immoral; I had no moral sense. I had scarcely any feelings; in crucial moments, whether of personal danger or of moral disaster, I was practically anaesthetic. I was like some impossible vegetable which is immune to experience. All climates agreed with me; no matter in what soil I found myself I shot down my roots; and if I were transplanted I flourished anew.

But soon after I met Hildred my moral sense began to revive. In her I saw the monster that I was becoming. I detected her apathy, I demanded that there be choice, direction, distinction, I began to establish values.

For the first time in my life I found a woman who wanted to make sacrifices for me, who demanded only one thing of me--that I do what I wanted. You would imagine this an ideal state, and so it was for a while. But it wasn't long before I discovered the worm in the apple. In order to do what I wanted I was

135.

obliged to shut my eyes to what was going on about me. Soon
after we were married, for example, Hildred decided that we
were to move into better quarters. A modest little place was
not sufficient for her--she wanted something above the ordinary
because "it was important for me". It was useless for me to say
that I didn't require such a home--she knew better than I what
was necessary. So we moved into a palatial apartment, far
beyond our means, a place which was supposed to give me inspira-
tion. But instead of inspiring me I was depressed by it. As
long as we were both working it was just possible to make ends
meet, but we were hardly there a few months when I gave up my
position; I was not obliged to give it up but I hadn't the
courage any longer to lie about my tardiness and my frequent
absence from the office. And Hildred--Hildred rejoiced. Now
I could devote myself entirely to my writing. But how were we
to make ends meet? Oh, that I was not to think about--that was
her affair. And soon after I quit my job she gave up hers;
again there was no need to sacrifice her position-- she deliber-
ately picked a quarrel with the director of the theatre. There
we were--free to do as we chose!

only

I was terrified. It was not, that we had to look after
ourselves, and that was a big enough problem, but there was the
alimony which I had to pay and Hildred's mother to support.
How was it to be done? I hadn't the faintest idea. Frantically
I dropped my writing and began to look for another job; and
now an ironic thing occurred--I could not find another job! I
who had hired people by the thousands, I who had so many con-
nections in the business world, strangely I found myself being
rejected everywhere. Was it that I didn't try hard enough, or
was I marked? Inwardly I felt that I was a failure; it is
true I didn't try hard enough, because when I went to make

136.

application I knew in advance that I would not succeed. And upon returning to the house I would find Hildred in a state of despair--not because I hadn't found a position but for fear that I might! She would plead with me to abandon the idea, to let her manage things; if I said "well, look at the mess we're in...is this how you manage things?" she would look at me reproachfully and say: "I have no heart to do anything when you show no confidence in me". And then she would get down on her knees and beg me to stay home and write--and of course I would capitulate to her because I really wanted to stay home...and write. I stayed home, but I didn't write. I cursed myself for an imbecile, a slacker, a pimp, a waster, a failure, a dreamer, everything imaginable--but it didn't help me to write. But Hildred never made the slightest reporach; she was content that I remained home. She made excuses for me, she pampered me still more; I was overwhelmed. Day after day she made her appointments, day after day she came home with her pockets full of jack; on Saturdays she would hand me the money for the alimony, and as if that were not enough she would throw in a gift for the child, or give me something extra so that I might take Blanche to the theatre. Everything I needed she bought me; I scarcely dated to open my mouth for fear that she would discover that I needed something else. It was inhuman--I couldn't fathom it. Not a thing did she demand of me except that I do what I want, and now that I had every opportunity I couldn't do what I wanted. I was paralyzed. It seemed to me that if I wrote another Bible it would not compensate for all that she was doing for me. She was stifling me with her generosity; her sacrifices were killing me. Instead of dreaming about what I should write I thought only of how to liberate her. But I never dared to breathe that; if I did I would

137.

