ESSAY Reserved for Hifsa

Tropic of Cancer

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or

autobiographies—captivating books, if only a man knew how

to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is

really his experience, and how to record truth truly.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

HENRY MILLER

Tropic of Cancer

Introduction by Karl Shapiro Preface by Anaïs Nin

Copyright © 1961 by Grove Press, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or

the facilitation thereof, including information storage and

retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the

publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief

passages in a review. Any members of educational

institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for

classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain

permission to include the work in an anthology, should send

their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New

York, NY 10003.

Material quoted in the Introduction from other works by

Henry Miller is reprinted by the kind permission of New

Directions: Wisdom of the Heart, copyright © 1941 by New

Directions; The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, copyright ©

1948 by Henry Miller; The Time of the Assassins, copyright

© 1946, 1949, 1956 by New Directions.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, Henry, 1891-1980

Tropic of Cancer. New York, Grove Press [1961]

318 p.

I. Title.

PS3525.I5454T7 1961 818.52 61-15597

ISBN-10: 0-8021-3178-6

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3178-2

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

09 10 40 39 38

The Greatest Living Author*

I call Henry Miller the greatest living author because I think

he is. I do not call him a poet because he has never written

a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think. But everything he

has written is a poem in the best as well as in the broadest

sense of the word. Secondly, I do not call him a writer, but

an author. The writer is the fly in the ointment of modern

letters; Miller has waged ceaseless war against writers. If

one had to type him one might call him a Wisdom writer,

Wisdom literature being a type of literature which lies

between literature and scripture; it is poetry only because it

rises above literature and because it sometimes ends up in

bibles. I wrote to the British poet and novelist Lawrence

Durrell last year and said: Let’s put together a bible of

Miller’s work. (I thought I was being original in calling it a

bible.) Let’s assemble a bible from his work, I said, and put

one in every hotel room in America, after removing the

Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes.

Durrell, however, had been working on this “bible” for years;

I was a Johnny-come-lately. In fact, a group of writers all

over the world have been working on it, and one version has

now come out.

There was a commonplace reason why this volume was

very much needed. The author’s books have been almost

impossible to obtain; the ones that were not banned were

stolen from libraries everywhere. Even a copy of one of the

nonbanned books was recently stolen from the mails en

route to me. Whoever got it had better be a book lover,

because it was a bibliography.

I will introduce Miller with a quotation from the Tropic of

Cancer: “I sometimes ask myself how it happens that I

attract nothing but crackbrained individuals, neurasthenics,

neurotics, psychopaths—and Jews especially. There must be

something in a healthy Gentile that excites the Jewish mind,

like when he sees sour black bread.” The “healthy Gentile”

is a good sobriquet for Miller, who usually refers to himself

as the Happy Rock, Caliban, “just a Brooklyn boy,”

“Someone who has gone off the gold standard of Literature”

or—the name I like best—the Patagonian. What is a

Patagonian? I don’t know, but it is certainly something rare

and sui generis. We can call Miller the greatest living

Patagonian.

How is one to talk about Miller? There are authors one

cannot write a book or even a good essay about. Arthur

Rimbaud is one (and Miller’s book on Rimbaud is one of the

best books on Rimbaud ever written, although it is mostly

about Henry Miller). D. H. Lawrence is another author one

cannot encompass in a book “about” (Miller abandoned his

book on Lawrence). And Miller himself is one of those

Patagonian authors who just won’t fit into a book. Every

word he has ever written is autobiographical, but only in the

way Leaves of Grass is autobiographical. There is not a word

of “confession” in Miller. His amorous exploits are

sometimes read as a kind of Brooklyn Casanova or male

Fanny Hill, but there is probably not a word of exaggeration

or boasting to speak of—or only as much as the occasion

would call for. The reader can and cannot reconstruct the

Life of Henry Miller from his books, for Miller never sticks to

the subject any more than Lawrence does. The fact is that

there isn’t any subject and Miller is its poet. But a little

information about him might help present him to those who

need an introduction. For myself, I do not read him

consecutively; I choose one of his books blindly and open it

at random. I have just done this; for an example, I find:

“Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts

of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing

syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is

why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the

nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is—the

afflictions of Job.” Not the greatest prose probably, but Miller

is not a writer; Henry James is a writer. Miller is a talker, a

street corner gabbler, a prophet, and a Patagonian.

What are the facts about Miller? I’m not sure how

important they are. He was born in Brooklyn about 1890, of

German ancestry, and in certain ways he is quite German. I

have often thought that the Germans make the best

Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans.

Miller understands the German in himself and in America.

He compares Whitman and Goethe: “In Whitman the whole

American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her

birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America

Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be

said. The future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He

was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first

and the last poet. He is almost undecipherable today, a

monument covered with rude hieroglyphs, for which there is

no key. … There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe

for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated

with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums

are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has

never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a

MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a

stuffed shirt, by comparison. Goethe was a respectable

citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal spirit, but stamped

with the German trademark, with the double eagle. The

serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing

more than the drowsy stupor of a German bourgeois deity.

Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning.”

If anybody can decipher the Whitman key it is Miller.

Miller is the twentieth-century reincarnation of Whitman. But

to return to the “facts.” The Brooklyn Boy went to a

Brooklyn high school in a day when most high schools kept

higher standards than most American universities today. He

started at CCNY but quit almost immediately and went to

work for a cement company (“Everlasting Cement”), then

for a telegraph company, where he became the personnel

manager in the biggest city in the world. The telegraph

company is called the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in

Miller’s books, or in moments of gaiety the Cosmococcic

Telegraph Company. One day while the vice-president was

bawling him out he mentioned to Miller that he would like to

see someone write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the

messengers.

I thought to myself [said Miller]—you poor old futzer, you,

just wait until I get it off my chest. … I’ll give you an Horatio

Alger book. … My head was in a whirl to leave his office. I

saw the army of men, women and children that had passed

through my hands, saw them weeping, begging,

beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming,

threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways, lying

on the floor of freight trains, the parents in rags, the coal

box empty, the sink running over, the walls sweating and

between the cold beads of sweat the cockroaches running

like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes or

falling backwards in the epileptic frenzy. … I saw the walls

giving way and the pest pouring out like a winged fluid, and

the men higher up with their ironclad logic, waiting for it to

blow over, waiting for everything to be patched up, waiting,

waiting contentedly… saying that things were temporarily

out of order. I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a

sick America, mounting higher and higher, first messenger,

then operator, then manager, then chief, then

superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then

trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the

Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay,

nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven thousand decimals

fore and aft. … I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the

day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared

away.

And he did. Miller’s first book, Tropic of Cancer, was

published in Paris in 1934 and was immediately famous and

immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. It is

the Horatio Alger story with a vengeance. Miller had walked

out of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company one day

without a word; ever after he lived on his wits. He had

managed to get to Paris on ten dollars, where he lived more

than a decade, not during the gay prosperous twenties but

during the Great Depression. He starved, made friends by

the score, mastered the French language and his own. It was

not until the Second World War broke out that he returned to

America to live at Big Sur, California. Among his best books

several were banned: the two Tropics (Tropic of Cancer,

1934, and Tropic of Capricorn, 1939); Black Spring, 1936;

and part of the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (including Sexus,

Plexus, and Nexus).

Unfortunately for Miller he has been a man without honor

in his own country and in his own language. When Tropic of

Cancer was published he was even denied entrance into

England, held over in custody by the port authorities and

returned to France by the next boat. He made friends with

his jailer and wrote a charming essay about him. But Miller

has no sense of despair. At the beginning of Tropic of Cancer

he writes: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am

the happiest man alive.”

George Orwell was one of the few English critics who saw

his worth, though (mirabile dictu) T. S. Eliot and even Ezra

Pound complimented him. Pound in his usual ungracious

manner gave the Tropic of Cancer to a friend who later

became Miller’s publisher, and said: Here is a dirty book

worth reading. Pound even went so far as to try to enlist

Miller in his economic system to save the world. Miller

retaliated by writing a satire called Money and How It Gets

That Way, dedicated to Ezra Pound. The acquaintanceship

halted there, Miller’s view of money being something like

this (from Tropic of Capricorn): “To walk in money through

the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money,

dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath

money, no least single object anywhere that is not money,

money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then

no money, or a little money or less money or more money,

but money, always money, and if you have money or you

don’t have money it is the money that counts and money

makes money, but what makes money make money?”

Pound didn’t care for that brand of economics.

But all the writers jostled each other to welcome Miller

among the elect, for the moment at least: Eliot, Herbert

Read, Aldous Huxley, John Dos Passos and among them

some who really knew how good Miller was: William Carlos

Williams, who called him the Dean, Lawrence Durrell, Paul

Rosenfeld, Wallace Fowlie, Osbert Sitwell, Kenneth Patchen,

many painters (Miller is a fanatical water colorist). But

mostly he is beset by his neurasthenics and psychopaths, as

any cosmodemonic poet must be. People of all sexes

frequently turn up at Big Sur and announce that they want

to join the Sex Cult. Miller gives them bus fare and a good

dinner and sends them on their way.

Orwell has written one of the best essays on Miller,

although he takes a sociological approach and tries to place

Miller as a Depression writer or something of the sort. What

astonished Orwell about Miller was the difference between

his view and the existential bitterness of a novelist like

Céline. Céline’s Voyage au bout de la Nuit describes the

meaninglessness of modern life and is thus a prototype of

twentieth-century fiction. Orwell calls Céline’s book a cry of

unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool. And Orwell

adds that the Tropic of Cancer is almost exactly the

opposite! Such a thing as Miller’s book “has become so

unusual as to seem almost anomalous, [for] it is the book of

a man who is happy.” Miller also reached the bottom of the

pit, as many writers do; but how, Orwell asks, could he have

emerged unembittered, whole, laughing with joy? “Exactly

the aspects of life that fill Céline with horror are the ones

that appeal to him. So far from protesting, he is accepting.

And the very word ‘acceptance’ calls up his real affinity,

another American, Walt Whitman.”

This is, indeed, the crux of the matter and it is

unfortunate that Orwell cannot see past the socio-economic

situation with Whitman and Miller. Nevertheless, this English

critic recognizes Miller’s mastery of his material and places

him among the great writers of our age; more than that, he

predicts that Miller will set the pace and attitude for the

novelist of the future. This has not happened yet, but I

agree that it must. Miller’s influence today is primarily

among poets; those poets who follow Whitman must

necessarily follow Miller, even to the extent of giving up

poetry in its formal sense and writing that personal

apocalyptic prose which Miller does. It is the prose of the

Bible of Hell that Blake talked about and Arthur Rimbaud

wrote a chapter of.

What is this “acceptance” Orwell mentions in regard to

Whitman and Henry Miller? On one level it is the poetry of

cosmic consciousness, and on the most obvious level it is

the poetry of the Romantic nineteenth century. Miller is

unknown in this country because he represents the

Continental rather than the English influence. He breaks

with the English literary tradition just as many of the

twentieth-century Americans do, because his ancestry is not

British, and not American colonial. He does not read the

favored British writers, Milton, Marlowe, Pope, Donne. He

reads what his grandparents knew was in the air when

Victorianism was the genius of British poetry. He grew up

with books by Dostoevski, Knut Hamsun, Strindberg,

Nietzsche (especially Nietzsche), Élie Faure, Spengler. Like a

true poet he found his way to Rimbaud, Ramakrishna,

Blavatsky, Huysmans, Count Keyserling, Prince Kropotkin,

Lao-tse, Nostradamus, Petronius, Rabelais, Suzuki, Zen

philosophy, Van Gogh. And in English he let himself be

influenced not by the solid classics but by Alice in

Wonderland, Chesterton’s St. Francis, Conrad, Cooper,

Emerson, Rider Haggard, G. A. Henty (the boy’s historian—I

remember being told when I was a boy that Henty had the

facts all wrong), Joyce, Arthur Machen, Mencken, John

Cowper Powys, Herbert Spencer’s Autobiography, Thoreau

on Civil Disobedience, Emma Goldman—the great anarchist

(whom he met)—Whitman, of course, and perhaps above all

that companion piece to Leaves of Grass called Huckleberry

Finn. Hardly a Great Books list from the shores of Lake

Michigan—almost a period list. Miller will introduce his

readers to strange masterpieces like Doughty’s Arabia

Deserta or to the journal of Anaïs Nin which has never been

published but which he (and other writers) swears is one of

the masterpieces of the twentieth century. I imagine that

Miller has read as much as any man living but he does not

have that religious solemnity about books which we are

brought up in. Books, after all, are only mnemonic devices;

and poets are always celebrating the burning of libraries.

And as with libraries, so with monuments, and as with

monuments, so with civilizations. But in Miller’s case (chez

Miller) there is no vindictiveness, no bitterness. Orwell was

bothered when he met Miller because Miller didn’t want to

go to the Spanish Civil War and do battle on one side or the

other. Miller is an anarchist of sorts, and he doesn’t

especially care which dog eats which dog. As it happens, the

righteous Loyalists were eaten by the Communists and the

righteous Falangists were eaten by the Nazis over the most

decadent hole in Europe; so Miller was right.

Lawrence Durrell has said that the Tropic books were

healthy while Céline and D. H. Lawrence were sick.

Lawrence never escaped his puritanism and it is his heroic

try that makes us honor him. Céline is the typical European

man of despair—why should he not despair, this Frenchman

of the trenches of World War I? We are raising up a

generation of young American Célines, I’m afraid, but

Miller’s generation still had Whitman before its eyes and

was not running back to the potholes and ash heaps of

Europe. Miller is as good an antiquarian as anybody; in the

medieval towns of France he goes wild with happiness; and

he has written one of the best “travel books” on Greece

ever done (the critics are unanimous about the Colossus of

Maroussi); but to worship the “tradition” is to him the

sheerest absurdity. Like most Americans, he shares the view

of the first Henry Ford that history is bunk. He cannot

forgive his “Nordic” ancestors for the doctrines of

righteousness and cleanliness. His people, he says, were

painfully clean: “Never once had they opened the door

which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking

a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were

promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was

read it was neatly folded and laid on a shelf; after the

clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then

tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow,

but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge

and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world

groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the

bridge.” As everyone knows, Cleanliness is the chief

American industry. Miller is the most formidable

anticleanliness poet since Walt Whitman, and his hatred of

righteousness is also American, with the Americanism of

Thoreau, Whitman, and Emma Goldman. Miller writes a

good deal about cooking and wine drinking. Americans are

the worst cooks in the world, outside of the British; and

Americans are also great drunkards who know nothing

about wine. The Germanic-American Miller reintroduces

good food and decent wine into our literature. One of his

funniest essays is about the American loaf of bread, the

poisonous loaf of cleanliness wrapped in cellophane, the

manufacture of which is a heavy industry like steel.

Orwell and other critics tend to regard Miller as a kind of

hedonist and professional do-nothing. And morally, they

tend to regard him as one of that illustrious line of

Americans who undermine the foundations of traditional

morals. Miller quotes Thoreau’s statement, which might

almost be the motto of the cosmic writer: “Most of what my

neighbors call good, I am profoundly convinced is evil, and if

I repent anything, it is my good conduct that I repent.” One

could hardly call Thoreau a criminal, yet he had his run-ins

with the law, just as Miller has, and for the same reasons.

The strain of anarchism and amorality is growing stronger in

American literature, or that branch of it that I am talking

about, and Miller is one of its chief carriers. It is not only

Emma Goldman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Whitman, and

perhaps Salinger and Mailer, but that whole literature of

Detachment from political hysteria and over-organization. I

am influenced enough by these people and by Miller to tell

my students, the poets at least, to cultivate an ignorance of

contemporary political and military events because they do

not matter. I tell them not to vote, to join nothing. I try to

steer them toward their true leaders and visionaries, men

almost unknown in the polite literary world, Reich for

instance. Wilhelm Reich furthered a movement in Germany

called “Work Democracy”; not machine politics, no politics

at all, but democracy within one’s immediate orbit;

democracy at home. America is still the only country where

social idealism and experimentation have elbow room; there

are still communities that practice primitive Christianity,

such as the Catholic anarchists; and just plain little

homemade gardens of Eden such as Miller’s cliff at Big Sur.

The life he describes in Big Sur and the Oranges of

Hieronymus Bosch is a far cry from the little fascist dreams

of the New Classicists. And it is a far cry from the bitter

isolationism of Robinson Jeffers or even of Lawrence. Morally

I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do—

Gandhi with a penis.

Miller says in a little essay on Immorality and Morality:

“What is moral and what is immoral? Nobody can ever

answer this question satisfactorily. Not because morals

ceaselessly evolve, but because the principle on which they

depend is factitious. Morality is for slaves, for beings without

spirit. And when I say spirit I mean the Holy Spirit.” And he

ends this little piece with a quotation from ancient Hindu

scripture: Evil does not exist.

Whitman, Lawrence, Miller, and even Blake all have the

reputation of being sex-obsessed, Miller especially. Whereas

Whitman writes “copulation is no more rank to me than

death is,” Miller writes hundreds of pages describing in the

minutest and clearest detail his exploits in bed. Every

serious reader of erotica has remarked about Miller that he

is probably the only author in history who writes about such

things with complete ease and naturalness. Lawrence never

quite rid himself of his puritanical salaciousness, nor Joyce;

both had too much religion in their veins. It is funny to

recollect that Lawrence thought Ulysses a smutty book and

Joyce thought Lady Chatterley a smutty book. Both were

right. But at least they tried to free themselves from literary

morality. Miller’s achievement is miraculous: he is

screamingly funny without making fun of sex, the way

Rabelais does. (Rabelais is, of course, magnificent; so is

Boccaccio; but both write against the background of

religion, like Joyce and Lawrence.) Miller is accurate and

poetic in the highest degree; there is not a smirk anywhere

in his writings. Miller undoubtedly profited from the mistakes

of his predecessors; his aim was not to write about the

erotic but to write the whole truth about the life he knew.

This goal demanded the full vocabulary and inconography of

sex, and it is possible that he is the first writer outside the

Orient who has succeeded in writing as naturally about sex

on a large scale as novelists ordinarily write about the

dinner table or the battlefield. I think only an American

could have performed this feat.

We are dealing with the serious question of banned

books, burned books, and fear of books in general. America

has the most liberal censorship laws in the West today, but

we have done no more than make a start. I have always

been amused by the famous decision of Judge Woolsey who

lifted the ban on Ulysses, although it was certainly a fine

thing to do and it is a landmark we can be proud of. Woolsey

said various comical things, such as that he could not detect

the “leer of the sensualist” in Joyce’s book, and that

therefore (the logic of it escapes me) it is not pornographic.

In excusing the use of old Saxon words he noted that Joyce’s

“locale was Celtic and his season Spring.” And, in order to

push his decision through, Judge Woolsey stated that

Ulysses “did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful

thoughts,” and he closed his argument with the elegant

statement that although the book is “somewhat emetic,

nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” Emetic means

tending to produce vomiting and I doubt that Joyce savored

that description of his masterpiece. The implication, of

course, is that vomiting is good for you, and lustful thoughts

not. Now everyone who has read Ulysses knows that the

book is based largely on the lustful thoughts and acts of its

characters and that Joyce spared no pains to represent

these thoughts and deeds richly and smackingly. Ulysses is,

since the Judge used the word, a pretty good aphrodisiac,

partly because of Joyce’s own religious tensions. Miller, on

the other hand, is no aphrodisiac at all, because religious or

so-called moral tension does not exist for him. When one of

Miller’s characters lusts, he lusts out loud and then proceeds

to the business at hand. Joyce actually prevents himself

from experiencing the beauty of sex or lust, while Miller is

freed at the outset to deal with the overpowering mysteries

and glories of love and copulation. Like other Millerites I

claim that Miller is one of the few healthy Americans alive

today; further, that the circulation of his books would do

more to wipe out the obscenities of Broadway, Hollywood,

and Madison Avenue than a full-scale social revolution.

Miller has furthered literature for all writers by ignoring

the art forms, the novel, the poem, the drama, and by

sticking to the autobiographical novel. He says in The Books

in My Life (one of the available works), “The

autobiographical novel, which Emerson predicted would

grow in importance with time, has replaced the great

confessions. It is not a mixture of truth and fiction, this

genre of literature, but an expansion and deepening of

truth. It is more authentic, more veridical, than the diary. It

is not the flimsy truth of facts which the authors of these

autobiographical novels offer but the truth of emotion,

reflection and understanding, truth digested and

assimilated. The being revealing himself does so on all

levels simultaneously.” Everything Miller has written is part

of this great amorphous autobiographical novel and it must

be read not entirely but in large chunks to make sense.

Many of the individual works are whole in themselves, one

dealing with his life in Paris, one with his life as a New

Yorker, and there is, in fact, a definite span of years

encompassed in the works. But the volumes of essays are

also part of the story and there is no way to make a whole

out of the parts. Miller is easy to quote if one quotes

carefully; the danger is that one can find massive

contradictions, unless there is some awareness of the

underlying world and the cosmic attitudes of the author.

These views are by no means unique, as they are the same

as those of all those poets and mystics I referred to in a

previous essay. What makes Miller unique is his time and

place; he is the only American of our time who has given us

a full-scale interpretation of modern America, other than the

kind we find in the cultural journals. Incidentally, we do not

find Miller in these journals, which, presuming an interest in

letters and art, are really organs of social and political

opinion.

Readers of Whitman recall that Whitman was blistering

about the materialism of this country a century ago, and its

departure from the ideals of the founding fathers. Miller is

worse. Now it is a commonplace of modern poetry that the

poet dissociates himself from life as it is lived by the

average American today. Whitman and Miller heap abuse on

the failure of the country to live up to its promise. Miller

writes as a poet about the demonic hideousness of New York

City, Chicago, the South, or he rhapsodizes when there is

anything to be rapturous about. But it is not Art that he

cares about; it is man, man’s treatment of man in America

and man’s treatment of nature. What we get in Miller is not

a sense of superiority but fury, even the fury of the prophet

of doom.

Miller knows America from the bottom up and from coast

to coast. In the same way he knows Paris as few Frenchmen

do. But when Miller describes slums it is usually with the

joyous eye of the artist, not with the self-righteous sneer of

the social reformer. Here, too, one might describe his

psychology as “Oriental” rather than modern. The cultural

situation is a matter of complete indifference to him. Miller

frequently immerses himself in such modern Indian mystics

as Krishnamurti and Ramakrishna, but without any of the

flapdoodle of the cultist. He is himself one of the foremost of

the contemporary men of Detachment. His influence (like

that of Lawrence) comes as much from his life as from his

writings. Here it is better to quote. This is Myrtle Avenue in

Brooklyn.

But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from

Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no

saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this

street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any species

of human genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor

did the sun strike it squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it.

For the genuine Inferno which I had to postpone for twenty

years I give you Myrtle Avenue, one of the innumerable

bridlepaths ridden by iron monsters which lead to the heart

of America’s emptiness. If you have only seen Essen or

Manchester or Chicago or Leval-lois-Perret or Glasgow or

Hoboken or Canarsie or Bayonne you have seen nothing of

the magnificent emptiness of progress and enlightenment.

Dear reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if

only to realize how far into the future Dante saw. You must

believe me that on this street, neither in the houses which

line it, nor the cobblestones which pave it, nor the elevated

structure which cuts it atwain, neither in any creature that

bears a name and lives thereon, neither in any animal, bird

or insect passing through it to slaughter or already

slaughtered, is there hope of “lubet,” “sublimate” or

“abominate.” It is a street not of sorrow, for sorrow would be

human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness: it is

emptier than the most extinct volcano, emptier than a

vacuum, emptier than the word God in the mouth of an

unbeliever.

This is a man describing his own neighborhood, but the

street is a type that runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific,

with variations:

The whole country is lawless, violent, explosive,

demoniacal. It’s in the air, in the climate, in the ultra-

grandiose landscape, in the stone forests that are lying

horizontal, in the torrential rivers that bite through the rocky

canyons, in the supranormal distances, the supernal arid

wastes, the over-lush crops, the monstrous fruits, the

mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects, beliefs,

the opposition of laws and languages, the contradictoriness

of temperaments, needs, requirements. The continent is full

of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters

and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in

doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul

is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain

everything comes in bucketsful—or not at all. The whole

continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily

concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream,

partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it’s the

same story. Nature dominates, Nature wins out. Everywhere

the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder.

Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people—

healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with

worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.

The passages on Times Square repeat and catalogue, like

Whitman; they are a little too painful to read out of context.

Here is a bit of Chicago; Miller is wandering in the Negro

slums with a fellow visitor:

We got into the car, rode a few blocks and got out to visit

another shell crater. The street was deserted except for

some chickens grubbing for food between the slats of a

crumbling piazza. More vacant lots, more gutted houses; fire

escapes clinging to the walls with their iron teeth, like

drunken acrobats. A Sunday atmosphere here. Everything

serene and peaceful. Like Louvain or Rheims between

bombardments. Like Phoebus, Virginia, dreaming of bringing

her steeds to water, or like modern Eleusis smothered by a

wet sock. Then suddenly I saw it chalked up on the side of a

house in letters ten feet high:

GOOD NEWS! GOD IS LOVE!

When I saw these words I got down on my knees in the open

sewer which had been conveniently placed there for the

purpose and I offered up a short prayer, a silent one, which

must have registered as far as Mound City, Illinois, where

the colored muskrats have built their igloos. It was time for

a good stiff drink of cod-liver oil but as the varnish factories

were all closed we had to repair to the abattoir and quaff a

bucket of blood. Never has blood tasted so wonderful! It was

like taking Vitamins A, B, C, D, E in quick succession and

then chewing a stick of cold dynamite. Good news! Aye,

wonderful news—for Chicago. I ordered the chauffeur to

take us immediately to Mundelein so that I could bless the

cardinal and all the real estate operations, but we only got

as far as the Bahai Temple. …

Or, again—in explanation:

Oh, Henry, what beautiful golden teeth you have!

exclaimed my four-year-old daughter the other morning on

climbing into bed with me. That’s how I approach the works

of my confreres. I see how beautiful are their golden teeth,

not how ugly or artificial they are.

Combating the “system” is nonsense. There is only one

aim in life and that is to live it. In America it has become

impossible, except for a few lucky or wise people, to live

one’s own life; consequently the poets and artists tend to

move to the fringes of society. Wherever there are

individuals, says Miller (like Thoreau) there are new

frontiers. The American way of life has become illusory; we

lead the lives of prisoners while we boast about free speech,

free press, and free religion, none of which we actually do

enjoy in full. The price for security has become too great;

abundance has become a travesty. The only thing for

nonenslaved man to do is to move out to the edge, lose

contact with the machines of organization which are as

ubiquitous in this country as in Russia. “Instead of bucking

your head against a stone wall, sit quietly with hands folded

and wait for the walls to crumble. … Don’t sit and pray that

it will happen! Just sit and watch it happen!” These sayings

the culture littérateur condemns as irresponsible. Miller

follows through with the complete program of

nonparticipation in our machine society, which is organized

from the cradle to the grave. “Just as Gandhi successfully

exploited the doctrine of nonresistance, so these ‘saints of

the just’ practiced non-recognition—nonrecognition of sin,

guilt, fear and disease… even death.” Whitman also

believed in nonrecognition of death. His view of death as

part of life is one of the many reasons for his unpopularity in

America, where death is considered a crime against society.

“Why try to solve a problem? Dissolve it! [says Miller]. Fear

not to be a coward, a traitor, a renegade. In this universe of

ours there is room for all, perhaps even need for all. The sun

does not inquire about rank and status before shedding its

warmth; the cyclone levels the godly and the ungodly; the

government takes your tax money even though it be

tainted. Nor is the atom bomb a respecter of persons.

Perhaps that is why the righteous are squirming so!”

All of this is about modern America and the high cost of

security. Do we really have a high standard of living? Miller

says not, as most poets do. If living means appreciation of

life we have the lowest standard of living in the world, in

spite of the fact that it costs more to live in America than in

any country in the world. Miller says “the cost is not only in

dollars and cents but in sweat and blood, in frustration,

ennui, broken homes, smashed ideals, illness and insanity.

We have the most wonderful hospitals, the most fabulous

prisons, the best equipped and highest paid army and navy,

the speediest bombers, the largest stockpile of atom bombs,

yet never enough of any of these items to satisfy the

demand. Our manual workers are the highest paid in the

world; our poets the worst. …”

And Miller gives this answer, letting Krishnamurti say it:

The world problem is the individual problem; if the

individual is at peace, has happiness, has great tolerance,

and an intense desire to help, then the world problem as

such ceases to exist. You consider the world problem before

you have considered your own problem. Before you have

established peace and understanding in your own hearts

and in your own minds you desire to establish peace and

tranquility in the minds of others, in your nations and in

your states; whereas peace and understanding will only

come when there is understanding, certainty and strength in

yourselves.

To place the individual before the state, whether the

Russian state or the American state, is the first need of

modern man. To interpret Miller, man is like the common

soldier on the battlefield; he can know nothing of the battle

at large or of its causes; he can know only the fifty feet or so

in his immediate vicinity; within that radius he is a man

responsible for himself and his fellows; beyond that he is

powerless. Modern life, having made everyone state

conscious, has destroyed the individual. America has as few

individuals today as Russia, and as many taboos to keep the

individual from coming to life as the USSR. First, we have

contaminated the idea of society; second, we have

contaminated the idea of community. Miller writing about his

little community at Big Sur frowns on the idea of community

itself. “To create community—and what is a nation, or a

people, without a sense of community—there must be a

common purpose. Even here in Big Sur, where the oranges

are ready to blossom forth, there is no common purpose, no

common effort. There is a remarkable neighborliness, but no

community spirit. We have a Grange, as do other rural

communities, but what is a ‘Grange’ in the life of man? The

real workers are outside the Grange. Just as the ‘real men of

God’ are outside the Church. And the real leaders outside

the world of politics.”

“We create our fate,” says Miller. And better still: “Forget,

forgive, renounce, abdicate.” And “scrap the past instantly.”

Live the good life instantly; it’s now or never, and always

has been.

Miller is “irresponsible” as far as officials and popular

politics go, or as far as common church morality goes, and

as far as literary manners go. But he is not a poseur, he has

no program, yet he has a deep and pure sense of morality. I

would call him a total revolutionary, the man who will settle

for nothing less than “Christmas on earth.” In his

remarkable study of Rimbaud, a prose-poem of one hundred

and fifty pages called The Time of the Assassins, Miller

discourses on the spiritual suicide of modern youth.

I like to think of him as the one who extended the

boundaries of that only partially explored domain. Youth

ends where manhood begins, it is said. A phrase without

meaning, since from the beginning of history man has never

enjoyed the full measure of youth nor known the limitless

possibilities of adulthood. How can one know the splendor

and fullness of youth if one’s energies are consumed in

combating the errors and falsities of parents and ancestors?

Is youth to waste its strength unlocking the grip of death? Is

youth’s only mission on earth to rebel, to destroy, to

assassinate? Is youth only to be offered up to sacrifice?

What of the dreams of youth? Are they always to be

regarded as follies? Are they to be populated only with

chimeras?… Stifle or deform youth’s dreams and you

destroy the creator. Where there has been no real youth

there can be no real manhood. If society has come to

resemble a collection of deformities, is it not the work of our

educators and preceptors? Today, as yesterday, the youth

who would live his own life has no place to turn, no place to

live his youth unless, retiring into his chrysalis, he closes all

apertures and buries himself alive. The conception of our

mother the earth being “an egg which doth contain all good

things in it” has undergone a profound change. The cosmic

egg contains an addled yolk. This is the present view of

mother earth. The psychoanalysts have traced the poison

back to the womb, but to what avail? In the light of this

profound discovery we are given permission… to step from

one rotten egg into another. … Why breed new monsters of

negation and futility? Let society scotch its own rotten

corpse! Let us have a new heaven and a new earth!—that

was the sense of Rimbaud’s obstinate revolt.

Miller calls for an end to revolt once and for all. His

message is precisely that of Whitman, of Rimbaud, of Rilke:

“Everything we are taught is false”; and “Change your life.”

As a writer Miller may be second- or third-rate or of no

rating at all; as a spiritual example he stands among the

great men of our age. Will this ever be recognized? Not in

our time probably.

The Rimbaud book ends with a Coda, a little recital of the

literature of despair which has surrounded us for a hundred

years. Listen to it.

Rimbaud was born in the middle of the nineteenth

century, October 20th, 1854, at 6:00 A.M., it is said. A

century of unrest, of materialism, and of “progress,” as we

say. Purgatorial in every sense of the word, and the writers

who flourished in that period reflect this ominously. Wars

and revolutions were abundant. Russia alone, we are told,

waged thirty-three wars (mostly of conquest) during the

eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Shortly after

Rimbaud is born his father is off to the Crimean War. So is

Tolstoy. The revolution of 1848, of brief duration but full of

consequences, is followed by the bloody Commune of 1871,

which Rimbaud as a boy is thought to have participated in.

In 1848 we in America are fighting the Mexicans with whom

we are now great friends, though the Mexicans are not too

sure of it. During this war Thoreau makes his famous speech

on Civil Disobedience, a document which will one day be

added to the Emancipation Proclamation. … Twelve years

later the Civil War breaks out, perhaps the bloodiest of all

civil wars. … From 1874 until his death in 1881 Amiel is

writing his Journal Intime… which… gives a thoroughgoing

analysis of the moral dilemma in which the creative spirits

of the time found themselves. The very titles of the books

written by influential writers of the nineteenth century are

revelatory. I give just a few… The Sickness unto Death

(Kierkegaard), Dreams and Life (Gérard de Nerval), Les

Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire), Les Chants de Maldoror

(Lautréamont), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), La Bête

Humaine (Zola), Hunger (Knut Hamsun), Les Lauriers Sont

Coupés (Dujardin), The Conquest of Bread (Kropotkin),

Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy), Alice in Wonderland,

The Serpent in Paradise (Sacher-Masoch), Les Paradis

Artificiels (Baudelaire), Dead Souls (Gogol), The House of

the Dead (Dostoevski), The Wild Duck (Ibsen), The Inferno

(Strindberg), The Nether World (Gissing), A Rebours

(Huysmans). …

Goethe’s Faust was not so very old when Rimbaud asked

a friend for a copy of it. Remember the date of his birth is

October 20th, 1854 (6:00 A.M. Western Standard Diabolical

Time). The very next year, 1855, Leaves of Grass makes its

appearance, followed by condemnation and suppression.

Meanwhile Moby Dick had come out (1851) and Thoreau’s

Walden (1854). In 1855 Gérard de Nerval commits suicide,

having lasted till the remarkable age of 47. In 1854

Kierkegaard is already penning his last words to history in

which he gives the parable of “The Sacrificed Ones.” Just

four or five years before Rimbaud completes A Season in

Hell (1873), Lautréamont publishes his celebrated piece of

blasphemy, another “work of youth,” as we say, in order not

to take these heartbreaking testaments seriously. … By

1888 Nietzsche is explaining to Brandes that he can now

boast three readers: Brandes, Taine, and Strindberg. The

next year he goes mad and remains that way until his death

in 1900. Lucky man! From 1893 to 1897 Strindberg is

experiencing a crise… which he describes with magisterial

effects in The Inferno. Reminiscent of Rimbaud is the title of

another of his works: The Keys to Paradise. In 1888 comes

Dujardin’s curious little book, forgotten until recently. … By

this time Mark Twain is at his height, Huckleberry Finn

having appeared in 1884, the same year as Against the

Grain of Huysmans. … By the fall of 1891 Gissing’s New

Grub Street is launched. It is an interesting year in

nineteenth-century literature, the year of Rimbaud’s death.

…

What a century of names!… Shelley, Blake, Stendhal,

Hegel, Fechner, Emerson, Poe, Schopenhauer, Max Stirner,

Mallarmé, Chekov, Andreyev, Verlaine, Couperus,

Maeterlinck, Madame Blavatsky, Samuel Butler, Claudel,

Unamuno, Conrad, Bakunin, Shaw, Rilke, Stefan George,

Verhaeren, Gautier, Léon Bloy, Balzac, Yeats. …

What revolt, what disillusionment, what longing! Nothing

but crises, breakdowns, hallucinations and visions. The

foundations of politics, morals, economics, and art tremble.

The air is full of warnings and prophecies of the debacle to

come—and in the twentieth century it comes! Already two

World Wars and a promise of more before the century is out.

Have we touched bottom? Not yet. The moral crisis of the

nineteenth century has merely given way to the spiritual

bankruptcy of the twentieth. It is “the time of the assassins”

and no mistaking it. …

Rimbaud is indeed the symbol of the death of modern

poetry. This seer, this visionary deserts poetry at the age of

eighteen to make money, by gunrunning, even by slave-

trading, ending with a death-bed conversion. His is a life of

slander, beginning with the motto “Death to God” chalked

on the church and ending with extreme unction and the

money belt under the bed. I think the message of Rimbaud

to Miller is the death of poetry, the death of history. The

whole romantic agony of the nineteenth century is summed

up in this adolescent genius, a curse laid on us. Miller

obliterates the curse; he pronounces the benediction over

Rimbaud, over the death of poetry, over the death of

civilization itself but with a side-splitting laugh without an

iota of animosity in it. Miller leads us away from the charnel

house of nineteenth-century poetry; he does not even

recognize the existence of twentieth-century poetry. For

poetry has lost its significance, its relevance, and even its

meaning in our time. To begin again it must repair to the

wilderness, outside society, outside the city gates, a million

miles from books and their keepers. Almost alone of the

writers of our time Henry Miller has done this; I would guess

that his following is enormous and that it is just beginning to

grow. Like Nietzsche, like Lawrence, his word somehow

spreads abroad and somehow cleanses the atmosphere of

the mind of its age-old detritus of tradition, its habits of

despair, its hates.

One word more: at the close of his beautiful clown story,

“The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder,” Miller talks about the

clown, the hero of so much of the best contemporary

literature.

Joy is like a river [says Miller], it flows ceaselessly. It

seems to me that this is the message which the clown is

trying to convey to us, that we should participate through

ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to

reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow on and through,

endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the

clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real.

At no time in the history of man has the world been so full

of pain and anguish. Here and there, however, we meet with

individuals who are untouched, unsullied, by the common

grief. They are not heartless individuals, far from it! They

are emancipated beings. For them the world is not what it

seems to us. They see with other eyes. We say of them that

they have died to the world. They live in the moment, fully,

and the radiance which emanates from them is a perpetual

song of joy.

And Miller is certainly one of these who have died to the

world, like the clown. The ponderous absurdities of modern

literature and the world it perpetuates dissolve in the

hilarities of this almost unknown American author; this poet

who dissociates himself from the so-called modern age and

whose one aim is to give literature back to life. There are

not many of these emancipated beings left in our world,

these clowns and clairvoyants, celebrants of the soul and of

the flesh and of the still-remaining promise of America. And

of these few great souls the greatest is—the Patagonian.

—Karl Shapiro

Preface

Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might

restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. The

predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and

bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild

extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times

almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes,

with bare stretches that taste like brass and leave the full

flavor of emptiness. It is beyond optimism or pessimism.

The author has given us the last frisson. Pain has no more

secret recesses.

In a world grown paralyzed with introspection and

constipated by delicate mental meals this brutal exposure of

the substantial body comes as a vitalizing current of blood.

The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as

manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever

accompanies the act of creation.

The restorative value of experience, prime source of

wisdom and creation, is reasserted. There remain waste

areas of unfinished thought and action, a bundle of shreds

and fibers with which the over critical may strangle

themselves. Referring to his Wilhelm Meister Goethe once

said: “People seek a central point: that is hard, and not even

right. I should think a rich, manifold life, brought close to our

eyes, would be enough without any express tendency;

which, after all, is only for the intellect”

The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and

rotation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also

there is no question of heroism or of struggle since there is

no question of will, but only an obedience to flow.

The gross caricatures are perhaps more vital, “more true

to life,” than the full portraits of the conventional novel for

the reason that the individual today has no centrality and

produces not the slightest illusion of wholeness. The

characters are integrated to the false, cultural void in which

we are drowning; thus is produced the illusion of chaos, to

face which requires the ultimate courage.

