FOREWORD

by Dorothy Dudley.

The boy, Emanuel Carnevali, was born in Florence
in 1898 --- prodigious. He is one of those few to be born
that way, just as a few girls are born beautiful ---
prodigiously beautiful. What he has done with this initial
power is revealed in his poems, stories and criticisms, some
of them published in 1925 in a book called *The Hurried Man*.
If at thirty-five his writings are fragmentary more than
entire, it may be partly because he lacks that rotary taste
which introduced into the prodigious makes it turn about a
center and attain volume. Though exalting the absolute above
the capricious, yet he has streaked like a meteor. He has
been a runaway, running with direction.

At an early age, perhaps at sixteen, perhaps before,
he joined with the irreconcilables of Time and Place:

"Arthur Rimbaud: His life is an adventure of
the gods; anybody who has not dropped his bundle
and gone on a great adventure will not understand
him. I have gone on a great adventure, and I may
sometime personify a god I have seen for a moment.
I would as much as I could personify him. . . ."

"If I were sure no one were listening I would
indeed cry out: I am a worshipper who has died
many times for Dostoievsky, for Nietszche, for
Christ, for Eimbaud. . . . . ."

(Carnevali.)

-II-

It may be I am biased when I call Carnevali
prodigious. Yet it is not his violent flight in itself that
I prize. It is the balance and freedom of his departure
away from what is stale toward what is essential, that fascin-
ates me. It is the recklessness of it so nearly free of
tarnish. If in truth I am biased it is because Carnevali
has for me a manner of intelligence which I find irresistible.
Continually I am surprised that so many resist it in him or
in another.

It is intellect which is sometimes called Mediterr-
anean; yet it is found near and far; perhaps among Icelanders,
probably among Africans; or to the far East, though there
intellect and custom have been so subtly married that they
are veiled now, one in the other. For the Western World,
Greece was once and France is today the cradle for such direct
genius. In France tempered by wet winds, by fog and mist,
the elixir may become modulated into leisurely satire or
progress into elaborations, divinely balanced as nowhere else.
There it ends by producing cultures with ineluctable flowers ---
Baudelaire, Mallarme, Valery, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso.

Yet initially it is convenient to describe this
temper as Mediterranean. Perhaps it took such an equilibrium
of the elements to initiate it and thereafter direct it through
the prison windows of alien histories. The intemperate Greeks
had their ethic to correct intemperance --- Nothing too Much.
The Mediterranean was their sea, center between lands, between
the races --- races which in tall corners of the earth, across

-III-

the Himalayas, in the Andes, beyond the Rockies, on Baltic,
Caspian, or Atlantic shores, have reached to such wild
excesses. Mediterranean remains a symbol of the balanced
psyche, whether it rushes at precipitate speed or burns
with a still intensity.

It is mind intolerant of doctrine and impatient of
impurities. It turns toward the absolute like plants toward
the sun, but aware that the absolute is more distant than the
furthest sun. It is today that rare thing, pre-Christian,
pre-mechanical intellect. It invents no obstacles, and
ignores none that exist. Rooted in the senses it proceeds
to the gist of things. Proceeding there it takes account of
the Christian age we are beginning to leave or have left and
takes account of the mechanical world in which we are now
entangled. It takes account, and is therefore modern. I am
biased in its favor because it appears to approach unbiased
action.

Carnevali is a splinter of this temper with gift
of pliant passionate speech to make it tell. At sixteen he
took this fire of mind to America, the way so many of his
compatriots have taken their smouldering bodies there to dig
the road-beds of the United States. Had he gone to Paris
instead he would have added undoubtedly another foreigner
to that list of moderns whom France has adopted, and who
shine like stars because they figure together in constella-
tions, or at least in important dissonances; more than do the

-IV-

lonely geniuses in American skies. Like the painter,
Modigliani, he would have found his plane there, where
others were working at his rate of sophistication. But
France was at war; he would have been sent back to Italy
to fight. Away from the mold and rich dirt of that ancient
Peninsula -- patrician morbidness of dead mother and aunt
whom he loves, bourgeois cruelty of a father he hated and
who hated him, culture of a school in Venice which taught
him French literature and expelled him for his love of
another boy -- to escape that human compost, tragic for him,
he took flight in 1914 toward the inhuman dust and grime of
New York and Chicago, toward new, free America, untrammeled
by war.

He came at sixteen and left at twenty-four, having
in eight years performed the miracle of becoming an American
writer who counted. "One of two contemporary American poets,"
the French critic, Regis Michaud has said, "whose work attained
an international standard." He came penniless and lived
literally by crusts of bread, picked here and there, lived by
kindness of gangsters, as bus-boy and waiter in restaurants,
and at length by his writings, and by a genius for intimacy,
for giving and receiving. Lived at length by friendships,
slight or intense, of writers and editors, some older and
slower than he, some of his own insatiable kind.

In the eight years, 1914 to 1922 -- years of that
renaissance of the spirit which flared in America for a genera-
tion -- this young Florentine, who loved the great Dante like

-V-

an heir to his estate, abandoned the Tuscan tongue and made
American his language. With remarkable speed and accuracy
our limber, informal changing slang became part of him. He
was aware of the ease with which a modern Latin could make a
poem with but a phrase or two, not much more than a shrug of
the shoulders or lift of an eyebrow. He translated from
Pallazzeshi, Govoni, Papini, Jahier, Soffici, and introduced
their yeast into drawling America. Our flat approximate
speech, which ends in almost no full statement at all, seemed
sometimes funny to him. But his ear traced in American lingo,
in voices and idiom, the chance of a medium, become not less
pliant, but more tractable by virtue of purpose. And his
writings, lyrical, narrative and critical, have realized this
progression. In them, Latin wit which unites poetry and
criticism to make a true ecstacy, a festival of the spirit,
penetrates and sometimes transfuses our lacy racy idiom. In
those few years, though acknowledged only by a few, Carnevali
contributed to American speech. In the sense that poems of
Sandburg and of T. S. Eliot, mimes of Ring Lardner, prose of
Gertrude Stein, lyrics of E. E. Cummings, romantics of Dos
Passos and Ernest Hemingway have been recent ingredients in
the making of American letters.

Yet the few who realized Carnevali were not neglig-
ible. He had great friends in America and after, and lost
them and often made them again. He had a talent for intimacy
and for estrangement. Among writers Waldo Frank, Louis Grudin,
Isidore Schneider, William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg,

-VI-

Maxwell Bodenheim, Lola Ridge, Jane Heap, Harriet Monroe, Mitchell Dawson, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, Robert McAlmon, Ernest Walsh, Ezra Pound, became his friends. Sometimes laughingly, sometimes extravagantly, they spoke and wrote of him as of a man to contradict the dust. Carlos Williams intoned in *Others*, July 1919:

"Emanuel Carnevali, the black man, the empty man,
the New York which does not exist.....I celebrate
your arrival.

It is for you we went out, old men in the dark.
It is for you that the rubbish stirred and a rat
crawled from the garbage, alive !

His poems will not be constructed, they cannot be.
He is wide open ! He is black, speckled with
flashes. But he is wide, wide, WIDE open. He is
out of doors. He does not look through a window.

We older can compose, we seek the seclusion of a
style of a technique, we make replicas of the
world we live in and we live in them and not in
the world.....

We salute you."

Carl Sandburg wrote as preface to Carnevali's book,

## The Hurried Man:

"He is of the sun treader tribe, also a walker in
dark shadows. He seemed sometimes to be throwing
himself at the sun..... He had a dream in Chicago
of publishing a magazine to redeem perhaps some of
the redeemables of America and Europe, even Russia
and China, perhaps even Mars and Betelgeuse.....

He spoke of intimacies of many kinds with God....
He is a writer writing always because he has to
write, writing of his pain to see if he can get a
grimace at his pain, writing of his baffled desires,
cursing them in the hope that they will go away,
then welcoming them with new poems when they come

-VII-

back; he is questing, paradoxical, singing so
often the songs of the cornered rat, bitten and
starved.....

His writings are the record of a personality that
burns with twentieth-century flames, and that was
marvellously alive to the intensities and the con-
trasts of American life."

His great friend, poet and editor of his own age,
Ernest Walsh, when he reviewed _The Hurried Man_ in his magazine
"This Quarter", told of his first visit to Carnevali when he
went to see him in a hospital in Bologna:

"His illness would kill most men. I felt he had
become ill because he was too strong. I never felt
death in him.... I had the feeling that a god or a
devil had exploded within him and fought for escape.
But this prisoner made me laugh with him so I knew
it was a God.... There is no death in Carnevali.
He is a live, warm, laughing and fighting man.

....He is what you will be proud to speak of in a few
years. He is going to be part of the mind and soul
of your children. When they have outgrown and
discarded what is false and cheap and immature, what
you would leave them as an inheritance. Your child-
ren will disown you. They will claim Carnevali for
their Father. He is the beginning of the Republic
of Youth.

You do not need to ask what Carnevali. There is but
one man by that name who will live beyond this cen-
tury."

Here are three high-powered Americans, Iberian,
Scandinavian, Celtic, who speak of him, suddenly become American,
like voices testifying to a miracle. And others, Yankees and
Jews among them, have declared as extreme a concern. What
magnet was there in it ?

-VIII-

Is it the magnetism of paradox Carnevali has ? ---
being a voluptuary steeped in misery but ruled by Taste. And
supreme Taste is threefold in its exactions; it will have none
of anything not tinctured by wit, darkened by wisdom, stained
with beauty. Hence the critical extravagance of a soul subject
to Taste. Life for him has to be at each moment critical to be
real, to keep him away from callouses. Opposites have values
for him, dissonance and harmony; the remote and the difficult;
the easy and the near at hand. He wants to touch limits indi-
cated by all dimensions, known and inferred rather than not
realize, rather than fall into rigid vulgarity; and to touch
them with the hand, the voice -- to become part of them.

Thus for Carnevali, Rimbaud is an infinite adventure
into godhead. But a finite phenomenon -- a voice like Caruso's
for example -- is not a banal thing. It is all of Italy
opening its throat to the naval, to be scorned no more than a
flood. With this virtue of loving urgently and without doc-
trine, he makes a critic in the derivative sense of the word,
**crisis**. The acute moment is what counts. It is live intellect
with roots in the senses, which summon glands and nerves into
the service of the brain, so that the brain is not lost in
hesitations. It may be this heart of a genius unembarrassed
in the presence of beauty and misery that gained for him these
unstinted tributes of friends.

Or it may have been his heart of Italy -- that country
where the sweet and the obscene walk together, both vital and
unashamed; where a wisdom of maquillage makes sculpture out of

-IX-

breads and cakes, hangs curtains in doorways and arcades, and
fringes on curtains, as if to veil the agonies and joys that
go on in the houses, the tragedies and feasts that file through
the streets to find shelter in houses. He brought perforce to
his writings this necessity of grace which surprises and piques
the inchoate American palate.

Then besides he has a quality of his own which belonged in a land where frontiers were still in the making. He might die of intolerance but not of inaction. He was intolerant but not tired, like the European with his "what does it matter ?" To him everything matters. He is young as we used to be young.

His victories and defeats in those eight years had
the same source --- a tremendous impatience. He flung the whole
of himself at this country that had no program or kitchen. He
would give it a menu, he would teach it how to cook. But for
that he must know it in all its sordidness of rich and poor
people. Robert McAlmon, who published his one book of writings,
told glamorously, admiringly, how once an old woman, crippled
and sick, was climbing the boarding-house stairs, and this poet,
nineteen years old, had pulled her into his room so that he might
know what it was to lie down with terrible old age. Carnevali
said: "No, I never did such a thing. McAlmon is a wonderful
boy, very romantic." Yet it was true he could boast that he
wished for syphilis not to spare him -- no one could understand life without experience of that hated unsocial disease.
It was true he was reckless and prodigal; went out to visit

-XI-

"How long ago was it
The dawn pleased Homer ?
And Petrarca -- was it among flowers
Dew-full, tearful for the love of the dawn,
That he sang his best song
For Laura ?"

He was a hurried man, as in his tales he called himself,
until sickness overtook him. It was not that dread disease his
willful mood had courted. Doctors disagreed as to the cause.
One of them in Chicago called it by a Latin name which means
intolerance of the spirit. In health he had that too. Sights
and sounds were not enough for their color, their tone, their
wave-lengths. They must be presage of amazing days, heroic
vision. If not, he was out to fight. He fought the drabness of
this country he had given himself to. How much longer he would
have fought alone its soot and cinders, not as some men do for a
change of government, but for a change of temper, who can say ?
Sickness overtaking him forced him back to a hospital in Italy,
and then to a room in an inn in Bazzano. By a violent leap,
with a melody, with a yell, or just with a grimace he had touched
boundaries of our language. When he returned, he wrote back:

"You are young and hurried; what threatens you
That you rush so, America ?
I have feared for you
The revenge of Love, O America !"

But in the years of his return he continues to write
in his adopted language, like an exile, and publishes in Amer-
ican magazines: "This Quarter", "Pagany", "Transition", "Poetry."

-XII-

When these later stories and poems are collected they will
make a second contribution to our letters not less valuable
than the others. They are older and more stoical, no longer
the cry of a rebel. He has no country now to make over.
Only a politician would make over Italy. Spiritually Italy
is fixed -- a country with a program, half-Roman, addicted to
authority; half-Greek, addicted to life. Yet Carnevali keeps
there the same immoderateness, seeds of which he wanted to
plant in America. He is the new modern, one of the first
rebels against the ugliness of revolution. A marvelous poem
by that name sees revolution dispassionately -- its grandeur
and its stupidity. And another, *Making a Fool of God*, belongs
to us especially for a kind of shrewdness; it is Americanized:

"Go on making a puppet-show of religion --
Hoping God will see you;
But be sure.....God is blind and deaf
long since:
War deafened Him
and Peace blinded Him."

The same agnostic writes:

"Flowers belie all pessimists,
Singing in the sun
a song older
than human passions."

Because these later writings like the earlier ones
will one day make part of American literature and will add to
the distillation that continually drips back from literature
into speech, this first long novel, *The First God*, which is a

-XIII-

record of a yet young life, is a confession certain to belong
seriously and vitally to American letters, certain to reveal
authentic design.

Chapter I.

Mother

Never once did I see my mother that she wasn't sick.
She was a morphino-maniac: she had got used to the terrible
drug after the laborious parturition of this poor champion,
Mister Me. My father, whom I was to see only when I was eleven
years old, lived separately from her. (This was natural and
easily understood.) But when they were together he used to
abuse and beat her on the smallest pretext. I was told by my
aunt of the ferocious jealousy of my father. Once he gave my
mother a beating simply because her hair was undone after a
half a day of ironing. Another time he beat her with a walking-
stick because, in the street, she had stopped to tie her shoe.
He beat my poor little mother almost to her death, certainly
to despair.....

This book contains all of my mother, or at least it
should for I am her son. Romance is life projected into a
written form, and I am in love with romance. My mother was in
love with pain and sorrow, as were all the saints before her.
I remember how she suffered and this memory is a sword, a hot
sword scorching my mind. I remember that she was marvelous
and this wonder stays with me.

-2-

She had a great heart, as great as the sea whose veins are
the many rivers that flow into it. Listening to the silence
that was the life of my mother, I hear the words of my poetry,
the words with which I could make a wreath for her head. My
mother was asleep most of the time and I should have given to
that sleep a voice, given a speech to that immobility. But
instead I have been broken by a tremendous disease, the most
unreal and most real of diseases, called encephalitis, and I
am nothing but a pot full of lilies, a noise, wind, nothing
more. My disease beats out a stuttering which is the title
of this book.

The morphine kept my mother asleep or sleepy three-
quarters of the days. But that was no easy sleep. My father
once caught her as she was trying to throw herself out of the
window. Mother, mother dolorous, I should cry thinking of you,
but my heart is cold and very like a stone. Mother, I would
give you now all the affection your misery claimed, but I am
too sick and fully engrossed with my own sickness. Your life
was a long agony, the prize awarded it being death. I stare
into the face of destiny and it is like a mirror rejecting my
life. But the life of my mother which I shall never write is
like a mirror rejecting nothing. Somewhere you must be suffer-
ing still, mother. You think of your beautiful youth wasted
by living with a brute. I think of your dead mouth.

Mother, because you carried ladyness with you, they

-3-

called you "the lady" in the little Piedmont town where we
went to live and my aunt to work for all of us. She had to
do so since you were crippled by enormous abscesses which
came from having used dirty needles for your injections. You
walked the streets of the village, crippled and sorrowing,
and sorrowing is the crippledness of the heart. But your face
still shines in my memory for you carried it like a benediction; your face was like a torch, held up on high. Mother, no prayer counts now nor does love, nor does the cleanliness of my heart against your bleached one, your destroyed one, your no-longer-existing heart. I would stand by your grave glorious with an old pain and terrible because of the homage I brought you. Your head, in the little cemetery of that little town, rests against the wall. Beyond the wall is an unkempt space of tall grass, grumbling with all kinds of small and big insects. I saw you dead, you were beautiful with your face color of the earth. You inspired tranquillity. A fool doctor had diagnosed your case as a mere cold while it was lockjaw instead, and you told him what the matter was.

Mother, do you remember your little boy who never
left you alone, who followed you everywhere with an insistence
that must often have made you sick? There is an atrocious
custom in some little towns of Piedmont that when one is in
agony the bells play a special music to fit the case, so that
often the sick man knows that the bells ring for him, in anticipation of his death. My mother, who could no longer speak,

-4-

stroked my head and gave me to her sister. Then she made a
gesture to mean ringing bells, and then she struck her own
breast, meaning _they ring for me_.

I do not know that I ever saw a finer mouth than my
mother's. It was sinuous and full-lipped and sensuous, large
but beautiful, and the great purity of the forehead I remember
well. You must know that I was only nine when she died. When
she was dying there came to the house a spotless black cat who
made friends with her right away and she used to feed him and
pet him and make him purr. They say cats, black cats, bring
misfortune, and whether or not I believe it, the fact is that
when the coffin lay in the courtyard, the black cat could be
seen going around the coffin, purring most strangely.

What can I tell you of myself, mother, except that I
have wasted in sickness a good half of my real life ? What can
I tell you to give you an idea of the misery I have suffered ?
Mother, oh, could I press my cheek against your cheek ! Yet
you beat me till the blood came out of my nostrils and mouth,
my little darling, my poor sick mama, you beat me because of the
poison in your veins. I have nothing to forgive you.

_Mater dolorosa_, you suffered enough to earn half a
dozen paradises. Mother, if the earth could be squeezed like a
lemon one would squeeze out sorrow and sorrow and sorrow. It
is long since that the earth was so stingy with its sons and
daughters. It takes to its bosom dead men only; the others
are forced to walk over it carrying in a bundle all their pains

-6-

## Chapter II.

### The White Beginning

I remember a white room with white sunlight coming in from tall windows; in it my mother and an old lady, a very white old lady, are stooping over me. It is in the city of Florence where a tremendous bronchitis and pneumonia had carried me near to the grave. I may have been from two to three years old then and they kept me going with asses' milk and asses' milk is not at all drinkable. This poor being, big-headed, narrow-shouldered, cost his mother much trouble and sorrow. All this could have been evaded had I died, and a good riddance too.

There was a ditch where the frogs sang at night their raucous songs and there was a white road where I fell one day and bled from the nose so copiously as to scare me stiff. There was a farmer's house that had holes in it instead of doors and there my old nurse lived. There was a great pleasant villa which my mother and aunt had rented. My little cousin went around the vines catching cicadas and eating them, wings, rattle, and all. In this big villa, it being a country villa, my mother and aunt kept many chickens and cocks and chicks. But the farmer who lived next to us poisoned all the chickens with a mixture we called copper-green and we were left with no chickens at all.

-7-

(Once my mother lost a scarf-pin and she had some suspicion that I had taken it, and she asked me for it. Without knowing, I suddenly got up and by means of a spade or similar instrument started to dig in a place in our garden, and after a little labor I found the pin and gave it back to mother. Reader, if I am not mistaken this was White also.)

But strongest in my memory are the sex adventures I had. I used to sleep with Maria, a big girl of fifteen, and sometimes she took my little hand and..... Another time, running after a girl, I caught her and suddenly fell on her and had an instant of intense delight. These things I can see as if they were under my eyes today. The adventure with Maria did not end there. I was four years old and already felt some pleasure in the little game, so much so that I grew thin and my mother, who must have guessed something, at last separated us.

Another villa we had was sad and full of gloom except for the wistaria falling over our garden walls. Also some olive trees nearby contributed to make it more picturesque. Dark was our villa, as if previously inhabited by ghosts, by the ghosts of people that had lived a dark life in it. But meanwhile the money of the two sisters was almost at an end. We went to live in Postoia, and then one fine day we left Tuscany for Piedmont, to be precise, for Biella, which is called the Italian Manchester, tremendously industrious and variously industrial. During this voyage I saw the sea. I saw the sea for the first time, for the first time I tasted spray. I saw

-8-

the sea which is such a large part of Italy. We passed
through an infinite number of tunnels and in the interval
between one and the other was the sea, the pulsating sea,
the sea of Ulysses and Herman Melville, a playful sea of so
many little waves and of salt spray which it spit in our faces,
all in the spectacle of the sea, in the great show of the sea,
the fickle sea, (since it changes dress so many times); the
sea of that bourgeois, Conrad, and my own sea manufactured by
my own imagination and by its presence. And by way of naive
contrast, there were some fishermen on the shore pulling and
fixing nets, puny tormentors of that so immense father. But
it was with enormous complacence that the sea watched these
puny tormentors, save that it should suddenly become serious
and terrific.

We stopped overnight at Vercelli and the next day
took the train for Biella.

-9-

## Chapter III.

### Biella and Cossato

That I was fair-haired when a small child while now I am dark, that is a little thing. And another little thing is that when I was six or seven I thought the greatest achievement was to call a woman a whore. That word had something magic and mysterious and deep and profound and philosophic and daring in it. With it I consecrated a woman. And another little thing is that when we captured cicadas we carried a long stick and then placed one end of it against the place where the insect was sitting and started to make it miserable: it felt that the place it occupied was unsafe and took a place on the stick. Then we lowered the stick with great gentleness and finally seized the poor insect.

I had two cousins, Leonardo and Federigo, two devilish brigands. They always walked in the most dangerous places, they always played at games the most hazardous, they defied God and His angels. At the age of three the bigger of them was so smart as to be the superstitious despair of all the nurses to whom he was confided. Now they have turned into two profligates for Life did the wrong thing to them. She handled them and now they are like two shipwrecks on a rock in mid-ocean. Having no profession at all, what could they do but become journalists? So now they have the precarious one of journalists of the worst and most dangerous sort.

-10-

Leonardo, the smaller, was the cicada-eater and the other ate dirt, thus causing enormous worms to breed in his belly. My play hours were divided between one friend and another and my cousins hardly ever intervened. Once Leonardo while eating a piece of bread was suddenly choked from having swallowed the wrong way. My mother, even half asleep as she always was, saw the thing and sticking her finger down the boy's throat, saved his life. That too is a little thing, pleasant to remember.

Even in our country villa in Pistoia I never enjoyed life very much, even though I was a very small child. Sorrow must be the greatest thing in my life. While at Pistoia I had made friends with our landlord's son and we used to do dirty things together; this too is a little thing I warn those American prudes who would make it a big thing. At Pistoia there was then the Congregation of the Brothers of Mercy and these fools scared me stiff every time I saw them. They wore hoods pulled over their heads with only two holes for the eyes, like the great Spanish Inquisitioners in olden days. They came out every time there was a dead man to accompany to the cemetery.

Biella is a small town, very industrial, rich with many textile works. My aunt sought work there and found it, as forelady in one of the big factories of the place. Biella is a town that runs the length of a main street, Independence Street. Not far from Biella is a famous sanctuary called Oropa

-11-

where one may go and stay for fifteen days at a stretch without paying a cent for one's room. But one succeeds in spending just the same because eating is tremendously expensive. One may see from afar little houses on the outside wall of which is written "POLENTA E LATTE", (which means cornmeal mush and milk.) On the contrary, however, one eats there anything from veal to chicken and sundries.

There is Biella the high and Biella the low, and Biella boasts the oldest rope-railway in Italy. I was put in a pension for young people and I cannot say I liked it much. There I had scarlet fever and my aunt who came to see me had to turn her face away lest I should see that she was quietly crying. This made a tremendous impression on me and I then knew for the first time that my aunt loved me. My mother and aunt quarrelled often, very often. This is, it was my mother who quarrelled since my aunt only kept on weeping and squeezing me tight as though she expected comfort from me.

At Cossato, a village of Piedmont, our life was more varied and finer, except for one lurid young man who initiated us into orgies of a sexual kind. But we were children and nothing can pollute the purity every child has. There we went around the fields destroying cherry-trees and apple-trees. Puny vandals, we used to let one of our crowd climb the trees and he threw down, instead of fruit, entire branches. The farmers knew of these things but were more scared of us than we of them. Cossato was a fine little country town. The

-12-

fields and hills were not far from it. We went around the hills looking for mushrooms and we found many of them often. Ah, there is no better pleasure than finding a mushroom hidden in the grass and then nearby finding another, for they go by couples, you know. Sometimes when we had a little money we bought of the farmers small cakes of cheese that were delicious. But that happened seldom because we were almost all the time dead broke.

The walk in order to reach the hills was magnificent too, but now they have put up a rope-railway to go to Oropa and the towns have most probably already polluted the countryside. Once I saw my dear aunt walking in the fields just outside Cossato. The poor thing was almost pretty, in a skirt, white with embroidered flowers, and likewise the waist. She was picking wild flowers, but some of these were painted on her dress. I never saw my aunt as genial and fine and glad. Risking being called clumsy, I told her so - that is, I told her she was pretty. It wasn't true, for she still had the same little head and the hard-looking countenance. She told me then that she was thirty-one. Ten years after she was still thirty-one.

Goodbye, chestnut-trees, if you are there no longer, goodbye, mushrooms and violets and strawberries, goodbye, little cakes of cheese, goodbye, small torrential rivers, goodbye, forests by the rivers - you probably have all gone, gone as all beautiful things go, not one lasts, as says great Carl. *

* Editor's Note: Carl Sandburg.

-13-

Chapter IV.

My Aunt

I hope something will be
done about this, my God !

Her name was Melany Piano and she was born of a
very good family in Turin, Piedmont, Italy. Turin is a grey
serious earnest city with long straight streets, a huddle of
square blocks. If she had been born out in the mountains
where Emily lived this wouldn't have happened, but then.....

I saw the old photographs of the family, a yellowish
mist on them. Photographs of the romantic period. Period in
which one still believed in the solemn face or the melancholy
face or the noble face or the pale face. The face of her
mother was solemn and mysterious. The face of her father was
that of a man with the heart of a knight, crowned with the
well-balanced smile of the successful man. Life to him was an
adventure in gallantry - women and war. He was, in fact, an
officer of the Italian army in the Erythrean expedition. He
had brought her and her sister along with him to Africa after
her mother had died. She had lived well and happily in Africa,
so she used to tell us children; all beautiful tales of
hyenas, pestilence, devoted negro servants and Ras Alula and
Ras somebody else.

-14-

She was skinny, she had a long lean nose, no curve
from the nose to the lips, small eyes, a tight bulging little
forehead; she was not attractive, as they say. Her hair was
very beautiful but that did not make a real difference. One
had to know her well to appreciate the beauty that was in her
hair. That is why she longed to be well-known, well-understood.
A famous explorer - there is a monument erected to his memory
in the city of Parma - fell in love with her. She was to
marry him. But he was the scientist kind, earnest and inele-
gant, she did not love him. He gave her a doll once, on her
nineteenth birthday, and she was very angry. He told her once:
"You are not attractive, Miss, but your mind has infinite beauty
and I beg you to let me take you for my wife....." But she was
too young and a bit too happy to understand a thing like that.
And he was naive and she was not, she was very well-read and
eaten up from within by the ever-hungry little old moth, romance.
He was a good fine man to marry and she knew so, but she wanted
a man with long soft hair and kind big hands. A man who could
sit for hours still and perfectly sad and who would understand
when the hungry hands of a well-read woman would smooth his hair;
who would not turn around and, out of embarrassment, try to
fight the situation with a smile or an irrelevant phrase.

She came back to Italy. She was still gay and light
but, already, she was motherly. She was motherly with every
man that came to her with not unkind sorrows in his manly heart.
Such a man came and she talked to him and on an evening they
cried together in front of a window; because the sunset burned

-15-

yellow and purple, the woman was thinking that it is sweet
and heavenly to understand the sorrows that have hardened
into the flesh of a man. He was to marry her but the family
did not want it. But he said: "You before, the family after,
though I love them very much." But instead he went away and
left her pregnant.

Who will say that he was wrong ? He had never
loved her. It is easy to believe that you love: he was an
honest man. She should have known. Now her father was dead
and she hadn't any money and the man wanted to help her out.
But she was proud. She went to work, she had a little monthly
allowance from the government; she got along and she loved the
baby, who was lean and sickly. His eyes were the eyes of the
father, very black and very cold, so black that there was no
bottom to them, so cold, so black that you would have called
them invisible eyes; eyes that were a darkness and not a light.

She was proud. She never forgave the man. Because
she was honest and hard she wasn't a loose girl and she gave
herself for love. She was magnificently aloof and the negro
servants in Africa thought she was a great Queen, the great
White Queen: the way she was majestic and sweetly hard with
them. She spoke of books and it was a marvel to see how every-
one was intimidated in her presence. To see how strangers
loved her after a few minutes with her.

Another man came along. He was shrewd and hungry for
a girl the way dogs and men are hungry in the summer in a
North American city where a girl is hard to get if you're not

-16-

initiated. He had her too. Because she loved him. Then there
was another child.

Two children, not brothers, and the mother a lady,
proud, now bitterly proud, but proud still like a Queen, poor
White Queen. And she was honest and she was so naive that when
the eyes of men who sought a girl met hers she did not really
know all that they searched and lewdly touched. For she wasn't
attractive and she knew it; that is why she was maternal with
men.

Then she was thirty-two. She met a man, a soldier,
who was twenty-five. He was beautiful, strong, a great sport,
a game guy, a spoiled child, penniless and ignorant. She had
a little money, she got him out of the army, where he thought
he'd have to remain, and got him a job. Taught him French and
how to know good books. Made him civilized and sophisticated.
He was intelligent; he never, after, wanted to admit that he
owed so much to her.

This man did not like the children.

He was young, so he fell in love with several girls
and she understood and suffered - and then she feared he'd go
away so she was good to him, she was especially good to him
when he broke her heart. Sometimes her heart would break and
she would fall in a swoon.

One day he was sick. He stayed in bed two months
with ulcers on his body and the fool doctor never could tell
what the trouble was. He went to the hospital and he was told
that it probably was the syphilis but that they couldn't be

-17-

sure until they had tested his blood. Next day on the card-
board tablet beside his bed, on which doctors wrote the
diagnosis, he saw some signs or words that amounted to a "yes".
It meant to him that he had the syphilis; he howled like a
wolf that has been caught. He came back home to her. He was
forced to stay in bed two more months.

He had caught it going around in brothels. But she
was a great mother to him while he stayed in bed. She knew
that he did not love her. She was maternal, although she was
old, although she beat her children, she was maternal with him.
She nursed him as a sweet nurse nurses a sweet child; and while
his hair was falling because of the syphilis he had caught in a
brothel, she'd call him "her lovely child."

But he did not like the children and he did not love
her. So she saw at last, well, the great grotesque.

When she beat the children she'd scream so that the
tenants of the house would all come out on the balconies to
gossip about "that crazy woman". She beat them and several
times she fainted, after. He cursed her to hear the noise she
was making. He cursed her vulgarly and she was still a lady,
a proud Queen.

She knew that he was getting to hate her. But it was
too late to act kindly, to be careful for his sake of what she
was doing, to put up a show of kindness and to discriminate.
Because oldness and ugliness and defeat were coming; and he was
going away. Sometimes she sat in the kitchen alone when the children
were out and she wished that he would die. She knew that he'd

-18-

go away when he was well.

When she got up every morning, she used to put powder
on her face. That was all right, but now she had to put too
much powder on her face. After her yelling to the children the
two wrinkles around her mouth were deeper. Before, a little
rouge on the cheeks sufficed, but now she had to put too much
rouge on and that was ugly.

And then, one day she had to buy three false teeth -
the front teeth, the front teeth !

Of course, he saw them.

So she beat the children, she swooned, she had headaches for days and nights.

He had to go to the hospital again. He came back
almost well, but he was doubled up and his skin showed under
his thin hair. He was bitter, too. He had the syphilis so
there wasn't much chance for him in life and so he wasn't going
to try to get along with her - he'd go after something easier.
One day he told her he'd quit her.

First she kneeled down before him and prayed. But
then she stood up and fought tremendously, fought beautifully
because she fought against the big failure which was now all
visible; she looked at the failure and fought and it was a
beautiful thing to do.

There comes the big failure and some bend
their heads
over their chests
like birds in the cold.

-19-

And some send their miserable bodies
to the absurd war.

But there are eyes in the world
that see the dance of the absurd,
and always someone
who carefully listens to the great song of it.

All her miserable body. Her skinny body and the last
hunger within it. She called her romantic heart and all the
books she had read to help her. Hurled herself - at last ! -
against the monster who awaits, during all the nights of the
infinite years, the hour of our awful scream. He waits for it
and when he has heard he waits still, to hear other screams,
he waits still, he waits forever. She hurled her miserable
body and her face, now like a dismal little clenched fist, in
a fight of teeth and nails..... false teeth !

And once more the world came to its symphonic night:
she cursed the stupid chairs and cursed the yellow lamp and
the shadows that had become infinitely old on the grey walls.
Cursed the windows, and the breeze they inhaled came over her and
made her sob with an agony of self-pity.

And now she would weep softly
because the breeze from the window was a
melody of remembrances.

She wanted her limbs to break; why wouldn't this
thing burst through her limbs ! She offered her limbs in
sacrifice if the awful thing would only burst through her !

-20-

Wanted to stretch her arms so violently that they'd sever
from her body - nodded her head up and down.

Her head swayed up and down and sideways, sideways
and up and down and she moaned, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh... boat
in the tempest. And the children wished that she would stop
sometime because they wanted to play.

I know that things await the terrible screaming.
The monster in the nights, the cavern whence the cool darkness
sails towards our windows and our mouths, the purest line of
the evening horizon on the lake - how many times have I gone
near to them, knowing that they awaited, have gone near and
stopped short, was afraid, or did not know how to scream. The
sheer pink flower before fantastic eyes in the morning, the
sheet pink flower is a gleaming eye looking upon a horror of
putrefied dreams. The sky when it is farthest from the earth,
the purest sky, the sky that has flown high and high because
the air was so clear, the sky feels the touch of the scream we
so fearfully constrain - as the very white breasts of a woman
hear the caress of the desperate lover. These things are await-
ing our horrible screaming.

The woman had repudiated her children, she had betray-
ed them. So now she did not dare to ask for the children's
love. She was too hungry. She knew that children give love to
everyone, but to hungry people they don't. Children are pure
and they are afraid of the awful eyes of hungry persons. Child-
ren refuse love to begging hearts because their world is a world

-21-

of fair and happy exchange, and they are right. And they are
right because they are beautiful.

And the man, he was just as bitter, his was another
fight, so he just shook her off.

God sent her a cancer in the womb and she died a week
after the big fight. I saw her dead. This lady, Melany Piano,
was my mother's sister, my aunt. I wrote this about her; I am
a writer and I write about persons and things:

You are dead and your mouth is stretched
and pulled down at the corners,
a curve swept downward.
Your hair is tall grass after
the flood has passed over it.
You have now become the image of the cry
that in your life
you have miserably and compromisingly striven
to utter.

Seriously, seriously,
with cool gentlemanliness,
I lay a word of reproach
on your grave, my aunt.
That was a crime, as I was only
a child and you were not
ashamed to soil me with the sight of your
tragedy.

-22-

You did not hide your awful
crazy hands from me.

Made a clown of me when
you dressed me in black
to mourn
your dead.

Still, desperate hands of last clean wind,
wind of the fall,
bring rags of noises from
the city to the cemetery:
the evening is a lady in grey
mourning for all the dead
and she is rustling by
on the road
beside
the graveyard.

Why do I come ? Were you not
my aunt ?
It's pity that brings me here,
or it is

your dead face projected
in all the darknesses which has driven
me here - for the soul of man is a ghost
and it haunts him and it drives him
But
it is not
sorrow.

-23-

Aunt, a sorrow for you would shatter the world,
send fragments on the horrible snout of God !
The day I saw you dead
your eyes were terribly open -
fingers searching
the infinite for
an echo to a cry of
horrible
pain.
Also, you were resting,
my aunt.

What do you want from me ? I do not try to explain,
I do not care to understand. I have not been cursed by those
who have died in misery: because I have not slain anyone with
misery. But I read the newspapers, I see rouge-and-powder faces
and sometimes as I pass alongside your houses with my hurried
heart for a moment attentive to your noises, I hear children
being beaten, yelling; and today I have seen one of those women
whose eyes have ceased to look at the world. I tell you, it's
Melany Piano's curse that is working out. Yes, surely, her
life had been accursed by a thousand other women like her who
had lived before.