destroy her, deprive her of all reason for existence. She was never more happy, Hildred, than then when there were so many claims on her; she was radiant with joy and her resources seemed unlimited. What did it matter to her that I was a failure? She was immolating herself for my idea; for her there was no feeling of sacrifice, only of power, of liberation, of creation. Did she not say sometimes that she wished I were an invalid so that she could prove to me how much she loved me? To make me entirely helpless, that was her real wish. When she urged me to do only what I wanted did she know perhaps that I was incapable of doing anything? At bottom wasn't she really antagonistic to my writing? There were times, I remember, when I did come out of the slough, when I went to work with a vengeance. And what would happen then? Was she pleased? Ostensibly yes; she would pick up my manuscript and gloat over it. But if I persisted in my work, if I failed to take notice of her as much as usual, if I expressed a desire to be left alone, if I fell into a revery and had nothing to say, if I went for a walk in order to mull over my ideas, ah then what scenes would follow! I didn't love her any more, I was a fanatic, I was selfish, I put my work above her, etc. etc. And in order to pacify her I would drop my work and soon I would be lying on the bed, and then when I thought everything had been cleared up I would spring out of bed and tackle my work again--and that infuriated her more than anything. To think that I could leave her lying there on the bed, like a job that had been finished, to think that I could put her completely out of mind, so quickly and so easily, to think that there was something more attractive, more compelling, more urgent than my need for her--that she could not tolerate. And when everything was ruined, when I had exhausted myself through bickering with her or pacifying her, when I lay on the bed exhausted and helpless, and not

138.

only incapable, but saddened and disspirited, then she would
shower me with her affection and, forgetting the destruction
that she had wrought, literally drag me to the desk and beg me
to go on. And then my real torture would commence. I would sit
there steadfastly, with an empty head, and try for her sake to
make my thoughts flow. Like a man whose bowels are paralyzed
I would sit there trying to coax my thoughts, preying for an
idea--and only a short while ago I had been bursting with them.
And now it seems to me that I understand better why it was that,
when I came to Paris with my novel half-finished and full of
confidence, certain that it would be terminated in a few months,
I made so little headway. Though there was three thousand miles
of water between us, though she was not by my side to plague me
or to love me, I was still chained to her, still dependent on
her. Instead of devoting myself wholeheartedly to the problems
inherent in my book I was worrying about her, frustrated when
I did not hear from her, saddened when I did hear from her,
fearful that I was not writing well enough for her, dismayed
because she could not read what I was writing, frightened when
I told the truth about her, tied to her by a thousand and one
little details; but above all, attaching less importance to the
book than to her, feeling that if she would only come the book
it could go to the devil. Therefore I added to the book the more
I destroyed; my judgment was completely lost. I wrote in despair;
I hastened to finish it, not in a creative way, but in any old
way, to get it done with so that I might sell it and have her
by my side again. And just as I realize how futile my actions
were then so I perceive now the reason for my creativeness when
I began the next book--"Tropic of Cancer". I was at that point
of desperation where nothing could any longer afflict me with
pain. Sunk to the very lowest ditch I had nothing to fear any

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more; if I looked in any direction now it was of necessity up.
I had given up all hope of seeing Hildred again; I expected
help from nobody; I had no plans for the future and absolutely
no concern about it. Each day was an event, a closed, perfect
thing in itself, owing nothing neither to the past nor the future.
I lived completely for myself and in myself; the least incident
was a boon to me, stimulating, nourishing, fecundating; I did not
know where my next meal was coming from nor whether the night
would see a roof over my head. I lived for the moment and I
stole from each moment all that it contained. I was richer than
any man I knew, and I was aware of my richesse. I had no re-
sponsibilities, no debts, no ties, no obligations; I had only
myself. Moreover I was not concerned whether anybody would ac-
cept my book when it was finished; I had only one concern and
that was to write it. It made no difference whether I was per-
mitted to write for an hour or for eight hours; it made no dif-
ference where I left off or where I began. Everything that
poured out of me was a sincere expression of myself, done in
joy, and with no end in view but the doing. That is one way to
live and to write. That is absolute freedom, which of course
few people can support. That is madness, which nobody desires.
But that is also an act of desperation, a choice governed and
dictated by extreme suffering and privation. It is not a triumph
over circumstance but a refusal to recognize circumstance; it is
not a victory, as critics and biographers like to say, but an
avoidance of conflict, a life in which external and internal are
ruled out, a life of oneness which is either divine or mad.

