* * * * *
Larry Mickler, with his revolver and his passion for Dostoevsky, had
made upon me an unpleasant impression. I had come to connect him
obscurely with my impulse to smash the peach-brandy bottle, when I
had felt myself so helpless with Rita, and I found that I disliked
Dostoevsky, because Larry Mickler admired him. I remembered--as I went
back in the taxi to my own apartment in Bank Street--Dostoevsky’s
sadistic manias, his complaisance in self-degradation, his extravagant
vanity; I began to feel, after meeting Mickler, that the masterpieces
of such a man of genius were a doubtful compensation on paper for
the moral bankruptcy of a life. Were not the purity of Dostoevsky’s
tenderness, the flights of his Christian idealism, to be measured
precisely by his perversity, the sub-human depths of his indifference?
Were not the Svidrigailovs and the Stavrogins--those malignant growths
which seemed to sprout and, almost without the author’s intention, to
swell to such monstrous proportions, in Dostoevsky’s novels--were they
not the price which one had to pay for the Myshkins and the Alyoshas?
True, it was quite unfair to Dostoevsky to identify him with Larry
Mickler; it was the triumph, at least, of the great artist that, by
dint of terrific effort, he had, if only in the world of his novels,
succeeded in restoring a moral balance to that universe which he had
once felt reeling with the world of his own soul; whereas, in the case
of Larry Mickler, who had merely to read Dostoevsky’s books, all that
desperate idealism, that victory of moral passion, would, it seemed
to me at that moment, go principally to give him a good conscience in
licking his chops over the cruelties and perversities, and to leave him
with the gratified conviction that there was no kind of discreditable
behavior which imagination might not redeem.
And Pete Bird, with his charming wistful verses and his swindle of the
liverwurst sandwiches! And Rita--without that _mêlée_ in which her
varying passions had involved her, that possession by all the devils of
all the human desires at once, all that panic and anarchy and anguish
and deceit of her daily life, would she ever without all this have been
compelled to the noble severity, the firm and harmonious form, the
bravery of candor, of her verse?
And those poets of whom Rita and I had talked the first night I had
known her in Bank Street! To-night, the curses and groans of Catullus
only filled me with the same disgust for his abasement at the feet
of Lesbia as did my own preoccupation with Rita.--And Verlaine,
in his prison cell, with his imbecile alternations between piety
and pornography--if he had published his religious poems, as he
had originally intended to do, sandwiched in between his poems of
lechery, he would have furnished a perfect example, an example forever
ludicrous, of the disorder of the poet’s mind.
Even Dante, of whom I had once thought, of whom I thought still, as the
supreme poet of Europe, who had possessed together the fiercest passion
and the most powerful intellect, who had been able to apply to one work
all man’s highest faculties at once--what stiff-necked, what stupid
obstinacy, what fanatic self-confidence, going against all common
sense, must have lain back of all that subtlety and feeling! Had not
Dante’s indignation with his neighbors, as Professor Grosbeake had once
suggested, been based upon an utter incapacity for understanding the
realities of his time? Yet he had been spurred by such a passion to be
_right_, that, balked and exiled in the real world, he had gone to live
in the world of his poem, where, passing over both Emperor and Pope, he
had sat in the place of God himself!
And even the philosopher and the saint! When I thought now of Professor
Grosbeake, it was with a certain sentiment of scorn for the domesticity
in which he seemed buried, and with misgivings as to whether his
metaphysics were not merely a monstrous hypertrophy, arising, first,
from a certain ineptitude at dealing with the affairs of the practical
world, and fostered, later, by his practical wife, who had taken
possession of him and securely immured him in a life where nothing but
contemplation was possible. And had I not just learned that Hugo’s
father, from whom I had caught for the first time in my boyhood the
sense of the unity of life--had I not just heard that he had fed his
vision with the dead wood of some area of his nature of which he had
never ceased to feel the lack, and that his ringing arraignment of the
Congressmen for their failure to search their hearts in a spirit of
Christian humility had been purchased at the expense of the tyrannic
subjection of his household! And in the case of Hugo himself, it now
appeared to me--what I had never understood before--that his ideas had
been given their direction by his early revolt against his father,
which had made him, not, as his father had been, the prophet of a new
moral discipline, but primarily a champion of the oppressed who still
resented and feared the oppressor.
But these reflections began to sicken me (I was at once hungry, nervous
and weary): I had succeeded in accounting for all these people,
who were precisely the people I most admired, as the victims of
deficiencies and derangements; and I now felt that I had been deriving
an ignoble satisfaction from knowing the secret of every one’s disease.
While I was changing my clothes in Bank Street, I began to remember
Dostoevsky’s miseries: the neurotic family given over to its manias and
collapsing after the mother’s death; the boy neglected by the drunken
father and left without money at his school; the elder Dostoevsky
murdered by his peasants; Dostoevsky sentenced to death for plotting
against the Czar,--taken out and tied to a stake to be shot, and
reprieved only at the last moment; his four years of imprisonment in
Siberia, wearing the fetters with murderers and thieves, hauling bricks
and pounding alabaster; his later years of servitude as a soldier;
his persecution by his brother’s creditors; and the epilepsy which had
accompanied all from that first day, when, a boy at school, he had
heard the news of the murder of his father. Where was there place for
ironic patronage in the contemplation of such a life or of the writings
which had been its products?
