34

1 t I

1111

1/ ?'

EDITOR ................•• Elliott Anderson ART DIRECTOR

..•..•..••..

MANAGING EDITOR

.....•..•

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

....•...

ASSISTANT EDITORS

.....•..

Lawrence Levy Theresa Maylone Michael McDonnell Allan Gray Lisa Freeman

George Mundstock Debby Silverman Mary Elinore Smith ADVISORY EDITORS

PRODUCTION FULFll.LMENT

....••••

....••.•.....

.•...........

Gerald Graff Peter Michelson Robert Onopa Cynthia Anderson Mary Margaret Zakrasek

TriQuarterly is an international journal of arts, letters, and opinion published in the fall, winter, and spring at North­ western University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. Subscription $15.00; three years $20.00.

rates: One year $10.00; two years

Foreign subscriptions $1.00 per year additional. Single copies usually $3.SO. Back issue prices on request. Contributions, correspondence, and SUbscriptions should be addressed to TriQuartel'ly, University Hall 101, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. The editors invite submissions, but

queries are strongly suggested. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuartel'ly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1975 by TriQuartel'ly. All rights reserved. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or

sponsors. Printed in the United States of America. Claims for missing numbers will be honored only within the four-month period after month of issue.

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FROM

ARBOR,

Fiction CHARLES NEWMAN

A dolphin in the forest, a wild boar on the waves:

A requiemfor Christmasfuture

5

Wll..LlAM S. WILSON

Desire

IAN MCEWAN

Intersection

RON SUKENICK

The children of Frankenstein

GENE Wll..DMAN ALBERT GUERARD

from98.6 87 Miss Clarity and her unfortunate charisma Bon Papa reviendra (suite et fin) 107

ANDREI CODRESCU

The women of Transylvania

58

63

127

Getting a cup of coffee at the Orange County Airport 128 The queer poets' seance 129 The long opera 129 130

The wild wild west MICHAEL BENEDIKT

The nipplewhip

131

Cirrhosis of the liver

131

ROBERT CREELEY

from Mabel: a story

133

RUSSELL BANKS

Remember me to Camelot

from Family Life

139

GILBERT SORRENTINO

The notebooks of Anthony Lamont

NATHANIEL TARN

Perspectives from Lyrics for the bride of God

158

Criticism ffiAB HASSAN

Joyce, Beckett, and the postmodern

JOSEPH Me ELROY

imagination 179 Neural neighborhoods and other concrete abstracts

20 1

JEROME KLINKOWITZ

Michael Stephens' superfiction

ROBERT SCHOLES

The fictional criticism of the the future

146

219

233

This issue ofTriQuarterly was illustrated by WilliamE. Biderbost

101

With issues 33/34, Charles Newman,

Editor andfounder of thisjournal,

resigned. He will continue to serve in an advisory capacity.

Elliott Anderson, present Executive Editor, assumes editorship.

Theresa Maylone, Managing Editor, and Lawrence Levy, 'Art Director, will continue to have things pretty much their own way.

A dolphin in the forest, a wild boar on the waves: A requiem for Christmas future Charles Newman

..

We must act as if we were lost, desperate beings -

" ...

Van Gogh to his brother

We'll start with Moulton. He's my brother and the important one in the

story, which is also about Mom and Dad and poor big sister, Rita. I'm known as the genius of the family because I remember what everybody

else says. But I'm no genius. I never made up a thing in my life; I simply

remember and wonder, like most people. They think 1'm brilliant because I can repeat what they say. And recite for guests, of course. My

teachers say I've got a photographic memory, but with all due respect that's a sloppy evaluation, since a camera can't hear. Certainly I can

remember whole pages of what they tell me to go read, and whenever

anybody talks, the words go across my eyes like on a movie screen; so it's seeing what you hear and then repeating it that I'm really good at.

Please remember that what I'm saying is what other people said­

something I've read or heard somewhere-and a lot of the time I honestly don't understand it myself. I'm just thirteen, after all, and just because I got straight A's doesn't mean I know everything. But don't get me wrong either. I do love all those voices in

my head. It's just that I don't love one more than another. The other thing to know is that people think I'm not only smart, but cute-and I have the feeling that I'm

going to pay for that. Everyone I ever knew who was cute, smart or not, has to.

S TriQuarterly

At any rate, when Moulton came home from college for Christmas this time, he was really sullen. Maybe that's all you really have to know about him. There were some sporadic fires in the city, at least there

grounded, and Moulton had totake the overnight train, then hitch with a security patrol to the National Guard camp. Moulton has changed a lot since he has been to college, and because Mom and Dad never went away to school, they probably exaggerate it. But having, as I do, a better memory, as well as less to remember, I think it's fair to say that nobody can say just how Moulton has changed, and if they try, they get pretty confused. Mom and Dad aren't against change exactly, just any more change in their own lifetimes. And if you want to know, I don't blame

were coils of smoke on the horizon. The airlines were

them one bit.

Moulton always had to work for what he got. I don't mean in the way that Mom and Dad did, but he studied five times as long as I ever did for

good grades, and made himself into a "competent," as coach says, football player. He was not big or particularly agile, but was born to a certain leverage, an ability to anticipate holes before they open, and in that he could usually beat a bigger man. His specialty was blocking extra points. Invariably, Moult could find the hole, break through, and throw himself onto that foot. His fingers are all broken from it, the knuckles bend both ways. But each frottaged finger can signal one less point for them-and gains these days are always, coach has said, a matter of inches! The defense catching up to the offense, if you need a handle for the age.

Because of my talent, my problem, this linotype of words slipping across my cute cobalt corneas, I have

always divided people into those

who are able to write and those who should be written about. Moulton, for better or worse, falls into the latter category You and I think more .

clearly, more demandingly, perhaps, than my brother; but we think almost exclusively about people like him.

It could be argued that no man has been more generally disappoint­ ing (and none, certainly, more forgiven), but Moulton gained his distinction from giving the impression that he was lost in a world of his own making. He alone had no excuse but Providence itself. And no matter how maddeningly self-assured or curiously impotent he might 6

always retained an almost ethereal balance. That, I suppose, is what our Founding Fathers were getting at in the Declaration when they gave equal weight to the dissonant voices of justice and consanguinity.

When Moult went away, he was wearing a lovet green suit and a yellow tie. His hair was carefully brushed in front, but stood up in the back. He was wearing hom-rims, black and amber like a coral snake, which occasionally, when you were talking, he'd remove and poke you.

Girls took this for vanity, but gradually I saw what he was accomplish­ seem at anyone moment, he

ing. Not knowing whether he was near- or far-sighted, you didn't know whether he wanted to see more or less of you. He was one up already.

He just stood there, slouched in what they called" conceit" and he called "empiricism," beautifullytentative--the pioneer stance--a man who pays lip service to nature but finally stands in awe only of his own will.

But when he came back, his hair was standing on end as if in the first moments after electrocution, his glasses were rose- tinted and rimmed with golden wire, he wore an old Prince Albert which he had once refused to wear to a debutante cotillion, its velvet lapels spattered with an undistinguished sauce, a $35 Viyella shirt which had been ruined after one washing (explicitly against the instructions on the label, words in a red saddle-stitch which still move across my somnambular gaze) ,

and Lord, our Dad's old white bucks which he could never bear to wear, too big for Moulton, naturally, for Dad is very large indeed, larger than

life as they say, but I'm afraid unSanforized. Beauty has gone out of the

world, the poet says, and the words come to the eye's mind: The soft tartan will glimmer in the sunlight, but not if you wash it.

As I was saying, Moulton was more withdrawn each Christmas he came back:

bittersweet, perspicacious, but reluctant to exercise his

perfect control. My own theory, having been forced by circumstances to scan much serious literature, was that his fine preparation had merely begun to lose its dazzle, that his potential had become a cumbersome and slightly ridiculous bearward. He no longer fathomed either the sources or the uses of his considerable power. He was becoming more invisible, or rather hazier, by the day. I shall never have such power, but I will never be so alone.

"What are you going to do now?" he was frequently asked, and this 7

simply a paternalistic question. It was asked by badly acned sailors with whom he had sat by chance on public transportation, by girls with a page boy's hair and function who at parties held him by a single finger of his hand like a child crossing the street, by businessmen who slipped him their card, invited him to lunch, so that he might resist and confirm their lack of prejudice. They all had high hopes for him.

They all had their investments, had devised strategies for his better knowledge, and very soon, they insisted, any minute now, he would go andgetit.

So, as it happened, Moulton was the unacknowledged arbiter, the administrative cement for the irregular shape of our family, and per­ haps Mom and Dad secretly believed that he would take care of them properly one day. was not

I have no further comment on the matter.

Mom and Dad looked up from swabbing out the turkey and rifle,

respectively. The air was flecked with beads of oil. Moulton was stomping around, cursing silently. Then he went to the closet, slipped on his parka, flipped me mine, and thumbed me toward the back door.

"Take your gun," Dad said.

"Mind the frostbite, hear!" Mom chorused.

One thing I have always admired about Mom and Dad is that they almost never scream for more than five or ten seconds. Moult slung a bandolier of shells over one shoulder and strapped the .30-.30 across the other. My .32 was where it always was, in my parka pouch with the hand-warmer. The message across my eyes read: Get me out of this

fucker house!

Out in the back yard, the wind had frozen the snow solid, and we walked upon it without sinking. It was so cold and clear that you noticed the sun only when you looked straight into it. Mere light. The creek was

inseparable from the land. That wind had fossiled everything.

We walked down the middle of the creek toward the. "Weeds,"

blitzing the delicate sewing-machine tracks of fey, lighthearted ani­ mals. Moult's heavier feet kicked away more snow than mine, and in his footsteps I could see black water surging beneath the ice.

The Weeds are forty acres of despoiled copse bounded by the creek 8

and a piquant railroad cut. We have lived near here all our short, totally

recalled life. The creek is lined with willow, clumps of hemlock, and wild privet. This latter bush is always brittle from either fierce frost or

malarial heat, shattering upon our thorny touch. It grows green and flexible only in ourforty-eight-hour spring when the creek burgeons and makes the copse impassable. Because of the flooding we had always

believed it safe from development. But it was filled with homes now,

long low homes oflannon stone and aluminum, sporting wrought-iron trellises, a fleur de lis or American eagle on the front door, and garages with percale curtains in the windows. It still floods over, nonetheless, and when the husbands come home on either of our spring evenings, their Oldsmobiles throw a wake like Pf boats. The doors rise upon an electric signal, the curtained windows enfold and disappear into the

roofline, the scarlet brake-lights reveal walls beaded with the sweat of the comatose. The houses jut from long, whiskey-dark puddles-cork

tile, bits of colloidal forest, and hundreds of indestructible styrene toys which span the generations bobbing about-toys older than mel

They still have more money than we do.

Many years ago, once each week, before I could read, armed with ball bats and lengths of pipe, Moult and I went to tear the real estate signs down. It was rather stupid, as I remember, the clanging and fume of sparks as we smashed them down. The first signs were wood; we simply threw them in the creek. Then they erected strip steel; we bent them double. Finally, they set anodized aluminum poles in concrete; that was when we had to smash them down.

I am not at all sure what we were up to.