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I spoke before of the long intervals in my life in which I seemed to lie dormant. I am reminded again of another interesting fact: the one brilliant idea I had in that early period with Hildred, when in despair I abandoned one project after another, was the discovery of *how I should write*. I remember that afternoon as distinctly as if a tornado had swept the house. I had been looking up words in the dictionary. Suddenly, as if I were caught up in a whirl, these words began to seethe, to string themselves out into sentences and paragraphs; with such a fury did this tempest did descend upon me that I ran home at full speed, and with hat and overcoat on, completely out of breath, I threw myself on the typewriter and began in the middle of a sentence. I had no idea from one moment to the next what I was going to write; I knew simply that I had to write and to write whatever came to my head whether it made sense or not. It developed soon enough that nobody saw any sense in it, but that affected me scarcely at all; I knew, and it was a most important realization, that for the first time I had done a piece of creative writing. I had never heard then of "automatic writing", or of Surrealisme, or of Dadaism; I knew nothing of what was going on by the great experimentalists of the age. And when my friends ridiculed this "Diary of a Futurist", as I called it, my conviction only increased that I had made a great discovery, that I was on the right track, that everybody else was wrong or mad. I learned, moreover, the immense importance that words, by and in themselves, had for me; I sensed that they had a particular use not merely as medium for ideas, but as touchstones, as power and magic in themselves, as symbols capable of unlocking directly the secret content of mind. More than that, I felt that whether they made no sense was beside the point; they had their own sense

141.

since they spoke a language more direct, more vital, more real,
more powerful than this other language which everyone could de-
cipher, which obeyed the most rigid laws, which concealed rather
than expressed thought.

But I hadn't the strength to go on writing this way, im-
mersed as I was in a world of common sense, in a world of expedi-
iency, in a world where everything was subjected to the acid
test of pragmatism. Once again it burst out, when I was writing
my first novel. This was a novel written to order, to Hildred's
order. "Somebody" had demanded that she write a novel; the mo-
ment it was finished this "somebody" was to fork up a lot of
cash, enough to buy a house, to take a trip to Europe, to settle
back comfortably for a few years and take it easy. The "some-
body" didn't know, of course, that Hildred was incapable
of writing a line; that "somebody" had faith in Hildred. Why
not? Hadn't she shown him all my manuscripts with her name
scrawled across the top in big letters? It was Hildred's idea
that I write about her; that would be intriguing and calculated
to please the "somebody" beyond all expectation. So I tried
to imagine myself Hildred and sat down to write the novel. As
the months went by Hildred grew impatient. The first eighty
pages I destroyed because, in Hildred's opinion, they didn't
seem as if they were written by a woman, however masculine that
woman might be. I commenced in the middle of the book and wrote
backwards and forwards. When I was about two-thirds through
I began to worry excessively about the opening chapter, which
I had not yet tackled. Parts of the book pleased me very much;
other parts I knew were inconsequential, totally unworthy of me,
sordid compromises. It lacked unity. It was incoherent. I
had the habit of running away from myself continually, deserting

142.

my theme, and indulging my propensity for ranting and raving.
Nevertheless, there was a certain quality of violence and a
maximal wealth of scope and character which gave it force, inade-
quate as it was. It was apparent to everyone, of course, with
the exception of Hildred, that it could not have been written
by a woman. But whoever the "somebody" was who was going to pay
for it Hildred was maximal confident he would swallow it; he had
probably swallowed more inconceivable things than a novel written
by a woman who did not know how to write. The months were
passing, as I say, and Hildred was itching to go to Europe; she
suggested lopping it off here and there, bringing it to a quick
conclusion, etc. And I, with a certain amount of naive fidelity
to my trust, was laboring over it with chisel and saw, trying to
make it as perfect as possible. At the same time I was heartily
tired of it and praying that I would find a proper solution on
which to end it. But more difficult than the end was the begin-
ning. I would dream about it at night. (I had during this
period the most magnificent dreams of my whole life.) Finally
one night, when Hildred was already in bed (she was sleeping
in the room where I worked) I stole out for a walk. I began to
think of a friend of mine whom I had left in Florida and as I
walked along thinking about him I began to write him a letter,
a very tumultuous letter explaining all that had happened to me
in the interim since we had parted. And then, out of a feeling
of affection and sympathy for this chap (whom I had left in
extremely difficult circumstances) I began to atone for my
neglect by saying to him that I would put him in my book. And

143.