And I remembered how Hugo, too, had suffered in his prison-camp in
France. No wonder he hated discipline and authority! It was true that
prison had made of Hugo an uncompromising revolutionist, whereas it had
made of Dostoevsky an equally uncompromising conservative: Hugo himself
was naturally good, and it seemed to him, in consequence, that all the
evil which he encountered must be the product of institutions somehow
imposed on humanity against their wish; whereas, in Dostoevsky’s case,
his inescapable sense of his own guilt, of the evil in his own heart,
seemed at last to have reduced him to feeling that, though he had
been punished for a political offense only, his punishment had been
somehow deserved, and that he had actually been expiating crimes of
which he had never been accused. He had come to believe in the badness
of humanity; and mere political readjustments, in consequence, no
longer appeared to him important. Yet the effect of the ordeal in each
case--in Hugo’s and in Dostoevsky’s--had been essentially the same: as
Dostoevsky’s years in Siberia had caused him so deeply to distrust even
the liberalism of educated Russians, so Hugo’s weeks in the prison-camp
had made it impossible for him to accept, even in their most genial
guise, the complacency and comfort of America. Both had been forced to
live at close quarters with the basic contentions and discords, the
basic horrifying anomalies, of our common life. And both were always
afterwards to look with the eyes of strangers and exiles upon even the
most conscientious, even the most intelligent, even the most amiable of
their fellows who had never recognized those realities.
Hugo and Dostoevsky alike had attempted to explain them, to resolve
them, those contentions, anomalies and discords.--And were not these
the prime provokers of literature?--not encountered in prisons only,
but in all treachery, violence, frustration, all the outbreaks of our
barbarous nature and the unlooked-for disasters which befell us at
the mercy of unknown forces. Such disasters and outbreaks alone could
rouse us from our normal existence of non-thinking and non-feeling,
the laziness of bodily processes inertly fulfilling their functions,
of the consciousness inertly drifting among random and meaningless
images--memories and anticipations--with unconscious but cunning
instinct steering clear of problems and tasks. What were literature and
art but the by-products of these collisions with the uncomprehended
reality--collisions whose repercussions, when we had withdrawn into
the shelter of ourselves, we attempted to palliate, to harmonize, to
account for, to subdue to a smoother rhythm in the current of our
thought, now resuming, which for a moment had been troubled or torn?
And was it not true that the individual artist--the greatest master
even: Dante himself--no matter how detached his intelligence, how
rich his imagination, how comprehensive his range, was never able to
escape from the instinct which made him justify his own life? If the
poet wrote about himself, or identified himself with his hero, the hero
must emerge victorious; or if the hero were allowed to be beaten, he
must at least be made to triumph morally; or if the writer confessed to
sin or ignominy, the confession itself must be a merit; or if he wrote
neither of himself nor of a hero, the historian, the economist or the
philosopher, in defending certain values, made them play the hero’s
rôle. Like the instinct which made us blink our eyes when anything was
brought near them, the instinct to produce a work of art (so I somberly
reflected to-night in that room where, so short a time before, as I had
heard Rita reciting her poems, the language of literature had seemed
to me something at once natural and noble)--the instinct to produce
a work of art was merely a self-protective reflex like another. Were
not imagination and reason like the phagocytes of our physical nature,
which, as soon as an infection occurs, rush to mass themselves at the
breach, where they ingest the disturbing intruders and put a stop to
the progress of the disease?--with this difference, that the work of
art, unlike the dead and discharged phagocytes, for some time and under
certain conditions, may retain a certain efficacy for others.
For the harmony, the justification, provided by a successful piece of
literature was accepted by the reader as valid. Yet the writer had
falsified life, because he had pretended to harmonize something of
which he was conscious chiefly as chaos, and to explain what he was
aware, all too well, he could not fully understand. So, when I had
written a sequence of sonnets about the night of my first meeting with
Rita, I had not mentioned, as I have not mentioned in my description
of that evening, the drunken friend who had kept calling me up and
interrupting our conversation; the agonized cries of cats; the howling
and sobbing of a baby; the sore throat which, toward the end of the
evening, I had begun to find very uncomfortable and which, afterwards,
during the days when I had been falling in love with Rita, had
developed into a bad cold. So I had also deliberately left out all that
uncertain and egoistic side of Rita’s character, of which I had already
become aware and which was already making me anxious.
A work of art was, then, an imposture. But the reader, himself balked
and bewildered, received naïvely the artist’s picture as a true diagram
of the world. The artist, who had been disconcerted and spurred to
compose a work of art by his failure to discover in the universe
either harmony or logic, supplied the logic and harmony himself; and
the reader, who had also been hungering for harmony or logic, accepted
with joyful reassurance what the artist gave him, and assumed that
the artist’s makeshift was a certified revelation, and the artist an
oracle. The reader leaned upon the writer: what for the latter was a
vague, a confused, or an approximate form of expression, the former
applied literally. All that part of literature which dealt directly
with current events--editorial-writing, pamphleteering, history, much
novel and play-writing--was but the painting of the thinnest varnish of
a comforting reason and art over earthquakes which actually took place,
not in the world of art and reason, but in the barbarous animal world,
bloody, uncontrollable, ignoble--and all the writer could hope for,
at best, was to divert the attention of his fellows, like a bystander
at a street accident who, when the rest of the crowd are only gaping,
insists upon the removal of the body, or like an actor in a burning
theatre who, by eloquence or jest, tries to avert a panic and stampede.
Yet the public, remembering the catchwords, the incantations, of their
leaders, attempted to enforce them as laws; and a flourish of rhetoric,
under pressure of a desperate crisis, would be imposed as a practical
programme or developed as a philosophic system.