What is certain is that they have relinquished what we would have

prevented. The California redwood oozes orange from their unmain­ tained casements. Their yards, slabs of yellow mud, are inching their way into the creek. Moonbeams dive beneath rivulets of mud in the

middle of the night. The mud suffers in the

sunlight where quince once bloomed and wild iris prospered amongst gnarled roots. the

Through

word SPRING, lean seethe old creek

running to rise, and between the

white eddies our heavenly detritus: tires, cans, bricks, bottles, and

great

stationary eels of toilet paper.

The moss hung in the willows along the creek has been cut away, and 9

floodlights installed so that lawns, once glazed white for guest arrivals, are now illumined for the unprescient prowler who shall be blasted from the night.

Nobody outside today. The men are home, yes, all home. From each house, headlights peer out from the curtains; thick smiles of pumpkins, rushing the season.

Moulton arched a snowball onto a front yard. I remember when he

thought. not so long ago at all, that he was better than they were. I asked him about this. but he didn't answer. I am beginning to suspect that Moulton thinks too much about his life to think properly at all. Maybe that is his problem. The hardest thing to understand about this world is that nothing is true to the extent that it is widely understood. And I am developing a theory about people like Moulton. It's that everybody normal is born with this ribbon of words in their heads like I have, but

they stop seeing it after a while because they worry about themselves too much. They stop seeing what they're listening to; sending or receiving.

Maybe it's true that people get overwhelmed by their "feelings," but all the people I know have been worn out by "long-term planning," as the President calls it. And I wouldn't have minded Moulton giving up so much; it was the self-important way in which he was doing it that bothered me. The truth is, mister, you have to be loved or hated more than ordinarily to pay attention to that telltale tape. And I have been loved a-plenty. I suppose, eventually, it soon dissolves into the red webs of one's eyes, and comes out, if not as tears, then as that yellow stuff in the comer. Or somewhere else. I don't know.

When you're in the Weeds at night now, and the headlights crash back from the picture windows, I remember the only house I loved as a

former child-before I learned what the words meant on my "window to the world," as the newsmen say. It was just a white cement-block shoe­ box of a house with windows running all the way around. The poor guy had put it up a year before the expressway was built, and they arched a

cloverleaf right through his front yard. After that, every time a car took

lights flared up in his living room. You would have thought he'd have thrown up a hedge, got out, but he never planted anything and stayed. He must have had a lot on his mind to do that. He must have just sat in his living room sipping brandy with a big dog at his feet, just leaning on back with no book or fire, studying the patterns of light a tum, its

10

sweeping the wall, and not a little warmed by the glare crackling through his glass.

And I wondered what he did now with no traffic, no snarl and thud and haste and honk, no lights save the blue strobes of the patrols. I

remember watching Dad when you could go to work in the city, when the expressway had just been finished, watching him from the ridge, his big puce car caught between the other sealed and waxen commuters, exhaust fumes rising over the splattered dogs, asphalt seams smacking,

smooching, popping, as they went to get the money before it got too dark.

We're in the silent trough of some gigantic wave.

We followed the creek until it dodged into a culvert beneath the

expressway. The traffic was sparse; the orange light for general security was lit. Only an occasional coal truck, weaving to avoid the potholes.

Pretty soon the old green Zenith would be plowing along the median strip, her upper windows busted out for machine-guns, the bar car filled with monitoring equipment and a complement of security patrol.

In the dark of the culvert, Moulton again stomped and cursed. No ice here, the water coursing over my boots, and light, nothing save light, such blinding light, at both ends.

As we emerged, Moulton reached back and took my hand, but instead of continuing into the Popular Forest, he turned up the em­ bankment, back toward the expressway. We crawled beneath the barb­ wire and jumped the restraining barrier. The four lanes were badly buckled and faulted. I looked both ways out of red undant habit, and then, as my brother again took me by the arm, I knew what was coming up. Chicken.

Chicken was a game. We had played it with the Zenith when she was still a commuter.

Moulton led me over the northbound restraining rail and out onto the median stri p. His hands were cold as the tracks we knelt over. I him one hard look and then lay down. I hadn't

gave

forgotten how. The tape

was wet and

blurry. I was damned if I would cry. I knew the rules.

Moulton pressed my head onto the rail and turned my face in the direction of the Zenith. Then he lay down solemnly behind.

I tucked my scarf in, the rail was cold, and I could hear the hum of 11

something not such a long way off after all. I wondered about the patrol and if they might take a pot-shot at us. I wondered who they might be carrying besides the usual army officers, priests, doctors, and dreary journalists.

The humming became a dull recognizable beat; then it began to syncopate. I looked down the rail like a rifle barrel and could see a boggling light. It was coming fast, this one. Maybe VIPs, or wounded.

I was not yet either curious or scared, and this surely didn't recall our

good old times together. The way things were now, it seemed a little, well, "self-indulgent," as Dad says sometimes, probably too often actually, and the other voices in my head were fogging over, diving under water and gurglingecholess.

That converted tank of a green streak was closing in, and the rail whanged my cheekbone. Whoever took his ear off the rail first was the Chicken, so I reached behind me to grab Moulton. But he was too far, I couldn't reach him.

"Moult," I muttered, but no answer. Bluffing, the son of a bitch. It

pull this. I hadn't survived all his petty bullying for nothing. So I stayed put, my jaw aching, the snow soaking through my jeans. The light was in my eyes. I was the smallest of his lies. It was like looking down through the ocean at an old console TV with plankton glowing where the picture was. It wasn't like it was when Moulton used to lie on top of me until I gave; it was as if he were trying to punish himself through me, his only brother. So I thought then I would really scare the pee out of him and lie there right until the last moment, until was mean of him to

he screamed and screamed.

But only the train and me were screaming. And that train wasn't

socking on the brakes like she did in the old days. If anything, she was speeding up. I still wasn't scared, mister. But I did feel a little stupid.

That rail was shimmying right along the ties now, and then my legs were scram bling even though my brain was welded to that steel, and then I saw my cheek was frozen to the

rail, and I flashed on a newspaper

clipping about a dog that got his tongue frozen to a streetlight in Lebanon, Indiana, and the whole town gathered around him, and finally, they cut the streetlight down and carried the dog and the streetlight, still connected, into the fire department until they thawed.

Moult!

The scream didn't come from my mouth. It came out of my whole 12

body, and that scared me. The Zenith wasn't twenty yards off now. My head was an inch off the rail, my cheek skin ripping away, and then a piece of the lower lip. My tongue was thick with blood. I had been waiting for Moulton to be grabbing at me, to be screaming too, to be helping me, to be calling me chicken, you're the chicken, but then my bod y saved my brain, popping me off that steel like a bandage off a wound, and my ears were full, the words had stopped, and I saw the scream as I

rolled, Er, Er, Er, Er, EEEE

And instead of my life all over, which, of course, would have been so

boring, brief, and inconsequential, there was time in those few seconds to run through the alphabet a few times, as the carriages clacked monotonously along the tracklets. I kept my eyes closed in the ditch, but through the slits I saw the guards' helmeted heads go by me upside down. They wouldn't waste a bullet on a corpse when there might be real trouble ahead. I spit out a lump of something. Still no Moult. I waited until the sound of the Zenith was gone, and then the funny thing was I ,

crawled up the embankment to look for my flesh on the track, but it was

shiny, shiny as a gun barrel, "Clean as a whistle," as Dad says, a phrase which I have never understood.

I put my hand to my face, the only manly thing to do. I covered one eye to take my mind off my bad lip. And then, something like a pirate, I

looked around for Moult. His tracks crossed the tracks and were head­ ed across the southbound lanes toward the Popular Forest.

Obviously I should have gone home right then and told Mom and Dad, but they wouldn't believe that my own brother was trying to bump me off. For one thing, there had been so much killing lately; easy, unpunished killing, along with what Dad calls "unjustified melancho­ lia," that he didn't have to do it to me.

I followed Moult's tracks as they entered the Popular Forest. A cut of trees had been taken out for a fire brake. Down the cut, across a junk

pile of old radios, the railroad and the expressway, you could see straight through to town. On the top of the bank was a sign telling the time and the weather. No clock or thermometer, just numbers changing every minute with the new time and static cold.

It was 10: 46 and 9° when we went in.

13

The creek was tangled with dead vines in the forest, slow going.

Besides, the cold air caught inyourlungs if you wenttoofast, and I needed to breathe easy. I went up to my crotch in a snowbank and took the occasion to soak my mouth in clean crystal.

Then I saw him, about two hundred yards ahead where the bridle

path begins, but suddenly Moult hit the ground, and I heard the .30-.30 speak twice. At first I thought he might be going for me, and I froze, but then I saw he'd fired twice and hit the bear in the throat and the nostrils. I had forgotten about the bear, that fine plywood springboard bear with red pants, cowboy hat, and official badge who rears up,

tripped by a laser beam, at all entrances to the Popular Forest; his lips are human and in his clawless, white-gloved, three-fingered hands he holds a sign, mulled with buckshot.

BE CONSIDERATE BE CAREFUL

Moulton was up then, cruising at his old lope, frost trailing from his mouth as from the exhaust of a sports car. He'd lost some wind at

school, but I still had trouble gaining on him.

It was hard going even on the bridle path. I broke through the snow

into drainage ditches twice; Moult's path almost disappeared. The snow was

pocked with pools of sludge as if a herd of filthy animals had shaken

themselves off there.

I passed a large drift from which an arm and leg protruded. The sun

remained an unlikely ornament in the wet sky.

I clambered up an embankment, cleared the woods again. Gray links

oflake appeared between the trees. The top-heavy forest slanted toward

Bristly locust and splayed pine, stunted from sun by the larger lumber long gone. I was feeling used up too.

It got steeper and slipperier near the bluffs. I was bent over from the cold and looking for hidden holes. I kept fogging my sight with my own deep breath. Then I heard them. Bells. Not churchlike, but electric. I scrambled up the rocks until I came to a plateau. Beneath the snow you me.

could see the outline of a softball diamond and the stakes of a dozen

horseshoe pits. A series of slit trenches had been begun and lined with tanbark and broken crockery. Moult's trail crossed the infield and

ascended a rock garden. The dwarf evergreens had been uprooted and the imported stones piled in cairns. Up in the treetops on the edge of the 14

bluff nested an enormous egg. I yelled Moult's name into the wind. For

thought I could hear him crashing along above me, but then the bells blotted out everything. They were coming from that big egg, I knew. My legs ached and my feet were soaked. I wanted to butt a tree in desperation. I was losing interest as he lost me. I was tired and a minute I

confused. I dismissed the egg from my mind. The drone of the bells became absorbed into the natural din of the forest. My heartbeat

dropped a level and, warm for the first time that day, the perspiration trickling down the lining of my parka, I headed for the lake.

The trees ceased at the bluffs, slate abutments permitting nothing but winter lichen. A simulated birch railing had been erected by the State, and I picked my way along ittothe end of a short promontory where there had been a picnic parapet. I pressed my stomach against the railing and leaned over the edge. The lake was frozen solid. It stretched away, angular and ribbed like a gull's wing. At the beach, deeper currents forced up geysers through the jagged ice. They came up inky, turned green at their topmost point, and then fell back invisible upon the ice, amidst the rusted turrets of several coast guard chase boats.