The humiliations and defeats, given with a primitive

honesty, end not in frustration, despair, or futility, but in

hunger, an ecstatic, devouring hunger—for more life. The

poetic is discovered by stripping away the vestiture of art;

by descending to what might be styled “a preartistic level,”

the durable skeleton of form which is hidden in the

phenomena of disintegration reappears to be transfigured

again in the ever-changing flesh of emotion. The scars are

burned away—the scars left by the obstetricians of culture.

Here is an artist who re-establishes the potency of illusion

by gaping at the open wounds, by courting the stern,

psychological reality which man seeks to avoid through

recourse to the oblique symbolism of art. Here the symbols

are laid bare, presented almost as naively and unblushingly

by this over-civilized individual as by the well-rooted savage.

It is no false primitivism which gives rise to this savage

lyricism. It is not a retrogressive tendency, but a swing

forward into unbeaten areas. To regard a naked book such

as this with the same critical eye that is turned upon even

such diverse types as Lawrence, Breton, Joyce and Céline is

a mistake. Rather let us try to look at it with the eyes of a

Patagonian for whom all that is sacred and taboo in our

world is meaningless. For the adventure which has brought

the author to the spiritual ends of the earth is the history of

every artist who, in order to express himself, must traverse

the intangible gridirons of his imaginary world. The air

pockets, the alkali wastes, the crumbling monuments, the

putrescent cadavers, the crazy jig and maggot dance, all

this forms a grand fresco of our epoch, done with shattering

phrases and loud, strident, hammer strokes.

If there is here revealed a capacity to shock, to startle the

lifeless ones from their profound slumber, let us

congratulate ourselves; for the tragedy of our world is

precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it

from its lethargy. No more violent dreams, no refreshment,

no awakening. In the anaesthesia produced by self-

knowledge, life is passing, art is passing, slipping from us:

we are drifting with time and our fight is with shadows. We

need a blood transfusion.

And it is blood and flesh which are here given us. Drink,

food, laughter, desire, passion, curiosity, the simple realities

which nourish the roots of our highest and vaguest

creations. The superstructure is lopped away. This book

brings with it a wind that blows down the dead and hollow

trees whose roots are withered and lost in the barren soil of

our times. This book goes to the roots and digs under, digs

for subterranean springs.

—ANAÏS NIN 1934

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt

anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and

we are dead.

Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to

shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop.

How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no

matter. We might never have known each other so

intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.

Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a

weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says.

There will be more calamities, more death, more despair.

Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The

cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed

themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not

Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step,

toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather

will not change.

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent

here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the

happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought

that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.

Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are

no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander,

defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary

sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of

spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man,

Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will. I am going to

sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing

while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse. …

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a

pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not

necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential

thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could

sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would

never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the

others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too

beautifully, or not beautifully enough.

It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep

track of the date. Would you say—my dream of the 14th

November last? There are intervals, but they are between

dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The

world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots

of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away. … I am

thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and

everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb

of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored

and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You,

Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the

world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am still alive,

kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.

Dozing off. The physiology of love. The whale with his six-

foot penis, in repose. The bat—penis libre. Animals with a

bone in the penis. Hence, a bone on. … “Happily,” says

Gourmont, “the bony structure is lost in man.” Happily? Yes,

happily. Think of the human race walking around with a

bone on. The kangaroo has a double penis—one for

weekdays and one for holidays. Dozing. A letter from a

female asking if I have found a title for my book. Title? To be

sure: “Lovely Lesbians.”

Your anecdotal life! A phrase of M. Borowski’s. It is on

Wednesdays that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who

is a dried-up cow, officiates. She is studying English now—

her favorite word is “filthy.” You can see immediately what a

pain in the ass the Borowskis are. But wait. …

Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion.

An invincible combination, especially when you consider

that he is not a bad artist. He puts on that he is a Pole, but

he is not, of course. He is a Jew, Borowski, and his father

was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is Jewish,

or half-Jewish, which is worse. There’s Carl and Paula, and

Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf

and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned

out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden

and Chérie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess.

Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am

writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this

is important to understand.

Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I

too would become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a

Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews

more than the Jew?

Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening

and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès.

The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller

coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a

crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central

America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black,

webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic in

design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the

camera registers in degrees of black.

Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this

beautiful Villa Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence

of food. It is positively appalling at times. I have asked Boris

time and again to order bread for breakfast, but he always

forgets. He goes out for breakfast, it seems. And when he

comes back he is picking his teeth and there is a little egg

hanging from his goatee. He eats in the restaurant out of

consideration for me. He says it hurts to eat a big meal and

have me watch him.

I like Van Norden but I do not share his opinion of himself.

I do not agree, for instance, that he is a philosopher, or a

thinker. He is cunt-struck, that’s all. And he will never be a

writer. Nor will Sylvester ever be a writer, though his name

blaze in 50,000-candle-power red lights. The only writers

about me for whom I have any respect, at present, are Carl

and Boris. They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a

white flame. They are mad and tone deaf. They are

sufferers.

Moldorf, on the other hand, who suffers too in his peculiar

way, is not mad. Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or

blood vessels, no heart or kidneys. He is a portable trunk

filled with innumerable drawers and in the drawers are

labels written out in white ink, brown ink, red ink, blue ink,

vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot, turquoise, onyx,

Anjou, herring, Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola. …

I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I

can see myself in the mirror as I write.

Tania is like Irène. She expects fat letters. But there is

another Tania, a Tania like a big seed, who scatters pollen

everywhere—or, let us say, a little bit of Tolstoy, a stable

scene in which the fetus is dug up. Tania is a fever, too—les

voies urinaires, Café de la Liberté, Place des Vosges, bright

neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark bathrooms,

Porto Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata

Pathétique, aural amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt

sienna breasts, heavy garters, what time is it, golden

pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffeta fingers, vaporish

twilights turning to ilex, acromegaly, cancer and delirium,

warm veils, poker chips, carpets of blood and soft thighs.

Tania says so that every one may hear: “I love him!” And

while Boris scalds himself with whisky she says: “Sit down

here! O Boris… Russia… what’ll I do? I’m bursting with it!”

At night when I look at Boris’ goatee lying on the pillow I

get hysterical. O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of

yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs?

There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out

every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send

you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and

your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows

how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot

hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent.

Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something,

does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set

the shores a little wider, I have ironed out the wrinkles. After

me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St.

Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum.

You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across

your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay

fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will

fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt

and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris

and spit out two franc pieces. …

Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees in-

finitely extended, their black boughs gesticulating like a

sleepwalker. Somber, spectral trees, their trunks pale as

cigar ash. A silence supreme and altogether European.

Shutters drawn, shops barred. A red glow here and there to

mark a tryst. Brusque the façades, almost forbidding;

immaculate except for the splotches of shadow cast by the

trees. Passing by the Orangerie I am reminded of another

Paris, the Paris of Maugham, of Gauguin, Paris of George

Moore. I think of that terrible Spaniard who was then

startling the world with his acrobatic leaps from style to

style. I think of Spengler and of his terrible

pronunciamentos, and I wonder if style, style in the grand

manner, is done for. I say that my mind is occupied with

these thoughts, but it is not true; it is only later, after I have

crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me the carnival of

lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For the

moment I can think of nothing—except that I am a sentient

being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a

forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily

over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them

with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver

as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to

whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings. …

The trouble with Irène is that she has a valise instead of a

cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise. Immense,

avec des choses inouïes. Llona now, she had a cunt. I know

because she sent us some hairs from down below. Llona—a

wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On every high hill

she played the harlot—and sometimes in telephone booths

and toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol and a shaving

mug with his initials on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road

with her dress pulled up and fingered herself. She used

candles, Roman candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the

land big enough for her… not one. Men went inside her and

curled up. She wanted extension pricks, self-exploding

rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote. She would

cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave

her permission. One cunt out of a million, Llona! A

laboratory cunt and no litmus paper that could take her

color. She was a liar, too, this Llona. She never bought a bed

for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whisky bottle

and her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Poor Carol,

he could only curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath

and he fell out—like a dead clam.

Enormous, fat letters, avec des choses inouïes. A valise

without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German

mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When

the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You

entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the

Porte de la Villette. You dropped your sweetbreads into the

tumbrils—red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the

confluence of the Ourcq and Marne, where the water sluices

through the dikes and lies like glass under the bridges. Llona

is lying there now and the canal is full of glass and splinters;

the mimosas weep, and there is a wet, foggy fart on the

windowpanes. One cunt out of a million Llona! All cunt and a

glass ass in which you can read the history of the Middle

Ages.

It is the caricature of a man which Moldorf first presents.

Thyroid eyes. Michelin lips. Voice like pea soup. Under his

vest he carries a little pear. However you look at him it is

always the same panorama: netsuke snuffbox, ivory handle,

chess piece, fan, temple motif. He has fermented so long

now that he is amorphous. Yeast despoiled of its vitamins.

Vase without a rubber plant.

The females were sired twice in the ninth century, and

again during the Renaissance. He was carried through the

great dispersions under yellow bellies and white. Long

before the Exodus a Tatar spat in his blood.

His dilemma is that of the dwarf. With his pineal eye he

sees his silhouette projected on a screen of

incommensurable size. His voice, synchronized to the

shadow of a pinhead, intoxicates him. He hears a roar where

others hear only a squeak.

There is his mind. It is an amphitheater in which the actor

gives a protean performance. Moldorf, multiform and

unerring, goes through his roles—clown, juggler,

contortionist, priest, lecher, mountebank. The amphitheater

is too small. He puts dynamite to it. The audience is

drugged. He scotches it.

I am trying ineffectually to approach Moldorf. It is like

trying to approach God, for Moldorf is God—he has never

been anything else. I am merely putting down words. …

I have had opinions about him which I have discarded; I

have had other opinions which I am revising. I have pinned

him down only to find that it was not a dung-beetle I had in

my hands, but a dragonfly. He has offended me by his

coarseness and then overwhelmed me with his delicacy. He

has been voluble to the point of suffocation, then quiet as

the Jordan.

When I see him trotting forward to greet me, his little

paws outstretched, his eyes perspiring, I feel that I am

meeting. … No, this is not the way to go about it!

“Comme un œuf dansant sur un jet d’eau.”

He has only one cane—a mediocre one. In his pocket

scraps of paper containing prescriptions for Weltschmerz.

He is cured now, and the little German girl who washed his

feet is breaking her heart. It is like Mr. Nonentity toting his

Gujarati dictionary everywhere. “Inevitable for everyone”—

meaning, no doubt, indispenensable. Borowski would find all

this incomprehensible. Borowski has a different cane for

each day in the week, and one for Easter.

We have so many points in common that it is like looking

at myself in a cracked mirror.

I have been looking over my manuscripts, pages scrawled

with revisions. Pages of literature. This frightens me a little.

It is so much like Moldorf. Only I am a Gentile, and Gentiles

have a different way of suffering. They suffer without

neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a man who has never been

afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of

suffering.

I recall distinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like

taking a cub to bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you

—and then you really were frightened. Ordinarily you had no

fear—you could always turn him loose, or chop his head off.

There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into

a cage with wild beasts and be mangled. They go in even

without revolver or whip. Fear makes them fearless. … For

the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. The door

is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His

courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in

the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not hear.

The drama, he thinks, is going on inside the cage. The cage,

he thinks, is the world. Standing there alone and helpless,

the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand

his language. Not one lion has ever heard of Spinoza.

Spinoza? Why they can’t even get their teeth into him. “Give

us meat!” they roar, while he stands there petrified, his

ideas frozen, his Weltanschauung a trapeze out of reach. A

single blow of the lion’s paw and his cosmogony is smashed.

The lions, too, are disappointed. They expected blood,

bones, gristle, sinews. They chew and chew, but the words

are chicle and chicle is indigestible. Chicle is a base over

which you sprinkle sugar, pepsin, thyme, licorice. Chicle,

when it is gathered by chicleros, is O.K. The chicleros came

over on the ridge of a sunken continent. They brought with

them an algebraic language. In the Arizona desert they met

the Mongols of the North, glazed like eggplants. Time

shortly after the earth had taken its gyroscopic lean—when

the Gulf Stream was parting ways with the Japanese current.

In the heart of the soil they found tufa rock. They

embroidered the very bowels of the earth with their

language. They ate one another’s entrails and the forest

closed in on them, on their bones and skulls, on their lace

tufa. Their language was lost. Here and there one still finds

the remnants of a menagerie, a brain plate covered with

figures.

What has all this to do with you, Moldorf? The word in

your mouth is anarchy. Say it, Moldorf, I am waiting for it.

Nobody knows, when we shake hands, the rivers that pour

through our sweat. Whilst you are framing your words, your

lips half parted, the saliva gurgling in your cheeks, I have

jumped halfway across Asia. Were I to take your cane,

mediocre as it is, and poke a little hole in your side, I could

collect enough material to fill the British Museum. We stand

on five minutes and devour centuries. You are the sieve

through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words.

Behind the word is chaos. Each word a stripe, a bar, but

there are not and never will be enough bars to make the

mesh.

In my absence the window curtains have been hung. They

have the appearance of Tyrolean tablecloths dipped in lysol.

The room sparkles. I sit on the bed in a daze, thinking about

man before his birth. Suddenly bells begin to toll, a weird,

unearthly music, as if I had been translated to the steppes

of Central Asia. Some ring out with a long, lingering roll,

some erupt drunkenly, maudlinly. And now it is quiet again,

except for a last note that barely grazes the silence of the

night—just a faint, high gong snuffed out like a flame.

I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a

line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my

thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev

I put the perfection of Dostoevski. (Is there anything more

perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in one and

the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in

Van Gogh’s letters there is a perfection beyond either of

these. It is the triumph of the individual over art.

There is only one thing which interests me vitally now,

and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in

books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those

elements in the air which give direction and motivation to

our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life

some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it.

The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive

explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else

succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall

back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that

can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million

lives in the space of a generation. In the study of

entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we

derive more…

The telephone interrupts this thought which I should

never have been able to complete. Someone is coming to

rent the apartment. …

It looks as though it were finished, my life at the Villa

Borghese. Well, I’ll take up these pages and move on.

Things will happen elsewhere. Things are always happening.

It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice—

they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You

scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get

permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making

a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It’s

in the blood now—misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The

atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility.

Scratch and scratch—until there’s no skin left. However, the

effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged,

or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more

disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want

the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to

scratch himself to death.

So fast and furiously am I compelled to live now that

there is scarcely time to record even these fragmentary

notes. After the telephone call, a gentleman and his wife

arrived. I went upstairs to lie down during the transaction.

Lay there wondering what my next move would be. Surely

not to go back to the fairy’s bed and toss about all night

flicking bread crumbs with my toes. That puking little

bastard! If there’s anything worse than being a fairy it’s

being a miser. A timid, quaking little bugger who lived in

constant fear of going broke some day—the 18th of March

perhaps, or the 25th of May precisely. Coffee without milk or

sugar. Bread without butter. Meat without gravy, or no meat

at all. Without this and without that! That dirty little miser!

Open the bureau drawer one day and find money hidden

away in a sock. Over two thousand francs—and checks that

he hadn’t even cashed. Even that I wouldn’t have minded so

much if there weren’t always coffee grounds in my beret

and garbage on the floor, to say nothing of the cold cream

jars and the greasy towels and the sink always stopped up. I

tell you, the little bastard he smelled bad—except when he

doused himself with cologne. His ears were dirty, his eyes

were dirty, his ass was dirty. He was double-jointed,

asthmatic, lousy, picayune, morbid. I could have forgiven

him everything if only he had handed me a decent

breakfast! But a man who has two thousand francs hidden

away in a dirty sock and refuses to wear a clean shirt or

smear a little butter over his bread, such a man is not just a

fairy, nor even just a miser—he’s an imbecile!

But that’s neither here nor there, about the fairy. I’m

keeping an ear open as to what’s going on downstairs. It’s a

Mr. Wren and his wife who have called to look at the

apartment. They’re talking about taking it. Only talking

about it, thank God. Mrs. Wren has a loose laugh—

complications ahead. Now Mister Wren is talking. His voice

is raucous, scraping, booming, a heavy blunt weapon that

wedges its way through flesh and bone and cartilage.

Boris calls me down to be introduced. He is rubbing his

hands, like a pawnbroker. They are talking about a story Mr.

Wren wrote, a story about a spavined horse.

“But I thought Mr. Wren was a painter?”

“To be sure,” says Boris, with a twinkle in his eye, “but in

the wintertime he writes. And he writes well… remarkably

well.”

I try to induce Mr. Wren to talk, to say something,

anything, to talk about the spavined horse, if necessary. But

Mr. Wren is almost inarticulate. When he essays to speak of

those dreary months with the pen he becomes unintelligible.

Months and months he spends before setting a word to

paper. (And there are only three months of winter!) What

does he cogitate all those months and months of winter? So

help me God, I can’t see this guy as a writer. Yet Mrs. Wren

says that when he sits down to it the stuff just pours out.

The talk drifts. It is difficult to follow Mr. Wren’s mind

because he says nothing. He thinks as he goes along—so

Mrs. Wren puts it. Mrs. Wren puts everything about Mr. Wren

in the loveliest light. “He thinks as he goes along”—very

charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but

really very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing

but a spavined horse.

Boris hands me money to buy liquor. Going for the liquor I

am already intoxicated. I know just how I’ll begin when I get

back to the house. Walking down the street it commences,

the grand speech inside me that’s gurgling like Mrs. Wren’s

loose laugh. Seems to me she had a slight edge on already.

Listens beautifully when she’s tight. Coming out of the wine

shop I hear the urinal gurgling. Everything is loose and

splashy. I want Mrs. Wren to listen. …

Boris is rubbing his hands again. Mr. Wren is still

stuttering and spluttering. I have a bottle between my legs

and I’m shoving the corkscrew in. Mrs. Wren has her mouth

parted expectantly. The wine is splashing between my legs,

the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my

veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy

things that commence to gush out of me now pell-mell. I’m

telling them everything that comes to mind, everything that

was bottled up inside me and which Mrs. Wren’s loose laugh

has somehow released. With that bottle between my legs

and the sun splashing through the window I experience once

again the splendor of those miserable days when I first

arrived in Paris, a bewildered, poverty-stricken individual

who haunted the streets like a ghost at a banquet.

Everything comes back to me in a rush—the toilets that

wouldn’t work, the prince who shined my shoes, the Cinema

Splendide where I slept on the patron’s overcoat, the bars in

the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat cockroaches,

the drinking and carousing that went on between times,

Rose Cannaque and Naples dying in the sunlight. Dancing

the streets on an empty belly and now and then calling on

strange people—Madame Delorme, for instance. How I ever

got to Madame Delorme’s, I can’t imagine any more. But I

got there, got inside somehow, past the butler, past the

maid with her little white apron, got right inside the palace

with my corduroy trousers and my hunting jacket—and not a

button on my fly. Even now I can taste again the golden

ambiance of that room where Madame Delorme sat upon a

throne in her mannish rig, the goldfish in the bowls, the

maps of the ancient world, the beautifully bound books; I

can feel again her heavy hand resting upon my shoulder,

frightening me a little with her heavy Lesbian air. More

comfortable down below in that thick stew pouring into the

Gare St. Lazare, the whores in the doorways, seltzer bottles

on every table; a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters.

Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed

around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to

move along with the tide and everything whirling in your

brain. A weird sort of contentment in those days. No

appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no

dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.

Each morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and

each morning the inevitable answer from the clerk. Dashing

here and there like a bedbug, gathering butts now and then,

sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly; sitting down on a

bench and squeezing my guts to stop the gnawing, or

walking through the Jardin des Tuileries and getting an

erection looking at the dumb statues. Or wandering along

the Seine at night, wandering and wandering, and going

mad with the beauty of it, the trees leaning to, the broken

images in the water, the rush of the current under the

bloody lights of the bridges, the women sleeping in

doorways, sleeping on newspapers, sleeping in the rain;

everywhere the musty porches of the cathedrals and

beggars and lice and old hags full of St. Vitus’ dance;

pushcarts stacked up like wine barrels in the side streets,

the smell of berries in the market place and the old church

surrounded with vegetables and blue arc lights, the gutters

slippery with garbage and women in satin pumps staggering

through the filth and vermin at the end of an all-night souse.

The Place St. Sulpice, so quiet and deserted, where toward

midnight there came every night the woman with the

busted umbrella and the crazy veil; every night she slept

there on a bench under her torn umbrella, the ribs hanging

down, her dress turning green, her bony fingers and the

odor of decay oozing from her body; and in the morning I’d

be sitting there myself, taking a quiet snooze in the

sunshine, cursing the goddamned pigeons gathering up the

crumbs everywhere. St. Sulpice! The fat belfries, the garish

posters over the door, the candles flaming inside. The

Square so beloved of Anatole France, with that drone and

buzz from the altar, the splash of the fountain, the pigeons

cooing, the crumbs disappearing like magic and only a dull

rumbling in the hollow of the guts. Here I would sit day after

day thinking of Germaine and that dirty little street near the

Bastille where she lived, and that buzz-buzz going on behind

the altar, the buses whizzing by, the sun beating down into

the asphalt and the asphalt working into me and Germaine,

into the asphalt and all Paris in the big fat belfries.

And it was down the Rue Bonaparte that only a year

before Mona and I used to walk every night, after we had

taken leave of Borowski. St. Sulpice not meaning much to

me then, nor anything in Paris. Washed out with talk. Sick of

faces. Fed up with cathedrals and squares and menageries

and what not. Picking up a book in the red bedroom and the

cane chair uncomfortable; tired of sitting on my ass all day

long, tired of red wallpaper, tired of seeing so many people

jabbering away about nothing. The red bedroom and the

trunk always open; her gowns lying about in a delirium of

disorder. The red bedroom with my galoshes and canes, the

notebooks I never touched, the manuscripts lying cold and

dead. Paris! Meaning the Café Select, the Dôme, the Flea

Market, the American Express. Paris! Meaning Borowski’s

canes, Borowski’s hats, Borowski’s gouaches, Borowski’s

prehistoric fish—and prehistoric jokes. In that Paris of ‘28

only one night stands out in my memory—the night before

sailing for America. A rare night, with Borowski slightly

pickled and a little disgusted with me because I’m dancing

with every slut in the place. But we’re leaving in the

morning! That’s what I tell every cunt I grab hold of —

leaving in the morning! That’s what I’m telling the blonde

with agate-colored eyes. And while I’m telling her she takes

my hand and squeezes it between her legs. In the lavatory I

stand before the bowl with a tremendous erection; it seems

light and heavy at the same time, like a piece of lead with

wings on it. And while I’m standing there like that two cunts

sail in—Americans. I greet them cordially, prick in hand.

They give me a wink and pass on. In the vestibule, as I’m

buttoning my fly, I notice one of them waiting for her friend

to come out of the can. The music is still playing and maybe

Mona’ll be coming to fetch me, or Borowski with his gold-

knobbed cane, but I’m in her arms now and she has hold of

me and I don’t care who comes or what happens. We

wriggle into the cabinet and there I stand her up, slap up

against the wall, and I try to get it into her but it won’t work

and so we sit down on the seat and try it that way but it

won’t work either. No matter how we try it it won’t work.

And all the while she’s got hold of my prick, she’s clutching

it like a lifesaver, but it’s no use, we’re too hot, too eager.

The music is still playing and so we waltz out of the cabinet

into the vestibule again and as we’re dancing there in the

shithouse I come all over her beautiful gown and she’s sore

as hell about it. I stumble back to the table and there’s

Borowski with his ruddy face and Mona with her

disapproving eye. And Borowski says “Let’s all go to

Brussels tomorrow,” and we agree, and when we get back

to the hotel I vomit all over the place, in the bed, in the

washbowl, over the suits and gowns and the galoshes and

canes and the notebooks I never touched and the

manuscripts cold and dead.

A few months later. The same hotel, the same room. We

look out on the courtyard where the bicycles are parked,

and there is the little room up above, under the attic, where

some smart young Alec played the phonograph all day long

and repeated clever little things at the top of his voice. I say

“we” but I’m getting ahead of myself, because Mona has

been away a long time and it’s just today that I’m meeting

her at the Gare St. Lazare. Toward evening I’m standing

there with my face squeezed between the bars, but there’s

no Mona, and I read the cable over again but it doesn’t help

any. I go back to the Quarter and just the same I put away a

hearty meal. Strolling past the Dôme a little later suddenly I

see a pale, heavy face and burning eyes—and the little

velvet suit that I always adore because under the soft velvet

there were always her warm breasts, the marble legs, cool,

firm, muscular. She rises up out of a sea of faces and

embraces me, embraces me passionately—a thousand eyes,

noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all

glaring at us and we in each other’s arm oblivious. I sit down

beside her and she talks—a flood of talk. Wild consumptive

notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word

because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy

and willing to die.

We walk down the Rue du Château, looking for Eugene.

Walk over the railroad bridge where I used to watch the

trains pulling out and feel all sick inside wondering where

the hell she could be. Everything soft and enchanting as we

walk over the bridge. Smoke coming up between our legs,

the tracks creaking, semaphores in our blood. I feel her

body close to mine—all mine now—and I stop to rub my

hands over the warm velvet. Everything around us is

crumbling, crumbling and the warm body under the warm

velvet is aching for me. …

Back in the very same room and fifty francs to the good,

thanks to Eugene. I look out on the court but the

phonograph is silent. The trunk is open and her things are

lying around everywhere just as before. She lies down on

the bed with her clothes on. Once, twice, three times, four

times… I’m afraid she’ll go mad… in bed, under the

blankets, how good to feel her body again! But for how

long? Will it last this time? Already I have a presentiment

that it won’t.

She talks to me so feverishly—as if there will be no

tomorrow. “Be quiet, Mona! Just look at me… don’t talk!”

Finally she drops off and I pull my arm from under her. My

eyes close. Her body is there beside me… it will be there till

morning surely. … It was in February I pulled out of the

harbor in a blinding snowstorm. The last glimpse I had of

her was in the window waving good bye to me. A man

standing on the other side of the street, at the corner, his

hat pulled down over his eyes, his jowls resting on his

lapels. A fetus watching me. A fetus with a cigar in its

mouth. Mona at the window waving good-bye. White heavy

face, hair streaming wild. And now it is a heavy bedroom,

breathing regularly through the gills, sap still oozing from

between her legs, a warm feline odor and her hair in my

mouth. My eyes are closed. We breathe warmly into each

other’s mouth. Close together, America three thousand

miles away. I never want to see it again. To have her here in

bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I

count that something of a miracle. Nothing can happen now

till morning. …

I wake from a deep slumber to look at her. A pale light is

trickling in. I look at her beautiful wild hair. I feel something

crawling down my neck. I look at her again, closely. Her hair

is alive. I pull back the sheet—more of them. They are

swarming over the pillow.

It is a little after daybreak. We pack hurriedly and sneak

out of the hotel. The cafés are still closed. We walk, and as

we walk we scratch ourselves. The day opens in milky

whiteness, streaks of salmon-pink sky, snails leaving their

shells. Paris. Paris. Everything happens here. Old, crumbling

walls and the pleasant sound of water running in the urinals.

Men licking their mustaches at the bar. Shutters going up

with a bang and little streams purling in the gutters. Amer

Picon in huge scarlet letters. Zigzag. Which way will we go

and why or where or what?

Mona is hungry, her dress is thin. Nothing but evening

wraps, bottles of perfume, barbaric earrings, bracelets,

depilatories. We sit down in a billiard parlor on the Avenue

du Maine and order hot coffee. The toilet is out of order. We

shall have to sit some time before we can go to another

hotel. Meanwhile we pick bedbugs out of each other’s hair.

Nervous. Mona is losing her temper. Must have a bath. Must

have this. Must have that. Must, must, must…

“How much money have you left?”

Money! Forgot all about that.

Hôtel des Etats-Unis. An ascenseur. We go to bed in broad

daylight. When we get up it is dark and the first thing to do

is to raise enough dough to send a cable to America. A cable

to the fetus with the long juicy cigar in his mouth.

Meanwhile there is the Spanish woman on the Boulevard

Raspail—she’s always good for a warm meal. By morning

something will happen. At least we’re going to bed together.

No more bedbugs now. The rainy season has commenced.

The sheets are immaculate. …

A new life opening up for me at the Villa Borghese. Only ten

o’clock and we have already had breakfast and been out for

a walk. We have an Elsa here with us now. “Step softly for a

few days,” cautions Boris.

The day begins gloriously: a bright sky, a fresh wind, the

houses newly washed. On our way to the Post Office Boris

and I discussed the book. The Last Book—which is going to

be written anonymously.

A new day is beginning. I felt it this morning as we stood

before one of Dufresne’s glistening canvases, a sort of

déjeuner intime in the thirteenth century, sans vin. A fine,

fleshy nude, solid, vibrant, pink as a fingernail, with

glistening billows of flesh; all the secondary characteristics,

and a few of the primary. A body that sings, that has the

moisture of dawn. A still life, only nothing is still, nothing

dead here. The table creaks with food; it is so heavy it is

sliding out of the frame. A thirteenth century repast—with

all the jungle notes that he has memorized so well. A family

of gazelles and zebras nipping the fronds of the palms.

And now we have Elsa. She was playing for us this

morning while we were in bed. Step softly for a few days

Good! Elsa is the maid and I am the guest. And Boris is the

big cheese. A new drama is beginning. I’m laughing to

myself as I write this. He knows what is going to happen,

that lynx, Boris. He has a nose for things too. Step softly. …

Boris is on pins and needles. At any moment now his wife

may appear on the scene. She weighs well over 180 pounds,

that wife of his. And Boris is only a handful. There you have

the situation. He tries to explain it to me on our way home

at night. It is so tragic and so ridiculous at the same time

that I am obliged to stop now and then and laugh in his

face. “Why do you laugh so?” he says gently, and then he

commences himself, with that whimpering, hysterical note

in his voice, like a helpless wretch who realizes suddenly

that no matter how many frock coats he puts on he will

never make a man. He wants to run away, to take a new

name. “She can have everything, that cow, if only she

leaves me alone,” he whines. But first the apartment has to

be rented, and the deeds signed, and a thousand other

details for which his frock coat will come in handy. But the

size of her!—that’s what really worries him. If we were to

find her suddenly standing on the doorstep when we arrive

he would faint—that’s how much he respects her!

And so we’ve got to go easy with Elsa for a while. Elsa is

only there to make breakfast—and to show the apartment.

But Elsa is already undermining me. That German blood.

Those melancholy songs. Coming down the stairs this

morning, with the fresh coffee in my nostrils, I was humming

softly. … “Es wär’ so schön gewesen.” For breakfast, that.

And in a little while the English boy upstairs with his Bach.

As Elsa says—“he needs a woman.” And Elsa needs

something too. I can feel it. I didn’t say anything to Boris

about it, but while he was cleaning his teeth this morning

Elsa was giving me an earful about Berlin, about the women

who look so attractive from behind, and when they turn

round—wow, syphilis!

It seems to me that Elsa looks at me rather wistfully.

Something left over from the breakfast table. This afternoon

we were writing, back to back, in the studio. She had begun

a letter to her lover who is in Italy. The machine got

jammed. Boris had gone to look at a cheap room he will take

as soon as the apartment is rented. There was nothing for it

but to make love to Elsa. She wanted it. And yet I felt a little

sorry for her. She had only written the first line to her lover

—I read it out of the corner of my eye as I bent over her. But

it couldn’t be helped. That damned German music, so

melancholy, so sentimental. It undermined me. And then

her beady little eyes, so hot and sorrowful at the same time.

After it was over I asked her to play something for me.

She’s a musician, Elsa, even though it sounded like broken

pots and skulls clanking. She was weeping, too, as she

played. I don’t blame her. Everywhere the same thing, she

says. Everywhere a man, and then she has to leave, and

then there’s an abortion and then a new job and then

another man and nobody gives a fuck about her except to

use her. All this after she’s played Schumann for me—

Schumann, that slobbery, sentimental German bastard!

Somehow I feel sorry as hell for her and yet I don’t give a

damn. A cunt who can play as she does ought to have

better sense than be tripped up by every guy with a big

putz who happens to come along. But that Schumann gets

into my blood. She’s still sniffling, Elsa; but my mind is far

away. I’m thinking of Tania and how she claws away at her

adagio. I’m thinking of lots of things that are gone and

buried. Thinking of a summer afternoon in Greenpoint when

the Germans were romping over Belgium and we had not

yet lost enough money to be concerned over the rape of a

neutral country. A time when we were still innocent enough

to listen to poets and to sit around a table in the twilight

rapping for departed spirits. All that afternoon and evening

the atmosphere is saturated with German music; the whole

neigh borhood is German, more German even than

Germany. We were brought up on Schumann and Hugo Wolf

and sauerkraut and kümmel and potato dumplings. Toward

evening we’re sitting around a big table with the curtains

drawn and some fool two-headed wench is rapping for Jesus

Christ. We’re holding hands under the table and the dame

next to me has two fingers in my fly. And finally we lie on

the floor, behind the piano, while someone sings a dreary

song. The air is stifling and her breath is boozy. The pedal is

moving up and down, stiffly, automatically, a crazy, futile

movement, like a tower of dung that takes twenty-seven

years to build but keeps perfect time. I pull her over me with

the sounding board in my ears; the room is dark and the

carpet is sticky with the kümmel that has been spilled

about. Suddenly it seems as if the dawn were coming: it is

like water purling over ice and the ice is blue with a rising

mist, glaciers sunk in emerald green, chamois and antelope,

golden groupers, sea cows mooching along and the amber

jack leaping over the Arctic rim. …

Elsa is sitting in my lap. Her eyes are like little belly-

buttons. I look at her large mouth, so wet and glistening,

and I cover it. She is humming now “Es wär’ so schön

gewesen. …” Ah, Elsa, you don’t know yet what that means

to me, your Trompeter von Säckingen. German Singing

Societies, Schwaben Hall, the Turnverein… links um, rechts

um… and then a whack over the ass with the end of a rope.

Ah, the Germans! They take you all over like an omnibus.

They give you indigestion. In the same night one cannot

visit the morgue, the infirmary, the zoo, the signs of the

zodiac, the limbos of philosophy, the caves of epistemology,

the arcana of Freud and Stekel. … On the merry-go-round

one doesn’t get anywhere, whereas with the Germans one

can go from Vega to Lope de Vega, all in one night, and

come away as foolish as Parsifal.

As I say, the day began gloriously. It was only this

morning that I became conscious again of this physical Paris

of which I have been unaware for weeks. Perhaps it is

because the book has begun to grow inside me. I am

carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the

streets big with child and the cops escort me across the

street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody

pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle

awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of

the world.

It was this morning, on our way to the Post Office, that we

gave the book its final imprimatur. We have evolved a new

cosmogony of literature, Boris and I. It is to be a new Bible—

The Last Book. All those who have anything to say will say it

here—anonymously. We will exhaust the age. After us not

another book—not for a generation, at least. Heretofore we

had been digging in the dark, with nothing but instinct to

guide us. Now we shall have a vessel in which to pour the

vital fluid, a bomb which, when we throw it, will set off the

world. We shall put into it enough to give the writers of

tomorrow their plots, their dramas, their poems, their

myths, their sciences. The world will be able to feed on it for

a thousand years to come. It is colossal in its

pretentiousness. The thought of it almost shatters us.

For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has

been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or

so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of

creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying

piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce, it needs to be

blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we

have in us all the continents and the seas between the

continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it

down—the evolution of this world which has died but which

has not been buried. We are swimming on the face of time

and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown. It will

be enormous, the Book. There will be oceans of space in

which to move about, to perambulate, to sing, to dance, to

climb, to bathe, to leap somersaults, to whine, to rape, to

murder. A cathedral, a veritable cathedral, in the building of

which everybody will assist who has lost his identity. There

will be masses for the dead, prayers, confessions, hymns, a

moaning and a chattering, a sort of murderous insouciance;

there will be rose windows and gargoyles and acolytes and

pallbearers. You can bring your horses in and gallop through

the aisles. You can butt your head against the walls—they

won’t give. You can pray in any language you choose, or you

can curl up outside and go to sleep. It will last a thousand

years, at least, this cathedral, and there will be no replica,

for the builders will be dead and the formula too. We will

have postcards made and organize tours. We will build a

town around it and set up a free commune. We have no

need for genius—genius is dead. We have need for strong

hands, for spirits who are willing to give up the ghost and

put on flesh. …

The day is moving along at a fine tempo. I am up on the

balcony at Tania’s place. The drama is going on down below

in the drawing room. The dramatist is sick and from above

his scalp looks more scabrous than ever. His hair is made of

straw. His ideas are straw. His wife too is straw, though still

a little damp. The whole house is made of straw. Here I am

up on the balcony, waiting for Boris to arrive. My last

problem—breakfast—is gone. I have simplified everything. If

there are any new problems I can carry them in my

rucksack, along with my dirty wash. I am throwing away all

my sous. What need have I for money? I am a writing

machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows.

Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I

am the machine. …

They have not told me yet what the new drama is about,

but I can sense it. They are trying to get rid of me. Yet here I

am for my dinner, even a little earlier than they expected. I

have informed them where to sit, what to do. I ask them

politely if I shall be disturbing them, but what I really mean,

and they know it well, is—will you be disturbing me? No, you

blissful cockroaches, you are not disturbing me. You are

nourishing me. I see you sitting there close together and I

know there is a chasm between you. Your nearness is the

nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I

withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.

Tania is in a hostile mood—I can feel it. She resents my

being filled with anything but herself. She knows by the very

caliber of my excitement that her value is reduced to zero.

She knows that I did not come this evening to fertilize her.

She knows there is something germinating inside me which

will destroy her. She is slow to realize, but she is realizing

it…

Sylvester looks more content. He will embrace her this

evening at the dinner table. Even now he is reading my

manuscript, preparing to inflame my ego, to set my ego

against hers.

It will be a strange gathering this evening. The stage is

being set. I hear the tinkle of the glasses. The wine is being

brought out. There will be bumpers downed and Sylvester

who is ill will come out of his illness.

It was only last night, at Cronstadt’s, that we projected

this setting. It was ordained that the women must suffer,

that off-stage there should be more terror and violence,

more disasters, more suffering, more woe and misery.

It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris

is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits

the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself

Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is

simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living

embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is

the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each

one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New

York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna

than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle

gives up its babes and new ones take their places. You can

read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and

Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was

anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other.

Nobody dies here. …

They are talking downstairs. Their language is symbolic.

The world “struggle” enters into it. Sylvester, the sick

dramatist, is saying: “I am just reading the Manifesto.” And

Tania says—“Whose?” Yes, Tania, I heard you. I am up here

writing about you and you divine it well. Speak more, that I

may record you. For when we go to table I shall not be able

to make any notes. … Suddenly Tania remarks: “There is no

prominent hall in this place.” Now what does that mean, if

anything?

They are putting up pictures now. That, too, is to impress

me. See, they wish to say, we are at home here, living the

conjugal life. Making the home attractive. We will even

argue a little about the pictures, for your benefit. And Tania

remarks again: “How the eye deceives one!” Ah, Tania, what

things you say! Go on, carry out this farce a little longer. I

am here to get the dinner you promised me; I enjoy this

comedy tremendously. And now Sylvester takes the lead. He

is trying to explain one of Borowski’s gouaches. “Come here,

do you see? One of them is playing the guitar; the other is

holding a girl in his lap.” True, Sylvester. Very true. Borowski

and his guitars! The girls in his lap! Only one never quite

knows what it is he holds in his lap, or whether it is really a

man playing the guitar. …

Soon Moldorf will be trotting in on all fours and Boris with

that helpless little laugh of his. There will be a golden

pheasant for dinner and Anjou and short fat cigars. And

Cronstadt, when he gets the latest news, will live a little

harder, a little brighter, for five minutes; and then he will

subside again into the humus of his ideology and perhaps a

poem will be born, a big golden bell of a poem without a

tongue.