Or the public got to the point of behaving as if every feature of the
artist’s work were something premeditated--writing, for example, after
the author was dead, “It was about this period that X, in his attempt
to understand his own time, decided that it would first be necessary to
understand the career of James G. Blaine, and, finding no satisfactory
book on the subject, he set out to write one himself,” or, “It was
in the course of his travels in the tropics that the necessity first
appeared to Y of a new and chaster form of expression,”--when the truth
was that the life of Blaine had been merely a piece of hackwork for a
publisher, suggested by the publisher himself, and that the baldness
of Y’s prose had been simply the result of enervation caused by the
tropical heat. Or some work, which had represented for the writer a
furious effort at completeness of understanding, at impersonality
of projection--an effort obstructed, to the writer’s dismay, by his
personal obsessions and mannerisms, his family habits, his organic
defects, the limitations of his nation and race, which pursued and
exasperated him, like a can tied to a dog’s tail--to the public, who
knew nothing of his aim, it was precisely the writer’s personality
which they savored and glorified, descending with gratified complacency
those very lines of least resistance against which the artist had
struggled to mount, and delighting in those very stigmata which the
artist had strained to efface. So posterity would piously cherish a
distinguished writer’s roughest notes, though these might be merely
irrelevant excretions, under the pressure of emotions and interests
not commemorated in them at all--productions which derived their only
vividness from the acuteness of the writer’s need to turn his mind away
from his troubles of the body, the heart or the purse, toward something
indifferent and remote--or they might be meaningless mechanical notes,
the merest rudimentary twitchings of the literary temperament, made in
moments of drunkenness or fatigue, but hungrily saved by the writer’s
admirers for their infinitesimal drops of some peculiar personal color,
no more significant or precious in itself than the color of his hair
or his eyes. From these notes, the writer’s disciples might end by
constructing a system which would have filled the writer with horror,
but which now carried the credit of his name--just as in the case of
ancient poetry, where the text was corrupt or fragmentary, Æschylus
seemed to us all the more awful and all the more oracular because, not
knowing precisely what he wrote, we did not know precisely what he
meant; and Sappho all the more a goddess because there was so little of
her left.
Nor were the public readers merely: they were also writers who imitated
the author. One had had a vision of movements in literature sweeping
over the minds of humanity like the wind that makes waves in the wheat;
but would it not, I now reflected, be more accurate to liken such
movements simply to the collapse of a row of dominoes, of which only
the first has felt the shock, the shock from the unknown reality, and
the others have merely toppled over, receiving it at second-hand? Till,
at last, the original composer of the symphony, the original inventor
of the system, would catch back from the minds of the public themselves
(who had merely taken it from him), a new belief in the all-embracing,
the all-satisfying character of that pattern, in the finality of those
conclusions, which, at the time he had first conceived them, he had
never himself regarded as complete.--Some day, like a fool, I should
myself read those poems I had written about Rita, and I should be
convinced that it had really been like that! Not content with deceiving
others, I should finally deceive myself!
But, in the long run, if my sonnets had become famous, the public would
have found them out. When the readers had got used to a writer--when
our first delight in his peculiar color, his peculiar music or flavor,
had commenced to wear thin--then the familiar malaise assailed us:
we began fatally to detect once again, beneath the novel or alluring
surface, the presence of all those grievances, those diseases and
insane preoccupations of the straining, incomplete human being--all
those anomalies, discords, and contentions from which, in seeking the
support of literature, we had hoped to be set free. And in the end, the
public of readers, when they had found out the weaknesses and falsities
of the system which it had once accepted--when they had perhaps tried
to put into practice some vision, like the morality of Nietzsche
(another favorite of Larry Mickler’s), which the writer had imagined in
his bed--they would turn against the writer and repudiate him.
Yet beyond the work of the individual artist, there was the concerted
general effort, the gigantic universal imposture, of literature itself!
I remembered the big volumes of Jebb in which, with the hope of
tranquillizing my spirit, I had lately been reading Sophocles. _There_
was perhaps the supreme achievement of the organized imposture of
literature! How many times had one seen the calmness and the sobriety
of Sophocles played off against the harshness or the cynicism of some
modern tragic writer! These plays had become the unchallenged example
of classic moderation and wisdom, the touchstone for modern turbulence.
Yet in what work of a modern dramatist had the harshness of Sophocles
been surpassed? I remembered the unruly tempers of the family of
Œdipus: the foolish quarrel of Œdipus with his father over a casual
encounter on the road; his harshness with Tiresias; the passionate
directness of all his gestures. Did one find even in the Œdipus of
Colonus that spirit of peace and resignation with which Victorian
critics sometimes credited it? Was the exiled and embittered king a
figure of mellow clemency? Surely his final cursing of his sons was
one of the most shocking scenes in literature!--nor did the species
of divine electrocution with which Sophocles finally disposed of him
strike precisely a note of tranquillity. And those sons who quarrel for
the kingdom and who finally slaughter each other! And the passionate
obstinacy of Creon, so like the passionate obstinacy of Œdipus--and
the passionate obstinacy of Antigone! The mother and daughter, in
_Electra_, bandying the most brutal abuse! These people were, in
their way, and even on the occasions when they were animated by some
passionate fanatical loyalty, as narrowly egoistic as the characters of
Ibsen, but more quarrelsome and more virulent!
Was there, indeed, I suddenly asked myself, from the point of view
of barbarous behavior, very much to choose between Sophocles and
Dostoevsky himself? There they were, the old hideous discords--Œdipus
killing his father, the old Karamazov murdered by his sons--that cruel
inevitable turning upon the beings who have given us life! I remembered
how Hugo had just told me that, rebelling against his father, he had
come to hate even those poets whom his father had loved--and how Rita,
in leaving behind her all that dull and homely life which for so long
had hobbled her youth, had discarded the name of Aunt Sadie, who
had taught her to play Handel and Bach.--And were not the horrors of
Dostoevsky--Myshkin’s epilepsy, Zossima’s putrefaction and Stavrogin’s
rape--quite matched by Philoctetes’s ulcer, by the unburied corpse of
Polyneices and by the incest of Œdipus? If even the form of Sophocles
were more chastened than the form of Dostoevsky, his spirit was more
astringent!