The bluffs were called OconomawakBluffs after an Indian chief, one of those Indians who leapt into space rather than submit to our fore­ fathers. They were looking for treasure (our forefathers) and when they didn't find it, they destroyed Oconomawak's village and chased him up here, where he jumped, or so the story goes. I don't think, myself, it was a very good place to look for treasure, but whatever, on the parapet there is a bronze plaque commemorating the chase, and bearing the words Lest WeForget. I have never understood exactly what it is we are not to forget, but whatever it is, I wish I could. I have an idea, though, of what went through the Chief's mind. There had been, from his point of view, a terrible misunderstanding. But I can't even imagine what went through our forefathers' minds as they chased the Chief up there.

Whatever did they think when, after breaking breathlessly through the foliage at the summit, they found no trace of an enemy-only a vast inland sea and the treasures of the empire still hypothetical upon the horizon? No wonder their portraits are so sullen and severe.

I sat down to wait for Moult. Somewhere down the bluffs the

egg was

blatant. Out of breath on the parapet, I wondered if Moult was

running

15

away or searching out. and figured that was probably our forefathers'

problem too. We never did get this straight. and now it's too late.

Down in the Weeds. I could hear our most recent forefathers opening cans oftunafish and flushing the oil down their johns. I did not want to be alone, not at all. I just didn't want to be alone with them. I wanted their fluorescent light off my eyes. my walls. But sitting like a stupe on the bluffs was also profitless. It was merely preferable. And as any foreign person knows. that is not sufficient. I stared at my boots and gazed down at the Weeds. It would serve Moult right if I showed up all a-whimper at their doors and begged them to organize a search party for my poor brother. only to find him warm at home while they were sloshing around with their guilt and guns. As a matter of fact, maybe those people in the Weeds. if not as smart or sensitive as Moult, were braver? They at least were putting up with things, keeping the porch lights on. It was funny. Moulton still felt above them yet hated himself at the same time.

Shit. I had begun to run again.

The bells increased their tempo and resonance. And then I found him about a hundred yards into the trees, gripping a cyclone fence. His arms were stretched out above

him, his fingers entangled in the mesh. He was

standing one foot upon the other, as if caught in the midst of a leap.

Then I yelled. but Moult didn't move. I screamed falsetto. Not a flinch. I ran crazily toward him waving my arms. But it was like he was in a movie and I was in a booklet. The wind burned in my nose and teeth.

Slag heaps of ice roots and earth had been bulldozed against the fence.

The great egg in the treetops revolved imperceptibly but constantly, its booby bells chattering endlessly. Steam escaped from a small hooded funnel. Perhaps in my craze I had lost what Mom and Dad call perspective. I could not even remember being that close to carelessness before. Distant machinery droned evenly, wearily, warily, wolverine.

There were shouts, I thought, but I could not see what was said.

Moulton's head had dropped back; his face impressed with the criss­ cross pattern of the fence. The sky rolled back above me. I dropped to my knees, and grasping the network of steel in one hand and Moult's calf with the other, followed his gaze ..

It rose against the forest like a.

like a.

an icicle? A

steeple? A totem pole? A fountain? A Louisville slugger? A naked lady from a 16

.

.

.

.

cake? What can the comparison matter? Ivory, finned, oblique, pert on a khaki crane, rusty, slightly arrested. The bells stopped abruptly, the

machinery ceased coaxing. A dull shadow mottled the the radar's egg.

It had started out as a secret, then gradually became an abstract idea, ifin factthere's any difference. Nobody knew what they really looked

like, even through the wars, until they went, for some reason, for a brief time, to the moon. I have no idea how old this one was. Older than me, certainly, probably older than Moult, though not quite so old as Mom and Dad. What I remember best is not the silhouette, which we still had to memorize in our civil defense course, but that once you could sign up

for a four-year hitch, playa lot of softball and horseshoes, and come up

from the underground with a four-year education and a marketable

happened to those good old boys.

Moult was still gaping ceremonially. I was getting more and more disappointed with him.

The rocket had now swung out of the silo doors, and it was going

career skill. I wonder what

errrerrrr

They were automated before I was born and, shortly thereafter, disarmed after never being used. "Our holocaust was not collective," as my favorite teacher, Mr. Howe, says.

The government had built ampitheaters around most of them,

declaring them national monuments, and if the truth be told, Mom and Dad had courted right here, I think, or maybe it was the one down near the breakwater in the city. Dad said once that watching them was the only fun thing he can remember about that time, although their discus­ sion since has spoilt many a supper.

The radar egg revolved on its magnesium spindles, our fathomer,

listening to everything in order to see, but understanding, remembering nothing. Slivers of ice cascaded down the concrete bunker. I don't get mad easy, but I was fed up now. I put both arms around Moult's waist and yanked him from the fence. The steel netting twanged violently

against its posts. I felt his powerful thighs contract. He was in what they call his prime. So what. What dutiful enemy could he now brutalize?

The Chief had leapt long ago. And with the secret leverage of a diffident child, I soon had him pointed where I wanted to go. I steered him from 17

behind and stepped up the pace. He ran naturally once I got him started.

We charged up the path and along the slope to the summit. I held fast to his belt so he wouldn't outdistance me again. I ratcheted my elbow

against the birch fence to keep us on course. Soon we were back at the parapet, gasping for breath over the edge.

Out in the lake, a convoy of squat tankers, bows aflame with rust, bulled their way through the ice toward the reactor. More supplies, And down the shore, the Private Gun Club was in action. A man in a red

jacket flung skeet with a hand trap. Another broke them consistently, dotting the beach below with black and yellow clay. But because of the wind there was no report, only a cartoon puff at the end of the barrel. I gulped wind to kill the nausea, and Moult sucked too-long, deeper inhalations syncopated with mine. Moult was smirking.

The wind had become stronger, turning our sweat against us, so we left the parapet and returned to the woods, where we sat down at one of the picnic tables by the defunct horseshoe pits. Moulton cocked the

.30-.30 and pushed it butt forward across the table to me. We faced each

other, hands on hips, our debate mere clots of vapor which coalesced, then evaporated between us. I refused to take the gun.

Finally, Moulton folded his arms judiciously, elevated his gaze to a point slightly above my forehead, and with great solemnity, put his index finger to his temple, cocked an arch thumb, and fired!

"It's as easy to smile as to scowl," I said, apropos of nothing, and, withdrawing my curled hand from a parka pouch, forced myfingers into a mock pistol.

We played guns without our guns, but not for very long. After a while you reach a point, the long, rich arc of paralysis, when the bells stop ringing and you've got to go back to The- Hotel-in-the- Rain. You get tired of asking, explaining, commiserating, making up sense. Quite frankly, I wished my brother dead.

And when something like that happens, so deep, pathetic, and unspoken, pretty soon you just get up and start walking again, not together but merely proximate, nobody leading, nobody following, letting the gaps in the Popular Forest decide, the course through a light and swirly snow.

18

Crossing the creek again, we followed it until it skipped through another culvert at the main highway. The underbrush was coiled, twigs thickened with sheaths of ice. The water there was frozen solid but still stank of tankage. Then we took the cloverleaf into town. The sign on top

of the bank said it was warmer and later than when we started.

We got some broth and bologna out of the vending machine and took our lunch down to the

park. In the park there was a tremendous rose garden with sixteen canopied trellises radiating from a cupola. In the summer, it used to be that a helicopter would take you up for five dollars to get an aerial view of the pattern. There are supposed to be over three thousand different varieties of roses, but they're all red from up there.

Each one, though, has its name written in Latin on a tongue depressor stuck in at the proper root. We went to the cupola to sit where there would be less wind. The bare vines twisted up into a turret, like a bombed cathedral, held up by its very cracks. Through a hole in the

floorboards, I could make out some rusted machinery. It was just

possible we were on an old revolving bandstand.

Moult took the rinds off his bologna. We ate for a while, passing the soy broth back and forth. Through the ashes and snow, a million tongue depressors poked their sepulchral heads. A helicopter hovered over us for a while, then headed for some plumes of smoke on the western horizon.

When we finished lunch, a scruffy sparrow crawled into the cupola and toyed with a bologna rind. I peered down each of the archways. The

arbors were swathed in plastic bunting, making the garden seem a machine wired for some immense computation. It was depressing, surrounded by all those names and not a single flower.

And that takes me back to my childhood and the laws of

things. None

of us enjoyed very much being a

youngster, I think. That derives from having parents who had nice childhoods and then a tough row to hoe, so they tend to link us with their childhoods rather than their adult lives, which no doubt are pretty messy, though it's true they try to spare us the details. They gave up things for us, I guess, as no one will ever

give them up again. But when a child is celebrated in such terms, all he can piece together later is how cruel he was. I don't think all the loving in the world is going to make any difference now. As Dad says, often and with a 19

strange guttural accent, we're going to have to be very, very smart to get along without him, implying that the future will require more than a sense of humor.

I didn't know what to say any more, or even how to stop, look, and

listen, so I asked Moult if he wanted to go over to Rita's and he nodded.

And then it was my turn to take his hand.

Our sister Rita lives with the parents of her husband. They are going to have a baby. I am going to be its uncle. I never visit them if I can help

it. I fear for every child added to this world, exceptional or no.

Drifts along the main road were piled high as the mailboxes and

packed hard from many plowings. We salked on top of them, six feet above the road; our heads in the leafless trees, occasionally striking a soft spot and going down to the crotch in powdered ice. It was sheer luck that Mrs. Nadler came along just then.

She was waving up at us, lookingblue through the tinted windshield of the last Cadillac, but smiling-and, boy, was I glad to see herllf there was anybody left who could straighten Moulton out, it was Irma Nadler.

"And where are you going?" she throbbed, "on the day before Christmas? Do your parents know you're out?" Then she guffawed and her neck disappeared into her shoulders.

Moult, staring down, managed a lofty wave.

"Come," Mrs. Nadler sang out, "I am breaking the law by stopping for hitchhikers, but I will give my favorite guy a lift."

I clambered down the bank and Moult followed, scowling like a satyr.

As you may have guessed, Mrs. Irma Nadler was our Jew. I don't know whether she considered herself that before she came to live with us, or rather the other way around, since Dr. Nadler had bought the first land here when the monastery began to reduce its holdings, but now she

knew, I guess.

Dr. Nadler bought out here when it was still a horseradish farm and

sold off piece by piece. He has four acres left, right in the center of us, the only house you can't see from the road. He's left all his trees

standing and has neither lawn nor guns.

Irma Nadler was the only person in my life whom I liked more and more.

20

The last Caddy had pearl-gray leather upholstery folded and stitched in contours like human brains. Explosions of ganglia ran through the

polished spaces where the Nadlers sat most often. From those, you could tell that Mrs. Nadler drove when they were together because the death seat was polished by a tiny pointed behind, which sat very near the window and put all its weight on the armrest, like a puppy, and Mrs. Nadler's behind was not small at all and hardly pointed. She wore her hair piled on top of her head like a whetstone, and affected the usual formless dresses and enormous brooches of those who have learned to celebrate their own creased weight.

Moulton got in back, giving me bad -ass looks. I got up in front with Mrs. Nadler. She patted me on the knee and accelerated.