I guess it's a well-balanced retaliation.

It's you who are concerned. You who are dragging
yourselves along under the shadow that Melany Piano casts upon
your world. Between the moon and you, tonight, looms the dead

-25-

Chapter V.

Father

My father is a tall man, almost six feet tall, who
carries around a dark face and hides a dark heart. My opinion
is that he is sick (one more sick man, alas !) He could not
be so incoherent, so irrational, so boresome and disturbing,
were he well.

My father took me into his house when I was eleven.
The first months he treated me very decently. He gave me one
lire every week and as I often bought books (small books, I
mean) he prophesied that I should turn into a poet or a similar
beast. For if there is a man who understands less about poetry
than my father, I do not know him. He reads so coldly that I
fear for my soul when I hear him. We used to make fun of him
when he was not there of an evening. He was pleased to call
himself a great cook and there is no denying that he understood
quite a little about it. But that is all he ever knew of the
arts.

When my mother died my father felt it was his duty
to take my brother and me into his house. He was good then:
perhaps owing to his romantic disposition which made him imagine
me as a poor orphan. He made me a present of a photograph-
machine, for there is nothing more piteous to certain minds
than the contemplation of an orphan. He even called me
"Manolucchio", a surname of his own invention which was not

-26-

altogether unsweet.

But we found fault in secret with all his ways. We
called him "Bissolati" (a member of the Italian Parliament),
and made the _iettatura_ gesture after him. But we could not
love our father. That was our great tragedy. Something had
willed forever that our father and we two should never come
near to one another. As for him, he grew fat on such misery.
He thrived on it.

When I first came into his house, I was surprised to
find that my father enjoyed life in the arms of two little
school-teachers. He had re-married, taking a little woman who
saw only with his eyes, felt with his feelings, obeyed him like
a little dog. She was patient and stupid. Several times she
wept on my vest-pocket, showing me a list of ciphers to the
effect that she had given much money to the family and now my
father wanted more and she had no more.

My step-mother liked me more than she did my brother,
for my brother once made her cry while I had nothing but good
words for her. It was all on account of two pairs of red socks
which my father had discarded. My brother abhorred them since
there was no way of escaping the sarcasm which the boarding-
school boys were sure to give them. So he threw the unhappy
socks up in the air and misfortune willed it that they should
fall on the curtain-rods. My poor little step-mother came in
and saw the socks dangling and began to cry. She was still
crying when my father came home and after much questioning she
revealed the source of her sorrow. My brother got one of the

-27-

beatings of his life.

My father used to beat my brother, the son that my mother bore him, till he bled, with awful refinement in his insults, with picturesque phrases, in a frenzy of play-acting, obeying thus his sordidly romantic nature. Once he spat in my brother's face, causing the poor boy to fall into convulsions. He called a doctor when I told him my brother had swallowed a dose of sulphuric acid. The sulphuric acid turned out to be dirty water, but he told the doctor that my father had spat in his face and I never saw a man more mortified than my father at his son's words. He felt shame - an emotion I never thought him capable of.

My father had a most vicious laugh: he showed his teeth when he laughed, which gave him the aspect of a ferocious beast. He had the Romagnli's kind of laugh. He seemed to drag that laugh from the very inside and throw it out. It was like a sneer, but a sneer is short-lived while my father's laughter continued. And when it was vented upon one of his little children it was like a snake running over a white plate. Oh, how I despised him for it, how I loathed that he should so defile such little things !

When he was absent from the house he left us under the care of an old aunt, my grandmother's sister. She was to tell him whether we had been good children or not. We were not good and when father came home we assaulted him on the stairs, screaming: "We have been bad ! We have been bad !" This affair was very ridiculous but my father did not see it so.

-28-

He scolded me if with the lire he gave me once a week
I bought fruit or some other good thing. There was, and there
is no green thing that throws its curls to the wind in his mind
or in his heart. At dinner, never a word was exchanged amongst
us unless my father quarrelled with my brother. Oh, the awful,
cheerless meals, the naked bad humor ! What endless boiled
beef, what idiocies my father uttered ! (He is so terrible that
he ends in being ridiculous. He is so fierce that he no longer
scares anybody). A tale ran through Bologna that he fired one
of his subordinates simply because the poor devil succeeded in
sending his family to the mountains during the summer months.
My father would make a point out of the corner of his napkin and
clean his ears with it at table; he would belch most ignomin-
iously. His humorous tales were sordid. (I cannot imagine him
ever making a speech, and yet he made one in honor of the fallen
in the war and it was widely appreciated.)

The case of my grandmother was as follows: she had
little wrinkles all over her face, so many of them, so many of
them. And she had a cracked little voice with which she sang
the same old song, always the same:

<u>Funiculi, funicula,</u>
Yammo, Yammo !

It was the song of the celebration of the making of a
rope railway up the side of Vesuvio. It was

<u>Yammo, Yammo in coppa va,</u>
<u>Funiculi, funicula.</u>

-29-

A stupid song, the stupidest ever. Casella made it
into a rhapsody, and it is bad, very bad music at that.

### Egghiuta Nannine, se n'e saliuta
In coppa sta.

(Do not let the student of Italian letters be dismayed
at these quotations. They are not Italian, they are Neapolitan.)

Finally, a stroke liquidated my grandmother. She was
fat, very fat, but when she lay straight in the coffin she seemed
a thinner woman. She was powerful, a big woman full of strength
and energy, but death made her something else.

She was a nagging old lady, stupid, vulgar, with a
habit of disapproval. I was so little grieved by her death that
I forced myself to stare hard at something in order to make my
eyes water. My brother who witnessed these tears and who did not
cry at all, could not believe his eyes. He had been the Benjamin
of grandmother, and I wondered at him. But I wondered still more,
and was shocked, when brother August said:

"Could you really cry for the old woman ?"

My father put me almost at once into another boarding-
school. Love and affection were all right but he preferred to
send his sons away. I imagine a cavernous song that is his song:
I imagine him walking at night in dangerous places, and he white
with fear for the shadows of the road. I imagine how he loves
his wife - how terribly ridiculous he must be in action. Be-

-31-

Chapter VI.

Pink

The Second Boarding School

This part I call "pink" because in comparison with
parts to come, it is surely meek and mild. But I detested them
enough, these jails where terrifically immoral things are done
by the inmates. I passed three years there.

My father almost immediately inscribed me in a school
at Bologna. I was then like a little lion unchained. This
national boarding-school was an old majestic palace with very
high ceilings and enormous windows. The lodges and galleries
were magnificently tall too. The white dormitories were
impotent in their simplicity. The town that enjoyed itself
outside in spite of us poor prisoners was a pretty town.

A man who tended the convicts helped to make my first
spiritual and ideal education. He gave me "The Three Mousk-
queteers", which I read in French, understanding more than one
might imagine. It was the first book that I read in French and
he loaned me the book because its French is extremely easy.
But right after that he gave me Eugenie Grandet, and "La
Derniere Fee", and he himself read to me the dreary, macabre,
fierce poems from "Les Fleurs du Mal." I loved to read. At
home I had devoured almost everything in the way of reading
matter. I read "Nick Carter", "Nat Pinkerton", "Buffalo Bill",
and some terrible appendix novels given me by an old uncle of

-32-

mine who had, through his own patience, made fifty or sixty
of such things into the shape of books.

This teacher was the first, De Fraja, who helped
make my education. The first after my aunt who might well
claim that she had been responsible for my education, the
education of my soul, I mean. I feel she made of me a poet,
even in those early days of my infancy and boyhood. I remember
how she beat her children, but she loved them like a lioness.
I remembered that once the river in Cossato, the Strona,
flooded the nearby country and threw down one of the arches
of the bridge. They told my aunt that the last they had seen
of her children was over the bridge. She became frantic and
showed then her lioness-love. She went insane and lost so
much weight as to seem a skeleton. I remember when I went to
see her from the first boarding-school she frightened me,
chilled my veins, and I could not help crying. She folded me
in her arms and loved me for having come, and loved me for
being there, and loved me because she sensed a certain weight
of experience in me which she did not find in her children,
they being very small. She used to confide in me. (I do not
come like a soul in pain near your grave, my aunt. I'd be
afraid were I to do so that I'd rouse once again the tempest
that is in you. For death for you should be a long hush.
But I do not believe that you in death cannot hear me, and
see me, and watch me. And this is not a Catholic notion: for
I believe that only certain fine people retain their qualities
even in death. A soul comes high, not every one may purchase

-33-

it.) I had no better companion, no better confidante, no better loving person. How horrible it was to have seen her dead! Her eyes were tremendously open. She was terrible: she seemed an insane rebel. There was terror and fury in her face. I never saw a worse-looking dead person. Her hair seemed like grass at the bottom of the river. It was as if a stream had passed over it. Surely death had given her no repose, she must have suffered even in death, as my mother had. Ah, that death should not be glad enough to take all from us without distorting even our miserable faces.

De Fraja was a tiny man with a head pressed in at the sides, which caused him to be called "Little Valise" by the irreverent lot of scholars. As for his estate, he was a miserable man, slave of his profession, slave of his habits which his profession implied, slave even of his little education which he quickly made mine.

Our teacher of Italian language was the then famous short-story writer, Adolfo Albertazzi. He was a fat man, tormented by gout, who could hardly move in his chair, and he had two moustaches that looked like two slices of hard cold cornmeal mush. He was the sweetest, most naive man in the world, and we took such advantage of his goodness. We were a group of three: Mario, Marcello, and I. When one of us was inclined to take the straight path, the other two were there to cajole the third back.

Of my companions, I recollect Purrini, who had two left feet: Preziosi, who had the face of a small monkey:

-34-

Gazzoni, who boasted of the things he would do when out of jail.
(I repeat it, it was a jail.) Fontana, the son of poor farming
people, who had a limpid, clear intelligence and whom I admired
rather than loved: Roboozi, another inmate, who had a voice
like Whispering Sullivan. (He was unhappy because every time
he spoke it sounded as though he were shouting.) Matteuzzi: he
sung horribly and out of tune and he would not have anyone say
or even think so. Zorzi: with two Zs to his name, he still
succeeded in turning many consonants into Zs. As for the
others, my chief enemy was one of them. He pestered me contin-
ually ..... The name of that individual was, ironically enough,
Preziosi (Precious.)

There was too Morten, a boy of German origin, a little
humpback boy, a dreary sort. But it is true that the boarding-
school air makes people dull, and so do the obscene practices
which blossom and blow in that atmosphere of filth, in those
places of enormous walls and long dormitories, of large study-
rooms and crazy superiors and crazier waiters and cooks. There
was also the director, a just if stern man, who came to love
me when he heard all that De Fraja said in my favor.

Oh, the florous walks on the Bolognese hills ! The
great hikes along the green country roads, perfumed by jasmines,
by honeysuckle, gloriously clad they were in flower dresses !
The dust, which are feet raised, in our eyes. Certainly these
hikes were altogether more useful to us than sitting in a nasty
room filled with the breath of students. All we learned in the
school-room we were doomed to forget utterly, for school is a
place in which one forgets all one ought to remember and remembers

-35-

all one ought to forget.

I remember the long walks that got us home tired and hungry, but I have forgotten how to do long division. I damn the old boarding-school and the years spent studying the absurdities teachers asked us to swallow. (Teachers wear like a double belly the pride of the matter they teach.) Damn the old hungry gang of professors set after us, at our heels, after us all the time, insisting that we be religious (oh, that religion of theirs !), that we be quiet and still. But, poor devils, that was their bread and butter, and often bread without the butter at all. Damn the dirty things all the collegio boys did, for I was one of the few that did not, reeking, filthy with a sterile, awful love.

I have never had much of an inclination for sports and I did not join the kind of football club. I never found any pleasure in watching a boxing-match, nor a cyclist race, not to speak of golf or baseball. There is always something brutal in one man seeking to win at the expense of another. There is violence in every race, always something awful in a match. The only sport I love is swimming: I was not a professional swimmer but I could swim a mile and a half.

Peloni was the leader of our gymnastic games. He was a fine piece of a man, tall and awfully strong. He played the trombone in our band. He was one of the most genial boys in the whole school, ready to laugh, ready to play, slow to take offense, and slow to be angry with anyone. Once I went to his study-room, the study-room of the bigger boys, and inside his desk, scratched

-36-

there with a pen-knife, was written: *This year is the last and then I shall go home whether God wills or God doesn't will.*

At that time he was ill, and then it developed into
meningitis, and the poor boy died of it.

I won five years of board and room at one of the best
national boarding-schools, but my brother had won nearly nothing
so my father gave us the same clothes and scolded us both
bitterly. My brother died of wounds received in the war and when
my father sent me this news to America he added that he forgave
the unfortunate boy for all the sorrow he had caused him. This
forgiveness repelled me so that I never answered the letter.
I hold my own rancour against my brother, even though he is dead.
I was very small, very little, and he liked to elaborate his
ways of beating me. A favorite way was to catch me by the feet
and hold me up thus, and then suddenly drop me to the floor.
Upon the heap of memories concerning him is the memory of the
beatings I got.

But there are other things I remember of him: I
remember that my brother, a tall lanky contraption, was once in
love with a school-teacher who taught in a village near Bologna.
It was towards this village we rode, a party of us, to make our
serenade. Serenading is never done in solitude, and I remember
there was a muddle of bicycles: four bicycles should have been
produced and there were only three. We were unfamiliar with
the road and we woke up a peasant to ask him the way. He was
angry and cursed us all, but finally he put us onto the right
road. The night was cold and very foggy and we rode along in

-37-

silence, following the infinite roadway to her window, feeling
we were always just there, and yet never quite arriving. There
was just enough of a path beside the ditch, and we kept to this
for the rest of the road was unspeakably muddy.

When we at last arrived, my brother took the violin
from its case which seemed so like a coffin. As soon as he
began to play a string snapped with a *tuck*. But he went on
with his: O, Lola che di latti hai la camise...... singing
courageously, for courage was all he had left. No window ever
lit or opened. The lady was probably asleep, fast asleep.
The rest of us were hidden near the hedge, but my brother stood
out conspicuously, and so I can see him now, playing his broken
violin to the absolute silence of the night.

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Chapter VII.

Myself

The time has come at last when I must discourse on
my outward appearance: here goes.

First of all, my face: keen, stubborn, sometimes very
hard but more often soft. Women tell me I have beautiful eyes
but I could never believe them. I have a very high forehead
(Oscar Wilde once said that a high forehead was a sign of stupid-
ity; of course, he had a very low forehead.) My lips are fine,
sensuous with quaint sinuousities. Once I fell in love with my
hair: so smooth, unwavy, straight in not an unpleasant way,
almost black. (A different tale could not be told about my
hair that was.)

I am a shabby, untidy, lazy fellow. I do not know how
to tie a necktie and my pants can never keep the crease nor the
jacket the original shape. (I'm speaking now of the time when
I was comparatively healthy.) My shoes are never shined, for
a shine costs ten cents and ten cents is money even for a
millionaire, nay, more so for a millionaire.

I improve now every time I shave, but only while the
shave lasts. I like the curve that is in the articulation of
the jaw. This curve is sweet but it would have been better
had it been square and strong. I look a little like a poet, by
way of wistfulness and dreaminess, but my face is often fierce,
especially when I get up in the morning. It mellows as the day

-39-

grows......

My face means explosion, and that will happen soon.
It means stagnation, and I have no hurry to make it different.
In my face there is the whole struggle of stale ideas, impressions,
sensations. Who said the face mirrors the soul ? What deluge
would this thing be if often repeated !

To call a man romantic now is the lowest form of
abuse, but what can I do ? My face is hopelessly romantic.
Surely, I am fat-headed in this sense: if we were to detach Kay
Boyle's head from the body it would drop down and then bounce
back to its owner. It is elastic. But if mine fell from my
body it would drop down and stay wistfully there. The old
Christian saying: "Love thy neighbor as thyself" does not work
with me since I detest myself. I have noticed that my eyes have
a Chinese slant which is not pretty. I always had a funny way
of walking which was accentuated as the years went by and my
sickness grew more and more serious. That is, I bend my right
leg at the knee and swing my feet as though I wanted to throw
them away.

Speaking of my inner appearance, I must acknowledge
that I possess the quality of forgiveness to others, which is
very dangerous; and also that of being eager to admit anything
to my cost and peril. Yes, I believe no woman is ablt to admit
her faults. (Because she is afraid of her own weakness: she
believes that if she cedes she loses - perhaps, because she has
little to lose.) To admit is eminently Christian and women
are very seldom good Christians.

-40-

I become angry when I think of women's will to get
the vote. For years men have been making a mess of the damn
thing, and who would tell me that women could make a lesser
mess of the damn thing ? I should like to throw the whole
thing in the lap of women, give them full power, and see.
Women could not do much worse than men but there is no reason
why she should do much better. The Vote, oh, thank you !
You can have it, whole and untrammelled. You can sleep sweet
sleep, resting your head upon this terrible octopus, the Vote.

Yes, this is my inner appearance, so called with a
reason. Some of the rays emitted by my outer appearance filter
through and stain my inner self. My mind cannot be beautiful
because it is bovine and obese. I have a great reserve of good-
ness that rots in the long run. My goodness is a real power.
It means that I often flatter others.

Since I fell sick my reservoir of tears dried up and
I cried no more. That is a terrible thing......

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Chapter VIII.

First Love

The lawn was as clean and cool as a lake. We had
evening conversations there. We made love there. We were so
many girls and boys together, as many boys. Pre ten-year-old's
love. She would take me by the hand and whisper to me. We
made love, or thought we did, love being such a delicate thing
that making love or thinking you are making it is about the
same thing.

Everyone of the crowd had his sweetheart. There was
the daughter of a famous industrial man. She would take me by
the hand and confess in a whisper:

"I love you and I love Dick and I love Joe."

I enjoyed precedence, but only to a certain extent,
for a doubt, subtle as a flea in the ear, murmured to me that
when she talked with another of her lovers she probably gave
him the precedence.

One evening, a friend of mine - a boy - moved by some
impulse I cannot remember, kissed me soundly, and she who had
been a spectator said:

"I bet you wouldn't kiss any of us girls so nicely".

With a thread of a voice I answered that I could kiss
with equal expansion... So she put a tiny hand to my mouth and
I kissed it; but, oh, so bashfully, oh, so gently, and I thought
I might become an all-day sucker and almost fainted.

-42-

How dear was that magical hand from that day on,
it is difficult to say. I was submerged in a flood of passion,
ten-year-old passion, as some fools say. For one is often
passionately in love at an early age.

Platonic love is nearer to the essence of love than
sexual love: I deduce this from the fact that it is the usual
thing to have somebody say of his sweetheart that he never
thinks of love for her except platonically. For a young man,
a woman who gives herself is generally despised and often
called a whore, and a <u>fille mere</u> has the same name.

Isolda was a poem of gracefulness and beauty - (how
is it then that she appears to my mind now as very unbeautif-
ul with too large a nose and too thin a face ?) She was thin,
delicate. She was also so ingenuous that she believed calves
came into the world through their mothers' mouths.

She opened my heart and threw into it with her beauti-
ful hands, a handful of love. So sweet was the sensation that
I could not help considering this a great love. I never dared
formulate a wish or prayer about this love. Everything that
was very human spoiled it: it feared extraneous intervention
terribly.

<u>All the spring songs were you,</u> <u>the birds sang for you</u> -
<u>and my heart, light and slight, sang too.</u> You deserve remembrance
<u>and I give it to you with full hands.</u> There is a tiny place in
<u>my heart where you live and suffer and talk and weep.</u> You are
<u>there completely, tremendously, and fatally.</u>

-43-

She walked about like a peacock but there was pity for poor men in her sweet babble. Her small face was all a-flame as she talked of things she necessarily knew nothing about.

There was another little lawn girl who had a deal more common-sense than Isolda. She was very pretty: she was a modern beauty, romantic, while Isolda had an ancient sort of beauty, classic. With this girl all the boys spoke of forbidden things. But she would not let herself be touched. So many women are like that: free in their talk but pure in their ways.

Oh, how many dreams I threw after you and you never knew them ! How many dreams, lonely and melancholy dreams, my up-to-date, my barren heart conceived ! They were pushed along the road of dreams by your small white hand. So small was your heart, a little fist merely, and yet how big was the love you hid there !

A few days after the days of the lawn, they told me she had given herself to a nasty way of living. She was fire - until she burned out. Because there is the youth of the city (but I am ashamed to give such a name as "youth" to those sinister individuals) who lie in wait for such burning girls. The city is on the watch for just such victims: victims of their own strong passion, victims of their own dark lust.

But Isolda was the queen of the lawn and when she went away the lawn became (from green) yellow and squalid and desolate. I knew her city address so I passed and re-passed before her house, hoping at least for a sight of her. But that

-44-

never happened. I carried my sorrow about.

All the splendor of the new-cut grass lost its
intensity for me. Sleep was the most difficult thing; eating
came next. Love gathers together every mood, every new mood,
every need and every lust. Keats said once that not every man
may love. Only the best people or the poets may love. Our
love was aristocratic, aloof, austere.

-45-

Chapter IX.

The Third Boarding School

My father put me in prison again. This time it was
in one of the first collegio of Italy, perhaps the best of all.
He would never have been able to support me there had I not won
the prize which meant room and board free to the end of my
schooling.

The most beautiful place in the most beautiful town,
for that collegio was one of the splendors of Venice. For me
Venice is the loveliest city in all the world. Is there any-
where such a great thing as the Canal Grande of the Palazzo
Vendramin (it has now been half destroyed by Austrian aeroplanes),
and the lace in stone which adorns the famous Gold House, "Ca'
d'oro" ? And the small rios of Venice, poor and wonderfully
silent. Venezia is like a lotus flower on a thread of water.
Nothing in Venice is unbeautifal. All is resplendent, all
speaks of ancient artists who have given their living hearts
to the creation of this naive little girl.

Some prefer the noise of other cities to the silence
of Venice. But the silence of Venice has something magical in
it. She is the only silent city in the world. She has a warm
soft mysterious silence. Queen of the lagoon; she huddles in
a corner of it, but she is still a Queen. Her palaces are her
laces. She is always ready to get married, therefore the laces.

-46-

How much dreaming was necessary to think you out, Venice?
It seems impossible that human hands made you. I would give
away all modernity for one look at Venice. I would give away
all the unlovely new things for a single look at you.

The Lido did not have my enthusiasm for the Lido is
essentially bourgeois. Although she is at times dishevelled,
she is still a prude. The Lido is your new thing: think of it
in connection with Venice and it disappears in shame. Venice
slides over the lagoon, ever so light, ethereal almost. That
is the secret of Venice, her lightness upon shallow waters.
The only filthy thing in Venice is when they shut off a canal
in order to clean it. The mud is almost blue, so black it is !
And the smell is pestilential. But if the Grand Canal is not
altogether clean, neither were the hands of Michel Angelo.

No, Dante even could not shut her in hell for she is
all Paradise. She is all holy and majestic. She is all of lace.
She seems to float upon the waters and from afar the buildings
seem to emerge from water. The gondola belongs to no one but a
poet. Perhaps there is something swifter, but there is nothing
lovlier, nothing so light, so elegant, gliding with such ease,
with such peace, and with such majesty. They say a gondola costs
more than an automobile and I am the first to believe it.

In this beautiful town there is a national boarding-school and there my father put me.

At the boarding-school I fell in love with a boy a
year younger than I. A real, fervid, passionate, beautiful love.

-47-

I loved this little boy and I besieged him with letter upon letter. Although we lived in the same place, I tormented him with my letters. He was a very good-looking little fellow and he returned my love, but weakly and without enthusiasm.

I was in love: all the world took on a different aspect. I was in a sort of fog, in a daze, in a trance. Love of the purest kind was mine. I loved him deeply, with all the love a poor heart can afford. My letters were passionate, and with the environment of beautiful Venice, my love grew very strong. He, being a Venetian, seemed not to feel the beauty of the Grand Canal.

The _Collegio Marco Foscarini di Venezia_ was a kind of militaristic institution. On review day, the first Sunday in June, we were mustered to the Piazza San Marco like the rest of the army. Moreover, we were the best marching men. But although I hated the place, I mixed my love for the Grand Canal with my love for Giovanni Genovali. He and Venice were the two splendors of my life. When I had his hand in mine, I was happy. When I was walking by his side in the hour we spend promenading, I was in the seventh heaven. When I was free to talk with him, I was embarrassed, shy, shameful. In short, ours was the ordinary love affair.

I wasn't much of a beauty when I was in this last boarding-school, but afterwards, of course, I became very handsome. (Except for now, a period in which there is no beauty for me. Yet, I am handsome still even though I am almost bald-

-48-

headed, because some female judged me so.) I had a great deal
of straight hair which I insisted on calling "abject". I thought
I was a repulsive little human being. I bathed my yellow face
in great profusions of lavender water. During these days I
thought I was fearfully ugly. The mirrors told me so, or I
thought they did. Yet, judging from later years, I could not
have been so very ugly and Giovanni assured me that I was not
quite ugly.

When I left Venice to go to Milan, I spent a day
loafing through the city, and he with me. I don't know how many
kisses I gave him on the pretext that I was leaving Venice for-
ever. He hardly returned them, those unfortunate kisses.

I know from "Jean-Christophe" that such love-affairs
between boys are frequent, and often are the most innocent and
pure things ever. I think they became pure by the force of their
greatness and power. But at last the superiors noticed something
between me and Giovanni Genovali and we were separated. They
put him in one *escaude* and me in the next. I was the superiors
at the school who profaned our love and covered us with abuse for
a thing they could not understand. We two, we knew of the orgies,
the ribaldry and scoundrelism about us, and we two who were inno-
cent must pay for the sins of the others.

But in the new place, Giovanni had to do with a man
whom they considered even more dangerous than myself, and in the
end they put him back with me. But then came the tragedy.

We had gone for many miles into the country on a so-
called strategic walk. All the time I noticed that Giovanni paid

-49-

more attention to the above-mentioned profligate than to me and
jealousy rose in waves over my brain. I walked in a yellow fog,
speaking to no one, and how at such moments one resents the
thoughtless joy and noise the others make! I was shut within
myself, twice as miserable because I was not able to cry. I
was like the shrunken rag of a man: I desired to die, to die on
the spot. But what I really desired was that he come to me and
beg forgiveness or that he come to me and make a glorious and
lasting peace.

Giovanni did come to me, then, but with some foolish
remarks. I merely greeted him. I had fallen into the bad habit
of calling him *Nino* and he fiercely resented this name. So after
a word or two spoken aloud, terrifically loud, we parted in anger.
That evening he had a letter brought to me in which he said that
he wished to have nothing more to do with me. I wrote to him,
once, twice, several times, seeking to put in my letters all the
sorrow he had given me. But these he never answered.

So my first symptoms of hysteria came on me: once I
fancied that I heard a keen thread-like noise, a far-off whistle.
I jumped up from my study table and the silence was broken by my
loud fierce sobs. Another time I had a wild attack of nerves
because of the humiliation of being put with my face to the wall.

It all ended by my being expelled from school, very
delicately expulsed, but thrown out just the same. Some letters
were sent to my father in one of which was the justification.
The day I left the boarding-school was the last day we saw each
other. We were together all day and went bathing at the Lido.

-50-

There I noticed for the first time how strong my sweet boy had grown during those years of gymnastics at school. Now he was as strong as a bullock, with a great chest and strong arms. Such a type of man, I knew, was not made for my affection.

At first, my father refused bitterly to take me back, but the Prefect, my father's immediate superior, was written to and my father at last agreed. No one can describe how fiercely, how wildly, how horribly he welcomed me. All the vicious expressions that had rankled in his heart for years were vomited on me. My whole being was revolted. Certainly I had never seen a man as angry as he was that day. I never heard anyone so vilely rebuking.

And now, for a time, my nerves were such that I broke almost everything I touched. I broke the English water-closet by stepping upon it to see how the thing functioned; thus I broke a set of oil and vinegar bottles, and many other things. My father's sharp and only comment was: "I *scienta* Tott." There was great bitterness in that utterance and it gave me pain.

One day the servant attacked me by saying: "The President of the school has telephoned your father....." I immediately left the house. It turned out later that the man who had telephoned was the president of my brother's school, but that remark to me filled the cup to the brim. I went to Mario's and there, sobbing like a damn fool, I wrote a letter to my father in which I said that I was sick of his house, terribly sick of it, that I had quit school forever and that I wanted to go to America as soon as possible. When I saw my father he told me he agreed to my going to America since, and these were his words: "For the

-51-

enemy in flight we build a golden bridge." I understood.
I was then the enemy of that big beast.

He gave me two lire to spend on food and lodging, three
lire which would come to me every day. Instead, things were
arranged like this: Mario's mother and father wanted me to stay
with them... but I anticipate.

-52-

Chapter X.

Last Days in Italy

I had conceived a great love for the family Pacini in
which Mario, one of the best friends I ever had, played the part
of son. I loved the little mother and also the little father:
the latter was so strong that when he shut the water faucet or
similar things the rest of the family had to unite all their
efforts in order to open it again, or they had to use wrenches.
He was the dearest man.

They fixed up a sort of cot and I slept by them. And
I ate with them also. So the two lire were intact and every
evening we went to the theatre, in the top gallery, to see things
which pleased me, the reader of Nick Carter, very much. The
Grand Guignol, fierce sort of one-act plays in which there were
often more dead men than personages. The actor was one of the
worst Italy ever had. To give you an idea, I shall mention a few
of his plays:

"A La Morgue". A man is suspected of having killed a
red-breeches. They bring him to the morgue and place a bottle of
presumed absinthe near him. He finishes the bottle and then,
turning around, sees for the first time the body of the gendarme,
all dressed up as when he had killed him, stretched out on a case.
Not only is he horrified by this sight but he thinks he sees the
cadaver move. He jumps up, screaming that he is ready to eat
his own tongue as he had eaten his heart, and the Commissaire,

-53-

hearing these hysterical words, jumps into the room, and screaming too, accuses the man of murder and puts him under arrest. That ends it.

"The Terrible Experiment." A doctor believes he has discovered a way to bring dead men back to life. He tries this experiment on his own daughter who has died. But as she comes back to life she grasps her father by the neck and will not let him go. Thus the old man dies a horrible death.

And so on, many more in that style, which may seem boring to you but which made my delight.

Meanwhile, my friendship with Mario was growing and assuming a special form. The thing I admired most in him was his muscles, his strength. In that sense, he was quite like his father. He was also a kind of poet. He wrote such exotic drivel, so utterly obscure and incomprehensible that it was a marvel and a wonder. But he laughed full-heartedly at his own efforts and was the first to recognize how clumsy they were.

I was almost in love with Mario's sister, but that was so long ago that I have even forgotten her name. She studied medicine and was a good student. But then I was ready to fall in love with all and any girls: if a girl turned around to look at me I was sure right away that the girl in question was madly in love with me. But I never dared approach any girl: indeed, I feared them all and every one. (I remember a girl school-fellow whose sympathy I won by defending d'Annunzio against Manzoni. Of all the queer discussions this was surely the queerest! None of us knew much about the two authors, none of

-54-

us had any particularly definite reason for defending or accus-
ing either of the two writers, and why did we choose two such
different human being as Manzoni and d'Annunzio ? These were
two opposites, no comparison was possible.)

These last days of Italy were the very best of my life.
Mrs. Pacini's food was excellent, and her hands on my face when
she wanted to wake me up in the morning were very dear. There
was a mystery in Mr. Pacini's life and he did not like being
reminded of it. He had made a great invention concerning the
telephone and he kept all the drafts of this hidden in a drawer,
and woe to him who opened this Barbe Bleue's forbidden room.

I lived with them and we went to the theatre every
night and my father and his two little school-teachers could go
to hell: that was my wish for them. But if he'd ever come to
know how I spent that money he gave me, the sky would have
opened up and shown all the cataracts of heaven ! He would not
have beaten me (he never beat me, he hated me too much to beat
me), but he would have spared no words. He would have called me
all sorts of dirty names.

I have never regretted one day that I was not at school.
I had the spirit of rebellion and these days marked my awakening
to many things. For instance, I discovered "Futurismo". I wore
a flowing necktie and was believed to be either an anarchist or a
futurist, the two things being strangely mixed together. We
would go up to the Santa Luca, a kind of sanctuary, and on the
platform beside the porches we built, with snow, an enormous
phallus. Old Paderno heard our riotous voices, our singing, our

-55-

screaming, and the priests that passed by cursed us and threatened to have us put in jail.

Bologna had become so dear to me that when I left her I wept for her. I did not weep for the friends who had come to the station to say goodbye, but the last bits of Bologna I saluted with great respect, almost religiously.

At Milano I stopped to see my two cousins and we went to the theatre to see an old pochade by Hennequin and Veber - or was it the famous duet, De Flers et Caillavet ? I spent the rest of the night, from the theatre until four in the morning, on a bench in the station waiting-room, trying hard and uselessly to sleep. The next day I was in Genoa, with the perspective of spending two whole days in that city. I saw but little of it but that little did not please me at all. There is something awfully tawdry about this city which people insist on calling "The Superb."

There is a kind of alley in Genoa where one can buy all sorts of tarts made of vegetables cooked in great pans. I bought and ate a lot of these things, with the result that I was barely aboard ship when I had a violent attack of sea-sickness. That sickness clung to me the length of the Mediterranean while the sea was as smooth as oil.

So I said goodbye to Italy, she to whom I gave so little and from whom I received less. (Oh, yes, she gave me something, too. While I was still at school I was made a member of a Society for the redemption of Trent and Trieste. I collected some money making new members and spent a happy Christmas with

-56-

the appropriated funds. That was almost all she gave me. Not even a sweetheart. Also, although now I can taste nothing, there was a time when I and my brother stole bottles of " Lambrusco" which we drank at our ease during the night in boarding-school. And, of course, we always stole the best bottles from my father's cellar.)

To Italy I owed my spoiled childhood. No thanks go to
Italy and no thanks shall I give her. (But I must at least be
dutifully thankful to her for being beautiful and that chance
sent me to the most beautiful of all her cities - Venice.)
Beautiful, sea-embraced Italy, beautifully girt by Florence,
crowned by the Alps, not a bit of your shore is less than marvel-
ous. How I have loved the beautiful sea of Italy, even when it
is as ugly as the Lido is (like Coney Island, put to shame by
the crowds of bathers.) Here is a parable of the sea: Oh, sea,
you stretch out calm and serene, an open page on which the word
"Peace" is written in enormous letters; or you pound the beach
with the closed fists of your waves. You are forever beautiful,
oh, sea; sea of my beloved Italy, when you are calm your little
waves run in and out on the beach like a smile and a sigh. When
you fling your great horses onto the shore, this is your tremendous
laughter; it is your incomparable beauty which erodesthe
rocks and denudes and laves them. All the oldest songs are
yours; in you it would be easy to die, for one would need only
to let oneself go, without struggling, and death would come.

Nor is it difficult to live in you, for shipwrecks
are rare now that man has got the best of you, you the uncon-

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querable, beautiful wild beast. You thunder on through the
night, trampling under foot the sleep of those who are not
accustomed to your voice. Or you whisper your love to the
beach which listens reverently to you. You are our common
possession and at the same time the most beautiful of all the
gods. From the ship I saw that the sea near Genoa is dark blue
and the sky the same.

Goodbye to ravioli of Milano, Zampone from Modena,
Agnolotti of Turin, spaghetti a la Napolitaine, goodbye !
And yet it was not food I was nostalgic for, leaving Italy.
It was the essence, the choice part of Italy I was leaving for-
ever perhaps. I remember that when in America I happened to sing
an Italian song in the streets, I started to weep like a fool.
One song does sometimes mean a whole nation. Besides, it is
possible to long even more for a country in which one has suffer-
ed much. The longing becomes in time a kind of compensation for
the suffering. There is an intimacy with a country one has
suffered in and it is this intimacy one misses most when away.

Yet at first I must confess that I felt no great sorrow
or nostalgia, for Italy meant my father to me; it meant the beat-
ings my brother gave me, and it meant my terrible grandmother,
and the loss (why "loss" then ?) of her who had been a familiar
thing.

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Chapter XI.

Arthur Rimbaud

His life is an adventure of the gods; anybody who
has not dropped his useless bundle and gone on a great adven-
ture will not understand him. I have gone on a great adventure
and I may sometime personify a god I have seen for a moment.
I would, as much as I could, personify him. If you do not
believe in Youth do not utter vague blasphemies. Rimbaud is
the advent of youth. Almost everything else in the world is
unbelief in youth; diplomats, statesmen, chiefs of all works,
generals, they're all old because they say, queerly, old age is
ripeness - as if an apple is ripe when it has wrinkles on its
face ! Almost everything else in the world, besides the poets,
who have all believed in youth, is a consecration of the error
that life is from youth up. It is from youth down.

Critics are dead leaves lying still while the hurricane
sweeps by high above. To utter something while enraptured in
the hurricane, that is the only way to compensate to me my not
being the hurricane; and the only way to criticize a poet.
Rimbaud said gloriously that the attainment of poetry is the
attainment of life. To know myself and to possess it - the
perfect image is the perfect sensation and the perfect life.