I remembered the story about Sophocles in Plato--how he had been asked
whether old age had made him impotent, and how he had replied that
growing old was like deliverance from a mad and cruel master. Was this
the saying of a calm and gentle nature? And what of the tranquillity
of even those later years?--I remembered in the second _Œdipus_, the
terrible description of old age--“unfriended, feeble, chided, unfit for
company, the crowning ill of all--not to be born is best, but once we
have seen the light it is better to go soon!” How did Matthew Arnold
know that “from first youth tested up to extreme old age,” “passion”
had never made Sophocles “wild”?
Yet so great was the need of humanity to believe in a human intellect
all-self-controlled and all-wise that there had been superimposed on
the plays of that great master of hatred and horror a legend which now
disguised them--and the solemn impassive don, laboring day after day
at his desk, explaining, interpreting, translating, every word of the
poet’s text--sometimes altering his words--had pared Sophocles down,
had sapped his power, ironing out to marmoreal smoothness a style
rather nodulous and tough, congealing angry cataracts of consonants
to colorless pediments of prose, and reducing the weighty rhythm, with
its urgent pulse of blood, tiding along from one line to another the
contractions of swift-spoken speech, to a tongue which could never
have been spoken--the British don, after centuries of critics, had
supplied us with what men of letters, what all mankind, had desired:
a writer super-human and humanly impossible, a writer who could never
have existed--a Master, of impeccable technique and imperturbable moral
balance, a writer who could never be supplanted and never be outgrown,
a writer unassailable, a classic!
So we had established the myth of the classics: from the written
remains of humanity, of beings outraged and wondering like ourselves,
we had created the illusion of a fortress of absolute beauty and
wisdom, into which educated men might retreat, upon whose invulnerable
strength they might rely.
And I thought, also, of those other efforts, those efforts more
characteristic of our time, which aimed, also, at an absolute
beauty, at an art wholly independent of the appetites and agonies of
men--paintings which represented nothing, “pure poetry” devoid of
ideas: both, in reality, mere assimilations on the part of literature
and painting to the pattern and rhythm of music--which itself had been
piously striving--in those composers who named their productions after
trigonometrical figures and the integral calculus--to assimilate itself
to mathematics.
How senseless such attempts seemed to-night! How could there be
anything absolute or pure about such exercises as the arts, which
were but pleasing arrangements of sensations, and which, therefore,
were inextricably dependent on the senses we had clumsily evolved to
meet our needs and to find our way through the jungle of nature! And
if the art which derived from our hearing seemed to us purer than the
others, it was merely because we experienced, in the region of sound
divorced from speech, sensations less complex and complete than through
images or words. These crude games, so much the play of our bodies,
of our primary animal life, that neither stories, visions, drama, nor
music--not argumentation even, not Euclid’s geometry itself, which
comes to a climax, like a Greek play, with the proposition of the
square on the hypotenuse--had been able to liberate themselves from the
type of our reproductive processes--so that one had always either, as
in Greek plays, to work up to a climax toward the end and then gently
and briefly subside, or, as in our modern ones, to reach a climax and
then abruptly cease. I thought of the heat of Catullus and Keats, of
the mounting excitement of Dante; of the even unimpassioned glow of
purely homosexual writers like Plato and André Gide; of the blank
stretches where the climaxes should be, in the novels of Henry James.
And I reflected, also, that between the sexes--Rita’s poetry and
Catullus’s--there was no real common norm of judgment in matters of
literature or art--men and women were each tied to their stakes: they
could only turn in circles about them. What critic could really
pretend to judge the work of men and women side by side?--or, for that
matter, the work of different races, or even of different nations--of
different periods, generations, each with its own adjustment to make to
the world which pursued and pressed it, each with its own particular
disasters, its own particular discords and conflicts, which, to be
easy, it must resolve? Or even of different individuals!
What a discrepancy--worst of all--what a gulf between the self which
experiences and the self which writes! What was the sense, I asked
myself, in that room where I had once brought Rita and where we had
talked the night through and seen the blue of June on the glass--what
was the comfort of “moments of emotion recollected in tranquillity”?
As if there could ever be a common denominator, as if there could ever
be a fusion or union, between those moments of tranquillity and our
moments of pain!
* * * * *
As I went out to buy a bottle of gin at a near-by Italian restaurant, I
resolved to disgorge all these ideas in a gigantic destructive essay.
But I found now that I was getting a headache: my mind was still going
on at a furious fatiguing rate--with slashed and deflated tires,
running rackingly on its rims--and I wanted now to make it stop. I
had been feeling rather faint with hunger, and, while the waiter was
wrapping up the bottle, I ate some bread and drank a highball.
I tried to shift my thoughts to Daisy, as I expected to find her when
I should call for her--in her pretty black evening-gown, and much
beautified and refreshed.--After the highball, and a second highball,
I found myself full of enthusiasm for the night-club.
When I arrived at Forty-fourth Street, however, the door of Daisy’s
apartment was opened by Pete Bird, and I saw Daisy sitting on the
edge of the bed, with the same old rowdy plaid dress and the same
demoralized countenance, now unnaturally pale. Pete said, “Oh, hello!”
and both stared at me. I saw that Daisy had been crying: she had a
bandage around her wrist.
I inquired what had happened. “Daisy cut her wrist,” said Pete. “I was
trying to open a spaghetti can,” said Daisy, without expression. “Good
Heavens!” I exclaimed. “Don’t you think you ought to have a doctor?”
“We’ve had one,” said Pete. “He’s just gone.” Daisy continued to stare
up at me, without speaking, with watery, swollen eyes.
I felt a deep disgust with them both. I protested that she should have
waited, that I had planned to get dinner at the night-club. “Just
didn’t want to wait,” she replied--then added, after a moment’s pause:
“I had some spaghetti here, and I thought I might as well eat it!”