"So where are you going, sonny? It's on my way."

"Going to see our dear sister," I said, "and you know where that is."

"A lot of suffering there terrible suffering When Mrs. Nadler said "terrible suffering," it sounded like "table soap-ring," and that somehow authenticated it for me.

"It sure makes Mom and Dad sad," I began.

"They got used to," she snapped. "Now it's for you to."

We drove on in silence for a while. Moult was fidgeting with his gun in "

...

...

the back.

Mrs. Nadler tossed her massive head.

"The world has become very cruel," she said to me in a stage whisper.

It was getting very uncomfortable in the car because Mrs. Nadler had

her first-class heater on wide open.

"Say," I said, "do you mind if I turndown that heat a little?"

"Sure, sonny," she said, "third lever on the left, down and to the right about an inch and a half."

We went on in silence, getting cooler. I was wondering if I ought to be

keeping my hand -warmer and pistol in the same pocket.

Mrs. Nadler swung the heavy car from the road and banged over a curbing into the parking lot of the Pick'N' Save. She glided along the sea of stalled and stripped autos for a good five minutes, the engine laboring at low rpm. At last she found a space and fell upon it. As she got out, she half-turned tome, speaking softly.

"I notice you got a gun there, young fella. I'm hoping it's not greasing on the car."

21

Then she slammed the door.

We sat in the cooling Cadillac and watched the mothers on the ramp to the supermarket. Mrs. Nadler was slowly grinding her way up,

clinging to the rail, a mauve duck in a shooting gallery. The Pick'N' Save had had its windows shot out so often they had filled most of them in with cement block. Which is just as well because flies had hatched in the thermopane and kept crawling up and down the inside the windows.

They could never get out to bother anybody, but they still could drive you crazy. And the stench from the offal trucks was unimaginable. It was

Christmastime, and the food store shouldn't stink for Christmas. I

held my nose and looked up at the Pick 'N' Save sign. It was a big wiener

that touched ends, and right in the curve of the wiener was a man, and from where I was, the wiener went in his mouth and came out of his

behind, and this was the least part of this gigantic wiener.

Now the" Jew Canoe," as Dad refers to it, was getting cold. Mrs. N.

had been gone almost half an hour. I didn't like the look on Moulton's face. I said we'd better go get her.

We got out, locked the car up, and headed for the ramp. The Pick

'N'Save's doors were still glass and had pink ribbons across them so that customers would not walk through them before they opened.

Most of the people inside were guards. But there wasn't much left to

guard on the day before Christmas. The empty produce counters converged to a single gleaming dot.

Suddenly Mrs. N. appeared before us, charging down an aisle, pretending she was going to run over us with her basket, then swerving at the last moment, she drew to a stop, clutching her breast. She had picked up almost everything that was left, and I recall there was a time when Moulton would have called that gauche. what a place! It kills me every time, butIloveit.

"My God, my Sonny, do a favor and get an old woman some grapefruit. I passed it but ...

I couldn't stop. Then to poor Rita."

Moult and she stalked one another while I went and got the grape­

fruit, and we met at the checkout counter. I gave the girl the fruit, but Mrs. Nadler took one look and snatched them away from her.

"Not so fast for just a minute," she snapped. "These are having rinds like cantaloupes. Where'd you find these, sonny boy?"

"I never bought citrus before," I admitted, with a little snarl. The

Nadlers always had more money than we did.

22

"Hoo! Never shopping his life. A man!"

We left the freckled checker girl mulling over our prod uce as Mrs. Nadler took the lead again. She negotiated the corridors crabwise, her

spectacles propped back on her forehead like racing goggles. When we arrived at the fruit bin, a good thirty feet long, Mrs. N. flung the rejects into a comer, and then started feeling over the side like a man searching for a plug in a soapy tub. She never looked, just felt, bringing out perhaps one of every ten she handled.

"Looks ruthless, she grunted, "but it's only smart."

Soon she had twenty or thirty lined up on the edge of the bin, ordered by touch, ascending in quality from her to the rear of the store. Then she took my hand firmly in hers.

"Now feel, young man," she commanded, "everyone." "

We went down the row, my hand on the fruit, Mrs. Nadler's on mine,

squeezing the fruit the same as she squeezed me.

"The thicker the rind, the less of life," she pronounced, "you got to feel juice. When it bounces back a little in your hand, then you know me

that's health!"

We had reached the climax of the fruit arrangement; they were

getting juicier, I could tell that, and at last, we came upon two or three almost perfect ones, firm and buoyant as I imagine lemons used to be in Spain and figs in other countries.

"Make them say 'yes' to you," she said, and swept them into a sack.

Then she batted the rest back. "Or they will give you rind every time."

We took up our penultimates and marched back to the counter. The checkerette was awaiting us, sagging sarcastically against the cash register. It was clear she found the whole choosing business pointless. I could well imagine what she would whisper to her packing partner as Mrs. Nadler left, and I was ashamed for knowing this so well. It is clear that we are going to have to learn how to be picky like Irma allover again.

When we got back to the car, I saw that Moult had splurged on a big cigar. Already the air smelled vaguely of a stable. While Mrs. N. swatted atthe smoke, I put the groceries in the trunk. There were some small bullet holes and some funny-looking candelabras in the back of the last Cadillac.

Then we got in and were off, teetering along the drifted, salt-stained

roads, Mrs. Nadler pounding out a rhythm, going from brake to 23

accelerator to passing gear to brake as from fruit to fruit. We passed

through the town, spewing sludge up over the sidewalks, were waved through the barricades, and settled into the auxiliary highway where a convoy of supply trucks flung waves of oil and ice in our eyes.

"I wonder, I said aloud but mostly to myself, "if we should just drop in. like this. without warning I mean after such a long time. "

.

.

.

.

.

.

"

"You mean to say," Mrs. Nadler broke in, "you wanttomakethem

think you didn't really want to see them, but it's just an accident you're here?"

"I just mean," I rejoined, "that if we just showup as a matter of

curiosity, they might take it as an insult." in your own family?"

"My God! So you can't be interested ...

"Nottoomuch

...

no."

Mrs. Nadler repeated my words to herself, biting them off, "not too

...

much

" ...

...

I shut and rubbed my eyes, the only way I have of

resting from the words; if I rub enough the lymph goes bloody and blessedly opaque. But my mouth was running on. "

You got to be careful now about how you care about.

.

."

"My God. The whole world is now doctors. I'm wondering sometimes how they make a living off each other."

Mrs. Nadler paused, then flicked her eyes to the rear-view mirror and gunned into passing gear. "You probably know my husband's a doctor ,and you, sonny boy, remind me of him. Every night he comes home from the hospital. 'It's very hard to maintain your objectivity in this profession, Irma,' he says, 'but you got to. You can't get yourself involved or your work suffers,' he says. 'Basically I'm a sirnple man. A medical man.' That's what he tells me.

.

."

"Well, anyway," I insisted, "could you stop sort of up the road from the house? We'll take it from there."

"You're hurting me," she said.

"It's got nothing to do with you," I pleaded.

"Or them," she snorted, braked, accelerated.

The auxiliary highway was badly fissured; fragments of macadam

protruded from the drifts. Enormous icicles grazed our top on turns, and the quaint bridges were choked with slush. A pond was fastened to the edge of a dam, where a silent opaque spout arced into a frozen pool 24

below, welded to its sources like a porcelain pitcher handle. Because of the law against cutting in the Popular Forest, most of the orchards had been savaged back to rootstock.

We took the hills and potholes indifferently; the heater induced

sleep. The radio faintly intoned the old-timyfrenetic commuters' music.

Walk right in, sit right down Baby let your hair grow on

••.

Everybody's talkin' bout a new way 0' walkin'

•••

Do you wanna lose your mine?

But you couldn't stop Mrs. N.

"I know you wantto do the rightthing. You're trying to be neutral

and that's nice. But maybe you're hurting more than helping. Did you ever think of that?"

We both shrugged.

"Listen. I'm just a fussy old woman who shouldn't bother young

people

" ...

Moulton yawned audibly. "

Listen. People now wantto cure all the time, for what I don't know.

It's a terrible thing to say, but I'm so very tired of curing. You know

what I mean? Everybody wants to be a professional. And they want

everybody else to be professional too, so they won't feel guilty, Profes­ sional doctors want professional patients and the other way too. But you get down in with them and they are all tough like nuts. And then you got to be professional yourself. To protect yourself. And you're supposed to say thank you for that. Personally, I just like to grab.

But they cure you of that. No promiscuous here. Plan. Plan. Plan. Plan.

Plan!"

When Mrs. Nadler finished, I saw just how ugly and flat the word plan is. Then she adjusted the visor to keep the sun out of her eyes and went on.

"I know about planning from my Benjamin, boys. He is a wonderful man and husband and

doctor, but he shows you still. In the old country,

before, Benjamin could have done anything. He had a strong and beautiful head. His parents were rich. The burghers hated his family, but he didn't care. He was always very gentle. Then he got to planning, or inclined that way. He made

2S

up his mind in South France in the

middle of a hot summer. They used to go on bicycling tri ps, all the

students, and that year they went to South France. It was the custom to

split up and ride out, each on a different road, and then meet back at the inn that night to tell what they had seen and thought of in the day.

One of the days, Benjamin rode out on his road. I don't know if it was a fine day or not, but at any rate, near noon, he passed a high hedge along the roadway. He had that urge to look through, my Benjamin's naturally curious, and sohedid. He saw a beautiful walled garden with a pool right in the middle. Soon a lovely young lady comes with a palette of paints and lays them out on a stone table. Then she goes back in the house and comes out with a big canvas and sets it on the easel. Someone is painting waterlilies! And soon, like a dream, comes the fabulous old master, all bent over and fat-what's-his-name! Benjamin said he didn't even mix his paints. They were all ready. He just looked in the pool, dabbed at the palette, dabbed at the canvas, looked back at the lilies, putting in the sunlight like nothing at all. Then suddenly, terribly, a cloud came over the sun, and the old man stepped back, shaking his brush at the sky, yelling, 'Merde! Merdel' Mrs. Nadler herself grimaced, shouted, shook her fist. Moulton and I were sq uirming like kids.

Benjamin ran back to his bicycle and pedaled fast back to town. a doctor! He Right then, he said, he knew what he wanted to be. ..

"

.

.

didn't even wait to tell his friends. He took the first train back to Vienna and started in. Now Benjamin tells me that story when we are courting, he tells it to a Belgian architect coming over on the boat, and he tells it to

his classes at the medical college, and all the students think it is very

beautiful. And you know, I did not understand it at first, or on the boat, and I do not understand now what it has to do with anything! Except

that it is part of a plan, and that men will do anything to have one. So you can get off right here to sneak up and help your famity."

Mrs. Nadler slammed on the brakes, and I pitched forward into the

dashboard. Moult got out and slammed the door. I said "Thank you" and" Sorry" and "Goodbye" and" Sorry" again, and stumbled out after him. The last Caddy swiveled artlessly away on the ice. I didn't have the faintest idea what she was talking about, much less about

Benjamin.