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To have myself in the days of youth, with every inch
of my body tense, looking and listening and interpreting, the
dualism of body and soul and the dualism of life and immortality
being then risible questions which are the appropriate doubt of
people who have lost IT (both things, both times, forever: old
people). To mould myself, then, through a "long, immense and
reasoned upheaval of all the senses." Certainties of the age of
seventeen and eighteen, certainties born of a perfect harmony
of youth's life and being, certainties of God.

The old words woke from their death-sleep and sang
again with the power that was theirs before cowards drugged them:
"I want liberty in salvation", "I want to possess truth in a
body and a soul." And for liberty, expression, poetry - the
world found, the beautiful Genesis known. Who but God himself
might have done this - "The fraternal awakening of all the choral
and orchestral energies and their instantaneous application -
the only occasion to disengage our senses." This is the consecra-
tion of the trinity, ethic-aesthetic-logic, which is godhead.
To achieve liberty, to write perfect poetry, to sense perfectly,
to love perfectly, to live - these are vague phrases, meaning
to the great but one thing. And that thing, to me, to a man
who has no sign from God otherwise than from books, is godhead
itself.

The querulous, fearful, fretful and rash god of Moses
is not a more beautiful vision than the god of "La Saison en
Enfer" and "Les Illuminations." Rimbaud's judgment is saner.
He sought to achieve, sometimes did achieve beauty that would

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enable him to smite the world with absolute judgments. And
some of his poems are absolute. If the eyes that see are clear,
damned be the ugly and only the ugly. If the heart that beats
knows its throbs, cursed be the dead and only the dead. "Les
Assis", the sitting men, is an apocalyptic vision: the irrevoc-
able, ultimate, terrible judgment of beauty, judgment ethical,
practical and utilitarian, also absolute. Use any of your
standards and tests and tell me what is the end of any ugliness.

But here come the reporters, the doctors, the caretakers,
the undertakers, the beauty makers (barbers), the pimps of the
concubinage between God and the dwarfs of rotten flesh, the pur-
veyors of death, "the hearts of filth, the mouths of stench."
Each one carries a pall and each one came to cover Rimbaud's infin-
ite body with his or her own rag and no other rag. On the pall's,
these inscriptions:

HATER OF THE BOURGEOISIE
FREE VERSE INVENTOR
WHO DEVISED SYMBOLISM
WHO MENDED TECHNIQUE
ANARCHIST, INSANE DEGENERATE
WE DON'T GIVE A DAMN
MESSIAH OF SEVENTEEN, pooh-pooh ?
COLORIST OF LES VOYELLES

And there are many of these as there are squinting or
bloodshot or swollen-eyed in the world. Let me say it, there are
as many of these as there are cowards in the world. Indeed, I
advise you, let an easy term of compromise make you forget him
who is the Youth you couldn't remember. Not even as worshippers

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could you do this. It is in a vase more beautiful than your soul
that this fragrance of his may be held in the ineffable hand of
a flower: the flower being the only reason for the vase. Which
of you would give up the life everyone of you hates, which of you
would die in order to understand him - or any god, anyway ?
Because you must die; not dwindle into a state of neutrality, as
aesthetic critics say, but die with long sorrow, through the
genetic emotions.....Oh, Jesus Christ, most beautiful, you have
forever spoken the words of the miracle of interpretation !

"Ah, ha," you laugh. "This fellow is one more of the religion-of-art !" You laugh, and it would appear that you have placed me, for indeed I feel ridiculous - because of this pen and this ink and the need of writing readable English.... And because all your cowardly sophistication is in me and your laugh is a wound talking to a wound inside of me, all these things shame me. If I were sure no one were listening I would indeed cry out: I am a worshipper who has died many times for Dostoievsky, for Nietszche, for Christ, for Rimbaud.

In '71 he was a rebel of La Commune. He had written
a project for a constitution. I know from Carlyle that revolu-
tion is sometimes the people producing poetry _en masse_. Clear
as the fire of even the things most rotten is revolution in the
pure vision of the seer, the inspired man who wants revolution
for the beauty of his eyes, for the beauty of his limbs, for
the beauty of his heart - who wants and has long wanted the
world to be his own body, cast infinitely, speaking.

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Arthur Rimbaud was religious, as all great men are.
For himself, for the beautiful god he built out of his soul, he
sought apostles. He found Verlaine, a splendidly sensitive soul,
who could not understand him....

Men do not wait for a saviour. Each man seeks drunkenness and forgetfulness and a hiding place. And the disease inherited from the centuries is perhaps one at last with a man's soul. As for me, I know Youth in love, I know Youth encountering the first men: I know Youth believing in the vision that arises, like the First Dawn, over the encounters. I know the first, valid, absolute axioms of godhead: "I love you, you beautiful. I will bring all the world to your feet." "I shall become beautiful for you." And the realization of a possible godhead: "I am not worthy of you." For this I believe in Arthur Rimbaud and even in all the distorted and queer and desperate signs of godhead that Youths give the world as they pass.

As they pass....He too went away, having found no
worshipper. Having heard no echo to his song, he doubted it.
And if a god be no more than a conceivable being, then the way
he abandons literature, the way he kisses the dream of godhead
goodbye makes me think that it is still divine to know why one
is not a god. The simple gesture, humble like a peasant of
Tolstoy's: "I have been idle like a toad, doing nothing, I
manages to live everywhere. I will beg pardon for having fed on
lies, allons !"

The sense of loss proved only in abysses and woods:
the gesture under a tremendously still sky: "Oh, I'm so forsaken

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that I offer to any divine image my efforts at perfection !"
"Oh, witches, oh, misery, oh, hatred, it is you that I trusted
with my treasure !" Or the doubt, infinite as the mystery of
creation, the doubt of the god-contemplator, the certainty of
a great Buddah sitting in a sunset with all the earth like a
cataract of opals and emeralds and rubies; the doubt that is
like the certainty that would exist in beautiful trees and
rivers if they were conscious:

"The friend not eager, nor weak. The friend.
The beloved not tormenting nor tormented. The
beloved.

The air and the world not sought after. Life.
Was it this, then ?"

Then ? - in the beginning. Doubt of all life seeking,
like almighty eyes, the beginning.

Rimbaud is, in me, a prayer to things more beautiful
than I, the perfectly soul-less things, the unconscious, beauti-
ful things. Which are, as they were in the beginning, the wit-
nesses of man's original greatness, the eternal (soul-less,
therefore unchangeable) mirrors. The things which are not God
and which are the only ones to pray to. They which sustain a
poet:

Bathe me in the vision of my youth, communicate
me forever.

Do not let me go back with the rest to
fornicate and forget.

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Let me accept the vision utterly, even to insanity.

Do not murder me with the drunkenness of you, do not
choke me with the words of the beauty
of you when I'm alone.

Let me accept "the atrocious death of the faithful
and the lovers."

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## Chapter XII.

### The Great Jump - Italy, U. S. A.

With a quiet majestic sea, I was sick to Gibraltar. As soon as we entered the Atlantic a fierce sea arose to greet us. Then, as if by enchantment, my sea-sickness disappeared. I ate like a hog out of dishes kept from falling from the table by little devices in wood.

Most lugubrious of all were the fog-whistles. At night they were terrific, with something somehow human in their voices. There was an old man, scared by the storm and the whistles, who kept on saying:

"Eternal Father, Eternal Father darling, Eternal Father, do me the favor of letting me live through tonight and then take me or leave me, darling Eternal Father."

In the morning we were able to admire the tremendously enraged sea. The waves were what one calls in Italian "Cavalloni", equal to "Great Horses", so solid they were, large, majestic waves, grey-green. The seemed solid and then they broke into a million diamonds and the ship proceeded through them, a-slant, one side almost out of the water. The wind blew so strong that it did not seem safe to walk on the other side of the ship. The propellers were most of the time free of the water, and the noise they made was ominous, lugubrious.

The ship was an old, decayed hulk, having but two classes, third and second, and the waves seemed to be always

-66-

oncoming, driving upon us, none running away. (Yet you are
servile, waves, because you merely reflect the color of the sky).
But there is no playing with words concerning the sea. Humans
only get a glimpse of what it may mean. There was no vestige
left of the former blue, but there is no use abusing the sea.
It refuses even to call people names, it is the most powerful
of powers.

On the ship there were two Genoese, elderly persons,
man and wife, who ate so much, so very much that they made one
think they had never eaten enough before. Also there were three
girls, laughing girls, full-breasted, red and full-faced, damn-
ably silly. There was the old man who prayed to his damn god
during the storm and there was a man that seemed to be a real
friend. Morea was an anarchist. He was a handsome man, a fairly
good singer and a very fine <u>bombardino</u> player. He had a grimace
to his mouth which, however, seemed good-natured and not ominous
of evil things.

There was also my improvised tutor who was all that
is fatuous, stupid and cowardly and a braggert, a typical bank
or shop employee who dressed elegantly, talked with a drawl,
spoke continually of the women he had conquered, showed me the
marks of a shot in the legs or the belly, and told me of women
who were crazy in love with him. Such was my tutor, bourgeois
to the core, an imbecilic story-teller, a desperate liar when
he found himself in shallow water, always intruding, always
self-important. He was more afraid of a stain on his necktie
than a slap in the face from Carnera. No one could say, and he

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wouldn't have anyone say, that he wasn't spotlessly elegant.
But enough of this damn fool. We left him behind forever as
soon as we reached shore.

I made a dear good friend on the ship - not my tutor,
however. His name was Missio and he was a philosopher. (At
times his slowness used to infuriate me.) He like Schopenhauer
above all others and he was reading on ship-board, with great
relish, "The World as Will and Idea." (Life on board a boat
forms itself into separate little families, small, human famil-
ies united by their humanity and by their common destination.)
He had held a civil post in the Belgian Congo and he taught me
a few words of the language of those people - "soka, malam, menemene"
All of them have an obscene meaning. (The first words one learns
of any language are always the obscenities and the blasphemies.
Because obscenities are half the vocabulary of the people and
the thing which interests them the deepest. Organized bestiality
is infinitely more comprehensible than organized beauty.) He
had splendid photographs of the African life and people, of the
cretin zone he had taken charge of there. He had been called
"Fist in the Mouth" by the negro porters, that being the punish-
ment he inflicted on the niggers.

Missio was wonderful. He was never still in that
almost too great bulk of his. He was epigrammatic. He was ency-
clopedia. He was pantheistic, he was a philosopher all over.
He was religious, and then he wasn't. He did not like great
gestures. He liked to be one with the humble, the lowly, the
meek, for he himself was meek. And yet he looked just like a

-68-

fat merchant, somehow like a butcher too. He liked the girls a lot and was continually showing off to them with tricks and jokes. He had an abrupt way of bowing when he passed near a woman, with a gesture of the hand to one side as if he were about to lift her skirt. This made everyone laugh, and this pleased Missio too. His laughter was our passport which allowed us full freedom wherever we went. He was the most conciliatory and generous and jovial man that I ever met. (Even the complete stupidity of the three girls on board did not prevent Missio from making love to them.)

I must admit that my tutor bothered me very little since Missio kept him in his place. I was beginning to read an American novel in English. Missio was puzzled by "Huckleberry Finn", saying it was not English, that no one could possibly understand it. Missio also told me that my friend Morea spoke an awful English, but then I did not know. Sometimes I shouted at Missio, exasperated by the fearful slowness of all his motions and his speech. But he went along, slowly, slowly, just like any old philosopher. (He was to go to Canada to find work on the strength of a letter he had to a superintendent of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. But he did not like the Canadians and he did not find work and after many tribulations he ended up as a street-cleaner. When I left Italy my father told me that I looked like a German out of work, so clumsy I was wearing an old suit of his; he said that all I could ever do in America was to be a street-cleaner - and indeed his prophecy was not far from wrong. From Canada, Missio was to send me his last

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dollar, writing that he would have preferred to come to New
York and live or starve together. But that was a thing that
never came true.)

The air had become terribly cold and one morning we
awoke and saw for the first time the beginning of America.

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Chapter XIII.

Black

New York

One fine morning, Missio and I were awakened by a great to-do upstairs. We dressed quickly. Upstairs was New York. First to appear were the Jersey shores, spread about on the hills with little houses much like Japanese toys. On the other side, one could admire the Statue of Liberty, if one had the stomach to.

The pilot and several officials came on the ship but not even the officials could keep me from looking at the strange panorama. (One of them thought it very fine to ask every immigrant whether he had been in jail.) This was New York. This was the city we had dreamed so much about, and these were the fabulous skyscrapers. It was one of the great disillusions of my entire unhappy life. These famous skyscrapers were nothing more than great boxes standing upright or on one side, terrifically futile, frightfully irrelevant, so commonplace that one felt he had seen the same thing somewhere before.

This was the long-dreamed of New York, this awful network of fire-escapes. This was not the New York we had dreamed of, so dear to the imagination, so cherished among all the hopes a man may hope: this dream of the dreamless, this shelter of all the homeless, this impossible city. This miserable panorama before us was one of the greatest cities

-71-

in the world.

Of course, I was wrong to condemn New York before I
had quite seen it and before I knew its miles and miles of
streets. But this depressing impression lasted even as I was
walking through the city. We had been invited while aboard
ship to visit the shop of one of our companions. He lived in
Mott Street, one of the streets sacred to filth and misery.
The whole Italian colony of Mott and Mulberry Streets, Oronxo
Marginati said, was not worth the price of the little dynamite
required to blow it up.

The first thing that struck our eyes in this land of
easy mystery (easy because readily solved) was a boot-black's
box. Feeling that we needed a shine, we entered the box and
suddenly heard the boss speaking to the little boy in the purest
Neapolitan dialect. Then there was the elevated railroad sta-
tion, an unpretending, unassuming little box, that too.

Surely the Thirty-Fourth Street dock is not a thing
to give one an idea of what New York is, I thought. But after
Mott Street as we walked it dawned on me that this was no great
city but a great village. It lacked the air, the smell, the
noise, the atmosphere of a metropolis. Even the Flat-Iron
Building failed to impress us. We walked and walked and
Missio lurched along dreadfully slowly, self-satisfied and
frightfully, frightfully slow. He, my new friend, was as dear
to me as if he had been an old friend, and a good old friend at
that, but I lost patience with him. I bawled him out, but all
to no avail.

-72-

We went on foot to 128th Street, where Morea's house was. The smell on the stairs did not bespeak wealth. He and his brothers welcomed us, and his greetings were a bit too cordial. He was a false friend as will be shown later in this history.

It was the fifth of April when we entered Manhattan and the weather proved itself to be as crazy as the city. Up to ten o'clock it snowed, at twelve o'clock the sun shone, and at five in the evening the rain fell. Missio and I found me a room with board on Thirteenth Street. After settling me in he left with a snug and easy feeling for Canada, for he was bound for Ottawa. Thus I began my life in the rooming-house, the furnished-rooms of America. The landlady of this one was deaf as a bell, but she was Italian and she was the cook. There was a servant-girl who inevitably asked me if I wanted "Awful Pie." I tried to write down for her whatever I wanted, but to my surprise and indignation she never understood.

Looking for a job, I learned to know New York, every nook and cranny, every side and corner from the Battery up to 110th Street. I walked the streets often in a frenzy of hatred and sang an Italian song sometimes and stopped to cry. I walked so much that I know still every street from Third Street to Columbus Circle, and in every street I have planted a remembrance. I learned to know Fifth Avenue, the majestic lady, elegant, proud, and beautiful. It always seemed to me that the crowds on it must have scraped their feet clean on the neighboring streets before daring to enter here. I knew every inch of Broadway with her gaudy reckless nights, and Delancey Street, the triumph

-73-

of Judaism; and Fourth Avenue, all drab, all useless: Sixth Avenue, rich with color and congested by the complex movement of the Greek quarter, where at Bryant Park one could always find a pederast in search of an adventure. The Greeks are usually very beautiful men and their wives extremely ugly - perhaps this explains why so many are perverted. I knew Forty-Second Street with its Times' Building breaking the sky's limpid blue, and the great canyons of high buildings around Nassau Street and Broad; Park Row flaunting its second-hand clothes, its second-hand bookshops, its shameful and horrible misery; Broadway, squalid in the downtown district, gradually takes on elegance as it advances - (I remember that number one thousand was the office of the Universal Motion Pictures Company where I went to try and sell my laboriously achieved scenarios - one thousand or six thousand, I can't remember which.) I thought the Bowery the most desolate street of all New York, so empty and hopeless and vacant it was; lacking even the fake character of so many of those side-streets which supported it. Here there is no more compromise for the sake of appearance: here poverty is brazen, giving not a damn for anyone or anything, for having lost everything it has now nothing left to lose. A dim haze always hung over the Bowery - a name surely recalling happier, more leisurely days when Bowery meant "Shady".

Your free lunch counters saved my life, oh, New York &
I would go pinching a bit of meat here and there without so much
as buying a beer. The most beautiful institution of the new
world was the free lunch, and now it exists no longer. And

-74-

the most terrible song of New York was the bawling-out the bartenders reserved for men like me who carried rage and hunger through the streets of New York, walking, walking, until human strength was practically extinguished and something super-human or un-human had taken its place. The great contradiction of New York, that queen of the air with her fancy sky-scrapers, was that she was as well a wretched whore with her little windowed houses. Some of her streets were like the highways of Paradise, and others were like the alley-ways of Hell. Prohibition served no purpose there; it was a futile thing because New York was parched into feverishness. It needed to drink. New York, the hungry, the poverty-stricken, the youngest of all cities, it is the real advent of youth.

The JOB, that damnable affair, THE JOB. Nightmare of the hunted, THE JOB, this misery, this anxiety, this kind of neurasthenia, this ungrateful, this blood-sucking thing. THE JOB, this piece-meal death, this fear that grips you in the stomach, this sovereign lady who leaks terror, who eats the very heart out of man.

Presently I moved from Thirteenth to Twelfth Street and there I had a hall bedroom, stifling hot, without a window, where I lay on the bed half-naked or all naked. Sometimes the landlady came in with a prospective roomer and I then got up and hid behind the door until my destiny was decided on. There I would have starved if it had not been for the one meal a day my landlady gave me. But the landlord soon grew tired of helping me and one fine evening he told me that I must suspend that

-75-

one meal a day. I cried, lying in bed naked in the stifling room.

I had fifty-five cents and an employment agency required one dollar to get me a job at four dollars a week. I called on Morea, walking to 128th Street where I spent the five cents on a glass of beer. Morea was sleeping the sleep of the unjust and when I begged him for the dollar he refused me.... I left and descended the steps of the first subway station and there a surprise was waiting me. The subway employee threw back my fifty cent piece at me saying it was no good, and in a threatening voice, too. So in despair I walked back to my filthy room. It had begun to rain.

At last a kind man found me a job in an Italian restaurant, as waiter-helper. This was the first job of my life. It was in a table d'hote in Eighth Street and there I worked seven-hour days a day and came back to my room at night to dream of plates, plates, plates. I worked there with all the ardor of the neophyte - I was full of joy and pride, working for the first time. I ran about like a madman from one floor to another. I was busboy to the waiters and my work consisted of setting tables and clearing the dishes away. There were six or seven waiters and I had to help them all.

My job was love and terror to me, thoughts of it kept me awake at night. For four days I had almost starved in that room in Twelfth Street and to think of losing my job was disaster and despair. I gave myself enthusiastically to it, working like a horse, and at night dreaming of the piles and stacks of

-76-

dishes, dishes, dishes. At this time I made my first acquaintance
with bedbugs. Although Italy is dirty, very dirty, I never saw
a bedbug while there. Now whole battalions of bedbugs tormented
my nights. New York is pitiless with the pitiful.

My job was my delirium, my loveless love. My compan-
ions were a bunch of unmitigated idiots, a lousy bunch of
strike-breakers. They were lousy with the dirt a job is sure
to produce. People have the nerve to say that work doesn't soil
the hands ! Nothing soils the hands so terribly as work and
kills the conscience that cannot stand dirt. These idiots some-
times boasted to me of having kept a job for five, ten, twenty
or more years ! I shivered as I heard them: how heastly, how
awful ! They had even forbidden the Italian girl-workers to
sing while at work. They had tried to stupefy that fine fire
that was in the songs of the Italian girls. My job was my
via crucia, my misery, my hatred, and yet I lived in continuous
fear of losing the bloody thing. So there we are ....

How long ago was it
The dawn pleased Homer ?
And Petrarca - was it among flowers
Dewfull, fearful for the love of the dawn
That he sang his best song
For Laura ?
Did the eyes of joy of Prince Paul Fort
See it well once,
And was it then that he
"Took pleasure in being a Frenchman ?"

-77-

In New York
These summer days
It's a swollen-faced hour,
Sick with a monstrous cold,
Gasping with the death of an expectance,
Houses there
In a thick row
Militarily shut out the sky;
Another fence in the east;
Over this one a shameful blush
Strives upward.

Nevertheless I go to perform the ceremony
Of purification - to wash myself....
Oh, dear water.....dear, dear soap....

Because I am poor
No ceremony will clean me;
In this crowded room
All the things touch me,
Soil me.
To start a day
Feeling dirty
Is to go to war
Unbelievingly.

A little happy pause here
For me to think of what I shall be doing in
the day.

-78-

Now has the deep hot belly of the night
Given birth to noises.
The noises pass
Over me,
I lie
Insensible,
Under.
Work, milk, bread, clothes, potatoes, potatoes......

This is
The big
Beauty rumbling on.
Is this
The world's
Music for evermore ?
This and the irrevocable peddlars
Who will come in an hour

To hurl loose:

"Pota-a-a-a-a-a-tous, yeh-p-l-s, waa-ry meh-l-n ?"
Little apocalyptic faces,
Faces of the end of all faces --
Are these the chief musicians ?
Please, listen, I have a small, dear soul, and all
I want

is a noiseless beauty, any little thing, I
was born for a sylvan century, may I claim
to be left alone ?...I will not even expect
you to understand - only.....

Under this, like a cold hating prostitute,

-79-

I lie

Insensible....

And my face is sad because

Once

There was....

Ah, there was a time....

Now go look for the mail -

Go glean the thoughts they drop before your door,

You eternal gleaner.

Love thoughts, too ?

Out in the hall

The gas jet

Doesn't give a damn that it is day already.

Stench of drenched clothes

And snore

Of married men.

Who shall ask the furnished-room poets to write

A song for the dawn ?

Oh, MAIL !

Ah, beggars:

"Iam-though-I-refrain-from-saying-it-better-than-
you-in-the-end. I-am-perfectly-honest-evidently-
nothing-up-my-sleeves......It-is-out-of-my-
bounteous-goodness-that-I-like-you-a-little-in-
spite-of......"

These scanty rights to live -

A clear day, an articulate moment, may take them

from us;

-80-

So we advance

At every chance

Our suffering claim and reference.

Dragging my soul along

I go to the window.

The sun-fingers reach slowly

Over the face of the house in front.

This is the hour they go to their work

Eastward and westward --

Two processions,

Silent.

Shapeless the hats,

Too large the jackets and shoes --

Grotesques walking,

Grotesques for no one to laugh at.

Are they happy perhaps ? --

For, of course....but do they

Really know where they're going ?

Has the first of them

Found

## Down there

Something for his happiness ?

And has he telephoned or telegraphed to the others

That they are going,

Without looking around,

Without knowing one another,

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ALL

TOGETHER

Eastward and Westward ?

The world has decreed:

These men go

Acknowledged

Eastward and Westward.

Sit down and take the rest of your life,

O, poets !

All my days

Are in this room

Pressing close against me.

I know what I have done, misdone, mistaken, mis-
understood, forgotten, overlooked.

And I have lost my youth,

Everybody knows me,

No one wonders at me;

They have placed me in their minds, made me small
and tied me up

To throw me in a little dusty corner of their minds.

All my days are huddled

Close against me;

My youth is but a regret and a madness -

A madness.....Jesus Christ ! I am not old yet,
never mind what I have told you, what I have been !

I have not irremediably committed myself, I am not
lost -

For pity's sake

-82-

Let me go,
Let me go free !
For pity's sake
Let me go
With my youth !

Ah, the old days are huddled
So close against my chest
That no great freeing gesture
Is possible.

After the tears,
Cool, new, sensitive,
Under my body hushed and stiff,
I open the door
Quietly,
I close the door behind me
Carefully.

The street's greeting:

I'm out of work --

Damn work - to work and come home in the evening hungry
for all the things that could have been done instead !

But to go
Unemployed
Without hunger
At all !

-83-

Oh, listen, O Street,

Let your word to me be a delicate whisper:

I am young,

Nice day,

I look

Straight ahead,

Staccato steps,

Stiff and cool,

I walk

(Sweet morning, soeur de charite !)

It is the light mood in the streets of the morning,
Bouncing on the roofs, kicked

By the rosy foot of the wind.

Ah, we - ah, we are chained to the sidewalk but we
hold our eyes upward,

Lightly, lightly.

Do blow away the dust of our dead,

And save us all from them who are smouldering inside our
houses.

See the fine dust from those windows, see the dust
angry at the sun !

Who threw these kids here among us, them and their fun
and war, "GIMME ! - GIMME !"

King of the triumphing mood, the iceman cracks easy
puns with a landlady of the dust.

-85-

Chapter XIV.

My Brother

My second job was that of an all-round boy in a
grocery store. I earned two dollars and fifty cents a week and
I may well say I earned it. I was fired by the owner, a Sicilian,
because I dared tell him that I had had more schooling than he.
My third job was in the Hotel Seville. I was fired from there
after I upset a bottle of ink on a most costly tablecloth. My
fourth job was at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn. I was fired
for dropping a big trayful of dishes in front of the manager.
My fifth job was in a nondescript lunch-room and lasted two
weeks.

Another job I had was in the Thompson Restaurant in
the Grand Central Station. I worked there one night - from seven
in the evening until seven in the morning. It was my job to
wash the floor, and I had to wash it three times - an immense
floor. But they gave me something to eat and that was all that
mattered. Another place I worked they fined me a dollar when they
caught me eating a lobster. The days I was not employed by work
I was employed by hunger. I dragged this wretched body from
restaurant to restaurant, not as consumer but as server; I
took it in misery from hotel to hotel. At times poems consumed
my thoughts, moving like an army of ants in my brain, or devour-
ed me like maggots. But more often I was desolate and forlorn.
Why this pre-occupation with words, I thought, if there is no
one to listen to them.

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America, great workhouse of the strong, you almost crushed me, but now and then I was able to rise to the surface and fight back. I was never strong enough to wound you. All these jobs were like old sagging broken-down chairs in which I sat for a little while before going on. It might have seemed there was nothing but hunger and poverty and misery to urge me on, for I was coupled with misery, like two dogs on a street-corner. But there was something else; there was always a little light shining that guided me through this country of America, this black country: I knew I was a poet and I had in my soul the desire to write. There were millions like me, of course, millions; and if these millions had a voice it would be the voice of God, like the voice of that poor Italian who wept desperately in the streets of New York remembering Neapolitan songs.

One morning I received a card from Europe advising me that my brother was in New York too and giving me his address. I rushed to that address and found him, and oh, what a day and a night we had of it ! We, with this new city as background, were like two castaways on a raft in mid-ocean. We told each other all the tales of our new life and exhibited all the cash we had between us, which amounted altogether to less than fifty cents. My brother was no longer the brute who had beaten me mercilessly, he was no longer my own brother even but my good old friend, my only comrade in this entire city, in this strange city that we no longer acknowledged, so full were we of Italy, our speech and our laughter so full of Italy, the happy eyes

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of each meeting the others eyes.

My big brother and the big things he had to tell were
a fete to me. The ghosts into which my brother had turned put on
a suit of flesh again and stood alive and lovely before me. I
could have kissed him but for some reason I did not.

How sweetly we laughed, laughed about nothing (it is
always better to laugh over nothing at all.) Although my
brother had never been very intelligent, he now surpassed himself.
He was witty, humorous, garrulous. All the insult and injury he
had ever heaped on me slipped away down a valley of laughter.
He was six feet tall and I thought how handsome he was, though
before his face had always seemed to me unattractive, sometimes
even repulsive. We walked together down Delancey Street, that
multi-colored Jewish bazaar. At the end of this street, where
one comes to bargain and to spend as little as one possibly can,
stands Manhattan Bridge, the most marvelous bridge in the world.
I showed him everything - the side streets off from Delancey
whose shops are full of Russian goods, copper samovars, copper
fire-dogs, all giving a russet tinge to the street. Here were
quilted covers in the old-fashioned style, and here you could
buy cheap those Russian cigarettes with the empty cardboard
ends. (One should come with weary legs to these little streets
so as to feel them become light under one, as if by miracle.)
We bought dill pickles from the Jews who sold these as well as
other food, all of which passed through their unwashed hands,
and perhaps even through their long, louse-infested beards.
There is a lot of movement in these streets - a human writhing,

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a seething; and in their movie-houses one can always find a momentary girl simply by letting one's hands explore a little through the dark. (I have done this ignoble thing a thousand times. To be a man of honor means to tell everything, even the queerest, smallest happenings, even the most unprintable obscenities. For the truth of one single human being would be enough to horrify the most ferocious Kraft-Ebbing imaginable - like the deleted chapter of Dostoevsky's "The Possessed," in which he calmly waits for a child to hang herself in the next room. I have worse things to say, and certainly Dostoevsky had worse, but there are some words like canaries which you throttle in your fingers, and these are the words you can never say.)

And then the jobs continued: there was the C. and L. Restaurant where I worked three months, and this is the only job I ever regretted. I was fired because I was arrogant and all-in-all a good-for-nothing. Then the National Biscuit Company, which lasted one day. Then the Hotel Woodward, then the Yale Club, a snobbish hang-out from the twentieth floor of which I could see the East River meandering slowly, like a languid serpent, on its way. Then my father, that ignoble man, made a great effort and sent us eighteen dollars - a hundred lire ! I abandoned my hole and my brother and I moved from room to room together. We fed on milk and buns and smoked cigarettes and tried to look from one room we had into the bathroom where a girl was bathing. In one rooming-house there was a negress, a real negress with enormous lips, white or yellow eyes, and pink palms to her hands which seemed to me very strange. At

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last I found still another job, at Shanley's. At that time my
brother had to stay in the room while I went out to look for
work, for between us we had one pair of shoes.

One evening as I came out of Shanley's, I found my
brother waiting for me. I naively told him I had my pay envelope
and he took the money, almost extorted it from my hands. So we
quarrelled fiercely, and then in a grand, majestic way my
brother flung the money to the ground. I grabbed it up and beat
it as fast as I could, then jumped on a street-car to escape him.
That night, it being too late to get a room, I slept in the park.
A few days later, he appeared in Shanley's bar-room and threaten-
ed to break my head if I didn't give him money. I was only
saved by telling him the truth, that I had no money left.

When this job was done with I went four days without
eating and the sight of food in restaurants I passed began to
nauseate me. But when I found a crust of bread on the ground I
washed it carefully in a fountain and ate it. Picking up cigar-
ette-butts in the street was not the lowest thing I was reduced
to then, but still I never begged (at least not from strangers);
later on when I had friends I pestered them freely for pennies
which would permit me to eat. It was a wretched life in this
land of millionaires, and still they say that richness is nothing
but a state of mind and to be poor the lowest vice. But this
wealth, which I had no wish to acquire, and this poverty, from
which I never fled, were the great causes of my life's confusion.
Hunted by hunger, the bottom worn out of my threadbare pants, I
came to know every street of New York. Such is the competition
of life with death. (I was not afraid of death but I was afraid

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of seeing so many die of hunger, as if at war.)

The Hotel of Spain was my next job and Twenty-ninth Street my next room. (How much of myself have I left in furnished rooms, such as my falling hair which I left on every pillow ? How much of my life has been torn and lacerated and abused and enslaved by the furnished rooms of America ? If all the hours I spent in furnished rooms could be strung as beads are strung they would form the notes of one eternal howl that might perhaps at last reach the ears of God. Everything that took place passed in an enormous night through which I carried that tiny lamp which is now about to go out.) Mr. Lehman, a German Jew, was my land-lord. I could never make out whether he was a thorough idiot or a smart fellow playing the fool. His love affair was a small bottle of gin, judiciously sipped. He had a mystery, by God, but only inasmuch as we each have the mystery of our own souls. His voice was all in his nose and he talked too much. There I passed for a Frenchman, because I had come to the conclusion that Italians were not well seen out of Italy. The enormous landlady used to call me "Frenchsciugno", and when I was behind in paying the rent she could mutter:

"You will never pay me, nun, Frenchy, you devilish Frenchy...."

There were several bad women in this furnished-room house, and I had many adventures with each of them. There was Marcelle, the little Parisian prostitute, and we became good friends when her **souteneur** was not around. We used to sit talking until three in the morning and she never thought that

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CRONICON
U.S.A.

I might want to possess her. She had narrow shoulders and large hips. Thousands of years of prostitution had had this spiritual off-spring. Her laughter was good and innocent and it was with much gracefulness that she threw her arms around my neck and called me: "Brotha !" When either of us had money, we both ate, but otherwise we went hungry most mirthfully together. She had replaced Missio in my hungry heart.

One night her *souteneur* came after her and then there was hell to pay. He called me a son of a bitch and threatened to kill me. But he was not a bad chap and soon we made friends. She did not love her pimp but she feared him, which is a feeling akin to love. She told me that her task was to "soulager le genre humain", but her sin was surely never so exalted. She was merely after her bread and butter. But the short spasm which everyone knows was not all she gave even thefoolest man who crossed her way and her bed.

She was the daughter of a wine merchant who had educated
her by beating her black and blue. She had rebelled and run
away from home. She believed in nothing and that made her all
the more vicious and evil. For believing in God beautifies,
somehow. Her flesh was accursed, and yet I craved it. Perhaps
a prostitute means disease, she means shamelessness, she means
destruction to all the notions of cleanliness that infest the
world. Yet she was a very clean little woman, for I assisted
more than once at her ablutions. She was as good as any little
girl, with a pleasant smile and a pleasing little face.

Once, as I was on the stairs talking to the landlady,

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a big cushion suddenly fell on me from above. I ran upstairs and knocked at the door of the guilty party and hearing "come in", I opened the door. There on the bed I saw a woman lying, naked as a new born; she wasn't a pretty sight, either. She was an ugly bit of a woman. She was a grotesque. She had a pint of beer beside her bedstead and she was smoking a fearful cigarette, not even dreaming, just bumming her time away. An enormous scar defiled her belly, and her skin itself reminded one of beer, so covered was it with short blond hair.

This was my second love, born in contempt, born in ugliness and helplessness, born to die, having nothing better to do than die.

My brother came to this house, too: except for sleeping, he was always there. One day he asked me for a dollar and I gave it to him, my last one. I told him he had caused me to lose my job at Shanley's by walking up and down with awful intensity in front of the restaurant while I was working. Of our first meeting in New York, nothing was left. Now he disappeared and I saw him again only after two months.

And the jobs went on: Moffat's, a French table d'hote. We busboys worked in dinner-jackets, and this absurd uniform cost me five bucks. It was a greenish-black - most ridiculous. And then a job at Gangiullo's, where I upset an order of roastbeef on the silk lining of a nondescript lady's cloak. She demanded that I pay her two dollars and a half to have it cleaned, so I lost both two dollars and a half and the job. Interminable and incessant talker that I am, I could pour out a deluge of words on every place that I have worked. America, you were a tremendous

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weight on my frail shoulders. It seemed to me at times that I
bore you, all entire, on my back. I was never able to take you
lightly, to joke with you....

In the cellar part of the building is the waiters'
dressing room. A smell arises from it that makes one
afraid of breathing. Smell greets other smell, it is an
evil struggle.

It is the publicity agency of stench, the factory,
the home, the headquarters of stench.

Upstairs, the great show is beginning. There
is no reason for joy, upstairs. The wardrobe
girl, virginal, not yet fecundated by sweat is
a little angel seeking admission to hell.

Waiters are enormous coleoptera with their wings
folded. Waiters go chasing for a good customer.
They wait in ambush for him. They sniff him, smell
him, measure him. Outside, pure, the snow and the
icy blue sky. Outside men sip the blue ice-cream of
air. Outside there is salvation yet.

La, la, set it loose, shake your legs, run about like
a fool, bring in the bloody roast-beef, spill the juice
in the back and get the sack for it. Drop a piece of ice
down a lady's bosom and go fishing for it. Oh, la,
choke them with mayonnaise, stifle them under a wave
of potage, yell "One soup, two soup and a bottle of
champagne !" and to hell and damnation. Corks struggle

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in vain to attain joy.

Now a religious hour has come: one or two Jesus Christs jump on tables, spill a pitcher of ice-water on their heads, make a speech. A German, with all the awkwardness of his race, makes a whole show all by himself, a speech reeking with drunken despair. Poor Jesuses, poor makers of religion.

Shout as high as the habitation of your God, shout down the steps of running waiters, shout down the food and wine. Shout down dismay and a stubborn kind of melancholy. They are sad, these crazy people, the sadness shows in one or two faces. Pleasure, a withered rose on the breast of life. Pleasure, you are a cup of cold coffee, a plate of bad soup, a slice of roast-beef whose juice the waiters spill on their pants. Oh, poor knight-errants of pleasure, waiters are domesticated wolves carrying plates of meat they do not dare to touch.