Had to knock off for an hour or so. Another customer to

look at the apartment. Upstairs the bloody Englishman is

practicing his Bach. It is imperative now, when someone

comes to look at the apartment, to run upstairs and ask the

pianist to lay off for a while.

Elsa is telephoning the greengrocer. The plumber is

putting a new seat on the toilet bowl. Whenever the doorbell

rings Boris loses his equilibrium. In the excitement he has

dropped his glasses; he is on his hands and knees, his frock

coat is dragging the floor. It is a little like the Grand Guignol

—the starving poet come to give the butcher’s daughter

lessons. Every time the phone rings the poet’s mouth

waters. Mallarmé sounds like a sirloin steak, Victor Hugo like

foie de veau. Elsa is ordering a delicate little lunch for Boris

—“a nice juicy little pork chop,” she says. I see a whole flock

of pink hams lying cold on the marble, wonderful hams

cushioned in white fat. I have a terrific hunger though we’ve

only had breakfast a few minutes ago—it’s the lunch that I’ll

have to skip. It’s only Wednesdays that I eat lunch, thanks

to Borowski. Elsa is still telephoning—she forgot to order a

piece of bacon. “Yes, a nice little piece of bacon, not too

fatty,” she says… Zut alors! Throw in some sweetbreads,

throw in some mountain oysters and some psst clams!

Throw in some fried liverwurst while you’re at it; I could

gobble up the fifteen hundred plays of Lope de Vega in one

sitting.

It is a beautiful woman who has come to look at the

apartment. An American, of course. I stand at the window

with my back to her watching a sparrow pecking at a fresh

turd. Amazing how easily the sparrow is provided for. It is

raining a bit and the drops are very big. I used to think a

bird couldn’t fly if its wings got wet. Amazing how these rich

dames come to Paris and find all the swell studios. A little

talent and a big purse. If it rains they have a chance to

display their brand new slickers. Food is nothing: sometimes

they’re so busy gadding about that they haven’t time for

lunch. Just a little sandwich, a wafer, at the Café de la Paix

or the Ritz Bar. “For the daughters of gentlefolk only”—

that’s what it says at the old studio of Puvis de Chavannes.

Happened to pass there the other day. Rich American cunts

with paint boxes slung over their shoulders. A little talent

and a fat purse.

The sparrow is hopping frantically from one cobblestone

to another. Truly herculean efforts, if you stop to examine

closely. Everywhere there is food lying about—in the gutter,

I mean. The beautiful American woman is inquiring about

the toilet. The toilet! Let me show you, you velvet-snooted

gazelle! The toilet, you say? Par ici, Madame. N’oubliez pas

que les places numérotées sont réservées aux mutilés de la

guerre.

Boris is rubbing his hands—he is putting the finishing

touches to the deal. The dogs are barking in the courtyard;

they bark like wolves. Upstairs Mrs. Melverness is moving

the furniture around. She had nothing to do all day, she’s

bored; if she finds a crumb of dirt anywhere she cleans the

whole house. There’s a bunch of green grapes on the table

and a bottle of wine—vin de choix, ten degrees. “Yes,” says

Boris. “I could make a washstand for you, just come here,

please. Yes, this is the toilet. There is one upstairs too, of

course. Yes, a thousand francs a month. You don’t care

much for Utrillo, you say? No, this is it. It needs a new

washer, that’s all. …”

She’s going in a minute now. Boris hasn’t even introduced

me this time. The son of a bitch! Whenever it’s a rich cunt

he forgets to introduce me. In a few minutes I’ll be able to

sit down again and type. Somehow I don’t feel like it any

more today. My spirit is dribbling away. She may come back

in an hour or so and take the chair from under my ass. How

the hell can a man write when he doesn’t know where he’s

going to sit the next half-hour? If this rich bastard takes the

place I won’t even have a place to sleep. It’s hard to know,

when you’re in such a jam, which is worse—not having a

place to sleep or not having a place to work. One can sleep

almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even

if it’s not a masterpiece you’re doing. Even a bad novel

requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy. These rich

cunts never think of a thing like that. Whenever they want

to lower their soft behinds there’s always a chair standing

ready for them. …

Last night we left Sylvester and his God sitting together

before the hearth. Sylvester in his pajamas, Moldorf with a

cigar between his lips. Sylvester is peeling an orange. He

puts the peel on the couch cover. Moldorf draws closer to

him. He asks permission to read again that brilliant parody,

The Gates of Heaven. We are getting ready to go, Boris and

I. We are too gay for this sickroom atmosphere. Tania is

going with us. She is gay because she is going to escape.

Boris is gay because the God in Moldorf is dead. I am gay

because it is another act we are going to put on.

Moldorf’s voice is reverent. “Can I stay with you,

Sylvester, until you go to bed?” He has been staying with

him for the last six days, buying medicine, running errands

for Tania, comforting, consoling, guarding the portals

against malevolent intruders like Boris and his scalawags.

He is like a savage who has discovered that his idol was

mutilated during the night. There he sits, at the idol’s feet,

with breadfruit and grease and jabberwocky prayers. His

voice goes out unctuously. His limbs are already paralyzed.

To Tania he speaks as if she were a priestess who had

broken her vows. “You must make yourself worthy. Sylvester

is your God.” And while Sylvester is upstairs suffering (he

has a little wheeze in the chest) the priest and the priestess

devour the food. “You are polluting yourself,” he says, the

gravy dripping from his lips. He has the capacity for eating

and suffering at the same time. While he fends off the

dangerous ones he puts out his fat little paw and strokes

Tania’s hair. “I’m beginning to fall in love with you. You are

like my Fanny.”

In other respects it has been a fine day for Moldorf. A

letter arrived from America. Moe is getting A’s in everything.

Murray is learning to ride the bicycle. The victrola was

repaired. You can see from the expression on his face that

there were other things in the letter besides report cards

and velocipedes. You can be sure of it because this

afternoon he bought 325 francs worth of jewelry for his

Fanny. In addition he wrote her a twenty-page letter. The

garçon brought him page after page, filled his fountain pen,

served his coffee and cigars, fanned him a little when he

perspired, brushed the crumbs from the table, lit his cigar

when it went out, bought stamps for him, danced on him,

pirouetted, salaamed… broke his spine damned near. The

tip was fat. Bigger and fatter than a Corona Corona. Moldorf

probably mentioned it in his diary. It was for Fanny’s sake.

The bracelet and the earrings, they were worth every sou he

spent. Better to spend it on Fanny than waste it on little

strumpets like Germaine and Odette. Yes, he told Tania so.

He showed her his trunk. It is crammed with gifts—for

Fanny, and for Moe and Murray.

“My Fanny is the most intelligent woman in the world. I

have been searching and searching to find a flaw in her—

but there’s not one.

“She’s perfect. I’ll tell you what Fanny can do. She plays

bridge like a shark; she’s interested in Zionism; you give her

an old hat, for instance, and see what she can do with it. A

little twist here, a ribbon there, and voilà quelque chose de

beau! Do you know what is perfect bliss? To sit beside

Fanny, when Moe and Murray have gone to bed, and listen

to the radio. She sits there so peacefully. I am rewarded for

all my struggles and heartaches in just watching her. She

listens intelligently. When I think of your stinking

Montparnasse and then of my evenings in Bay Ridge with

Fanny after a big meal, I tell you there is no comparison. A

simple thing like food, the children, the soft lamps, and

Fanny sitting there, a little tired, but cheerful, contented,

heavy with bread… we just sit there for hours without

saying a word. That’s bliss!

“Today she writes me a letter—not one of those dull

stock-report letters. She writes me from the heart, in

language that even my little Murray could understand. She’s

delicate about everything, Fanny. She says that the children

must continue their education but the expense worries her.

It will cost a thousand bucks to send little Murray to school.

Moe, of course, will get a scholarship. But little Murray, that

little genius, Murray, what are we going to do about him? I

wrote Fanny not to worry. Send Murray to school, I said.

What’s another thousand dollars? I’ll make more money this

year than ever before. I’ll do it for little Murray—because

he’s a genius, that kid.”

I should like to be there when Fanny opens the trunk.

“See, Fanny, this is what I bought in Budapest from an old

Jew. … This is what they wear in Bulgaria—it’s pure wool. …

This belonged to the Duke of something or other—no, you

don’t wind it, you put it in the sun. … This I want you to

wear, Fanny, when we go to the Opera… wear it with that

comb I showed you. … And this, Fanny, is something Tania

picked up for me… she’s a little bit on your type. …”

And Fanny is sitting there on the settee, just as she was in

the oleograph, with Moe on one side of her and little Murray,

Murray the genius, on the other. Her fat legs are a little too

short to reach the floor. Her eyes have a dull permanganate

glow. Breasts like ripe red cabbage; they bobble a little

when she leans forward. But the sad thing about her is that

the juice has been cut off. She sits there like a dead storage

battery; her face is out of plumb—it needs a little animation,

a sudden spurt of juice to bring it back into focus. Moldorf is

jumping around in front of her like a fat toad. His flesh

quivers. He slips and it is difficult for him to roll over again

on his belly. She prods him with her thick toes. His eyes

protrude a little further. “Kick me again, Fanny, that was

good.” She gives him a good prod this time—it leaves a

permanent dent in his paunch. His face is close to the

carpet; the wattles are joggling in the nap of the rug. He

livens up a bit, flips around, springs from furniture to

furniture. “Fanny, you are marvelous!” He is sitting now on

her shoulder. He bites a little piece from her ear, just a little

tip from the lobe where it doesn’t hurt. But she’s still dead—

all storage battery and no juice. He falls on her lap and lies

there quivering like a toothache. He is all warm now and

helpless. His belly glistens like a patent-leather shoe. In the

sockets of his eyes a pair of fancy vest buttons. “Unbutton

my eyes, Fanny, I want to see you better!” Fanny carries

him to bed and drops a little hot wax over his eyes. She puts

rings around his navel and a thermometer up his ass. She

places him and he quivers again. Suddenly he’s dwindled,

shrunk completely out of sight. She searches all over for

him, in her intestines, everywhere. Something is tickling her

—she doesn’t know where exactly. The bed is full of toads

and fancy vest buttons. “Fanny, where are you?” Something

is tickling her—she can’t say where. The buttons are

dropping off the bed. The toads are climbing the walls. A

tickling and a tickling. “Fanny, take the wax out of my eyes!

I want to look at you!” But Fanny is laughing, squirming with

laughter. There is something inside her, tickling and tickling.

She’ll die laughing if she doesn’t find it. “Fanny, the trunk is

full of beautiful things. Fanny, do you hear me?” Fanny is

laughing, laughing like a fat worm. Her belly is swollen with

laughter. Her legs are getting blue. “O God, Morris, there is

something tickling me. … I can’t help it!”

Sunday! Left the Villa Borghese a little before noon, just as

Boris was getting ready to sit down to lunch. I left out of a

sense of delicacy, because it really pains Boris to see me

sitting there in the studio with an empty belly. Why he

doesn’t invite me to lunch with him I don’t know. He says he

can’t afford it, but that’s no excuse. Anyway, I’m delicate

about it. If it pains him to eat alone in my presence it would

probably pain him more to share his meal with me. It’s not

my place to pry into his secret affairs.

Dropped in at the Cronstadts’ and they were eating too. A

young chicken with wild rice. Pretended that I had eaten

already, but I could have torn the chicken from the baby’s

hands. This is not just false modesty—it’s a kind of

perversion, I’m thinking. Twice they asked me if I wouldn’t

join them. No! No! Wouldn’t even accept a cup of coffee

after the meal. I’m delicat, I am! On the way out I cast a

lingering glance at the bones lying on the baby’s plate—

there was still meat on them.

Prowling around aimlessly. A beautiful day—so far. The

Rue de Buci is alive, crawling. The bars wide open and the

curbs lined with bicycles. All the meat and vegetable

markets are in full swing. Arms loaded with truck bandaged

in newspapers. A fine Catholic Sunday—in the morning, at

least.

High noon and here I am standing on an empty belly at

the confluence of all these crooked lanes that reek with the

odor of food. Opposite me is the Hôtel de Louisiane. A grim

old hostelry known to the bad boys of the Rue de Buci in the

good old days. Hotels and food, and I’m walking about like a

leper with crabs gnawing at my entrails. On Sunday

mornings there’s a fever in the streets. Nothing like it

anywhere, except perhaps on the East Side, or down around

Chatham Square. The Rue de l’Echaudé is seething. The

streets twist and turn, at every angle a fresh hive of activity.

Long queues of people with vegetables under their arms,

turning in here and there with crisp, sparkling appetites.

Nothing but food, food, food. Makes one delirious.

Pass the Square de Furstenberg. Looks different now. at

high noon. The other night when I passed by it was

deserted, bleak, spectral. In the middle of the square four

black trees that have not yet begun to blossom. Intellectual

trees, nourished by the paving stones. Like T. S. Eliot’s

verse. Here, by God, if Marie Laurencin ever brought her

Lesbians out into the open, would be the place for them to

commune. Très lesbienne ici. Sterile, hybrid, dry as Boris’

heart.

In the little garden adjoining the Eglise St. Germain are a

few dismounted gargoyles. Monsters that jut forward with a

terrifying plunge. On the benches other monsters—old

people, idiots, cripples, epileptics. Snoozing there quietly,

waiting for the dinner bell to ring. At the Galerie Zak across

the way some imbecile has made a picture of the cosmos—

on the flat. A painter’s cosmos! Full of odds and ends, bric-a-

bric. In the lower left-hand corner, however, there’s an

anchor—and a dinner bell. Salute! Salute! O Cosmos!

Still prowling around. Mid afternoon. Guts rattling.

Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomblike from the

water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace façade. They

hang there like an idée fixe in the mind of a monomaniac.

An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some

Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his

head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns

the golden sands to mud. Bookstore with some of Raoul

Dufy’s drawings in the window. Drawings of charwomen with

rosebushes between their legs. A treatise on the philosophy

of Joan Miró. The philosophy, mind you!

In the same window: A Man Cut In Slices! Chapter one:

the man in the eyes of his family. Chapter two: the same in

the eyes of his mistress. Chapter three:—No chapter three.

Have to come back tomorrow for chapters three and four.

Every day the window trimmer turns a fresh page. A man

cut in slices. … You can’t imagine how furious I am not to

have thought of a title like that! Where is this bloke who

writes “the same in the eyes of his mistress… the same in

the eyes of… the same…?” Where is this guy? Who is he? I

want to hug him. I wish to Christ I had had brains enough to

think of a title like that—instead of Crazy Cock and the other

fool things I invented. Well, fuck a duck! I congratulate him

just the same.

I wish him luck with his fine title. Here’s another slice for

you—for your next book! Ring me up some day. I’m living at

the Villa Borghese. We’re all dead, or dying, or about to die.

We need good titles. We need meat—slices and slices of

meat—juicy tenderloins, porterhouse steaks, kidneys,

mountain oysters, sweetbreads. Some day, when I’m

standing at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, I’m

going to remember this title and I’m going to put down

everything that goes on in my noodle—caviar, rain drops,

axle grease, vermicelli, liverwurst—slices and slices of it.

And I’ll tell no one why, after I had put everything down, I

suddenly went home and chopped the baby to pieces. Un

acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupé en

tranches!

How a man can wander about all day on an empty belly,

and even get an erection once in a while, is one of those

mysteries which are too easily explained by the “anatomists

of the soul.” On a Sunday afternoon, when the shutters are

down and the proletariat possesses the street in a kind of

dumb torpor, there are certain thoroughfares which remind

one of nothing less than a big chancrous cock laid open

longitudinally. And it is just these highways, the Rue St.

Denis, for instance, or the Faubourg du Temple—which

attract one irresistibly, much as in the old days, around

Union Square or the upper reaches of the Bowery, one was

drawn to the dime museums where in the show windows

there were displayed wax reproductions of various organs of

the body eaten away by syphilis and other venereal

diseases. The city sprouts out like a huge organism diseased

in every part, the beautiful thoroughfares only a little less

repulsive because they have been drained of their pus.

At the Cité Nortier, somewhere near the Place du Combat,

I pause a few minutes to drink in the full squalor of the

scene. It is a rectangular court like many another which one

glimpses through the low passageways that flank the old

arteries of Paris. In the middle of the court is a clump of

decrepit buildings which have so rotted away that they have

collapsed on one another and formed a sort of intestinal

embrace. The ground is uneven, the flagging slippery with

slime. A sort of human dump heap which has been filled in

with cinders and dry garbage. The sun is setting fast. The

colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre

to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. Here and

there a lopsided monster stands in the window blinking like

an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces

and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the

forceps. A fetid odor seeps from the walls, the odor of a

mildewed mattress. Europe—medieval, grotesque,

monstrous: a symphony in B-mol. Directly across the street

the Ciné Combat offers its distinguished clientele Metropolis.

Coming away my mind reverts to a book that I was

reading only the other day. “The town was a shambles;

corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers,

lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to

eat them; the black death and other plagues crept in to

keep them company, and the English came marching on;

the while the danse macabre whirled about the tombs in all

the cemeteries. …” Paris during the days of Charles the

Silly! A lovely book! Refreshing, appetizing. I’m still

enchanted by it. About the patrons and prodromes of the

Renaissance I know little, but Madam Pimpernel, la belle

boulangère, and Maître Jehan Crapotte, l’ orfèvre, these

occupy my spare thoughts still. Not forgetting Rodin, the evil

genius of The Wandering Jew, who practiced his nefarious

ways “until the day when he was en-flamed and outwitted

by the octoroon Cecily.” Sitting in the Square du Temple,

musing over the doings of the horse knackers led by Jean

Caboche, I have thought long and ruefully over the sad fate

of Charles the Silly. A halfwit, who prowled about the halls of

his Hôtel St. Paul, garbed in the filthiest rags, eaten away by

ulcers and vermin, gnawing a bone, when they flung him

one, like a mangy dog. At the Rue des Lions I looked for the

stones of the old menagerie where he once fed his pets. His

only diversion, poor dolt, aside from those card games with

his “low-born companion,” Odette de Champdivers.

It was a Sunday afternoon, much like this, when I first met

Germaine. I was strolling along the Boulevard

Beaumarchais, rich by a hundred francs or so which my wife

had frantically cabled from America. There was a touch of

spring in the air, a poisonous, malefic spring that seemed to

burst from the manholes. Night after night I had been

coming back to this quarter, attracted by certain leprous

streets which only revealed their sinister splendor when the

light of day had oozed away and the whores commenced to

take up their posts. The Rue du Pasteur-Wagner is one I

recall in particular, corner of the Rue Amelot which hides

behind the boulevard like a slumbering lizard. Here, at the

neck of the bottle, so to speak, there was always a cluster of

vultures who croaked and flapped their dirty wings, who

reached out with sharp talons and plucked you into a

doorway. Jolly, rapacious devils who didn’t even give you

time to button your pants when it was over. Led you into a

little room off the street, a room without a window usually,

and, sitting on the edge of the bed with skirts tucked up

gave you a quick inspection, spat on your cock, and placed

it for you. While you washed yourself another one stood at

the door and, holding her victim by the hand, watched

nonchalantly as you gave the finishing touches to your

toilet.

Germaine was different. There was nothing to tell me so

from her appearance. Nothing to distinguish her from the

other trollops who met each afternoon and evening at the

Café de l’Eléphant. As I say, it was a spring day and the few

francs my wife had scraped up to cable me were jingling in

my pocket. I had a sort of vague premonition that I would

not reach the Bastille without being taken in tow by one of

these buzzards. Sauntering along the boulevard I had

noticed her verging toward me with that curious trot-about

air of a whore and the run-down heels and cheap jewelry

and the pasty look of their kind which the rouge only

accentuates. It was not difficult to come to terms with her.

We sat in the back of the little tabac called L’Eléphant and

talked it over quickly. In a few minutes we were in a five

franc room on the Rue Amelot, the curtains drawn and the

covers thrown back. She didn’t rush things, Germaine. She

sat on the bidet soaping herself and talked to me pleasantly

about this and that; she liked the knickerbockers I was

wearing. Très chic! she thought. They were once, but I had

worn the seat out of them; fortunately the jacket covered

my ass. As she stood up to dry herself, still talking to me

pleasantly, suddenly she dropped the towel and, advancing

toward me leisurely, she commenced rubbing her pussy

affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it,

patting it, patting it. There was something about her

eloquence at that moment and the way she thrust that

rosebush under my nose which remains unforgettable; she

spoke of it as if it were some extraneous object which she

had acquired at great cost, an object whose value had

increased with time and which now she prized above

everything in the world. Her words imbued it with a peculiar

fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ, but a

treasure, a magic, potent treasure, a God-given thing—and

none the less so because she traded it day in and day out

for a few pieces of silver. As she flung herself on the bed,

with legs spread wide apart, she cupped it with her hands

and stroked it some more, murmuring all the while in that

hoarse, cracked voice of hers that it was good, beautiful, a

treasure, a little treasure. And it was good, that little pussy

of hers! That Sunday afternoon, with its poisonous breath of

spring in the air, everything clicked again. As we stepped

out of the hotel I looked her over again in the harsh light of

day and I saw clearly what a whore she was—the gold teeth,

the geranium in her hat, the rundown heels, etc., etc. Even

the fact that she had wormed a dinner out of me and

cigarettes and taxi hadn’t the least disturbing effect upon

me. I encouraged it, in fact. I liked her so well that after

dinner we went back to the hotel again and took another

shot at it. “For love,” this time. And again that big, bushy

thing of hers worked its bloom and magic. It began to have

an independent existence—for me too. There was Germaine

and there was that rosebush of hers. I liked them separately

and I liked them together.

As I say, she was different, Germaine. Later, when she

discovered my true circumstances, she treated me nobly—

blew me to drinks, gave me credit, pawned my things,

introduced me to her friends, and so on. She even

apologized for not lending me money, which I understood

quite well after her maquereau had been pointed out to me.

Night after night I walked down the Boulevard Beaumarchais

to the little tabac where they all congregated and I waited

for her to stroll in and give me a few minutes of her precious

time.

When some time later I came to write about Claude, it

was not Claude that I was thinking of but Germaine. … “All

the men she’s been with and now you, just you, and barges

going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life

flowing through you, through her, through all the guys

behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the

sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you,

annihilating you.” That was for Germaine! Claude was not

the same, though I admired her tremendously—I even

thought for a while that I loved her. Claude had a soul and a

conscience; she had refinement, too, which is bad—in a

whore. Claude always imparted a feeling of sadness; she left

the impression, unwittingly, of course, that you were just

one more added to the stream which fate had ordained to

destroy her. Unwittingly, I say, because Claude was the last

person in the world who would consciously create such an

image in one’s mind. She was too delicate, too sensitive for

that. At bottom, Claude was just a good French girl of

average breed and intelligence whom life had tricked

somehow; something in her there was which was not tough

enough to withstand the shock of daily experience. For her

were meant those terrible words of Louis-Philippe, “and a

night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have

closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to

stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it

had been masticated by every mouth.” Germaine, on the

other hand, was a whore from the cradle; she was

thoroughly satisfied with her role, enjoyed it in fact, except

when her stomach pinched or her shoes gave out, little

surface things of no account, nothing that ate into her soul,

nothing that created torment. Ennui! That was the worst she

ever felt. Days there were, no doubt, when she had a

bellyful, as we say—but no more than that! Most of the time

she enjoyed it—or gave the illusion of enjoying it. It made a

difference of course, whom she went with—or came with.

But the principal thing was a man. A man! That was what

she craved. A man with something between his legs that

could tickle her, that could make her writhe in ecstasy,

make her grab that bushy twat of hers with both hands and

rub it joyfully, boastfully, proudly, with a sense of

connection, a sense of life. That was the only place where

she experienced any life—down there where she clutched

herself with both hands.

Germaine was a whore all the way through, even down to

her good heart, her whore’s heart which is not really a good

heart but a lazy one, an indifferent, flaccid heart that can be

touched for a moment, a heart without reference to any

fixed point within, a big, flaccid whore’s heart that can

detach itself for a moment from its true center. However vile

and circumscribed was that world which she had created for

herself, nevertheless she functioned in it superbly. And that

in itself is a tonic thing. When, after we had become well

acquainted, her companions would twit me, saying that I

was in love with Germaine (a situation almost inconceivable

to them), I would say: “Sure! Sure, I’m in love with her! And

what’s more, I’m going to be faithful to her!” A lie, of

course, because I could no more think of loving Germaine

than I could think of loving a spider; and if I was faithful, it

was not to Germaine but to that bushy thing she carried

between her legs. Whenever I looked at another woman I

thought immediately of Germaine, of that flaming bush

which she had left in my mind and which seemed

imperishable. It gave me pleasure to sit on the terrasse of

the little tabac and observe her as she plied her trade,

observe her as she resorted to the same grimaces, the

same tricks, with others as she had with me. “She’s doing

her job!”—that’s how I felt about it, and it was with

approbation that I regarded her transactions. Later, when I

had taken up with Claude, and I saw her night after night

sitting in her accustomed place, her round little buttocks

chubbily ensconced in the plush settee, I felt a sort of

inexpressible rebellion toward her; a whore, it seemed to

me, had no right to be sitting there like a lady, waiting

timidly for someone to approach and all the while

abstemiously sipping her chocolat. Germaine was a hustler.

She didn’t wait for you to come to her—she went out and

grabbed you. I remember so well the holes in her stockings,

and the torn ragged shoes; I remember too how she stood

at the bar and with blind, courageous defiance threw a

strong drink down her stomach and marched out again.

A hustler! Perhaps it wasn’t so pleasant to smell that boozy

breath of hers, that breath compounded of weak coffee,

cognac, apéritifs, Pernods and all the other stuff she guzzled

between times, what to warm herself and what to summon

up strength and courage, but the fire of it penetrated her, it

glowed down there between her legs where women ought to

glow, and there was established that circuit which makes

one feel the earth under his legs again. When she lay there

with her legs apart and moaning, even if she did moan that

way for any and everybody, it was good, it was a proper

show of feeling. She didn’t stare up at the ceiling with a

vacant look or count the bedbugs on the wallpaper; she kept

her mind on her business, she talked about the things a

man wants to hear when he’s climbing over a woman.

Whereas Claude—well, with Claude there was always a

certain delicacy, even when she got under the sheets with

you. And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate

whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away

when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when

he’s burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants

to see everything, even how they make water. And while it’s

all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature

coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to

be served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was

ignorant and lusty, she put her heart and soul into her work.

She was a whore all the way through—and that was her

virtue!

Easter came in like a frozen hare—but it was fairly warm in

bed. Today it is lovely again and along the Champs-Elysées

at twilight it is like an outdoor seraglio choked with dark-

eyed houris. The trees are in full foliage and of a verdure so

pure, so rich, that it seems as though they were still wet and

glistening with dew. From the Palais du Louvre to the Etoile

it is like a piece of music for the pianoforte. For five days I

have not touched the typewriter nor looked at a book; nor

have I had a single idea in my head except to go to the

American Express. At nine this morning I was there, just as

the doors were being opened, and again at one o’clock. No

news. At four-thirty I dash out of the hotel, resolved to make

a last-minute stab at it. Just as I turn the corner I brush

against Walter Pach. Since he doesn’t recognize me, and

since I have nothing to say to him, I make no attempt to

arrest him. Later, when I am stretching my legs in the

Tuileries his figure reverts to mind. He was a little stooped,

pensive, with a sort of serene yet reserved smile on his face.

I wonder, as I look up at this softly enameled sky, so faintly

tinted, which does not bulge today with heavy rain clouds

but smiles like a piece of old china, I wonder what goes on in

the mind of this man who translated the four thick volumes

of the History of Art when he takes in this blissful cosmos

with his drooping eye.

Along the Champs-Elysées, ideas pouring from me like

sweat. I ought to be rich enough to have a secretary to

whom I could dictate as I walk, because my best thoughts

always come when I am away from the machine.

Walking along the Champs-Elysées I keep thinking of my

really superb health. When I say “health” I mean optimism,

to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the

nineteenth century. I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans.

Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. “I have only to talk

about a meal,” he say, “and you’re radiant!” It’s a fact. The

mere thought of a meal—another meal—rejuvenates me. A

meal! That means something to go on—a few solid hours of

work, an erection possibly. I don’t deny it. I have health,

good solid, animal health. The only thing that stands

between me and a future is a meal, another meal.

As for Carl, he’s not himself these days. He’s upset, his

nerves are jangled. He says he’s ill, and I believe him, but I

don’t feel badly about it.

I can’t. In fact, it makes me laugh. And that offends him,

of course. Everything wounds him—my laughter, my

hunger, my persistence, my insouciance, everything. One

day he wants to blow his brains out because he can’t stand

this lousy hole of a Europe any more; the next day he talks

of going to Arizona “where they look you square in the eye.”

“Do it!” I say. “Do one thing or the other, you bastard, but

don’t try to cloud my healthy eye with your melancholy

breath!”

But that’s just it! In Europe one gets used to doing

nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get

contaminated. You rot.

Fundamentally Carl is a snob, an aristocratic little prick

who lives in a dementia praecox kingdom all his own. “I hate

Paris!” he whines. “All these stupid people playing cards all

day… look at them! And the writing! What’s the use of

putting words together? I can be a writer without writing,

can’t I? What does it prove if I write a book? What do we

want with books anyway? There are too many books

already. …”

My eye, but I’ve been all over that ground—years and

years ago. I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a

fuck any more what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me.

I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No

past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day.

Today! Le bel aujourd’hui!

He has one day a week off, Carl, and on that day he’s

more miserable, if you can imagine it, than on any other day

of the week. Though he professes to despise food, the only

way he seems to enjoy himself on his day off is to order a

big spread. Perhaps he does it for my benefit—I don’t know,

and I don’t ask. If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of

vices, let him—it’s O.K. with me. Anyway, last Tuesday, after

squandering what he had on a big spread, he steers me to

the Dôme, the last place in the world I would seek on my

day off. But one not only gets acquiescent here—one gets

supine.

Standing at the Dôme bar is Marlowe, soused to the ears.

He’s been on a bender, as he calls it, for the last five days.

That means a continuous drunk, a peregrination from one

bar to another, day and night without interruption, and

finally a layoff at the American Hospital. Marlowe’s bony

emaciated face is nothing but a skull perforated by two

deep sockets in which there are buried a pair of dead clams.

His back is covered with sawdust—he has just had a little

snooze in the water closet. In his coat pocket are the proofs

for the next issue of his review, he was on his way to the

printer with the proofs, it seems, when some one inveigled

him to have a drink. He talks about it as though it happened

months ago. He takes out the proofs and spreads them over

the bar; they are full of coffee stains and dried spittle. He

tries to read a poem which he had written in Greek, but the

proofs are undecipherable. Then he decides to deliver a

speech, in French, but the gérant puts a stop to it. Marlowe

is piqued: his one ambition is to talk a French which even

the garçon will understand. Of Old French he is a master; of

the surrealists he has made excellent translations; but to

say a simple thing like “get the hell out of here, you old

prick!”—that is beyond him. Nobody understands Marlowe’s

French, not even the whores. For that matter, it’s difficult

enough to understand his English when he’s under the

weather. He blabbers and spits like a confirmed stutterer…

no sequence to his phrases. “You pay!” that’s one thing he

manages to get out clearly.

Even if he is fried to the hat some fine preservative

instinct always warns Marlowe when it is time to act. If there

is any doubt in his mind as to how the drinks are going to be

paid he will be sure to put on a stunt. The usual one is to

pretend that he is going blind. Carl knows all his tricks by

now, and so when Marlowe suddenly claps his hands to his

temples and begins to act it out Carl gives him a boot in the

ass and says: “Come out of it, you sap! You don’t have to do

that with me!”

Whether it is a cunning piece of revenge or not, I don’t

know, but at any rate Marlowe is paying Carl back in good

coin. Leaning over us confidentially he relates in a hoarse,

croaking voice a piece of gossip which he picked up in the

course of his peregrinations from bar to bar. Carl looks up in

amazement. He’s pale under the gills. Marlowe repeats the

story with variations. Each time Carl wilts a little more. “But

that’s impossible!” he finally blurts out. “No it ain’t!” croaks

Marlowe. “You’re gonna lose your job… I got it straight.” Carl

looks at me in despair. “Is he shitting me, that bastard?” he

murmurs in my ear. And then aloud—“What am I going to do

now? I’ll never find another job. It took me a year to land

this one.”

This, apparently, is all that Marlowe has been waiting to

hear. At last he has found someone worse off than himself.

“They be hard times!” he croaks, and his bony skull glows

with a cold, electric fire.

Leaving the Dôme Marlowe explains between hiccups that

he’s got to return to San Francisco. He seems genuinely

touched now by Carl’s helplessness. He proposes that Carl

and I take over the review during his absence. “I can trust

you, Carl,” he says. And then suddenly he gets an attack, a

real one this time. He almost collapses in the gutter. We

haul him to a bistro at the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and sit

him down. This time he’s really got It—a blinding headache

that makes him squeal and grunt and rock himself to and fro

like a dumb brute that’s been struck by a sledge hammer.

We spill a couple of Fernet-Brancas down his throat, lay him

out on the bench and cover his eyes with his muffler. He lies

there groaning. In a little while we hear him snoring.

“What about his proposition?” says Carl. “Should we take

it up? He says he’ll give me a thousand francs when he

comes back. I know he won’t, but what about it?” He looks

at Marlowe sprawled out on the bench, lifts the muffler from

his eyes, and puts it back again. Suddenly a mischievous

grin lights up his face. “Listen, Joe,” he says, beckoning me

to move closer, “we’ll take him up on it. We’ll take his lousy

review over and we’ll fuck him good and proper.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why we’ll throw out all the other contributors and we’ll

fill it with our own shit—that’s what!”

“Yeah, but what kind of shit?”

“Any kind… he won’t be able to do anything about it. We’ll

fuck him good and proper. One good number and after that

the magazine’ll be finished. Are you game, Joe?”

Grinning and chuckling we lift Marlowe to his feet and

haul him to Carl’s room. When we turn on the lights there’s

a woman in the bed waiting for Carl. “I forgot all about her,”

says Carl. We turn the cunt loose and shove Marlowe into

bed. In a minute or so there’s a knock at the door. It’s Van

Norden. He’s all aflutter. Lost a plate of false teeth—at the

Bal Nègre, he thinks. Anyway, we get to bed, the four of us.

Marlowe stinks like a smoked fish.

In the morning Marlowe and Van Norden leave to search

for the false teeth. Marlowe is blubbering. He imagines they

are his teeth.

It is my last dinner at the dramatist’s home. They have just

rented a new piano, a concert grand. I meet Sylvester

coming out of the florist’s with a rubber plant in his arms.

He asks me if I would carry it for him while he goes for the

cigars. One by one I’ve fucked myself out of all these free

meals which I had planned so carefully. One by one the

husbands turn against me, or the wives. As I walk along with

the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few

months back when the idea first occurred to me. I was

sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding

ring which I had tried to pawn off on a garçon at the Dôme.

He had offered me six francs for it and I was in a rage about

it. But the belly was getting the upper hand. Ever since I left

Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie. It was so much a

part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it. It was

one of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold. Worth a

dollar and a half once, maybe more. For three years we

went along without a wedding ring and then one day when I

was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a

jewelry window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was

stuffed with wedding rings. When I got to the pier Mona was

not to be seen. I waited for the last passenger to descend

the gangplank, but no Mona. Finally I asked to be shown the

passenger list. Her name was not on it. I slipped the

wedding ring on my pinkie and there it stayed. Once I left it

in a public bath, but then I got it back again. One of the

orange blossoms had fallen off. Anyway, I was sitting there

on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when

suddenly someone clapped me on the back. To make it brief,

I got a meal and a few francs besides. And then it occurred

to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if

only he had the courage to demand it. I went immediately

to a café and wrote a dozen letters. “Would you let me have

dinner with you once a week? Tell me what day is most

convenient for you.” It worked like a charm. I was not only

fed… I was feasted. Every night I went home drunk. They

couldn’t do enough for me, these generous once-a-week

souls. What happened to me between times was none of

their affair. Now and then the thoughtful ones presented me

with cigarettes, or a little pin money. They were all obviously

relieved when they realized that they would see me only

once a week. And they were still more relieved when I said

—“it won’t be necessary any more.” They never asked why.

They congratulated me, and that was all. Often the reason

was I had found a better host; I could afford to scratch off

the ones who were a pain in the ass. But that thought never

occurred to them. Finally I had a steady, solid program—a

fixed schedule. On Tuesdays I knew it would be this kind of a

meal and on Fridays that kind. Cronstadt, I knew, would

have champagne for me and homemade apple pie. And Carl

would invite me out, take me to a different restaurant each

time, order rare wines, invite me to the theater afterward or

take me to the Cirque Médrano. They were curious about

one another, my hosts. Would ask me which place I liked

best, who was the best cook, etc. I think I liked Cronstadt’s

joint best of all, perhaps because he chalked the meal up on

the wall each time. Not that it eased my conscience to see

what I owed him, because I had no intention of paying him

back nor had he any illusions about being requited. No, it

was the odd numbers which intrigued me. He used to figure

it out to the last centime. If I was to pay in full I would have

had to break a sou. His wife was a marvelous cook and she

didn’t give a fuck about those centimes Cronstadt added up.

She took it out of me in carbon copies. A fact! If I hadn’t any

fresh carbons for her when I showed up, she was crestfallen.

And for that I would have to take the little girl to the

Luxembourg next day, play with her for two or three hours,

a task which drove me wild because she spoke nothing but

Hungarian and French. They were a queer lot on the whole,

my hosts. …

At Tania’s I look down on the spread from the balcony.

Moldorf is there, sitting beside his idol. He is warming his

feet at the hearth, a monstrous look of gratitude in his

watery eyes. Tania is running over the adagio. The adagio

says very distinctly: no more words of love! I am at the

fountain again, watching the turtles pissing green milk.

Sylvester has just come back from Broadway with a heart

full of love. All night I was lying on a bench outside the mall

while the globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss and the

horses stiffened with priapic fury galloped like mad without

ever touching the ground. All night long I smell the lilacs in

the little dark room where she is taking down her hair, the

lilacs that I bought for her as she went to meet Sylvester. He

came back with a heart full of love, she said, and the lilacs

are in her hair, her mouth, they are choking her armpits.

The room is swimming with love and turtle piss and warm

lilacs and the horses are galloping like mad. In the morning

dirty teeth and scum on the windowpanes; the little gate

that leads to the mall is locked. People are going to work

and the shutters are rattling like coats of mail. In the

bookstore opposite the fountain is the story of Lake Chad,

the silent lizards, the gorgeous gamboge tints. All the letters

I wrote her, drunken ones with a blunt stub, crazy ones with

bits of charcoal, little pieces from bench to bench,

firecrackers, doilies, tutti-frutti; they will be going over them

now, together, and he will compliment me one day. He will

say, as he flicks his cigar ash: “Really, you write quite well.

Let’s see, you’re a surrealist, aren’t you?” Dry, brittle voice,

teeth full of dandruff, solo for solar plexus, g for gaga.

Upon the balcony with the rubber plant and the adagio

going on down below. The keys are black and white, then

black, then white, then white and black. And you want to

know if you can play something for me. Yes, play something

with those big thumbs of yours. Play the adagio since that’s

the only goddamned thing you know. Play it, and then cut

off your big thumbs.

That adagio! I don’t know why she insists on playing it all

the time. The old piano wasn’t good enough for her; she had

to rent a concert grand—for the adagio! When I see her big

thumbs pressing the keyboard and that silly rubber plant

beside me I feel like that madman of the North who threw

his clothes away and, sitting naked in the wintry boughs,

threw nuts down into the herring-frozen sea. There is

something exasperating about this movement, something

abortively melancholy about it, as if it had been written in

lava, as if it had the color of lead and milk mixed. And

Sylvester, with his head cocked to one side like an

auctioneer, Sylvester says: “Play that other one you were

practicing today.” It’s beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a

good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So

lenitive. Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a

breath of fresh air. Yes, her fingers are very supple,

extraordinary supple. She does batik work too. Would you

like to try a Bulgarian cigarette? I say, pigeon breast, what’s

that other movement I like so well? The scherzo! Ah, yes,

the scherzo! Excellent, the scherzo! Count Waldemar von

Schwisseneinzug speaking. Cool, dandruff eyes. Halitosis.