26

Waterlilies? The Mayor of Who? She had left us on the edge of an old trash pit, which had come to light in one of the thaws; our heavenly bottles, cans, and jars had been

coated, submerged, and regurgitated. Scavengers had already gotten most of the good stuff, but I chanced upon a small block of marbled ice, and through the milky glaze a kindly old aproned lady looked back at me. She was

cooking. Her lips were parted, she was saying something,

the words frozen in a small balloon near her mouth. "I can't make all

the catsup on the world, so I just make the best of it," she was saying

testily, and I thought I detected a trace of hysteria in her eyes.

I dropped her to catch up with Moulton. I didn't want him starting anything. Through a break in the trees I could make out an inoperative seesaw, a busted birdbath, and beyond, our destination. It was a nice house, but while its three stories remained the oldest, highest in the perimeter area, its striped awnings llOW hung tattered and sodden from their frames. Their car was up on blocks, the surrounding snow well lubricated.

We approached the kitchen door; an electric fan spun warmth and

odor out to us. Bread. There was a tree by the back stoop, its lower limbs severed and patched with tar. Strips of salt pork had been nailed to the

tree, and a rare cardinal busily gutted one. I could hear the sow they

fattening, rooting about in the garage.

They had always had less money than us.

were

The door was Dutch, and the mother of my sister's husband opened the top of it before we knocked. A forlorn cadaverous cocker spaniel

squirming in her arms. Her hair was red like Rita's and our Mom's, but not so natural. What you might call a flamingo red. But was she glad to see us! I know, because hers was a very slow smile. If not knowing, willing.

"I'm trying to get through on the phone," she said. "Rita and Shel are in the wreck room how nice to see you. Excuse me just a moment."

She waved us in, dropped the doggie, and hurried away. The spaniel was

...

turned to go after her, but his claws did not hold on the linoleum so he spun statically for some time before picking up the trail again. Moulton and I stood in the em pty kitchen waiting for some signal. The basement

door was closed. Itwas a new door of cheap green slash pine, and you 27

could still smell the sap. In the next room, small folding tables and

chairs were set in a circle around the TV for supper. Over the back of a

wing chair I could see the top of the man-of-the-house's head. Smoking.

And then I realized I couldn't remember their last name.

Rita and our mother, Rose, are very sly and very brave and, for those two reasons primarily, very lonely. They live in a place which has not yet

decided exactly what to do with them, so in the interim the people of the

place have learned to say, "Do anything, it is your right." They are not lonely because of being sly and brave, but rather they have to be sly so they can avoid" doing anything," and brave as those who have so many "rights" must be. They don't want to be entitled to everything because they don't want to have do everything. They, perhaps more than anybody else in the world, would like one thing they could do better than anyone else, and have absolutely no rights at all. Both ofthem are redheads.

When Rita was my age, she was just brave. Once we were walking

about in the Popular Forest, and one of those fellows from the city, as is still their habit, was waiting for us. He was sitting on a stump by the bridle path, and as we broke into the sunlight around a tum, he got up and started toward us. When he was about a hundred yards away, he

pulled his hat down over his eyes and opened his fly. Then he kept on walking.

I didn't know what to do. I knew he could outrun us, and I didn't want to turn my back on him. But Rita knew. She just walked over to the edge

of the bridle path, picked up a stick, and ran straight at him. She ran as

fast as she could, holding the stick more like a baton than a weapon, her dress and red braids flying out behind her. The man stopped short when she was fifty yards away, and then as she closed the gap, turned and ran,

losing his hat, crashing like a blind bear in the forest.

Later on, she got vicious for a time and finally sly, even reasonable.

But of course it is high time to be reasonable. We are frankly obsessed with it. After she graduated from school, she went off to the city for some job. Once in a while I'd get a letter from her saying, "I'm waiting till we fall to bits," or things like that. She used to send Moulton poems.

He never showed me any. But I stole one once, though I couldn't understand the words. It went (and goes): 28

Death comes. I have come.

To kiD my feathered fears And when I die A gift returned unwrapped Pinwheel in small mist

Then, atthe bottom of the typescript, in longhand: "Putting this in

poetry seems to be an excuse for getting down thoughts which are

incomplete-but there's a certain freedom to it. I forgot to include the usual grumbling noises And then she got married. Vaguely but not effortlessly, sort of second "

....

nature. But what is the nature of second nature? Her hus band,

Sheldon, isn't telling.

Now the conception of their child took place this way. Rita was the

daughter of Rose. Rose was our mother, and Rose was the wife of our Dad. Then Rita married Sheldon, at the time of his graduation, and he had two parents also, Michael and Elizabeth, and Rita was found to be with child. And they wentto live with Michael and Elizabeth.

I saw Rita's scrapbook once-sneaked, of course. It was made from

lumpy orange art paper and had HIM- NAL written on the cover. It was the story of her IDMS: photographs, trinkets, letters, corsages, ticket stubs glued to the pages. Another attempt to prove certain unallowable correspondencies. On the last page was written, IDM OF IDMS, and it was Sheldon.

Sheldon was sensitive. He had become acquainted with Zen in

nonconceptual ways. When Sheldon sulked and was most silent, Rita was most moved. He always talked as if he was in the midst of a bliz­ zard. He was plainly of two minds aboutthis baby. His father, Michael, had a ferocious grin which would have looked better on him if he were cool and swarthy. Sheldon is also an artist. A flutist. Don't ask me why.

What Sheldon liked best was to lay the responsibility for the war on his dad at dinner. I'm not sure of which war, butthe last I heard

Sheldon's dad had the blood of2SO,OOO Brazilians on his hands. Since her conception, Rita has rarely been moved, and never by his silence.

I do not believe any sentence which begins, "Since the baby"

"Since the war

or

" ....

Sheldon, I almost forgot, was known for his personal discovery that success was rotten. These

days, the notion has not a little quaintness.

Being right, it appears, is no consolation, even to Sheldon.

29

Those were all the ideas he had.

I often wonder how we got in this fix. You know, if only someone had

just gone up to Christ and said, "Look, you just listen to me for a minute. This cross isn't for you. Take my word for it. What are you

trying to prove anyway? You don't need it, and you're not ready for it.

Maybe if you had really done something to be ashamed of. But not this time. It's too much for you You want to make yourself better by suffering? Okay. You wantto help these sons-of-bitches? Okay. We all do. But I tell you just remember the other guy who suffers, all the time, and that will be enough. Get some education first. We'll get organized. We'll go underground. We need you. Don't you see that?

You can't do this now. They won't understand. They'll think you were .

...

crazy. And some other guy will take up the ball and we'll never see it again. Look. You don't tie your shoes in a melon patch. Right? If you

throw this thing down right now and head for the desert, it'll accomplish much better what you want to do. What we all want to do. We'll get

organized and come back. And you'll be even a greater man than if you quit on us now. It's worth a try, don't you think?"

Now, if that man had only come along and done his job, ifhe could have sold Him, he'd be the one to celebrate. And I know this sounds

pretentious-all right, sacrilegious, but I wish I could have been there.

Wheelwright, dammit, Wheelwright. That's their name! And I started for the basement, Moult in tow.

Mrs. Wheelwright had changed from her housecoat to a pantsuit.

Her hair was braided and coiled on top of her head.

"Already Christmas and you haven't killed the pig?" I said cheerily. I could feel Moult a-hulked up behind me.

Mrs. Wheelwright seemed embarrassed. "There'll be other

Christmases," she said, more mysteriously than nicely. "We're having fried egg sandwiches for dinner," she went on "You stay now. What's .

Christmas without children?"

"Thanks anyway. Mom and Dad've got something planned, I

imagine."

Mrs. Wheelwright was the best cook around, but I wasn't about to get into anything like dinner with them.

30

The cocker spun out on the straightaway and crashed into a door

jamb. Moulton laughed hugely. Mrs. Wheelwright opened the wreck room

door, and some music came up the stairs which bewildered us. I

searched out Mrs. Wheelwright's unremarkable eyes and she smiled

again, a little faster this time. It makes people suspicious eventually, that slow motion grin.

"Rita got a recorder from Sheldon for Christmas. She's done nothing else for a week."

The music welled up from the basement. It was "Good King

Wenceslas." Slow, cerebral, but good for a beginner. Rita was playing a

hymn for her Him of Hims. But her nonchalance frightened me. I looked over my shoulder at Moulton. He had stopped cold, cocked his head. He was licking his lips.

The music persisted, and we stood by stupidly. Mrs. Wheelwright looked right through us. The cocker ran a widening circle at our feet.

Then "Good King Wenceslas" was finished, and she started scales, up and down, gracefully, without a break. They were together down there.

She would be sitting cross-legged, performing, and Sheldon would have his fat head in his hands. The scales expanded an octave, growing shrill at either pole. Mrs. Wheelwright was getting fidgety. Moult was waiting for me. The music didn't stop for a minute. I could not break through that recorder. Whatever it was, escape or warmth, play or protest, I could not take it. No one said anything. Across my eyes went the

thought, We got no business here.

But Moulton was already pushing me down the stairs, and the door behind us closed to with a rush of compressed air.

Rita and Sheldon were sitting cross-legged on a big pillow, and when Rita saw us she stopped in the middle of a rise and handed the recorder to Sheldon.

"Well, if it isn't Boy Wonder!" She was almost always shitty like that now.

"How's everything with you?" I said.

"What will be, is," Rita said, and got up. I noticed that the child had

put a nasty little strain on her boyish hips! She was near due. And her face, iffuller, redder, was still beautiful.

"You can't stay for dinner," she whispered. "We've

enough as it is."

31

got barely

"Your mother-in-law already invited us," I replied rather testily.

"Then go eat with them," she flounced. "We don't go upstairs at all.

We even have our own entrance now."

The wreck room was the basement of the Wheelwright house, but it was another world. Shel and Rita had decorated it themselves. There was no furniture at

all, unless you count the lonely white commode in the comer. For chairs they had pig chop sacks, stuffed with buckwheat

hulls; their bed frame, a garage door on cement blocks. From the bed her old menagerie of stuffed animals eyed us warily. The cold damp of the floor was cured by a matting of newpaper thick as garden mulch,

this in turn covered with straw. The walls were papered with Sheldon's old flute scores and Sunday editions. So we faced each other, shuffling around the coal stove, us peers, our poor broke-down family, Rita

staring at her tummy, glaring at us. I thanked my stars that I was not that kid to come, and I saw the only reason we were together was that none of us wanted togo upstairs.

Moulton spit on the stove, and it sizzled orange. Rita looked up at him, as she always did, a pure wave of admiration flecked with envy. In the roseate fire of the stove, he was admittedly an incredibly handsome man. Rita took his hand in hers, but spoke to me.

"How's Mom and Dad?" "Now there's a question for you."

Sheldon still sat half-turned away from us. I don't think he knew whether to be confused or angry.

"What'd you get for Christmas?" Rita asked me.

"You know we don't open until Christmas day."

"Well I gotta recorder."

"So I heard. You and Shel can play duets now."

"Sheldon won't play any more. He says he's got as good as he's going to get."

"Can't he get any better?"

"I'm good enough already," Sheldon sulked.

"Rita, you play something then."

"You've heard what I know, honey. I might never be as good as

Sheldon."

"You're better than all of us, except Sheldon

" ...

I began, but then,

above us, through the rafters, Mrs. Wheelwright's steps could be heard.