There is nothing nice in the whole racket except for a little boy who pisses in a woman's lap and weeps, hollering: "I want to go home !" The snow outside is a virginal breast, waiting. These people are afraid of the deep hush that follows laughter.

The morning after, waiters seek for lost money in the dirt.

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Chapter XV.

My Brother Returns

When my brother came back to me, which he did not fail
to do when he had no more money, we took Marcelle to a fine little
Italian place to eat and be merry. She was extremely grateful,
which is strange enough amongst women of her trade.

Meanwhile, I had found a job in a Fifth Avenue restaur-
ant, and my partial prosperity bred ingratitude in my breast.
My bother had convinced me that we would do better to move out
of Lehman's and added to that Mr. Lehman called me a man who had
the education of a wood-chopper. He was aroused to this pitch
of indignation because I addressed his spouse as "mistress".
I explained that in Italy women were always addressed as Signora
which I believed meant "mistress", and no one would ever dream
of calling a lady by her actual name. Moreover, it was very hard
to be grateful to such an ungainly-looking man as Mr. Lehman.
So we moved away.

The new room was in Third Street and the elevated
rushed by past our windows and was a terrible nuisance. I lost
one job and found another, but in between these two jobs we knew
what slow and steadfast starvation was. We ate once every two
days in one of those filthy restaurants of the Bowery where they
let you eat all the bread you want - that is, they do not let you
but trust to your sense of decency not to eat too much bread.
Pork and beans, beans and pork, pork and beans, this was our

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usual meal.

Then I lost the second job mentioned above and when I
announced this loss to my brother, he answered in these very
words:

"Well, now you must think of earning your living by
yourself."

The dirty cur - I had supported him all the while. So
the next morning I beat it and left him in the lurch. I never
saw him again. I did not hear of him again until they wrote me
he had been killed in the war, peace to his soul.

Seventeenth Street was my next boarding-place. Here
I would have starved to death if it hadn't been for the saloons
where I stole food from the free lunch counter. I could not pay
my rent. And here already a certain dreaminess and a certain
vagueness while talking to anyone marked my days. I began read-
ing good books, dived fearlessly into George Bernard Shaw. I
remember I fell in love with one word of which I did not get the
real significance: *disparagingly*.

I knew I could love to fierceness. I could squeeze a
woman until her dregs came out. I had loved women but they were
for the most part unbeautifull. But a beautiful woman cannot
change except for the worse, any change must be towards ugliness,
whereas an ugly woman can change only for the better, and they
are both bound to change features every now and then. I had in
my soul the image of a hen that was hatching eggs: something
sweetly familiar and quiet and fecund and fertile, but something
dirty, too, because all that is familiar and quiet and fecund is,

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in the end, dirty. Think of the awful sloppiness and dirt that
flourishes in most families. And the more they love one another
the more they stick to one another and everything that sticks to
something must do so because it is dirty. I knew I was the most
unsuccessful man in my ways of loving and playing cards and in
the smaller things that took the place of my family which I
had never had.

(Apropos, I once slept with a young, a very young boy
of the Ponente Riviera, and he did nothing but hug me all night
and call me endearing names. There was not a shadow of pederasty
in it, you may be sure, reader. And all the while I was being
beaten, devoured by an _esquade_ of fleas and worse. That was love
with contour, like roasted meat and potatoes.)

I knew there were flowers in my inner self: violets in
the deep grass for deep thought, roses in the open air for blood,
cherry-blossoms for light joy, peonies in the sun for fierce love,
daisies for modesty, dandelions for fearlessness, buttercups for
all that the name implies, for skipping happiness, crocuses for
old men, hard to pick and when picked becoming nothing soon, and
forgetmenots, which one soon forgets because they are so small
and irrelevant.

But above all I was, and I am, an envious man, madly
jealous of all the writers who have got out more than one book.
I was jealous (guess what I am jealous of !) - jealous even of
Shakespeare. I was frantically in need of praise, crazy about
my being considered a major poet. The fact that there may be
other poets better than I makes my heart sick. I knew I was

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futile, the triumph of futility.

I was comfortable without any notion of God (though I
may be wicked and ugly in this connection.) To be with God and
not to be with God - this is a dramatic phrase that works both
ways. Christ never ceased being immense to me, and I think the
Evangel is the most beautiful book that was ever written. The
paraphernalia of divinity has done nothing but hurt that ever-
shining man which is Christ. Religion is always wrong. Christ
is always right, even when he speaks in a minor key of the Kingdom
of Heaven. He has never had my prayers but he can easily do
without them. Jesus Christ was the proudest man of any and all
the centuries; if he is divine it is due simply to this pride.
(Lover of poetic quarrels, he was also, this great blond poet,
very beautiful according to some and very ugly according to
others.)

I have never believed in God, not even as a child, and
when I utter the word "God" it is only as a sentimental symbol.
Somehow God found no place in my spirit. I had always before
me the things that religion had accomplished in me and other
mortals. God meant often the Spanish Inquisition.... It seems
to me that to take care of the whole universe, the stars and
planets and everything, God would have to shake a mean leg.
(But this is just an attempt to make God ridiculous on my part.)

At times I believed myself to be black clouds ready to
burst into a blossoming of thunder and lightning, impending,
always impending, never ready for big things. If you knew how
brave I was when there was no need to be brave....! If you knew

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how greatly I loved literature and yet how contemptuously I
rejected it !

I was friendly now with a Dutchman who had got hold
of the idea of writing scenarios for the movies. One play of
ours was entitled "The Bagpipe's Call." It was a drastic muddle
of love, death, crime, and malefactors. We also wrote together
"The Seven Black Men", an absurd and interminable detective
story which was naturally rejected by everyone. Another of my
plays was "The Moral Law," and it was about a priest who ended
up praying for his depraved mother who had tried to have him
killed by a most improbable lover. I spent five dollars to have
this play typed, my first real literary work. All nonsense,
but somehow the memory of it is not unpleasant. My Dutch friend,
who was after all an idiot, never did much on his own account
in the writing of these scenarios. In fact, he did nothing at
all. He was my typist on an invisible typewriter and I saw the
last of him when I abandoned him in a furnished-room one early
morning. It was necessary for me to beat it without being seen.

I took my waiter's jacket and escaped from this room in
Seventeenth Street where I owed three or four dollars, and I set
out for Coney Island. After four or five hours of walking, during
which I spent my last nickle on a glass of beer, I reached that
buffoon's paradise. I had some cigarettes on me and, as happens
on an empty stomach, the smoke descended like living fire into
my guts. Along the way I looked in the ditches for any edible
roots and devoured what I found with appetite. But once in Coney
Island I could find no work at once, although I tried in all the

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restaurants for a job as a waiter. I spent the night in an
unfinished house. It was raining and I remember that lightning
struck a few yards from my shelter and as I fell asleep I
heard the fire-engine bell when they came to put out the fire.

The next day I got a job as dishwasher in Percoraro's
Inn, a dirty shop near the sea where one could eat doubtfully-
clean boiled corn on the cob. There was no beauty in the whole
show of Coney Island. Insanity here reigned supreme. And the
job itself was an awful proposition. At night I went to bed all
wet, drenched, sick, tired, sick of being sick, a miserable boy
lost in the filth and misery of a filthy job. I slept too little
and too badly, and yet every morning I was able to go bathing
in the sea. This was my great marriage with misery, and the
off-spring of this match was hunger. A wretched puny struggle
to keep alive this body which wasn't worth the trouble. I was
the captain of the ship of American Misery. To continue this
parable of the sea: the sea offers a big glass of bitters to
the sky and the sky drinks slowly and then gives it back in
rain, rain falling like the tears of the sky. (Have you ever
seen during a great calm the terrible lion that roars all night
and will not let you sleep?) The little bathing-huts are like
a dirty comment on this great poem which is the sea. Puny men
try to plough it with their ships, but their ships pass and
leave no trace behind them. Mother of heroes and father of
fishermen, the sea hides its treasures and the shameless man
seeks them so as to sell them ignominiously. In this place I

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heard the great bugle of the wind sound its tally-ho and the
wild horses of the sea sprang up and chased each other,
aroused from lethargy and champing for battle. Man spreads
everywhere, like a contagious disease, and God Almighty, who
sifts and renews the stock of the sea (as d'Annunzio has said,
taking excessive liberties with this nameless God), it is our
human conceit which makes us believe that we can communicate
with God. (The unique, intrinsic God is certainly not good,
but evil.)

I have spoken already of the sense of silent exalta-
tion I felt sometimes while working: a faint dreaminess, a
vagueness of emotion, a feeling - I say _feeling_ - like a
messiah, like a sweet Christ. (That has cost me many a job,
I guess, for a dreamful man doesn't work right......) And all
of a sudden I began to write: rhymed poems at first, absurd,
rhymed poetry which I sent to more than twenty magazines,
getting nothing but rejection slips in return. They were
variously colored, and from them I took stereotyped encourage-
ment to continue. It is difficult to say how rotten the poems
were and how impossible the stories. I even poetized that old
drab mask, Pierrot. And then the springtime, and several other
standard subjects; among them my conspicuously bad poem about
the East River which oozed outside the windows of the Yale Club.
I wrote desperate appeals to the magazine editors, among them
William Rose Benet. He wrote me that my poems were "turgid."
I was compelled to lose some precious time going to my dictionary
to find out what turgid meant.

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Chapter XVI.

My Wife

Now let me talk about my little wife: I met her when
she was on a vacation. Her room was next to mine and when either
door opened one felt his own door was being opened. We fell in
love right away.

(This is the way of furnished rooms. There was a
young girl once who had the room next to mine. One day she
showed me her naked breasts, but I was so much in need of a woman
that I could do nothing about it. I gave her a box of candy but
that didn't help any. She left me there, alone with a fistful
of flies; which is always the case with me in life. I have
always been too late, always the belated gleaner after the other
gleaners have passed.)

I lived in a rooming-house kept by Vincenzo Bevilacqua,
a fat moron who had a recently-imported little sister who slept
in the passageway which led to my room. (Once as she was undress-
ing and had nothing but her shirt on, I came along and seeing her
had a terrible desire to attack her. But she started screaming
so I let her alone.) It was thanks to Bevilacqua that I got a job
at the Yale Club, and my wife came to see me there, and there we
went through the whole repertoire of tricks, but still I didn't
possess her. That came later in my room, where I took her half-
drunk one night and where she spent a whole night with me. The
result was she got pregnant and I had to have her operated - or

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rather she had to be operated, as she, of course, paid the bill.

(Looking from my window into the houses opposite I could see half-naked or completely naked women who did not mind showing themselves like this to my or anybody else's eyes. All living in squalid, miserable rooms, all alike, bug-ridden, hopelessly filthy; little ripples, these women were, on the enormous sea of my despondency; Once in a little furnished room in Brooklyn I considered corrupting a boy of eight. This is horrible, unspeakable, and even Joseph Delteil, complete sensualist that he is, flees aghast from his Don Juan when he entices two children to make love together.Delteil, so sensual that he loves even the smell of feet, has only words of censure for this precocious act. But a clown of sensuality such as I, I know I am capable of the worst crimes there are.)

She was a blessed little woman, my wife; blessed for the song that was in her face, blessed for all her misfortune. Blessed because she loved unloved, because she was a very little thing and her love was big, her love was despair, her love depended solely on me. Her voice was the sweetest ever, sensual in a small way, pretty as a bird's song. Her voice was a synthesis of many splendors. We were like fools, kissing in full Broadway.

I remember her ecstatic face, the ecstasy lasting but a few moments. She expressed a frenzied love, with something of a wrathful expression. It was as if her soul showed on her face. Sweet she was, sweeter than I ever knew her to be before or after. She cried profusely; indeed there was not a day that passed when she came to me that she did not cry. At first this crying of hers sent me into an agony of pity, then gradually I got used to it,

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and then finally I could not stand it any more. (Once she made me cry by criticizing my shoes which were down at the heels.) Everything seemed to her a good reason for crying, damn her. She had a great receptacle of tears ready to be spilled, and this became ludicrous.

But she could tell stories of her past in the Italian mountains very effectively, picturesquely, and vividly. That's all she knew how to do. She was so entirely ignorant that she wondered who Shakespeare was, and I told her that I had just met him in the street. The same was true of Dante. I took her to the French theatre (she really took me, for I was always broke) to see "The Brothers Karamazov." She wept through the entire play. There was a certain power in her, this little woman. She was stubborn, obstinate, and sullen; but her flesh was sweet: brown, brown as the Madonna's. She had black hair and black eyes. We went to Coney Island together, and we went to the Italian restaurant in Sullivan Street. She was very pretty sometimes. She had a way of pushing back with her lips the veil that got tangled there.

I began to live in a glorious mist. My work on earth was different now. A heavy fog was mine, even in those days. I felt vaguely but passionately that I could be a king over kings, no Jesus Christ about it now. Maybe I could save the whole bloody world. I thought about that too. Save it from what? For save the world is easier said than done. Save the world from vain desires, from dissimulated hunger, from considering love a secondary affair, from eating too much. Save the world

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from all kinds of sentimentality (though I am quite sentimental
myself, inasmuch as sentimentality is often sweet.) Save the
world from all kinds of bigotry, clerical or otherwise. Save
the world from being too tired and worn-out. Save the world
from being too difficult to understand, too hard to die and too
hard to live. Save the world from being flowerless, from being
too pitiful.

Keats has said that to make love is a thing very few
people can do, and that no menial should boast of his ability.
But I am not boasting when I speak of love here. To love is a
privilege of the great, Keats said as well, and a privilege of
the beautiful; but I must add that it is also given to the lowly
to love, and to the ugly. Perhaps it is truer to say as Leonardi
did, that all are beautiful and great while they love, so that
for a little while this woman who was my wife was both beautiful
and great. (Butterflies of life, such are the days of love,
and from the depths of my hospital bed I now send you my ultimate
and desperate farewell !)

Have you never felt the heart of your beloved throb so
close to yours at night that her heart-beats were mingled and
lost in yours ? Have you ever lain awake, dreaming, with your
four eyes watching life slip through your fingers as light as
sand ? Or have you ever, like a young and marvelous God, given
life lavishly away with both open hands ? Have you tried to halt
forever an hour which was passing too quickly ? Have you felt
your strength tripled, your intellect finer than the greatest
genius's, all because one woman was near you ? All this is love.
Have you ever waited, counting the hours until your love came to

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you, thinking how many more seconds were interposed between you
and her ? Have you ever been very rich with only a few pennies
in your pocket ? Or very poor when she was absent although you
had enough money to eat for the whole day ? In the little
village of your love there is a little steeple of a little church
which summons you to pray to God. But your entire being even
though convulsed by the storm of love has never asked for help
and never prayed for it to cease, never cried out enough, enough,
I cannot bear it any more !

Have you ever seen the sky at sunset, a bloody rose
shedding its petals, and realized that you were perhaps the sole
spectator of a display perhaps staged only for you ? Have you
ever felt underfoot the running of the smooth street which made
you bounce with joy like a rubber ball ? Have you ever felt the
blood flowing through your veins and believed that all the bliss
of life was yours entirely ? This, all this is love.

She had black hair, I have said. (Here is the parable
of women's hair, their major beauty. Some are black as deepest
night, and she was one of these; some are blond as a sunny day;
some are red as the beneficent sunset or the malevolent dawn;
some are grey as an overcast day, or white as clouds passing
in the heavens. Rain is only the grey hair of that enormous pate,
the sky; and snow is nothing but the sky's white hair, while hail
is only the uncombed curly hair of heaven, and here ends the
parable of women's hair.) She had just enough intelligence to
deceive one and she gave herself to me first when she was half-
drunk, and that bound us together a little more. That's about

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the best of my rememberances of her and her ways and things.

And speaking of love, here I must mention the dearest friend of my life: Louis Grudin. He was not a good-looking boy: his features were roughly hewn and his nose shapeless, his mouth too thick-lipped, his eyes vague but not unbeautiful, his stride too much for him, his voice quite booming, his hat out-of-mode and ugly, his pants without any creases, bagging at the knees, his jacket ill-fitting, his ways rough but not indelicate, his heart good and big, his sense of irony strong, his sense of humor keen and always alert, his love affairs always unfortunate, his sweetheart a ridiculously fat girl in whom he believed as in an oracle, his appearance in military clothes ponderous but not startling, his love for noises and his own noisiness there all the time, his disgust for sex and his love for coffee (red hot coffee which he swallowed valiantly.) his utter purity concerning sexual matters, his revolutionary ideas concerning love, his country, his government, his being a Litvach Jew - all these things made him himself. (I find myself curiously satisfied with the friendship of Jews. There is nothing equivalent to their intelligence, their hospitality; utterly misunderstood, despised, treated with a solemn presumption, these fine and beautiful people ! Only the aesthetic of a barber could maintain they are unbeautifull.)

Big boy, Lou, you were bursting through your soldier-uniform, big fat boy, you ! We sent the universe to smithereens, we conquered the world, nay, the worlds ! We were lords of the road, walking all night. We sang "Winter Sturme Weichen den

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Wonne Mond", not caring whether we were grammatically correct. We walked sometimes the whole night through, shouting our ideas to the stars and the moon, awfully glad we were intelligent, terribly proud of our intelligence, that saviour of our bodies, that which saved and proclaimed this manner of living.

Every time we passed under the Woolworth Building, Louis Grudin would take off his hat in homage. I liked him so well because I thought he was a better edition of myself. But instead, we were as different as bread and butter are, although both things are food. His verse was more beautiful than he ever imagined. In it were large, majestic rhythms, and a certain prettiness, a certain humor. He called me "master" and "teacher", but if I brought him my knowledge of Rimbaud and Laforgue, he gave me the knowledge of American letters. I told him he resembled "Jean-Christophe", but he told me I was being sentimental.

You are a whole sky for my memory, dear Lou. I ate and drank of you, I admired you, however incoherently, tremendously. Though you called me "master", it was I who learned from you, all the time. Your strength, your manliness, your energy were things you gave away. Very humbly I acknowledge all you did for me. Yes, my dear, your friendship was a great thing for me. I knew that I was inferior to you, and once you wrote in a little book:

"He was afraid of me and his bed was filthy."

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Chapter XVII.

"Va, garde ta pitie comme ton ironie - "

(Mallarme)

She brought a dove to the house. She had caught it in
the street as she was coming home from work:

"It couldn't fly and I just caught it !"

I had just come home from work, too, and the dried
sweat covered me like a second skin. With nostalgia for my
heart, my nose was sipping the evening Spring.

So the dove came through the door in her hands into my
life.

I took it and touched the soft grey wing of it with my
dirty face. The two dots of its eyes said nothing. The grip of
its red claws was gentle, and in my fingers it rested as lightly
as a cloudlet of fog. If I put it on the floor, it just ran
away. It ran away all the time. Every time I attempted to go
near it, it just began to stagger along, faster and faster, away
from my impending fingers. We had to feed it: open its beak and
force it chunks of soaked bread and hard-boiled egg. It did not
like to eat and it would shake its head in quick disgust.

And above all, it would make dirty things all over the
house. In every corner, everywhere, in the morning, I found green
and white little things. Rosaries and constellations of them,
sometimes like an ornament, sometimes like a disease. It made us
sick, the way that creature indulged in that ! Even on my jacket

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it did it once when I lay down to read and put it on my chest
for aesthetic accompaniment to my reading.

If the window was open it would attempt a clumsily
desperate flight towards it. The real light, not borrowed or
stolen lights of the houses, was there, I suppose; the air, and
whatever a dove eats with pleasure; mother and sister and brother
and real home - I suppose. But we did not want to let it go.
We thought we'd fatten it and eat it afterwards. We could not
let it go.

And we couldn't seriously think of fattening it with
the view of eating it afterwards. Because we both hovered over
the dove for long stretches of time, talking about it, making
vague suppositions. Because we were happy looking at it, seeing
how the room awoke to the tingle of its clean grey. Perhaps it
was rather the room sinking into the most dismal realization of
its own squalid slovenliness, as the little grey note rang
unconcernedly before the hardened and self-important face of
the immobile furniture.

I was often angry to think of my emotion as I had
touched the dove for the first time. Not a response to my
affection had it given. Not a noise.

It would only run away and twist its head extraordinarily and shudder with its neck and beak when I forced bits of hard-boiled egg down its clean brown throat. If I left it alone it would puff up and burrow into its ruffled plumes and remain still for hours.

She did not like it because it made of the whole house

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a filthy place. But she never really thought of killing it.
And neither did I, though I hated it, often, when it tried to
run away. Once it tried to make for the door as I was going out
and I kicked it inside. I kicked it up in the air. It flapped
badly down and struck the ground with one wing spread. But it
didn't complain. It did not twist its head around to see who
had done it; it just ran away.

To try to explain, so as to make the sadness bearable.
Which means, to rebel against sadness, which would lead us to a
splendid and terrible death. The dove would not acknowledge us.
We were two sad persons longing for a sweetness that had forever
flown out of the reach of our heavy fingertips.

"Damn strangers," it must have thought of us. Desperately so, rather, little dove, desperately and hopelessly strangers.

One may not touch sweetness with hands that are sweet
but not sweet enough - only coarse hands or divine hands may
touch you, stubborn little grey dream. But I can imprison you
here and you won't go away, you must stay - you can't deny that
I am keeping you, that you are somewhat with me. That's where
I have one on you, as they say, those horrible persons.

Ah, you are a little darling cloud descended...
descended to prove to them that clouds may be held
in our hands and caressed, as though
they were things of our own, of a tissue alike to
our flesh.

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No, you don't want to be caressed. A long time ago
there was a covenant of silence between the clouds and men. The
first human word broke the covenant and now all the human words
in all the books are not sufficient to piece together the coven-
ant again.

Dove,
with your red claws like
a frozen lean red flower.
Your breast is so soft
that human fingers
might die there.
Dove.

I am not yet beautiful because no one has come to ask of
my flesh all the love that is in my flesh. So I am anchored to
their streets and to the floors of their houses by the weight of
sunken desires. But I know that children will come to me, my
own children, and I know that I will not caress my child with
hands that are less than beautiful. And children answer us,
whereas you, dove, are silent.

But children.....
do children answer us ?

As we expected, it died. She, who had gone in my room
where the dove's sleeping-place was, got its box from under the
table and saw it - half-spread wings pushed against the corner

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of the box, still warm.

* * * * * *

It stayed unwillingly and it was too proud to formulate
a protest. So it objected by dying, a haughty objection, perhaps
an infinite objection: certainly an irrevocable and an irrefutable
one.

"Ooooh," cried she. She ran to me. "It died, you know.
Come and see it."

I bewailed its death for a few minutes. I was in
dismay. We were silent for a long time after, both of us, knowing
that if we should speak we'd have to mention the dove. I could
have told her things and things. I could have told her: "Let's
cry now, not because we really loved it, not because it is a loss,
but because... I could have told her things and things, but they
were things I could not tell her. She was not anything like a
dove, ah !

Instead, instead - I write here a sort of lying tale.
And I imagine, here, that I spoke to the dove after its death,
thus:

You died.

I'm so tired, the weather is close and I wanted to whip
this damned silence away from me with some awful words, and you -
you wanted to do a sinister deed so that I shouldn't get up and
whip this damned silence away from me. You wanted to do something
sinister and you did it and death has knocked the curves off your
body, sucked the flowing liquor in your wings and left them dry
and half-spread, shrunken; pushed you crudely down into the corner

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of that box.

I am glad, dove, that you died in my room. Some
disease was due, overdue, and you come and die, right here.
I'm glad. Your breast is tepid and your eyelids are extraordinarily broad and loose, the eyelids of an old woman with wrinkles of lead. Your eyelids cover only half the two still small moons of your eyes, as though the wierd mystery were not ended. (Ah, get a zoologist and ask him why a dove's eyes do not shut when a dove has died....) Your claws are an old little twig. Your beak has tight curves and ridges. It looks like the nose of an old man which debauch has smoothed and polished so that it is smooth and lean and shiny. My hands that hold you are horrible! It is sweetness that is dead. Sweetness came into my house and its death has been sinister. Do you wonder ?

"Oooh," cried she. "It died, you know."

I asked: "What'll you do with it ? We can't eat it,
can we ?"

"Of course not. It died of itself."

"I'll throw it - out of the window."

"Do," she whispered.

"Where ?"

"Oh, in the yard," she whispered.

"Yes," I whispered.

I took it gently. I remember how gently I took it.
I was afraid to squeeze it, afraid to hurt it. I did not look
at it. I held my arm stiff, held it down, as if it stank - but

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of course it was still warm. I opened the window with one hand
and I threw it down - no, I didn't. I dropped it. I just
opened my hand, quickly. And I did not look at it fall. It was
absolutely black, and a passing train that moment whistled. I
shivered for that whistle. Damned little corpse !

I only remember it at times, on these occasions: when
I try to light a match and can't, whenever, washing my hands, I
get wet all over, whenever I drop a fork or a spoon and pick it
up and it falls again - then I remember the dove: how I wouldn't
let it be anywhere, how it would stagger away, faster and faster,
annoyed.

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## Chapter XVIII.

Home, Sweet Home !

The way to my house begins half a mile away from it.
It begins at the corner where the grey-purple sweating Hartford
Lunch is. From Broadway into the street, the air becomes denser,
the facades are more resolutely drab, a sagging of the Broadway
mood makes my heart faint in an indefinite sorrow. This little
tragedy happens every day, each time I am on the way to my house.

I walk on, westward. Amsterdam Avenue is low and broad;
its face is sullen and without a forehead. Food stores, like men
that are too fat, cigar stores like little bigot spinsters dressed
in clothes not dirty but brittle for oldness. Broken and old is
the Avenue's bed and adorned only by the car-line. Then, further
westward, I march into open misery: usual red facades or sick-
yellow ones, riddled full of black windows. Rags, like flags of
poverty, dangle from windows; grey panes where misery writes with
dust and rain things that the tenants are too dismal to want to
cancel. Opposite tower the obese gas tanks, dolorous with rust,
sick with blotches of grey paint, grotesquely solemn. Along
this block, human beings prefer the street to the home; so they
are all outside, the children playing, the women gossipping, the
men loafing. Burnt-out coal and ashes spilled from the over-
flowing ash-cans are strewn over the bulging and rippled and
cracked sidewalk.

I turn at the corner where the necessary wooden-faced

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saloon is. And there is West End Avenue. Whitish and greenish
the houses, the colors of the wives of the poor wops. Here is
a valley formed by two smooth asphalt hillsides. And here is my
house. The door of it is as dirty and drivelling as the mouth
of a very old man who chews tobacco. Way upstairs are my rooms.

I enter, I open the windows......"Damn it, why does she
close them ?" She says that they might get in from the fire-
escape. I would like to meet the desperado who'd be so desper-
ate as to come around these quarters to steal ! A wave of dank
smell has lapped me around. I have taken a chair and sat down.
Now I'm in my own home !

The rooms face north. Till ten o'clock in the morning
we have the sun. The rest of the day it's on the house opposite.
In front of my windows there is a straight, windowless, white
wall, jagged, over its edge with the chimneys. The chimneys are
poised gently against the sky which today is very blue. Craning
my neck out I can see the river, and the freight railroad
station with its asthmatic locomotives.

There was a stretch of bare ground between the rail-
road and my house. It was a meeting place for cats and dogs
without a home, and at night a fine big hall for their orchestra.
That's where they came to die, too, or where they threw their
corpses. They went there to fumble in the rubbish for food. A
single shoe here, and a pair of shoes down there, half a dish,
a saucepan camouflaged by the rust, a smashed box, the brim of a

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derby and rags hardened with dirt; a battlefield after the
battle, with the lonely corpse of a cat left and the lonely
corpse of a dog, one by the fence, the other in a big crater
in the middle. There came children to reconstrue, with their
fiery imaginations, the battle of the cats and dogs. But they
didn't stay long because it smelled bad. Sometimes after a
rain, as a great big puddle collected there, you could see them
running all around what they called its shore, romancing with
little paper boats and seeking the ever-new sensation of throw-
ing a stone into the water.

Now, in that space, they are building another house.
A house like this, I suppose. It will be so near the railroad
and the asthma of the locomotives is so nasty, so sore, especially
at night, that the tenants of the future house won't be able to
sleep - not until they've all become deaf. Another poor house,
and there are thousands and thousands. It's preparedness, to
build a house to shelter the poor. Like making guns and gas-
masks for the next war. And the city is totally grey...and
they're making another grey house ! Houses that are born poor
and old, or ugly, as in the middle-class or rich quarters. In
Italy I saw houses born white and beautiful; and when they were
old and miserable, they wore their misery like a soldier his
uniform that bullets have tattered. Add grey on grey, brown on
brown, Masons of the New World, Makers of the New World, grey on
grey, brown on brown, work for the great blindness to come !

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But, as I write the dredge is wheezing and crackling
and whistling and its three-toothed jaws are eating the ground,
then vomiting it into a motor-car which staggers, tired and drunk,
up the slope out of the big hole where the dredge is sitting.

I don't want to go down to my rooms any more. I don't
want to see her any more. I want the Earth to stop running
around like a damn fool and I want him to listen to a thing I
have to say. I want the Earth to stop going and I want him to
watch me die. I could touch this intangible air if I sent my
body whirling through it, in a spider's dance, to break over the
flagstones. I would give a hundred persons at least the thrill
of their lives. I want the setting sun to steal my eyes and
carry them along with him under the earth.

But I reckon I shall walk down again to my apartment.
And every day that cranes it grey face toward me will have my
offering of a few words. I reckon I shall walk down to my
apartment and open the door with a Yale key, just like everybody.
And they will not say that I have gone away from them to find
the truth. Always my great sadness looms beyond my world and
theirs, just as the sun lies beyond all weathers. Words do not
make me glad and I am not an artist. The word that was first and
that shall be the last when they shall join my two eyelashes in
their last kiss and my two hands shall touch in their last
caress: a word that you might mistake for the word Death.

I am an emigrant and I have left my home. I am home-
less and I want a home. You look at me with evil eyes, with

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squinting eyes; you don't look at me, you sneer at me. I am an
emigrant waiting, I know millions that are like me.

* * * * * * *

Let God congratulate himself on the simple things he
turns out of the ground which go, dressed in humility's colors,
to bring a modest happiness into every house: potatoes, rhubarb,
beans, lettuce, and radishes. (The wife is working and I am not
so I do the things around the house.)

You peel the rhubarb and slowly a soft heap of pink
and green and silver-green ribbons accumulates under your
fingers. And the potatoes spit a whiff of country-sturdiness
to your nose. Perfumed reality of the dirt - ladies say you
smell bad, ladies who smell bad with bad perfume, which is
nothing but the perfume of flowers turned stale, turned bad.
Then, when you boil the potatoes they become white as purity
and they break if you touch them with a fork. There is a minia-
ture storm in the pot - the potatoes thunder under the swelling
cloud of the steam.

As for spaghetti and ravioli, let me tell you once
and for all that parsley chopped fine and one small onion and...
Yes, people do think I am interesting! Characteristically an
Italian, don't you know. And it's just what they want...
the local color, that attractive and light way of talking...and
those very extraordinary neckties...oh, perfectly charming!

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And, anyway, Dante died quite long ago, and there was a dash of Teuton blood in him. I bet ! Cagliostro is more the Italian. And today fierce men a la Cagliostro are out of fashion. "The good mannered man is the man of the future," a certain gentleman told me. The harmless, charming little man - oh, the ladies all patronize him ! - and if he writes some tiny verses now and then, well, what of it ? That's one quality more, it only adds to the charm - and let him be fiery too, on certain occasions. That adds too.

Alone with my wife, I have meals that are feasts. Anti-puritan meals. To the eternal glory of the magnificent eaters of my old land, Lorenzo de' Medici, Alessandro Borgia, Leone X, and Cornaro before he had got tired. Crunching a plant of dandelion under my teeth and devouring with my eyes the small space of my wife's breasts that she lets me see - eating a bleeding beefsteak...God ! We are in a cage, but we are lions and monkeys yet ! And if, in ten years, people will chew food-stuff instead of eating, what the hell ! We eat and laugh now, we eat and weep together, eh, girl ? And no one knows we have a real home, by Jesus Christ, so they'll leave us alone.

I go into the kitchen, nibble at a piece of cheese and a loaf of bread, walk up and down, wash my face to chill the headache, walk all through the house, stop in front of each mirror to see whether my face has assumed at last a less vague aspect, whether there is yet on it the beginning of something that these weary hands and legs may follow.

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The wind falters and gasps like a furnished-room-
house landlady coming up the stairs. The wind comes, breast
forward, into the space between that high wall and my window
and puffs up my curtains. I sit by the window and the curtains
touch my face again and again, doting lovelessly. The wife has
gone to work and left everything upside down and even her room
today affords no coolness of things put in their right place,
nor the gleam of clean brushes and mirrors and panes. Like me,
the bed is stretched in its own disorder and no invitation is
in it. The decay of a room is in its things and all the wind
brings is some more dust and the thick stench of boiling laundry
from the floor below. I went to look at the letter-box down-
stairs about ten times today. All they send is words, anyway,
and I know all about words, I am a writer.

I have heard old men, half-blind and half-deaf, blabber
of home, sweet home, and an immense lady-teacher (weighing more
than two hundred and fifty pounds), a long time ago in my child-
hood taught me the song:

Casa mia, casa mia,
benche piccola tu sia...

(House of mine, house of mine, however small thou art......)
I have read all the big books which contain the bulk of a house,
THE HOUSE. But my house is one of today and she is like a
modern girl with whom you have to be careful if you want to keep
her; and the moment she jilts you, or you see a better one,

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everything is ended and nothing remains in the heart of you or
anywhere else; maybe a twisted smile remains. We have now
become used to tragedy.

* * * * * * *

Mornings or blue veils and rose veils fluttering in
and out of the windows. Air for butterflies in the spring.
Ah, any face in the frame of any window, how sweet and well-known !
But your face best of all, woman, when you sleep yet in the
morning and I, who got up early and am cool and smell of cleanliness and toothpaste, come to kiss you. You awake the way a
little ripple breaks against the shore. Your drowsy arms move
like the smoke of a cigarette. Your kiss is warm with sleep.
It is not love, dear, because there is no pain. It is the home.
Witness the kids that have started making a noise that we both
know so well, witness the tranquillity of my feet as they step
upon the carpet, witness the farina boiling, blabbering, blowing,
sputtering, puffing and spitting on the gas range. Witness
the underwear dancing on the fire-escape - and you washed it
last night while I was fooling around and bothering you. The
river is only a light surface - a blue veil, too. We shall
take a walk along the Drive....

How good the home is to those who come back from a
walk ! These things that know me too. Lunchtime, lunchtime !
Oh, the dear little tree of parsley in the glass by the sink !
Last night all the carpets were swollen with dust. Now they are

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clean, naked. The bed is so well made - it is like a new book,
yet unopened. Black-stained bananas, what perfume your skin
holds ! Skin them and delight ! The smell of cooking food is
incense for the gods that will never die, and the color of the
salad you are making is the flag of mine own soul !

The eyes of the wife are two little black cats, washed
and smooth-haired. If we weren't here together I should never
have the time to see her so well.

But in the night, the gas-light is a sun of a diseased
world and the table, the chairs, the bookshelf are sapless and
silent and sad, like lepers. The bookshelf. The books. Any
book. The first line of the first book pulls along all the
lines of all the books. I have them all in my blood, these
little black microbes - once you've read one you're infected
and chronic. And they shout too loud ! It's a shame to let
people print such things ! Aren't you afraid ? And we, the
readers, pass before the gaping graves of these books, before
these bodies torn asunder, we look at a man stretch an arm out
of his grave and shake his bloody heart at us, and we say: "I
like.....I like.....I don't like...."

I burn with restlessness, I smoulder without fire,
I can't sleep. There are many persons here, bothering me. All
uninvited guests, crowding around my bed, shamelessly curious -
I can't dismiss them. I can't touch them. I can't grasp a hand
and feel it like a realization in my fingers.....these are real
ghosts ! They ask all sorts of impossible questions, and each

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of them has a naked soul to show me that nauseates me. You
come into my home, at night, to exhibit your shames, damn little
beggars, you ! Those eyes I saw today that seemed to acknowledge
me so naively, now they want to know too much. To them all I
can't be anything else but a man who is in bed and can't sleep.
And these people are the same whom I said I loved, whom I car-
essed, whom I even kissed, during this same day. The daylight
is a liar ! I must run away from those people who do not love
me enough.

I go into the other room where she sleeps. I go there
to get from her all the strength my heart needs to beat its next
beat. If she knew how many things I want she'd be so desperate,
she'd scream and die. But as it is she gives back the kiss and
a drowsy arm comes out and binds me to her warm face. Thus I
take much, very much, and I steal back into my room afraid that
even the silence might know of my theft....

Now you can see the dust on everything, there's no
sun and no wind. Outside, the rain is drilling holes into the
aching skull of dirty earth. The room throws its yellow breath
on the tall white wall. Everything is resting. Everything
weighs upon something else and, if a metaphor were miraculous,
this whole room would dash down to the ground. Everything is
still but nothing sleeps at night.