as I grew more and more remorseful I made wilder and wilder
promises. I swore to him that I would make the pages about him
the best in the book, that they would live forever, etc. Then,
just as on the other occasion which I have cited, I was caught
up again by some inner illumination: I had the feeling of being
at the very core of existence, with the secret in my hands, and
there were no irrelevancies any more, no contradictions, no
confusion or error. Everything was clear to me. I remember
coming to a crack in the sidewalk--it was night-- and getting
down on my knees to examine it closely; I looked at that crack
in the sidewalk as if it were the most mysterious thing in the
universe. I felt positively holy looking at it. There it was--
nothing but a crack in the sidewalk: not even an ant crawling
in it--just a crack! And while I gazed at it ecstatically,
feeling the whole world reeling about me in splendor and sig-
nificance, my thoughts gushed up so violently that it was like
a vomit. I ran home babbling like a lunatic and fell on the
machine in a trance. Hildred awoke and reproached me for being
unreasonable, but I silenced her with a curse. I was writing a
letter to my friend in Florida and that letter became my first
chapter; it was mutilated and excised, and part of it that
seemed to irrelevant and too fantastic I have with me now and
I am going to quote from it to show you the strange processes of
the human mind--strange only when one examines them from the
outside, stranger still when one realizes the effort the mind
is constantly making to gain its proper expression.....

"These names, which are nothing more than the empty vessels
into which we pour our dreams and desires, what are they often
as not but the mistaken or abortive ideas of man?....In the
first place, this book will be unlike any book ever written.....

144.

No, there won't be any men in this document, except the chief figure, and I am not certain yet whether he ought to be a man or a demi-god. Perhaps I'll make him just an ordinary centaur.

... You understand, of course, that even as I am relate the plan to you, I am inventing the situations and incidents. Sometimes one carries the germ of an idea about with him for years, hoping that it will some day develop into a coherent unity, and then suddenly, perhaps after a day of thoroughly prosaic occurrences, the idea commences to germinate in the dark when you are in bed, the walls begin to breathe and heave, the place itself becomes alive and the creator a mere instrument of those dark forces which have taken possession of his mind and body.

There is nothing mystical about all this. I should say, rather, that there is a toxic or chemical quality in the blood which, if we could analyze it and get to grips with it, would reveal very clearly to us the reasons for these seizures.

"I thought it best for the moment to give this creature of my fancy (who may be, as I said, just an ordinary centaur, or an acrobat, or a severed head--John the Baptist's, for instance) a name, an odd name, if you will, because he will perform sundry odd tricks as he glides from one sphere of activity to another.

He cannot be an ordinary individual, you see, any more than....

And if I use the conventional handle of Mister I must beg you not to let that disturb you either, since you will find in some of our best Arabian and Muscovite tales the prefix Mister, even though the character is only a poodle dog....At any rate, Mr. Pantuffle will have recognizable human feelings--sometimes even animal spirits or planetary lusts....I have even considered

145.

the necessity of converting his sensitivity on occasion into
that of a frail lilac bush which gives out such plaintive sounds
when in the dead of night it brushes gently against the window -
pane. Or, he might have the stern, rigorous quality of a thorn
on a rose-bush, which is capable of recognizing a maiden's warm
evincing
blood without <u>smoking</u> a tremor.....Mr. Pantuffle will never be
lost in the midst of a learned digression. He will be a s close
x to you as your skin--have the sweet, uncompromising <u>smoking</u> flavor
of the gristle which clings to your bones. If he undertakes the
hazards of a soliloquy it will be Mr. Pantuffle speaking and
not William Shakespeare or Simon Daedalus. If he lies down on
the greensward "surrounded by swift nudes" it will be Mr. Pan-
tuffle you will recognize in the foreground and not some enter-
prising critic from the Faubourg St. Germain. ....He will have
the lambent flexibility of an aphorism embedded in the brain of
a poet out for a Sunday afternoon's stroll....In his more de-
lirious moments (what we earth-worms style our "tragic" moments)
he will show no hesitancy in rolling in the gutter....In that
greater reality of art, which parallels life and yet somehow
gets above and beneath it, it is unnecessary to put on a cake of
mud as a token of piety. Art does not clamor for a mystagogue.
Mr. Pantuffle's behavior in the gutter will far more resemble
the cosmic sophistication of a planetary being than the drunken
antics of a priest.....Mr. Pantuffle inhabits a world that ex-
isted before the umbrella, a world that puts the umbrella to one
side.....A world that will serve to remind one of a new hand in
a poker game--new faces, strange combinations, queer hunches,
silent incantations, etc. ....For Mr. Pantuffle there will ex-
ist no <u>forced options</u>, as our pompous professors label the enig-

146.

matic semaphores which guide our way along the elevated structure of life....When he communes with himself he will do so with his head in his hands. I mean that he will actually decapitate himself, and with the living, thinking skull in his hands, meditate afresh on stereotyped problems. *Stereotyped problems*, because in the final analysis the marvellous permutations of the universe never alter the fundamental mysteries."