32

"I better fix Shel something to eat," Rita said immediately.

She took a greasy pan out from under the bed, set it on the stove and

then went to the windowsill, retumingwith two brown eggs. She dropped the eggs into the pan, chopping at the yolks with a fork, searing the white in a trice. Then she broke the mass apart with the fork and, scooping up the glutinous flakes with a hamburger bun, handed it in the

general direction of Sheldon, who ate it in three not inconsiderable bites.

Bang! went Sheldon's teeth.

"One to provoke you," Rita sang.

Bang!

"One to surround you."

Bang! "

And one to break your heart!"

Rita caught me staring at her.

"I cook too much to be a good cook," she said. "What happened to your face anyway?"

"Oh, fell."

Moulton had gone over and flipped on the TV. I did not think I could take another splotch of news 'n' sports, the grim statistics which we have somehow outlived. Besides, I needed to crap, and I wasn't about to unload on that open commode. "Love your own best," as the President says.

Upstairs again, the door hissed to behind me. I went to ask the Wheelwrights if I could use their john. But they were just about to eat, and I watched them from the hall through louvered doors. It was pretty obvious the orig�al decor of the wreck room had been moved upstairs to the living room. Everything was so bright and polished it was almost scary. The jaunty red and gold divan was covered with plastic so the cocker could sit on it, and the floor was black and white linoleum tile

that reflected the family bodies as they walked. It was sort of nautical

too, a globe and sailing ship on the bookcase, a ship's wheel and

captain's chairs, some fishnet and corks over the bar.

The Wheelwrights were watching the same news 'n' sports as we were

downstairs, and Mrs. Wheelwright was making her famous fried egg sandwiches. She was kneeling before the fireplace with her condiments in a small red wagon, while Mr. Wheelwright's blue pipe smoke turned 33

green in the light of the TV, its statistics battering like sleet about his wife at work.

She took a small marrow bone and and banged it gently with her little

fist, disgorging a gelatinous pellet which liquefied quickly in the pan.

Then while still holding the pan above the coals with her left hand, the handle of a cup looped about her right thumb, with her four free fingers she broke an egg into the cup. Then she slid the egg into the pan, where it

congealed in an instant as she basted it, without the faintest trace of brown. She covered the pan while she cut two thick slices of dark bread,

brushing one with mayonnaise, the other with marrow and paprika, then slipped the egg, its yolk now pink, between them. Finally, she added a sliver of horseradish root, a half moon of pimento, and the sandwich flew like an astonished finch into the chair.

I snuck off, for some reason embarrassed, to their bathroom.

When I got back downstairs, they had already taken the pills and

lying around on the floor together, oohing and ahhing, earlier than usual. Sheldon handed the vial to me, but I refused as I always did, and Rita mumbled, "think you're better than us, kid?"

were

"No, honest, Rita

" ...

"You were always an insufferable arrogant little snot."

"You ought to stop this stuff at least until you have it," I said.

"I'd get even fatterif I did."

"You'll ruin your goddam tastebuds," I said.

I decided to snuff out the news' n' sports and put on some old video­

tapes, some history, or what I call" Pre- Me"; it's hard these days to trust a memory that isn't yours. I didn't care about them taking that stuff, but I just can't hack it. It's worse than TV, being conked out like that, and when I am, all I get is advertisements on my eyes, personalized stuff with my name in computer italics.

Everybody else was now unconscious, and I picked out an old tape about how Tarzan and Jane met. It seems that Jane's parents, due to

genteel naivete and general stuffiness, were killed by the cannibals, and Jane, not yet old enough to fight for the empire or plump enough for eating, is abducted. As a result of being fattened up on native gruel, however, her new charms become apparent, and she is in turn spirited away by, or sold to, it was never quite clear, an Arab chieftain, Who'San, who takes her to his palace where the desert and jungle meet.

34

There Jane is tenderly raised by the ladies of the harem, who just

naturally take to her. Then one day, while swimming in a jungle pool, she meets Tarzan. (A crocodile attacks her and he breaks its jaw.)

Who'San knows all about Tarzan. In fact, there is strong evidence

that the two control the jungle between them, an unspoken pact.

Who'San considers him a rival, though Tarzan couldn't care less. That is why Tarzan is so effective. He couldn't care less. He takes what's

offered, and fights only when it's necessary. He couldn't very well just look on while Jane got eaten by a crocodile, for example, and, as Tolstoi

pointed out, such things happen rarely. He's never surprised by anything because he never anticipates anything. He's just as loose as a goose and never loses.

At any rate, Who'San sends out a battalion of dervishes to get

Tarzan, but naturally Tarzan is warned by his many animal friends, and the dervishes are trampled by a premeditated elephant stampede.

Gradually Tarzan comes to realize that Who'San is out to get him and becomes curious about this strange white girl who has upset the jungle balance of terror. His fine-feathered lieutenants report back that Who' San is keeping Jane high in a palace minaret. Tarzan looks up

"minaret" and sets off, breasts the swollen river, and swings up onto the

palace balustrade where he overpowers the fag sentry, flinging him to the piranha fish. Nevertheless, he has miscalculated and swung onto the terrace below Jane-the Terrace of the Treasure Trove. He wanders

among the overflowing caskets, fondling coins and jewelry uncompre­ hendingly. Suddenly he comes across a locket with cameos of Jane's

parents in it, and a light ignites between his eyes. At this moment of racial illumination, however, Who'San confronts him and, misunder­

standing Tarzan's motives, draws his scimitar. At that point Jane rushes in, and seeing the locket in the savage's hand, a locket she herself has pondered over and fondled in the the past, she too misunderstands Tarzan's motives. Throwing herself at Who'San's feet, she begs him not to kill Jungle Boy because "Jungle Boy can tell me who I am."

Fade-out, wide angle of Jungle Boy's face, which expresses, in its absence of a single crease or tic, "I don't need this"-the victor driving hence the Spirit of Victory.

I stopped the story there and put on a real oldie, a family series probably, entitled MacArthur Returns.

It starts out with this old guy wading ashore to some island, his pants 3S

rolled up, and an eagle on his cap that looks just like his face. Then he is driven around the island all alone, sitting in the back of a jeep in his gold braid and executive sunglasses. The natives are all laughing hysteri­

cally, jumping up and down, throwing flowers atthe jeep, trying to run out to kiss him and getting shoved away by big black soldiers who look like Who' San. Then at the end of the route, in front of the bombed -out

capital, a little girl is pushed toward him with a box of soil and the seed of a palm tree in her fist. He leans down, the L of his body at right angles but still at attention, and kisses her a big soldier-firm kiss, and she runs away into the crowd crying for joy.

I flicked that off too-for being even more ridiculous than Tarzan.

Jesus, what will they try to pass off on us next?

My peers were stirring now; Rita had rolled beside me. "Playa music, play something nice," she slurs, and I put a stack of records on the changer.

"Ohh," she exclaims, Malaguena.' "

,

"

"

"

"Close," I said, 'Clair de Lune.'

"Ooh," she was going on, "this is ludicrous

...

." Then she opened

her eyes and brightened measurably. "Ludicrouse, lood-i-crush, my word for the week.

"

Then she flopped back, and with her feet and

fingers tried to tap along with Debussy.

I lay down in front of the coal stove to take a little nap. Above us I could hear the hesitant but all consuming step of Mrs. Wheelwright, a perfectly compensatory double limp, and I was going to go up there again to see if they wetereally there; but just before I dropped off, the words began whirring across my eyes: is this the way it is

stop

is this the way it is

I dreamed Rita and I were walking in the Popular Forest again, in the

late summer when everything is brittle, ready to catch on fire at the

slightest word, and the sky is a garish prairie pink all evening. We walk to where the bridle path ends with cement posts, wander off into the slough, and return unwillingly, shaking with chills as the sky conforms to night, knowing we have everything to learn and nothing to lose.

I woke up later to a funny sound. It was starting to darken, and Rita

sitting on her haunches brushing her hair with long, deliberate strokes. She was obviously in a racy mood, a sort of Spanish Provincial was

mood.

36

"Don't brusha now, Reet," 1 mumbled.

"It makes my face feel lighter, "she crept out from under my logic, her gray eyes glowing from the corona of red hair.

"You know," she went on, "I think you're very insecure in a way."

1 didn't know how to answer that, and just then Rita's fiery hair fell down over my stomach like a tent.

1 couldn't see what she was doing but froze when 1 felt her undoing my

pants. Rita was always clumsy for a girl, but now she was so gentle I could just feel a thousand little caterpillars on my thighs and tummy, her hair swaying back and forth like the linden trees just before a storm, and her tongue part, then all, of me. I was wet in my eyes too, all the words were foggy except for for the easy low errr-er-er-er.

Then some new spurious words appeared, in capitals, IDS POOKE FLOTCHED

and then the words began to dance to some exciting nonsense, words I didn't know the meaning of: Beneath on earth pompe peJfe prase they pooke Her pat my hart in sick a flocht

••.

I felt I had been dropped gently into a warm and shallow sea, and the

ripples from my splash were going out and out toward the horizon; my life was going out of me, but I was not afraid at all, and then I thought my back would bust as I screamed for joy.

Moulton and Sheldon were up and groggy like soldiers at reveille, and Rita was still on her knees, swaying, grinning, her face like a flower with

petals blown off as I zipped up; I had read about this at an airport news­ stand once, and therefore knew what to expect, and how it was perfectly natural.

"Boy," she said, "do your eyes ever go nutty."

I glanced at my tremb ling watch and gave the sign to Moult to go "See," Rita went on nasally, "you're just like the rest of us after all."

I was feeling good but pointless. Sheldon was an artist, Moult an intellectual, Rita was pregnant, I was pooke-stupid, and everybody else was upstairs.

Rita escorted us to the landing, where she kissed me on the cheek and whispered in my ear, "Keep it in your knickers, fella."

I almost slipped on the linoleum as Mrs. Wheelwright came out of the 37

living room with her mouth full. My knees negotiated a separate peace.

I got the top half of the door open, and Mrs. Wheelwright reminded me, muffledly, "It's a Dutch door," and I got the bottom half open with my boot. I looked up at her; she was eating another cookie and the crumbs stuck to her lips. We stood silently in the doorway for some time while Moulton got his gun. Her tongue was feeling for a crumb.

"Why are you staring at me, child?" Mrs. Wheelwright said.

"I had a very nice time, ma'am, thank you," I caught myself. The dog had stopped floundering and squinted up at me.

"Anytime," she said.

I concurred, and we headed down the road to the intersection, intent

catching a lift. Mrs. Wheelwright picked up the dog and stood in the rectangle of the half-light long after we left, feeding her dying cocker

on

the remains of her dessert.

"There has not been a fatality for forty-eight days," the sign says

,

fashioned in Olde Englishe except for the number which is handily chalked in. Erect at the intersection for the duration, it has been up to over a

hundred, down to zero. When I was little and had more time to

think about such things, I wondered whose office it is that believes that o is more terrifying than 100; surely the higher the order of accidentless

days, the more imminentthe catastrophe.

We passed the sign, Moult and I, took our time and temperature from the bank, and, spying no traffic, struck out for home and dinner.

It was 5:28 and 23°.