I get up and go into the kitchen. To survey the pans
and dishes a little. An aluminum pan shines like a bald head

-127-

in a darkened theatre and some sauce-pans are holes of deeper
darkness in the darkness. A chair is sitting quietly in the
shadow. The fire-escape is a skeleton peeping in.

In my room, the typewriter hides under its cover, the
white-glaring bed shrieks. The scars and blotches on the wall
make strange faces at me. Outside, the trains puff and blow
fiercely. They are throbbings of the physical pain of the
Earth. The locomotive driver, the damned fool who makes that
noise, who thinks it's good for him or for anybody to make that
noise, who thinks it is good for him not to consider me, not
to consider that I can't stand that noise....that I can't stand
it.....I can't, I can't !

-128-

Chapter XIX.

Beginning a Literary Career

I lived in Willoughby Street in Brooklyn for a few months - perhaps the darkest months of my life. I shovelled snow - a terrible ordeal for a weakling like myself. (It was in this room that I possessed my wife for the first time, when she was only my fiancee.) As yet I wasn't a poet, I was only a reader, but there I wrote one line: I wrote, Love is a mine hidden in the mountain of our old age.

Then I lived in Thirty-Seventh Street near Eighth Avenue, in that house with green walls where I met a Pollack who wanted to throw his dictionary at me when I woke him up with my singing. (It was here I won the first prize in "Poetry", which I drank up almost entirely in ginfIZES.) I was like a fisherman adrift on the sea, floating heless on a raft, kept afloat by God knows what promise or strength or hope. This I always was. And what did I fish in the sea of friendship, or what did I try to fish? Here came Louis Grudin, and he and I set out together to call on the best writers of New York.

We went to see Max Eastman who gave us each a copy of his "Understanding Poetry." He had very becoming grey hair, becoming because the rest of his face was very young. There was youthfulness in the appearance of Max Eastman but there was no youth in the sermons of this awful man. He had a stain instead of an eye, a most awful spot. We went to see Louis

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Untermeyer who also gave us autographed copies of one of his books and almost shame-facedly showed us a book of smutty pictures. We went to see Babette Deutsch who showed us her leg covered by a stocking full of indecent holes. But her mother was quite aristocratic. We went to see Alfred Kreymborg, and he was our first real acquaintance in a literary way. I think about the worst sort of autobiography is Kreymborg's "Troubadour" and Harry Kemp's "Tramping On Life." The former is so bland that it permits of no criticism. In it Kreymborg mentions about half a hundred writers without giving us any idea of what these men are. The latter is thoroughly stupid, cold, silly, rather pre-possessing, ponderous without strength - the work of a jackass of literature. He was the idol of those who look for poetry in the tail-piece of any magazine. Surely if I can't do better than those two men I am a goner, I am done for.

All is death in those two books. I read Kreymborg's first book, "Mushrooms". It was full of nostalgia, full of little poems, sometimes irrelevant, sometimes pleasing, sometimes amusing, sometimes startling. (But the poison of his later work has got me to the bone. What he says of his wife isn't sufficient. What he repeats and repeats is not worth repeating.) Yet Kreymborg was, and still is I hope, a good friend of mine. But friendship must not interfere. As for Harry Kemp, I always despised the man and the writer. There isn't a page that can be called even lovely. He did tramp on life with too careless a foot.

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Alfred Kreymborg took us to the house of that ultra-
modern saint, Lola Ridge. Emily Dickinson meant poetical solid-
ude; she meant thinking solitude of a poetic kind, Chinese
daintiness at times. Adelaide Crapsey meant sadness, sometimes
rebellion, too, but a sweet sad rebellion. Amy Lowell meant
voluminous and disorderly culture, wordiness, exaggeration; all
of which may go under the heading that would comprehend the
case of most women artists - Weakness. But as for Lola Ridge,
to fit her case no diminutive adjective could serve. It is not
a case of sweetness nor any of those qualities which, up to
date, have belonged to women writers. She is a poet, that's all.

Talk of propaganda here, was what I wrote of her poems.
I wish every poet had something as strong and virile to uphold !
It is not a matter of politics, it's a matter of such damning
hatred and love as would turn a modern city to ashes. Virile ? -
it may be an insult to use that adjective since Lola Ridge has
begun an era in which for a woman to be virile, i.e., masculine,
might mean to be weaker. I think she is one of the most beautiful
signs we have of woman's emancipation and independence. Let her
be a socialist; this rebellion of hers is pure beauty, it is
sanctified, it is nothing less than burning human blood. It is
no longer that particular fact of the revolt against actual
social conditions, which is, unfortunately, what effects today's
socialists and anarchists. It is an eternal thing, the thing that
caused Prometheus to be bound. It's the fire of heaven burning
in this wonderful woman's blood.

The words of her poems are so intensely vivid, they
are so palpable, so physically tangible that they whip or stab -

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they hurt. There is a ghastliness here caused by an excess of
pain and sorrow. And it is her integrity of impulse and emotion
that makes her shun more elaborate rythm forms for a perfectly
simple and equal one; although her rhythmical sense is richer
than that of certain poets who discover forms as one finds mush-
rooms after a rain. She is a woman suffering - with the snarl of
a lioness, rather. It is a lioness flinging herself madly
against the walls of the ugly city.

In this room I discovered Ezra Pound. I read his "Pavannes and Divisions" and I wrote these words about him: there is a word which one associates with Dostoievsky's works - Sorrow; as we think of Walt Whitman the word may be Joy; for Mr. Pound the word is Irritation. Irritation inspires him and he inspires irritation in his readers. Here he had made a translation of Laforgue in which Mr. Pound achieved a thing worthy of observation: he was true to the letter (almost) of the original and at the same time had betrayed and desecrated it. Laforgue's satires are veiled by a delicate and almost haughty modesty, and they have a sorrowful humble way; this becomes boisterous in the translation, reminding one of what Billy Sunday did to Christ.

This book, taken as a whole, is Mr. Pound's profession of faith in art. A faith in art which consists of a few "DON'TS" shouted at some imaginary and improbable followers; of repetitions of phrases by old and ancient masters, duly stripped of their original glamor, as all repetitions are. (One finds in this book a formula almost directly translated from a famous passage

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of Rimbaud's "Les Illuminations": "It is the presentation of such a complex instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation.") A faith in art that becomes militant in a fierce little contempt for America / Look, he's throwing pebbles at our sky-scrapers, O People ! And a provincial and bourgeois quarrel with the provincial and bourgeois in art. A faith in art that has no love, no ecstacy, not even drunkeness. Here a sulking, aggressive, self-conscious man scowls at you from behind every sentence. He tells us that he takes "no pleasure in writing this....." Boosting James Joyce, he cannot find a more enthusiastic or enlightening phrase than, "He gives us Dublin as it _presumably_ is"; or "He gives the thing as it is." Giving _the thing_ as it is he calls realism.

I might praise the book and say that there is in it a sort of dignified love for art and art concepts. But how can I ? - this love is so cold and so awkward that it inspires no sympathy. It is probably an affair between Mr. Pound and some Grecian wraiths, and we are unable to say just how immoral or lively it is. And is it love ? If so, it is an ugly love. Rather the crudity and the bombast of an earnest beginner, rather all the pathetic attitudes of self-glorification and self-abnegation with which incomplete artists daily pester the world than this sophisticated love towards Her; for She is a tough-handed and strong-smelling Woman. Rather the uncouth _gaffes_ of an adolescent than this philandering with fawns and nymphs and mouldy reminiscences of Pan - a nasty way of snubbing this great Woman who slings, in passing, streetfuls of dust of today's cities; whose favorite perfume is the loam - the loam

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that soils the hands of dudes and snobs. Rather morbid and talkative love than this ungainly abstinence from raptures for fear of clumsiness; rather coarseness that is tender-hearted and foolishly weeps and foolishly laughs than this delicacy and aloofness achieved and striven for without drama.

I would praise the book and be pleased at Mr. Pound's sincere love for James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, and Laforgue; exult in the fact that he was one of the first who spoke at all of Laforgue to the English-speaking-and-not-reading-public. But how can I ? - I like these men well enough myself and his enthusiasm is so slack that it disconcerts mine. And as for Laforgue, I love him so that I am ashamed for Laforgue of Mr. Pound's indecent flirting. As for the elucidations which might pass instead of enthusiasm - "If the nineteenth century had built itself on Crabbe ? Ah, if ! But no, they wanted confections." Naughty child, that little nineteenth century ! Mr. Pound talks of the experts, of such men as may die of a harsh sound inadvertently caught by their ears. We know them, _ces delicats_. It's Oscar Wilde who wrings new postures and new words out of poor Salome (she was an adolescent and she had a human tendency to be obvious); who writes of men flinging themselves languorously on sofas - and refuses to sit down in Whitman's room for fear of soiling his clothes. It is Remy de Gourmont, with his perfectly charming receptiveness, who cowers at the sight of such a forsaken, accursed and violent genius as Rimbaud and gossips about the tragedy of the splendid youth. It's Gustave Kahn who quibbles as to whether Laforgue is a symbolist or not, while Laforgue's

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aloofness and sorrow and death are one of those mistakes or
crimes of the world for which the world never gives an account or
an apology.

Attitudes and opinions are such things as may be
bought, sold, and exchanged, like clothes; they are never
contributors to the welfare of the world. Men are forces within
the world and when they become conscious one hears an exaltation
or a complaint; and these are signs of life. Ezra Pound has
estranged himself, and this is our resolution: he cannot talk
to us. By us, I mean readers, artists, and shoemakers. We -
and I stand together with all the fools he so hopelessly curses -
acknowledge that there are many things the matter with us; but
we realize that he is not really interested and we consider
his talk an intrusion. He irritates us.

As it happened, the "Seven Arts" never published my
work. It died before it had a chance to do so. But (John Crage/
the editor, was the typical great man. That is, he listened
with great patience to my belly-aching and gave me a luxurious
cigar. He also gave me a little gray magazine and told me to
write for it, which I did. The little magazine was edited by
Harriet Monroe and its name was "Poetry". I sent her stuff
and it was accepted. Later on, for these poems, I won the
famous fifty-dollar prize.

I went to (John Crage/no) once more, attracted very
much by the hope of another good cigar, and he gave me twenty-
five dollars for my poems. That night Mitterlechner and I got
gloriously drunk. But here I must say a word concerning Mitter-

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lechner. He was, as the name says, a German. Hard-boiled,
tough, loose-tongued, boisterous, German, German, German.
He was a German all right, and overmore a Rhinelander. He
called his landlady "a camel". He called me "a sucker".
He called his doctor "a fraud." He called his sweetheart
" a whores". He called his work "slaving." He called all
Italians and Greeks rotten people. He called his "vaterland"
the highest most civilized land on earth. He sang "Die Wacht am
Rhein" with gusto.

At intervals, he gave me much money and I was duly
thankful and grateful. (By the way, as I have perhaps said
before and will surely say again, being grateful is the most
difficult thing on earth to accomplish. One is almost always
bound to over do it.) His love for his "vaterland" was most
ugly. It consisted of shouts and guffaws and boisterousness
and obstinacy. All his love was altogether as I have described
it above and like his character. He befriended me and bought
me lots of beer. His moustaches were refined, a little pert,
a little aggressive, but they gave him an air of distinction.
This was soon belied by his awful manners. He was my good
friend, but in a bad way. I never liked him very much.

I lived on the second floor of this house and upstairs
there was a sink. That's where I used to wash myself. Each
step of the stairs had lost its horizontality and threatened to
fall to the floor below. Through a skylight window bulging
from the ceiling an ever -grey day oozed. And I often asked
God-knows-whom what diabolic extremes or what extraordinary

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device of economic paucity had made the landlord paint the walls green. Dark shining green. Shining in winter, sweating in the summer like a degenerate's face. Upstairs there was the sink, and by the sink the toilet......ah, only censurable words can say what weighed down upon the furnished-room house, choked by the tenants' breath and the multitudinous dust of the carpets that were fulsome with unswept years.

I went to wash myself. The girl was straightening the rooms. It was two. Two p.m. The girl dropped the broom and its stick fell with a "tock" upon one of the closed hall-room doors. The girl went into another room. The tenant of the insulted door came out: a great white nose that stuck out of two hollow grey cheeks and a moustache like a threat.

"Listen," he cried at me.

"Yes."

He slammed the door open, took a book in his hands, shook it before my eyes.

"I gotta fon da dichonary book, see !"

"Yes....well....what....do you ?"

"See ?"

"Do you want to sell it ? I don't want to buy it."

His big teeth appeared and disappeared, monstrously.

"I gotta fon da dichonary book. Mabbe you good.....I no say you no good....mabbe. Hu make noise bump me....I kick... no can sleep. I gib you fon da kick....you no stand ?" And then with a last great push, with long-bursting expansion: "I gib you fon da dichonary book."

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I understood at last that he wanted to throw it at me. So I went downstairs and laughed. I didn't know he was a night worker. Perhaps I didn't care how many night workers were in the house. I sang all the time. That is I used to scream uproariously old songs and Brahm's Wiegenlied and Katie, K-K-K-Katie, beau-tiful Kaaa-tie! One day as he passed my door the Pole shouted:

"No can sleep. Some people make noise. I fix."

(You pass in the street and look sideways and down, and sideways. Hardly you lift your eyes from the broken sidewalk before you. As far as to see the sky your head is never twisted. And a mother points you out to her child - Shhh, look at the bogey man! They are all against you, all they who know English. They enjoy knocking at your door, they who don't see how much you need your sleep, and you get angry at yourself, because you know these creatures who go to vaudevilles and put on queer neckties on Sunday morning, you know they're awake making a noise which they have a right to make, being more beautiful than you, knowing English. All are against you. When you open your eyes you see a broken sidewalk, broken with its own tragedy and not your own. As for me, I wasn't the one to throw the broom against your door but I don't care how much the broom awoke you. You have seen one face of truth and it's the whole truth to you who couldn't see any other, and you are snarling at it. Poor dog, snarl and bite if you can, but it's a big city, it's many people, it's too many things are your foe.)

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Chapter XX.

A Little Club in New York

What distinguished this club from any other I knew
of was that its members were all very young. There was Lilly
Steigman, the hefty girl who was gradually driving Louis Grudin
insane; then there was Goldie Steigman, and Rebecca and Sophie.
Sophie had the great honor of knowing personally the great
Hebrew artist, Sholam Asch. Izzie Schneider was also a member
of this club, and here he reigned supreme. (Izzie, your great
nose is a nice thing to remember.) He was such a suave writer,
such a charming personality, such a big Izzie, such a terse mind,
such a will to fight one and everybody. His humor was sharp
and cutting, and he was not what one would call handsome but his
face changed expressions swiftly and without notice beforehand.
(You said you'd get ahead of both of us, both Louis Grudin and me,
and perhaps you were right. Now behold your friend, dear Izzie,
caught by a modern sickness which makes him ridiculous, shattered
and broken to smithereens......)

I liked the splendid delicacy for me in "Dr.Transit."
You said: "Emanuel Carnevali, who helped to make the man who
made this book." Do you remember when we walked at night in
Staten Island ? We ate very green grapes which you named "gripes."
There we stole green apples.

This little club used to meet once a week in the house
of one of the members. A talk was given on a subject chosen the

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week before. Youth was the finest thing about this club and also the worst thing about it. There was freshness and ineptitude. Youth, sheer youth, reigned in this club and was the reason for its existence. It was a little vein of gold running through the black mine of New York. Because of it, and because Harriet Monroe had printed my poetry, this became the golden period of my life. (I knew Harriet Monroe was the finest editor in the country. She was always hungry for new unpublished work, and it was for that reason that I was so easily accepted.) It was the club of the disbanded, the morally homeless, the heretics of the artistic world. Once they met to eat at my house - the Kreymborgs came too - and my wife served us such salty bacala that no one could eat a mouthful.

Once we had a talk on sexual relationships, and once I was asked to read an article on contemporary Italian literature. This was a great success and received great applause. It went: Carducci and Pascoli are dead and d'Annunzio has reached the appreciation of fat American reviews. This is about a few young poets who were acknowledged in and contributed to the magazine "La Voce" and the Futurist's organ "Lacerba." As for the rest, they are many in Italy - imitators of d'Annunzio or Carducci, over-visioned, over-inspired, overwhelming saviours-of-the-world or sons-of-the-Muses. And the most popular of them is Sam Benelli, known to the French and American public for his dramatic poems.

Now I should speak of characteristics, schools, and tendencies, but I am thinking of Verlaine, Laforgue, Browning, Verhaeren, and of how they stood out and above all schools, and

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of how puzzled a critic would be who should want to pigeon-hole
them. The first good poem that was ever written started the
school of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, and insofar as a poet
succeeds in writing poetry he belongs to that school and to no
other. Here then are a few names:

Palazzeschi: Simplicity and naivete of a modern St.
Francis of Assisi. Wonder-eyed playboy, swift and light artist.

Papini: "At twenty, each idea is to be suspected,
each man is the enemy"; having suffered our own great way, we
have our own great remedies to suggest. But after, most of us
shrink, become humbler - out of some defeat, perhaps. Papini
has fulfilled the desire of his heart of twenty - he has not
shrunk. More than a warrior or a martyr has Papini given his
life to his country, his people; in tempestuous autobiographical
complaints, articles - criticism and pragmatism.

Slataper: died, very young, in the war. Wrote of the
Carso mountains, the sheer, hard landscapes where he lived - a
big, hard and clean boy.

Govoni: The writer of the most musical, most humane
free verse I have ever read. Delicate as a girl, if at times he
sings the luridist, obscenest facts in the life of an old Italian
city, he does so with the same delicate voice. Something of
Frost in him - or, I should rather say, something of Govoni in
Frost.

Di Giacomo: Writes in Neapolitain dialect short stories
and poems of the irremediable sadness and the irrational tragedy
of the old Naples. With a tenderness that is real in Italy

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because of the climate, etc. and would be sentimentality in
America. He has been acknowledged by Croce and is considered
to be the national poet.

Jahier: "Man of many scruples," believing that a
poet is any man bothered by a great conscience. Works in an
office for a living. No language and no grammar fits Jahier,
and they must widen and become more hospitable in order to
accept him. Jahier knows that it is the poet who shapes languages
and grammars and accomplishes many other things.

Soffici: Most advanced of the all, fights his way
through French influences to a broken, jagged sort of poetry
(words at liberty and lyric simultanities) which is as haphazard
as life itself.

And then Clemente Rebora, very earnest and very rich,
who overflows into an imagism that is an orgy of cold senses,
and dwindles into an unanimism that is emotional vagueness.
Also Umberto Saba, Luciano Folgore and Camillo Sbarbaro, poets
with too indefinite an attitude - sometimes borrowed.

When a heavy mood of mine crushes the appreciative attitude that I like to maintain, I see the flaws of Italian poetry as all being liable to definition under one name - Futurism. Futurism we built upon the mistakes, exaggerations and aberrations of some of the poets I have mentioned. It was born of the need for fellowship among those poets, and, with Marinetti, of the need for notoriety; and was fostered by the hustling of many vacant souls who made out of these exaggerations, etc., (which were all they could reach), a theory and a way of art. The

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movement, being largely a furious reaction, was largely a merely
negative manifestation. The attitude was: Since the Passatisti
were obvious, we will be obscure, since they were grandiloquent
with faith, we will struggle from irony to despair and backward,
since with them sexual matters were more or less fig-leafed, we
will trace the minutes and the seconds of our sexual sophistica-
tion; since they were too definite, soared too high astride
voluminous Pegasuses blown by the wind of universal moods, we
will herald the unimportance of art; we will trace the formation
of the mood, but be careful to evade the mood itself; write
elements of protopsychology (and Mallarme started it). Above all,
let's hate the bourgeois.

The trouble with them was, as Prezzolini put it, that
they were bourgeois themselves. Vicious circles of weariness
and sensualism, disease and cynicism - aren't these very bour-
geois ? Squalor of unemployed senses, where literature becomes
an obsession; wantlessness - as with Ezra Pound who spends too
many pages of his "Lustra" worrying whither and wherefore and
when and how his songs go - (do they go ?) Well, snobs and
freaks and business-men are also always occupied with disoccupa-
tions of the sort. All the vicious circles, all the insanities,
all the decadences are of the world that the artist hates. But
he hates it because he suffers at seeing it thus; he does not
resolve upon hating it while still he is in it and lives no
better than anybody else - this the bourgeois does and the
Futurist also. And as to obscurity: faces turn sour, stale,
lurid, twisted, and are eaten up from inside. To whomever

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would preach obscurity, I say out, out in the open to be
simplified by the clean weather ! Out in the open and less in
the rooms for the sake of health !

And then, of course, their theories being absurd,
these writers betray their theories. Marinetti is more grandiloquent, more obvious, and writes noisier classical bombast
than any cheap Passatisti. That's why they hear him around the
world. But Prezzozini, lovable critic, full of strength and
cleanness, has fixed him and his gang in the only intelligent
articles on Futurism that have appeared in Italian magazines
where pig-headed professors wage war against and nasty ignorant
youths defend it.

After all this, I see in Italian poetry now something
that I want to call modern. And if participation in Futurism
of the best poets of Italy has any good significance at all, it
means that it had the effect of giving them a consciousness of
modernity. Whether there is or is not anything new under the
sun, things which must, if you will, be repeated are said in a
line whereas in olden times they required a whole strophe.
Modern man, grown to a consciousness that science and the
experience of dead artists have given him, sees a more intricate
and nearer, even if apparently smaller world than the large one
of the old artists. I think it is Yeats who said that no
traditional pose is adequate to express it, this modern consciousness.
(Here a friend suggests that a kind of sophistication
recurring more than once through the ages, with the suavity of old
civilizations. Though I advance my view humbly and would defend

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it from attack by saying that it is mainly pragmatic, I am
thinking that my friend's observation is rather confirmed than
confuted by history. Let this be food for speculation for
those whose opinion that there is nothing new under the sun is
also pragmatic.)

I want, finally, to point out the simple way of
expression of Palazzeschi, Govoni, and Jahier, which suggests
to me that the only school is that of simplicity. It has been
said that making poetry is the process wherewith one frees the
thing seen of all that is not artistic - the unnecessary, the
commonplace, the grandiloquent, the poetical. And I should
dare to say that simplicity is then also the quality of being
true, which means human, which means beautiful.

And I realize here that I owe an apology to Ezra Pound.

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Chapter XXI.

Spring

These flowers that are on the window-sill, I got them
from the Park this afternoon. The air in the park was a luke-
warm punch sipped with half-open lips at a party of perfect
delicacy, where a word said a little louder is an obscene thing.

Almost everyone has flowers on the window-sill. They
haven't bought them so they are there "against the law." These
flowers are the result of a broken law. A preambulating battle-
ship of fat has put an empty tomato can beside the lilacs on
her window-sill. It yawns into the face of the lilacs, which
is bent away a little.

My flowers are on the window-sill in a milk-bottle.
I have looked at them again and again like a man who knows that
something terrible will happen if he does not talk. They are the
colors of the world; lilacs, azaleas, violets and buttercups.
The azaleas were closed yet, furled up and lean, with long
wrinkles, crude little hands. The violets I picked in the tall
grass; in the shadow I found darker ones, seeming dark with
thought, in the oblivion of the tangle of the deep grass. The
lilacs - it was the only cluster left on the tree. Gently,
though I forced it down, came the branch over me, fluttering with
great impudence its skirts of leaves in my face.

And the buttercups - the gleaming buttercups - cups held

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high by a tiny arm. Offering a miniature of Father Sun from
Mother Earth, on the dusty and black window-sill, in the grey
frame of the window. They are the dance of my hands along the
perfect curves, the caress of my eyes along their perfect nuances.
These hands of a young man, which I hold in my pockets, want to
start out - want to stop, and ask, and doubt, and begin, and
falter, then twist in sorrow, twitch in sorrow back again into
their forced stride of everyday. These are the hands of a
destroyer and these are the hands which hold anathemas as
Jupiter's hands held lightnings.

Flowers, flowers are there because of the thousand
nuances - I have gathered into my eyes, the thousand nuances I
have gleaned - while looking from over the heads of everybody and
from under everybody's heels, from the fog and across the swing of
the rain. I want a home that will not insult flowers. I want a
home that will not be insulted by the homes under and above it.
I want a home that will not be insulted by a city, I want a city
that the other cities may not insult. I want another home, but
not one like any of yours. Some day, when I know more and when I
shall have gained a little return - then I shall cast in a book the
frame of a house, with the help of the artists of America and of
the world. I shall let the frame of the house break through
heavy tangle of my bones, arise from the heap of my flesh. And
it will loom over the city, against your house, frightfully, for
it will be a ghost, the ghost of the man who was let die, the
ghost of the song forever forgotten and forever coming again and
again to shake the four walls of the sky.

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Tender and young again, feminine, sky of the
evening of summer is blushing.

Round, long and soft like a draped arm, sky of
the evening over the poor city resting.

Spaces of cool blue are musing -

They will hold all our sadness, O spaces of cool blue.

O city, there lived in you once, O Manhattan, a man,
Walt Whitman.

Our hands are wasted already, perhaps; but enough for
contribution to Beauty.

Enough for a great sadness, will be

Evening of summer, evening of summer going to sleep
Over the purple bed, over the light flowers of the
sunset.

Many other evenings have I in my heart - I have
loved so much, so long and so well -

Don't you remember, cool blue spaces brooding ?

I shall recall you,

I shall recall you if insanity comes and sits down
and puts her hands in my hair.

Once I touched things with religion, once a girl loved
me, once I used to go hiking with
young folks over the Palisades,

Once I cried worthily.

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Once Louis Grudin read me the beginning of a novel in which he confessed that I meant very much to him. He let escape such phrases as this:

"This is the beginning of American Culture." "We shall be politicians since the attainment of metaphysics is politics." "To be in love is perfect living; it is the most rational way of being."

Once Louis Grudin's girl danced for us: she lifted her aggressively green skirt and showed her awful legs. We quarreled often and bloodily. (When I went to Chicago, we quarrelled further when I found he had sent to the office of "Poetry", of which I was then associate-editor, some poems written by his fat girl. The quarrel expanded and grew red hot. I wrote him such a lot of insults and abused him so awfully that he wrote me, without loss of time, threatening me. "Your nimble pen will be good and useful when I come and show you my fists," he wrote.)

At the "Seven Arts", I met Waldo Frank, and I must say that the first meeting was not pleasant at all. And at Lola Ridge's I met William Carlos Williams, and I have had no happier encounter (save the encounter with Kay Boyle and Dorothy Dusley.) He was a most lovely man, strange, with a deprecatory voice, especially when he read poems of his own. At Lola's I made my first long speech, and this speech won Carlos William's friendship for me, or at least he offered it without any difficulty. I went and spent a few days at his home.

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A big boy, he was, naive to a great point, more boyish
than his lovely, earnest, almost-grave children. He went around
in his Ford over the hills to pick wild flowers with a quantity
of earth attached to them, and he transplanted them into his
back-yard with a hope that they would grow and thrive there.
Thoroughly modest, he was almost ashamed to read his poetry
(which was full of surprises and white and powerful and true and
beautiful) in public. Therefore the deprecatory twang in his
voice.

Sometimes his face was ghastly, fierce and unbeautif
from some inner struggle. His face was a mixture of arrogance
and the good-natured slinger of all sorts of things. I never
saw him composing, but I imagine him laughing while he does.
His wife was....(but I vowed never to speak of wives, except
my own.)

In spite of voices to the contrary, he was chaste as a
virgin, delicately chaste, elusively so, in fact. In the evening,
I coaxed him to lie down on a sofa and listen to my latest partur-
ition - but he went to sleep and had the nerve to snore at me.
He had the courage to dedicate the last number of the magazine
"Others" to me. (That cost me a scolding from Waldo Frank.)
He wrote:

"Emanuel Carnevali, the black poet, the empty man, the
New York which does not exist.....I celebrate your arrival. It
is for you we went out, old men in the dark. It is for you that
the rubbish stirred and a rat crawled from the garbage, alive !
....What do I care if Carnevali has not written three poems I

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can thoroughly admire ? Who can write a poem complete in every
part, surrounded by this mess we live in ? .... His poems will
not be constructed, they cannot be. He is wide open ! He is
black, speckled with flashes, but he is wide, wide, WIDE open !
He is out-of-doors. He does not look through a window.

We older can compose, we seek the seclusion of a
style, of a technique, we make replicas of the world we live in
and we live in them and not in the world....We salute you!

I wrote to him once when he seemed to repent making
this fine gesture, this greatest gesture of all.

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Chapter XXII.

My Speech at Lola's

This is an article - or whatever you will want to
call it to suit your traditional gentleness, O gentle reader-
obese with bombast, clamorous with objections, obstreperous
and violent in an obsolete way, like ultimatums and wars. It
is indeed an ultimatum and an attack. The greatest difficulty
will be to answer why and how I stuck all these different names
in a line to make out of them a title for this thing - Maxwell
Bodenheim, Alfred Kreymborg, Lola Ridge, William Carlos Williams,
William Saphier. Did not the infernal dissonance shatter my
brain ? Did not the wrangle of so different lights make me
dizzy ? The suggestive violentism and the heavy scented drunk-
ening whirlwind that is Williams; the sweet simplicism and the
capering bitterness that is Kreymborg; the voracious hunger of
Lola Ridge - flashlights searching a battlefield, slicing a
thick foul night, breaking one another to be drawn together
into pools of swarming gold over corpses; the delicate strength
of Saphier, like a hand of a laborer who has subdued work, big
and perfectly wrought; Bodenheim's evanescent precision and
perfectly contained and constrained demeanor of a lady that is
each and every gesture and posture - how could I put them
together ?

Because they are a synthetic moment in my life. I
have done some reading of their works and have seen each of

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them separately and together. They are one of my experiences,
an experience I want to gather together and express by elevat-
ing myself above it, if possible, or by sinking under it, if
necessary.

These are the poets of New York, my city. I have
seen and talked with each of them. And one night, how much I
loved them and how much I hated them was so splendidly clear
to my mind that I knew I must fight this overwhelming spectacle
in or out of me in order to live to the next day. What I under-
stood by literature was in danger of falling down - depriving
me of sleep, depriving me of what I call my soul. So, for my
soul's sake I sat and wrote an attack.

I can't go to sleep. The darkness that flaps at the
end of each day like a great black fan cannot blow my eyelids
down. I am a pair of open eyes forever.

I must keep back my joy as a man holds his breath lest
my joy shatter me bursting out of me. From the brain that is
my heart a thousand messages have flown away. I am in love and
I can't live if an answer is not given me. Perhaps I think
none of you, my friends, would care to answer me; perhaps I
am sure not one of you could give an answer. This I answer
myself, and my sorrow is my hatred that you cannot answer me,
that you are irremediably, tremendously different from what I am.

I hate you. I am a god seeking around the world what
there is need to create. Or the world is a god and I go begging
of him to help me become a god. I am an unfinished god in the
unfinished divinity which is the world - just the same as you

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are unfinished gods. And this, our quality of being unfinished
is eternity, immortality and ever-changing life to me. I break
and burst open and I unfold continually or I remain in a posture
of perfect receptiveness. My action is beautiful, that of a
flower: 1st, closed bud of fifteen petals, held by the fretting
ready-to-break hand of the sepals; 2nd, each sepal falls and
each petal unfolds to give a chance to each other petal; 3rd,
petals laid out in three planes forming an absolute openness,
openness to things of all direction, openness for giving and
taking. My action is more than that (perhaps there is no such
flower as that), going quicker through radical changes than
nature with her routine of seasons. I am the clenched fist
of the worker and the lazy pale hand of the count falling
diffusedly over the curved arm of the chair. What makes people
damned toward one another and upon the belly of the earth that
accepts them one and all with gigantic patience and patient
discrimination? What damns them is the fact that a man can
be but himself and no more - and when he's nothing he thinks
it suffices since he is yet himself.

In the new mornings, my heart breaks as the sepals of
the flowers break. My friends, Kreymborg, Bodenheim, Saphier,
Williams, and Ridge, I hate you.

The two of you who sneer I hate, and the two of you
who curse, and the five of you who do nothing. Sneer - what
chained impotence is this? Of whom are you prisoners? Who is
your boss that, unable to command him, you would pinch and bite
and scratch with your sneers? Curse - you do not know the

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simple curse of a straight upward arm that bears a pointing
finger like a gun bayonet. You have ceased to believe in
plain statements because, you say, the men-of-nothing, the
fakers have corrupted them. (Does an artist invent a new art
because of his imitators ? The simple statements were created
by poets; only the poets know their use. The simple words are
still, and exclusively, the poets !

When the poets ceased using terms like God, divine,
etc., out of the belief that they would be given a commercial
value, the inverse terms were brought out by them: Satan,
infernal, useless, beauty versus mob, beauty versus goodness.
This retaliation against the public when earnest and unconscious
has been the sign of the defeat of the poets; when conscious,
if ever it was so, a sign of weariness or a lowly expedient.
Thus you too, defeated ones and sons of the defeated ones, talk
of non-utilitarianism of art, as everybody in this century did
who wrote down his own defeat (de Gourmont, Papini, Pound, Croce).
This talk of non-utilitarianism, turns it one way and the other,
it is the same thing logically that every bourgeois does when he
lives without reason and scope. The same thing every damned
bourgeois does when he smiles with condescendioco at what he
calls "the artistic temperament."

Of all human activities, the only useful one is art.
I'll maintain this axiom no matter where its corollaries will
carry you, I'll maintain it even if it force you to conclusions
as these: the only action is apathy, the only practical the
utterly unpractical. For what does the expression "to create"
mean ? It means "to hell with the mob who will always misunder-

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stand !" Yes, but let us speak what we have to speak, then,
in "the language" no matter how the mob has warped, stumped,
and minced the language. You pure artists, you non-utilitarians,
you half-and-half, you socialists, you souls of serenity, let
us see supreme serenity, the last indifference, the highest
pride, that of the man who, even if alone in the world, talks
the world's language. Let us see you brave the danger which
brings insanity and damnation to an artist, the danger of being
believed the megaphone of all the filthy symbols of death and
rest which wear such shining names as god, life, beauty, liberty,
democracy, and peace along the ash-can guarded streets of the
mob.

Look out, I'm not blaming you for the lack of philo-
sophical content in your work. There are signs of that Kreymborg,
Ridge, and Williams. That so-called philosophical content -
stretches of cold-handed reasoning to prove that which is red hot,
stretches of desert for the sake of the oasis here and there.
I must indeed admit that my own work is full of that barrenness
and that none of you has committed a crime of half the size of
those one comes across - swamps - in the Lawyer Masters' barren
great valley. Philosophy when it is great is poetry, when small
...a trick, a technique, a work, a fallacious way of proving
a fallacy. But I speak of the emotional content of your works,
that which generally goes under the name of "form". The names
that "form" has assumed through the ages - (Romanticism, Naturalism,
Impressionism, Realism, Symbolism) - indicate different attempts
at truth. And each of these names was, in its time, the definition

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of truth. Symbolism to me has meant Mallarme creating a radically different language and therewith stating differently everything. Or Rimbaud, finding his "liberty in salvation."
I speak of your form, that half-and half-thing, that thing which cannot break loose from the cage of metrical rhythms and which clumsily strives toward the spontaneity of talk, that thing that is as broken, as queer, as grotesque, as half-killed as your wills are queer, grotesque, broken, and half-killed. My will and your will, that is the fight and the attack in this article.

You are old, truth has become a difficult thing to know and you call your swaggering-staggering, your stumbling-swearing, your climbing-crawling-falling, your lazy swaying, your minute elusive squirming after truth, you call this technique or what-not. (I love you because you are still after the old lady and still hoping to one day get hold of her by the shoulders and make her turn around and be marvelously surprised to find her so young and so new.) I hate you because you suggest and like to suggest that what made you first write is no longer there, that your youth's will is gone, that you do what you do disinterestedly, for the sake of expressing some queer shape of yourself, which must of necessity be either your own shape or some shape you would like to attain - that is your unkillable will.

You want to be photographing machines and it pleases you when your "negative" results are different from those of

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the other fellows. Your wills are half-killed and you walk
around like men with their heads dangling from their trunks,
held only by some bloody necessary threads. You're useless,
and you know it, and your sneer is your own bitterness. You do
not want to give anything to the young, you cannot give anything
to the young. The fight you started in the beginning has you
exhausted. And because you are not fighting, I, who have written
too many bad poems and have made too many mistakes already
(but who, as every young man should, hear a new literature
awaking with him), I damn you with the denomination of poets
of old forms, past poets. Unless you are young, too, I must
do that.

You make me mad! You say that what is gall in my
throat you have already swallowed and have not yet croaked
thereof! I hate you - let me spit it out - because you're not
boys, because you are not just over twenty (and I say that who
cannot be always twenty), he's dead when he's no more twenty,
he's one of the too-many names in the archives, he's a forgotten
exclamation in the immense, quick-judging and damning head of
God; he's a man passing in the street just once and never again
......Looking at Papini's portrait, a simple girl I know said
that he looked sixteen, twenty, and sixty. I said, he was born
in the Genesis and he has lived and spoken to the Apocalypse.
One passes from a day to the next day through death. Death
marks the age. Papini died in the last death, the death of
himself and his world together, and his "Un Uomo Finito" is
the report of such death. But where are your "Un Uomo Finitos"?
Where are your references, how have you earned, how will you

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earn the credit of readers and fellow-men, readers and fellow-
men such as I? You are not sane, and still you are not as mad
as I.