Gaudy socks. And croutons in the pea soup, if you please.

We always have pea soup Friday nights. Won’t you try a

little red wine? The red wine goes with the meat, you know.

A dry, crisp voice. Have a cigar, won’t you? Yes, I like my

work, but I don’t attach any importance to it. My next play

will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe.

Revolving drums with calcium lights. O’Neill is dead. I think,

dear, you should lift your foot from the pedal more

frequently. Yes, that part is very nice… very nice, don’t you

think? Yes, the characters go around with microphones in

their trousers. The locale is in Asia, because the

atmospheric conditions are more conducive. Would you like

to try a little Anjou? We bought it especially for you….

All through the meal this patter continues. It feels exactly

as if he had taken out that circumcised dick of his and was

peeing on us. Tania is bursting with the strain. Ever since he

came back with a heart full of love this monologue has been

going on. He talks while he’s undressing, she tells me—a

steady stream of warm piss, as though his bladder had been

punctured. When I think of Tania crawling into bed with this

busted bladder I get enraged. To think that a poor, withered

bastard with those cheap Broadway plays up his sleeve

should be pissing on the woman I love. Calling for red wine

and revolving drums and croutons in his pea soup. The

cheek of him! To think that he can lie beside that furnace I

stoked for him and do nothing but make water! My God,

man, you ought to get down on your knees and thank me.

Don’t you see that you have a woman in your house now?

Can’t you see she’s bursting? You telling me with those

strangulated adenoids of yours—“well now, I’ll tell you…

there’s two ways of looking at that. …” Fuck your two ways

of looking at things! Fuck your pluralistic universe, and your

Asiatic acoustics! Don’t hand me your red wine or your

Anjou… hand her over… she belongs to me! You go sit by

the fountain, and let me smell the lilacs! Pick the dandruff

out of your eyes… and take that damned adagio and wrap it

in a pair of flannel pants! And the other little movement

too… all the little movements that you make with your weak

bladder. You smile at me so confidently, so calculatingly. I’m

flattering the ass off you, can’t you tell? While I listen to

your crap she’s got her hand on me—but you don’t see that.

You think I like to suffer—that’s my role, you say. O.K. Ask

her about it! She’ll tell you how I suffer. “You’re cancer and

delirium,” she said over the phone the other day. She’s got

it now, the cancer and delirium, and soon you’ll have to pick

the scabs. Her veins are bursting, I tell you, and your talk is

all sawdust. No matter how much you piss away you’ll never

plug up the holes. What did Mr. Wren say? Words are

loneliness. I left a couple of words for you on the tablecloth

last night—you covered them with your elbows.

He’s put a fence around her as if she were a dirty,

stinking bone of a saint. If he only had the courage to say

“Take her!” perhaps a miracle would occur. Just that. Take

her! and I swear everything would come out all right.

Besides, maybe I wouldn’t take her—did that ever occur to

him, I wonder? Or I might take her for a while and hand her

back, improved. But putting up a fence around her, that

won’t work. You can’t put a fence around a human being. It

ain’t done any more. … You think, you poor, withered

bastard, that I’m no good for her, that I might pollute her,

desecrate her. You don’t know how palatable is a polluted

woman, how a change of semen can make a woman bloom!

You think a heart full of love is enough, and perhaps it is, for

the right woman, but you haven’t got a heart any more…

you are nothing but a big, empty bladder. You are

sharpening your teeth and cultivating your growl. You run at

her heels like a watchdog and you piddle everywhere. She

didn’t take you for a watchdog… she took you for a poet.

You were a poet once, she said. And now what are you?

Courage, Sylvester, courage! Take the microphone out of

your pants. Put your hind leg down and stop making water

everywhere. Courage, I say, because she’s ditched you

already. She’s contaminated, I tell you, and you might as

well take down the fence. No use asking me politely if the

coffee doesn’t taste like carbolic acid: that won’t scare me

away. Put rat poison in the coffee, and a little ground glass.

Make some boiling hot urine and drop a few nutmegs in it.

…

It is a communal life I have been living for the last few

weeks. I have had to share myself with others, principally

with some crazy Russians, a drunken Dutchman, and a big

Bulgarian woman named Olga. Of the Russians there are

chiefly Eugene and Anatole.

It was just a few days ago that Olga got out of the

hospital where she had her tubes burned out and lost a little

excess weight. However she doesn’t look as if she had gone

through much suffering. She weighs almost as much as a

camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has

halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like

excelsior. She has two big warts on her chin from which

there sprouts a clump of little hairs; she is growing a

mustache.

The day after Olga was released from the hospital she

commenced making shoes again. At six in the morning she

is at her bench; she knocks out two pairs of shoes a day.

Eugene complains that Olga is a burden, but the truth is

that Olga is supporting Eugene and his wife with her two

pairs of shoes a day. If Olga doesn’t work there is no food.

So everyone endeavors to pull Olga to bed on time, to give

her enough food to keep going, etc.

Every meal starts off with soup. Whether it be onion soup,

tomato soup, vegetable soup, or what not, the soup always

tastes the same. Mostly it tastes as if a dish rag had been

stewed in it—slightly sour, mildewed, scummy. I see Eugene

hiding it away in the commode after the meal. It stays there,

rotting away, until the next meal. The butter, too, is hidden

away in the commode; after three days it tastes like the big

toe of a cadaver.

The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly

appetizing, especially when the cooking is done in a room in

which there is not the slightest form of ventilation. No

sooner than I open the door I feel ill. But Eugene, as soon as

he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and pulls

back the bedsheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep

out the sunlight. Poor Eugene! He looks about the room at

the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bed-sheets and the

wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: “I am

a slave!” Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times.

And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings.

But about the smell of rancid butter. … There are good

associations too. When I think of this rancid butter I see

myself standing in a little, old-world courtyard, a very

smelly, very dreary courtyard. Through the cracks in the

shutters strange figures peer out at me… old women with

shawls, dwarfs, rat-faced pimps, bent Jews, midinettes,

bearded idots. They totter out into the courtyard to draw

water or to rinse the slop pails. One day Eugene asked me if

I would empty the pail for him. I took it to the corner of the

yard. There was a hole in the ground and some dirty paper

lying around the hole. The little well was slimy with

excrement, which in English is shit. I tipped the pail and

there was a foul, gurgling splash followed by another and

unexpected splash. When I returned the soup was dished

out. All through the meal I thought of my toothbrush—it is

getting old and the bristles get caught in my teeth.

When I sit down to eat I always sit near the window. I am

afraid to sit on the other side of the table—it is too close to

the bed and the bed is crawling. I can see bloodstains on

the gray sheets if I look that way, but I try not to look that

way. I look out on the courtyard where they are rinsing the

slop pails.

The meal is never complete without music. As soon as the

cheese is passed around Eugene jumps up and reaches for

the guitar which hangs over the bed. It is always the same

song. He says he has fifteen or sixteen songs in his

repertoire, but I have never heard more than three. His

favorite is Charmant poème d’amour. It is full of angoisse

and tristesse.

In the afternoon we go to the cinema which is cool and

dark. Eugene sits at the piano in the big pit and I sit on a

bench up front. The house is empty, but Eugene sings as if

he had for audience all the crowned heads of Europe. The

garden door is open and the odor of wet leaves sops in and

the rain blends with Eugene’s angoisse and tristesse. At

midnight, after the spectators have saturated the hall with

perspiration and foul breaths, I return to sleep on a bench.

The exit light, swimming in a halo of tobacco smoke, sheds

a faint light on the lower corner of the asbestos curtain; I

close my eyes every night on an artificial eye. …

Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the

world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in

the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to

the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung.

The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but

there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which

says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I

can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed;

in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my

artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A

woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk;

she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined

with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes;

there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before

the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and

Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the

corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse

is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse

from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window.

She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from

the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve

and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the

woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean

out the window and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it

is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The

sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs

everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.

I have been ejected from the world like a cartridge. A

deep fog has settled down, the earth is smeared with frozen

grease. I can feel the city palpitating, as if it were a heart

just removed from a warm body. The windows of my hotel

are festering and there is a thick, acrid stench as of

chemicals burning. Looking into the Seine I see mud and

desolation, street lamps drowning, men and women choking

to death, the bridges covered with houses, slaughterhouses

of love. A man is standing against a wall with an accordion

strapped to his belly; his hands are cut off at the wrists, but

the accordion writhes between his stumps like a sack of

snakes. The universe has dwindled; it is only a block long

and there are no stars, no trees, no rivers. The people who

live here are dead; they make chairs which other people sit

on in their dreams. In the middle of the street is a wheel and

in the hub of the wheel a gallows is fixed. People already

dead are trying frantically to mount the gallows, but the

wheel is turning too fast. …

Something was needed to put me right with myself. Last

night I discovered it: Papini. It doesn’t matter to me whether

he’s a chauvinist, a little Christer, or a near sighted pedant.

As a failure he’s marvelous. …

The books he read—at eighteen! Not only Homer, Dante,

Goethe, not only Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, not only

Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, not only Walt Whitman, Edgar

Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Villon, Carducci, Manzoni, Lope de

Vega, not only Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel,

Darwin, Spencer, Huxley—not only these but all the small

fry in between. This on page 18. Alors, on page 232 he

breaks down and confesses. I know nothing, he admits. I

know the titles, I have compiled bibliographies, I have

written critical essays, I have maligned and defamed. … I

can talk for five minutes or for five days, but then I give out,

I am squeezed dry.

Follows this: “Everybody wants to see me. Everybody

insists on talking to me. People pester me and they pester

others with inquiries about what I am doing. How am I? Am I

quite well again? Do I still go for my walks in the country?

Am I working? Have I finished my book? Will I begin another

soon?

“A skinny monkey of a German wants me to translate his

works. A wild-eyed Russian girl wants me to write an

account of my life for her. An American lady wants the very

latest news about me. An American gentleman will send his

carriage to take me to dinner—just an intimate, confidential

talk, you know. An old schoolmate and chum of mine, of ten

years ago, wants me to read him all that I write as fast as I

write it. A painter friend I know expects me to pose for him

by the hour. A newspaperman wants my present address.

An acquaintance, a mystic, inquires about the state of my

soul; another, more practical, about the state of my

pocketbook. The president of my club wonders if I will make

a speech for the boys! A lady, spiritually inclined, hopes I

will come to her house for tea as often as possible. She

wants to have my opinion of Jesus Christ, and—what do I

think of that new medium?…

“Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you

people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul,

suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion,

confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me

for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to

play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a

slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of

you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I

know? Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon to lift

her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first

man in a tailored suit who comes along?

“I am a man who would live an heroic life and make the

world more endurable in his own sight. If, in some moment

of weakness, of relaxation, of need, I blow off steam—a bit

of red-hot rage cooled off in words—a passionate dream,

wrapped and tied in imagery—well, take it or leave it… but

don’t bother me!

“I am a free man—and I need my freedom. I need to be

alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in

seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the

streets without companions, without conversation, face to

face with myself, with only the music of my heart for

company. What do you want of me? When I have something

to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give

it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your

compliments humiliate me! Your tea poisons me! I owe

nothing to any one. I would be responsible to God alone—if

He existed!”

It seems to me that Papini misses something by a hair’s

breadth when he talks of the need to be alone. It is not

difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is

always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is

loneliness.

The artist, I call myself. So be it. A beautiful nap this

afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae. Generated

enough ideas to last me three days. Chock-full of energy

and nothing to do about it. Decide to go for a walk. In the

street I change my mind. Decide to go to the movies. Can’t

go to the movies—short a few sous. A walk then. At every

movie house I stop and look at the billboards, then at the

price list. Cheap enough, these opium joints, but I’m short

just a few sous. If it weren’t so late I might go back and cash

an empty bottle.

By the time I get to the Rue Amélie I’ve forgotten all

about the movies. The Rue Amélie is one of my favorite

streets. It is one of those streets which by good fortune the

municipality has forgotten to pave. Huge cobblestones

spreading convexly from one side of the street to the other.

Only one block long and narrow. The Hôtel Pretty is on this

street. There is a little church, too, on the Rue Amélie. It

looks as though it were made especially for the President of

the Republic and his private family. It’s good occasionally to

see a modest little church. Paris is full of pompous

cathedrals.

Pont Alexandre III. A great windswept space approaching

the bridge. Gaunt, bare trees mathematically fixed in their

iron grates; the gloom of the Invalides welling out of the

dome and overflowing the dark streets adjacent to the

Square. The morgue of poetry. They have him where they

want him now, the great warrior, the last big man of Europe.

He sleeps soundly in his granite bed. No fear of him turning

over in his grave. The doors are well bolted, the lid is on

tight. Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it

was only your corpse!

The river is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights. I

don’t know what it is rushes up in me at the sight of this

dark, swift-moving current, but a great exultation lifts me

up, affirms the deep wish that is in me never to leave this

land. I remember passing this way the other morning on my

way to the American Express, knowing in advance that

there would be no mail for me, no check, no cable, nothing,

nothing. A wagon from the Galeries Lafayette was rumbling

over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking

through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of

roofs with a cold fire. I recall now how the driver leaned out

and looked up the river toward Passy way. Such a healthy,

simple, approving glance, as if he were saying to himself:

“Ah, spring is coming!” And God knows, when spring comes

to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells

in paradise. But it was not only this—it was the intimacy

with which his eye rested upon the scene. It was his Paris. A

man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this

way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people—the

proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the

earth, it seems to me. And yet they give the illusion of being

at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all

other metropolitan souls.

When I think of New York I have a very different feeling.

New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance.

New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate.

There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the

more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A

constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a

test tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs

the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous

reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.

When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this

Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks

my guts. New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks

swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints

that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the

lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of

faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters,

jobs, crimes, loves. … A whole city erected over a hollow pit

of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. And

Forty-second Street! The top of the world, they call it.

Where’s the bottom then? You can walk along with your

hands out and they’ll put cinders in your cap. Rich or poor,

they walk along with head thrown back and they almost

break their necks looking up at their beautiful white prisons.

They walk along like blind geese and the searchlights spray

their empty faces with flecks of ecstasy.

Life,” said Emerson, “consists in what a man is thinking all

day.” If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine.

I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at

night.

But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in double

harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a

poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only

remains to be a man. Last week I thought the problem of

living was about to be solved, thought I was on the way to

becoming self-supporting. It happened that I ran across

another Russian—Serge is his name. He lives in Suresnes

where there is a little colony of émigrés and run-down

artists. Before the revolution Serge was a captain in the

Imperial Guard; he stands six foot three in his stockinged

feet and drinks vodka like a fish. His father was an admiral,

or something like that, on the battleship “Potemkin.”

I met Serge under rather peculiar circumstances. Sniffing

about for food I found myself toward noon the other day in

the neighborhood of the Folies-Bergère—the back entrance,

that is to say, in the narrow little lane with an iron gate at

one end. I was dawdling about the stage entrance, hoping

vaguely for a casual brush with one of the butterflies, when

an open truck pulls up to the sidewalk. Seeing me standing

there with my hands in my pockets the driver, who was

Serge, asks me if I would give him a hand unloading the iron

barrels. When he learns that I am an American and that I’m

broke he almost weeps with joy. He has been looking high

and low for an English teacher, it seems. I help him roll the

barrels of insecticide inside and I look my fill at the

butterflies fluttering about the wings. The incident takes on

strange proportions to me—the empty house, the sawdust

dolls bouncing in the wings, the barrels of germicide, the

battleship “Potemkin”—above all, Serge’s gentleness. He is

big and tender, a man every inch of him, but with a

woman’s heart.

In the café nearby—Café des Artistes—he proposes

immediately to put me up; says he will put a mattress on

the floor in the hallway. For the lessons he says he will give

me a meal every day, a big Russian meal, or if for any

reason the meal is lacking then five francs. It sounds

wonderful to me—wonderful. The only question is, how will I

get from Suresnes to the American Express every day?

Serge insists that we begin at once—he gives me the

carfare to get out to Suresnes in the evening. I arrive a little

before dinner, with my knapsack, in order to give Serge a

lesson. There are some guests on hand already—seems as

though they always eat in a crowd, everybody chipping in.

There are eight of us at the table—and three dogs. The

dogs eat first. They eat oatmeal. Then we commence. We

eat oatmeal too—as an hors d’oeuvre. “Chez nous,” says

Serge, with a twinkle in his eye, “c’est pour les chiens, les

Quaker Oats. Ici pour le gentleman. Ça va.” After the

oatmeal, mushroom soup and vegetables; after that bacon

omelet, fruit, red wine, vodka, coffee, cigarettes. Not bad,

the Russian meal. Everyone talks with his mouth full. Toward

the end of the meal Serge’s wife, who is a lazy slut of an

Armenian, flops on the couch and begins to nibble bonbons.

She fishes around in the box with her fat fingers, nibbles a

tiny piece to see if there is any juice inside, and then throws

it on the floor for the dogs.

The meal over, the guests rush away. They rush away

precipitously, as if they feared a plague. Serge and I are left

with the dogs—his wife has fallen asleep on the couch.

Serge moves about unconcernedly, scraping the garbage for

the dogs. “Dogs like very much,” he says. “Very good for

dogs. Little dog he has worms… he is too young yet.” He

bends down to examine some white worms lying on the

carpet between the dog’s paws. Tries to explain about the

worms in English, but his vocabulary is lacking. Finally he

consults the dictionary. “Ah,” he says, looking at me

exultantly, “tapeworms!” My response is evidently not very

intelligent. Serge is confused. He gets down on his hands

and knees to examine them better. He picks one up and lays

it on the table beside the fruit. “Huh, him not very beeg,” he

grunts. “Next lesson you learn me worms, no? You are gude

teacher. I make progress with you. …”

Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odor of the

germicide stifles me. A pungent, acrid odor that seems to

invade every pore of my body. The food begins to repeat on

me—the Quaker Oats, the mushrooms, the bacon, the fried

apples. I see the little tapeworm lying beside the fruit and

all the varieties of worms that Serge drew on the tablecloth

to explain what was the matter with the dog. I see the

empty pit of the Folies-Bergère and in every crevice there

are cockroaches and lice and bedbugs; I see people

scratching themselves frantically, scratching and scratching

until the blood comes. I see the worms crawling over the

scenery like an army of red ants, devouring everything in

sight. I see the chorus girls throwing away their gauze tunics

and running through the aisles naked; I see the spectators

in the pit throwing off their clothes also and scratching each

other like monkeys.

I try to quiet myself. After all, this is a home I’ve found,

and there’s a meal waiting for me every day. And Serge is a

brick, there’s no doubt about that. But I can’t sleep. It’s like

going to sleep in a morgue. The mattress is saturated with

embalming fluid. It’s a morgue for lice, bedbugs,

cockroaches, tapeworms. I can’t stand it. I won’t stand it!

After all I’m a man, not a louse.

In the morning I wait for Serge to load the truck. I ask him

to take me in to Paris. I haven’t the heart to tell him I’m

leaving. I leave the knapsack behind, with the few things

that were left me. When we get to the Place Péreire I jump

out. No particular reason for getting off here. No particular

reason for anything. l’m free—that’s the main thing. …

Light as a bird I flit about from one quarter to another. It’s

as though I had been released from prison. I look at the

world with new eyes. Everything interests me profoundly.

Even trifles. On the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière I stop

before the window of a physical culture establishment.

There are photographs showing specimens of manhood

“before and after.” All frogs. Some of them are nude, except

for a pince-nez or a beard. Can’t understand how these

birds fall for parallel bars and dumbbells. A frog should have

just a wee bit of a paunch, like the Baron de Charlus. He

should wear a beard and a pince-nez, but he should never

be photographed in the nude. He should wear twinkling

patent-leather boots and in the breast pocket of his sack

coat there should be a white handkerchief protruding about

three-quarters of an inch above the vent. If possible, he

should have a red ribbon in his lapel, through the

buttonhole. He should wear pajamas on going to bed.

Approaching the Place Clichy toward evening I pass the

little whore with the wooden stump who stands opposite the

Gaumont Palace day in and day out. She doesn’t look a day

over eighteen. Has her regular customers, I suppose. After

midnight she stands there in her black rig rooted to the

spot. Back of her is the little alleyway that blazes like an

inferno. Passing her now with a light heart she reminds me

somehow of a goose tied to a stake, a goose with a diseased

liver, so that the world may have its pâté de foie gras. Must

be strange taking that wooden stump to bed with you. One

imagines all sorts of things—splinters, etc. However, every

man to his taste!

Going down the Rue des Dames I bump into Peck-over,

another poor devil who works on the paper. He complains of

getting only three or four hours’ sleep a night—has to get up

at eight in the morning to work at a dentist’s office. It isn’t

for the money he’s doing it, so he explains—it’s for to buy

himself a set of false teeth. “It’s hard to read proof when

you’re dropping with sleep,” he says. “The wife, she thinks

I’ve got a cinch of it. What would we do if you lost your job?

she says.” But Peckover doesn’t give a damn about the job;

it doesn’t even allow him spending money. He has to save

his cigarette butts and use them for pipe tobacco. His coat

is held together with pins. He has halitosis and his hands

sweat. And only three hours’ sleep a night. “It’s no way to

treat a man,” he says. “And that boss of mine, he bawls the

piss out of me if I miss a semicolon.” Speaking of his wife he

adds: “That woman of mine, she’s got no fucking gratitude, I

tell you!”

In parting I manage to worm a franc fifty out of him. I try

to squeeze another fifty centimes out of him but it’s

impossible. Anyway I’ve got enough for a coffee and

croissants. Near the Gare St. Lazare there’s a bar with

reduced prices.

As luck would have it I find a ticket in the lavabo for a

concert. Light as a feather now I go there to the Salle

Gaveau. The usher looks ravaged because I overlook giving

him his little tip. Every time he passes me he looks at me

inquiringly, as if perhaps I will suddenly remember.

It’s so long since I’ve sat in the company of well-dressed

people that I feel a bit panic-stricken. I can still smell the

formaldehyde. Perhaps Serge makes deliveries here too. But

nobody is scratching himself, thank God. A faint odor of

perfume… very faint. Even before the music begins there is

that bored look on people’s faces. A polite form of self-

imposed torture, the concert. For a moment, when the

conductor raps with his little wand, there is a tense spasm

of concentration followed almost immediately by a general

slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the

steady, uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra. My mind is

curiously alert; it’s as though my skull had a thousand

mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are

like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water. I’ve never

been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing

escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It’s as though I

had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window

and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards.

I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and

my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with

reverberations. How long this lasts I have no idea; I have

lost all sense of time and place. After what seems like an

eternity there follows an interval of semiconsciousness

balanced by such a calm that I feel a great lake inside me, a

lake of iridescent sheen, cool as jelly; and over this lake,

rising in great swooping spirals, there emerge flocks of birds

of passage with long slim legs and brilliant plumage. Flock

after flock surge up from the cool, still surface of the lake

and, passing under my clavicles, lose themselves in the

white sea of space. And then slowly, very slowly, as if an old

woman in a white cap were going the rounds of my body,

slowly the windows are closed and my organs drop back into

place. Suddenly the lights flare up and the man in the white

box whom I had taken for a Turkish officer turns out to be a

woman with a flowerpot on her head.

There is a buzz now and all those who want to cough,

cough to their heart’s content. There is the noise of feet

shuffling and seats slamming, the steady, frittering noise of

people moving about aimlessly, of people fluttering their

programs and pretending to read and then dropping their

programs and scuffling under their seats, thankful for even

the slightest accident which will prevent them from asking

themselves what they were thinking about because if they

knew they were thinking about nothing they would go mad.

In the harsh glare of the lights they look at each other

vacuously and there is a strange tenseness with which they

stare at one another. And the moment the conductor raps

again they fall back into a cataleptic state—they scratch

themselves unconsciously or they remember suddenly a

show window in which there was displayed a scarf or a hat;

they remember every detail of that window with amazing

clarity, but where it was exactly, that they can’t recall; and

that bothers them, keeps them wide awake, restless, and

they listen now with redoubled attention because they are

wide awake and no matter how wonderful the music is they

will not lose consciousness of that show window and that

scarf that was hanging there, or the hat.

And this fierce attentiveness communicates itself; even

the orchestra seems galvanized into an extraordinary

alertness. The second number goes off like a top—so fast

indeed that when suddenly the music ceases and the lights

go up some are stuck in their seats like carrots, their jaws

working convulsively, and if you suddenly shouted in their

ear Brahms, Beethoven, Mendeleev, Herzegovina, they

would answer without thinking—4, 967, 289.

By the time we get to the Debussy number the

atmosphere is completely poisoned. I find myself wondering

what it feels like, during intercourse, to be a woman—

whether the pleasure is keener, etc. Try to imagine

something penetrating my groin, but have only a vague

sensation of pain. I try to focus, but the music is too

slippery. I can think of nothing but a vase slowly turning and

the figures dropping off into space. Finally there is only light

turning, and how does light turn, I ask myself. The man next

to me is sleeping soundly. He looks like a broker, with his big

paunch and his waxed mustache. I like him thus. I like

especially that big paunch and all that went into the making

of it. Why shouldn’t he sleep soundly? If he wants to listen

he can always rustle up the price of a ticket. I notice that

the better dressed they are the more soundly they sleep.

They have an easy conscience, the rich. If a poor man dozes

off, even for a few seconds, he feels mortified; he imagines

that he has committed a crime against the composer.

In the Spanish number the house was electrified.

Everybody sat on the edge of his seat—the drums woke

them up. I thought when the drums started it would keep up

forever. I expected to see people fall out of the boxes or

throw their hats away. There was something heroic about it

and he could have driven us stark mad, Ravel, if he had

wanted to. But that’s not Ravel. Suddenly it all died down. It

was as if he remembered, in the midst of his antics, that he

had on a cutaway suit. He arrested himself. A great mistake,

in my humble opinion. Art consists in going the full length. If

you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or

TNT. Ravel sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable

that people must digest before going to bed.

My thoughts are spreading. The music is slipping away

from me, now that the drums have ceased. People

everywhere are composed to order. Under the exit light is a

Werther sunk in despair; he is leaning on his two elbows, his

eyes are glazed. Near the door, huddled in a big cape,

stands a Spaniard with a sombrero in his hand. He looks as

if he were posing for the “Balzac” of Rodin. From the neck

up he suggests Buffalo Bill. In the gallery opposite me, in

the front row, sits a woman with her legs spread wide apart;

she looks as though she had lockjaw, with her neck thrown

back and dislocated. The woman with the red hat who is

dozing over the rail—marvelous if she were to have a

hemorrhage! if suddenly she spilled a bucketful on those

stiff shirts below. Imagine these bloody no-accounts going

home from the concert with blood on their dickies!

Sleep is the keynote. No one is listening any more.

Impossible to think and listen. Impossible to dream even

when the music itself is nothing but a dream. A woman with

white gloves holds a swan in her lap. The legend is that

when Leda was fecundated she gave birth to twins.

Everybody is giving birth to something—everybody but the

Lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat

wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of

sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is

piercing her ears. Little phrases from California, whales with

big fins, Zanzibar, the Alcazar. When along the Guadalquivir

there were a thousand mosques ashimmer. Deep in the

icebergs and the days all lilac. The Money Street with two

white hitching posts. The gargoyles… the man with the

Jaworski nonsense… the river lights… the…

In America I had a number of Hindu friends, some good,

some bad, some indifferent. Circumstances had placed me

in a position where fortunately I could be of aid to them; I

secured jobs for them, I harbored them, and I fed them

when necessary. They were very grateful, I must say; so

much so, in fact that they made my life miserable with their

attentions. Two of them were saints, if I know what a saint

is; particularly Gupte who was found one morning with his

throat cut from ear to ear. In a little boarding house in

Greenwich Village he was found one morning stretched out

stark naked on the bed, his flute beside him, and his throat

gashed, as I say, from ear to ear. It was never discovered

whether he had been murdered or whether he had

committed suicide. But that’s neither here nor there. …

I’m thinking back to the chain of circumstances which has

brought me finally to Nanantatee’s place. Thinking how

strange it is that I should have forgotten all about

Nanantatee until the other day when lying in a shabby hotel

room on the Rue Cels. I’m lying there on the iron bed

thinking what a zero I have become, what a cipher, what a

nullity, when bango! out pops the word: NONENTITY! That’s

what we called him in New York—Nonentity. Mister

Nonentity.

I’m lying on the floor now in that gorgeous suite of rooms

he boasted of when he was in New York. Nanantatee is

playing the good Samaritan; he has given me a pair of itchy

blankets, horse blankets they are, in which I curl up on the

dusty floor. There are little jobs to do every hour of the day

—that is, if I am foolish enough to remain indoors. In the

morning he wakes me rudely in order to have me prepare

the vegetables for his lunch: onions, garlic, beans, etc. His

friend, Kepi, warns me not to eat the food—he says it’s bad.

Bad or good what difference? Food! That’s all that matters.

For a little food I am quite willing to sweep his carpets with a

broken broom, to wash his clothes and to scrape the crumbs

off the floor as soon as he has finished eating. He’s become

absolutely immaculate since my arrival: everything has to

be dusted now, the chairs must be arranged a certain way,

the clock must ring, the toilet must flush properly. … A crazy

Hindu if ever there was one! And parsimonious as a string

bean. I’ll have a great laugh over it when I get out of his

clutches, but just now I’m a prisoner, a man without caste,

an untouchable. …

If I fail to come back at night and roll up in the horse

blankets he says to me on arriving: “Oh, so you didn’t die

then? I thought you had died.” And though he knows I’m

absolutely penniless he tells me every day about some

cheap room he has just discovered in the neighborhood.

“But I can’t take a room yet, you know that,” I say. And then,

blinking his eyes like a Chink, he answers smoothly: “Oh,

yes, I forgot that you had no money. I am always forgetting,

Endree. … But when the cable comes… when Miss Mona

sends you the money, then you will come with me to look

for a room, eh?” And in the next breath he urges me to stay

as long as I wish—“six months… seven months, Endree…

you are very good for me here.”

Nanantatee is one of the Hindus I never did anything for

in America. He represented himself to me as a wealthy

merchant, a pearl merchant, with a luxurious suite of rooms

on the Rue Lafayette, Paris, a villa in Bombay, a bungalow in

Darjeeling. I could see from first glance that he was a half-

wit, but then half-wits sometimes have the genius to amass

a fortune. I didn’t know that he paid his hotel bill in New

York by leaving a couple of fat pearls in the proprietor’s

hands. It seems amusing to me now that this little duck

once swaggered about the lobby of that hotel in New York

with an ebony cane, bossing the bellhops around, ordering

luncheons for his guests, calling up the porter for theater

tickets, renting a taxi by the day, etc., etc., all without a sou

in his pocket. Just a string of fat pearls around his neck

which he cashed one by one as time wore on. And the

fatuous way he used to pat me on the back, thank me for

being so good to the Hindu boys—“they are all very

intelligent boys, Endree… very intelligent!” Telling me that

the good lord so-and-so would repay me for my kindness.

That explains now why they used to giggle so, these

intelligent Hindu boys, when I suggested that they touch

Nanantatee for a five-spot.

Curious now how the good lord so-and-so is requiting me

for my benevolence. I’m nothing but a slave to this fat little

duck. I’m at his beck and call continually. He needs me here

—he tells me so to my face. When he goes to the crap-can

he shouts: “Endree, bring me a pitcher of water, please. I

must wipe myself.” He wouldn’t think of using toilet paper,

Nanantatee. Must be against his religion. No, he calls for a

pitcher of water and a rag. He’s delicate, the fat little duck.

Sometimes when I’m drinking a cup of pale tea in which he

has dropped a rose leaf he comes alongside of me and lets

a loud fart, right in my face. He never says “Excuse me!”

The word must be missing from his Gujarati dictionary.

The day I arrived at Nanantatee’s apartment he was in

the act of performing his ablutions, that is to say, he was

standing over a dirty bowl trying to work his crooked arm

around toward the back of his neck. Beside the bowl was a

brass goblet which he used to change the water. He

requested me to be silent during the ceremony. I sat there

silently, as I was bidden, and watched him as he sang and

prayed and spat now and then into the washbowl. So this is

the wonderful suite of rooms he talked about in New York!

The Rue Lafayette! It sounded like an important street to me

back there in New York. I thought only millionaires and pearl

merchants inhabited the street. It sounds wonderful, the

Rue Lafayette, when you’re on the other side of the water.

So does Fifth Avenue, when you’re over here. One can’t

imagine what dumps there are on these swell streets.

Anyway, here I am at last, sitting in the gorgeous suite of

rooms on the Rue Lafayette. And this crazy duck with his

crooked arm is going through the ritual of washing himself.

The chair on which I’m sitting is broken, the bedstead is

falling apart, the wallpaper is in tatters, there is an open

valise under the bed crammed with dirty wash. From where I

sit I can glance at the miserable courtyard down below

where the aristocracy of the Rue Lafayette sit and smoke

their clay pipes. I wonder now, as he chants the doxology,

what that bungalow in Darjeeling looks like. It’s

interminable, his chanting and praying.

He explains to me that he is obliged to wash in a certain

prescribed way—his religion demands it. But on Sundays he

takes a bath in the tin tub—the Great I AM will wink at that,

he says. When he’s dressed he goes to the cupboard, kneels

before a little idol on the third shelf, and repeats the mumbo

jumbo. If you pray like that every day, he says, nothing will

happen to you. The good lord what’s his name never forgets

an obedient servant. And then he shows me the crooked

arm which he got in a taxi accident on a day doubtless when

he had neglected to rehearse the complete song and dance.

His arm looks like a broken compass; it’s not an arm any

more, but a knucklebone with a shank attached. Since the

arm has been repaired he has developed a pair of swollen

glands in the armpit—fat little glands, exactly like a dog’s

testicles. While bemoaning his plight he remembers

suddenly that the doctor had recommended a more liberal

diet. He begs me at once to sit down and make up a menu

with plenty of fish and meat. “And what about oysters,

Endree—for le petit frère?” But all this is only to make an

impression on me. He hasn’t the slightest intention of

buying himself oysters, or meat, or fish. Not as long as I am

there, at least. For the time being we are going to nourish

ourselves on lentils and rice and all the dry foods he has

stored away in the attic. And the butter he bought last

week, that won’t go to waste either. When he commences to

cure the butter the smell is unbearable. I used to run out at

first, when he started frying the butter, but now I stick it out.

He’d be only too delighted if he could make me vomit up my

meal—that would be something else to put away in the

cupboard along with the dry bread and the moldy cheese

and the little grease cakes that he makes himself out of the

stale milk and the rancid butter.

For the last five years, so it seems, he hasn’t done a

stroke of work, hasn’t turned over a penny. Business has

gone to smash. He talks to me about pearls in the Indian

ocean—big fat ones on which you can live for a lifetime. The

Arabs are ruining the business, he says. But meanwhile he

prays to the lord so-and-so every day, and that sustains

him. He’s on a marvelous footing with the deity: knows just

how to cajole him, how to wheedle a few sous out: of him.

It’s a pure commercial relationship. In exchange for the

flummery before the cabinet every day he gets his ration of

beans and garlic, to say nothing of the swollen testicles

under his arm. He is confident that everything will turn out

well in the end. The pearls will sell again some day, maybe

five years hence, maybe twenty—when the Lord

Boomaroom wishes it. “And when the business goes,

Endree, you will get ten per cent—for writing the letters. But

first Endree, you must write the letter to find out if we can

get credit from India. It will take about six months for an

answer, maybe seven months… the boats are not fast in

India.” He has no conception of time at all, the little duck.

When I ask him if he has slept well he will say: “Ah, yes,

Endree, I sleep very well… I sleep sometimes ninety-two

hours in three days.”

Mornings he is usually too weak to do any work. His arm!

That poor broken crutch of an arm! I wonder sometimes

when I see him twisting it around the back of his neck how

he will ever get it into place again. If it weren’t for that little

paunch he carries he’d remind me of one of those

contortionists at the Cirque Médrano. All he needs is to

break a leg. When he sees me sweeping the carpet, when

he sees what a cloud of dust I raise, he begins to cluck like a

pygmy. “Good! Very good, Endree. And now I will pick up the

knots.” That means that there are a few crumbs of dust

which I have overlooked; it is a polite way he has of being

sarcastic.

Afternoons there are always a few cronies from the pearl

market dropping in to pay him a visit. They’re all very

suave, butter-tongued bastards with soft, doelike eyes; they

sit around the table drinking the perfumed tea with a loud

hissing noise while Nanantatee jumps up and down like a

jack-in-the-box or points to a crumb on the floor and says in

his smooth slippery voice—“Will you please to pick that up,

Endree.” When the guests arrive he goes unctuously to the

cupboard and gets out the dry crusts of bread which he

toasted maybe a week ago and which taste strongly now of

the moldy wood. Not a crumb is thrown away. If the bread

gets too sour he takes it downstairs to the concierge who, so

he says, has been very kind to him. According to him, the

concierge is delighted to get the stale bread—she makes

bread pudding with it.

One day my friend Anatole came to see me. Nanantatee

was delighted. Insisted that Anatole stay for tea. Insisted

that he try little grease cakes and the stale bread. “You

must come every day,” he says, “and teach me Russian.

Fine language, Russian… I want to speak it. How do you say

that again, Endree—borsht? You will write that down for me,

please, Endree. …” And I must write it on the typewriter, no

less, so that he can observe my technique. He bought the

typewriter, after he had collected on the bad arm, because

the doctor recommended it as a good exercise. But he got

tired of the typewriter shortly—it was an English typewriter.

When he learned that Anatole played the mandolin he

said: “Very good! You must come every day and teach me

the music. I will buy a mandolin as soon as business is

better. It is good for my arm.” The next day he borrows a

phonograph from the concierge. “You will please teach me

to dance, Endree. My stomach is too big.” I am hoping that

he will buy a porterhouse steak some day so that I can say

to him: “You will please bite it for me, Mister Nonentity. My

teeth are not strong!”

As I said a moment ago, ever since my arrival he has

become extraordinarily meticulous. “Yesterday,” he says,

“you made three mistakes, Endree. First, you forgot to close

the toilet door and so all night it makes boom-boom;

second, you left the kitchen window open and so the

window is cracked this morning. And you forgot to put out

the milk bottle! Always you will put out the milk bottle

please, before you go to bed, and in the morning you will

please bring in the bread.”

Every day his friend Kepi drops in to see if any visitors

have arrived from India. He waits for Nanantatee to go out

and then he scurries to the cupboard and devours the sticks

of bread that are hidden away in a glass jar. The food is no

good, he insists, but he puts it away like a rat. Kepi is a

scrounger, a sort of human tick who fastens himself to the

hide of even the poorest compatriot. From Kepi’s standpoint

they are all nabobs. For a Manila cheroot and the price of a

drink he will suck any Hindu’s ass. A Hindu’s, mind you, but

not an Englishman’s. He has the address of every

whorehouse in Paris, and the rates. Even from the ten franc

joints he gets his little commission. And he knows the

shortest way to any place you want to go. He will ask you

first if you want to go by taxi; if you say no, he will suggest

the bus, and if that is too high then the streetcar or the

metro. Or he will offer to walk you there and save a franc or

two, knowing very well that it will be necessary to pass a

tabac on the way and that you will please be so good as to

buy me a little cheroot.

Kepi is interesting, in a way, because he has absolutely no

ambition except to get a fuck every night. Every penny he

makes, and they are damned few, he squanders in the

dance halls. He has a wife and eight children in Bombay, but

that does not prevent him from proposing marriage to any

little femme de chambre who is stupid and credulous

enough to be taken in by him. He has a little room on the

Rue Condorcet for which he pays sixty francs a month. He

papered it all himself. Very proud of it, too. He uses violet-

colored ink in his fountain pen because it lasts longer. He

shines his own shoes, presses his own pants, does his own

laundry. For a little cigar, a cheroot, if you please, he will

escort you all over Paris. If you stop to look at a shirt or a

collar button his eyes flash. “Don’t buy it here,” he will say.