Back in the Popular Forest, we floundered along the bridle path,

finding our previous tracks nearly filled in again. Moult's pants were wadded in frozen wrinkles; his white bucks had turned black and were

turned up at the toes like a jester's. He walked on the edge of the path where the crust had hardened, gazing at his frozen feet, out into the

trees, and back to his feet. You could tell from the way he walked that it was very

painful.

Out of cold and boredom I began to speculate on my mute brother,

whom, if you didn't know him as I do, you might simply write off as a murderous shit. There was something in his forgetfulness, a "cruel

indifference" as the old books say, "a menace to society" according to 38

the new ones. Oh well, all our books are wrong. And I cannot really We have had no experience to speak of. Or for our

experience.

speak

rather, the only experience we've had has been bespoken. "All stories are the same,

except for the differences," like Dad says, "20years

growing, 20 years living, 20 years stooping, and 20 dying." It's not exactly that nothing's now symbolic, it's just that everything seems to smell the same. We were born and raised, born and raised in what will be remembered as the time when we could have killed everybody and

when everybody, therefore, wanted to kill us. Our species had got up to zero.

That, at least, is how I understand the story. We knew what we

wanted then-but what we wanted we didn't like much. There were

those among us who thought that what we wanted was positively bad for us. But then what we

wanted, good or bad, got used up. We lost both our

smugness and our spleen, our sloppiness and our severity, even our murderous rectitude. And while saved from the hand of those who

hated us, we became the unhappiest people on the face of the earth.

As Dad, the loss prevention engineer, is fond of repeating, "Back to the beginning, sport fans," or some such similarly desperate throw­ away.

Mom says unequivocally that she grew up in the best of times, a time

unlike any other, although when you ask her what kind of car she had, she simply says she can't recall the name but it was the finest one made.

"Horsefeathers," replies Dad, "it was a time of blight, of waste."

"Waste was nice," she retorts, "for one hundred years we were a miracle! We are not what we were, nosir."

"If the future is too much on your mind," Dad says, gripping the arms of his

chair, "it cannot happen. As for the past, my better half, I

for one have no desire to return to the Age of Pets! And anyway," he

meanders, seemingly losing the point, "there are no more hurricanes than there ever were; only the reports of them have increased.

"

Then he

hums a few bars of"ln the Mood."

It is not clear whether we were overpriced or undersold. Or that this was a time unlike any other. But

nevertheless, at the crossroads, the sign

will soon again be set back to zero.

We stood there, Moult and I, the banal wind spooling erotic snow about us. We passed a dead horse upon which someone had taken some

professional-looking whacks.

39

Oh, a little less money, And a little more murder, So we're notthe Renaissance

...

We cleared the forest, startled. The Christmas lights had been turned on! The houses, normally dark and disparate, had reconnoitered in an

electrical pageant, and now marched upon us full of jolly fury. The sky

rooftops, extinguishing the stars. It was as if the sun had fallen into the ocean. Our day of celebration, full of voluntary was molted green at the

his own? energy, to each his own, to each Strands of light lay everywhere. Hung in winking festoons from the ...

trees, strung through the gristle of hedges; entwined about obsolescent power poles, gas capsules, disinterred septic tanks; framing windows,

crowning doorways, shrouding chimneys, garlanding mailboxes, stumps, balconies. Some lay in the winter brush like foxfire, others straddled gutters or dangled from frozen conifers, and others simply lay scattered on the snow where they had been thrown, like a broken atom chain.

Windowpanes had been carefully flocked, in special predrifted patterns, but unfortunately real frost had filled these in. And through this ice, plastic wreaths revolved, while on beribboned trees electric candles bubbled colored waters. Enormous aluminum lollipops and stalks of peppermint were anchored in the snowbanks, and plastic life­ size Santas, squatting in their own glow, waved convincingly as parking­ lot attendants. Here and there a horseless, driverless sleigh, laden with massive hollow packages, embarked across a yard. Golden doves with pipe cleaners in their claws strained on their wires in the wind. The Millers had a Kodachrome enlargement of the family in their window, framed by birds of peace. The children were as happy as the birds and the birds as cute as the children. The Simmonses had chosen Raphael's "Alba Madonna" for their front porch. The Harrisons had a snowman with a nose which blinked in the night like an airliner. The Nelsons' four papier-rnache lambs huddled for warmth in a spotlight. Elves worked at an assembly line in the Johnsons' patio, grinning devilishly to themselves, while the Coopers' bevy of imported tinsel partridges hooted prerecorded hoots from collapsible pear trees. Baseboard silhouettes of Wise Men and camels stole across the playground toward 40

the Memorial: mother holding child untrembling, the swirling snow

filling in their eyesockets.

The P A system was playing the old carols over and over: Six for the six proud walkers Five for the symbol at your door

And Four for the gospel makers

There was a stare which Dad used to command when I was very small.

A good common Sunday stare which he reserved for the cars loaded with

oglers who came down to our end of the road on weekends while he was working in his yard. It made them back all thewayouttothemainroad, groaning in reverse. I wished he had kept his skill fresh or one of us had inherited it.

For the first time, I struck out on my own, leaving the road, and

Moulton followed. But he was hurting for sure, and at the first sign of a proper log, I signaled for a rest.

We sat there for a while looking at the snow and the sky. I hadn't

realized it, but we had come all the way back through the Popular Forest and were in the unincorporated woods behind the Golf Club, the most

direct if difficult route home.

We cleared away some snow and squatted down upon the frozen sod, a

finely quilted grass for future divots. Sand for the traps was heaped

among the trees, and above us stretched the powder-blue water tower of Precious Blood Retreat. The order had bought the land when it was still

wild onion. Their tower was the highest thing outside the city. When we first moved in, I lay in bed at night and listened to the water running out of the tower and into all the houses. They grew horseradish for years

until the ground turned blue. Then they sold the west forty to the state for an airport" they sold the east forty to developers for a golf club, they sold the south forty to the city for a garbage dump, they sold the north

forty to Irma Nadler's husband, the doctor, and he sold it to us and 139 others.

Before they sold the south forty, they took out all the rock and sold it to the airport for concrete. Before they sold the west 41

forty, they took off

all the sod and sold it to the Golf Club for grass. When they put the

garbage where the rock and sod had been, the gulls from the lake moved inland with us. The gulls are clean and quiet birds, but they heckled the clipped-wing swans down atthe club swan pond, and one gull flew into the mouth of an executive jet and blew it up. The last thing the Precious Blood did was to import some amphibious Chinese carp, which were reported to thrive on gull eggs and algae but in our Occident seemed to prefer trout and quail. They lummoxed from pond to pond at night now. leaving trails of mucus on the lawns.

The water tower was a real landmark. At Christmastime they put messages on it in lights. This year it said: CHRIST WANTS MORE

There was some comment about that. It attracted attention because it

stretched around the entire tank, and to get the whole message it was necessary to drive an ever-widening circle through the countryside.

Otherwise. from a single perspective, you could only get a few letters.

From our house, for instance, all you could see was ANTS. Airliners used

it for a pylon, and when a pervert took his annual child in the woods,

official observers were seen at the tower railing, flashing signals

through the night to search parties in the Popular Forest. They'd go right up there as soon as a little girl was late for dinner. Rewards were offered. the state police and National Guard were summoned, the hounds went out, the creek was dragged, and the air was full of helicopters, but it never was any use. The dogs always found the bodies the same way, half buried decomposed, their underclothes stuffed in their mouths. The newspapers ran a picture of the cop giving a little shoe to a big dog to smell. Sometimes, the body was dismembered, and the police were around for weeks. Tell me, why did they have to find all of it, once they knew? ,

For weeks there is no news but the news of that kid's life-where she went to school, what her father does, tributes from her playmates, the

variety of her performance, her fantastic potential, the shame of it all.

And after about a week they start coming into the police stations.

Hundreds of men. From all over. And how they do confess I They describe in the most corroborative detail how they enticed the child, the props of seduction, how and when they disposed of her. The cops trace 42

the men's stories back and find that none of them could have possibly done it. These men had putto memory all that information, all that news, and committed themselves to the child. The actual criminal never

confesses. He doesn't need to. He did it. They find him with his wife and kids having Sunday dinner and drag him down the stairs. It can make a man furious, crazy, to have nothing, nothing to confess. I see now how Moulton

...

oh well, why speculate? The facts we have are

theoretical enough.

At any rate, the Cloister itself was yellow stucco with a red tile roof and a bell-less campanile. We went there several times a year to vote.

Our precinct polls were in the foyer of the chapel, the only public place

around. My parents always took me when they voted

,

a nice

touch,

though we never discussed the specifics of the referendum. While they

doing their duty, I stayed in the foyer, and-it always surprised me-next to the religious pamphlet rack towered a big stuffed polar bear rearing up on his hind legs. You put a penny on his grooved tongue, shoved it back through the scissor teeth, and for a good minute his head swiveled, his eyes rolled, and from deep inside came a siren roar:

were

err-err-Err-Err!

The money was for orphans.

I mention this because something happened while we were sitting

there, all tired out with nothing to do, that nearly made the day.

Moulton and I were in pretty bad shape; we didn't have too much more to say to each other. Our supply lines were overextended. So we were just

sitting there, heads between our tails, and I had begun to hear the water dripping out of the tower again after so many years, at my small sane age, when three men came barging out of the forest. They were running crazily, zigzagging, and they all carried huge sticks with which they beat the ground.

It is one of the facts of the New Living that we don't question what a man is doing as long as we understand what he's wearing. So when I saw they were attired in surplus air force parkas, not hooded robes; sweat pants, not pantaloons; football cleats, not clochepieds; and their weapons were merely fiberglas pole-vault poles, I did not prepare to shoot these wiseguys immediately.

43

What they were doing was hunting. Their plan, apparently, was to run the

length of the field in troika, flushing rabbits and then busting them with their poles. And sure enough, on their third sally, one rabbit zigged when he should have zagged and got clouted by the center hunter. They gathered around to finish the job, and by that time we were up to them.

"By God, you got him!" I yelled. "That was terrific!"

The three of them grinned and leaned on their poles. They were stocky, flushed types, and the fur of their hoods was drawn in perfect circles about their faces.

"First one today, too," the center hunter spoke for the others.

"Tough going."

"I'll bet. What a fine idea!"

They didn't say anything but just kept grinning. They were probably wondering what we were doing out there, so close to curfew. I was

getting a little worried.

"You fellas with Precious Blood?" I broke in.

"For a time," the center one spoke again. "Until the spring, when we

take orders."

"Uh, monks?"

"Brothers," they grinned.

"Where to from here?"

They shrugged collectively, shifting their weight on the poles. I wanted to ask them "Orders for what?" but I was afraid Moult might start an argument if it was one of those with vows of silence or celibacy or something; for there was a light in Moulton's eye as he looked down at that fresh -pounded rabbit on the snow-a light not for the killing or even the hunting, but for the lengths they had gone to before they did kill.

"Lemme see one of those poles, will you, pal?"

The center hunter handed me his and I presented itto Moulton. He choked up on it, backed away, and took a few swings. Then he took

several vicious swings, grunting and letting the momentum throw him off balance. Then he arched it back over his shoulder and flung it like a

javelin. It sailed and bore quivering into a thicket. He plunged in after it, and emerged in a minute with snow clinging to his hair, the pole over 44

his shoulders like a yoke. His face was reddened from either spleen or wind.