But there comes the moon to weep inside my window.
This great lady's humility makes me humble too. I mute my
insurrective trombone and I am contrite. You are as mad as gods
must be. I have seen Kreymborg hold a chisel so fearfully with
his skinny hands and engrave a line that was as tremendously
pregnant as a 305 shell. I have seen him behind one of his
poems, an arrow before it's let go. I have seen him constrain
himself with the strength of the ray-concentrator Sun and I
understood that in the face of God, in order that there be all
the lines that the little flowers and the husky crags have, each
line must be a synthesis.

With his mobility, Williams reaches almost every part
of the truth at the same time - the synthesis of it being a
mere exclamation, a magic single word.

The dear sufferer, Lola Ridge, has spoken of a wind
in such a way that I saw the hand of God bringing clean stillness
to man - and I was ashamed, I, the restlessness that has no
direction.

In a portrait by Saphier, I saw that my hands were
and would always be too rough to hold a bit of life (oh, anything,
a little bit!) in adoration. I say to my arms that gesticulate,
please, please, down for a moment and let your posture be a
synthetic one. I say to my face, here, look at the river, it's
all laid out; when the sun falls in it there are many little

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ripples revealed, whirlpools that the sunlight beats the tempo to, many quiet spaces where the sun silently pours his gift of melted gold, many little tongues licking the shore that the sun sets a-singing. Be like that, quiet. Be like that, all spread out. See Bodenheim, how he is spread out. See Soffici, he went to war and brought it back in his face and his heart. Because in his open arms, like a Christ's, all the war entered; while, you, you would have lowered your head and fought against the war, you would have seen nothing, you would have smashed your head and lost.

See Kreymborg: because he has been sitting so quiet the child in him didn't get scared and hasn't left him. It's still playing in him, that sad and crazy child, seeing all that the old man Kreymborg sees and not getting stupidly scared because the old man Kreymborg isn't running about knocking down furniture and trampling over flowers and lives as you do. Learn from them what it is that is too difficult for them to say because it is all their life, face, name; learn that which is too difficult for you to ask, too sacrilegious of you to ask, foolish of you to ask - impossible for them to say in a better way than by merely being what they are.

But, please, I am disgusted with your little-review talk of technique and technicians. Easier than everything, commoner than everything is to have a technique, to talk like Ezra Pound does in his "Subdivisions of the Poetical Department Store with Antiques for Sale only to those Who Know How the Oriental Pooh-Pooh-Chink wore His Slippers." The fakers need a

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technique, they who go lying for a cent and lying more for a cent and a half.

If you are poets, as they say, I don't want to be a poet. I say you discovered yourselves and you're disgusted with the find and you are hiding behind a thick-woven, ragged curtain of image-words, shunts, tricks, and verse that lack even the one-two-three-dip of rhymes which would at least make them decisively comic. Your black pens are ravens croaking over the stinking corpses of your wills - the stench of which can't help but filtrate in between the cracks and the chinks of your cracked and wrinkled poems. Like all the rest, you have forgotten your youth. You have been defeated by the world. If you say that you never fought, that will only place you as cowards. If you say nothing, then I'll shout into your ears that the world expects a formal surrender from you.

But if what I see is there, you are the last white fringes of a tide that is ebbing back into abyss that is the world's womb. You will roll down into the abyss, you pebbles, you twigs, you starfishes and shells and sand and salt perfume - it will be better for you, jelly-fishes, for you would dry on the shore. I am an enormous commonplace rolling over your delicate miniatures, I'm an enormous lady with large feet, such large feet that she can't help but step on your little flowers. I am the same enormous lady crying as sincerely as she can over the beautiful flowers that her feet destroyed.

Let me look for my heart,

In the loam, in the black earth of my country.

My heart is buried deep in the heart of my

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## Chapter XXIII

### The End of Love

Where I worked as a beast of burden was at Gus's in Broad Street, where during the lunch-hour the whole of Wall Street came with its bank-clerks, employees; all amounting to more than eight hundred lunches. Working there I managed to collect about twenty dollars so as to buy a gold watch, a present for my wife. But I spent it instead with Mitterlechner and a couple of whores. My wife was working in the country then and I wrote her what I had done, mentioning that it was, after all, her mission to keep me on the straight and narrow path. She replied that she had no interest in missions and didn't want to hear about my adventures. If she wanted the gold watch I had promised her, well, she could just go and buy it for herself.

There was also a C. and L. Restaurant where I waited on table with much wisdom and forethought. Here I rose to the heights of counterman. I fell in love with one waitress there, rather pretty, with very soft hands who took care of my tips for me. The waitresses showered me with lovely names, such as "sweetness", "handsome", "love", "precious." Once a man I was waiting on spoke gently to me. He told me, mildly, humbly, that he was a pedarast. But enough of the places where I have worked! I curse them all! I never had a single hour of joyous labor, not one hour, unless I was drunk as frequently happened. I dragged this weary body of mine, eternally tired, eternally

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ill, with a certain obstinacy from place to place. I had to
live, but I had all of America against me, all this never-
ending urge to work. I called aloud wildly and endlessly for
help, but no answer ever came. I sang my feeble songs like a
swallow lost in the immense sky of life. I was broken, weary;
the few moments of comfort and peace came when I left a job
with a few cents in my pocket - enough to last me a couple
of days.

Saturday evenings I would join my wife in the country
where she worked, and I would wash myself all over first and
then put on talcum powder so that I was all fresh and perfumed
when I saw her. Sunday I would sleep in Mr. Green's cottage,
my wife's boss. Fine, beautiful days I spent there with my
wife in the sun - for she was still pretty then. We seemed never
to tire of each other in those days, but still it was the
beginning of the end. I remember that neither of us knew the
meaning of the English word, "shallow", then, and we kept on
repeating it to each other, hoping that one of us would divulge
the meaning. Finally we confessed to each other that we didn't
know what it meant.

Then when my wife was being operated on (anti-birth),
I met Dorothy S., a painter. I fell in love with her because
she was kind to me. (That was the way all my love-affairs
began.) When I went to see my wife I had the letter in my
pocket in which Dorothy S. told me "I love you." I went to her
that evening and as I finally kissed her, her eyelids beat like
dying butterflies. I decided to let them die, those dying
butterflies.........

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I never saw her again, but I met Caroline D. I do
not know from what skies she fell into my arms. But I know
that her former sweetheart once spent half the night under her
window, knowing I was upstairs with her. (He was the man she
married and subsequently divorced after....after....) This is
the way it began: a message was brought to my room asking me
to telephone Caroline D. at her bank. I did so, rather surlily,
and at the other end of the phone Caroline kept repeating: "You
talk quite like a celebrity....you act like a celebrity.... I
want to meet you somewhere...."

She was not beautiful, but she had a face full of
mystery and the prefact to mystery. She was tall and mighty,
with full round breasts and powerful shoulders. (I never could
forgive her for being stronger than I.) She had bulging chestnut
eyes which seemed evil but were not. She was meek, in spite of
her spiritual and physical strength, in spite of her eyes which
seemed thoroughly evil, stubbornly bad. She dressed with great
gorgeousness when she knew I was coming to see her, and she
would tell me that I was almost Jesus or else a plain charlatan.
She was very new to love and her *gaffes* were frequent and
preposterous. *Turris Eburnea*, I don't know that I ever loved
her. *Turris Eburnea*, she was terribly white.

One day my wife came back from the country unexpectedly
and she visited my room while I was not there. I had hidden
Caroline's letters under the bed, and my wife rummaged around
in my absence and found the box in which they were concealed.
Next morning she telephoned each of us: she telephoned me and

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asked me to come and see her, and she made a similar request of Caroline. When we both reached the place where she worked and were seated in the room with her, she suddenly jumped up and expressed her intention of calling the police. Caroline asked that I leave them alone together and after agreeing that I would get out and stay out while they consulted about me, I burst into the room again, shouting: "No, this is not fair, not fair at all!"

My wife was in the midst of the most hellish tirade I have ever listened to, and in fury I gave her a push that sent her flying. All this row so alarmed the poor little telephone operator stationed near the entrance that she sent for assistance, and when Caroline managed to make an ignominious escape (I following her), we met a group of people on the stairs, fighting their way up and shouting:

"Where is that woman? Where is that woman?"

I too joined the chorus of voices as I made my way down the stairs, crying too:

"Where is that woman? Where is she?"

But the negro porter was not fooled and he pursued me and caught me up at the subway station, but as soon as he laid hands on me the ticket-collector shouted at him to let me go.

* * * * * * *

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She was a woman of great and small wrath, my wife.
There was a certain power in her, for she drove me to insanity
at times. She could never beg for pardon, and that signified
a great weakness in her.

I said: I should make a prayer
with the sound of her footsteps
when she comes to my desolate room
bringing luxurious sweets.

I shall make a prayer
with the rhythm that is in her features,
with her voice for a music.

But, unexpectedly,
the prayer ran thus:

Deliver me
from the stubbornness of this woman.
She is like a sardinian ass,
a sardinian ass, so small!

Deliver me
from the animalistic love
of this woman,
an enormous leech
at my breast.

She was a woman of great and small wrath,
She was a preposterous barbarian.
An obsolete moralist.

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An obstreperous scolder.

Over my bed she crushed
the little children of my yesterdays:
over my bed she slew
the tiny birds of my tomorrows.
Over my bed she strewed
the little hypocritical toads
of her whims.

So I said:

I shall make a curse to God
with the anger in her voice.
I shall make blasphemy
with the ugliness of her face.
I shall make a malediction
with her unkind words.

And to think that we had once passed more than twelve
hours together without tiring of one another! Yes, sometimes
we had spent half the night sitting on a park-bench, talking
and looking at each other. But now our love was gone. We
trampled it down with our feet until it was quiet, all gone,
all finished. It was the absolute destruction, the end of love.

After the affair with Caroline was over, my wife had
wept and wept until I was reduced to going to live with her again,
but now even this was past and we were as quiet as death. My
wife no longer grovelled at my feet with the eternal question,
"Do you love me?" And I no longer shouted the answer, eternal
also, "No!" What had been destroyed could not be mended. We

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were surrounded by the calmness of death.

At first we had opposed our whole strength against this feeling of dying, but it was to no avail. Death was ours and only death. We sat together by a small creek in the Bronx, and we suddenly knew how near to us it was, forming almost a part of ourselves. Melancholy had obliterated us entirely, and how meekly the little rivulet reflected and returned our melancholy. Here we brought all our rags of love, our abject misery, hoping that the sum of these gifts would be truly death. Little rivulet, you watched our end and went on murmuring as you passed us by. I had known the birth of love and now I knew its death.

* * * * *

Then I discovered that I had been made cuckold too. I sent Louis Grudin to the little town in Connecticut where my wife was passing the summer, working, and when he came back he told me he had met a Russian violinist with my wife. It seemed to Lou that she seemed under a strain while talking of this violinist or to him.

When she returned, I spoke of Lou's visit to her and she mentioned a few people she had introduced to him. But she did not mention the Russian violinist. That was the cue to the situation for me. I was sleeping with her in her room and I began shouting at her, giving full speech to my suspicion.

"Who is this Russian violinist Lou talked to me about?" I cried.

She was silent for a while and in that space of time

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I saw the entire truth which she had succeeded in hiding from me. I laughed aloud and, roaring with laughter, jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to my own room. Presently she too made her appearance in my room, and controlling myself I told her, pedantically and gravely, that she must consider me as a priest and that she should confess everything without attempting to exonerate herself from blame.

"Do not, for once," I said, "Try to put the fault for everything on me."

So she confessed the truth to me, but so uglily, with such meanness, with petty tears, with such a cowardly fear of me that I feared for her soul. Not only had she given herself to the Russian, but to another man as well - the hero of an ancient love-affair, a Spanish boy. I remembered with amazement the infernal hours she had spent calling me names, calling Caroline a whore, a snake, a vile woman.

Finally, Harriet Monroe came to New York and told me that if I wanted to come to Chicago she would help me to find a job there.

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## Chapter XXIV

### *Chicago*

When Waldo Frank saw the handwriting of my future employer he said spontaneously, "What a horrible man!" And he was right. He had the face of a sour Presbyterian minister, which he was. His name was Pasquale and he was a shady character, an ugly brute. He was the editor of "The Citizen" besides being a minister, and I never could imagine what kind of sermons he preached to his congregation. They must have been terrible if they resembled in any way their author's soul. He had green eyes, with the iris misted (perhaps by cataract), which terrified one. He peppered his spaghetti, making it quite uneatable, and once he told me that he had at one time seen an Italian being hanged. He said he had laughed himself sick at this event, which must have seemed to any other human being a thing as lugubrious as a skull.

My work consisted of writing notes concerning the criminals of Chicago and soliciting advertisements and subscriptions. He was in league with bootleggers, and I once wrote an article for him against the Italian gangster element in America. It almost cost me my life, although I didn't know it. And this horrible man was the father of a strapping girl who needed altogether different things than Presbyterian sermons. I used to talk to her about religion, telling her that God is a sentimental symbol. Religion was good for little old ladies, I told her; for tired people, for fools. I said I loved

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Christ but that Christ is the denial of any Christian sect, of all Christian religions. Christ might well be called a god but he had preferred to be called a man, knowing instinctively that the word "man" is larger and greater than the word "god."

Religion, I said, teaches the world to do without love, to do without sin, for religion forgives all sins. Mythology is beautiful, religion cramped and ugly. Why should men stoop to religion, I asked her, when religion is such an obscure, unsecure, truly unholy thing? I told her of the priests who had instructed me as a child; there was one who used to make a hell of a noise singing mass. He was always in a hurry: in a hurry in the confessional, in a hurry to sing mass, in a hurry to teach us, in a hurry to preach his sermon. Hurry, hurry. He was fat and arrogant and he was continuously chasing something or other. I fancied he chased his god around the dark corners of the church. (There was another priest who had been the teacher of the third elementary class. He was a furious human being and I saw him once tear a bit of one of the pupil's ears off in his rage. And yet if one went to see him in his house, he was the sweetest ever. He would offer you wine and sweets, yet he was not a pedarast. I say he was not a pedarast because so many of the priests in my country are.)

My trip to Chicago was the first long trip I had taken in a train and I travelled like a lord in a lower berth. Waldo Frank and my wife accompanied me to the station and when I saw him later in Chicago, he said to me: "The little woman knew what was coming to her." I left my wife with the promise to send for

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her as soon as things looked clear, but this I never did.
(My wife asked for and probably got a divorce. Her hypocrisy
is obvious from one single fact: she wrote to me later that
during the three years of our separation I had never sent her
so much as a penny. What a hypocrite! As if she did not know
that I never had so much as a penny to send. But all the same,
some thanks are due her for having kept me, or almost kept me,
for three years in New York. The rent of the West End Avenue
room was always paid by her.)

Pasquale fired me soon, but very gently, without
violence of any kind. And my second job in Chicago was in the
office of "Poetry", with that great mother of poets, Harriet
Monroe. All her spinster years had accumulated in her great
heart until now it overflowed and it was a real maternal love
she gave. We often quarrelled long and loud about what should
be accepted or rejected and when she furtively printed something
I didn't like, there was howls in the office. I was associate-
editor those few months there, but I was an undesirable worker
and Harriet Monroe was dissatisfied with me. I must admit that
I deserved her reproaches for I was a lazy good-for-nothing
sort of cub. I slept long and determinedly, rested and looked
lazily, not at the lake, but at the throngs of people who walked
past. I told her her review was an absurdity - the mere idea of
having to print every month a certain number of pages dedicated
to poetry. (But from this absurdity came geniuses like Carl
Sandburg, and that imbecile of a Master who, as Alfred Kreymborg
rightly said, treated universal matter with insularity.) I told

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her that her review was completely lacking in a sense of humor; I accused her of dragging about this heavy waggon of a review, this lifeless burden that was grey not only in color but in spirit. I called her a she-professor of English, but if I resulted her ferociously, madly, it was because at that time I insulted everything, and every man and woman.

(When Harriet Monroe came to see me in Italy years later, Signora Emma, the inn-keeper, described her in this way: "The cleanest little woman I've ever seen." Compared to you, Harriet, I was never anything but a poor poet, a tattered, bare-footed beggar. I will remember you always as the mother of all poets, the good and the bad, the saviour of all poets who often saved my life just in time with a check.) The lady I am trying to describe was neither a great lady nor an insignificant woman, but she had a little of both in her. I have heard her with her voice trembling with indignation, and I have heard her laugh gaily like a child. (I know so well this strange type of little woman, and while shaking out the sack of one's words, one word must always be kept back to explain at her death the fact of her life.) Harriet Monroe, I thank you for the bread you gave me, I thank you for the maternal love you bestowed on me; you became my mother, and for this miracle I thank you. For the amnesia which you covered with the cloak of your memory, I thank you; for having come to Italy to find me in a little inn, I thank you; but still, though you printed my name, you were not a great editor. Tireless little woman, you are now dead. Those little fingers which held so many pages before your grey eyes are now empty and lying helpless in the grave.)

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One day I was given leave to go to Niagara, provided I be back the same day from Tonnawada to Buffalo. I can find no words with which to speak of this great waterfall. It is too great, too tremendous, this inhuman, this soul-less Niagara. It is somehow the final acknowledgment of the greatness of the great U. S. A. Niagara was to me an immensity that had, by miracle, found a way of speaking. Like a miracle too, here was water that had acquired hardness, marvelous solidity. It was equally beautiful in all its parts and I felt its name should be perfection. So beautiful it was, like a hundred white stallions galloping on, that I felt ashamed even to look at or lay hands on such beauty.

In those last days in New York I suffered paroxisms of thought. I thought as hard as the Egyptian sphynx must have before it was made ridiculous by a broken nose. My thoughts were dark, enclosed in mental darkness, because I hardly ever found the words to express them. And I felt then this terrific fire that is within me, a fire that constantly tries to escape me. But here in Chicago I found no feverishness (except for the smell of feverishness when the wind blew the wrong way and brought the stench of the stockyards to the town.) They told me that Chicago was one of the largest cities in the world. I knew nothing about that, but I knew there was often green between the houses. Even the little girls are milder and softer here than in New York

The great forehead of the city is the facade facing the Illinois Central. This great brow redeems much ugliness,

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much of the drabness of the landscape, much filth
and powdery nurse-dung. One of the signs that Chicago is
happy is the awful dirt it leaves in its streets, and it does
not give a damn whether the streets be many or few. I liked
the funny little bridges on the river of this hoodlum city,
I liked its softness. New York screamed or shouted at me,
but Chicago stammered, it was still so very young.

I had a job in Lincoln Park once, cutting off the
diseased branches from otherwise healthy trees and shooting
arsenic and lead poisoning over everything to kill the pretty
little colored caterpillars. There was all the poetry I needed
in this job. I smelled the great perfumed branches as they
fell to the ground in the heat of the long summer days. I
love trees however they are, strong or diseased, green or naked,
standing quiet or shaking like trembling hands in the gale.
I am a tree lover, but not as stupid as the one who wrote:

"Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree..."

(I agree as to the fools like me.) I have sometimes
hugged a tree, hugged the trees of Lincoln Park. Sometimes I
have held a tree in my arms and called it my darling and my
beautiful, and it was dear to me, very dear to me. But in the
long run, its unresponsiveness made me sick.

For its girls also, Chicago should be praised. They
have mellow eyes - like Italian eyes - and they are large-hipped,
saying that they will be future mothers. Their speech is slow
and deep, their voices contralto rather than soprano, while the
voices of New York girls were as sharp as knives in my heart.

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I was too poor or too shy to know much about it, but I believe
they were generous too, these Chicago girls, about giving their
bodies away. (Louis Grudin once told me that I loved only
ugly women. This is true, perhaps, because I have said it before
that if an ugly woman's face changes it cannot be for the worse
but only towards the beautiful. Ugly women have contemplation
in their faces.)

Chicago girls paint themselves less awfully than in
New York, and they are healthier to see. Chicago flings to the
four walls of the skies a windy bet that she will survive seasons
and seasons before sickening like New York. (But in the temple
of learning, in the public library of Chicago there is this
notice:

ADJUST YOUR CLOTHES BEFORE LEAVING.

Can you beat that? No, you surely can't.)

As Italy is called queen of the air because of her
hundreds of planes, so America is queen of the air because of
her skyscrapers. What America flaunts is what she knows best -
a fairytale of the skies. She is the tallest bride of all the
years, and she was married to her people in November nineteen-
eighteen when she screamed her screams of horror and fear and
topsy-turvy joy. She was married to her people, and millions
of bits of paper served for rice.

I have seen New York rising from the water like a
brand-new Venus, and to think that merely an economic factor
gave rise to such beauty; namely, the high cost of ground, so
that sky-scrapers had to be built. Riverside Drive has water

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at its hem while Chicago washes her dirty feet in the Michigan
sea, and her feet are forever dirty.

But memories weep or mourn, all memories do. I had
left the home and her. I could have painted the walls half
blue and half pink and could have drawn a heavy-headed sun-
flower in the middle. I could have drawn my nightmares on the
walls of my bedroom and laughed at them, having exalted them to
art. I could have strung wreathes of oak leaves and maple
leaves all around and I could have strewn the floor with sand
and pebbles and my bedroom with ashes. I could have bought
silk handkerchiefs and hung them from the windows - different
ones every day. I could have planted beans, parsley and morning-
glories in a box full of dirt out on the fire-escape where it's
forbidden to "place any encumbrance." And I could have written
a tremendously happy treatise to show why the wops break one
and every law of the United States. But they don't - and it
wouldn't have sufficed - and reform is reform and I chose revol-
ution. I quit.

I quit. I am a vagabond again. I am a roomer.
In a furnished-room house. One of the homes of the homeless,
of the orphans, the whores, the pimps, the poor spinsters, the
poor bachelors, the typical American Home, the Furnished Room.
The New World is tired of the family. The New World damns
European shackles of the Family and has a new institution - a
transitory institution in the transitory New World - the
furnished room welcomes with miserable arms the hopeless rebels
of the earth. I am the typical American, see ? Unacknowledged.

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The rich, the middle-class ! Don't let them fool
you about that - their houses are imitations, unreal and ugly -
and there are hotels. Hotels and furnished rooms. And concu-
bines, pimps, and purveyors to these, the Lunch-room and the
Restaurant. If you can eat in a restaurant all your life then
you can sleep in a furnished room or a hotel all your life.
Isn't my misery blinding me ? - oh, Christ, I am crying - if
I don't see well it's because there are tears before my eyes.
I tell you, I have known too many who know nothing about the
old negro song and nothing about New England and the pies that
are made there and which are the tradition of the country - and
many who do not know how tremendously and maybe successfully
sacreligious skyscrapers are. These are the homeless and I am
one of them. They don't eat like men, they don't sleep like men,
they don't see any colors. (Why have you taken the colors away
from your cities ? They will soon become blind. Why do you
handle grey things only, why does everything turn grey in your
hands . Why do you want to take the joy out of oranges and
peaches - kill fruits ?)

You'd want me to make a better, more specific complaint,
wouldn't you ? But this is my own and a million Greeks (oh,
have you seen the beautiful Greeks that work in kitchens and
restaurants, and have you heard them ? They are still singing
the songs of the mountains.) And this is the complaint of a
million Italians (have you seen them going home from work, loaded
with two jackets and a sweater and with immense mittens to fight
the cold, the skin of their necks like bark ?), they say

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"L'America, donne senza colore e frutta senza sapore" - America, women without color and fruits without taste. And maybe they are right. Don't you see the millions of girls, almost all the poor little working girls rouged and powdered, looking like thanksgiving masks or funny dead faces ?

I will say it better sometime - I think there is some use for such a complaint - but now I have no time, I'm going, I'm going along, I am going along, I am going along. Furnished rooms - they got me again. They took me back. There is always a brothel for a prostitute and always a sick lust in some one for her, so it was with me - the furnished room took me back. Now I am again a vagabond, spilling words from a hole in my pocket, knowing only other vagabonds, like me and urging them to wander around. To wander and go, hurriedly, like myself. When we are tired, we meet and sing old, very old songs that no one understands except us and we call one another "brother" and "artist" - and we often weep together. We weep when we realize that there cannot be brothers without there being a family or artists without there being a home....when we realize that we are liars too.

That morning the dawn arose from the sodden grey city pavements, And it was a sick grey breath. I had spent myself asking the night for sleep. Broken in pieces I was - only the evil spirit was whole in me;

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There was a curse on my bitten bloody lips...
And then...

Oh, then the old accustomed, impudent ghost came in:
He wore my bagged, ragged pants, and was unshaven;
And his face was the one I had seen in the mirror
Too many times.

The last job I had in Chicago consisted of carrying,
from one end of the city to the other, sacks of corks. At
times the sacks were bigger than I was and with the excuses that
they were only corks, I was loaded like a mule. I owed this
job to a Christian Scientist, my boss being a Christian Scientist
as well. The girls in the street used to laugh at me because I
tottered under the loads and dragged my feet - but is there
anything a woman will not laugh at ? At times, the weight was
too much for me and it was almost impossible for me to get up
the stairs to the elevated trains.

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Chapter XXV.

Annie Glick

I spread wide nets in the sea of my memory, but few
fish are caught in them, all too few. Among them there is a
beautiful starfish, as beautiful as it is useless, and it bears
some resemblance to you, oh, Annie Glick! (Words, words, words...
words which serve only to nail me to my cross, words which serve
only to gag me, words which destroy one another and which leave
me more lonely and wretched than I was before. It is so long
that I have courted this infamous figure of death, and even
she rejects me. She repulses me so fiercely that I know that
no one and nothing can want me.) Annie, I never humbled myself
so as to ask a single gift of that inexorable grande dame which
is life. I was content to embroider a regal cloak of fantasy
with which to cover my quaking bones.

Annie, open the door of my memories and into that dark
little room will come the illumination of words. There is a
closeness, a staleness, a musty stink in there, but light will
disperse the ghosts and the smell. Annie, you were my greatest
love. Your immense beautiful eyes saw everything except my love.
Those big beautiful eyes, racially dark, racially profound, had
been bathed and re-bathed by thousands of years of tears until
they were all the more brilliant and tender and soft. They
accompanied me through the tumultous life of those American
years. You were a Jewish girl, and I have already said how I

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respect your race. The Jews are usually small, nearly all small
and ugly, so many amongst them are ugly and just see what fine
names they have: Sun's Ray, Field of Roses, White as Snow,
Moon's Ray, Precious Stone, Good Luck, which was your name. I
think I know the reason for this irony: when the Jews left
their ghetto and dispersed in the world it was necessary for
them to be named, and it is due to the comic genius of certain
bureaucrats that these ugly samples of humanity were given such
high-sounding names. There is no other explanation for it.
You, at any rate, Annie, had taken possession of all the beauty
of your ancient ancestry.

If I have any faith in the female being, I owe this
faith to you, first beautiful woman that I loved vitally, humanly
beautiful. (She was also rather the type of the little cheap
stenographer and many people found this ridiculous but I found
this alluring.) Your face was mysterious, but of a mystery
not too profound or too difficult to solve. Annie, you had no
pity for me. You scoffed at my misery and my poverty. You
scoffed at my love for Rimbaud. Do you remember when I gave you
the manuscript of my long poems on Marianne Moore you said that
it expressed nothing but hate for that stupid woman ? Annie,
you were the furrow behind each of my thoughts, the peace
between my too numerous wars, you were the use for all usable
words: beautiful, ugly, holy, ferocious, marvelous, miserable.
Your legs were imperial, but if I went so far as to put my
hand on them you said: "No, no, I am not your wife."

I remember you telling me that you had loved me once
for two hours. Out of a lifetime, only two hours. It was the

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evening we met and your two little hands were in mine, their
softness no longer a quality but a state of the spirit. We
began to speak about Elena, who had introduced us, and I said
that I thought she was Lesbian; and then your two hands swooned
without life within mine and I felt them turn cold although
they did not turn cold at all. Then I looked into your face
and I said: "But it's all finished now, isn't it ?" You
laughed hysterically. When you wiped your mouth after I kissed
you, you exasperated me, for I was ill even then and you knew
it and that frightened you. But on that fine day when you
really loved me, you did not wipe my kisses away. The first
time I kissed you I went home and wrote and wrote, because
inspiration draws from the sleeping heart at times a great wail,
at times a gentle word, at times a sigh, and then lets the heart
slumber on.

You remember how often you came to my room and I pre-
tended to be asleep when you came in, out of some strange sense
of coquetry ? You remember what joy you brought when you
entered and with what love I looked at you although what you
brought me then was not yet love, only a splendid promise. I
called you "darling", and "dear", and "love", and "treasure",
words that were new and strange to me, and in contradiction to
the belief of Soffice that you cannot easily call a woman
sweet names. You made these words brim to my lips and I gave
them to you so simply, almost like giving you a present, Annie
darling. Presents, presents, presents ! You waited like a
child for presents. (In those days I was still fashionable

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in Chicago and I was invited everywhere for dinner. One week I decided to accept every dinner invitation and so I saved a week's pay. With this money I bought you a coral necklace which delighted you.) But the thing I could never give you was the supreme gift, happiness. I always made you more unhappy than you were by nature.

You were the verandah of my life from which I looked out on all the world passing by. You were the stairs of my will, leading upward. Your breasts, pear-shaped, were beautiful and proud and strong. Your delicate little hands awoke desires which flashed to the finger tips of men. Once when you promised me a thousand kisses, I took you to the cinema instead. For all I know, I may have been then like a man whose trembling hands do not dare to pluck the flower for fear of bruising it. You were tenderness entire, you were a sinuous soft curve which would have carved the heart from the breast of a eunuch. I do not know what you are like today. I know that Russian beauties like you become flaccid with the years, (for you were only a poor miserable woman after all.) Dostoevsky wrote that women of your type cannot endure, and he was surely an authority on the subject.

How many days of hunger in Chicago did I kill with sleep ! (Sleep of which I was later deprived during the many eras of my illness.) Sleep was then my greatest friend. I used to drown myself in sleep, terrible sleepless sleep, a sleep that was close to madness. The conception of this madness was given me by a book which I had read and which impressed me very much.

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When I read a book and found it beautiful I experienced a sort
of appetite for madness, and this appetite was roused in me
by Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." (At one time, too, after
reading a chapter of Papini, I wept tears of fire and brought
myself to the point of writing him a desperate letter, telling
him wildly of my admiration for him. He was good enough to
answer me and we exchanged letters for more than a year. Then
I wrote him that his letters to me were vacuous and he replied
in irritation that he could not take the time to worry over the
destinies of all his disciples. I also wrote to Croce and he
condescended to send me a postcard. I translated into English,
and very badly, his breviary of aesthetics, a little book con-
taining some splendid expressions of truth.)

The great thing which I had against "Crime and Punish-
ment" was that Raskalikoff was not enough of an artist and there-
fore his crime was actually a crime and his punishment actually
a punishment. Artists are different from any one else because
they create new differences, for words are always the same and
alter only when the vision alters. Thus Wagner, that stammering
encephalitic, began to walk straight when he composed "Parsifal",
his greatest work. It is the musicians who hear the footfall of
every man on earth and hear the whisper of every falling leaf.
They also hear sounds which do not exist at all, except in the
life of their minds. Thus Wagner heard the remedy for his ail-
ment, and, listening to the notes of it, was cured. It is only
in death that eternal deafness can be.

Because you were the feminine entity every poet needs,
Annie, I was held captive in your hands so long and you were

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captive in mine for so short a time. I disturbed your dreams
and you disturbed every day this soul of mine already shattered
by so many cold and loveless passions. Do you remember that
for more than a year I tried to model your face in clay ? Do
you remember the excursion we took to the Chicago dunes and did
not succeed in seeing the lake ? It is a comic thing to go to
the dunes without seeing the waters of the lake. Do you remember
when you drew a pen-knife out and threatened to cut my veins ?
Do you remember when you said I was God's younger brother while
I believed I was God himself ? Annie, every hour of my life
has a minute for you in it and this should make me a little more
expert when I am in the art of living or the art of keeping alive
at all. I capsized the bark of your purity and of your youth,
entering furtively at night into your dreams, entering furtively
by day into your reality.

It has taken centuries of gigantic sorrow -
sorrow of an old world-weary race -
to build the sorrow that is in your eyes,
you, magnificent girl.

You said: *Love is a swallow.*

*Why would you capture a swallow.*

*Love is not servile like*
*a canary.*

You, girl with the perfect elbows.

Like a young, well-leafed branch in the wind

You walked.

But you said: *You are hungry and a beggar.*

*Love is a princely affair.*

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Chapter XXVI.

The Dill Pickle Club

This little club was the fair of the freaks, the
union of the eccentrics, the forum of those arrived at the
wrong moment, were wrongly welcomed and came to the wrong place.
The president of it was Jack Jones, the King of the Discontented
and the Disconnected, and there he throned with his way of
talking as funny as he was himself. He once gave me as much as
seven dollars for reciting the part of Anatole in Schnitzler's
"Wedding of Anatole." (It seems to me I am with the dead,
evoking as I do these spectres of the past. But I hope you are
not dead, Jack Jones, because Chicago needs you. Chicago needs
those two small rooms, one over the other, which were called
"The Dill Pickle.")

He was the emperor of the intellectual flops, Jack
Jones. He was a minister of lost souls, a shepherd of wailing
spirits under the rain and wind of life's adversity. (By
wailing I mean making an unpleasant noise which the ears harken
to subly and terribly.) They were all interested in you, men
like Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank, these proud men; and
even the police who came to spy on this curious group which you
had gathered together in your rooms. You were ugly, but your
wife was uglier than you. Perhaps the police came because once,
while rowing on the lake, you lost your wife overboard and
someone stupidly said that you had killed her. She had short

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hair, almost like a man's and she was small and dirty and
devoid of elegance, but Jack Jones, he loved her. Your hesita-
tion before the realities of life is sometimes called socialism,
sometimes communism, sometimes anarchism, but it is hesitation
just the same, and during the brief moment of your hesitating
you established this kingdom of failures, of the disinherited,
of those who bore like beasts of burden the staggering weight
of their opinions. There was open discussion of all the
fields of American achievement in those two little, tiny rooms
of yours.

Tucker Alley was the apotheosis of all the strange
alleys of Chicago. In their gutters cats come to die and there
is always a stray dog nosing in the refuse, but Jack Jones
brought his love into the depths of this mysterious cramped
street. These stricken alleyways had lost even the sense of
sight in the filthy dark; dirty children played in the rubbish,
nothing beautiful ever passed that way; except this fact which
may be beautiful or not but which at any rate is true - one's
back had to be bowed under a burden before one could pass through
the little door that led to Tucker Alley. A burden of protest
against man's foulness, or a burden of anguish or of illness or
despair; but anyway a burden before one could enter the ranks
of that high pure army that waged its battle in Jack Jones'
two rooms. In his little domain grew only stunted trees, but
the strong manure of his remedies was good. He clothed those
who had nothing, fed those who were in want, gave to those who
begged the few dollars he could in payment of the little speeches

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they made. What sort of business he actually did in his
"Dill Pickle", I do not know. He was neither very rich nor
very poor, this president of the disbanded whom he divided
into groups, ate them, digested them, evacuated them, so that
there was always room for more.

That first year in Chicago I was consumed, devoured
by the disease of impatience. And to heighten my anguish now,
Annie went to New York. My bed was like a grave and my songs
died there. I lay in my bed, extraordinarily dreary, and one day
Sherwood Anderson and his wonderful wife came to my room, bring-
ing me fruit, a magnificent grape-fruit. To receive a gift
from such a man seemed to me an amazing thing, and I talked my
head off to them. But all the time I talked I could see that
they did not much believe in my queer state of being. They
thought me melodramatic and a play-actor and altogether disreput-
able. It must have been difficult to accept all my foolishness
at its face value, for I believed I was God, and for a brief
time I was for myself the Only God, the First God. I told
Anderson that I could bear vulgarity and filth and stupidity no
longer. Take the songs they sung in America, songs sung by
serious business-men and young men actually entering into the
mystery of life. One of them was:

"Nelly, the garbage man's daughter,
She lived quite near the swill.
And sweet was the smell of the garbage
But she was sweeter still."

I held a photograph in my hand all the time I talked.

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It was Annie's. Suddenly I burst into sobs (a thing that happened to me very frequently these days.) This time I wept because I believed I had discovered a blemish in that very lovely face. I could remember none of her words, except those she wrote me. She wrote me nearly every day from New York and her letters were vapidities, more than stupid, inane. I answered them with violence and this made her angry, and so it became a vicious circle. When she was angry she allowed three or four days to pass without writing, and then I would leap out of bed and telegraph her in desperation. Then finally she wrote me that she had the right to sanity and the right to live. The right to live ! So many people think they have it and they haven't it at all, because life is a delicate and beautiful thing, perishable as a piece of fine embroidery which poverty and carelessness can destroy over night.

I remembered how sweet her lips were the first time I kissed them and I went and I shall always go searching for one thing equal to the sweetness of that kiss. I remembered the sound of her voice, high and winged, on the point at any moment of becoming hysterical. I remembered how ugly she was when she wept, with her face swollen; and I told the memories of her that she was the bed of that poor drying river, of that great wide river, of that wild torrent that was Carnevali. I made this invocation to Death.