“I don’t suppose you want to do any more looping, then,” I said. She
answered shortly: “Not to-night.”
Pete Bird had sat down on the bed beside her, and put one arm around
her: he looked like a faithful dog. She looked like a wounded owlet:
I was astonished to observe that her nose, in the centre of her pale
round face, could appear like a little beak. She had through suffering
and fatigue reached one of those moments when women seem completely
dispossessed of their sex, and it occurs to us as a surprise that they
probably resemble their fathers.
I asked whether she wouldn’t like a drink. “You might leave some here,”
said Daisy. I felt that Pete regarded me with coldness, that he had
assumed complete proprietorship of Daisy, so I gave them the bottle
and took my leave. “I’m sorry,” said Daisy, without feeling, “that I
couldn’t go out.”
I directed the taxi-driver to take me to Sue Borglum’s.--I was
irritated by Daisy’s clumsiness in cutting her wrist on the spaghetti
can; and I resented the presence of Pete Bird. I did not particularly
want to see any more of Sue Borglum’s party--in fact, the thought
of returning was repugnant to me. But I had got to the bottom of
everything--nothing really mattered to-night. Going back to my
apartment alone was the most intolerable prospect of all.
In the cab, I fell to wondering, in my discouragement with art and
literature, whether it might not perhaps be possible to find a deeper,
more austere satisfaction in scientific writing and research: my mind
had been haunted that evening by ideas from my recent scientific
reading. In the sciences, at least, one was dealing with ruthless
reality itself: _there_ one did not pretend to justify; _there_ one’s
work was accomplished in indifference as to whether it solaced men’s
minds. I regretted now that I had never had the foresight to study
physics and biology at college. And in an attempt to exercise, at
least, that gift of scientific observation upon which I had rather
prided myself, I asked the taxi-driver, as I was paying him, whether
he had not been born in Alabama. But he replied that he had been born
in New York, and had lived there all his life.
I was struck, when I re-entered Sue Borglum’s, by a certain
demoralization which seemed to have taken place since I left. In the
room where people were dancing, a little baldish man with spectacles
was playing on a set of trap-drums: he was apparently under the
impression that he was contributing to the pleasure of the dancers; but
as his drumming made the phonograph inaudible, they were endeavoring
to restrain him. He was complacently smiling to himself, and when any
one remonstrated with him, only glanced up and smiled more happily,
deafened by his own drums. From time to time, he blew a kazoo.
On the couch in the room across the hall--the couch on which Rita had
been sitting--there lay a man (though he might almost have been a
woman of the taller more aquiline type) in a green and orange kimono,
from which protruded lean bare shanks and feet. He made me pause in
horror when I first saw him: his eyes, which had mascara on them, were
cadaverously closed, and his unnaturally narrow face had almost the
pinched look of the dead.
In the room where the refreshments had been served, there was nothing
left now but a sandwich which some one had bitten into, and the
purplish dregs of the punch. Bobby McIlvaine was leaning against the
mantel: his straight mouth and his narrow eyes seemed to have shut up,
at the intimation of danger, like a turtle’s shell. Sue Borglum was
vehemently haranguing him, while a girl with lustreless complexion
and lips painted a heavy magenta was expostulating tearfully with Sue
in an endeavor to justify herself for having just thrown a punch glass
at another girl, who, in her turn, feminine and frail in a fashion
rather wispy and washy, was half-hiding, like a frightened chick,
behind a species of woman doctor. This last person, who was broad
and well-tailored, with white cuffs and a black masculine dress, was
herself defying and deriding the first girl--the one who was appealing
to Sue Borglum--with robustious male taunts and chuckles, which served
to convey female malice.
Sue received me with a violent gust of welcome, evidently forgetting
that she had seen me before--no doubt my changing my clothes had misled
her--and immediately called me as a witness against Bobby McIlvaine:
“Now, tell him--tell him frankly!” she shouted. “I want him to know
what people really think of his sets! Did you ever see anything more
terrible in your life than the first act of _April Showers_? I tell
him that as a snug little cottage, it would make a good annex to the
Public Library!” I said that it was a great pity that the scene hadn’t
taken place in a palace, because Bobby was so good at palaces. “It’ll
take place in Cain’s palace soon!” Sue Borglum breathlessly went on.
“Palace! The trouble with him is that his style has gotten vulgar! It’s
vulgar, that’s what it is! Palace! It looks like a movie palace! It
looks like some movie man’s idea of a palatial ladies’ lavatory!”
I drifted on, after a little, to the kitchen: perhaps I wanted to be
sure that Rita had really gone--perhaps I still hoped to speak to her
alone and to break down that constraint between us of which I carried
the consciousness everywhere, like an ache at the back of my head.
In the kitchen, I found a little group waiting around the bathroom
door. One of the men was remonstrating with the others. In those
days, in Greenwich Village, there was always a man in a dinner-jacket
who was present on all major social occasions: he was some sort of a
bond-salesman or broker who took an interest in the arts. When, as in
the case of Sue Borglum’s Thursday evenings, these occasions became a
little more formal and many people wore dinner-jackets, he began to
appear in a dress-suit. Thus costumed, he was now leaning against the
sink, with his hands in his trousers pockets--his regular equine face
expressionless and almost distinguished--protesting with good-humored
gentlemanliness against the vigorous measures proposed by certain other
members of the group for inducing the occupants of the bathroom, who,
it appeared, had been in there a long time, to give somebody else a
chance. It was also suggested that the people inside might actually
be ill, that they might even have committed suicide, and that one
really ought to find out. “No,” said the gentleman in the dress-suit.