“They ask too much. I will show you a cheaper place.” And

before you have time to think about it he will whisk you

away and deposit you before another show window where

there are the same ties and shirts and collar buttons—

maybe it’s the very same store! but you don’t know the

difference. When Kepi hears that you want to buy something

his soul becomes animated. He will ask you so many

questions and drag you to so many places that you are

bound to get thirsty and ask him to have a drink, whereupon

you will discover to your amazement that you are again

standing in a tabac—maybe the same tabac!—and Kepi is

saying again in that small unctuous voice: “Will you please

be so good as to buy me a little cheroot?” No matter what

you propose doing, even if it’s only to walk around the

corner, Kepi will economize for you. Kepi will show you the

shortest way, the cheapest place, the biggest dish, because

whatever you have to do you must pass a tabac, and

whether there is a revolution or a lockout or a quarantine

Kepi must be at the Moulin Rouge or the Olympia or the

Ange Rouge when the music strikes up.

The other day he brought a book for me to read. It was

about a famous suit between a holy man and the editor of

an Indian paper. The editor, it seems had openly accused

the holy man of leading a scandalous life; he went further,

and accused the holy man of being diseased. Kepi says it

must have been the great French pox, but Nanantatee avers

that it was the Japanese clap. For Nanantatee everything

has to be a little exaggerated. At any rate, says Nanantatee

cheerily: “You will please tell me what it says, Endree. I can’t

read the book—it hurts my arm.” Then, by way of

encouraging me—“it is a fine book about the fucking,

Endree. Kepi has brought it for you. He thinks about nothing

but the girls. So many girls he fucks—just like Krishna. We

don’t believe in that business, Endree. …”

A little later he takes me upstairs to the attic which is

loaded down with tin cans and crap from India wrapped in

burlap and firecracker paper. “Here is where I bring the

girls,” he says. And then rather wistfully: “I am not a very

good fucker, Endree. I don’t screw the girls any more. I hold

them in my arms and I say the words. I like only to say the

words now.” It isn’t necesary to listen any further: I know

that he is going to tell me about his arm. I can see him lying

there with that broken hinge dangling from the side of the

bed. But to my surprise he adds: “I am no good for the

fucking, Endree. I never was a very good fucker. My brother,

he is good! Three times a day, every day! And Kepi, he is

good—just like Krishna.”

His mind is fixed now on the “fucking business.”

Downstairs, in the little room where he kneels before the

open cabinet, he explains to me how it was when he was

rich and his wife and the children were here. On holidays he

would take his wife to the House of All Nations and hire a

room for the night. Every room was appointed in a different

style. His wife liked it there very much. “A wonderful place

for the fucking, Endree. I know all the rooms. …”

The walls of the little room in which we are sitting are

crammed with photographs. Every branch of the family is

represented, it is like a cross section of the Indian empire.

For the most part the members of this genealogical tree

look like withered leaves: the women are frail and they have

a startled, frightened look in their eyes: the men have a

keen, intelligent look, like educated chimpanzees. They are

all there, about ninety of them, with their white bullocks,

their dung cakes, their skinny legs, their old-fashioned

spectacles; in the background, now and then, one catches a

glimpse of the parched soil, of a crumbling pediment, of an

idol with crooked arms, a sort of human centipede. There is

something so fantastic, so incongruous about this gallery

that one is reminded inevitably of the great spawn of

temples which stretch from the Himalayas to the tip of

Ceylon, a vast jumble of architecture, staggering in beauty

and at the same time monstrous, hideously monstrous

because the fecundity which seethes and ferments in the

myriad ramifications of design seems to have exhausted the

very soil of India itself. Looking at the seething hive of

figures which swarm the façades of the temples one is

overwhelmed by the potency of these dark, handsome

peoples who mingled their mysterious streams in a sexual

embrace that has lasted thirty centuries or more. These frail

men and women with piercing eyes who stare out of the

photographs seem like the emaciated shadows of those

virile, massive figures who incarnated themselves in stone

and fresco from one end of India to the other in order that

the heroic myths of the races who here intermingled should

remain forever entwined in the hearts of their countrymen.

When I look at only a fragment of these spacious dreams of

stone, these toppling, sluggish edifices studded with gems,

coagulated with human sperm, I am overwhelmed by the

dazzling splendor of those imaginative flights which enabled

half a billion people of diverse origins to thus incarnate the

most fugitive expressions of their longing.

It is a strange, inexplicable medley of feelings which

assails me now as Nanantatee prattles on about the sister

who died in childbirth. There she is on the wall, a frail, timid

thing of twelve or thirteen clinging to the arm of a dotard. At

ten years of age she was given in wedlock to this old roué

who had already buried five wives. She had seven children,

only one of whom survived her. She was given to the aged

gorilla in order to keep the pearls in the family. As she was

passing away, so Nanantatee puts it, she whispered to the

doctor: “I am tired of this fucking. … I don’t want to fuck any

more, doctor.” As he relates this to me he scratches his

head solemnly with his withered arm. “The fucking business

is bad, Endree,” he says. “But I will give you a word that will

always make you lucky; you must say it every day, over and

over, a million times you must say it. It is the best word

there is, Endree… say it now… OOMAHARUMOOMA!”

“OOMARABOO. …”

“No, Endree… like this… OOMAHARUMOOMA!”

“OOMAMABOOMBA. …”

“No, Endree… like this. …”

… But what with the murky light, the botchy print, the

tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the

fox-trotting fleas, the lie-a-bed lice, the scum on his tongue,

the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his

pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief

from his breath, the fog of his brainfag, the tic of his

conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his

fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the

rats in his garret, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears,

since it took him a month to steal a march, he was hard-set

to memorize more than a word a week.

I suppose I would never have gotten out of Nanantatee’s

clutches if fate hadn’t intervened. One night, as luck would

have it, Kepi asked me if I wouldn’t take one of his clients to

a whorehouse nearby. The young man had just come from

India and he had not very much money to spend. He was

one of Gandhi’s men, one of that little band who made the

historic march to the sea during the salt trouble. A very gay

disciple of Gandhi’s I must say, despite the vows of

abstinence he had taken. Evidently he hadn’t looked at a

woman for ages. It was all I could do to get him as far as the

Rue Laferrière; he was like a dog with his tongue hanging

out. And a pompous, vain little devil to boot! He had decked

himself out in a corduroy suit, a beret, a cane, a Windsor tie;

he had bought himself two fountain pens, a kodak, and

some fancy underwear. The money he was spending was a

gift from the merchants of Bombay; they were sending him

to England to spread the gospel of Gandhi.

Once inside Miss Hamilton’s joint he began to lose his

sang-froid. When suddenly he found himself surrounded by

a bevy of naked women he looked at me in consternation.

“Pick one out,” I said. “You can have your choice.” He had

become so rattled that he could scarcely look at them. “You

do it for me,” he murmured, blushing violently. I looked

them over coolly and picked out a plump young wench who

seemed full of feathers. We sat down in the reception room

and waited for the drinks. The madam wanted to know why I

didn’t take a girl also. “Yes, you take one too,” said the

young Hindu. “I don’t want to be alone with her.” So the

girls were brought in again and I chose one for myself, a

rather tall, thin one with melancholy eyes. We were left

alone, the four of us, in the reception room. After a few

moments my young Gandhi leans over and whispers

something in my ear. “Sure, if you like her better, take her,”

I said, and so, rather awkwardly and considerably

embarrassed, I explained to the girls that we would like to

switch. I saw at once that we had made a faux pas, but by

now my young friend had became gay and lecherous and

nothing would do but to get upstairs quickly and have it

over with.

We took adjoining rooms with a connecting door between.

I think my companion had in mind to make another switch

once he had satisfied his sharp, gnawing hunger. At any

rate, no sooner had the girls left the room to prepare

themselves than I hear him knocking on the door. “Where is

the toilet, please?” he asks. Not thinking that it was

anything serious I urge him to do in the bidet. The girls

return with towels in their hands. I hear him giggling in the

next room.

As I’m putting on my pants suddenly I hear a commotion

in the next room. The girl is bawling him out, calling him a

pig, a dirty little pig. I can’t imagine what he has done to

warrant such an outburst. I’m standing there with one foot

in my trousers listening attentively. He’s trying to explain to

her in English, raising his voice louder and louder until it

becomes a shriek.

I hear a door slam and in another moment the madam

bursts into my room, her face as red as a beet, her arms

gesticulating wildly. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,”

she screams, “bringing a man like that to my place! He’s a

barbarian… he’s a pig… he’s a…!” My companion is

standing behind her, in the doorway, a look of utmost

discomfiture on his face “What did you do?” I ask.

“What did he do?” yells the madam. “I’ll show you. …

Come here!” And grabbing me by the arm she drags me into

the next room. “There! There!” she screams, pointing to the

bidet.

“Come on, let’s get out,” says the Hindu boy.

“Wait a minute, you can’t get out as easily as all that.”

The madam is standing by the bidet, fuming and spitting.

The girls are standing there too, with towels in their hands.

The five of us are standing there looking at the bidet. There

are two enormous turds floating in the water. The madam

bends down and puts a towel over it. “Frightful! Frightful!”

she wails. “Never have I seen anything like this! A pig! A

dirty little pig!”

The Hindu boy looks at me reproachfully. “You should

have told me!” he says. “I didn’t know it wouldn’t go down. I

asked you where to go and you told me to use that.” He is

almost in tears.

Finally the madam takes me to one side. She has become

a little more reasonable now. After all, it was a mistake.

Perhaps the gentlemen would like to come downstairs and

order another drink—for the girls. It was a great shock to the

girls. They are not used to such things. And if the good

gentlemen will be so kind as to remember the femme de

chambre. … It is not so pretty for the femme de chambre—

that mess, that ugly mess. She shrugs her shoulders and

winks her eye. A lamentable incident. But an accident. If the

gentlemen will wait here a few moments the maid will bring

the drinks. Would the gentlemen like to have some

champagne? Yes?

“I’d like to get out of here,” says the Hindu boy weakly.

“Don’t feel so badly about it,” says the madam. “It is all

over now. Mistakes will happen sometimes. Next time you

will ask for the toilet.” She goes on about the toilet—one on

every floor, it seems. And a bathroom too. “I have lots of

English clients,” she says. “They are all gentlemen. The

gentleman is a Hindu? Charming people, the Hindus. So

intelligent. So handsome.”

When we get into the street the charming young

gentleman is almost weeping. He is sorry now that he

bought a corduroy suit and the cane and the fountain pens.

He talks about the eight vows that he took, the control of

the palate, etc. On the march to Dandi even a plate of ice

cream it was forbidden to take. He tells me about the

spinning wheel—how the little band of Satyagrahists

imitated the devotion of their master. He relates with pride

how he walked beside the master and conversed with him. I

have the illusion of being in the presence of one of the

twelve disciples.

During the next few days we see a good deal of each

other; there are interviews to be arranged with the

newspaper men and lectures to be given to the Hindus of

Paris. It is amazing to see how these spineless devils order

one another about; amazing also to see how ineffectual they

are in all that concerns practical affairs. And the jealousy

and the intrigues, the petty, sordid rivalries. Wherever there

are ten Hindus together there is India with her sects and

schisms, her racial, lingual, religious, political antagonisms.

In the person of Gandhi they are experiencing for a brief

moment the miracle of unity, but when he goes there will be

a crash, an utter relapse into that strife and chaos so

characteristic of the Indian people.

The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to

America and he has been contaminated by the cheap

idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous

bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle,

the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free

libraries, etc., etc. His ideal would be to Americanize India.

He is not at all pleased with Gandhi’s retrogressive mania.

Forward, he says, just like a YMCA man. As I listen to his

tales of America I see how absurd it is to expect of Gandhi

that miracle which will deroute the trend of destiny. India’s

enemy is not England, but America. India’s enemy is the

time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing

will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole

world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will

drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.

He thinks the Americans are a very gullible people. He

tells me about the credulous souls who succored him there

—the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Theosophists, the New

Thoughters, the Seventh-day Adventists, etc. He knew

where to sail his boat, this bright young man. He knew how

to make the tears come to his eyes at the right moment; he

knew how to take up a collection, how to appeal to the

minister’s wife, how to make love to the mother and

daughter at the same time. To look at him you would think

him a saint. And he is a saint, in the modern fashion; a

contaminated saint who talks in one breath of love,

brotherhood, bathtubs, sanitation, efficiency, etc.

The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to “the

fucking business.” He has had a full program all day—

conferences, cablegrams, interviews, photographs for the

newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice to the faithful,

etc., etc. At dinner time he decides to lay aside his troubles.

He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at

the garçon and behaves in general like the boorish little

peasant that he is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the

good places he suggests now that I show him something

more primitive. He would like to go to a very cheap place,

order two or three girls at once. I steer him along the

Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be

careful of his pocketbook. Around Aubervilliers we duck into

a cheap dive and immediately we’ve got a flock of them on

our hands. In a few minutes he’s dancing with a naked

wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls. I can see

her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the

room—and those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her

tenaciously. The table is full of beer glasses, the mechanical

piano is wheezing and gasping. The girls who are

unoccupied are sitting placidly on the leather benches,

scratching themselves peacefully just like a family of

chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in

the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited

explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail,

something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated,

completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which

permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite

aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but

insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline

form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And

like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly

free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless

determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which

commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be

giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was

responding to the dictates of an ambiance which it had

never before experienced; that which I could call myself

seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the

stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter

knew only the modulations of the nerve ends.

And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me

became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the

close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed. In

the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the

same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated.

The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the

introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic

particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the

fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter clarity

which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that

moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the

world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian

which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt

that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the

wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I

felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow

in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding

itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that

dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of

time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion

creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment

anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that

great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus

seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that

men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for

some reason or other, they should want roses. For some

reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to

accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch

himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for

only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the

hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace,

humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that

overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render

life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and

there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All

the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking

the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides

away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of

the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is

pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no

miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief.

Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be

fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like

the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.

And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle

which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing

more than these two enormous turds which the faithful

disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment,

when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there

should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a

silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is

nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps

of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than

anything which man has looked forward to. It would be

miraculous because it would be undreamed of. It would be

more miraculous than even the wildest dream because

anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has,

and probably nobody ever again will.

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for

had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for

years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to

something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter

my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute

hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a

great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I

parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him

for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward

Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to

make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what

form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me

thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had

been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The

world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a

plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a

single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for

faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already

manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at

this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on

to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I

would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a

plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to

go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to

the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I

would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the

quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime

and distress? Had one single element of man’s nature been

altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant

march of history? By what he calls the better part of his

nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme

limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as

a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been

picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life

again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh;

the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will

pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I

will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have

been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the

few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I

have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the

wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am

dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce

back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only

spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The

world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is

breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean

spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean

and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

At one-thirty I called on Van Norden, as per agreement. He

had warned me that if he didn’t answer it would mean that

he was sleeping with someone, probably his Georgia cunt.

Anyway, there he was, tucked away comfortably, but with

an air of weariness as usual. He wakes up cursing himself,

or cursing the job, or cursing life. He wakes up utterly bored

and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die

overnight.

I sit down by the window and give him what

encouragement I can. It is tedious work. One has to actually

coax him out of bed. Mornings—he means by mornings

anywhere between one and five p.m.—mornings, as I say,

he gives himself up to reveries. Mostly it is about the past

he dreams. About his “cunts.” He endeavors to recall how

they felt, what they said to him at certain critical moments,

where he laid them, and so on. And as he lies there,

grinning and cursing, he manipulates his fingers in that

curious, bored way of his, as though to convey the

impression that his disgust is too great for words. Over the

bedstead hangs a douche bag which he keeps for

emergencies—for the virgins whom he tracks down like a

sleuth. Even after he has slept with one of these mythical

creatures he will still refer to her as a virgin, and almost

never by name. “My virgin,” he will say, just as he says “my

Georgia cunt.” When he goes to the toilet he says: “If my

Georgia cunt calls tell her to wait. Say I said so. And listen,

you can have her if you like. I’m tired of her.”

He takes a squint at the weather and heaves a deep sigh.

If it’s rainy he says: “God damn this fucking climate, it

makes one morbid.” And if the sun is shining brightly he

says: “God damn that fucking sun, it makes you blind!” As

he starts to shave he suddenly remembers that there is no

clean towel. “God damn this fucking hotel, they’re too stingy

to give you a clean towel every day!” No matter what he

does or where he goes things are out of joint. Either it’s the

fucking country or the fucking job, or else it’s some fucking

cunt who’s put him on the blink.

“My teeth are all rotten,” he says, gargling his throat. “It’s

the fucking bread they give you to eat here.” He opens his

mouth wide and pulls his lower lip down. “See that? Pulled

out six teeth yesterday. Soon I’ll have to get another plate.

That’s what you get working for a living. When I was on the

bum I had all my teeth, my eyes were bright and clear. Look

at me now! It’s a wonder I can make a cunt any more. Jesus,

what I’d like is to find some rich cunt—like that cute little

prick, Carl. Did he ever show you the letters she sends him?

Who is she, do you know? He wouldn’t tell me her name, the

bastard… he’s afraid I might take her away from him.” He

gargles his throat again and then takes a long look at the

cavities. “You’re lucky,” he says ruefully. “You’ve got friends,

at least. I haven’t anybody, except that cute little prick who

drives me bats about his rich cunt.”

“Listen,” he says, “do you happen to know a cunt by the

name of Norma? She hangs around the Dôme all day. I think

she’s queer. I had her up here yesterday, tickling her ass.

She wouldn’t let me do a thing. I had her on the bed. … I

even had her drawers off… and then I got disgusted. Jesus, I

can’t bother struggling that way any more. It isn’t worth it.

Either they do or they don’t—it’s foolish to waste time

wrestling with them. While you’re struggling with a little

bitch like that there may be a dozen cunts on the terrasse

just dying to be laid. It’s a fact. They all come over here to

get laid. They think it’s sinful here… the poor boobs! Some

of these schoolteachers from out West, they’re honestly

virgins… I mean it! They sit around on their can all day

thinking about it. You don’t have to work over them very

much. They’re dying for it. I had a married woman the other

day who told me she hadn’t had a lay for six months. Can

you imagine that? Jesus, she was hot! I thought she’d tear

the cock off me. And groaning all the time. “Do you? Do

you?” She kept saying that all the time, like she was nuts.

And do you know what that bitch wanted to do? She wanted

to move in here. Imagine that! Asking me if I loved her. I

didn’t even know her name. I never know their names… I

don’t want to. The married ones! Christ, if you saw all the

married cunts I bring up here you’d never have any more

illusions. They’re worse than the virgins, the married ones.

They don’t wait for you to start things—they fish it out for

you themselves. And then they talk about love afterwards.

It’s disgusting. I tell you, I’m actually beginning to hate

cunt!”

He looks out the window again. It’s drizzling. It’s been

drizzling this way for the last five days.

“Are we going to the Dôme, Joe?” I call him Joe because

he calls me Joe. When Carl is with us he is Joe too.

Everybody is Joe because it’s easier that way. It’s also a

pleasant reminder not to take yourself too seriously.

Anyway, Joe doesn’t want to go to the Dôme—he owes too

much money there. He wants to go to the Coupole. Wants to

take a little walk first around the block.

“But it’s raining, Joe.”

“I know, but what the hell! I’ve got to have my

constitutional. I’ve got to wash the dirt out of my belly.”

When he says this I have the impression that the whole

world is wrapped up there inside his belly, and that it’s

rotting there.

As he’s putting on his things he falls back again into a

semi-comatose state. He stands there with one arm in his

coat sleeve and his hat on assways and he begins to dream

aloud—about the Riviera, about the sun, about lazing one’s

life away. “All I ask of life,” he says, “is a bunch of books, a

bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.” As he mumbles this

meditatively he looks at me with the softest, the most

insidious smile. “Do you like that smile?” he says. And then

disgustedly—“Jesus, if I could only find some rich cunt to

smile at that way!”

“Only a rich cunt can save me now,” he says with an air

of utmost weariness. “One gets tired of chasing after new

cunts all the time. It gets mechanical. The trouble is, you

see, I can’t fall in love. I’m too much of an egoist. Women

only help me to dream, that’s all. It’s a vice, like drink or

opium. I’ve got to have a new one every day; if I don’t I get

morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I’m amazed at myself,

how quick I pull it off—and how little it really means. I do it

automatically like. Sometimes I’m not thinking about a

woman at all, but suddenly I notice a woman looking at me

and then, bango! it starts all over again. Before I know what

I’m doing I’ve got her up to the room. I don’t even

remember what I say to them. I bring them up to the room,

give them a pat on the ass, and before I know what it’s all

about it’s over. It’s like a dream. … Do you know what I

mean?”

He hasn’t much use for the French girls. Can’t stand

them. “Either they want money or they want you to marry

them. At bottom they’re all whores. I’d rather wrestle with a

virgin,” he says. “They give you a little illusion. They put up

a fight at least.” Just the same, as we glance over the

terrasse there is hardly a whore in sight whom he hasn’t

fucked at some time or other. Standing at the bar he points

them out to me, one by one, goes over them anatomically,

describes their good points and their bad. “They’re all

frigid,” he says. And then begins to mold his hands, thinking

of the nice, juicy virgins who are just dying for it.

In the midst of his reveries he suddenly arrests himself,

and grabbing my arm excitedly, he points to a whale of a

woman who is just lowering herself into a seat. “There’s my

Danish cunt,” he grunts. “See that ass? Danish. How that

woman loves it! She just begs me for it. Come over here…

look at her now, from the side! Look at that ass, will you?

It’s enormous. I tell you, when she climbs over me I can

hardly get my arms around it. It blots out the whole world.

She makes me feel like a little bug crawling inside her. I

don’t know why I fall for her—I suppose it’s that ass. It’s so

incongruous like. And the creases in it! You can’t forget an

ass like that. It’s a fact… a solid fact. The others, they may

bore you, or they may give you a moment’s illusion, but this

one—with her ass!—zowie, you can’t obliterate her… it’s like

going to bed with a monument on top of you.”

The Danish cunt seems to have electrified him. He’s lost

all his sluggishness now. His eyes are popping out of his

head. And of course one thing reminds him of another. He

wants to get out of the fucking hotel because the noise

bothers him. He wants to write a book too so as to have

something to occupy his mind. But then the goddamned job

stands in the way. “It takes it out of you, that fucking job! I

don’t want to write about Montparnasse. … I want to write

my life, my thoughts. I want to get the dirt out of my belly.

… Listen, get that one over there! I had her a long time ago.

She used to be down near Les Halles. A funny bitch. She lay

on the edge of the bed and pulled her dress up. Ever try it

that way? Not bad. She didn’t hurry me either. She just lay

back and played with her hat while I slugged away at her.

And when I come she says sort of bored like—‘Are you

through?’ Like it didn’t make any difference at all. Of course,

it doesn’t make any difference, I know that goddamn well…

but the cold-blooded way she had… I sort of liked it… it was

fascinating, you know? When she goes to wipe herself she

begins to sing. Going out of the hotel she was still singing.

Didn’t even say Au revoir! Walks off swinging her hat and

humming to herself like. That’s a whore for you! A good lay

though. I think I liked her better than my virgin. There’s

something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn’t

give a fuck about it. It heats your blood. …” And then, after

a moment’s meditation—“Can you imagine what she’d be

like if she had any feelings?”

“Listen,” he says, “I want you to come to the Club with

me tomorrow afternoon… there’s a dance on.”

“I can’t tomorrow, Joe. I promised to help Carl out. …”

“Listen, forget that prick! I want you to do me a favor. It’s

like this”—he commences to mold his hands again. “I’ve got

a cunt lined up… she promised to stay with me on my night

off. But I’m not positive about her yet. She’s got a mother,

you see… some shit of a painter, she chews my ear off

every time I see her. I think the truth is, the mother’s

jealous. I don’t think she’d mind so much if I gave her a lay

first. You know how it is. … Anyway, I thought maybe you

wouldn’t mind taking the mother… she’s not so bad… if I

hadn’t seen the daughter I might have considered her

myself. The daughter’s nice and young, fresh like, you know

what I mean? There’s a clean smell to her. …”

“Listen, Joe, you’d better find somebody else. …”

“Aw, don’t take it like that! I know how you feel about it.

It’s only a little favor I’m asking you to do for me. I don’t

know to get rid of the old hen. I thought first I’d get drunk

and ditch her—but I don’t think the young one’d like that.

They’re sentimental like. They come from Minnesota or

somewhere. Anyway, come around tomorrow and wake me

up, will you? Otherwise I’ll oversleep. And besides, I want

you to help me find a room. You know I’m helpless. Find me

a room in a quiet street, somewhere near here. I’ve got to

stay around here… I’ve got credit here. Listen, promise me

you’ll do that for me. I’ll buy you a meal now and then.

Come around anyway, because I go nuts talking to these

foolish cunts. I want to talk to you about Havelock Ellis.

Jesus, I’ve had the book out for three weeks now and I

haven’t looked at it. You sort of rot here. Would you believe

it, I’ve never been to the Louvre—nor the Comédie-

Française. Is it worth going to those joints? Still, it sort of

takes your mind off things, I suppose. What do you do with

yourself all day? Don’t you get bored? What do you do for a

lay? Listen… come here! Don’t run away yet… I’m lonely. Do

you know something—if this keeps up another year I’ll go

nuts. I’ve got to get out of this fucking country. There’s

nothing for me here. I know it’s lousy now, in America, but

just the same. … You go queer over here… all these cheap

shits sitting on their ass all day bragging about their work

and none of them is worth a stinking damn. They’re all

failures—that’s why they come over here. Listen, Joe, don’t

you ever get homesick? You’re a funny guy… you seem to

like it over here. What do you see in it?… I wish you’d tell

me. I wish to Christ I could stop thinking about myself. I’m

all twisted up inside… it’s like a knot in there. … Listen, I

know I’m boring the shit out of you, but I’ve got to talk to

someone. I can’t talk to those guys upstairs… you know

what those bastards are like… they all take a byline. And

Carl, the little prick, he’s so goddamned selfish. I’m an

egotist, but I’m not selfish. There’s a difference. I’m a

neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself. It isn’t

that I think myself so important. … I simply can’t think

about anything else, that’s all. If I could fall in love with a

woman that might help some. But I can’t find a woman who

interests me. I’m in a mess, you can see that can’t you?

What do you advise me to do? What would you do in my

place? Listen, I don’t want to hold you back any longer, but

wake me up tomorrow—at one-thirty—will you? I’ll give you

something extra if you’ll shine my shoes. And listen, if

you’ve got an extra shirt, a clean one, bring it along, will

you? Shit, I’m grinding my balls off on that job, and it

doesn’t even give me a clean shirt. They’ve got us over here

like a bunch of niggers. Ah, well, shit! I’m going to take a

walk… wash the dirt out of my belly. Don’t forget,

tomorrow!”

For six months or more it’s been going on, this

correspondence with the rich cunt, Irene. Recently I’ve been

reporting to Carl every day in order to bring the affair to a

head, because as far as Irene is concerned this thing could

go on indefinitely. In the last few days there’s been a perfect

avalanche of letters exchanged; the last letter we

dispatched was almost forty pages long, and written in

three languages. It was a potpourri, the last letter—tag ends

of old novels, slices from the Sunday supplement,

reconstructed versions of old letters to Llona and Tania,

garbled transliterations of Rabelais and Petronius—in short,

we exhausted ourselves. Finally Irene decides to come out

of her shell. Finally a letter arrives giving a rendezvous at

her hotel. Carl is pissing in his pants. It’s one thing to write

letters to a woman you don’t know; it’s another thing

entirely to call on her and make love to her. At the last

moment he’s quaking so that I almost fear I’ll have to

substitute for him. When we get out of the taxi in front of

her hotel he’s trembling so much that I have to walk him

around the block first. He’s already had two Pernods, but

they haven’t made the slightest impression on him. The

sight of the hotel itself is enough to crush him: it’s a

pretentious place with one of those huge empty lobbies in

which Englishwomen sit for hours with a blank look. In order

to make sure that he wouldn’t run away I stood by while the

porter telephoned to announce him. Irene was there, and

she was waiting for him. As he got into the lift he threw me

a last despairing glance, one of those mute appeals which a

dog makes when you put a noose around its neck. Going

through the revolving door I thought of Van Norden. …

I go back to the hotel and wait for a telephone call. He’s

only got an hour’s time and he’s promised to let me know

the results before going to work. I look over the carbons of

the letters we sent her. I try to imagine the situation as it

actually is, but it’s beyond me. Her letters are much better

than ours—they’re sincere, that’s plain. By now they’ve

sized each other up. I wonder if he’s still pissing in his pants.

The telephone rings. His voice sounds queer, squeaky, as

though he were frightened and jubilant at the same time.

He asks me to substitute for him at the office. “Tell the

bastard anything! Tell him I’m dying. …”

“Listen, Carl… can you tell me…?”

“Hello! Are you Henry Miller?” It’s a woman’s voice. It’s

Irene. She’s saying hello to me. Her voice sounds beautiful

over the phone… beautiful. For a moment I’m in a perfect

panic. I don’t know what to say to her. I’d like to say: “Listen,

Irene, I think you are beautiful… I think you’re wonderful.”

I’d like to say one true thing to her, no matter how silly it

would sound, because now that I hear her voice everything

is changed. But before I can gather my wits Carl is on the

phone again and he’s saying in that queer squeaky voice:

“She likes you, Joe. I told her all about you. …”

At the office I have to hold copy for Van Norden. When it

comes time for the break he pulls me aside. He looks glum

and ravaged.

“So he’s dying, is he, the little prick? Listen, what’s the

lowdown on this?”

“I think he went to see his rich cunt,” I answer calmly.

“What! You mean he called on her?” He seems beside

himself. “Listen, where does she live? What’s her name?” I

pretend ignorance. “Listen,” he says, “you’re a decent guy.

Why the hell don’t you let me in on this racket?”

In order to appease him I promise finally that I’ll tell him

everything as soon as I get the details from Carl. I can

hardly wait myself until I see Carl.

Around noon next day I knock at his door. He’s up already

and lathering his beard. Can’t tell a thing from the

expression on his face. Can’t even tell whether he’s going to

tell me the truth. The sun is streaming in through the open

window, the birds are chirping, and yet somehow, why it is I

don’t know, the room seems more barren and poverty-

stricken than ever. The floor is slathered with lather, and on

the rack there are the two dirty towels which are never

changed. And somehow Carl isn’t changed either, and that

puzzles me more than anything. This morning the whole

world ought to be changed, for bad or good, but changed,

radically changed. And yet Carl is standing there lathering

his face and not a single detail is altered.

“Sit down… sit down there on the bed,” he says. “You’re

going to hear everything… but wait first… wait a little.” He

commences to lather his face again, and then to hone his

razor. He even remarks about the water… no hot water

again.

“Listen, Carl, I’m on tenterhooks. You can torture me

afterward, if you like, but tell me now, tell me one thing…

was it good or bad?”

He turns away from the mirror with brush in hand and

gives me a strange smile. “Wait! I’m going to tell you

everything. …”

“That means it was a failure.”

“No,” he says, drawing out his words. “It wasn’t a failure,

and it wasn’t a success either. … By the way, did you fix it

up for me at the office? What did you tell them?”

I see it’s no use trying to pull it out of him. When he gets

good and ready he’ll tell me. Not before. I lie back on the

bed, silent as a clam. He goes on shaving.

Suddenly, apropos of nothing at all, he begins to talk—

disconnectedly at first, and then more and more clearly,

emphatically, resolutely. It’s a struggle to get it out, but he

seems determined to relate everything; he acts as if he

were getting something off his conscience. He even reminds

me of the look he gave me as he was going up the elevator

shaft. He dwells on that lingeringly, as though to imply that

everything were contained in that last moment, as though,

if he had the power to alter things, he would never have put

foot outside the elevator.

She was in her dressing sack when he called. There was a

bucket of champagne on the dresser. The room was rather

dark and her voice was lovely. He gives me all the details

about the room, the champagne, how the garçon opened it,

the noise it made, the way her dressing sack rustled when

she came forward to greet him—he tells me everything but

what I want to hear.

It was about eight when he called on her. At eight-thirty

he was nervous, thinking about the job. “It was about nine

when I called you, wasn’t it?” he says.

“Yes, about that.”

“I was nervous, see. …”

“I know that. Go on. …”

I don’t know whether to believe him or not, especially

after those letters we concocted. I don’t even know whether

I’ve heard him accurately, because what he’s telling me

sounds utterly fantastic. And yet it sounds true too, knowing

the sort of guy he is. And then I remember his voice over

the telephone, that strange mixture of fright and jubilation.

But why isn’t he more jubilant now? He keeps smiling all the

time, smiling like a rosy little bedbug that has had its fill. “It

was nine o’clock,” he says once again, “when I called you

up, wasn’t it?” I nod my head wearily. Yes, it was nine

o’clock. He is certain now that it was nine o’clock because

he remembers having taken out his watch. Anyway, when

he looked at his watch again it was ten o’clock. At ten

o’clock she was lying on the divan with her boobies in her

hands. That’s the way he gives it to me—in driblets. At

eleven o’clock it was all settled; they were going to run

away, to Borneo. Fuck the husband! She never loved him

anyway. She would never have written the first letter if the

husband wasn’t old and passionless. “And then she says to

me: ‘But listen, dear, how do you know you won’t get tired

of me?’”

At this I burst out laughing. This sounds preposterous to

me, I can’t help it.

“And you said?”

“What did you expect me to say? I said: ‘How could

anyone ever grow tired of you?”’

And then he describes to me what happened after that,

how he bent down and kissed her breasts, and how, after he

had kissed them fervidly, he stuffed them back into her

corsage, or whatever it is they call these things. And after

that another coupe of champagne.

Around midnight the garçon arrives with beer and

sandwiches—caviar sandwiches. And all the while, so he

says, he has been dying to take a leak. He had one hard on,

but it faded out. All the while his bladder is fit to burst, but

he imagines, the cute little prick that he is, that the

situation calls for delicacy.

At one-thirty she’s for hiring a carriage and driving

through the Bois. He has only one thought in his head—how

to take a leak? “I love you… I adore you,” he says. “I’ll go

anywhere you say—Istanbul, Singapore, Honolulu. Only I

must go now. … It’s getting late.”

He tells me all this in his dirty little room, with the sun

pouring in and the birds chirping away like mad. I don’t yet

know whether she was beautiful or not. He doesn’t know

himself, the imbecile. He rather thinks she wasn’t. The room

was dark and then there was the champagne and his nerves

all frazzled.

“But you ought to know something about her—if this isn’t

all a goddamned lie!”

“Wait a minute,” he says. “Wait… let me think! No, she

wasn’t beautiful. I’m sure of that now. She had a streak of

gray hair over her forehead… I remember that. But: that

wouldn’t be so bad—I had almost forgotten it you see. No, it

was her arms—they were thin… they were thin and brittle.”

He begins to pace back and forth.—Suddenly he stops dead.

“If she were only ten years younger!” he exclaims. “If she

were ten years younger I might overlook the streak of gray

hair… and even the brittle arms. But she’s too old. You see,

with a cunt like that every year counts now. She won’t be

just one year older next year—she’ll be ten years older.

Another year hence and she’ll be twenty years older. And I’ll

be getting younger looking all the time—at least for another

five years. …”

“But how did it end?” I interrupt.

“That’s just it… it didn’t end. I promised to see her

Tuesday around five o’clock. That’s bad, you know! There

were lines in her face which will look much worse in

daylight. I suppose she wants me to fuck her Tuesday.

Fucking in the daytime—you don’t do it with a cunt like that.

Especially in a hotel like that. I’d rather do it on my night

off… but Tuesday’s not my night off. And that’s not all. I

promised her a letter in the meantime. How am I going to

write her a letter now? I haven’t anything to say. … Shit! If

only she were ten years younger. Do you think I should go

with her… to Borneo or wherever it is she wants to take me?

What would I do with a rich cunt like that on my hands? I

don’t know how to shoot. I am afraid of guns and all that

sort of thing. Besides, she’ll be wanting me to fuck her night

and day… nothing but hunting and fucking all the time… I

can’t do it!”

“Maybe it won’t be so bad as you think. She’ll buy you

ties and all sorts of things. …”

“Maybe you’ll come along with us, eh? I told her all about

you. …”

“Did you tell her I was poor? Did you tell her I needed

things?”

“I told her everything. Shit, everything would be fine, if

she were just a few years younger. She said she was turning

forty. That means fifty or sixty. It’s like fucking your own

mother… you can’t do it… it’s impossible.”

“But she must have had some attractiveness… you were

kissing her breasts, you said.”

“Kissing her breasts—what’s that? Besides it was dark,

I’m telling you.”

Putting on his pants a button falls off. “Look at that, will

you. It’s falling apart, the goddamned suit. I’ve worn it for

seven years now. … I never paid for it either. It was a good

suit once, but it stinks now. And that cunt would buy me

suits too, all I wanted most likely. But that’s what I don’t like,

having a woman shell out for me. I never did that in my life.

That’s your idea. I’d rather live alone. Shit, this is a good

room isn’t it? What’s wrong with it? It’s a damned sight

better than her room, isn’t it? I don’t like her fine hotel. I’m

against hotels like that. I told her so. She said she didn’t

care where she lived… said she’d come and live with me if I

wanted her to. Can you picture her moving in here with her

big trunks and her hatboxes and all that crap she drags

around with her? She has too many things—too many

dresses and bottles and all that. It’s like a clinic, her room. If

she gets a little scratch on her finger it’s serious. And then

she has to be massaged and her hair has to be waved and

she mustn’t eat this and she mustn’t eat that. Listen, Joe,

she’d be all right if she were just a little younger. You can

forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn’t have to

have any brains. They’re better without brains. But an old

cunt, even if she’s brilliant, even if she’s the most charming

woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young

cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they

can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn’t put meat

on their arms or juice between the legs. She isn’t bad, Irene.

In fact, I think you’d like her. With you it’s different. You

don’t have to fuck her. You can afford to like her. Maybe you

wouldn’t like all those dresses and the bottles and what not,

but you could be tolerant. She wouldn’t bore you, that I can

tell you. She’s even interesting, I might say. But she’s

withered. Her breasts are all right yet—but her arms! I told

her I’d bring you around some day. I talked a lot about you.

… I didn’t know what to say to her. Maybe you’d like her,

especially when she’s dressed. I don’t know. …”

“Listen, she’s rich, you say? I’ll like her! I don’t care how

old she is, so long as she’s not a hag. …”

“She’s not a hag! What are you talking about? She’s

charming, I tell you. She talks well. She looks well too… only

her arms. …”

“All right, if that’s how it is, I’ll fuck her—if you don’t want

to. Tell her that. Be subtle about it, though. With a woman

like that you’ve got to do things slowly. You bring me around

and let things work out for themselves. Praise the shit out of

me. Act jealous like. … Shit, maybe we’ll fuck her together…

and we’ll go places and we’ll eat together… and we’ll drive

and hunt and wear nice things. If she wants to go to Borneo

let her take us along. I don’t know how to shoot either, but

that doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care about that either. She

just wants to be fucked that’s all. You’re talking about her

arms all the time. You don’t have to look at her arms all the

time, do you? Look at this bedspread! Look at the mirror! Do

you call this living? Do you want to go on being delicate and

live like a louse all your life? You can’t even pay your hotel

bill… and you’ve got a job too. This is no way to live. I don’t

care if she’s seventy years old—it’s better than this. …”

“Listen, Joe, you fuck her for me… then everything’ll be

fine. Maybe I’ll fuck her once in a while too… on my night

off. It’s four days now since I’ve had a good shit. There’s

something sticking to me, like grapes. …”

“You’ve got the piles, that’s what.”

“My hair’s falling out too… and I ought to see the dentist.