Let me

Close my eyes tight.

Still my arms,

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Let me
Be.
Then,
Come !

Let me be utterly alone:
Do not let the awful understanding that
comes with
The thought of Death
Bother me.

Your love was not strong enough to hold me.

Death takes things away:
I have them here in my hands,
The rags.

I do not understand the cosmic humor
That lets foolish impossibilities, like me,
live.
I have made a mess of it,
But I am no debtor.

It's the yearning of a nervous man,
The yearning for peace,
The curiosity for a word:
FOREVER.

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If she would only come quietly,
Like a lady -
The first lady and the last.

Just not to hear any longer
The noise swelling from the morning streets,
Nor the two desperate sparrows chirruping;
Just not to fear any longer
The landlady.

Jack Jones took pity on me that time I ran stumbling
and desperate to him and then fell to the ground. He picked me
up and said, "Poor boy !" He took me to Dr. Vacca, and although
the heart may be a great psychiatrist it is certainly a poor
psychologist for it never understood the sources of my anxiety
and torture nor how terribly I was the prey of neurotic obsess-
ions which destroy the soul from within. (These neurologists
seek to heal the soul and they know nothing about it; they do
not know that to understand the human soul one must be a poet
and scarcely any of them have any sense of the poetic.) I
did not see Jack Jones again until two years later, when I was
to return to Italy. He gave a farewell party in my honor (where
I managed to collect a few dollars.) When I was but a stray
dog myself, he was still faithful to me, faithful as a husband
who is unaware that his wife has grown ugly with illness and
the years. He was my spiritual father more than any priest
ever was, and like a priest using Latin words, he spoke a
language all his own, part Irish, part American: For to Do,

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For to Make, For to Go. One paid one small quarter to enter
his temple, for more than any priest he had a temple, small
and shabby and without direction like all the greatest things.

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Chapter XXVII.

The Crisis

- I believed that the time had come for the pestilence of poets to be brought to an end - an end to the songs, the odes, the poems, all the old putrid bunk. Poets, like desperate sparrows, leaving their excrement everywhere. I was sick of the tender hearts which poets carry exposed in their hands, the bloody trophies of their war with life - carrying them over life's highways and byways with their bleeding mouths crying "Help, help !" although they know very well that no one will ever listen to them. For who the hell listens to the poets except other poets? On one side lies the great world and on the other the little poet with his infinitesimal words; the king of form, the indefatigable dancer. The artist does not see that his domain is emptiness, his empire muteness, his regime disorder, his dance dislocation. Oh, the artists, these photographers of love, these movie-picture takers of adventure ! Too many words have been said already, too many phrases written, too many songs sung aloud, too many dances danced. The artist speaks of God like a relative, he treats Him like a cousin, whether insulting or praising Him. And the artist is so in need of God, he needs so bitterly to have God hearken to his little words.

The other day I met a dancer. He had blue eyes and a
lady's mouth and his voice was sickening soft. His name was Mr.

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Snake. When he lifted his arm, bent at the elbow, hand hori-
zontal outward, I was afraid; and when of his legs he made a
perfect twist, I laughed. In other words, I enjoyed his danc-
ing and was very much interested in it.

"Mr. Snake, I think I want to learn how to dance."

"My dear man, dancing is art, every art - art."

"That doesn't make much of a difference to me."

"It makes all the difference in the world to me."

"Ah, you clever rascal !" said I, with a sneer of
understanding. Shortly after, I went home. The sneer became
embarrassed as I was walking on my way home. The sneer chilled
as the stars laughed on top of my ungainly head. But at last
it assumed its ultimate shape, becoming a grimace of fear as
I saw moonlight break against a doorway and smooth the wind-
swept sidewalk. I must learn dancing. It would be good for my
legs, good for my arms, for my outward appearance, and I have
often desired, I always desire that bright elegance which - I
must learn how to dance.

I felt my knees, I looked down upon the shapeless
bagging of my pants, saw my feet sprawling in my too large shoes
and imagined with a quick pang my worn-out heels. I must learn
how to dance. There I was, with my dangling arms, my heavy,
uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable hands; my legs always bent
a little forward, my belly pushed backward, my shoulders rounded
forward. As I walked my head pecked the air like a helpless hen's.
With the concentrated despair of twenty years of clumsiness sudden-
ly revealed, I lifted a cursing hand. But the arm came up slowly

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and dislocatedly, without direction, refusing to be cast into a
gesture. In the name of Mr. Snake, what was this ? Where was
I going - for, indeed, my body was not following ! My head
this way, my belly that, my knees that way ! What was this ?

I was in the shape of an ugliness, a drifting thing,
a walking contradiction. I had been unconscious of a great
ridiculous absurdity and it had, without my knowing, moulded me.
Damn me ! I thought I was going somewhere - along ecstatic streets
crowned with glare of lamplight - and my body wasn't following.
My form wasn't following, I wasn't following. I was only a
shadow, that of Mr. Visionary who had so inspired me once, or
any other shadow anyway. I was a warped effort on a road to the
splendid somewhere which I had conceived one day....conceived
beautifully one day, - oh, I remember that gesture, I remember
the dance I had then begun.

God, I was a thwarted effort and my own damnation and
my own end it was that twisted me down like that ! I couldn't
any more learn to dance. Oh, if I lift a finger now do I not
know how far within me that motion begins ! You couldn't change
that far within. Mr. Snake, what can you do for me ? Haven't I
been aware of that which made me as I am now ? I have, I know
I hand. I can be saved. Mr. Snake....ah, the hell with you,
I don't need you. I'll learn, I'll learn, almighty stars, watch-
ing eyes upon this world, seers, judges, WATCH ME !

And I lifted myself up. I forced my body into a
complete gesture of immobile contrition, knowing that if the
gesture was true it would be the destruction of my former clumsiness

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ness, which was a weird root in the sodden depths of me.
Perfectly immobile, in tears and frets, in deadly sweat,
through every pore of my body the years of filth that had
clogged me oozed out of me. I don't know how I didn't die.
Then it was that I felt ashamed of every word I had ever
confessed to anyone else, then it was that the gross lie of
what I had always called "my impetuous naive nature" assumed
a form that frightened me beyond human words, then it was that
I stood waiting, humble before the ash-can which open-mouthed
watched me free myself. And the stars laughed insolently -
unless it was my eyes were insane.

Then I moved. You know, there is some greatness in
me, you know that I always saw it, the beacon shining very far -
a little infinitely beyond every street's end, over the hump of
this street that jumps down into the abyss, accompanied to its
perdition by the lamp-posts procession; always saw it, dim as
lit fog, thinking it was probably nothing but lit fog. But now
on top of a house a star shone, a hole revealing that the sky
is a diamond palace covered with a blue cloth. Well, I had to
hurry up, as I was at the end of my strength. I swung myself
up, whirled through the air, writing a beautiful parabola over
the skirt of night and

Crac - rck !

I fell on the side of a house and broke my bones in pieces. I
hung in shreds from several laundry ropes until they came to get
me. The last thing I saw on earth was the horrid mouth of a
window which had been gaping that way fifty years.

In the crisis, I believed that I was walking the cen-

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turies looking for my face, for the losing of my reality also meant the losing of my face to me. I felt I belonged to the nineteenth century more than to any other, perhaps entirely, insanely to the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was made up of masks: the masks of poetry, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Verharen, Carducci, Leopardi - all more or less crazy, all more or less sick; and Baudelaire, altogether crazy. The masks of music, with Schuman, Beethoven, the one crazy and a suicide, the other deaf; and Donizatti, crazy too. I thought with love of Van Gogh's suicide and the philosophy of Nietzsche.

I believed absolutely now that I was the Only God. But no god was ever humbler than I, and no god ever made worse blunders, and no god was ever as ugly as I was. No god had ever satisfied me as this suddenly conceived god did, and no god ever sprang as spontaneously to life, and no god wanted the colors of the world as passionately as I. I believed no god had ever been as good as I was, and by goodness I meant a very large thing, something enormous, terrific, something so great I did not know its name. Yet now that it has passed, it seems futile, incredible. I was terrified by the totally new way the very light from the window looked, such ethereal light, such flimsy light, weak and shaking in the window. I thought I was dying, or about to die, or even that I had accomplished death. Noises took on another meaning, but the noise of my own voice was the most terrible of all. I cried out as loud as possible my crazy formula of godhead, repeating that I was for myself and for all men the First God, the Only God, that I was a shipful of spices come suddenly to port. But I was the one apostle

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of my own religion: I respected the sun and the moon although,
in my fierce pride, I didn't need either of them very much. I
had always hated sophistication and now I wept and screamed
for simplicity, only simplicity was not to be taken for sheer
idiocy. To be a god, a true god, one must be filled with simple
things: this was the simplest way to reach the perfection of
being god.

It happened while I was reading a book on Chinese
history: suddenly the knot of despair and dismay loosened in
me and the whole room reeled, and I stood up reeling, drunk.
I was going crazy and I knew it. Every vestige of reality had
left me and I was staggering and stumbling about helpless in an
uncertain world. I flew to Sherwood Anderson's and I asked him
to give me something to eat, thinking that the mechanical action
of eating would help bring me back to reality. I devoured the
food he gave me but it was to no avail. With the excuse that
his wife would be coming home soon and might be afraid of me in
such a state, Sherwood Anderson fairly chased me out of the house.
I reeled out into the snow, drunk with these awful symptoms of
insanity, wandering through the streets that were forever
unknown and forever known to me. My companions were the horrible
Fear of Fears, the Fear that now, all of a sudden, I should no
longer understand the meaning of anything; and the Misery of
All Miseries: of knowing that the strength to distinguish one
thing from another and the will to distinguish even is gone.
I can still hear the awful noises I made as I went - the
grumbling that I mistook for poetry, and the weeping that was

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the most hideous weeping in the world.

I knew now that it was only pride that had kept Sherwood Anderson nailed before me listening to my tirades and my speeches, for he had surely always hated everything about me and his eyes said so clearly. And yet I had gone to him asking for the monstrous charity of understanding in the crisis. Out in the snow again I said out loud: now that corner is going to stop being a corner, that lamp-post cease being a lamp-post, that gutter no longer run with its burden of dirty water, because the beloved list of understandable things has been inadvertently destroyed, because in this immaculate sky-piece a screw has been loosened, a nut has gone daffy, has gone cuckoo, and the whole machine of reality has jumped the switch. I said: because I am or will be crazy presently, it is impossible for me to ever grasp reality again. And then something strange happed or did not happen: I felt that one of my eyes could not shut, that it would never be able to shut, and that it acted now quite separately from the other eye.

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Chapter XXVIII.

Prestige
=========

It must have been about two in the morning when I
got back to my room, and I stood looking at myself in the mirror,
able to see nothing, to prove nothing. I spent the time until
draylight shouting that I had found the formula of godhead,
this is the formula: YES - NO and YES and NO. This is the
formula of acceptance and denial, at the same time and at differ-
ent times, and if simultaneous acceptance and denial could be
achieved, then godhead would be at your door. It seemed to me
that it was now all a matter of speed, to say these things
fast enough and loud enough, but at the same time I knew it was
not entirely a matter of speed. Above everything else, it was
not deceit; it was no betrayal, it was not an apology for my
weakness and my low-minded ways. I was not fooling myself. I
was convinced that this was the reasoning that must be the one,
the only one for my particular metaphysical needs. Moreover, I
believed it was a reasoning that could save everyone, for Tolstoy
once said that no man is decisively one thing or another forever
but that man is one thing at one time of his life and at another
time he is another, and that it is blindness of the spirit not
to see that man is never quite the same. This was a thought
which helped me to shout louder and wilder the proclamation of
my ready-made divinity, and I filled the house and the night
with the repetitions of my formula for insanity: YES-NO, YES and

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NO, NO-YES.

Once during the night I left the room, thinking that death was dragging me through the door and down the hall. I screamed for help, yelling: "Help me, help me, I am dying !" I went out into the snow again, half-naked this time, but gods seldom catch cold. I sat down on my bed in my room again, so miserable, so desperate, believing so frantically that I was a god that I did not know I was an utter fool. No god before me had ever really been any good, I kept saying out loud; no god had ever really been not a fake, not one of them had ever been a really satisfying god. I scorned the idea of being a miracle maker; no real god ever made miracles, no real god needed this enforcement of his spirit. The great mistake Christ had made was that of saying "My kingdom is not of this earth" and then trying to prove, and proving, with miracles that his kingdom really was of this earth. As long as gods did not require miracles, it came to me that there were then surely many more gods than people had imagined - a whole new mythology or history of deism. Even the realists were gods of a sort.

At first I was appalled by the extraordinary simplicity of the thing. I had found the solution of life in the formula:

"God is or God is not.

God neither is nor is not.

God absolutely is

or

God absolutely is not."

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This was a sort of pantheism which I felt I had reached. I
was the centre of the earth; the whole universe revolved
around me. My four states of mind had to be and were now
expressed in one single phrase: "Yes and no. Neither yes
nor no. Yes or No." And then the wonder at its simplicity
gave way to a sort of craftiness: after all, why should I
consider death, why should I give a thought to death ? The
easiest thing in the world was to live and now I could live,
survive forever because of this simple formula of godhead I
had found.

You say yes

And you feel it in your temples - that entity
you are so divinely, mysteriously sure of;
and you call it LIFE.

You say no -

In the saloon, the wooden yellow temple,
You grunt no, and you poison that which you
call LIFE.

It's noon, the whistles rattle and shriek -
city Parcae, I come too.

You say yes

And you grunt NO,

But your faces are faces of rancour:

Rancour against

Those who won't let you

Hurl loose your soul - (you think, you bad
philosophers !) -

Which you must steadily

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Throttle within you.

Imbecility is an immense maw, and at noon

It is hungry with a thousand crawling hungers.

So that happy bewildered imbecile of a sun

Looks bewildered at me,

Wondering that I am so utterly disgusted.

Not so.....

Not so disgusted after all.

O altars of a little comfort, altars of a dyspeptic god gone crazy in America for lack of personality (hamburger steak, Irish stew, goulash, spaghetti, chop suey and curry !) O lunch-room counters !

O tripods of a little secure religion, tripods of a little secure beauty ! O kitchen fires !

O bedraggled romances, O alcoholic ladies in crimson and green mists, O women so cheap and ingratiating, O sacrifices for you, ladies, of all the flesh and all the brains ! O saloons !

My malediction on the cowards who are afraid of the word (the word is a kind sweet child, a kind sweet child !) Male-diction on the sacrifices of the dumb and deaf !

Hesitating everywhere, hesitating fearfully,
The few poets, they who weigh with delicate
hands,

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Walk in the unfrequented roads,
Maundering,
Crying and laughing
Against the rest.

The morning after the awful night I found my room
filled with women, and this seemed to me only another part of
my insanity. There were five or six women in my room and the
cackle, cackle, cackle was tremendous. Among them I recognized
Mrs. O'Keefe, the landlady, big and protective; she seemed to
be directing the talk and the noise of the whole bunch. I
thought it strange that there were no men in my room, but this
was perhaps because they had already gone to work. I remember
they brought me ham and eggs to eat, and I ate them in the room
of another roomer. I heard them calling up Harriet Monroe and
after a short time she joined all the other women in the room.

The second night, Harriet Monroe spent sitting by my
bed. That little captain of the ragged, the mad army of poets,
she sat there all night and let me talk. I told her I had
committed a grave sin: that of loving success. I had nurses
success, held it close to my heart, watched it grow and develop,
until the total downfall came. In my life there had been nothing
very triumphal in either the ascent or the descent. Both were
built on drab foundations, both had a bottom of misery. It was
my fault, for I always went too passionately, too fiercely at
people. Some I scared and others I annoyed. There was that time

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at Bill Williams where I talked and talked and talked. I
talked for a whole day and in the evening I wanted to talk
some more, but fortunately I was made to stop. There was no
love, no homage in my words, only an eagerness to be under-
stood and therefore I blooming well knocked their heads off.

I do not know how many dollars Hamiet Monroe gave
me; I lost count of them long ago. But I know that for fifteen
days, part of which time was spent in the Psychopathic Ward of
a big hospital, I was God, the First, the Only God. I do not
remember having slept during those fifteen days, and probably
did not. A cyclone had struck me and whirled me from the earth
of common-places. There was little serenity in all this, but
there was no help for it. I must make apostles, I must gather
disciples about me. It was no partial craziness which possessed
me but it was a thing which now owned my whole soul. It had
been coming too long a time to pass me lightly. I had felt it
coming towards me with a remote and gradually increasing sound
and strength, this madness of mine. The extreme feebleness
which is as well a symptom of this illness and which eventually
succeeds in robbing one of the power of movement had been coming
slowly on me. This is an enormous illness, a primordial one:
when one is badly stricken, one crawls awkwardly about as the
first men must have done. According to Freud, it is easier to
sing than to speak, and so the first men must have done. There
is something poetic about this illness: the eternal need to
change one's position is synonymous with the need to change
expression, and woe to him who uses the old positions as woe to

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the poet who uses the old phraseology.

My faith became a kind of pragmatism now, simple to excess, baffling yet beautiful and convincing; full of wonder, its violence, its very violence being its indisputable truth. I could even find the right words to describe it to others and in some way I made apostles, talking endlessly, endlessly to the other patients in Saint Luke's Hospital in the Psychopathic Ward. Romance had been thrown on the rubbish heap, scientists created nothing but ugly machines now, I said, and romance had gone to the dogs. I am astonished at the amount of spiritual joy this thought brought me. It seemed to me that my spirit and soul ached with the truth. I was joyous and aching all over with exalted spiritual anguish, and I was proud of this kind of pain. This godhead or mine was a release of many things to me; this god, however great a fake he was, was a great comfort, a great find, a valid discovery for the time that he endured.

Now I knew I was the master of death: he was the servant who would come when I called. I teased him, provoked him on purpose, challenged him. I called him vulgar and funny names, but I never once gave him the love he requested. I knew he was still far away, and I knew he did not hang around my bed for long watching me lying there. But once, just once, I certainly did feel his hands go over my body and leave me coldly sweating, rigidity in my muscles, despair in my heart, fear in my mouth, and a new craze in my eyes.

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## Chapter XXIX.

### Convalescence

When I left the Psychopathic Ward I was taken to a sanatorium which was ruled over by the awful Dr. Newman. (At the end of my two-month sojourn there this monster told me he would put me in the bug-house if I ever fell into his hands. again.) Hospitals have taken the better part of my life and of my soul. Hospitals are now the milestones which mark the different stages of my life; hospitals end by exhausting even the strongest of us. In hospitals, butcher-doctors dole out death, doctors who know nothing or nearly nothing as diagnosis and the methods of diagnosis must be false, since there are no diseases, there are only the ill.

My friends paid about fifty dollars a week for me in this sanatorium, and there I was showered with a lot of fine food. Visitors and money, every day visitors and money, the money a little more important than the visitors. Tennessee Mitchell came to see me, and her husband, Sherwood Anderson, but I could only think of the night he chased me from his house. Alfred Kreymborg and his lovely wife came, and Carl Sandburg, Robert McAlmon, Mitchell Dawson. Mitch was more than a visitor, this crazy man of letters, this big-hearted generous boy. I always imagined him as doing all kinds of phallic dances in solitude. This man was miserably a lawyer, poor kid. (His business was mostly with quarrelling Italians.) Eric Hjorth

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came there too, perhaps the most elusive of all the friends
I had. His eyes were cold agate, like the fjords of his
Norway; they still shine in my memories for me. He said I was
a great man, even in this period of my decadence, and I was
grateful to him because I was in need of praise, like all poets,
good or bad. He spent much money on me when he and my other
friends paid these hospital fees.

But Annie Glick and Louis Grudin were the two beings
who had mattered most to me, and it was of them that I thought
with grief. (I have said a few words, utterly inadequate,
about Lou. I have said more concerning Annie, and this was a
mistake for friendship is far more than love; it is a thing
for the strong. Louis was generously beautiful. His sensuality
was fierce, but he himself was not aware of it. He was the
strongest man physically that I had ever met, and his mind was
as powerful as his body. He looked like a kindly prize-fighter.
He was as violent in his tears as in his laughter. I loved him.
I thought his poetry was great, and now I can only remember
the following lines from a "Miniature of the Woolworth Building":

There shall be peace,
Pale glory in the mist
When they will fashion their cities after you,
White waterfall of granite
From heaven.

And now, either for my sake or otherwise, Annie came
back from New York. I do not know how it happened, but I knew

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that the time had passed for her to come, that she had come too late. It was no longer true for me that extremes meet: extremes were now the same thing. Hate and love, life and death, these were the same. She wept every time she came to see me, and if the first few times I dried her tears respectfully and with awe, after a while I got fed up with her crying and a bit later I got exasperated. These tears, which for women are a simple release, became ridiculous in the end. My tears, on the contrary, were terrible. But I did not weep for Annie or for love. In fact, Annie seemed a little ridiculous to me now and I made a little song which pleased me much at the time:

Annie would not marry Jack
She would not marry any-body
not even Lord Dunsany.

Once out of the sanatorium, I felt renewed, restored. I had never been so happy as now. It wasn't I that was new but the whole world around me. The springtime was all a-stir, all mobilized, all in a frenzy of dance and rhythm, all new and clean. I had on a fine overcoat that was a gift from Sherwood Anderson and this gave me a romantic look. He also gave me a cane which helped me to stand and walk and with which I played the role of elegance. All was cool, fresh, fine. Everything around me seemed important, vital, forceful, strong. I floated on the air of the wind-blown afternoons. I danced over city and country, glad, fearfully glad. I scarcely felt lonely any more and then

-212-

only enough to temper my gladness; I was proud that I under-
stood all this joy, this movement that was even more marvelous
than joy, all this new, brand-new, coolness and freshness of
life. I went off my head with joy one day because a small
little girl I passed in the street called me "sweetheart."
I was happy all day long. I danced, actually danced, and I
painted pictures in my room, and I began to be a sculptor again,
using plasticine.

Annie came to my room almost daily and even loved me
a little bit. But in that night which followed the long splendid
day of my convalescence, that sombre jungle in which the wild
animals of my faculties roamed savagely, Annie became the Diana,
the implacable huntress of my reason and my faculties. I knew
that whenever two things approached and touched in this world
the result was a kiss, that the infinitely delicate horizon
touches the earth, kissing it; that there is no sound or poetry
except when two things meet and embrace. But this contact of
my illness with your health was a little of a ghastly kiss and
you felt this, and it was this that made your face swell with
weeping and become ugly. (He who nourishes himself on memories
is already partly dead, and a man half dead has less right to
life than a man wholly dead.) I, who could not walk erect any
more, had become partly your clown and the garments you fashion-
ed for me, Annie were those of a harlequin. Annie, I scarcely
know now if you were ugly or beautiful. Your face has been
taken from my memory and I can only see you crying and crying;
you cried because you could not love me.

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(She is a sweet. It's the man who is ferocious and
savage, a poor sad man. They didn't give him any motherly care
at all. But she's a sweet. He wants to drag her ferociously
into his cave - you must excuse him. He wants to make a statue
of death and there is no other model. There was no other model
when the open sun had burnt out or scorched or melted all the
other girls.

But she went around of a morning, and having found a
simplified little flower she sat down by it and she's smiling
still, sitting down by the flower. Flowers and chips of sun-
light and grey pebbles shame the furious will-to-do of the
man, so he hides his head in the day and at night only he lifts
a frowning face to the stars. Poor boy, he loved the stars and
they deceived him, and as he loves them still he frowns at them
in the night and shrieks "Flirts!" He shrieks, but his heart
is as lonely as a leafless tree standing companionless over the
shroud of the dunes.

Now the time has come for the last fight. He has the
good chance of seeing a darkness in the eyes of her and from
that darkness images of death arose before the hungry hands of
the man. That's the only reason he is still after her. Once
she stood shamefully naked before the cave of the man and sang:

I shall laugh until
your heart be
a dark accompaniment
to the shrill and thin music of my
teeth.

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Then I'll go,
then I'll go
away.

I'm shaking this bouquet,
I'm shaking - don't you see ? - this bouquet
to make you come out of there.

Then you can have the bouquet,
spoiled for your sake
and I'll go gather
other and more flowers.

I'll make a kid of you,
you'll follow me.

Follow, follow,
in the cortege
of the Fairy Queen
whom children follow.

But the time for Fairy Queens was shut in the graves of
books, so the man smiled pleasantly. And he smiled well.
Because he knew no Fairy Queen to have ever had legs as beautiful
as the old whore death. He was proud of his love, his unrequited
love, and he was waiting for his love. His old love would come
and lie down by him and say not a word, his old love would be a
rock to echo his last word - that is what he thought.

He thought so, and he waited, his last word gripped within
the fist of his dry heart, smiling.)

-215-

There came too to my room a sort of object who described
himself as the brother-in-law of a toothless and stammering poet,
Maxwell Bodenheim. He had a stupid face with a protruding lower
lip which almost compensated for the rest. He installed himself
in my room and there was no wanting him to stay or not - he
simply remained. He objected to having to sleep on a quilt on
the floor as he wanted instead to sleep in bed with me, a thing
I never permitted him to do. He went out and looked for work,
found a job and stayed there like an old friend, he who was in
reality all too new. He disturbed me very much, but little did
he care, and even had he known that he disturbed me he would have
stayed on just the same. He dulled my nights; he was so absurd
that I almost liked him. He was an obscure soul who tried to
express himself in little stupid poems. He was surely the Lord
of Stupidity, but he was not altogether an oaf; had he been
entirely an oaf it would have been better for then I would will-
ingly have turned him out.

He was almost haunting with his cretin remarks and his
childish ways, always seeking something which cannot possibly be
found, pausing now and then to look back the way he has come with
astounded wondering eyes. He had one of those faces which you
see better once you have turned the other way. He approached
one with an affectionate manner which ended by captivating you.
He even possessed a certain devious intelligence which seemed to

-216-

enable him to grasp things which were so superior that he was
totally incapable of understanding them. So true it is that
the human intelligence is both frail and plastic, adjusting
itself to all conceivable things. It is like gun-shot which,
failing to kill an elephant may happen to kill a bird. His
name was Cosachebrilla (Thing that Shines) but he never shone
at all. He was a Jew, of course, like his brother-in-law, the
poet, whom I have called elsewhere a stinking mass with sleepy
eyes. I don't know how the landlady did not perceive that he
slept in my room, but she didn't.

Finally, his sister, Minnie Bodenheim came and she
became a good friend to me, as kind a friend as if she had not
slapped my face once when I insulted her husband in a speech.
Minnie told me that my eyes had once looked like Valentino's,
but this was only half a compliment because, as she said it,
this meant they were no longer so. I took her to see Grasso,
the Sicilian actor, and she tried hard to understand what he said.
And now, perhaps in this very theatre, I was seized by a terrible
nervous anxiety - the second stage of my illness -, a cursed and
horrible fear that something was about to happen which never
happened: a terror of expectation, a continuous, an unflagging
assault of anxiety. Here, in the first gallery, I felt my
blood and body itching with the desire, not so much the desire
as the necessity to leap over the edge.

Grasso was in his period of decadence too, a tired and
supine man who dragged himself with effort across the stage. He
stammered hoarsely and feebly instead of proclaiming his lines,

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and I seemed to find in him some apotheosis of myself and my
decline. He was approaching the end; this man who had been a
lively and vibrating actor was no longer able to rouse the en-
thusiasm of American ladies who were accustomed to worse and
much worse than this.

Eric Hjorth, who spoke of his mother as "my little
Swedish mother", came to my room and sometimes slept with me.
But slept is not the word, for I kept him awake all night so
that he should accompany me down the scabrous ways of my insomnia.
In this illness, either one sleeps or wakes for long unbroken
periods, and I used to go shouting and raving at night along
Lake Shore Drive. I used to cry aloud my mad barbarous songs,
and sobbed against the trees, great tears falling from my eyes.
If to weep is easy for a woman, it is a very difficult thing
for a man. Man drags the cry of anguish from his breast, this
equivalent to a woman's sob. It is torn from his depths, it
seems to be torn out of his guts, and does more harm than good.
Whoever heard me sob would have taken me for a madman, and it
was indeed a madness.

Eric, whether you are alive or dead, I ask your
forgiveness. I did nothing but disturb you and caused you
incredible pain. In the furnished rooms we sought together,
you looked for running water and I for open air, and so we
never agreed. But your memory is sweet just the same. When
we went into the country and I picked wild flowers I once asked
you to carry them for me and you said you would not know what
to do with all those weeds. But those weeds were beautiful to

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Chapter XXX.

Debacle and Damnation

Then the hours and days of misery came back to me and
took full possession of me again. Where there had been friend-
ship, a deluge of friends before, I now found only supercilious
disdain. I had been sick too long. I should have known better.
Everywhere I went now I met contempt. Before I had been invited
even to the Cooper-Carlton by the Ben Bacharachs. (An intelli-
gent bunch, these Bacharachs, who were ready to begin a philo-
sophical discussion at any time. Walter Bacharach always sat
smoking a fine big cigar, the finest cigar to be found in the
American world.) But now the access to houses which remained
open to anybody was denied to me. I was called "Carnevali"
where before I had been simply Em. I had fallen, but I fell
from high. This made it all the more painful, although more
dignified too.

Once it was forbidden me to sit down at table with the
other guests by the lady of the house; she who in other days had
granted me favors of a forbidden kind. Here I met Mayo Wadler,
a fine violinist, and during the evening she shouted loud enough
for the whole roomful of people to hear that I was indecent
with my continuous trembling. Oh, misery, misery, their misery
as much as mine. The misery of petty things, the misery of big
things, the misery in one's own soul and the misery all around
one. But why this change, why ? Simply because people got

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tired of hearing my name, tired of looking at me, tired of
knowing how I had fallen from a terrific height and got smashed
to awful, shameful, ignominious smithereens.

I was all over the place. I was abused by the Chicago
hostesses for being too good now, I was accused of being too
mild and meek. And now there was no more money to be had. I
was forced to go around asking for a quarter from everyone I
knew and from some I did not know. Sam Putnam was my chief
benefactor and I revere his name. Finally, a great doctor
told me that I should get out of cities, and my friends got
more money together and sent me first of all to the Indiana
dunes.

Here began the last great beautiful days of my life !
Oh, my true loves, those unforgettable days, those incredible
spring and summer months ! The first night on the dunes was a
prelude to what was to come: I found a burnt-down shanty,
shrouded in what seemed to be an old sail, and there I went to
sleep. I slept utterly alone and unafraid. This night and the
nights to come were bitterly cold and I froze but I rejoiced.
I trembled, trembled with my illness and with the cold, but I
was happy. I could have taken into my arms the beauty of stars
and sky and the beautiful rich black heaven.

As soon as I awoke in the morning, I rushed into the
lake. Sometimes I would swim so far out into the lake that a
great fear would overcome me, the fear of never reaching shore
again. The fear of drowning would make me scream out for help

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although I knew there was no one to come to my rescue. I
thought of the dunes as the sand-breasts of an unseen god and
I would fall on them and kiss them many times. There was a
suffused smile in the morning dunes and the waters of the lake
answered back. The dunes were my white paradise of sand and
back in the ravine was the mosquitoes green hell.

One day I stole a rope from some fishermen, and then
I collected driftwood and made a raft. With the long stolen
rope, I fastened my raft to shore. I drank sassafras tea, I
climbed trees, I let my beard grow until I looked like Jesus
Christ. I sang in the water and out, I sang in the daytime
and I sang at night and exercized in order to get tired enough
to sleep. The days were terrifically hot and the nights un-
bearably cold. At night the dunes were like ice-cream to my
flesh, and during the day they were blasts from a roasting
furnace. Once, as I was sitting on a stump, a wasp bit me
ferociously. I took a special pleasure and wonder and interest
in this smarting pain.

My life was thus divided: I got up at sunrise and
went straight into the water. Then I came back and cooked my
inevitable oatmeal and sometimes some flapjack, made in a hap-
hazard way but pretty good at that. Then I would fall asleep
swathed in sunlight, in a mild enough seeming sunlight, but at
noon I would wake with a violent headache. (Beware, you who
trust the light of day and fall asleep in the sun.) Then I
would cook another meal for myself and spend almost all the
rest of the day in the water, unless the lake was rough, which

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misplaced all the day's plans. Once a week I went to Chester-
ton to get the usual check from Mitchell Dawson. Between the
sand dunes and Chesterton was a sort of little town. There I
stopped to buy my food supply, and this weekly trip always
exhausted me.

The dunes were delicate ladies, dressed in transparent
pink muslin dresses at sunset and dawn, but I loved them so that
they sapped my strength. Behind them was the green of the luxur-
iant vegetation; sand-cherries, quite edible, and wild grapes,
not quite so edible, and the smell of the pine trees that is so
keen that it searches and pries into your body, caressing it in
its own way. I got drunk with bathing in the lake, and I would
swim out quite a space, pushing my raft before me. Then I would
climb on it and stand singing, singing, singing. I had a choice
program, beginning with the swan song from "Lohegrin" and includ-
ing "Ave Maria." The lake water was my absinthe, but the dunes
were tremendous, almost uncanny in their power; fierce always,
terrible always, always too exciting to my poor sick body.
The only nasty thing about the dunes was the patch of poison
ivy that grew near them.

No one got up at sunrise in order to bathe the way
I did in the lake. No one saw rapture in the sand the way I
did. I knew the odor of every leaf, the fragrance of every
fruit. Great God, all was a tremendous perfume thrust back
into one's nose. When I came back out of the water, I sang even
more fiercely, I screamed with joy and drunkenness. By God,
these dunes were mine, for I was no Sunday caller !

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I did not love them merely because I would soon leave them,
but because it seemed to me they requited my love. I had
become the real crazy man of the dunes. I walked naked as
God made me all over the green of the dunes and the yellow
of the sand. I was accused, that is the right word, of feeding
on little fishes, of eating them raw. I was suspected of being
the murderer of a man whose body was found, carbonized, in the
dunes. But I was none of these things.

Then I went on to other places: to Milwaukee, who
lifted a proud shoulder to Michigan Lake. She had no sky-
scrapers then, but she had a certain elegance, a certain pretti-
ness. Weathers have always intrigued and mystified me and some-
times the taste of a certain day will bring back other days to
me. I remember one dawn in the Minnesota woods - such sharp
colors I can never forget: such violet, such blue, such deep
red. The air and the colors were electric, threatening bad
weather for the dawning day. In the loam of the Minnesota
woods, under the already rotting leaves, in the fresh block
bogs, I left a portion of my spirit and my youth. Sometimes
a deer showed itself for a moment and then was gone again in
the mystery of those woods. Prudish little beasts, living a
life of tender fear. The loam, that perfumed rottenness,
evoked tiny lakes of water under my feet as I walked, making
that entrammeled voyage through the brush and the trees of
the shore. Minnesota woods, untouched by man or woman - still
untouched by the shame that goes with woman and the arrogance
that goes with man - you tore veils and veils from my eyes

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until they were worthy to look at beauty. I found only one
thing that was not beautiful in your woods: an orchid that
looked like a swollen face.

There is a weather in Chicago that makes the lake
waters green, sharp, almost unpleasant to the eye; and another
weather that fills the sky with racing spaces of dark blue.
These spaces of color are so clear, so pure that they have a
virginal aspect, like a pure woman showing her breasts inadvert-
antly. There are more than a hundred springtime weathers, and
there is a summer weather when hot chocolate seems to have been
poured onto the air. There is a weather of wet leaves after a
storm, when little drops rain down if one touches a tree and
the sun returns suddenly after a brief absence. There is a
weather when the sky seems an omelette, and other weathers charged
with the smell of flowers. Some are like the gas lit in a room.

For awhile I lived in a shack in Ravinia, Illinois,
with Mr. Jens Jensen, a worthy old man who bestowed on me great
parts of his big heart. But I was so disorderly, so slovenly,
so expensive (always telephoning to town), that he was forced to
show me the door. There was no help for me, no cure, because of
the major sin I had committed: that of loving success. Above all
I was an envious man, madly jealous of all the writers who had got
out more than one book. (I am jealous now, yes, jealous even of
Shakespeare. I am frantically in need of praise, I am crazy about
being considered a major poet, and the fact that there may be
other poets greater than I am makes my heart sick.) I was slovenly
in body and soul, downright lazy at times. I was like a dog

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barking at stones which he cannot pick up and throw.

For awhile I fed on the remembrance of my success
but now there was nothing left. After Jensen put me out, I
went with thirty dollars to buy a tent and I went back to the
dunes again. I who had been the god of blackness over the
whiteness of the dunes was merely a sick man now. The sand
seemed commonplace to me, life was a drab impossibility, not
even physical exercize was worth a cent. I could not longer
understand the humor of the cosmic prank that my existence was.
I could not see the funny side of it any more. I could not see
the point of dragging this infamous life along behind me as an
idiot draws after him a crowd of jeering boys.

In Chicago there was a Greek who said one of the most
majestic things I shall ever hear in this muted-down life, now
that folk-lore has ceased being produced and folk-women wear hats.
He owned a fruit store on North Avenue in which flowers also
were sold. Because I saw carnations for thirty-five cents a
dozen - as if they had been a commodity gone down at last -
I entered. I had a cane and leaned on it. He said:

"What's the matter, sick ?"