“I don’t think they’ve bumped themselves off. A little while ago I
heard somebody laughing.” “Maybe one of them’s bumped the other off,”
suggested somebody in the group, “and it’s the one that’s alive that’s
laughing.” “I don’t think so,” replied the arbiter. “I know them
both.--I want to get in,” he added, “just as badly as you do, but I
think we ought to be discreet.”
“Well, I’m damned if I do!” declared emphatically a little chunky
Hungarian, one of the editors of a communist paper. “Whatever they’ve
been doing in there, they’ve been doing it long enough!” “Yes,” said a
furtive-eyed poet, who wore a khaki shirt. “It’s time the workers got
a break!” The Hungarian’s companion, a chunky and pretty young Jewess,
smiled a little uneasily, in awe of the communist, but impressed by the
man in the dress-suit.
The Hungarian marched to the door and knocked resolutely and clearly.
“Look here, old chap!” said the man in the dress-suit, going forward
and taking him by the shoulder, though without violence or heat.
“Better lay off! Let’s be tactful!” “Get away, you animal cracker!”
the communist retorted. “Don’t try to high-hat me! There are other
gentlemen and ladies in the world besides you and your friends in the
bathroom!”
The door opened suddenly and widely, and Larry Mickler came out. He
was followed by a tall plain blonde, very much flushed and evidently
angry. They made their way through the group about the door, looking
fixedly straight ahead of them. But when Mickler came up to me--I was
the farthest from the bathroom--he stopped and let the girl leave the
kitchen alone.
“Well, old-timer!” he greeted me genially--with the exaggerated
heartiness of one who has failed to commend himself elsewhere. I
asked him whether Rita had gone. “I don’t know,” he replied, reaching
for the bottle of Scotch. “She was in the other room a little while
ago.--_There’s_ a woman who’s not afraid to be herself!--These
women are all afraid of themselves--they’re afraid to say _Yea_ to
life! Village and college girls, one’s just as bad as the other in
this goddam country of ours!--Like that rope-haired blonde girl, for
instance--she wants it and yet she’s afraid of it--when it comes to the
point, she’s afraid! She pretends to be scandalized, when she’s really
only sore at herself!--Well, let’s drink to Rita Cavanagh, the woman
who’s not afraid!”
“I’m all for Rita Cavanagh,” I said, “but I’ve drunk enough toasts
to-night!” “That’s right!” replied Larry Mickler, immediately directing
his resentment at me. “Say _Nay_, like all the rest! I’m not surprised
you’re in the publishing business. The publishers are all _Nay_-sayers!
I wouldn’t be writing ads, instead of novels, if the publishers
said _Yea_ to life!--Why, if the whole tribe of publishers--and
editors!--and critics!--were combined in one attack, they wouldn’t be
enough to make a Dostoevsky scratch the bite!” I repressed an impulse
to answer, “To hell with Dostoevsky!”--but replied, “I never heard that
Dostoevsky had any trouble getting published.” I left him glaring,
before he had retorted, and went back into the dining-room.
In the dining-room, the girl with the lustreless skin had broken down
and was weeping on a chair, while Sue Borglum, her own eyes leaking
tears, was making an effort to console her. Sue was saying: “Never
mind, Claudette--you can’t win! you can’t win!” Bobby McIlvaine, who
was standing alone, his face locked against the scene which confronted
him, produced two theatre-ticket stubs from his pocket and dropped them
into the dregs of the punch. He remarked to me: “That’s a combination
that I’ve always wanted to try in the theatre--mauve and blue!”
In the front room, to which I immediately returned, I was just in
time to witness an arrival which made upon me a curious impression. I
could hardly at first believe my eyes: there had appeared suddenly,
under the escort of Tony Scallopino, the proprietor of one of those
Greenwich Village restaurants which were beginning, at that period,
to be transformed into small but increasingly expensive night-clubs,
two young women who, even among that company where one was not
ordinarily surprised at anything, astonished and jarred upon me, like
some incongruous image of a dream, remembered after we wake, some
image which owes its strangeness, its power obscurely to worry us, to
the fact that it has been transferred from its surroundings in the
waking world to surroundings which do not fit it. They were strangely
conspicuous, these girls--more conspicuous, even, in their way, than
the man in the orange kimono or the woman with the stiff white cuffs.
In the first place, they were very brightly dressed, one in blue, the
other in red--and I saw, at a second glance, that their dresses, though
gay and even smart, were flimsy and cheap. Neither was bad-looking; and
when they first came in, I thought they were attractive. The small one,
the one in blue, had blue eyes and looked a little like a fish; but the
other, the one in red, was quite handsome; she had rich brown hair,
large brown eyes, full cheeks, fleshy lips, rather a creamy complexion
and a nice thick nose. But their cheeks glowed with a heightening
of color, and their eyes were starred with a black radiation, which,
among all the varied make-ups of the party, seemed improper and out of
place; such faces were not meant for the lighting of ordinary private
houses, but for the pink-shaded lights-in-darkness of Tony Scallopino’s
night-club. And in their eyes I saw that public stare, the stare of the
prostitute, which, like the jockey’s bowed legs, the tailor’s peering
eyes, the courtroom intonations of the lawyer, the military officer’s
curtness, is the universal sign of the profession--that stare which
must be always watching, which must meet all the world without winking,
without demurring or veiling itself--that stare which sometimes looks
amazed, sometimes panic-stricken, sometimes resentful and sullen, and
sometimes insane, but which seems always to have robbed the face of
some essential element of personality, and therefore of humanity itself.
I gazed at these girls, and, in an instant, the brunette had become
aware of my gaze and was welcoming it, with smiling eyes. I approached
her, and she began at once, before I had even spoken: “I think this
is the most delightful old house! What a lovely old mirror over the
mantel!” We discussed the house, the weather, the theatre: she had
opinions about the plays that were being given in the little Village
theatres: I was surprised to hear her make conversation so cleverly
and with such a good manner, but I was shocked to see her ply her
trade--she made no pretense of anything else--so brazenly and so
promptly.