******

******

******

Used in Topic Cancer to p. 156

At precisely this point she arrives! Like a driver who has fallen asleep with the reins in his hands I am suddenly rudely awakened and bend forward again to crack my whip, to put the horses at a gallop. At three o'clock in the morning I am informed that she is here in Paris--she wants to see me. Carl and I take our bicycles and rush to the hotel. She is in bed. And while she opens the grips to look for a poiture of Greta Garbo (none of her idols having changed since she was last here) I espy the manuscript of my novel, the pages torn and jumbled, the color of the pages turned to coffeeand smoke. "And where are all the other manuscripts that you were to bring?" I ask. "They are in the cellar, in Brooklyn--too hard to get at!" And just as on every other occasion when she comes to visit Paris we find ourselves at dawn leaving some stinking cafe and walking through the milk white streets. And she is talking to me--drowning me in talk-- about things I haven't the faintest interest in. But I am more restrained now, more patient, more sympathetic--I am even interested! I am interested now in

147.

ascertaining just why I am not interested in this kind of talk,
interested in knowing why she talks this way to me. And before
many hours have passed I get it--she gives it to me herself,
voluntarily. The reason is that she is at war with me. She
knows it now. She admits it to herself.

But I am going a little too fast.... We have a roof over
our heads now, a little home in Clichy which I share with my
friend Carl. She is here with us and she likes the place.....
Carl has just shampooed her hair.....I am taking a nap, though
I awoke only an hour ago from a long sleep.... There are manu-
scripts lying on the floor, in the kitchen, in the bidet; every-
thing is begun and nothing finished....But the place is gradually
getting to rights. She is cleaning it from top to bottom and
her hands are very sore.....And by some strange fatality, Carl
who was supposed to be her sworn enemy, is good to her, he is
doing everything in his power to please her. And she makes x
him dance on her, she quarrels with him, scolds him, criticizes
him, etc. And I am watching Carl hopping around after her,
scrubbing the walls with the sponge I bought, running out and
buying fruit and cigarettes for her, coming home unexpectedly
with little surprises, sitting up all night listening to her---
I am watching all this with relish. I am putting Carl in my
place: I am making him the husband! And now and then Carl tip-
toes up to me and says slyly-- "you're fucking me, eh? she's
got me by the balls!" Oh, I am enjoying this immensely--and
for complicated reasons. First, because Carl was so sure she
was harmless--he could never be made to understand why she af-
fected people so, why she put them in her power, why she was
always regarded as dangerous, destructive, etc. Secondly, I

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am amused, because Carl is doing all this as a sacrifice: he
wants to protect me! He has been calling me the "saint" all
along, but in reality he is the saint, a very sly saint, a tem-
peramental one, to be sure, but a saint nevertheless. We dis-
cussed that, Hildred and I, on our way home to Clichy at dawn.
She thought it strange that I should be referred to as a saint.
But she knows now that I am not a saint, never was. "Carl is
a martyr" she says. "He likes to sacrifice himself." But
Carl is also one of those practical martyrs; he only crucifies
himself in order to earn his reward. We were lying in bed
talking the other night, Hildred and I, and Carl comes running
in from his room asking me if there is a real "maelstrom" some-
where in the world. I hear him typing again and it is not dif-
ficult for me to imagine the character of the pages that engage
him now. He is gloating over this "maelstrom" in which he finds
the house engulfed. He is probably writing pages of "pity for
his friend so-and-so-" who is now in the toils of his wife. We
go on talking and Carl comes back to our room again; he wants to
talk. While he talks to Hildred I fall asleep; I wake up fre-
quently and I catch portions of the conversation, which is about
me and about Vanya, about the book that I am writing, in other
words. And I hear Carl grilling her; when he sees me stirring,
raising his voice so that I will not fail to catch the gist
of things. Everything he says, everything he asks, is for my
benefit. He says to her "I believe you, Hildred....I have changed
my mind about you--completely, etc." but I know by the intonation
of his voice that he is lying, that he only wishes to expose her
to me, prove to me how right he was in his opinions. But I go to
sleep on him. I laugh to myself. All these proofs, all Hildred's