"Yes. Do I look it ?"

"What's the matter, rheumatism ?"

I said no and I explained, but he didn't get it, so
rheumatism it had to be. He said:

"Young fellow like you, rheumatism ! TO my country,
no rheumatism at all !"

-226-

I saw the sun and the moon mirrored on the face of
Lake Michigan (as love was never mirrored on Annie's face), the
lake with which I inebriated myself every morning when I was
alone on the dunes, the lake of Carl Sandburg.... I had lain
my broken body on the shore of Lake Superior, exhausted with-
out having worked, spent without having given... Every night
I went to bed saying:

"Tomorrow will be beautiful, for tomorrow comes out
of the lake."

Sitting on a bench facing God's beautiful
lake,

A poem to God beautiful.

Lake Michigan,
The love a poor sick body held
(Sifted by the seive of a hundred nights of
pain),
A poor sick body gave it all to you.

Your absinthe
Has intoxicated me.

Having risen out of your waters,
In front of my great eyes now
There is a mad blur of sunlight,
And the city spread out before me calling
for a great curve:

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"Come, enter, conquistador !"

The line of your horizon, pure and long, hitched
to the infinite both ways,
Where the mist lies like Peace.
Swimming, I flirted with death,
Saw death running over the shadow-laced ripples;
And turned around as you threw water in my eyes
and laughed at death, as death's brother, the
devil, would.

You slammed open the doors of the sky
And there stood the tremendous sun.

Lake, gilded in the morning,
I have come out of you,
A fresh-water Neptune;
And the water rang little bells
Trickling down
Along my flesh.

Lake, garden of the colors,
Sweet-breathing mouth of Chicago,
Words die in the fingers of a sick man,
As children dying on a poor father.
Take my promise, lake.

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THE RETURN

To Dorothy Dudley Harvey

I.

After eight days of the monotony
Of sea and sky appeared
City-on-the-rock, proud and beautiful -
Gibraltar.

Then, after two days of Mediterranean,
Monstrous water-lilies of the sea
Budding forth on the ocean -
The Neapolitan islands.

Then the Neapolitan coast
Besprinkled, as with flowers, with little white houses;
And Mount Vesuvio forgetting its head
In a confusion of cloud and smoke;
Pusilleco, place of trysts.

Here begins my Italy -
Where memories spring like geysers
Crying at me where I place my feet;
Italy that receives with benignity
This shipwreck - my sick body,
And this feeble candle-light - my soul.

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## II.

I come from America, the land that gathers
The rebels, the miserable, the very poor;
The land of puerile and magnificent deeds;
The naive sky-scrapers, votive candles
At the head of supine Manhattan.

I remember Manhattan Island crowned with docks.

I come from America where everything
Is bigger but less majestic;
Where there is no wine.
I arrived in the land of wine -
Wine for the soul.
Italy is a little family;
America is an orphan,
Independent and arrogant,
Crazy and sublime,
Without tradition to guide her,
Rushing headlong in a mad run which she calls progress.
Tremendously laborious America,
Builder of the mechanical cities.
But in the hurry people forget to love;
But in the hurry one drops and loses kindness.

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And hunger is the patrimony of the emigrant;
Hunger, desolate and squalid -
For the fatherland,
For bread and for women, both dear.
America, you gather the hungry people
And give them new hungers for the old ones.

Where the sky-scrapers grow, O America,
You have yelled your name to the four winds;
An ungracious, unkind yell -
That of a sour youth.

You are pitiless for the feeble,
The weak, whereas my country is
A sister of charity.

You are young and your people,
Pitiless like the young, have hard eyes.
Here eyes are mellowed by the experience
Of two thousand years.
We are old and mellow -
We, the hungry.

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How often in the streets of Manhattan
Have I thrown my hatred !
How often in those streets
Have I begged the Universe
To stop that crazy going and coming,
Or to drag me along too in that
Oblivion of hurry.

I have feared for you
The revenge of Love, O America !
How cheap is the sorrow of man !
People eat it with their bread;
It costs little in America -
It doesn't count.

### III.

Genova with her flights of green trees
On her ascending squares;
Genova that goes to the hills
Like a great staircase.

Modern Bologna in the late evening
Seems a bureaucratic bazaar -
With her little shops and her promenading
Of semi-elegant youth.

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What and what for do you watch, O Tower ?
Austria and the Pope have gone their miserable way;
And no danger threatens your fields,
Golden with the white grapes in autumn,
Silver with the new wheat in the spring
Where the snow comes only as a caress.

IV.

I have come back and have found you
All new and friendly, O Fatherland !
I have come back with a great burden,
With the experience of America in my head -
My head which now no longer beats the stars.

O Italy, O great shoe, do not
Kick me away again !

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Chapter XXXI.

After The Return

Whoever comes to Bazzano, whether triumphantly in an auto, or slowly on one's own legs, or meekly on a horse, is struck by the fact that this is one of the commonest little country towns of Italy. In order to endure it for long, one should climb often to the highest part where the belfry and castle are. From there one can see the most splendid panorama ever. One can see Bologna, enormously beautified by distance, and Modena, and farther away, Verona, when the day is clear and no mist lies on the horizon.

Bazzano is partly bourgeois, that is true, but that fault is tempered by the beauty of its Lombardy poplars and its climbing streets, and of the songs sung by its young men at night. At night there is no quieter place in the whole universe. In America I felt there was no single place where the night was not troubled by the sound of trains and cars, but here only the winds sing among the acacia. When it is hot, very hot, there is a certain restlessness in the trees as though the wind were suffering. This bespeaks storms to come or relates the story of storms that have already passed. In winter the trees are ghostly, trying hard to remember the springtime and not succeeding.

Broken, poor, wretched, I came straight to this little village which offered me the hospitality of its hospital. I

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came back from America and was taken at once by the secretary of the commune to this place. Here I took up a residence of years in this palace of pus and blood, in the bedlam of the cries of the ill, nailed to a bed I scarcely ever left and then unwillingly. Not knowing what my illness was or how to cure it, the doctors gave me scopulatum - the "Truth Drug", as they call it in America. It is given to criminals in order to make them confess everything, but I found it made one confess things that one knew nothing of. It produces an immediate parching of the throat, then a complete stupor, and finally draws the victim down, down, down into the abyss of sleep. But for an interval it halts the terrible shaking of every limb.

This constant trembling is the most absurd, the most awful jokes. Encephalitus, oh, glorious ailment, when I saw three dozen encephalitus patients I was terrified! There were some faltering past with gaping mouths (a gaping mouth is, according to Wells, a sign of mental weakness; according to Chesterton an infallible sign of encephalitus); others with ophthalmic eyes stared glazed and fixed at a certain point, always lateral or perpendicular but always set in the same way. (This is a symptom I have escaped luckily.) There were some who stammered and some who drooled, and the greatest of them all was an old priest called Bavoni (Drooler.) But all of them trembled, all of them shook as if with uproarious laughter.

(Now I remember other priests, priests of my youth: there was a priest who instructed us in religion in one of the

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boarding-schools. He had an enormous nose which seemed to cut
his words in half like a knife. There were two notorious
degenerates, one of them a Bazzanese, who were expelled from
the diocese for taking liberties with young people. This vice
comes partly from the difficulty a priest has to get a woman,
partly from the influence of the seminaries. There was another
priest, the director of my first boarding-school: oh, how
wise and sweet he was ! How his beautiful hands held ours and
how gentle was his smile ! I never knew him to punish anybody.
He was a priest, however, and that means that under his suavity
lurked something dirty.)

There was one man in the hospital whose only symptom
was to yawn constantly. This doesn't sound like much, but just
think what a thing it is to have to raise your hand to your
mouth, to have to feel your jaw dropping open all day long.
And the dribbling ! Think of the incessant and monotonous
effort of lifting a handkerchief to your lips all the time !
There was another who kept hopping about, bending his right leg
in such a way that he seemed continuously on the point of jump-
ing into the air. And there was one who could not speak - and
another who made a pirouette every few steps, and another who
lifted his buttocks up in the palms of his hands, hitched them
up vehemently before each step as he walked. And still another
who hesitated a half hour before taking a step and then broke
into a run. All these cases terrified me at first - there was
one man with a face exactly like an ape's who told me right
off that he didn't believe in Darwin's theory; I was frightened

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at first and then I wanted to roar aloud with laughter, to
scream with laughter, to laugh so majestically, so enormously
that my laughter would conceal all these grotesques of humanity
from the sight of the world. And then came another period when
I believed that the encephaliti were the supremest beings of
our race.

For instance, there was one boy, Aldo, who during
his stay in the hospital had appendicitis, pneumonia, pleurisy,
encephalitus, arthritis - seven or eight ailments, in fact.
When I talked to him about my father, who still lived in Bologna,
Aldo wept tears of pity for me and for the soul of that black-
faced, black-hearted man. (Since then my father has died. I
don't know how he died, but still he died, God damn his soul.
He was not worthy of remaining in this world and if one of my
letters to him has hastened his death, I am over-joyed. He
wrote me that he did not like either Socialism or Fascism -
his motto was "let the ship drift with the tide.") Aldo wept
when I read my father's letters aloud to him, poor child, poor
martyr. The thing is that in a hospital one begins life anew,
we all become children and start over again. (There was one
old, old man who cried like a child because he didn't want an
enema.)

There was an Austrian, poor fellow, who hated me like
death. One day I spat in his face. He was an enormous strong
giant of a man who could have carried a ton under one arm as
easily as a bag of straw, and he had struck me at four different
times. Another time I shook my fist in his face and a yellowish

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smile crossed his features - a smile that expressed more hatred
than I have ever seen in the world. Once when he was in the
latrine, this accursed Austrian who hobbled about with one
crutch, I took the crutch away and then called after him to
follow me. I wanted to see if I could perform the miracle of
making him walk alone.

There was another patient who, because he insisted on
kissing the nurse, was tied to the bed where he piteously begged:

"I won't do it again ! I promise not to do it again !"

Then Eric Hjorth came to see me ! How well I remember
the day he came ! As I was under the effect of the drug, I kept
talking to him in Italian and this angered him as he could not
understand me. He had ordered a good dinner at the inn for us,
but I could not go, too drugged, too lost in lethargy and sleep.
For him and Mitchell Dawson I wrote a "Sick Men's Hymn:"

The hospital waits:

I today, you tomorrow;

five days, ten days, a month,

six months, a year, ten years;

How much of life have you given the
hospital ?

Oh, the long hours God steals
from a man's life !

Oh, the dear precious hours
God throws away.

-239-

Tumors, broken legs, cancers in the face,
abscesses, bones horribly prominent,
thinness, consumption-sucked faces,
eczema, scabs, eruptions;
Oh, what a funny, happy, gay sculptor and painter
is God !
Yells, roars, jumps and somersaults of epileptics,
Oh, what a happy, gay, funny old Circus Director
is God !

You mock us with your sun
that doesn't warm us,
we, trembling with fever;
With the kind moon we do but see,
we, the blind;
With the green earth our broken legs cannot tread;
With the days and the nights
skipping past us,
(Oh, such beautiful dancers)
while we lie helpless and angry.

I talk of You but who are You and who knows You ?
You are too distant a promise and we must be dead
in order to see You.
You say You are the light in the midst of our souls,
But I know that in our souls there is only filthy
darkness
And the fear of death.

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We shall cast over Your world our pus and
putrefaction:

Let all the flowers be stifled,
what do we care ?

The earth is decay to us
and from millions of stinking places
like a monstrous anthem
arises the miasma that is YOU.

You have hidden Your promise under the darkness
of death.

You're in bad faith, O, God !
You're no good.

God, give us tonight our rest,
give us tonight our sleep.

Let sleep, the sophisticated lady, embrace us.
Let sleep come, slay her thousand
little enemies.

Let our filthy thirty wounds be quenched,
Let pain knock at our head
a tremendous lullaby.

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Chapter XXXII.

Bazzano

I once said that in Bazzano the snow came only as a
caress. This is a lie, unless it is a matter of a caress being
five feet in height. The snow came here fierce and unforgiving.
The black and white wood-cuts of the landscape were more defin-
ite than ever. The soil, it seemed, had been hungry for snow.
This little town deserves to be put on the map: for it is the
typical Italian little town, hardly more than a village, with
even its own town idiot who always fell asleep while the barber
shaved him. (Vigilant mothers warned their female off-spring
against him.) Bazzano had its own songs, songs heard nowhere
except in Bazzano. There was one about the barber which the
boys sang in the streets at night:

"Moretto, Moretto, he has in his hair
The natural wave that comes from
nature,
The waves of the sea."

In some of these songs there was a nostalgic beauty:

"The day that never was for him
Can cause the drinker no pain;
From the world he flees,
And missing love he misses too
The squalor of the day that
never was."

-242-

And in others a certain viciousness:

"When he touched her little teats
She ran straight to her mother
Who is an old whore
And who taught her to make love young.
He, rin tin tin,
Ho, rin tin tin,
Tin La.
Love is like a roulette wheel,
Always turning, always spinning."

When one begins to notice who dies and who doesn't,
this is a sign that one has begun to live long in a place. (It
may also be a sign that one is growing old.) There was Folla,
that poor lover of a violin he hadn't touched for years, that
miserable enthusiast of Beethoven of whom no one knew anything
in this vile little town. He walked so slowly down the street
that death easily overtook him. Then came Cristo. Cristo went
around the streets of Bazzano with a newspaper that he carried
twisted into a kind of club behind his back and which he never
read. He was quarrelsome, bad; he would fly into rages when
the boys followed him and called him, not names, but noises.
The noise he hated worst to be called was something like this:
Sh...sh...sh...sh.....

Then there was Arrigo Arcangely. He used to stand on
the main road and yell stupid incoherent phrases at the passing
automobiles. (He always saluted me and bowed to me extravagant-
ly whenever I went out. He seemed to like me.)

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He was famous for the incomprehensible jargon he would shout at people. He hanged himself. He got tired of waiting for death.

These dead men marked with their deaths little periods in my Bazzano life. (Strangely enough, when one is young one scarcely notices the wretched dead, protected from their assault by the thoughtlessness, or the insanity, or the restless impatience of youth.) In the hospital I lived as in a dream among the living, the shaking. Only during sleep were we quiet and did we cease to tremble. This illness must have inspired the saying, "As long as you aren't dead, you're fine." During an instant of comparative quiet and repose, the slightest shock or movement even can start afresh the incessant, the relentless trembling. It is the falsest and at the same time the truest of all illnesses - it consists of nothing, practically nothing, but it is made of a multiplication of nothings until in the end it becomes an enormity. There were several idiots among us: one of them was my closest friend, a scientist, an old man. I could confide in him and talk to him freely. I made him understand that he could use what little money I had and he answered, with tears, that I had a great and generous heart. But when I gave him the money, he gave almost all of it away to other patients.

The head nurse was an adorable little woman and her white veil fluttered behind her like the wings of a butterfly.

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She seemed to me like one of the madonnas which my country hides in every nook and cranny, each madonna so different in its execution that they have become goddesses which the people worship, so making a politheistic religion of christianity.
This nun-nurse took possession of our entire universe and did with us exactly as she pleased. She called us, these mad encephalitic dancers of death, her "treasures," her "darlings", her "loves." I would find myself murmuring to her: "Oh, dear, good, sacred, holy little sister of mine !"

Then Robert McAlmon came to Bazzano, with that strange ironical smile that was more like a grimace on his face. Seeing the filth of the place I was in, he paid a year for me in a private sanatorium, the Villa Rubazziana. There I began another life. This place was called the Villa Rubazziana from the Italian "rubare" which means to rob. In fact, they take the shirt off a man's back as soon as they notice he has one on. It was red in the green of the pines, like a huge strawberry in the tall grass; not quite the color of a strawberry but rather that of a red cloth that has been washed too many times.
A House of Health, they called it, but it was the House of Rotten Nerves. With the tendrils of these clipped, mangled, twisted nerves one could have made an embroidered handkerchief for God to blow his nose in. He deserves it.

On top of a hill, it surveyed the city: a high sentry.
It was populated by at least fifty patients or guests, all of them very crazy, or else half crazy, or else half sane. When I

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arrived they put me in the best room of the place, and there
came young Dr. Kingpeels to speak of tremendous doses of
arsenic, bromus, calcium, so that by reflection he made the
place tremendous in my eyes. Kingpells had small eyes that
bespoke falsity, but he was not false, as I found out later on.

The room was so pretty, so beautiful, it had such
lordly intimacies with my soul that my heart was slammed open
and I said: this is just the place to get well in. I walked
about the room for some hours, touching everything, looking
everywhere, till I felt that the room belonged to me and then
I was happy. (But they transferred me later into the ugliest
room of the place. The spirit of triumphant entrance was thus
abated and I was unhappy again.)

The first evening, having certain needs, I called
the nurse and asked her to show me to the watercloset. A
woman appeared, ugly and malignant. I asked her to look for
my slippers in my suitcase. Having examined and contemplated
my lingerie, she exclaimed:

"Where are your underclothes ?"

"What are those things there if they're not under-clothes ?" I replied very angrily.

She was vindicating on me the moneyed aristocracy
of the place. She tried to tell me, in the least possible amount
of words, that I was a bum. I could have told her:

This man you see, horrible woman,
Is richer and more

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aristocratic than perhaps all your guests.
My brain is aristocratic,
My nose and eyes and all the senses
are great aristocrats.
But if you knew this, woman,
you could no longer waddle about
like a proletarian goose.
You'd be too scared
to move a foot.

But I said nothing instead. The next morning I was
awoken by a thousand and one birds singing their halleluja to
the sky together. It was as though a bomb had suddenly explod-
ed and from its inside these birds had flown, singing, singing,
singing. They were singing the glory of a very old good God
who peacefully listened from the heights of a pure light-asure
sky, scarcely grazed by a few pink-kissed clouds. They celebrat-
ed the billionth advent of the morning. (There was the music
of the winds around the Villa Rubazziana as well as the music
of the birds in the early morning.) Awoken by these singers,
so many small birds, I imagined how it would be to move west-
ward with the sun and find them girdling the belly of the old
earth, celebrating this early mass of joy.

And the red sun over the tree trunks. It lay on them
as light as the dust on the wings of a butterfly. It was ether-
eal, unreal almost. A brush made with the hair of the breeze

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had done this work. The blood of the essence of my own soul,
it was. The trees were sublime with it, they could be called
the trees of heaven since it was heaven's colors that lent
them their personality.

The red gradually waned into a soft yellow and then
I knew that the day had begun. I sat by the window and thought
of my being in this new house, and the red on the tree trunks
that was gradually waning into yellow, and the birds - and I
swayed with the elegance of all this; I thought all this was
extremely elegant.

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Chapter XXXIV

Train of Characters Through the Villa Rubazziana

The director, who was also the owner of the place,
had a red beard and was cunning and sly. He looked as though
he was fooling you half the time. Professor Blacks, his name,
and a disciple of Babinsky. He didn't look at all like a
scientist since he didn't even wear glasses. But to open up
the brains of psychopathics and neuropathics with the small
and big keys of science was a cinch for him. He smiled on all
sick people as though he believed they were faking their
illnesses.

He led the caravan of the cross-myelitics, of the
ataxics, the spinal-syphilitics, the polymelitics, that went
wavering, trembling, waddling, swaying, cock-stepping, goose-
stepping, sorrowfully-stepping after him. He knew the secret,
the watchword, and the slogan. He led the caravans of the
ladies whose husbands do not satisfy, the caravan of the
encephalitics, sleeping as they walked, doubled over. This
disciple of Babinsky handled power with ease, and triumphantly;
but the story ran that he was as crazy as the craziest of
his patients.

The young doctors adored him and had unbounded
estem for his vast knowledge: esteem that in the long run
became servility. Women must have been crazy about him
because his red beard was really nice, almost beautiful.
With the secret, the watchword, and the slogan, he led the

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caravan that goes towards death and was able to smile all along. When his patients died they had three doctors around them: he made them die easy.

He smiled like a good old Satan and the Rubazziana lay, like an island in a river, in the shadow of that smile. His responsibilities did not seem to bother him much, and his patients, healed or unhealed, made together a great chorus of praises that was to be heard wherever there were rotten nerves to mend, to sew, or to knock together. He smiled and his face was a mellow-red sun, and the light of that sun was made for true or fake happiness for his patients: for when he smiled, they all smiled back.

The first acquaintance was Arches. A young Fascist from Faenza, he had been accused of murdering a man during a Fascist punitive expedition. He was, however, innocent, but he hadn't left the scene of battle without receiving in his breast and arm I don't know how many ounces of gunshot. Women thought him very handsome, and his face was indeed sweet and gentle, but it was also rather insignificant. He used to say that he had one sweetheart, ever-ready, for each finger and toe. We passed the time listening to his love affairs.

He was waiting his trial and was meanwhile continually guarded by two carabineri whose uniforms added to the picturesqueness of the Villa. He was also the official gazette of the place and he spent much of his time talking with his carabineri. He spoke three-quarters of the time

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about women, one eighth of the time about hunting, and the
other eighth about bees whom he knew from their birth to
their death, just like a father who has outlived his sons.

Arches' face was gentle as a good woman's word
told whisperingly to a very sick man. (Devotion and friend-
ship were to him tacitly acknowledged duties.) His smile
had several gradations: it was good, then nasty, then
ironical. This last form lasted the longest and was the
most habitual one. His smile was sometimes an irradiation
of his face, a light and a halo. His body was small but it
contained exactly his soul which was not at all big. But he
was good company, making funny faces and singing comically
to amuse people. His tragedy - hidden - was his insignif-
icance. He had passed along the field of life stealing the
worst grapes for lack of intelligence and little discernment.
But he considered his booty very precious and praised him-
self about it.

To the whole Villa he was a pleasure and a joy.
Young ladies flocked after him like chick-chickens after
their probable mother. When he went away, several young
ladies wept the desperate tears of regret. Arches' secret,
what was it? To be quiet and to wait like a flower not
totally bloomed. His secret was to adorn his banality with
the picturesque colors that came from his Romagna: it was a
love affair with a gramaphone record (Schubert's Serenade);
it was that his lascivious eyes were not quite his own; they
were two skunks trying to sneak away; (not that he was

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sneaky). If Fascists had been better men, that is truly
great conquerors of the soul of Italy, Arches would have
been an almost legendary hero. As it was, he was a mere
invalid.

This fragment is in the form of an old-fashioned
minuet:

Fedora is an American lady who came to see me with
her sister at the Villa Rubazziana. Clarinets like a
poplar's leaves trilling, twisting and tinkling; o clarinets
whose chords are the very chords of my heart, play me a song
of praise to God for the intelligence of this lady!
Trombones, play me a music that will be like great big men,
giants, in praise of this small, supple, and dearest lady!
Saxaphone, play the blues of Mister Me who have been left
alone by the two most glorious sisters the whole world over;
saxaphone, play me the most vulgar melodies for she is of
this earth and of this vulgus and she loves them both. She
knew that the greater spiritualities are to be found in the
loam and the dirt, and that the hand of an Italian farmer
was major in the scale of aristocratic spirituality rather
than the delicate viciously langorous hand of an Italian
Count.

(She was the most aristocratic lady and she told
me that she was too old to love me, and the devil if I know
what a guy could say to that! Agree that she was too old,
or say that she was not too old at all, or that she was
still very young, nay, younger than myself? She said to me:

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"Talk to me as I talk to my child", and this humiliated me and did not help me to talk any better - in fact it embarassed me. When she wept, I called her "Poor Fedora!" and she cried: "Don't call me poor!")

I was able to go to town once a week to the theatre and we saw Petrolini, the Roman actor, together and she was enthusiastic. When from the height of a window an actor in a nightcap threw a piss-pot's contents upon the head of a serenader, she laughed and said that such things were not allowed in America. Her laugh was cool and fresh as a spring appearing suddenly in the crags of a mountain-side: a laugh that one might wish to eat, like icecream. After she had left me she wrote to me from Switzerland that the Alps have a way of standing up similar to Petrolini. Better glorification than that......

(You were really quite beautiful once, although the years have put a tragic mask on your face, as I told you, but you would not admit it, of course. You came twice to Bazzano, and the second time you refused to give yourself to me because you feared the illness. You wept, and this nauseated me. Are you aware that during the fifteen years which my illness has endured I have never once shed a tear? Sobs, yes, screams, yes; but I have forgotten how to weep.)

This little lady, whose slim body carries her head like the stem the flower, has hidden powers. She speaks with little shrieks that are very pretty, but behind her voice stands a sphinx of beauty and wisdom. My lady of across the

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sea, my distant love, the lady that lasts in my heart after
all the other love affairs have miserably died. She is the
sustenance through which my heart continues. She is the
blossoming of my thought, the bed where I rest and the earth
that I tread: she is the universal joy and cosmic laughter.

Her small body contains delights; her small body
is an amphora of joys. She too in New York, where the whirl-
wind of grime and dust tries to wrap her around, asks, as I
did, for a little sylvan beauty. I love her in the morning
because the sun that arises has a large wondering face, and
the same wonder is in her eyes. I love her at noon when the
sun is a knocker in the gong of the sky, for she belongs
with sky and sun, so lightful and harmonious and powerful
her spirit is. And I love her in the night when the too-
romantic sky-rider weeps small silver tears because she too
is pale and her tears are silver for my mind and gold for
my heart.

(I remember your wild eyes and your little moans
when you were in voluptuous ecstacy, but it was a vicious
circle, it was a wretched little mystery, that of your
personality and hence that of our love. You needed
excitement and I was only a depressing load, you needed a
stimulus and I was only a sedative; under this depression
and lethargy this soul of mine kept shouting the story of
my ghastly sickness. You did not seem to understand that the

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encephalitic does everything badly, even talk: that he
cannot describe his intricacies except by words like these:
I am confused, I am not well, I am dazed; while you expected
madrigals from me, light verse, or delicately sad things
which would not distress you too much. If I could have
expressed what I felt, it would have been a wild, ferocious,
terrible utterance.)

In my hollow cavernous heart she shines like an
idol and to forget her would be to forget too many things
that are the furniture of half of my past. I remember
carrying big, huge bunches of lilacs to that sweetly and
clean-smelling house of X Street in America. And I remember
I was in love with her and with another sister of hers. I
lived, those days, in a fog of ecstacy, drowsily and warmly
wrapped around in that fog. I became her sister's lover then
but in my heart I had an adoration for her. She did not love
me, ever; so that she will be surprised to hear of this now.
She will be surprised and angry perhaps and she will call
this writing absolutely false. But I know that what little
truth my closed fist of sick man may let escape is in this
writing.

(Do you remember that time in Washington Square,
New York, that you told me you thought you loved me, while
I was in love with your sister? She had been kind to me,
and I was looking so eagerly then for a smiling word that I
would have fallen in love with the first woman who gave it
to me. Your sister was ugly, but I didn't care as long as

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she was kind. I believe you, I don't believe you, so
continued the refrain of our stupidity. Poor little Fedora,
mistress during one short indulgent night, mostly indulgent
towards the lies I told you; if you feared the contamination
of my illness, this fear of yours was understandable for the
gift of it would have been to you a sorry gift indeed.)

Now we are far one from the other and maybe I
shall never see her again. And upon my love I shall put a
seal and throw the packet in a hidden corner of my heart.
There to grow or die, to blossom or shrivel, to increase or
dwindle away, to remain or to go. If they are roses they
will bloom.

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## Chapter XXXV

### To The Memory of Ernest Walsh

There came to see me at the Villa then Ernest Walsh with Ethel Moorhead. They brought me to the theatre where we saw one of those actresses who imitates the Duse and where the first actor roars and jumps and shrieks to show his unsatiable anger. Where the actor plays the way all actors in Italy play, the same way of getting angry, the same, absolutely, inflexion of voice: a thing that mauseates. After the theatre they brought me to a swell hotel where I passed the night. There Ernest spoke while he was half-drunk. And he said many beautiful things.

There was a cow in a jade meadow beside a jade river..... so went the lullaby-fable of Ethel Moorhead.

Ernest said there was no death in either of us, and while so saying his face was glowing with a halo. He said that poets were the holy men, the principal worshippers at every religion, the prophets, the great scolders, the most indulgent towards the weeping world; the best judges, absolute judges. And while he spoke, my friend was a magistrate of splendors, giver of pardons, the most religious of the skeptical: but laughing at God for his divine paraphanalia, his divine self-importance (who will say that he has always had time for God?) A halo shone around his beautiful head. I understood but one thing: that this man must be always sacred to me.

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And the river flowed slowly, slowly, slowly.
sleepingly, sleepingly, sleepingly. And the cow was
faaast asleep, faaaaaast asleep.

Yes, I understood one thing only: the marvelous
holiness of this man in my eyes. Words, words, words to
praise you, my dearest, where are all the words to praise
you, my dearest? Your beauty that night had a poignancy that
knocked at my heart for entrance (at my wooden heart for
entrance). And I lay there, impotent to say a word. Oh,
my friend, blessed be the wine that made you talk so to me.
Blessed be your half-drunkenness. I will carry with me to
my death the image of that hotel room and you talking to
me, sitting by my bed......

I had something to tell you then and I do so now:
I have remained under the wreckage of my soul, half-destroyed,
panting and a-tremble. Hundreds of nights of misery have
putrefied my bitterness and it now stinks in my nostrils.
I am no longer sad, and what is sadder than not to be sad
any more? I am no longer sad: my heart is worn and wrinkled
and it gives forth no pretty-colored flames of sadness,
langorous flames of sadness, but rank smoke and stench of
regret and crazy yearning.

You, my friend, know my tremendously, enormously
ridiculous sickness. My complaints have at last become timid
birds in the presence of an ogre. Oh, the atrocious insomnia,

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and after one has fallen asleep at last, the awakening with
the sickness one had dreamed of not having........

And the cow and the river and the meadow were faast
asleep, fast asleep.

And the impotence to do one's own work, and the
impotence to think one's own thoughts, and the impotence to
sleep one's own nights; and the impotence to tell one's own
friend "I love you" in such a way as to make him believe it;
and the impotence to sing, and the impotence to be intellig-
ible when speaking of one's own sickness. Whom or what shall
I accuse? Nothing to do but to shed the burning tears of
despair and fear and dismay, to croak at last with all my
youth squandered for nothing at all, for nothing at all!

Ernest Walsh, this poor sick man, vowed to sickness
like myself, ah, but he was no sick man that night! He
uttered healthy thoughts that night. He spoke of art with
depth and insight: depth because he took the cool water of
his thoughts from a deep well, insight because he pierced
the secret of art. A God-forsaken man, like myself....not
like myself because he was uncomplaining whereas I am swollen
with complaints. He was pure and wise like a modern Socrates.
His forehead was a tryst for dreams and thoughts. His white
pure and taut forehead where no worm of sophistication crept.
His long hair seemed to consecrate an idea of goodness - his
hair was good-natured with its long sweep and no curls. An
eagle, he was, this dear friend, soaring over the cemetery
where the dead artists of the world stank of their old age.

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He said:

"Where there is beauty is no death. There is no death in us either. Where there is beauty there is art. Art should concern the life of everyday. All should be exalted by it. It should be the eucharistic bread and the eucharistic wine. Have a holy communion with art, you who are blind, you who are deaf, you whose souls are numb with solitude and despair."

"All the trades should become beautiful. Love should move our hands, love should sanctify our work, and that love is also called art!" The artists carry through the ages the flower of the civilization they lived in, they should seek the eternal in the mortal. What is this talk of modern art, new art? Is art an object, a chair, a dish, a toy that it can be new or old? Shakespeare is still one of our best present-day writers. It is the present-day writer that is in Shakespeare that counts. There are as few men today that understand Shakespeare as in the time that Shakespeare wrote his masterpieces. Not one more, not one less."

"The artists are the salt of the earth. They are the recorders of civilizations. Where there are artists the flowers bloom and the fruits blossom. Sophistication is the old age of art that could not reach anybody. Simplicity is the ever-new sun and moon."

These things said or thought or knew my dear friend, Ernest Walsh, and I loved him for it. And now he is dead, my dearest, my lovely, my great friend is dead. What is

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there to say after that; that encloses all the sorrow my
heart can bear. He loved life and yet he died before I did.
He died, while I go on making half-hearted love to life in
every night of insomnia, I go on inventing tiny poems to life
while he is dead, dead, dead. He was so full of joy, he was
such a splendid youth, but why evoke his beauty now? Every
evocation is rememberance and all rememberance is sorrow.

I remember when he came to the Villa Rubazziana,
that generous, happy, and strong man! He brought me a wagon-
load of cigarettes. He brought me eau-de-cologne and wetted
my forehead with it. I imagine myself wiping his icy forehead
and calling him aloud. I imagine myself able to make him
speak, the dead - who knows? I loved him so well and so long
that perhaps the miracle could be accomplished....

Right is Yvor Winters when he says his death has
been the greatest literary tragedy of this half century.
For me, however, the tragedy was more intimate, less literary.
We should be reverent before this dead man who, besides
editing "This Quarter", left a ripe harvest of poems and
prose. I don't know how great a poet he was, this dearest of
boys who died too soon; but to me he was a very great poet
for I never derived such pleasure in reading poetry as I
found in reading his work. He was a poet, gentleman, and he
went on his way, away from you all, on his way of loneliness
and pain. Though dead, he is still going, going, going.
Watch him go and keep still. He doesn't need your help at
all, at all. He doesn't need your sympathy. A face suffused

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## Chapter XXXVI

### Last Memories

One night, between Friday and Saturday, the awful crime took place. It announced itself by means of a little shock and then a series of little shocks which did not frighten anybody. But then, tired of playing about with insipid little quiverings, it decided to give a good big shudder. And then the giant was upon us:- earthquake!

The thorough helplessness before this terrible thing is what gets my goat. The futile, frantic rebellion against its presence was almost the most fearful thing about it. I was like a baby on a rock in mid-ocean, in a wild, tossing ocean, choked by the spray from the enormous waves that smashed against the rock. Imagine a town that has slept its five hundred years of quiet, suddenly flung into an impossible situation by this crazy business: the quaking of the earth! It was a dirty business of fear, cries, cowardice, escape - escaping from where to where? A madness of running, blind with terror, mangling everything crazily beneath one's feet as one ran. I knew all the categories of fear and in the end I believed this: the name of the worst fear is "earth-quake fear." It gave me a violent pain in the belly and brain which lasted for months after the last shock had passed. It was a giant, but it had delicate little fingers: look at the bits of plaster that it picked off the walls and ceiling and threw onto the floor!

LET ME FIND MY HEART

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It is perhaps in a little blue hole, entwined with
an octupus, that I shall find my young friend, my friend of a
season, one far away, almost forgotten season of sun and sea
on the riviera of the setting sun.

I slept one night with him and he endowed me with
the sweetest names, but there was nothing pedarastic about it,
for he was young and strong and loved women very much, and I
did too. (Then I was very handsome, but now is the period
when there is no beauty for me. Now I am almost bald-headed,
but I like to believe I am still handsome because the voice
of one woman has told me I still am.) We spent a night of
fleas and bed-bugs together, itching, tossing, scratching.
(Like that old bore of American literature, Ezra Pound, who
itches with a literary eczema. The more he itches the more
he scratches, and the more he scratches the more he itches:
a vicious circle devoid of beauty. He is a nocturnal barker
who keeps so many people awake who are in need of sleep.)

During the day, Gioomin and I used to go along the
seashore in the shallow water which abruptly deepened, look-
ing for porous stones in which the worms to fish with were
hidden. Once he took me far, far out in a little row-boat
and I was frightened, afraid that one vigorous pull on the
oar might capsize the boat. That day the weather was spoiling
and it seemed to me that the deep blue of the water concealed
a veiled but final threat.

I wish I could speak about him with enthusiasm,
but to voice enthusiasm I should at least be able to rise from
this bed which sucks my energy and life and leaves me empty

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and desolate, flaccid as a jelly-fish on a rock. I wish I
could give vent to a howl of joy thinking of those wonderful
moments which have set now like the sun setting in the sea
forever. He was the Neptune of that beautiful Tyrrhenian
Sea. He was the strongest on the beach and he displayed his
muscles under his brown skin with a pride that approached
ferocity. I looked upon him like on a fine picture in a
shining golden frame.

Varazze was his town, his own, and its mountains
and sea were green. The land there was like the elbow of an
arm extending into the water and cradling the quiet and the
tumult, as a mother's arm cradles the head of her little girl.
He was everything I had wanted to be, Gioomin: strong as the
rocks which the sea needs centuries to undermine, brown as
the stone of the reefs, a fearless diver, laughing out loud.
The world is for him and for the strong, while I am only a
weak-fist lifted against God, or like two sickly hands joined
in prayer, but always a wretched, ill-shapen thing.

Oh, Lady Death, take me, is now the common refrain
of all my songs! Take me with you and I will be docile as
a child and I will follow obediently in your footsteps
without terror, knowing you are the divine mistress and the
diving gift of God. I will not so much as slay a worm who
comes to greet me and crosses my path, oh, Lady Death!
I will be good and kind to all those who are going the same
way. I will not talk too loud and too much the way I always
did in life. I will merely stammer a few words in your ear,