I was made uneasy, as we talked of other things, to meet nothing in
her large fine eyes but a look of sly, humorous complicity. Those
eyes, for all their intelligence, had been glazed against the warmth
of frankness, the expression of personal feeling, as much as those of
any streetwalker’s who makes off to the streets again the moment her
transaction is finished. And this troubled me--I hated and resented it:
to-night I had felt myself estranged, first, from Rita, and then, from
Daisy--I had felt cut off beyond even communication. And I now exerted
myself to make a contact with the brown-eyed girl in red--to force her
to meet my friendliness.
But as she saw that I was refusing to do business, she soon passed on
to the man in the dress-suit, who happened to be standing near us.
Without excuse or explanation, without hesitation or resentment, like
some salesman of carpet-sweepers, who, rejected at one door where he
has knocked, immediately passes on to the next, she assailed him with
her shameless patter.
I wondered how Tony Scallopino had ever dared to bring these women
here, and I was aroused to disgusted anger. (I found out afterwards
that Sue herself, in her morbid and hysterical fear lest her party
should be ill-attended, had telephoned to Tony to bring any one still
at his place--meaning, of course, any of his regular patrons.) I
remembered how Tony Scallopino, in the days before his advent to the
Village, had been an I. W. W. agitator and how, in the course of the
long Italian dinners, in his former and cheaper restaurant, he had
often sat down at our table and talked about politics with us; I had
at that time always rather liked him, but it seemed to me to-night
that Tony had become Manhattanized and cynical. It did not occur to me
that, from Tony’s point of view, the girls were working-people like
himself, and that in bringing them to Sue Borglum’s party he might be
merely endeavoring to make it up to them for a night of bad business at
his night-club; I might have guessed, from their technique of hungry
wolves, that they were desperately badly off. But I only felt that Tony
had somehow become a traitor.
The fish-faced blonde approached me in her turn, hoping to succeed
where the other had failed, but I let her see that I was disaffected.
She passed on to the creature on the couch, the man in the orange
kimono, and by some playful overture, awoke him. But he, nervously
starting up, regarded her with surprise and indignation, and exclaimed,
in a high peevish voice: “I want to lie down here, please! I’ve got a
perfectly terrible headache!”
Sue Borglum and Bobby McIlvaine had, in the meantime, appeared from the
dining-room; and Sue, beholding the girl in red, who had not long been
detained by the dress-suit, address herself immediately to Bobby as if
she already knew him, had concluded at once that she was some flame of
his, whom Bobby had invited without consulting her. And, in a moment,
learning that Sue was the hostess, the newcomer had turned to her
enthusiastically, exclaiming over the beauty of the old house, the old
mirror, the quiet charm of the neighborhood, the delightfulness of the
occasion: “But I’m so sorry to miss seeing Rita Cavanagh: I admire her
poetry so much! I was so excited when Tony told me she was going to be
here to-night, and then we missed her--she left before we came!”
I made my way to the hall again, where, in the manner of Larry Mickler,
I drew and drank rapidly several cocktails from the lemon-cloudy lees
of the water-cooler. Then, feeling that these drinks were weak--they
consisted principally of melted ice--with a vision of a den of drug
addicts gathered together, with gruesome merriment, to dose themselves
with alcohol, I drank what was left of a bottle of whiskey, which
turned out to be excessively bad, stinging my tongue and constricting
my gullet.
Now I began to ask myself whether it were the revolver Larry Mickler
was carrying which had made me break off with him so quickly and leave
the room without waiting for his reply.
Through a door which led into the dining-room and which opened
behind me from the hall, I could hear Sue, who had left the
sitting-room--retreating, as was by no means characteristic of her, at
the advance of the outrageous guests, whom she still believed to be
friends of Bobby’s--pouring out, to the equally unfortunate Claudette,
in a shrill, strained, and grating voice, her grievances against Bobby:
“It isn’t as if I’d ever been anything to him--I never was! I never
wanted to do anything but help him. Some women would have tried to
get a hold on him!”--etc., etc. At that moment, it seemed to me that
Sue--whom I found that I now somehow identified with the woman with
the dyed red hair and the slatternly lacy dressing-gown, whom I had
seen at the beginning of the evening in the house where Larry Mickler
lived--that Sue Borglum was the ugliest and most odious woman whom I
had ever known, and that she possessed the most horrible voice. Yet it
was not really her voice which made me hate her, but the fact that she
was lonely and in pain.
In the room where the phonograph was playing, the dancers had abandoned
the floor, driven off by the man with the drums, who, however, still
sat trancedly drumming. They sat or lay on the couches and chairs,
which had been moved back against the sides of the room--as if washed
up, I said to myself, in what I thought was a felicitous fancy, like
driftwood, dead fish, and seaweed left behind by the tide on the shore.
Then I remembered Rita’s poem, the poem about the beach-fire and the
darkness: it seemed to me that my own image had been caught from it,
and I felt that I had been travestying it foolishly.
With an impulse of irritation, I broke in upon the imbecile with the
drums, interrupting him in a loud clear voice and inquiring whether he
knew the time. “I don’t know the time,” he replied, with his abstracted
fatuous smile--“but,” he added, after a moment, when he had come to
the end of a spasm of drumming, “I’ve got something else that’s just
as good!” He produced a pint flask from his back pocket: “And a darn
sight better!” he added. He offered me a drink, which I accepted. I sat
down on a chair beside him. “This is something,” he further observed,
after taking a swig himself, “which makes time unnecessary!” He had
the conviction of quiet humor of a very stupid person. “If you carry a
little flask,” he continued, after a brief pause--he had begun softly
drumming again--“you don’t need to carry a watch!”