I feel as though I were falling apart. I told her what a good

guy you are. … You’ll do things for me, eh? You’re not too

delicate, eh? If we go to Borneo I won’t have hemorrhoids

any more. Maybe I’ll develop something else… something

worse… fever perhaps… or cholera. Shit, it’s better to die of

a good disease like that than to piss your life away on a

newspaper with grapes up your ass and buttons falling off

your pants. I’d like to be rich, even if it were only for a week,

and then go to a hospital with a good disease, a fatal one,

and have flowers in the room and nurses dancing around

and telegrams coming. They take good care of you if you’re

rich. They wash you with cotton batting and they comb your

hair for you. Shit, I know all that. Maybe I’d be lucky and not

die at all. Maybe I’d be a cripple all my life… maybe I’d be

paralyzed and have to sit in a wheelchair. But then I’d be

taken care of just the same… even if I had no more money.

If you’re an invalid—a real one—they don’t let you starve.

And you get a clean bed to lie in… and they change the

towels every day. This way nobody gives a fuck about you,

especially if you have a job. They think a man should be

happy if he’s got a job. What would you rather do—be a

cripple all your life, or have a job… or marry a rich cunt?

You’d rather marry a rich cunt, I can see that. You only think

about food. But supposing you married her and then you

couldn’t get a hard on any more—that happens sometimes

—what would you do then? You’d be at her mercy. You’d

have to eat out of her hand, like a little poodle dog. You’d

like that, would you? Or maybe you don’t think of those

things? I think of everything. I think of the suits I’d pick out

and the places I’d like to go to, but I also think of the other

thing. That’s the important thing. What good are the fancy

ties and the fine suits if you can’t get a hard on any more?

You couldn’t even betray her—because she’d be on your

heels all the time. No, the best thing would be to marry her

and then get a disease right away. Only not syphilis.

Cholera, let’s say, or yellow fever. So that if a miracle did

happen and your life was spared you’d be a cripple for the

rest of your days. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about

fucking her any more, and you wouldn’t have to worry about

the rent either. She’d probably buy you a fine wheelchair

with rubber tires and all sorts of levers and what not. You

might even be able to use your hands—I mean enough to be

able to write. Or you could have a secretary, for that matter.

That’s it—that’s the best solution for a writer. What does a

guy want with his arms and legs? He doesn’t need arms and

legs to write with. He needs security… peace… protection.

All those heroes who parade in wheelchairs—it’s too bad

they’re not writers. If you could only be sure, when you go

to war, that you’d have only your legs blown off… if you

could be sure of that I’d say let’s have a war tomorrow. I

wouldn’t give a fuck about the medals—they could keep the

medals. All I’d want is a good wheelchair and three meals a

day. Then I’d give them something to read, those pricks.”

The following day, at one-thirty, I call on Van Norden. It’s

his day off, or rather his night off. He has left word with Carl

that I am to help him move today.

I find him in a state of unusual depression. He hasn’t slept

a wink all night, he tells me. There’s something on his mind,

something that’s eating him up. It isn’t long before I

discover what it is; he’s been waiting impatiently for me to

arrive in order to spill it.

“That guy,” he begins, meaning Carl, “that guy’s an artist.

He described every detail minutely. He told it to me with

such accuracy that I know it’s all a goddamned lie… but I

can’t dismiss it from my mind. You know how my mind

works!”

He interrupts himself to inquire if Carl has told me the

whole story. There isn’t the least suspicion in his mind that

Carl may have told me one thing and him another. He

seems to think that the story was invented expressly to

torture him. He doesn’t seem to mind so much that it’s a

fabrication. It’s the “images” as he says, which Carl left in

his mind, that get him. The images are real, even if the

whole story is false. And besides, the fact that there actually

is a rich cunt on the scene and that Carl actually paid her a

visit, that’s undeniable. What actually happened is

secondary; he takes it for granted that Carl put the boots to

her. But what drives him desperate is the thought that what

Carl has described to him might have been possible.

“It’s just like that guy,” he says, “to tell me he put it to

her six or seven times. I know that’s a lot of shit and I don’t

mind that so much, but when he tells me that she hired a

carriage and drove him out to the Bois and that they used

the husband’s fur coat for a blanket, that’s too much. I

suppose he told you about the chauffeur waiting

respectfully… and listen, did he tell you how the engine

purred all the time? Jesus, he built that up wonderfully. It’s

just like him to think of a detail like that… it’s one of those

little details which makes a thing psychologically real… you

can’t get it out of your head afterward. And he tells it to me

so smoothly, so naturally. … I wonder, did he think it up in

advance or did it just pop out of his head like that,

spontaneously? He’s such a cute little liar you can’t walk

away from him… it’s like he’s writing you a letter, one of

those flowerpots that he makes overnight. I don’t

understand how a guy can write such letters… I don’t get

the mentality behind it… it’s a form of masturbation… what

do you think?”

But before I have an opportunity to venture an opinion, or

even to laugh in his face, Van Norden goes on with his

monologue.

“Listen, I suppose he told you everything… did he tell you

how he stood on the balcony in the moonlight and kissed

her? That sounds banal when you repeat it, but the way that

guy describes it… I can just see the little prick standing

there with the woman in his arms and already he’s writing

another letter to her, another flowerpot about the roof tops

and all that crap he steals from his French authors. That guy

never says a thing that’s original, I found that out. You have

to get a clue like… find out whom he’s been reading lately…

and it’s hard to do that because he’s so damned secretive.

Listen, if I didn’t know that you went there with him, I

wouldn’t believe that the woman existed. A guy like that

could write letters to himself. And yet he’s lucky… he’s so

damned tiny, so frail, so romantic looking, that women fall

for him now and then… they sort of adopt him… they feel

sorry for him, I guess. And some cunts like to receive

flowerpots… it makes them feel important. … But this

woman’s an intelligent woman, so he says. You ought to

know… you’ve seen her letters. What do you suppose a

woman like that saw in him? I can understand her falling for

the letters… but how do you suppose she felt when she saw

him?

“But listen, all that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at

is the way he tells it to me. You know how he embroiders

things… well, after that scene on the balcony—he gives me

that like an hors d’œuvre, you know—after that, so he says,

they went inside and he unbuttoned her pajamas. What are

you smiling for? Was he shitting me about that?”

“No, no! You’re giving it to me exactly as he told me. Go

ahead…”

“After that”—here Van Norden has to smile himself—”after

that, mind you, he tells me how she sat in the chair with her

legs up… not a stitch on… and he’s sitting on the floor

looking up at her, telling her how beautiful she looks… did

he tell you that she looked like a Matisse?… Wait a minute…

I’d like to remember exactly what he said. He had some

cute little phrase there about an odalisque… what the hell’s

an odalisque anyway? He said it in French, that’s why it’s

hard to remember the fucking thing… but it sounded good.

It sounded just like the sort of thing he might say. And she

probably thought it was original with him… I suppose she

thinks he’s a poet or something. But listen, all this is

nothing… I make allowance for his imagination. It’s what

happened after that that drives me crazy. All night long I’ve

been tossing about, playing with these images he left in my

mind. I can’t get it out of my head. It sounds so real to me

that if it didn’t happen I could strangle the bastard. A guy

has no right to invent things like that. Or else he’s diseased.

…

“What I’m getting at is that moment when, he says, he

got down on his knees and with those two skinny fingers of

his he spread her cunt open. You remember that? He says

she was sitting there with her legs dangling over the arms of

the chair and suddenly, he says, he got an inspiration. This

was after he had given her a couple of lays already… after

he had made that little spiel about Matisse. He gets down on

his knees—get this!—and with his two fingers… just the tips

of them, mind you… he opens the little petals… squish-

squish… just like that. A sticky little sound… almost

inaudible. Squish-squish! Jesus, I’ve been hearing it all night

long! And then he says—as if that weren’t enough for me—

then he tells me he buried his head in her muff. And when

he did that, so help me Christ, if she didn’t swing her legs

around his neck and lock him there. That finished me!

Imagine it! Imagine a fine, sensitive woman like that

swinging her legs around his neck! There’s something

poisonous about it. It’s so fantastic that it sounds

convincing. If he had only told me about the champagne

and the ride in the Bois and even that scene on the balcony

I could have dismissed it. But this thing is so incredible that

it doesn’t sound like a lie any more. I can’t believe that he

ever read anything like that anywhere, and I can’t see what

could have put the idea into his head unless there was some

truth in it. With a little prick like that, you know, anything

can happen. He may not have fucked her at all, but she may

have let him diddle her… you never know with these rich

cunts what they might expect you to do. …”

When he finally pulls himself out of bed and starts to

shave the afternoon is already well advanced. I’ve finally

succeeded in switching his mind to other things, to the

moving principally. The maid comes in to see if he’s ready—

he’s supposed to have vacated the room by noon. He’s just

in the act of slipping into his trousers. I’m a little surprised

that he doesn’t excuse himself, or turn away. Seeing him

standing there nonchalantly buttoning his fly as he gives her

orders I begin to titter. “Don’t mind her,” he says, throwing

her a look of supreme contempt, “she’s just a big sow. Give

her a pinch in the ass, if you like. She won’t say anything.”

And then addressing her, in English, he says. “Come here,

you bitch, put your hand on this!” At this I can’t restrain

myself any longer. I burst out laughing, a fit of hysterical

laughter which infects the maid also, though she doesn’t

know what it’s all about. The maid commences to take down

the pictures and the photographs, mostly of himself, which

line the walls. “You” he says, jerking his thumb, “come here!

Here’s something to remember me by”—ripping a

photograph off the wall—”when I go you can wipe your ass

with it. See,” he says, turning to me, “she’s a dumb bitch.

She wouldn’t look any more intelligent if I said it in French.”

The maid stands there with her mouth open; she is

evidently convinced that he is cracked. “Hey!” he yells at

her as if she were hard of hearing. “Hey, you! Yes, you! Like

this…!” and he takes the photograph, his own photograph,

and wipes his ass with it. “Comme ça! Savvy? You’ve got to

draw pictures for her,” he says, thrusting his lower lip

forward in absolute disgust.

He watches her helplessly as she throws his things into

the big valises. “Here, put these in too,” he says, handing

her a toothbrush and the douche bag. Half of his belongings

are lying on the floor. The valises are crammed full and

there is nowhere to put the paintings and the books and the

bottles that are half empty. “Sit down a minute,” he says.

“We’ve got plenty of time. We’ve got to think this thing out.

If you hadn’t come around I’d never have gotten out of here.

You see how helpless I am. Don’t let me forget to take the

bulbs out… they belong to me. That wastebasket belongs to

me too. They expect you to live like pigs, these bastards.”

The maid has gone downstairs to get some twine. … “Wait

till you see… she’ll charge me for the twine even if it’s only

three sous. They wouldn’t sew a button on your pants here

without charging for it. The lousy, dirty scroungers!” He

takes a bottle of Calvados from the mantelpiece and nods to

me to grab the other. “No use carrying these to the new

place. Let’s finish them off now. But don’t give her a drink!

That bastard, I wouldn’t leave her a piece of toilet paper. I’d

like to ruin the joint before I go. Listen… piss on the floor, if

you like. I wish I could take a crap in the bureau drawer.” He

feels so utterly disgusted with himself and everything else

that he doesn’t know what to do by way of venting his

feelings. He walks over to the bed with the bottle in his

hand and pulling back the covers he sprinkles Calvados over

the mattress. Not content with that he digs his heel into the

mattress. Unfortunately there’s no mud on his heels. Finally

he takes the sheet and cleans his shoes with it. “That’ll give

them something to do,” he mutters vengefully. Then, taking

a good swig, he throws his head back and gargles his throat,

and after he’s gargled it good and proper he spits it out on

the mirror. “There, you cheap bastards! Wipe that off when I

go!” He walks back and forth mumbling to himself. Seeing

his torn socks lying on the floor he picks them up and tears

them to bits. The paintings enrage him too. He picks one up

—a portrait of himself done by some Lesbian he knew and

he puts his foot through it. “That bitch! You know what she

had the nerve to ask me? She asked me to turn over my

cunts to her after I was through with them. She never gave

me a sou for writing her up. She thought I honestly admired

her work. I wouldn’t have gotten that painting out of her if I

hadn’t promised to fix her up with that cunt from Minnesota.

She was nuts about her… used to follow us around like a

dog in heat… we couldn’t get rid of the bitch! She bothered

the life out of me. I got so that I was almost afraid to bring a

cunt up here for fear that she’d bust in on me. I used to

creep up here like a burglar and lock the door behind me as

soon as I got inside. … She and that Georgia cunt—they

drive me nuts. The one is always in heat and the other is

always hungry. I hate fucking a woman who’s hungry. It’s

like you push a feed inside her and then you push it out

again. … Jesus, that reminds me of something… where did I

put that blue ointment? That’s important. Did you ever have

those things? It’s worse than having a dose. And I don’t

know where I got them from either. I’ve had so many

women up here in the last week or so I’ve lost track of them.

Funny too, because they all smelled so fresh. But you know

how it is. …”

The maid has piled his things up on the sidewalk. The

patron looks on with a surly air. When everything has been

loaded into the taxi there is only room for one of us inside.

As soon as we commence to roll Van Norden gets out a

newspaper and starts bundling up his pots and pans; in the

new place all cooking is strictly forbidden. By the time we

reach our destination all his luggage has come undone; it

wouldn’t be quite so embarrassing if the madam had not

stuck her head out of the doorway just as we rolled up. “My

God!” she exclaims, “what in the devil is all this? What does

it mean?” Van Norden is so intimidated that he can think of

nothing more to say than “C’est moi… c’est moi, madame!”

And turning to me he mumbles savagely: “That cluck! Did

you notice her face? She’s going to make it hard for me.”

The hotel lies back of a dingy passage and forms a

rectangle very much on the order of a modern penitentiary.

The bureau is large and gloomy, despite the brilliant

reflections from the tile walls. There are bird cages hanging

in the windows and little enamel signs everywhere begging

the guests in an obsolete language not to do this and not to

forget that. It is almost immaculately clean but absolutely

poverty-stricken, threadbare, woebegone. The upholstered

chairs are held together with wired thongs; they remind one

unpleasantly of the electric chair. The room he is going to

occupy is on the fifth floor. As we climb the stairs Van

Norden informs me that Maupassant once lived here. And in

the same breath remarks that there is a peculiar odor in the

hall. On the fifth floor a few windowpanes are missing; we

stand a moment gazing at the tenants across the court. It is

getting toward dinner time and people are straggling back

to their rooms with that weary, dejected air which comes

from earning a living honestly. Most of the windows are wide

open: the dingy rooms have the appearance of so many

yawning mouths. The occupants of the rooms are yawning

too, or else scratching themselves. They move about

listlessly and apparently without much purpose; they might

just as well be lunatics.

As we turn down the corridor toward room 57, a door

suddenly opens in front of us and an old hag with matted

hair and the eyes of a maniac peers out. She startles us so

that we stand transfixed. For a full minute the three of us

stand there powerless to move or even to make an

intelligent gesture. Back of the old hag I can see a kitchen

table and on it lies a baby all undressed, a puny little brat

no bigger than a plucked chicken. Finally the old one picks

up a slop pail by her side and makes a move forward. We

stand aside to let her pass and as the door closes behind

her the baby lets out a piercing scream. It is room 56, and

between 56 and 57 is the toilet where the old hag is

emptying her slops.

Ever since we have mounted the stairs Van Norden has

kept silence. But his looks are eloquent. When he opens the

door of 57 I have for a fleeting moment the sensation of

going mad. A huge mirror covered with green gauze and

tipped at an angle of 45 degrees hangs directly opposite the

entrance over a baby carriage which is filled with books. Van

Norden doesn’t even crack a smile; instead he walks

nonchalantly over to the baby carriage and picking up a

book begins to skim it through, much as a man would enter

the public library and go unthinkingly to the rack nearest to

hand. And perhaps this would not seem so ludicrous to me if

I had not espied at the same time a pair of handle bars

resting in the corner. They look so absolutely peaceful and

contented, as if they had been dozing there for years, that

suddenly it seems to me as if we had been standing in this

room, in exactly this position, for an incalculably long time,

that it was a pose we had struck in a dream from which we

never emerged, a dream which the least gesture, the wink

of an eye even, will shatter. But more remarkable still is the

remembrance that suddenly floats up of an actual dream

which occurred only the other night, a dream in which I saw

Van Norden in just such a corner as is occupied now by the

handle bars, only instead of the handle bars there was a

woman crouching with her legs drawn up. I see him

standing over the woman with that alert, eager look in his

eye which comes when he wants something badly. The

street in which this is going on is blurred—only the angle

made by the two walls is clear, and the cowering figure of

the woman. I can see him going at her in that quick, animal

way of his, reckless of what’s going on about him,

determined only to have his way. And a look in his eyes as

though to say—”you can kill me afterwards, but just let me

get it in… I’ve got to get it in!” And there he is, bent over

her, their heads knocking against the wall, he has such a

tremendous erection that it’s simply impossible to get it in

her. Suddenly, with that disgusted air which he knows so

well how to summon, he picks himself up and adjusts his

clothes. He is about to walk away when suddenly he notices

that his penis is lying on the sidewalk. It is about the size of

a sawed-off broomstick. He picks it up nonchalantly and

slings it under his arm. As he walks off I notice two huge

bulbs, like tulip bulbs, dangling from the end of the

broomstick, and I can hear him muttering to himself

“flowerpots… flowerpots.”

The garçon arrives panting and sweating. Van Norden

looks at him uncomprehendingly. The madam now marches

in and, walking straight up to Van Norden, she takes the

book out of his hand, thrusts it in the baby carriage, and,

without saying a word, wheels the baby carriage into the

hallway.

“This is a bughouse,” says Van Norden, smiling

distressedly. It is such a faint, indescribable smile that for a

moment the dream feeling comes back and it seems to me

that we are standing at the end of a long corridor at the end

of which is a corrugated mirror. And down this corridor,

swinging his distress like a dingy lantern, Van Norden

staggers, staggers in and out as here and there a door

opens and a hand yanks him, or a hoof pushes him out. And

the further off he wanders the more lugubrious is his

distress; he wears it like a lantern which the cyclists hold

between their teeth on a night when the pavement is wet

and slippery. In and out of the dingy rooms he wanders, and

when he sits down the chair collapses, when he opens his

valise there is only a toothbrush inside. In every room there

is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his

rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling

and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have

gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his

beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he’s so disgusted

with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits

with his big heels.

Meanwhile the luggage is being hauled in. And things

begin to look crazier even than before—particularly when he

attaches his exerciser to the bedstead and begins his

Sandow exercises. “I like this place,” he says, smiling at the

garçon. He takes his coat and vest off. The garçon is

watching him with a puzzled air; he has a valise in one hand

and the douche bag in the other. I’m standing apart in the

antechamber holding the mirror with the green gauze. Not a

single object seems to possess a practical use. The

antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a

barn. It is exactly the same sort of sensation which I get

when I enter the Comédie-Française or the Palais-Royal

Theatre; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms

and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in

armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass

cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it’s like

finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there’s

no room in the valise.

Climbing up the stairs, as I said a moment ago, he had

mentioned the fact that Maupassant used to live here. The

coincidence seems to have made an impression upon him.

He would like to believe that it was in this very room that

Maupassant gave birth to some of those gruesome tales on

which his reputation rests. “They lived like pigs, those poor

bastards,” he says. We are sitting at the round table in a

pair of comfortable old armchairs that have been trussed up

with thongs and braces; the bed is right beside us, so close

indeed that we can put our feet on it. The armoire stands in

a corner behind us, also conveniently within reach. Van

Norden has emptied his dirty wash on the table; we sit there

with our feet buried in his dirty socks and shirts and smoke

contentedly. The sordid-ness of the place seems to have

worked a spell on him: he is content here. When I get up to

switch on the light he suggests that we play a game of

cards before going out to eat. And so we sit there by the

window, with the dirty wash strewn over the floor and the

Sandow exerciser hanging from the chandelier, and we play

a few rounds of two-handed pinochle. Van Norden has put

away his pipe and packed a wad of snuff on the underside of

his lower lip. Now and then he spits out of the window, big

healthy gobs of brown juice which resound with a smack on

the pavement below. He seems content now.

“In America,” he says, “you wouldn’t dream of living in a

joint like this. Even when I was on the bum I slept in better

rooms than this. But here it seems natural—it’s like the

books you read. If I ever go back there I’ll forget all about

this life, just like you forget a bad dream. I’ll probably take

up the old life again just where I left off… if I ever get back.

Sometimes I lie in bed dreaming about the past and it’s so

vivid to me that I have to shake myself in order to realize

where I am. Especially when I have a woman beside me; a

woman can set me off better than anything. That’s all I want

of them—to forget myself. Sometimes I get so lost in my

reveries that I can’t remember the name of the cunt or

where I picked her up. That’s funny, eh? It’s good to have a

fresh warm body beside you when you wake up in the

morning. It gives you a clean feeling. You get spiritual like…

until they start pulling that mushy crap about love et cetera.

Why do all these cunts talk about love so much, can you tell

me that? A good lay isn’t enough for them apparently… they

want your soul too. …”

Now this word soul, which pops up frequently in Van

Norden’s soliloquies, used to have a droll effect upon me at

first. Whenever I heard the word soul from his lips I would

get hysterical; somehow it seemed like a false coin, more

particularly because it was usually accompanied by a gob of

brown juice which left a trickle down the corner of his

mouth. And as I never hesitated to laugh in his face it

happened invariably that when this little word bobbed up

Van Norden would pause just long enough for me to burst

into a cackle and then, as if nothing had happened, he

would resume his monologue, repeating the word more and

more frequently and each time with a more caressing

emphasis. It was the soul of him that women were trying to

possess—that he made clear to me. He has explained it over

and over again, but he comes back to it afresh each time

like a paranoiac to his obsession. In a sense Van Norden is

mad, of that I’m convinced. His one fear is to be left alone,

and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he

is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to

her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for

himself. “I try all sorts of things,” he explains to me. “I even

count sometimes, or I begin to think of a problem in

philosophy, but it doesn’t work. It’s like I’m two people, and

one of them is watching me all the time. I get so

goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself… and in a

way, that’s what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one

second like I obliterate myself. There’s not even one me

then… there’s nothing… not even the cunt. It’s like receiving

communion. Honest, I mean that. For a few seconds

afterward I have a fine spiritual glow… and maybe it would

continue that way indefinitely—how can you tell?—if it

weren’t for the fact that there’s a woman beside you and

then the douche bag and the water running… all those little

details that make you desperately self-conscious,

desperately lonely. And for that one moment of freedom you

have to listen to all that love crap… it drives me nuts

sometimes… I want to kick them out immediately… I do now

and then. But that doesn’t keep them away. They like it, in

fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after

you. There’s something perverse about women… they’re all

masochists at heart.”

“But what is it you want of a woman, then?” I demand.

He begins to mold his hands; his lower lip droops. He

looks completely frustrated. When eventually he succeeds

in stammering out a few broken phrases it’s with the

conviction that behind his words lies an overwhelming

futility. “I want to be able to surrender myself to a woman,”

he blurts out. “I want her to take me out of myself. But to do

that, she’s got to be better than I am; she’s got to have a

mind, not just a cunt. She’s got to make me believe that I

need her, that I can’t live without her. Find me a cunt like

that, will you? If you could do that I’d give you my job. I

wouldn’t care then what happened to me: I wouldn’t need a

job or friends or books or anything. If she could only make

me believe that there was something more important on

earth than myself. Jesus, I hate myself! But I hate these

bastardly cunts even more—because they’re none of them

any good.

“You think I like myself,” he continues. “That shows how

little you know about me. I know I’m a great guy. … I

wouldn’t have these problems if there weren’t something to

me. But what eats me up is that I can’t express myself.

People think I’m a cunt-chaser. That’s how shallow they are,

these high brows who sit on the terrasse all day chewing the

psychologic cud. … That’s not so bad, eh—psychologic cud?

Write it down for me. I’ll use it in my column next week. …

By the way, did you ever read Stekel? Is he any good? It

looks like nothing but case histories to me. I wish to Christ I

could get up enough nerve to visit an analyst… a good one,

I mean. I don’t want to see these little shysters with goatees

and frock coats, like your friend Boris. How do you manage

to tolerate those guys? Don’t they bore you stiff? You talk to

anybody, I notice. You don’t give a goddamn. Maybe you’re

right. I wish I weren’t so damned critical. But these dirty

little Jews who hang around the Dôme, Jesus, they give me

the creeps. They sound just like textbooks. If I could talk to

you every day maybe I could get things off my chest. You’re

a good listener. I know you don’t give a damn about me, but

you’re patient. And you don’t have any theories to exploit. I

suppose you put it all down afterward in that notebook of

yours. Listen, I don’t mind what you say about me, but don’t

make me out to be a cunt-chaser—it’s too simple. Some day

I’ll write a book about myself, about my thoughts. I don’t

mean just a piece of introspective analysis… I mean that I’ll

lay myself down on the operating table and I’ll expose my

whole guts… every goddamned thing. Has anybody ever

done that before?—What the hell are you smiling at? Does it

sound naïf?”

I’m smiling because whenever we touch on the subject of

this book which he is going to write some day things

assume an incongruous aspect. He has only to say “my

book” and immediately the world shrinks to the private

dimensions of Van Norden and Co. The book must be

absolutely original, absolutely perfect. That is why, among

other things, it is impossible for him to get started on it. As

soon as he gets an idea he begins to question it. He

remembers that Dostoevski used it, or Hamsun, or

somebody else. “I’m not saying that I want to be better than

them, but I want to be different,” he explains. And so,

instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after

another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not

going to tread on their private property. And the more he

reads the more disdainful he becomes. None of them are

satisfying; none of them arrive at that degree of perfection

which he has imposed on himself. And forgetting completely

that he has not written as much as a chapter he talks about

them condescendingly, quite as though there existed a shelf

of books bearing his name, books which everyone is familiar

with and the titles of which it is therefore superfluous to

mention. Though he has never overtly lied about this fact,

nevertheless it is obvious that the people whom he

buttonholes in order to air his private philosophy, his

criticism, and his grievances, take it for granted that behind

his loose remarks there stands a solid body of work.

Especially the young and foolish virgins whom he lures to

his room on the pretext of reading to them his poems, or on

the still better pretext of asking their advice. Without the

least feeling of guilt or self-consciousness he will hand them

a piece of soiled paper on which he has scribbled a few lines

—the basis of a new poem, as he puts it—and with absolute

seriousness demand of them an honest expression of

opinion. As they usually have nothing to give by way of

comment, wholly bewildered as they are by the utter

senselessness of the lines, Van Norden seizes the occasion

to expound to them his view of art, a view, needless to say,

which is spontaneously created to suit the event. So expert

has he become in this role that the transition from Ezra

Pound’s cantos to the bed is made as simply and naturally

as a modulation from one key to another; in fact, if it were

not made there would be a discord, which is what happens

now and then when he makes a mistake as regards those

nitwits whom he refers to as “push-overs.” Naturally,

constituted as he is, it is with reluctance that he refers to

these fatal errors of judgment. But when he does bring

himself to confess to an error of this kind it is with absolute

frankness; in fact, he seems to derive a perverse pleasure in

dwelling upon his inaptitude. There is one woman, for

example, whom he has been trying to make for almost ten

years now—first in America, and finally here in Paris. It is the

only person of the opposite sex with whom he has a cordial,

friendly relationship. They seem not only to like each other,

but to understand each other. At first it seemed to me that if

he could really make this creature his problem might be

solved. All the elements for a successful union were there—

except the fundamental one. Bessie was almost as unusual

in her way as himself. She had as little concern about giving

herself to a man as she has about the dessert which follows

the meal. Usually she singled out the object of her choice

and made the proposition herself. She was not bad-looking,

nor could one say that she was good-looking either. She had

a fine body, that was the chief thing—and she liked it, as

they say.

They were so chummy, these two, that sometimes, in

order to gratify her curiosity (and also in the vain hope of

inspiring her by his prowess), Van Norden would arrange to

hide her in his closet during one of his seances. After is was

over Bessie would emerge from her hiding place and they

would discuss the matter casually, that is to say, with an

almost total indifference to everything except “technique.”

Technique was one of her favorite terms, at least in those

discussions which I was privileged to enjoy. “What’s wrong

with my technique?” he would say. And Bessie would

answer: “You’re too crude. If you ever expect to make me

you’ve got to become more subtle.”

There was such a perfect understanding between them,

as I say, that often when I called for Van Norden at one-

thirty, I would find Bessie sitting on the bed, the covers

thrown back and Van Norden inviting her to stroke his

penis… “just a few silken strokes,” he would say, “so as I’ll

have the courage to get up.” Or else he would urge her to

blow on it, or failing that, he would grab hold of himself and

shake it like a dinner bell, the two of them laughing fit to

die. “I’ll never make this bitch,” he would say. “She has no

respect for me. That’s what I get for taking her into my

confidence.” And then abruptly he might add: “What do you

make of that blonde I showed you yesterday?” Talking to

Bessie, of course. And Bessie would jeer at him, telling him

he had no taste. “Aw, don’t give me that line,” he would say.

And then playfully, perhaps for the thousandth time,

because by now it had become a standing joke between

them—“Listen, Bessie, what about a quick lay? Just one little

lay… no.” And when this had passed off in the usual manner

he would add, in the same tone: “Well, what about him?

Why don’t you give him a lay?”

The whole point about Bessie was that she couldn’t, or

just wouldn’t, regard herself as a lay. She talked about

passion, as if it were a brand new word. She was passionate

about things, even a little thing like a lay. She had to put her

soul into it.

“I get passionate too sometimes,” Van Norden would say.

“Oh, you,” says Bessie. “You’re just a worn-out satyr. You

don’t know the meaning of passion. When you get an

erection you think you’re passionate.”

“All right, maybe it’s not passion… but you can’t get

passionate without having an erection, that’s true isn’t it?”

All this about Bessie, and the other women whom he

drags to his room day in and out, occupies my thoughts as

we walk to the restaurant. I have adjusted myself so well to

his monologues that without interrupting my own reveries I

make whatever comment is required automatically, the

moment I hear his voice die out. It is a duet, and like most

duets moreover in that one listens attentively only for the

signal which announces the advent of one’s own voice. As it

is his night off, and as I have promised to keep him

company, I have already dulled myself to his queries. I know

that before the evening is over I shall be thoroughly

exhausted; if I am lucky, that is, if I can worm a few francs

out of him on some pretext or other, I will duck him the

moment he goes to the toilet. But he knows my propensity

for slipping away, and, instead of being insulted, he simply

provides against the possibility by guarding his sous. If I ask

him for money to buy cigarettes he insists on going with me

to purchase them. He will not be left alone, not for a second.

Even when he has succeeded in grabbing off a woman, even

then he is terrified to be left alone with her. If it were

possible he would have me sit in the room while he puts on

the performance. It would be like asking me to wait while he

took a shave.

On his night off Van Norden generally manages to have at

least fifty francs in his pocket, a circumstance which does

not prevent him from making a touch whenever he

encounters a prospect. “Hello,” he says, “give me twenty

francs… I need it.” He has a way of looking panic-stricken at

the same time. And if he meets with a rebuff he becomes

insulting. “Well, you can buy a drink at least.” And when he

gets his drink he says more graciously—“Listen give me five

francs then… give me two francs” We go from bar to bar

looking for a little excitement and always accumulating a

few more francs.

At the Coupole we stumble into a drunk from the

newspaper. One of the upstairs guys. There’s just been an

accident at the office, he informs us. One of the

proofreaders fell down the elevator shaft. Not expected to

live.

At first Van Norden is shocked, deeply shocked. But when

he learns that it was Peckover, the Englishman, he looks

relieved. “The poor bastard,” he says, “he’s better off dead

than alive. He just got his false teeth the other day too. …”

The allusion to the false teeth moves the man upstairs to

tears. He relates in a slobbery way a little incident

connected with the accident. He is upset about it, more

upset about this little incident than about the catastrophe

itself. It seems that Peckover, when he hit the bottom of the

shaft, regained consciousness before anyone could reach

him. Despite the fact that his legs were broken and his ribs

busted, he had managed to rise to all fours and grope about

for his false teeth. In the ambulance he was crying out in his

delirium for the teeth he had lost. The incident was pathetic

and ludicrous at the same time. The guy from upstairs

hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep as he related it. It

was a delicate moment because with a drunk like that, one

false move and he’d crash a bottle over your skull. He had

never been particularly friendly with Peckover—as a matter

of fact, he had scarcely ever set foot in the proofreading

department: there was an invisible wall like between the

guys upstairs and the guys down below. But now, since he

had felt the touch of death, he wanted to display his

comradeship. He wanted to weep, if possible, to show that

he was a regular guy. And Joe and I, who knew Peckover well

and who knew also that he wasn’t worth a good goddamn,

even a few tears, we felt annoyed with this drunken

sentimentality. We wanted to tell him so too, but with a guy

like that you can’t afford to be honest; you have to buy a

wreath and go to the funeral and pretend that you’re

miserable. And you have to congratulate him too for the

delicate obituary he’s written. He’ll be carrying his delicate

little obituary around with him for months, praising the shit

out of himself for the way he handled the situation. We felt

all that, Joe and I, without saying a word to each other. We

just stood there and listened with a murderous, silent

contempt. And as soon as we could break away we did so;

we left him there at the bar blubbering to himself over his

Pernod.

Once out of his sight we began to laugh hysterically. The

false teeth! No matter what we said about the poor devil,

and we said some good things about him too, we always

came back to the false teeth. There are people in this world

who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders

them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more

ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end

with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to

discover anything tragic in their going. And since we didn’t

have to put on a false front we could laugh about the

incident to our heart’s content. We laughed all night about

it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust

for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to

persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine

fellow and that his death was a catastrophe. All sorts of

funny recollections came to our minds—the semicolons that

he overlooked and for which they bawled the piss out of

him. They made his life miserable with their fucking little

semicolons and the fractions which he always got wrong.

They were even going to fire him once because he came to

work with a boozy breath. They despised him because he

always looked so miserable and because he had eczema

and dandruff. He was just a nobody, as far as they were

concerned, but, now that he was dead, they would all chip in

lustily and buy him a huge wreath and they’d put his name

in big type in the obituary column. Anything to throw a little

reflection on themselves; they’d make him out to be a big

shit if they could. But unfortunately, with Peckover, there

was little they could invent about him. He was a zero, and

even the fact that he was dead wouldn’t add a cipher to his

name.

“There’s only one good aspect to it,” says Joe. “You may

get his job. And if you have any luck, maybe you’ll fall down

the elevator shaft and break your neck too. We’ll buy you a

nice wreath, I promise you that.”

Toward dawn we’re sitting on the terrasse of the Dôme.

We’ve forgotten about poor Peckover long ago. We’ve had a

little excitement at the Bal Nègre and Joe’s mind has slipped

back to the eternal preoccupation: cunt. It’s at this hour,

when his night off is almost concluded, that his restlessness

mounts to a fever pitch. He thinks of the women he passed

up earlier in the evening and of the steady ones he might

have had for the asking, if it weren’t that he was fed up with

them. He is reminded inevitably of his Georgia cunt—she’s

been hounding him lately, begging him to take her in, at

least until she can find herself a job. “I don’t mind giving her

a feed once in a while,” he says, “but I couldn’t take her on

as a steady thing… she’d ruin it for my other cunts.” What

gripes him most about her is that she doesn’t put on any

flesh. “It’s like taking a skeleton to bed with you,” he says.

“The other night I took her on—out of pity—and what do you

think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it

clean… not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a

woman who shaved her twat? It’s repulsive, ain’t it? And it’s

funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn’t look like a twat any

more: it’s like a dead clam or something.” He describes to

me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and

searched for his flashlight. “I made her hold it open and I

trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me. … it

was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all

about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously.

You’d imagine I’d never seen one before. And the more I

looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to

show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s

shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a

statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a

statue—that was by Rodin. You ought to see it some time…

she has her legs spread wide apart. … I don’t think there

was any head on it. Just a cunt you might say. Jesus, it

looked ghastly. The thing is this—they all look alike. When

you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts

of things: you give them an individuality like, which they

haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between

the legs and you get all steamed up about it—you don’t

even look at it half the time. You know it’s there and all you

think about is getting your ramrod inside; it’s as though

your penis did the thinking for you. It’s an illusion! You get

all burned up about nothing… about a crack with hair on it,

or without hair. It’s so absolutely meaningless that it

fascinated me to look at it. I must have studied it for ten

minutes or more. When you look at it that way, sort of

detached like, you get funny notions in your head. All that

mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—

just a blank. Wouldn’t it be funny if you found a harmonica

inside… or a calendar? But there’s nothing there… nothing

at all. It’s disgusting. It almost drove me mad…. Listen, do

you know what I did afterwards? I gave her a quick lay and

then I turned my back on her. Yeah, I picked up a book and I

read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad

book… but a cunt, it’s just sheer loss of time. …”

It just so happened that as he was concluding his speech

a whore gave us the eye. Without the slightest transition he

says to me abruptly: “Would you like to give her a tumble? It

won’t cost much… she’ll take the two of us on.” And without

waiting for a reply he staggers to his feet and goes over to

her. In a few minutes he comes back. “It’s all fixed,” he

says. “Finish your beer. She’s hungry. There’s nothing doing

any more at this hour… she’ll take the both of us for fifteen

francs. We’ll go to my room… it’ll be cheaper.”

On the way to the hotel the girl is shivering so that we

have to stop and buy her a coffee. She’s a rather gentle sort

of creature and not at all bad to look at. She evidently

knows Van Norden, knows there’s nothing to expect from

him but the fifteen francs. “You haven’t got any dough,” he

says, mumbling to me under his breath. As I haven’t a

centime in my pocket I don’t quite see the point of this, until

he bursts out: “For Christ’s sake, remember that we’re

broke. Don’t get tenderhearted when we get upstairs. She’s

going to ask you for a little extra—I know this cunt! I could

get her for ten francs, if I wanted to. There’s no use spoiling

them. …”

“Il est méchant, celui-là,” she says to me, gathering the

drift of his remarks in her dull way.

“Non, il n’est pas méchant, il est très gentil.”

She shakes her head laughingly. “Je le connais bien, ce

type.” And then she commences a hard luck story, about

the hospital and the back rent and the baby in the country.

But she doesn’t overdo it. She knows that our ears are

stopped; but the misery is there inside her, like a stone, and

there’s no room for any other thoughts. She isn’t trying to

make an appeal to our sympathies—she’s just shifting this

big weight inside her from one place to another. I rather like

her. I hope to Christ she hasn’t got a disease. …

In the room she goes about her preparations

mechanically. “There isn’t a crust of bread about by any

chance?” she inquires, as she squats over the bidet. Van

Norden laughs at this. “Here, take a drink,” he says, shoving

a bottle at her. She doesn’t want anything to drink; her

stomach’s already on the bum, she complains.

“That’s just a line with her,” says Van Norden. “Don’t let

her work on your sympathies. Just the same, I wish she’d

talk about something else. How the hell can you get up any

passion when you’ve got a starving cunt on your hands?”

Precisely! We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for

her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond

necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the

fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s

like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipated

nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it

over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his

arms, to say, “I’m fed up with it… I’m through.” No, there’s

fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn

about any more and which nobody is going to get in the end

anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of

things and rather than listen to one’s own voice, rather than

walk out: on the primal cause, one surrenders to the

situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the

more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he

behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and

suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers

pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on

their chest. Then one has the rest of his life to think about

the fifteen francs. One hasn’t any eyes or arms or legs, but

he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his days

about the fifteen francs which everybody has forgotten.

It’s exactly like a state of war—I can’t get it out of my

head. The way she works over me, to blow a spark of

passion into me, makes me think what a damned poor

soldier I’d be if I was ever silly enough to be trapped like this

and dragged to the front. I know for my part that I’d

surrender everything, honor included, in order to get out of

the mess. I haven’t any stomach for it, and that’s all there is

to it. But she’s got her mind set on the fifteen francs arid if I

don’t want to fight about it she’s going to make me fight.