149.

protestations---they mean nothing to me...nothing! As if they
could add one tittle to this drama I have carried around in me
for so many years! She says to him, just when she is revealing
one of her most sacred "truths"---"Shhh---you'll wake him up!"
No, that doesn't deceive me either. She knows damned well I am
not fast asleep. She knows that I am listening to see if there
will be any fresh "truths". "Don't wake him up!" means "listen,
you, I am saying what I have always said...you see that I am con-
sistent, at least, with my lies." And Carl thinks he is making
discoveries; he is getting "material" for his book--fresh charact-
ers, fresh glimpses at old problems, fresh lies. He is seeing me
in a new role; he is beginning to have respect for this drama
which never interested him before.

A year ago when she left she looked like a dead woman. Now
she is all alive. She thanked me for it last night, in bed. "I'm
going to kill you!" she said. But wait--I am going too fast
again.....

The very first time I left her here alone--I was only gone
a few minutes--she had found the manuscript. She had already
read ten pages when I returned. The manuscript had been put away
where she found it. Not a word about it passed her lips. But I
knew immediately that she had looked at it......

Later in the day it comes out. She is amazed that any one
could be so blind as I am. She criticizes the first ten pages--
a withering criticism that would have reduced me to ashes a year
ago. She relents. "Perhaps I ought to wait until I have read
more!" she adds. "You're going to read more", I say. I give
her the manuscript. " Here, read it while I write." I am typing

150.

away quietly when suddenly there is an hysterical burst of laughter and I see her doubling up on the couch, her head buried in the pages of my manuscript, laughing, laughing as if her heart would break. "What's happened?" Oh, it's nothing....just an error I made. "If you only knew the hundredth part of it!" And she laughs again in that heart-breaking way. Afterwards I look at the page where she left off (she reads in snatches only!) but I see nothing that would warrant this outburst.

Once the book fades out of the conversation she becomes pleasant again, very pleasant. She looks for things to do for us. And Carl is quite touched. "I'm going to be good to you, Hildred," he says. "Just wait...you'll see.... I'm going to do things for you." I remember Hildred's words when I was falling asleep on them the night before. "The more you do for me the more I'll suspect you. For every gift you make me I'll give you another, that's all. Don't think you're going to get anywhere with me by being nice to me."

There is an interim during which we see "Scarface" together. Hildred insists that it is only to see Paul Muni that she has urged us to come. As we leave the theatre I explode--it is the first time I have lost my patience. I am quarreling with her at the bar as we take a drink. I am almost dancing with rage. "Don't ever suggest a gangster picture to me again...I detest them!" "But I told you it was a poor film," she says; "I only wanted to have you see Paul Muni." "But I don't give a damn for your Paul Muni...I don't ever expect to see him again either." While we wait for the bus there are more hot words. It isn't the picture so much that enrages me, but her interest in it. (As a matter of

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fact the picture is a good one, as gangster pictures go.) I tell her that I am sorry for losing my temper. "It was a fine picture, Hildred, and I mean it, but...." Then I break loose again. "But that's one of the reasons why I am here in France. I hate your god-damned America, your god-damned American women. I want to stay here in a civilized world, etc. etc." She tries to tell me that she hates America even more than I do, that she was revolted by the picture the first time she saw it, that she went out of the theatre raving. "But if you felt that way about it, why did you insist on dragging me to see it? If a thing disgusts you why do you go near it again? To please me? Do you think Paul Muni means anything to me?" It begins all over again.

It's her profound and obsessive interest in these things I said disturbed me. I want to make that clearer. Lying in bed, after the theatre, I was reading the last volume of Proust. I am at that part where Saint-Loup pretends that he takes no interest in "such things", meaning homosexual practices. "I haven't the slightest <u>ink</u>erest notion of such things. If you want any information about that, <u>my dear fellow</u>, I advise you to apply elsewhere. As for me, I'm a soldier and nothing more....." And then adds Proust: "These subjects which Robert scorned in this way, Gilberte, on the other hand, as soon as he had left, was glad to take up in her talks with me. Not, of course, with reference to her husband, for she was unaware of all that--or pretended to be. But she liked to go into them at length as far as others were concerned, whether because she saw therein a sort of indirect excuse for Robert, or because the latter, vacillating, like his uncle, between strict silence on these topics and a need to unbosom himself and speak ill of others, had given her a great deal of information