I asked him whether he knew Larry Mickler, and when he shook his head,
always smiling, I expressed the extreme distaste I felt for the admirer
of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. “Why, he’s a fellow,” I protested, “who
smashes the statue of the Winged Victory that his wife brings home from
college--a perfectly nice little college girl! He tries to neck other
girls in the Jap’s room--in the bathroom!--He threatens them with a
gun! He’s the most objectionable man I’ve ever known!”
And I reflected to the tune of the fox-trot and to the subdued
rat-a-tat of the drum, that what I had said was literally true: Larry
Mickler was, without any question, the most obnoxious man I had ever
known--and I had failed to put him properly in his place! I had been
afraid of his damned revolver! Here there had come to me an opportunity
to stand up to Evil itself: it might be that such a moment as this,
such a moment that tested a man, came but once to a man in his life!
And I had quailed at the thought of a gun! Yet to stand up to Larry
Mickler would be finally to vindicate one’s honor against the horror,
the shame, the despair, of that terrible house! They themselves, I felt
sure, would thank me for it!
I decided to seek him out. I should find him slinking about the
rooms--I remembered his dirty complexion and his furtive, ill-natured
eye, his cockily waxed mustache. He would ask me to drink to
Dostoevsky, and I should reply: “To hell with Dostoevsky! What’s the
good of a Dostoevsky to nourish such worms as you? The world would be
more decent without him!--the world would be better off if it were rid
of all the cripples and defectives who find their only justification in
reading and writing books!”
And I was steadied with a deep satisfaction, a perfect self-assurance:
I took on a new authority. With the most affable friendliness, I
complimented the man with the spectacles on his mastery of the traps,
and asked him whether he had taken lessons. He said, no: that he
had just picked it up, and added some quiet pleasantry, at which I
uproariously laughed, but to which I had paid no attention, as I had
been thinking of the classical statue which Larry Mickler had smashed
on the mantelpiece and which now presented itself to my mind in the
guise of a silver-gray Athena as slender as her spear--and this vision,
in the glimpse of a second, had dragged with it all the fresh bright
beauty of the portfolio of drawings for Homer which Bobby McIlvaine had
shown Rita and me that May night in University Place.
I arose and thanked the drummer for his drink, which I extravagantly
commended with a condescension almost regal. He offered me another,
which I took.
Walking composedly from room to room, I began scouring the house for
Larry Mickler: with a keen and arrogant glance, I scrutinized the
groups one by one.--I told myself that, once Mickler was disposed of,
I should carry off the pretty brunette, who had come to seem to me
very desirable--I should meet her at first on her professional basis,
and then I should compel her to be human with me--she should drop that
horrible manner and mask, she should share with me her feelings and her
thoughts!--She should become my companion--she should love me!
But I could find Larry Mickler nowhere, and when at last I began to
inquire, nobody seemed to know what had become of him. In the front
room, I was taken aback to discover that the girl with the brown
eyes had already reached an understanding with a clownish-looking
elderly man, who wore a heavy black ribbon on his eye-glasses. He was
pressing her to leave with him at once; and she was explaining that
she would have to wait until her “girl-friend” was ready to go. The
little fish-faced blonde, for her part, had, in the meantime, been
taken in the toils of one of the licensed Greenwich Village lunatics,
who, without a penny in his pocket, was exerting the active and ironic
intelligence of which his derangement had never deprived him to
convince her of the seriousness of his intentions.
I went up to Tony Scallopino, who greeted me with a broad, sunny smile,
and asked him whether he had seen Larry Mickler. “I just see him go,”
he replied.
I stood for a moment without speaking. Then, “What’s the idea,” I
began, “of bringing these girls here to-night?” “They’re just two
little girls,” he explained, “who come to my place to dance. They’ve
had hard luck and they have to earn a little money. They’re two very
nice girls.” He had said this with a smiling eye in which I thought I
detected insolence: I found myself glaring at him. “Well, I think that
it was a great mistake to bring them here to-night!” I declared.
His grin was for a second obscured by a blink, like the shutter
of a camera: he began to say something more, I don’t know what.
I only stared into his face: his eyes were wide open but shrewd;
he still smiled--he had the habitual tactfulness of the Italian
restaurant-proprietor, but his obsequiousness was gone: he was raising
his heavy black eyebrows, as if in protest and surprise. I felt that
he thought me drunk, that he considered my objections tactless: was
Tony Scallopino not himself an independent Villager? had he not been
invited to the party? had he not sometimes loaned money to the lunatic
who was attempting to impose on the blond girl? had he not talked like
a brother to Hugo of the trials and aspirations of the workers? had he
not cashed my checks?
My lips opened, without my having planned it, and, despite the gummy
tongue of drunkenness, I heard myself suddenly interrupt him: “You used
to be a Wobbly! You used to talk about justice to the workers! Well,
it seems to me that now you’re betraying the workers! You’re trying
to give the Greenwich Villagers a taste for leisure-class luxuries!
You’ve turned your old Italian restaurant into an expensive up-town
night-club!--and you charge us high prices for bad liquor! And you have
the nerve to bring these girls--” He tried to slip away, but I seized
him by the arms and pinioned him against the wall: “You used to talk
about the social revolution--well, if there’s ever a social revolution,
you proletarians who run night-clubs will be the first to get the
axe!--When I first came down to Greenwich Village----”
He was angry and tried to pull away--I thought I heard him say, “You
must be drunk!” and saw him give me a black malign look. With a
powerful movement of his arms, he lifted them and pushed me away with
such force that I staggered backward and almost fell.--I struck him in
the jaw with my fist--and the next moment was looking at the room from
a different point of view, and knew that I was lying on the floor.