But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any

fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you

can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to

death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us

who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a

little behind. My mind is on the peace treaty all the time. I

can’t forget that it was the fifteen francs which started all

the trouble. Fifteen francs! What does fifteen francs mean to

me, particularly since it’s not my fifteen francs?

Van Norden seems to have a more normal attitude about

it. He doesn’t care a rap about the fifteen francs either now;

it’s the situation itself which intrigues him. It seems to call

for a show of mettle—his manhood is involved. The fifteen

francs are lost, whether we succeed or not. There’s

something more involved—not just manhood perhaps, but

will. It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know

any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes

now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same,

and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has

admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or

even just his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and

slaughtering, he’d slaughter a million men rather than stop

and ask himself why.

As I watch Van Norden tackle her, it seems to me that I’m

looking at a machine whose cogs have slipped. Left to

themselves, they could go on this way forever, grinding and

slipping, without ever anything happening. Until a hand

shuts the motor off. The sight of them coupled like a pair of

goats without the least spark of passion, grinding and

grinding away for no reason except the fifteen francs,

washes away every bit of feeling I have except the inhuman

one of satisfying my curiosity. The girl is lying on the edge of

the bed and Van Norden is bent over her like a satyr with his

two feet solidly planted on the floor. I am sitting on a chair

behind him, watching their movements with a cool,

scientific detachment; it doesn’t matter to me if it should

last forever. It’s like watching one of those crazy machines

which throw the newspaper out, millions and billions and

trillions of them with their meaningless headlines. The

machine seems more sensible, crazy as it is, and more

fascinating to watch, than the human beings and the events

which produced it. My interest in Van Norden and the girl is

nil; if I could sit like this and watch every single performance

going on at this minute all over the world my interest would

be even less than nil. I wouldn’t be able to differentiate

between this phenomenon and the rain falling or a volcano

erupting. As long as that spark of passion is missing there is

no human significance in the performance. The machine is

better to watch. And these two are like a machine which has

slipped its cogs. It needs the touch of a human hand to set it

right. It needs a mechanic.

I get down on my knees behind Van Norden and I examine

the machine more attentively. The girl throws her head on

one side and gives me a despairing look. “It’s no use,” she

says. “It’s impossible.” Upon which Van Norden sets to work

with renewed energy, just like an old billy goat. He’s such an

obstinate cuss that he’ll break his horns rather than give up.

And he’s getting sore now because I’m tickling him in the

rump.

“For God’s sake, Joe, give it up! You’ll kill the poor girl.”

“Leave me alone,” he grunts. “I almost got it in that

time.”

The posture and the determined way in which he blurts

this out suddenly bring to my mind, for the second time, the

remembrance of my dream. Only now it seems as though

that broomstick, which he had so nonchalantly slung under

his arm, as he walked away, is lost forever. It is like the

sequel to the dream—the same Van Norden, but minus the

primal cause. He’s like a hero come back from the war, a

poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.

Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door

he enters the room is empty; whatever he puts in his mouth

leaves a bad taste. Everything is just the same as it was

before; the elements are unchanged, the dream is no

different than the reality. Only, between the time he went to

sleep and the time he woke up, his body was stolen. He’s

like a machine throwing out newspapers, millions and

billions of them every day, and the front page is loaded with

catastrophes, with riots, murders, explosions, collisions, but

he doesn’t feel anything. If somebody doesn’t turn the

switch off he’ll never know what it means to die; you can’t

die if your own proper body has been stolen. You can get

over a cunt and work away like a billy goat until eternity;

you can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will

create that spark of passion if there isn’t the intervention of

a human hand. Somebody has to put his hand into the

machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh

again. Somebody has to do this without hope of reward,

without concern over the fifteen francs; somebody whose

chest is so thin that a medal would make him hunchbacked.

And somebody has to throw a feed into a starving cunt

without fear of pushing it out again. Otherwise this show’ll

go on forever. There’s no way out of the mess. …

After sucking the boss’s ass for a whole week—it’s the

thing to do here—I managed to land Peckover’s job. He died

all right, the poor devil, a few hours after he hit the bottom

of the shaft. And just as I predicted, they gave him a fine

funeral, with solemn mass, huge wreaths, and everything.

Tout compris. And after the ceremonies they regaled

themselves, the upstairs guys, at a bistro. It was too bad

Peckover couldn’t have had just a little snack—he would

have appreciated it so much to sit with the men upstairs

and hear his own name mentioned so frequently.

I must say, right at the start, that I haven’t a thing to

complain about. It’s like being in a lunatic asylum, with

permission to masturbate for the rest of your life. The world

is brought right under my nose and all that is requested of

me is to punctuate the calamities. There is nothing in which

these slick guys upstairs do not put their fingers: no joy, no

misery passes unnoticed. They live among the hard facts of

life, reality, as it is called. It is the reality of a swamp and

they are the frogs who have nothing better to do than to

croak. The more they croak the more real life becomes.

Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman—these are

the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world.

A constant atmosphere of calamity. It’s marvelous. It’s as if

the barometer never changed, as if the flag were always at

half-mast. One can see now how the idea of heaven takes

hold of men’s consciousness, how it gains ground even

when all the props have been knocked from under it. There

must be another world beside this swamp in which

everything is dumped pell-mell. It’s hard to imagine what it

can be like, this heaven that men dream about. A frog’s

heaven, no doubt. Miasma, scum, pond lilies, stagnant

water. Sit on a lily pad unmolested and croak all day.

Something like that, I imagine.

They have a wonderful therapeutic effect upon me, these

catastrophes which I proofread. Imagine a state of perfect

immunity, a charmed existence, a life of absolute security in

the midst of poison bacilli. Nothing touches me, neither

earthquakes nor explosions nor riots nor famine nor

collisions nor wars nor revolutions. I am inoculated against

every disease, every calamity, every sorrow and misery. It’s

the culmination of a life of fortitude. Seated at my little

niche all the poisons which the world gives off each day

pass through my hands. Not even a fingernail gets stained. I

am absolutely immune. I am even better off than a

laboratory attendant, because there are no bad odors here,

just the smell of lead burning. The world can blow up—I’ll be

here just the same to put in a comma or a semicolon. I may

even touch a little overtime, for with an event like that

there’s bound to be a final extra. When the world blows up

and the final edition has gone to press the proofreaders will

quietly gather up all commas, semicolons, hyphens,

asterisks, brackets, parentheses, periods, exclamation

marks, etc. and put them in a little box over the editorial

chair. Comme ça tout est réglé. …

None of my companions seem to understand why I

appear so contented. They grumble all the time, they have

ambitions, they want to show their pride and spleen. A good

proofreader has no ambitions, no pride, no spleen. A good

proofreader is a little like God Almighty, he’s in the world

but not of it. He’s for Sundays only. Sunday is his night off.

On Sundays he steps down from his pedestal and shows his

ass to the faithful. Once a week he listens in on all the

private grief and misery of the world; it’s enough to last him

for the rest of the week. The rest of the week he remains in

the frozen winter marshes, an absolute, an impeccable

absolute, with only a vaccination mark to distinguish him

from the immense void.

The greatest calamity for a proofreader is the threat of

losing his job. When we get together in the break the

question that sends a shiver down our spines is: what’ll you

do if you lose your job? For the man in the paddock, whose

duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the

possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is

disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a

piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his

livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.

This life which, if I were still a man with pride, honor,

ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of

degradation, I welcome now, as an invalid welcomes death.

It’s a negative reality, just like death—a sort of heaven

without the pain and terror of dying. In this chthonian world

the only thing of importance is orthography and

punctuation. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the

calamity is, only whether it is spelled right. Everything is on

one level, whether it be the latest fashion for evening

gowns, a new battleship, a plague, a high explosive, an

astronomic discovery, a bank run, a railroad wreck, a bull

market, a hundred-to-one shot, an execution, a stick-up, an

assassination, or what. Nothing escapes the proofreader’s

eye, but nothing penetrates his bulletproof vest. To the

Hindoo Agha Mir, Madam Scheer (formerly Miss Esteve)

writes saying she is quite satisfied with his work.” I was

married June 6th and I thank you. We are very happy and I

hope that thanks to your power it will be so forever. I am

sending you by telegraph money order the sum of… to

reward you. …” The Hindoo Agha Mir foretells your future

and reads all your thoughts in a precise and inexplicable

way. He will advise you, will help you rid yourself of all your

worries and troubles of all kinds, etc. Call or write 20 Avenue

Mac-Mahon, Paris.

He reads all your thoughts in a marvelous way! I take it

that means without exception, from the most trivial

thoughts to the most shameless. He must have a lot of time

on his hands, this Agha Mir. Or does he only concentrate on

the thoughts of those who send money by telegraph money

order? In the same edition I notice a headline announcing

that “the universe is expanding so fast it may burst” and

underneath it is the photograph of a splitting headache. And

then there is a spiel about the pearl, signed Tecla. The

oyster produces both, he informs all and sundry. Both the

“wild” or Oriental pearl, and the “cultured” pearl. On the

same day, at the Cathedral of Trier, the Germans are

exhibiting the Coat of Christ; it’s the first time it’s been

taken out of the moth balls in forty-two years. Nothing said

about the pants and vest. In Salzburg, also the same day,

two mice were born in a man’s stomach, believe it or not. A

famous movie actress is shown with her legs crossed: she is

taking a rest in Hyde Park, and underneath a well-known

painter remarks “I’ll admit that Mrs. Coolidge has such

charm and personality that she would have been one of the

12 famous Americans, even had her husband not been

President.” From an interview with Mr. Humhal, of Vienna, I

glean the following…“Before I stop,” said Mr. Humhal, “I’d

like to say that faultless cut and fit does not suffice; the

proof of good tailoring is seen in the wearing. A suit must

bend to the body, yet keep its line when the wearer is

walking or sitting.” And whenever there is an explosion in a

coal mine—a British coal mine—notice please that the King

and Queen always send their condolences promptly, by

telegraph. And they always attend the important races,

though the other day, according to the copy, it was at the

Derby, I believe, “heavy rains began to fall, much to the

surprise of the King and Queen.” More heart-rending,

however, is an item like this: “It is claimed in Italy that the

persecutions are not against the Church, but nevertheless

they are conducted against the most exquisite parts of the

Church. It is claimed that they are not against the Pope, but

they are against the very heart and eyes of the Pope.”

I had to travel precisely all around the world to find just

such a comfortable, agreeable niche as this. It seems

incredible almost. How could I have foreseen, in America,

with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you

pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my

temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes? Over

there you think of nothing but becoming President of the

United States some day. Potentially every man is

Presidential timber. Here it’s different. Here every man is

potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it

is an accident, a miracle. The chances are a thousand to one

that you will never leave your native village. The chances

are a thousand to one that you’ll have your legs shot off or

your eyes blown out. Unless the miracle happens and you

find yourself a general or a rear admiral.

But it’s just because the chances are all against you, just

because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.

Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. The

barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast.

You wear a piece of black crepe on your arm, you have a

little ribbon in your buttonhole, and, if you are lucky enough

to afford it, you buy yourself a pair of artificial lightweight

limbs, aluminum preferably. Which does not prevent you

from enjoying an apéritif or looking at the animals in the zoo

or flirting with the vultures who sail up and down the

boulevards always on the alert for fresh carrion. Time

passes. If you’re a stranger and your papers are in order you

can expose yourself to infection without fear of being

contaminated. It is better, if possible, to have a

proofreader’s job. Comme ça, tout s’arrange. That means,

that if you happen to be strolling home at three in the

morning and you are intercepted by the bicycle cops, you

can snap your fingers at them. In the morning, when the

market is in swing, you can buy Belgian eggs, at fifty

centimes apiece. A proofreader doesn’t get up usually until

noon, or a little after. It’s well to choose a hotel near a

cinema, because if you have a tendency to oversleep the

bells will wake you up in time for the matinee. Or if you

can’t find a hotel near a cinema, choose one near a

cemetery, it comes to the same thing. Above all, never

despair. Il ne faut jamais désespérer.

Which is what I try to din into Carl and Van Norden every

night. A world without hope, but no despair. It’s as though I

had been converted to a new religion, as though I were

making an annual novena every night to Our Lady of Solace.

I can’t imagine what there would be to gain if I were made

editor of the paper, or even President of the United States.

I’m up a blind alley, and it’s cosy and comfortable. With a

piece of copy in my hand I listen to the music around me,

the hum and drone of voices, the tinkle of the linotype

machines, as if there were a thousand silver bracelets

passing through a wringer; now and then a rat scurries past

our feet or a cockroach descends the wall in front of us,

moving nimbly and gingerly on his delicate legs. The events

of the day are slid under your nose, quietly,

unostentatiously, with, now and then, a by-line to mark the

presence of a human hand, an ego, a touch of vanity. The

procession passes serenely, like a cortege entering the

cemetery gates. The paper under the copy desk is so thick

that it almost feels like a carpet with a soft nap. Under Van

Norden’s desk it is stained with brown juice. Around eleven

o’clock the peanut vendor arrives, a half-wit of an Armenian

who is also content with his lot in life.

Now and then I get a cablegram from Mona saying that

she’s arriving on the next boat. “Letter following,” it always

says. It’s been going on like this for nine months, but I never

see her name in the list of boat arrivals, nor does the garçon

ever bring me a letter on a silver platter. I haven’t any more

expectations in that direction either. If she ever does arrive

she can look for me downstairs, just behind the lavatory.

She’ll probably tell me right away that it’s unsanitary. That’s

the first thing that strikes an American woman about Europe

—that it’s unsanitary. Impossible for them to conceive of a

paradise without modern plumbing. If they find a bedbug

they want to write a letter immediately to the chamber of

commerce. How am I ever going to explain to her that I’m

contented here? She’ll say I’ve become a degenerate. I

know her line from beginning to end. She’ll want to look for

a studio with a garden attached—and a bathtub to be sure.

She wants to be poor in a romantic way. I know her. But I’m

prepared for her this time.

There are days, nevertheless, when the sun is out and I

get off the beaten path and think about her hungrily. Now

and then, despite my grim satisfaction, I get to thinking

about another way of life, get to wondering if it would make

a difference having a young, restless creature by my side.

The trouble is I can hardly remember what she looks like,

nor even how it feels to have my arms around her.

Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen

into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost

their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time-

bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire. If I try to recall my life

in New York I get a few splintered fragments, nightmarish

and covered with verdigris. It seems as if my own proper

existence had come to an end somewhere, just where

exactly I can’t make out. I’m not an American any more, nor

a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian. I

haven’t any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds,

any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I’m neither for nor

against. I’m a neutral.

When we walk home of a night, the three of us, it often

happens after the first spasms of disgust that we get to

talking about the condition of things with that enthusiasm

which only those who bear no active part in life can muster.

What seems strange to me sometimes, when I crawl into

bed, is that all this enthusiasm is engendered just to kill

time, just to annihilate the three-quarters of an hour which it

requires to walk from the office to Montparnasse. We might

have the most brilliant, the most feasible ideas for the

amelioration of this or that, but there is no vehicle to hitch

them to. And what is more strange is that the absence of

any relationship between ideas and living causes us no

anguish, no discomfort. We have become so adjusted that, if

tomorrow we were ordered to walk on our hands, we would

do so without the slightest protest. Provided, of course, that

the paper came out as usual. And that we touched our pay

regularly. Otherwise nothing matters. Nothing. We have

become Orientalized. We have become coolies, white-collar

coolies, silenced by a handful of rice each day. A special

feature in American skulls, I was reading the other day, is

the presence of the epactal bone, or os Incae, in the occiput.

The presence of this bone, so the savant went on to say, is

due to a persistence of the transverse occipital suture which

is usually closed in fetal life. Hence it is a sign of arrested

development and indicative of an inferior race. “The

average cubical capacity of the American skull,” so he went

on to say, “falls below that of the white, and rises above

that of the black race. Taking both sexes, the Parisians of

today have a cranial capacity of 1,448 cubic centimeters;

the Negroes 1,344 centimeters; the American Indians

1,376.” From all of which I deduce nothing because I am an

American and not an Indian. But it’s cute to explain things

that way, by a bone, an os Incae, for example. It doesn’t

disturb his theory at all to admit that single examples of

Indian skulls have yielded the extraordinary capacity of

1,920 cubic centimeters, a cranial capacity not exceeded in

any other race. What I note with satisfaction is that the

Parisians, of both sexes, seem to have a normal cranial

capacity. The transverse occipital suture is evidently not so

persistent with them. They know how to enjoy an apéritif

and they don’t worry if the houses are unpainted. There’s

nothing extraordinary about their skulls, so far as cranial

indices go. There must be some other explanation for the

art of living which they have brought to such a degree of

perfection.

At Monsieur Paul’s, the bistro across the way, there is a

back room reserved for the newspapermen where we can

eat on credit. It is a pleasant little room with sawdust on the

floor and flies in season and out. When I say that it is

reserved for the newspapermen I don’t mean to imply that

we eat in privacy; on the contrary, it means that we have

the privilege of associating with the whores and pimps who

form the more substantial element of Monsier Paul’s clientle.

The arrangement suits the guys upstairs to a T, because

they’re always on the lookout for tail, and even those who

have a steady little French girl are not averse to making a

switch now and then. The principal thing is not to get a

dose; at times it would seem as if an epidemic had swept

the office, or perhaps it might be explained by the fact that

they all sleep with the same woman. Anyhow, it’s gratifying

to observe how miserable they can look when they are

obliged to sit beside a pimp who, despite the little hardships

of his profession, lives a life of luxury by comparison.

I’m thinking particularly now of one tall, blonde fellow

who delivers the Havas messages by bicycle. He is always a

little late for his meal, always perspiring profusely and his

face covered with grime. He has a fine, awkward way of

strolling in, saluting everybody with two fingers and making

a beeline for the sink which is just between the toilet and

the kitchen. As he wipes his face he gives the edibles a

quick inspection; if he sees a nice steak lying on the slab he

picks it up and sniffs it, or he will dip the ladle into the big

pot and try a mouthful of soup. He’s like a fine bloodhound,

his nose to the ground all the time. The preliminaries over,

having made peepee and blown his nose vigorously, he

walks nonchalantly over to his wench and gives her a big,

smacking kiss together with an affectionate pat on the

rump. Her, the wench, I’ve never seen look anything but

immaculate—even at three a.m., after an evening’s work.

She looks exactly as if she had just stepped out of a Turkish

bath. It’s a pleasure to look at such healthy brutes, to see

such repose, such affection, such appetite as they display.

It’s the evening meal I’m speaking of now, the little snack

that she takes before entering upon her duties. In a little

while she will be obliged to take leave of her big blonde

brute, to flop somewhere on the boulevard and sip her

digestif. If the job is irksome or wearing or exhaustive, she

certainly doesn’t show it. When the big fellow arrives,

hungry as a wolf, she puts her arms around him and kisses

him hungrily—his eyes, nose, cheeks, hair, the back of his

neck… she’d kiss his ass if it could be done publicly. She’s

grateful to him, that’s evident. She’s no wage slave. All

through the meal she laughs convulsively. You wouldn’t

think she had a care in the world. And now and then, by way

of affection, she gives him a resounding slap in the face,

such a whack as would knock a proofreader spinning.

They don’t seem to be aware of anything but themselves

and the food that they pack away in shovelsful. Such perfect

contentment, such harmony, such mutual understanding, it

drives Van Norden crazy to watch them. Especially when she

slips her hand in the big fellow’s fly and caresses it, to which

he generally responds by grabbing her teat and squeezing it

playfully.

There is another couple who arrive usually about the

same time and they behave just like two married people.

They have their spats, they wash their linen in public and

after they’ve made things disagreeable for themselves and

everybody else, after threats and curses and reproaches

and recriminations, they make up for it by billing and

cooing, just like a pair of turtle doves. Lucienne, as he calls

her, is a heavy platinum blonde with a cruel, saturnine air.

She has a full underlip which she chews venomously when

her temper runs away with her. And a cold, beady eye, a

sort of faded china blue, which makes him sweat when she

fixes him with it. But she’s a good sort, Lucienne, despite

the condor-like profile which she presents to us when the

squabbling begins. Her bag is always full of dough, and if

she deals it out cautiously, it is only because she doesn’t

want to encourage him in his bad habits. He has a weak

character; that is, if one takes Lucienne’s tirades seriously.

He will spend fifty francs of an evening while waiting for her

to get through. When the waitress comes to take his order

he has no appetite. “Ah, you’re not hungry again!” growls

Lucienne. “Humpf! You were waiting for me, I suppose, on

the Faubourg Montmartre. You had a good time, I hope,

while I slaved for you. Speak, imbecile, where were you?”

When she flares up like that, when she gets enraged, he

looks up at her timidly and then, as if he had decided that

silence was the best course, he lets his head drop and he

fiddles with his napkin. But this little gesture, which she

knows so well and which of course is secretly pleasing to her

because she is convinced now that he is guilty, only

increases Lucienne’s anger. “Speak, imbecile!” she shrieks.

And with a squeaky, timid little voice he explains to her

woefully that while waiting for her he got so hungry that he

was obliged to stop off for a sandwich and a glass of beer. It

was just enough to ruin his appetite—he says it dolefully,

though it’s apparent that food just now is the least of his

worries. “But”—and he tries to make his voice sound more

convincing—“I was waiting for you all the time,” he blurts

out.

“Liar!” she screams. “Liar! Ah, fortunately, I too am a

liar… a good liar. You make me ill with your petty little lies.

Why don’t you tell me a big lie?”

He hangs his head again and absent-mindedly he gathers

a few crumbs and puts them to his mouth. Whereupon she

slaps his hand. “Don’t do that! You make me tired. You’re

such an imbecile. Liar! Just you wait! I have more to say. I

am a liar too, but I am not an imbecile.”

In a little while, however, they are sitting close together,

their hands locked, and she is murmuring softly: “Ah, my

little rabbit, it is hard to leave you now. Come here, kiss me!

What are you going to do this evening? Tell me the truth, my

little one. … I am sorry that I have such an ugly temper.” He

kisses her timidly, just like a little bunny with long pink ears;

gives her a little peck on the lips as if he were nibbling a

cabbage leaf. And at the same time his bright round eyes

fall caressingly on her purse which is lying open beside her

on the bench. He is only waiting for the moment when he

can graciously give her the slip; he is itching to get away, to

sit down in some quiet café on the Rue du Faubourg

Montmartre.

I know him, the innocent little devil, with his round,

frightened eyes of a rabbit. And I know what a devil’s street

is the Faubourg Montmartre with its brass plates and rubber

goods, the lights twinkling all night and sex running through

the street like a sewer. To walk from the Rue Lafayette to the

boulevard is like running the gauntlet; they attach

themselves to you like barnacles, they eat into you like ants,

they coax, wheedle, cajole, implore, beseech, they try it out

in German, English, Spanish, they show you their torn hearts

and their busted shoes, and long after you’ve chopped the

tentacles away, long after the fizz and sizzle has died out,

the fragrance of the lavabo clings to your nostrils—it is the

odor of the Parfum de Danse whose effectiveness is

guaranteed only for a distance of twenty centimeters. One

could piss away a whole lifetime in that little stretch

between the boulevard and the Rue Lafayette. Every bar is

alive, throbbing, the dice loaded; the cashiers are perched

like vultures on their high stools and the money they handle

has a human stink to it. There is no equivalent in the

Banque de France for the blood money that passes currency

here, the money that glistens with human sweat, that

passes like a forest fire from hand to hand and leaves

behind it a smoke and stench. A man who can walk through

the Faubourg Montmartre at night without panting or

sweating, without a prayer or a curse on his lips, a man like

that has no balls, and if he has, then he ought to be

castrated.

Supposing the timid little rabbit does spend fifty francs of

an evening while waiting for his Lucienne? Supposing he

does get hungry and buy a sandwich and a glass of beer, or

stop and chat with somebody else’s trollop? You think he

ought to be weary of that round night after night? You think

it ought to weigh on him, oppress him, bore him to death?

You don’t think that a pimp is inhuman, I hope? A pimp has

his private grief and misery too, don’t you forget. Perhaps

he would like nothing better than to stand on the corner

every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them

piddle. Perhaps he would like it if, when he opened the door,

he would see her there reading the Paris-Soir, her eyes

already a little heavy with sleep. Perhaps it isn’t so

wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste

another man’s breath. Better maybe to have only three

francs in your pocket and a pair of white dogs that piddle on

the corner than to taste those bruised lips. Bet you, when

she squeezes him tight, when she begs for that little

package of love which only he knows how to deliver, bet you

he fights like a thousand devils to pump it up, to wipe out

that regiment that has marched between her legs. Maybe

when he takes her body and practices a new tune, maybe it

isn’t all passion and curiosity with him, but a fight in the

dark, a fight single-handed against the army that rushed the

gates, the army that walked over her, trampled her, that left

her with such a devouring hunger that not even a Rudolph

Valentino could appease. When I listen to the reproaches

that are leveled against a girl like Lucienne, when I hear her

being denigrated or despised because she is cold and

mercenary, because she is too mechanical, or because she’s

in too great a hurry, or because this or because that, I say to

myself, hold on there bozo, not so fast! Remember that

you’re far back in the procession; remember that a whole

army corps has laid siege to her, that she’s been laid waste,

plundered and pillaged. I say to myself, listen, bozo, don’t

begrudge the fifty francs you hand her because you know

her pimp is pissing it away in the Faubourg Montmartre. It’s

her money and her pimp. It’s blood money. It’s money that’ll

never be taken out of circulation because there’s nothing in

the Banque de France to redeem it with.

That’s how I think about it often when I’m seated in my

little niche juggling the Havas reports or untangling the

cables from Chicago, London and Montreal. In between the

rubber and silk markets and the Winnipeg grains there

oozes a little of the fizz and sizzle of the Faubourg

Montmartre. When the bonds go weak and spongy and the

pivotals balk and the volatiles effervesce, when the grain

market slips and slides and the bulls commence to roar,

when every fucking calamity, every ad, every sport item

and fashion article, every boat arrival, every travelogue,

every tag of gossip has been punctuated, checked, revised,

pegged and wrung through the silver bracelets, when I hear

the front page being hammered into whack and see the

frogs dancing around like drunken squibs, I think of Lucienne

sailing down the boulevard with her wings outstretched, a

huge silver condor suspended over the sluggish tide of

traffic, a strange bird from the tips of the Andes with a rose-

white belly and a tenacious little knob. Sometimes I walk

home alone and I follow her through the dark streets, follow

her through the court of the Louvre, over the Pont des Arts,

through the arcade, through the fents and slits, the

somnolence, the drugged whiteness, the grill of the

Luxembourg, the tangled boughs, the snores and groans,

the green slats, the strum and tinkle, the points of the stars,

the spangles, the jetties, the blue and white striped awnings

that she brushed with the tips of her wings.

In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan

and crumpled; along the beach at Montparnasse the water

lilies bend and break. When the tide is on the ebb and only

a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the muck, the

Dôme looks like a shooting gallery that’s been struck by a

cyclone. Everything is slowly dribbling back to the sewer. For

about an hour there is a deathlike calm during which the

vomit is mopped up. Suddenly the trees begin to screech.

From one end of the boulevard to the other a demented

song rises up. It is like the signal that announces the close

of the exchange. What hopes there were are swept up. The

moment has come to void the last bagful of urine. The day

is sneaking in like a leper. …

One of the things to guard against when you work nights

is not to break your schedule; if you don’t get to bed before

the birds begin to screech it’s useless to go to bed at all.

This morning, having nothing better to do, I visited the

Jardin des Plantes. Marvelous pelicans here from

Chapultepec and peacocks with studded fans that look at

you with silly eyes. Suddenly it began to rain.

Returning to Montparnasse in the bus I noticed a little

French woman opposite me who sat stiff and erect as if she

were getting ready to preen herself. She sat on the edge of

the seat as if she feared to crush her gorgeous tail.

Marvelous, I thought, if suddenly she shook herself and from

her derrière there sprung open a huge studded fan with long

silken plumes.

At the Café de l’Avenue, where I stop for a bite, a woman

with a swollen stomach tries to interest me in her condition.

She would like me to go to a room with her and while away

an hour or two. It is the first time I have ever been

propositioned by a pregnant woman: I am almost tempted

to try it. As soon as the baby is born and handed over to the

authorities she will go back to her trade, she says. She

makes hats. Observing that my interest is waning she takes

my hand and puts it on her abdomen. I feel something

stirring inside. It takes my appetite away.

I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual

provender. As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye

or a leg she goes on the loose. In America she’d starve to

death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation.

Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or

a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural

homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an

added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.

I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to

the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop

of juice has been squeezed out by the machine—the

martyrs of modern progress. It is this mass of bones and

collar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh

on.

It is only later, in the afternoon, when I find myself in an

art gallery on the Rue de Sèze, surrounded by the men and

women of Matisse, that I am drawn back again to the proper

precincts of the human world. On the threshold of that big

hall whose walls are now ablaze, I pause a moment to

recover from the shock which one experiences when the

habitual gray of the world is rent asunder and the color of

life splashes forth in song and poem. I find myself in a world

so natural, so complete, that I am lost. I have the sensation

of being immersed in the very plexus of life, focal from

whatever place, position or attitude I take my stance. Lost

as when once I sank into the quick of a budding grove and

seated in the dining room of that enormous world of Balbec,

I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those

interior stills which manifest their presence through the

exorcism of sight and touch. Standing on the threshold of

that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the

power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so

deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself,

are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable

of transforming the negative reality of life into the

substantial and significant outlines of art. Only those who

can admit the light into their gizzards can translate what is

there in the heart. Vividly now I recall how the glint and

sparkle of light caroming from the massive chandeliers

splintered and ran blood, flecking the tips of the waves that

beat monotonously on the dull gold outside the windows. On

the beach, masts and chimneys interlaced, and like a

fuliginous shadow the figure of Albertine gliding through the

surf, fusing into the mysterious quick and prism of a

protoplasmic realm, uniting her shadow to the dream and

harbinger of death. With the close of day, pain rising like a

mist from the earth, sorrow closing in, shuttering the

endless vista of sea and sky. Two waxen hands lying

listlessly on the bedspread and along the pale veins the

fluted murmur of a shell repeating the legend of its birth.

In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle

of human flesh which refused the consummation of death.

The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the

miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a

greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into

hungry seeing mouths. By whatever vision one passes there

is the odor and the sound of voyage. It is impossible to gaze

at even a corner of his dreams without feeling the lift of the

wave and the cool of flying spray. He stands at the helm

peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio of time. Into

what distant corners has he not thrown his long, slanting

gaze? Looking down the vast promontory of his nose he has

beheld everything—the Cordilleras falling away into the

Pacific, the history of the Diaspora done in vellum, shutters

fluting the froufrou of the beach, the piano curving like a

conch, corollas giving out diapasons of light, chameleons

squirming under the book press, seraglios expiring in oceans

of dust, music issuing like fire from the hidden

chromosphere of pain, spore and madrepore fructifying the

earth, navels vomiting their bright spawn of anguish. … He

is a bright sage, a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the

brush, removes the ugly scaffold to which the body of man

is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life. He it is, if any

man today possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve

the human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an

harmonious line in order to detect the rhythm and murmur

of the blood, who takes the light that has been refracted

inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of color. Behind the

minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the

invisible pattern; he announces his discoveries in the

metaphysical pigment of space. No searching for formulae,

no crucifixion of ideas, no compulsion other than to create.

Even as the world goes to smash there is one man who

remains at the core, who becomes more solidly fixed and

anchored, more centrifugal as the process of dissolution

quickens.

More and more the world resembles an entomologist’s

dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has

shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-

blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse

sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn

belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch

by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are

smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day,

when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore.

As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows

blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there

articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose,

at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds

like a broken rectum.

At the very hub of this wheel which is falling apart, is

Matisse. And he will keep on rolling until everything that has

gone to make up the wheel has disintegrated. He has

already rolled over a goodly portion of the globe, over Persia

and India and China, and like a magnet he has attached to

himself microscopic particles from Kurd, Baluchistan,

Timbuktu, Somaliland, Angkor, Tierra del Fuego. The

odalisques he has studded with malachite and jasper, their

flesh veiled with a thousand eyes, perfumed eyes dipped in

the sperm of whales. Wherever a breeze stirs there are

breasts as cool as jelly, white pigeons come to flutter and

rut in the ice-blue veins of the Himalayas.

The wallpaper with which the men of science have

covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand

whorehouse which they have made of life requires no

decoration; it is essential only that the drains function

adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the

balls in America, is finished. To fathom the new reality it is

first necessary to dismantle the drains, to lay open the

gangrened ducts which compose the genitourinary system

that supplies the excreta of art. The odor of the day is

permanganate and formaldehyde. The drains are clogged

with strangled embryos.

The world of Matisse is still beautiful in an old-fashioned

bedroom way. There is not a ball bearing in evidence, nor a

boiler plate, nor a piston, nor a monkey wrench. It is the

same old world that went gaily to the Bois in the pastoral

days of wine and fornication. I find it soothing and refreshing

to move amongst these creatures with live, breathing pores

whose background is stable and solid as light itself. I feel it

poignantly when I walk along the Boulevard de la Madeleine

and the whores rustle beside me, when just to glance at

them causes me to tremble. Is it because they are exotic or

well-nourished? No, it is rare to find a beautiful woman

along the Boulevard de la Madeleine. But in Matisse, in the

exploration of his brush, there is the trembling glitter of a

world which demands only the presence of the female to

crystallize the most fugitive aspirations. To come upon a

woman offering herself outside a urinal, where there are

advertised cigarette papers, rum, acrobats, horse races,

where the heavy foliage of the trees breaks the heavy mass

of walls and roofs, is an experience that begins where the

boundaries of the known world leave off. In the evening now

and then, skirting the cemetery walls, I stumble upon the

phantom odalisques of Matisse fastened to the trees, their

tangled manes drenched with sap. A few feet away,

removed by incalculable eons of time, lies the prone and

mummy-swathed ghost of Baudelaire, of a whole world that

will belch no more. In the dusky corners of cafés are men

and women with hands locked, their loins slather-flecked;

nearby stands the garçon with his apron full of sous, waiting

patiently for the entr’acte in order to fall upon his wife and

gouge her. Even as the world falls apart the Paris that

belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms,

the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees

tangled like hair. On its wobbly axle the wheel rolls steadily

downhill; there are no brakes, no ball bearings, no balloon

tires. The wheel is falling apart, but the revolution is intact.

…

Out of a clear sky there comes one day a letter from Boris

whom I have not seen for months and months. It is a

strange document and I don’t pretend to understand it all

clearly. “What happened between us—at any rate, as far as I

go—is that you touched me, touched my life, that is, at the

one point where I am still alive: my death. By the emotional

flow I went through another immersion. I lived again, alive.

No longer by reminiscence, as I do with others, but alive.”

That’s how it began. Not a word of greeting, no date, no

address. Written in a thin, pompous scrawl on ruled paper

torn out of a blank book. “That is why, whether you like me

or not—deep down I rather think you hate me—you are very

close to me. By you I know how I died: I see myself dying

again: I am dying. That is something. More than to be dead

simply. That may be the reason why I am so afraid to see

you: you may have played the trick on me, and died. Things

happen so fast nowadays.”

I’m reading it over, line by line, standing by the stones. It

sounds nutty to me, all this palaver about life and death and

things happening so fast. Nothing is happening that I can

see, except the usual calamities on the front page. He’s

been living all by himself for the last six months, tucked

away in a cheap little room—probably holding telepathic

communication with Cronstadt. He talks about the line

falling back, the sector evacuated, and so on and so forth,

as though he were dug into a trench and writing a report to

headquarters. He probably had his frock coat on when he

sat down to pen this missive, and he probably rubbed his

hands a few times as he used to do when a customer was

calling to rent the apartment. “The reason I wanted you to

commit suicide…” he begins again. At that I burst out

laughing. He used to walk up and down with one hand stuck

in the tail flap of his frock coat at the Villa Borghese, or at

Cronstadt’s—wherever there was deck space, as it were—

and reel off this nonsense about living and dying to his

heart’s content. I never understood a word of it, I must

confess, but it was a good show and, being a Gentile, I was

naturally interested in what went on in that menagerie of a

brainpan. Sometimes he would he on his couch full length,

exhausted by the surge of ideas that swept through his

noodle. His feet just grazed the bookrack where he kept his

Plato and Spinoza—he couldn’t understand why I had no use

for them. I must say he made them sound interesting,

though what it was all about I hadn’t the least idea.

Sometimes I would glance at a volume furtively, to check up

on these wild ideas which he imputed to them—but the

connection was frail, tenuous. He had a language all his

own, Boris, that is, when I had him alone; but when I

listened to Cronstadt it seemed to me that Boris had

plagiarized his wonderful ideas. They talked a sort of higher

mathematics, these two. Nothing of flesh and blood ever

crept in; it was weird, ghostly, ghoulishly abstract. When

they got on to the dying business it sounded a little more

concrete: after all, a cleaver or a meat ax has to have a

handle. I enjoyed those sessions immensely. It was the first

time in my life that death had ever seemed fascinating to

me—all these abstract deaths which involved a bloodless

sort of agony. Now and then they would compliment me on

being alive, but in such a way that I felt embarrassed. They

made me feel that I was alive in the nineteenth century, a

sort of atavistic remnant, a romantic shred, a soulful

Pithecanthropus erectus. Boris especially seemed to get a

great kick out of touching me; he wanted me to be alive so

that he could die to his heart’s content. You would think that

all those millions in the street were nothing but dead cows

the way he looked at me and touched me. But the letter…

I’m forgetting the letter. …

“The reason why I wanted you to commit suicide that

evening at the Cronstadts’, when Moldorf became God, was

that I was very close to you then. Perhaps closer than I shall

ever be. And I was afraid, terribly afraid, that some day

you’d go back on me, die on my hands. And I would be left

high and dry with my idea of you simply, and nothing to

sustain it. I should never forgive you for that.”

Perhaps you can visualize him saying a thing like that!

Myself it’s not clear what his idea of me was, or at any rate,

it’s clear that I was just pure idea, an idea that kept itself

alive without food. He never attached much importance,

Boris, to the food problem. He tried to nourish me with

ideas. Everything was idea. Just the same, when he had his

heart set on renting the apartment, he wouldn’t forget to

put a new washer in the toilet. Anyway, he didn’t want me

to die on his hands. “You must be life for me to the very

end,” so he writes. “That is the only way in which you can

sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you

see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I

shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live

more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I

speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It’s hard to

talk of one’s self so intimately.”

You would imagine perhaps that he was anxious to see

me, or that he would like to know what I was doing—but no,

not a line about the concrete or the personal, except in this

living-dying language, nothing but this little message from

the trenches, this whiff of poison gas to apprise all and

sundry that the war was still on. I sometimes ask myself

how it happens that I attract nothing but crackbrained

individuals, neurasthenics, neurotics, psychopaths—and

Jews especially. There must be something in a healthy

Gentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour

black bread. There was Moldorf, for example, who had made

himself God, according to Boris and Cronstadt. He positively

hated me, the little viper—yet he couldn’t stay away from

me. He came round regularly for his little dose of insults—it

was like a tonic to him. In the beginning, it’s true, I was

lenient with him; after all, he was paying me to listen to

him. And though I never displayed much sympathy I knew

how to be silent when it involved a meal and a little pin

money. After a while, however, seeing what a masochist he

was, I permitted myself to laugh in his face now and then;

that was like a whip for him, it made the grief and agony

gush forth with renewed vigor. And perhaps everything

would have gone smoothly between us if he had not felt it

his duty to protect Tania. But Tania being a Jewess, that

brought up a moral question. He wanted me to stick to Mlle.

Claude for whom, I must admit, I had a genuine affection.

He even gave me money occasionally to sleep with her.

Until he realized that I was a hopeless lecher.

I mention Tania now because she’s just got back from

Russia—just a few days ago. Sylvester remained behind to

worm his way into a job. He’s given up literature entirely.

He’s dedicated himself to the new Utopia. Tania wants me to

go back there with her, to the Crimea preferably, and start a

new life. We had a fine drinking bout up in Carl’s room the

other day discussing the possibilities. I wanted to know what

I could do for a living back there—if I could be a proofreader,

for example. She said I didn’t need to worry about what I

would do—they would find a job for me as long as I was

earnest and sincere. I tried to look earnest, but I only

succeeded in looking pathetic. They don’t want to see sad

faces in Russia; they want you to be cheerful, enthusiastic,

light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America

to me. I wasn’t born with this kind of enthusiasm. I didn’t let

on to her, of course, but secretly I was praying to be left

alone, to go back to my little niche, and to stay there until

the war breaks. All this hocus-pocus about Russia disturbed

me a little. She got so excited about it, Tania, that we

finished almost a half dozen bottles of vin ordinaire. Carl

was jumping about like a cockroach. He has just enough Jew

in him to lose his head over an idea like Russia. Nothing

would do but to marry us off—immediately. “Hitch up!” he

says, “you have nothing to lose!” And then he pretends to

run a little errand so that we can pull off a fast one. And

while she wanted it all right, Tania, still that Russia business

had gotten so solidly planted in her skull that she pissed the

interval away chewing my ear off, which made me

somewhat grumpy and ill at ease. Anyway, we had to think

about eating and getting to the office, so we piled into a taxi

on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, just a stone’s throw away

from the cemetery, and off we whizzed. It was just a nice

hour to spin through Paris in an open cab, and the wine

rolling around in our tanks made it seem even more lovely

than usual. Carl was sitting opposite us, on the strapontin,

his face as red as a beet. He was happy, the poor bastard,

thinking what a glorious new life he would lead on the other

side of Europe. And at the same time he felt a bit wistful,

too—I could see that. He didn’t really want to leave Paris,

any more than I did. Paris hadn’t been good to him, any

more than it had to me, or to anybody, for that matter, but

when you’ve suffered and endured things here it’s then that

Paris takes hold of you, grabs you by the balls, you might

say, like some lovesick bitch who’d rather die than let you

get out of her hands. That’s how it looked to him, I could see

that. Rolling over the Seine he had a big foolish grin on his

face and he looked around at the buildings and the statues

as though he were seeing them in a dream. To me it was like

a dream too: I had my hand in Tania’s bosom and I was

squeezing her titties with all my might and I noticed the

water under the bridges and the barges and Notre-Dame

down below, just like the post cards show it, and I was

thinking drunkenly to myself that’s how one gets fucked, but

I was sly about it too and I knew I wouldn’t ever trade all

this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or

anything on earth. It was a fine afternoon, I was thinking to

myself, and soon we’d be pushing a feed down our bellies

and what could we order as a special treat, some good

heavy wine that would drown out all this Russia business.

With a woman like Tania, full of sap and everything, they

don’t give a damn what happens to you once they get an

idea in their heads. Let them go far enough and they’ll pull

the pants off you, right in the taxi. It was grand though,

milling through the traffic, our faces all smudged with rouge

and the wine gurgling like a sewer inside us, especially

when we swung into the Rue Laffitte which is just wide

enough to frame the little temple at the end of the street

and above it the Sacré-Cœur, a kind of exotic jumble of

architecture, a lucid French idea that gouges right through

your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly in

the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and

yet doesn’t jar your nerves.

With Tania back on the scene, a steady job, the drunken

talk about Russia, the walks home at night, and Paris in full

summer, life seems to lift its head a little higher. That’s why

perhaps, a letter such as Boris sent me seems absolutely

cockeyed. Most every day I meet Tania around five o’clock,

to have a Porto with her, as she calls it. I let her take me to

places I’ve never seen before, the swell bars around the

Champs-Elysées where the sound of jazz and baby voices

crooning seems to soak right through the mahogany

woodwork. Even when you go to the lavabo these pulpy,

sappy strains pursue you, come floating into the cabinet

through the ventilators and make life all soap and iridescent

bubbles. And whether it’s because Sylvester is away and

she feels free now, or whatever it is, Tania certainly tries to

behave like an angel. “You treated me lousy just before I

went away,” she says to me one day. “Why did you want to

act that way? I never did anything to hurt you, did I?” We

were getting sentimental, what with the soft lights and that

creamy, mahogany music seeping through the place. It was

getting near time to go to work and we hadn’t eaten yet.

The stubs were lying there in front of us—six francs, four-

fifty, seven francs, two-fifty—I was counting them up

mechanically and wondering too at the same time if I would

like it better being a bartender. Often like that, when she

was talking to me, gushing about Russia, the future, love,

and all that crap, I’d get to thinking about the most

irrelevant things, about shining shoes or being a lavatory

attendant, particularly I suppose because it was so cosy in

these joints that she dragged me to and it never occurred to

me that I’d be stone sober and perhaps old and bent… no, I

imagined always that the future, however modest, would be

in just this sort of ambiance, with the same tunes playing

through my head and the glasses clinking and behind every

shapely ass a trail of perfume a yard wide that would take

the stink out of life, even downstairs in the lavabo.

The strange thing is it never spoiled me trotting around to

the swell bars with her like that. It was hard to leave her,

certainly. I used to lead her around to the porch of a church

near the office and standing there in the dark we’d take a

last embrace, she whispering to me “Jesus, what am I going

to do now?” She wanted me to quit the job so as I could

make love night and day; she didn’t even care about Russia

any more, just so long as we were together. But the moment

I left her my head cleared. It was another kind of music, not

so croony but good just the same, which greeted my ears

when I pushed through the swinging door. And another kind

of perfume, not just a yard wide, but omnipresent, a sort of

sweat and patchouli that seemed to come from the

machines. Coming in with a skinful, as I usually did, it was

like dropping suddenly to a low altitude. Generally I made a

beeline for the toilet—that braced me up rather. It was a

little cooler there, or else the sound of water running made

it seem so. It was always a cold douche, the toilet. It was

real. Before you got inside you had to pass a line of

Frenchmen peeling off their clothes. Ugh! but they stank,

those devils! And they were well paid for it, too. But there

they were, stripped down, some in long underwear, some

with beards, most of them pale, skinny rats with lead in

their veins. Inside the toilet you could take an inventory of

their idle thoughts. The walls were crowded with sketches

and epithets, all of them jocosely obscene, easy to

understand, and on the whole rather jolly and sympathetic.

It must have required a ladder to reach certain spots, but I

suppose it was worth while doing it even looking at it from

just the psychological viewpoint. Sometimes, as I stood

there taking a leak, I wondered what an impression it would

make on those swell dames whom I observed passing in and

out of the beautiful lavatories on the Champs-Elysées. I

wondered if they would carry their tails so high if they could

see what was thought of an ass here. In their world, no

doubt, everything was gauze and velvet—or they made you

think so with the fine scents they gave out, swishing past

you. Some of them hadn’t always been such fine ladies

either; some of them swished up and down like that just to

advertise their trade. And maybe, when they were left alone

with themselves, when they talked out loud in the privacy of

their boudoirs, maybe some strange things fell out of their

mouths too; because in that world, just as in every world,

the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth,

sordid as any garbage can, only they are lucky enough to be

able to put covers over the can.

As I say, that afternoon life with Tania never had any bad

effect upon me. Once in a while I’d get too much of a skinful

and I’d have to stick my finger down my throat—because

it’s hard to read proof when you’re not all there. It requires

more concentration to detect a missing comma than to

epitomize Nietzsche’s philosophy. You can be brilliant

sometimes, when you’re drunk, but brilliance is out of place

in the proofreading department. Dates, fractions,

semicolons!—these are the things that count. And these are

the things that are most difficult to track down when your

mind is all ablaze. Now and then I made some bad blunders,

and if it weren’t that I had learned how to kiss the boss’s

ass, I would have been fired, that’s certain. I even got a

letter one day from the big mogul upstairs, a guy I never

even met, so high up he was, and between a few sarcastic

phrases about my more than ordinary intelligence, he hinted

pretty plainly that I’d better learn my place and toe the

mark or there’d be what’s what to pay. Frankly, that scared

the shit out of me. After that I never used a polysyllabic

word in conversation; in fact, I hardly ever opened my trap

all night. I played the high-grade moron, which is what they

wanted of us. Now and then, to sort of flatter the boss, I’d

go up to him and ask politely what such and such a word

might mean. He liked that. He was a sort of dictionary and

timetable, that guy. No matter how much beer he guzzled

during the break—and he made his own private breaks too,

seeing as how he was running the show—you could never

trip him up on a date or a definition. He was born to the job.

My only regret was that I knew too much. It leaked out now

and then, despite all the precautions I took. If I happened to

come to work with a book under my arm this boss of ours

would notice it, and if it were a good book it made him

venomous. But I never did anything intentionally to

displease him; I liked the job too well to put a noose around

my neck. Just the same it’s hard to talk to a man when you

have nothing in common with him; you betray yourself,

even if you use only monosyllabic words. He knew goddamn

well, the boss, that I didn’t take the least bit of interest in

his yarns; and yet, explain it how you will, it gave him

pleasure to wean me away from my dreams and fill me full

of dates and historical events. It was his way of taking

revenge, I suppose.

The result was that I developed a bit of a neurosis. As

soon as I hit the air I became extravagant. It wouldn’t

matter what the subject of conversation happened to be, as

we started back to Montparnasse in the early morning, I’d

soon turn the fire hose on it, squelch it, in order to trot out

my perverted dreams. I liked best talking about those things

which none of us knew anything about. I had cultivated a

mild sort of insanity, echolalia, I think it’s called. All the tag

ends of a night’s proofing danced on the tip of my tongue.

Dalmatia—I had held copy on an ad for that beautiful

jeweled resort. All right, Dalmatia. You take a train and in

the morning your pores are perspiring and the grapes are

bursting their skins. I could reel it off about Dalmatia from

the grand boulevard to Cardinal Mazarin’s palace, further, if

I chose to. I don’t even know where it is on the map, and I

don’t want to know ever, but at three in the morning with all

that lead in your veins and your clothes saturated with

sweat and patchouli and the clink of bracelets passing

through the wringer and those beer yarns that I was braced

for, little things like geography, costume, speech,

architecture don’t mean a goddamn thing. Dalmatia belongs

to a certain hour of the night when those high gongs are

snuffed out and the court of the Louvre seems so

wonderfully ridiculous that you feel like weeping for no

reason at all, just because it’s so beautifully silent, so

empty, so totally unlike the front page and the guys upstairs

rolling the dice. With that little piece of Dalmatia resting on

my throbbing nerves like a cold knife blade I could

experience the most wonderful sensations of voyage. And

the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the

globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even

further lost than a lost continent, because with the lost

continents I felt some mysterious attachment, whereas with

America I felt nothing at all. Now and then, it’s true, I did

think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura of time

and space, but separately, detached, as though she had

blown up into a great cloudlike form that blotted out the

past. I couldn’t allow myself to think about her very long; if I

had I would have jumped off the bridge. It’s strange. I had

become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I

thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce

the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me

back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.

For seven years I went about, day and night, with only

one thing on my mind—her. Were there a Christian so

faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus

Christs today. Day and night I thought of her, even when I

was deceiving her. And now sometimes, in the very midst of

things, sometimes when I feel that I am absolutely free of it

all, suddenly, in rounding a corner perhaps, there will bob up

a little square, a few trees and a bench, a deserted spot

where we stood and had it out, where we drove each other

crazy with bitter, jealous scenes. Always some deserted

spot, like the Place de l’Estrapade, for example, or those

dingy, mournful streets off the Mosque or along that open

tomb of an Avenue de Breteuil which at ten o’clock in the

evening is so silent, so dead, that it makes one think of

murder or suicide, anything that might create a vestige of

human drama. When I realize that she is gone, perhaps

gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am

falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is

worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is

the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no

climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or

human touch of hand.

How many thousand times, in walking through the streets

at night, have I wondered if the day would ever come again

when she would be at my side: all those yearning looks I

bestowed on the buildings and statues, I had looked at them

so hungrily, so desperately, that by now my thoughts must

have become a part of the very buildings and statues, they

must be saturated with my anguish. I could not help but

reflect also that when we had walked side by side through

these mournful, dingy streets now so saturated with my

dream and longing, she had observed nothing, felt nothing:

they were like any other streets to her, a little more sordid

perhaps, and that is all. She wouldn’t remember that at a

certain corner I had stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that,

when I bent down to tie her laces, I remarked the spot on

which her foot had rested and that it would remain there

forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and

the whole Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever.

Walking down the Rue Lhomond one night in a fit of

unusual anguish and desolation, certain things were

revealed to me with poignant clarity. Whether it was that I

had so often walked this street in bitterness and despair or

whether it was the remembrance of a phrase which she had

dropped one night as we stood at the Place Lucien-Herr I do

not know. “Why don’t you show me that Paris,” she said,

“that you have written about?” One thing I know, that at the

recollection of these words I suddenly realized the

impossibility of ever revealing to her that Paris which I had

gotten to know, the Paris whose arrondissements are

undefined, a Paris that has never existed except by virtue of

my loneliness, my hunger for her. Such a huge Paris! It

would take a lifetime to explore it again. This Paris, to which

I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with

the best of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that

has to be experienced each day in a thousand different

forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer,

and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it.

Stumbling down the Rue Mouffetard, with these

reflections stirring in my brain, I recalled another strange

item out of the past, out of that guidebook whose leaves

she had asked me to turn but which, because the covers

were so heavy, I then found impossible to pry open. For no

reason at all—because at the moment my thoughts were

occupied with Salavin in whose sacred precincts I was now

meandering—for no reason at all, I say, there came to mind

the recollection of a day when, inspired by the plaque which

I passed day in and day out, I impusively entered the

Pension Orfila and asked to see the room Strindberg had

occupied. Up to that time nothing very terrible had befallen

me, though I had already lost all my worldly possessions

and had known what it was to walk the streets in hunger

and in fear of the police. Up to then I had not found a single

friend in Paris, a circumstance which was not so much

depressing as bewildering, for wherever I have roamed in

this world the easiest thing for me to discover has been a

friend. But in reality, nothing very terrible had happened to

me yet. One can live without friends, as one can live without

love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non.

One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and

anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for

certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of

my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. I had time and

sentiment enough to spare to peep into other people’s lives,

to dally with the dead stuff of romance which, however

morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between the covers of

a book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous. As I was

leaving the place I was conscious of an ironic smile hovering

over my lips, as though I were saying to myself “Not yet, the

Pension Orfila!”

Since then, of course, I have learned what every madman

in Paris discovers sooner or later; that there are no ready-

made infernos for the tormented.

It seems to me I understand a little better now why she

took such huge delight in reading Strindberg. I can see her

looking up from her book after reading a delicious passage,

and, with tears of laughter in her eyes, saying to me:

“You’re just as mad as he was… you want to be punished!”

What a delight that must be to the sadist when she

discovers her own proper masochist! When she bites

herself, as it were, to test the sharpness of her teeth. In

those days, when I first knew her, she was saturated with

Strindberg. That wild carnival of maggots which he reveled

in, that eternal duel of the sexes, that spiderish ferocity

which had endeared him to the sodden oafs of the

northland, it was that which had brought us together. We

came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I

sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the

surface again I could not recognize the world. When I found

myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over

and I had been picked clean. …

After leaving the Pension Orfila that afternoon I went to

the library and there, after bathing in the Ganges and

pondering over the signs of the zodiac, I began to reflect on

the meaning of that inferno which Strindberg had so

mercilessly depicted. And, as I ruminated, it began to grow

clear to me, the mystery of his pilgrimage, the flight which

the poet makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he

had been ordained to re-enact a lost drama, the heroic

descent to the very bowels of the earth, the dark and

fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody

struggle to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a

bright, gory sun god cast up on an alien shore. It was no

mystery to me any longer why he and others (Dante,

Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to

Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the

tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I

understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel,

one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible

theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here

that one reads again the books of his youth and the

enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair.

One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed,

because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent

faces are the visages of one’s keepers. Here all boundaries

fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad

slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to

infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs

rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing., The air is chill and

stagnant, the language apocalyptic. Not an exit sign

anywhere; no issue save death. A blind alley at the end of

which is a scaffold.

An eternal city, Paris! More eternal than Rome, more

splendorous than Nineveh. The very navel of the world to

which, like a blind and faltering idiot, one crawls back on

hands and knees. And like a cork that has drifted to the

dead center of the ocean, one floats here in the scum and

wrack of the seas, listless, hopeless, heedless even of a

passing Columbus. The cradles of civilization are the putrid

sinks of the world, the charnel house to which the stinking

wombs confide their bloody packages of flesh and bone.

The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand

the glamor of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in

them, until he has become a straw that is tossed here and

there by every zephyr that blows. One passes along a street

on a wintry day and, seeing a dog for sale, one is moved to

tears. While across the way, cheerful as a cemetery, stands

a miserable hut that calls itself “Hôtel du Tombeau des

Lapins.” That makes one laugh, laugh fit to die. Until one

notices that there are hotels everywhere, for rabbits, dogs,

lice, emperors, cabinet ministers, pawnbrokers, horse

knackers, and so on. And almost every other one is an

“Hôtel de l’Avenir.” Which makes one more hysterical still.

So many hotels of the future! No hotels in the past

participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis.

Everything is hoary, grisly, bristling with merriment, swollen

with the future, like a gumboil. Drunk with this lecherous

eczema of the future, I stagger over to the Place Violet, the

colors all mauve and slate, the doorways so low that only

dwarfs and goblins could hobble in; over the dull cranium of

Zola the chimneys are belching pure coke, while the

Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears to the

bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads

which squat by the roadside.

Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des

Thermopyles? Because that day a woman addressed her

puppy in the apocalyptic language of the slaughterhouse,

and the little bitch, she understood what this greasy slut of

a midwife was saying. How that depressed me! More even

than the sight of those whimpering curs that were being

sold on the Rue Brancion, because it was not the dogs which

filled me so with pity, but the huge iron railing, those rusty

spikes which seemed to stand between me and my rightful

life. In the pleasant little lane near the Abattoir de Vaugirard

(Abattoir Hippophagique), which is called the Rue des

Périchaux, I had noticed here and there signs of blood. Just

as Strindberg in his madness had recognized omens and

portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila, so, as I

wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered

with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and

floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst

forebodings. I saw my own blood being spilled, the muddy

road stained with it, as far back as I could remember, from

the very beginning doubtless. One is ejected into the world

like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood

and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling

his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good

things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession

scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there,

such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are

trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.

My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly

alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the

streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language

compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure,

wasted effort. Passing under the viaduct along the Rue

Broca, one night after I had been informed that Mona was ill

and starving, I suddenly recalled that it was here in the

squalor and gloom of this sunken street, terrorized perhaps

by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me and

with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would

never leave her, never, no matter what happened. And, only

a few days later, I stood on the platform of the Gare St.

Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the train that was

bearing her away; she was leaning out of the window, just

as she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New

York, and there was that same, sad, inscrutable smile on her

face, that last-minute look which is intended to convey so

much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a vacant

smile. Only a few days before, she had clung to me

desperately and then something happened, something

which is not even clear to me now, and of her own volition

she boarded the train and she was looking at me again with

that sad, enigmatic smile which baffles me, which is unjust,

unnatural, which I distrust with all my soul. And now it is I,

standing in the shadow of the viaduct, who reach out for

her, who cling to her desperately and there is that same

inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have clamped

down over my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly,

and no matter how fervid my prayers, no matter how

desperate my longing, there is an ocean between us; there

she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk from one

street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face.

It is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets;

it is that which stares out from the walls and terrifies us

when suddenly we respond to a nameless fear, when

suddenly our souls are invaded by a sickening panic. It is

that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish twists, which

makes them beckon to us and lure us to their strangling

grip; it is that which makes certain houses appear like the

guardians of secret crimes and their blind windows like the

empty sockets of eyes that have seen too much. It is that

sort of thing, written into the human physiognomy of the

streets which makes me flee when overhead I suddenly see

inscribed “Impasse Satan.” That which makes me shudder

when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is

written: “Mondays and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays

and Fridays syphilis.” In every Metro station there are

grinning skulls that greet you with “Défendez-vous contre la

syphilis!” Wherever there are walls, there are posters with

bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No

matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is

cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and

dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and

we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.

I think it was the Fourth of July when they took the chair

from under my ass again. Not a word of warning. One of the

big muck-a-mucks from the other side of the water had

decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders

and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses

of his trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he

occupied at the Ritz. After paying what little debts I had

accumulated among the linotype operators and a goodwill

token at the bistro across the way, in order to preserve my

credit, there was scarcely anything left out of my final pay. I

had to notify the patron of the hotel that I would be leaving;

I didn’t tell him why because he’d have worried about his

measly two hundred francs.

“What’ll you do if you lose your job?” That was the phrase

that rang in my ears continually. Ça y est maintenant!

Ausgespielt! Nothing to do but to get down into the street

again, walk, hang around, sit on benches, kill time. By now,

of course, my face was familiar in Montparnasse; for a while

I could pretend that I was still working on the paper. That

would make it a little easier to bum a breakfast or a dinner.

It was summertime and the tourists were pouring in. I had

schemes up my sleeve for mulcting them. “What’ll you do.

…?” Well, I wouldn’t starve, that’s one thing. If I should do

nothing else but concentrate on food that would prevent me

from falling to pieces. For a week or two I could still go to

Monsieur Paul’s and have a square meal every evening; he

wouldn’t know whether I was working or not. The main thing

is to eat. Trust to Providence for the rest!

Naturally, I kept my ears open for anything that sounded

like a little dough. And I cultivated a whole new set of

acquaintances—bores whom I had sedulously avoided

heretofore, drunks whom I loathed, artists who had a little

money, Guggenheim-prize men, etc. It’s not hard to make

friends when you squat on a terrasse twelve hours a day.

You get to know every sot in Montparnasse. They cling to

you like lice, even if you have nothing to offer them but your

ears.

Now that I had lost my job Carl and Van Norden had a

new phrase for me: “What if your wife should arrive now?”

Well, what of it? Two mouths to feed, instead of one. I’d

have a companion in misery. And, if she hadn’t lost her good

looks, I’d probably do better in double harness than alone:

the world never permits a good-looking woman to starve.

Tania I couldn’t depend on to do much for me; she was

sending money to Sylvester. I had thought at first that she

might let me share her room, but she was afraid of

compromising herself; besides, she had to be nice to her

boss.

The first people to turn to when you’re down and out are

the Jews. I had three of them on my hands almost at once.

Sympathetic souls. One of them was a retired fur merchant

who had an itch to see his name in the papers; he proposed

that I write a series of articles under his name for a Jewish

daily in New York. I had to scout around the Dôme and the

Coupole searching for prominent Jews. The first man I picked

on was a celebrated mathematician; he couldn’t speak a

word of English. I had to write about the theory of shock

from the diagrams he left on the paper napkins; I had to

describe the movements of the astral bodies and demolish

the Einsteinian conception at the same time. All for twenty-

five francs. When I saw my articles in the newspaper I

couldn’t read them; but they looked impressive, just the

same, especially with the pseudonym of the fur merchant

attached.

I did a lot of pseudonymous writing during this period.

When the big new whorehouse opened up on the Boulevard

Edgar-Quinet, I got a little rake-off, for writing the

pamphlets. That is to say, a bottle of champagne and a free

fuck in one of the Egyptian rooms. If I succeeded in bringing

a client I was to get my commission, just like Kepi got his in

the old days. One night I brought Van Norden; he was going

to let me earn a little money by enjoying himself upstairs.

But when the madame learned that he was a

newspaperman she wouldn’t hear of taking money from

him; it was a bottle of champagne again and a free fuck. I

got nothing out of it. As a matter of fact, I had to write the

story for him because he couldn’t think how to get round

the subject without mentioning the kind of place it was. One

thing after another like that. I was getting fucked good and

proper.

The worst job of all was a thesis I undertook to write for a

deaf and dumb psychologist. A treatise on the care of

crippled children. My head was full of diseases and braces

and workbenches and fresh air theories; it took about six

weeks off and on, and then, to rub it in, I had to proofread

the goddamned thing. It was in French, such a French as I’ve

never in my life seen or heard. But it brought me in a good

breakfast every day, an American breakfast, with orange

juice, oatmeal, cream, coffee, now and then ham and eggs

for a change. It was the only period of my Paris days that I

ever indulged in a decent breakfast, thanks to the crippled

children of Rockaway Beach, the East Side, and all the coves

and inlets bordering on these sore points.

Then one day I fell in with a photographer; he was making

a collection of the slimy joints of Paris for some degenerate

in Munich. He wanted to know if I would pose for him with

my pants down, and in other ways. I thought of those skinny

little runts, who look like bellhops and messenger boys, that

one sees on pornographic post cards in little bookshop

windows occasionally, the mysterious phantoms who inhabit

the Rue de la Lune and other malodorous quarters of the

city. I didn’t like very much the idea of advertising my

physiog in the company of these élite. But, since I was

assured that the photographs were for a strictly private

collection, and since it was destined for Munich, I gave my

consent. When you’re not in your home town you can permit

yourself little liberties, particularly for such a worthy motive

as earning your daily bread. After all, I hadn’t been so

squeamish, come to think of it, even in New York. There

were nights when I was so damned desperate, back there,

that I had to go out right in my own neighborhood and

panhandle.

We didn’t go to the show places familiar to the tourists,

but to the little joints where the atmosphere was more

congenial, where we could play a game of cards in the

afternoon before getting down to work. He was a good

companion, the photographer. He knew the city inside out,

the walls particularly; he talked to me about Goethe often,

and the days of the Hohenstaufen, and the massacre of the

Jews during the reign of the Black Death. Interesting

subjects, and always related in some obscure way to the

things he was doing. He had ideas for scenarios too,

astounding ideas, but nobody had the courage to execute

them. The sight of a horse, split open like a saloon door,

would inspire him to talk of Dante or Leonardo da Vinci or

Rembrandt; from the slaughterhouse at Villette he would

jump into a cab and rush me to the Trocadéro Museum, in

order to point out a skull or a mummy that had fascinated

him. We explored the 5th, the 13th, the 19th and the 20th

arrondissements thoroughly. Our favorite resting places

were lugubrious little spots such as the Place Nationale,

Place des Peupliers, Place de la Contrescarpe, Place Paul-

Verlaine. Many of these places were already familiar to me,

but all of them I now saw in a different light owing to the

rare flavor of his conversation. If today I should happen to

stroll down the Rue du Château-des-Rentiers, for example,

inhaling the fetid stench of the hospital beds with which the

13th arrondissement reeks, my nostrils would undoubtedly

expand with pleasure, because, compounded with that odor

of stale piss and formaldehyde, there would be the odors of

our imaginative voyages through the charnel house of

Europe which the Black Death had created.

Through him I got to know a spiritual-minded individual

named Kruger, who was a sculptor and painter. Kruger took

a shine to me for some reason or other; it was impossible to

get away from him once he discovered that I was willing to

listen to his “esoteric” ideas. There are people in this world

for whom the word “esoteric” seems to act as a divine ichor.

Like “settled” for Herr Peeperkorn of the Magic Mountain.

Kruger was one of those saints who have gone wrong, a

masochist, an anal type whose law is scrupulousness,

rectitude and conscientiousness, who on an off day would

knock a man’s teeth down his throat without a qualm. He

seemed to think I was ripe to move on to another plane, “a

higher plane,” as he put it. I was ready to move on to any

plane he designated, provided that one didn’t eat less or

drink less. He chewed my head off about the “threadsoul,”

the “causal body,” “ablation,” the Upanishads, Plotinus,

Krishnamurti, “the Karmic vestiture of the soul,” “the

nirvanic consciousness,” all that flapdoodle which blows out

of the East like a breath from the plague. Sometimes he

would go into a trance and talk about his previous

incarnations, how he imagined them to be, at least. Or he

would relate his dreams which, so far as I could see, were

thoroughly insipid, prosaic, hardly worth even the attention

of a Freudian, but, for him, there were vast esoteric marvels

hidden in their depths which I had to aid him to decipher. He

had turned himself inside out, like a coat whose nap is worn

off.

Little by little, as I gained his confidence, I wormed my

way into his heart. I had him at such a point that he would

come running after me, in the street, to inquire if he could

lend me a few francs. He wanted to hold me together in

order to survive the transition to a higher plane. I acted like

a pear that is ripening on the tree. Now and then I had

relapses and I would confess my need for more earthly

nourishment—a visit to the Sphinx or the Rue St. Apolline

where I knew he repaired in weak moments when the

demands of the flesh had become too vehement.

As a painter he was nil; as a sculptor less than nil. He was

a good housekeeper, that I’ll say for him. And an economical

one to boot. Nothing went to waste, not even the paper that

the meat was wrapped in. Friday nights he threw open his

studio to his fellow artists; there was always plenty to drink

and good sandwiches, and if by chance there was anything

left over I would come round the next day to polish it off.

Back of the Bal Bullier was another studio I got into the

habit of frequenting—the studio of Mark Swift. If he was not

a genius he was certainly an eccentric, this caustic

Irishman. He had for a model a Jewess whom he had been

living with for years; he was now tired of her and was

searching for a pretext to get rid of her. But as he had eaten

up the dowry which she had originally brought with her, he

was puzzled as to how to disembarrass himself of her

without making restitution. The simplest thing was to so

antagonize her that she would choose starvation rather than

support his cruelties.

She was rather a fine person, his mistress; the worst that

one could say against her was that she had lost her shape,

and her ability to support him any longer. She was a painter

herself and, among those who professed to know, it was

said that she had far more talent than he. But no matter

how miserable he made life for her she was just; she would

never allow anyone to say that he was not a great painter. It

was because he really has genius, she said, that he was

such a rotten individual. One never saw her canvases on the

wall—only his. Her things were stuck away in the kitchen.

Once it happened, in my presence, that someone insisted

on seeing her work. The result was painful. “You see this

figure,” said Swift, pointing to one of her canvases with his

big foot. “The man standing in the doorway there is just

about to go out for a leak. He won’t be able to find his way

back because his head is on wrong. … Now take that nude

over there. … It was all right until she started to paint the

cunt. I don’t know what she was thinking about, but she

made it so big that her brush slipped and she couldn’t get it

out again.”

By way of showing us what a nude ought to be like he

hauls out a huge canvas which he had recently completed.

It was a picture of her, a splendid piece of vengeance

inspired by a guilty conscience. The work of a madman—

vicious, petty, malign, brilliant. You had the feeling that he

had spied on her through the keyhole, that he had caught

her in an off moment, when she was picking her nose

absent-mindedly, or scratching her ass. She sat there on the

horsehair sofa, in a room without ventilation, an enormous

room without a window; it might as well have been the

anterior lobe of the pineal gland. Back of her ran the zigzag

stairs leading to the balcony; they were covered with a

bilious-green carpet, such a green as could only emanate

from a universe that had been pooped out. The most

prominent thing was her buttocks, which were lopsided and

full of scabs; she seemed to have slightly raised her ass

from the sofa, as if to let a loud fart. Her face he had

idealized: it looked sweet and virginal, pure as a cough drop.

But her bosom was distended, swollen with sewer gas; she

seemed to be swimming in a menstrual sea, an enlarged

fetus with the dull, syrupy look of an angel.

Nevertheless one couldn’t help but like him. He was an

indefatigable worker, a man who hadn’t a single thought in

his head but paint. And cunning as a lynx withal. It was he

who put it into my head to cultivate the friendship of

Fillmore, a young man in the diplomatic service who had

found his way into the little group that surrounded Kruger

and Swift. “Let him help you,” he said. “He doesn’t know

what to do with his money.”

When one spends what he has on himself, when one has

a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt

to say “he doesn’t know what to do with his money.” For my

part, I don’t see any better use to which one can put money.

About such individuals one can’t say that they’re generous

or stingy. They put money into circulation—that’s the

principal thing. Fillmore knew that his days in France were

limited; he was determined to enjoy them. And as one

always enjoys himself better in the company of a friend it

was only natural that he should turn to one like myself, who

had plenty of time on his hands, for that companionship

which he needed. People said he was a bore, and so he was,

I suppose, but when you’re in need of food you can put up

with worse things than being bored. After all, despite the

fact that he talked incessantly, and usually about himself or

the authors whom he admired slavishly—such birds as

Anatole France and Joseph Conrad—he nevertheless made

my nights interesting in other ways. He liked to dance, he

liked good wines, and he liked women. That he liked Byron

also, and Victor Hugo, one could forgive; he was only a few

years out of college and he had plenty of time ahead of him

to be cured of such tastes. What he had that I liked was a

sense of adventure.

We got even better acquainted, more intimate, I might

say, due to a peculiar incident that occurred during my brief

sojourn with Kruger. It happened just after the arrival of

Collins, a sailor whom Fillmore had got to know on the way

over from America. The three of us used to meet regularly

on the terrasse of the Rotonde before going to dinner. It was

always Pernod, a drink which put Collins in good humor and

provided a base, as it were, for the wine and beer and fines,

etc., which had to be guzzled afterward. All during Collins’s

stay in Paris I lived like a duke; nothing but fowl and good

vintages and desserts that I hadn’t even heard of before. A

month of this regimen and I should have been obliged to go

to Baden-Baden or Vichy or Aix-les-Bains. Meanwhile Kruger

was putting me up at his studio. I was getting to be a

nuisance because I never showed up before three a.m. and

it was difficult to rout me out of bed before noon. Overtly

Kruger never uttered a word of reproach but his manner

indicated plainly enough that I was becoming a bum.

One day I was taken ill. The rich diet was taking effect

upon me. I don’t know what ailed me, but I couldn’t get out

of bed. I had lost all my stamina, and with it whatever

courage I possessed. Kruger had to look after me, had to

make broths for me, and so on. It was a trying period for

him, more particularly because he was just on the verge of

giving an important exhibition at his studio, a private

showing to some wealthy connoisseurs from whom he was

expecting aid. The cot on which I lay was in the studio; there

was no other room to put me in.

The morning of the day he was to give his exhibition,

Kruger awoke thoroughly disgruntled. If I had been able to

stand on my feet I know he would have given me a clout in

the jaw and kicked me out. But I was prostrate, and weak as

a cat. He tried to coax me out of bed, with the idea of

locking me up in the kitchen upon the arrival of his visitors. I

realized that I was making a mess of it for him. People can’t

look at pictures and statues with enthusiasm when a man is

dying before their eyes. Kruger honestly thought I was

dying. So did I. That’s why, despite my feelings of guilt, I

couldn’t muster any enthusiasm when he proposed calling

for the ambulance and having me shipped to the American

Hospital. I wanted to die there, comfortably, right in the

studio; I didn’t want to be urged to get up and find a better

place to die in. I didn’t care where I died, really, so long as it

wasn’t necessary to get up.

When he heard me talk this way Kruger became alarmed.

Worse than having a sick man in his studio should the

visitors arrive, was to have a dead man. That would

completely ruin his prospects, slim as they were. He didn’t

put it that way to me, of course, but I could see from his

agitation that that was what worried him. And that made me

stubborn. I refused to let him call the hospital. I refused to

let him call a doctor. I refused everything.

He got so angry with me finally that, despite my

protestations, he began to dress me. I was too weak to

resist. All I could do was to murmur weakly—“you bastard

you!” Though it was warm outdoors I was shivering like a

dog. After he had completely dressed me he flung an

overcoat over me and slipped outside to telephone. “I won’t

go! I won’t go!” I kept saying but he simply slammed the

door on me. He came back in a few minutes and, without

addressing a word to me, busied himself about the studio.

Last minute preparations. In a little while there was a knock

on the door. It was Fillmore. Collins was waiting downstairs,

he informed me.

The two of them, Fillmore and Kruger, slipped their arms

under me and hoisted me to my feet. As they dragged me

to the elevator Kruger softened up. “It’s for your own good,”

he said. “And besides, it wouldn’t be fair to me. You know

what a struggle I’ve had all these years. You ought to think

about me too.” He was actually on the point of tears.

Wretched and miserable as I felt, his words almost made

me smile. He was considerably older than I, and even

though he was a rotten painter, a rotten artist all the way

through, he deserved a break—at least once in a lifetime.

“I don’t hold it against you,” I muttered. “I understand

how it is.”

“You know I always liked you,” he responded. “When you

get better you can come back here again … you can stay as

long as you like.”

“Sure, I know. … I’m not going to croak yet,” I managed to

get out.

Somehow, when I saw Collins down below my spirits

revived. If ever any one seemed to be thoroughly alive,

healthy, joyous, magnanimous, it was he. He picked me up

as if I were a doll and laid me out on the seat of the cab—

gently too, which I appreciated after the way Kruger had

manhandled me.

When we drove up to the hotel—the hotel that Collins was

stopping at—there was a bit of a discussion with the

proprietor, during which I lay stretched out on the sofa in

the bureau. I could hear Collins saying to the patron that it

was nothing … just a little breakdown … be all right in a few

days. I saw him put a crisp bill in the man’s hands and then,

turning swiftly and lithely, he came back to where I was and

said: “Come on, buck up! Don’t let him think you’re

croaking.” And with that, he yanked me to my feet and,

bracing me with one arm, escorted me to the elevator.

Don’t let him think you’re croaking! Obviously it was bad

taste to die on people’s hands. One should die in the bosom

of his family, in private, as it were. His words were

encouraging. I began to see it all as a bad joke. Upstairs,

with the door closed, they undressed me and put me

between the sheets. “You can’t die now, goddamn it!” said

Collins warmly. “You’ll put me in a hole. … Besides, what the

hell’s the matter with you? Can’t stand good living? Keep

your chin up! You’ll be eating a porterhouse steak in a day

or two. You think you’re ill! Wait, by Jesus until you get a

dose of syphilis! That’s something to make you worry. …”

And he began to relate, in a humorous way, his trip down

the Yangtze Kiang, with hair falling out and teeth rotting

away. In the feeble state that I was in, the yarn that he spun

had an extraordinary soothing effect upon me. It took me

completely out of myself. He had guts, this guy. Perhaps he

put it on a bit thick, for my benefit, but I wasn’t listening to

him critically at the moment. I was all ears and eyes. I saw

the dirty yellow mouth of the river, the lights going up at

Hankow, the sea of yellow faces, the sampans shooting

down through the gorges and the rapids flaming with the

sulfurous breath of the dragon. What a story! The coolies

swarming around the boat each day, dredging for the

garbage that was flung overboard, Tom Slattery rising up on

his deathbed to take a last look at the lights of Hankow, the

beautiful Eurasian who lay in a dark room and filled his

veins with poison, the monotony of blue jackets and yellow

faces, millions and millions of them hollowed out by famine,

ravaged by disease, subsisting on rats and dogs and roots,

chewing the grass off the earth, devouring their own

children. It was hard to imagine that this man’s body had

once been a mass of sores, that he had been shunned like a

leper; his voice was so quiet and gentle, it was as though his

spirit had been cleansed by all the suffering he had

endured. As he reached for his drink his face grew more and

more soft and his words actually seemed to caress me. And

all the while China hanging over us like Fate itself. A China

rotting away, crumbling to dust like a huge dinosaur, yet

preserving to the very end the glamor, the enchantment,

the mystery, the cruelty of her hoary legends.

I could no longer follow his story; my mind had slipped

back to a Fourth of July when I bought my first package of

firecrackers and with it the long pieces of punk which break

so easily, the punk that you blow on to get a good red glow,

the punk whose smell sticks to your fingers for days and

makes you dream of strange things. The Fourth of July the

streets are littered with bright red paper stamped with black

and gold figures and everywhere there are tiny firecrackers

which have the most curious intestines; packages and

packages of them, all strung together by their thin, flat, little

gutstrings, the color of human brains. All day long there is

the smell of powder and punk and the gold dust from the

bright red wrappers sticks to your fingers. One never thinks

of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your

fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward,

when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells

like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and

the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and

the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people

and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood,

mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or

space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and

more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind,

but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is

wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two

hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it

stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.

A few weeks later, upon receipt of a pressing invitation