The three were examining their cleats.

"You guys must have a pretty good athletic setup," I said. "You ever

play anybody in anything?"

They shook their heads.

"Well, for not playing anybody they sure give you a lot of

equipment."

Moult bent the pole in the snow, letting it snap back. I was afraid he

might do something funny, and I wanted to get out of there.

"Just rabbits?" I pondered. "Why not owls and muskrats too? And there's those damn Chink carp all over the place."

"The rabbits get into the garbage in the winter," the center one replied officiously, "and the vegetables in the spring."

"We can't shoot them," another spoke for the firsttime. "It's against ourlaws."

"We can't even eat them," the third said morosely.

I knew Moult was going to ask why they couldn't eat them, and it

could have been embarrassing, so I interrupted.

"You fell as got a nice chapel up there," I said. "We go there a lot to vote." They smiled mysteriously.

I was trying to figure out how to ask them the story behind the polar

bear without getting involved, when I saw Moult screwing the pole into

the snow and getting a very troubled expression on his face.

"Well, better be going," I said. "Nice to meet you guys."

We shook hands all around, but just as I thought we were free, Moult did it.

"May I have the rabbit?"

They looked at each other, shuffled their feet, folded and unfolded their arms. The center one made sure we were not being watched, then smiled benignly. "Why not?" And we shook hands again before they ran off, brandishing their poles silently, running in cadence.

When they were out of sight, I handed the bunny over to Moult and he fastened the gift to his belt by the ears. You could tell it perked him up.

4S

The rabbit swung in step with Moulton like a scalp. The brush was

frozen, and shattered like a glass underfoot. Attheedgeofthefield, we climbed the cyclone fence and cut through Mrs. Parker's bird sanctuary to save time. The Parker place had once been the largest and most

magnificent around. Mr. Parker had been Dr. Nadler's first customer, as Dr. Nadler had first entreated upon the Church, though they had eschewed one another since. In Parker's case, a successful engineering career had been cut short by his involvement with the conspiracy. Part of Parker's frontal cortex had been shot away in a raid, and he was

allowed to retire under house arrest; he devoted his remaining years to

photographing the wild life within his acreage. For this he had been awarded the National Merit medal posthumously.

Since Parker's death, or more precisely since the carp invasion, little birdlife has been seen except for a few grackles and starlings, but the crescent paths which were his testament are still kept up by his sad wife, Stella, whom nobody resents any more for her money. The woods were still webbed with the rusty wires he used to trip his secret cameras, and the Parker foyer was fully decorated with testimony to his skill.

Hundreds of startled, extinct animals gazed down from his waIls like beautiful movie stars trapped in some profane indulgence=raccoons with fish, deer stripping bark, birds atop rodents, snakes sucking eggs, rabbits with each other.

Suddenly Mrs. Stella Parker appeared ahead of us, turning one of her husband's serpentine bends, leading her black Labrador, Beodyboy.

"Get that rabbit out of sight," I hissed to Moult, "she'll think we've been poaching."

Moult disposed of the corpse in his coat. And we met a moment later, Mrs. Parker brimming with that old-fashioned gentleness which has no object, pleased that we were taking advantage of her privacy. I said all the nice things and introd uced Moulton, who refused to shake hands like a stiff foreigner, as he had the rabbit secreted in his armpit. We would have gotten out of it cleanly, in fact, if it hadn't been for Beodyboy. He sauntered up, nosed Moult, and dropped into a solemn point. I don't think Mrs. Parker had ever seen Beodyboyon point before; nothing had been dead and bleeding that close to her. It embarrassed all of us, of course. Particularly when Beodyboy jammed 46

his nose into Moulton's groin. Mrs. Parker apologized and tugged on

Beodyboy's collar, but Beodyboyjust stood his ground and growled.

Moult grinned terribly, and I patted Beodyboy's head as fast as I could.

What we should have done, I suppose, was to let Mrs. Parker see what was up,

explain things, throw the bunny to Beodyboy, and get home for

dinner. Butthis was no time to start that. It would be easier, in a way,

just to stand there, being pointed at, until Mrs. Parker left or collapsed from the cold, and we could beat the pee out of Beodyboy and make it for home. For when we move, we leave nothing behind. No scraps, no ribbons in the trees, no graves, no dung. We leave things clean-if not precisely as we found them, still clean-bequeathing a footprint so wide, so equally pressured, that our successors will never comprehend what monster had passed their way.

But as it turned out, we didn't have to. Because Mrs. Parker just picked up a branch and started to whale Beodyboy about the shoulders.

Exactly as we would have done, except for different reasons. Beodyboy didn't differentiate and took off for home. It was nice of Mrs. Parker to do that because she loved Beodyboy; he had been Mr. Parker's favorite,

after all. It was hard to believe they had been part of the conspiracy.

We commended her as best we knew how, and then she excused

herself, returning around the bend to the enormous house which on this

day a year was permitted to light up the apple sky like an ocean liner. Her plotting was now confused, I suspect, and we were free again, one

ifthat's the word.

There are no hills near the lake, so they built one. They dug a hole for the necessary dirt, called what was left a reservoir, and that was all

right. But inadvertently they inverted the mountain. That is, they piled first what they dug first, so that the mountain is built on clods of topsoil small as walnuts while the peak is enormous rectangles of clay and striped granite. So our mountain tends to collapse into itself each year, and is maintained only by the constant ministrations of a corps of steam shovels, dump trucks, and army conscripts. In any case, our hill rose tentatively out of the fields before us, settling like a fallen meteor in its rim of shale. It was on the way and we climbed it for the view and to rest.

In the dark, at the top, things were indistinct. Across the fields, I 47

could make out our house, set in the prairie turflike an ax blade. The

forest was darker than the sky; the sky had seeped through the horizon and ran like lymph throughout the electric patches of our Christmas.

The water tower was spotlit, its fine message warped as always by

parallax. From the hill tonight it read WAN. The monastery's turrets glowed red; the lake, still white and ribbed with frozen currents, angled away like a gull's wing. We squatted down and rested.

It was quite still. The air base had shut down for the holiday; the blunt-nosed orange planes, aerodynamics bulged with radar, were down. The submarines were in their pens. The commuters were home. I was very cold and tired.

In the dark, of the stillness, at the top, I heard water backing up in the

tower, the silence too of more solid fuel cached in the Popular Forest,

frost-splitting brick paths, drone of precision thermostats, lubric drip of idle engines-waiting only for the coordinates to intersect, ignite. .

.

in order to retaliate.

Yes, we'll bereadyl We'll all be multilingual, able to exist on roots and berries, karate wise, equipped with foreign currency, microfilm, and one dark syringe. And pretty soon we'll have our orders, our

mission, our goal, and then our team will be toppling or buttressing all governments, perhaps even our own, pretenders denouncing

usurpers; probing efficiently, waging the war, carrying on the good fight, scorching the old earth, meeting rising expectations, sharing the

wealth, keeping the cord sanitary, massively deterring piecemeal

aggression, retaliating secretively, selectively, mobilizing means, keeping the peace, maximizing our potential, utilizing our concern, isolate, selfless, stoic, pure white killers. And at Christmastime, we'll come home on furlough, we'll lay down our foreign currency, our

decoder, our secret compartment ring, our warning whistle, our

antidote pellet belt, our dark syringe on the hall table; amiable spouse will bring in the soup, and after dinner, if we are very very good, she will tum the crank slowly, and from left to right a landscape will pass in

front ofthe picture window, and she will keep turning until, God, yes,

there's that same little tree again with the idiot child feeding squirrels

underneath, around for the second time; and we will have corroborated ourselves.

48

.

..

We shall live in a true age of art, where our fugitive

entertainment will be the sole reality, and within which we shall all become eminently capturable, all. We will have ventilated our passions,

exercised our rights, capitalized on our investments, articulated our

demands, cut our losses, geared up for the long haul, and nothing shall touch us for a thousand years.

As the sun slithered from our western flank, I could make out, for the first time in I don't know how long, the silhouette of Mound City on the horizon. The capital of our predecessors, if not precisely our antece­

dents, the greatest growth industry of the last century, model for this our own

portable hill where it was once possible to dig for artifacts at

minimum wage. But it was their pottery, their conch anklets, this cache in a com field; their gourds and weirs, their nuts and husks and ducks

and mollusks, their beads and butchered maidens, found frequently as

foursome, arm in skeletal arm, heads and hands cut off. Their heads'd be the last thing I'd cut off-Eh, Heh-those two wonderful words a

which have alone retained their purity.

Despite the dusk, I could make out the largest and most symmetrical mound, the lunar observatory, an equinox centered between two ridges which marked the winter and summer solstices, on the perimeter of the restored stockade. These great plinths, our first computer, their augury holes filled with the scraps of that idyllic life, their Stone Age soups; ten­ ton rocks brought a thousand miles downstream, levered in place by volunteer armies to make a tern pIe, a millennium before the Britons, two thousand years before the Mayans, Babylonians, Egyptians. their demise as inexplicable as their origins.

Abandoned well before our blunderwunderplunder, what had threatened this magnificent community? Another people infringed upon by their city-state? Oppressed lower classes, a slave caste? There are, of course, the academic possibilities: .

.

A. Climatic change

B. Disease C.War D. Depletion of natural resources

You would think we could invent a better story than that! Perhaps, as

Dad says, we're back to where we started. Or perhaps it's only the 49

strongest and most whole who refuse to start over. I recall from an old textbook: a society can be defined as Barbarian when Its literacy and technology become opposed forces.

•

•

•

•

•

•

And then I had a vision, an afterimage on my retinas, a ghostly voice;

"Man," it read, "if man you be in heart, forbear. what the Surplus is, and where it is

.

.

untilyou discover

...

"MyGodl" yelled Moult, "There's someone down therel" It was his voice more than his discovery which startled me. I peered down into the great white field below us. There was someone there all

right, but if it was someone, it looked dead. It was lying right in the center of the field with arms and legs outstretched, an illiterate's signature on the snow.

We ran down the hill as fast as we could and into the field. At first I

thought the perverts were rushing the season, but they would never have left things this way. Maybe cancer. Or thundering apoplexy? We crashed down through the ice as we ran. Moult was getting short of wind, and tears were freezing to his face. Once he tripped and cut his ankle on the edge of his own deep track. He clutched at his wound, but I got him by the back of the neck and hauled him to his feet. Then we were going again, and he soon outdistanced me. We strutted on, knee deep by now, cutting our socks to pieces. A great volume of blood pressed against my eyes-the adrenalin hadn't started yet, I wasn't excited, I was going on pure intent. I had been feeling mean; now maybe we could make a rescue.

It was a kid, all right. About ten, in a purple snowsuit. Moult arrived

first but didn't know what to do. I drew up, dropped to my knees to see if he was breathing. Moult fell on the other side of him and began to retch.

But the kid was fine. His eyes were wide open, and he was breathing

nimbus clouds of frost. Nothing was wrong with him at all, except his nose was

running. He looked just like I used to, and Rita's burden would

too.

"Whatya want, bub?" he said, and nottoo pleasantly.

"What happened, you fall down?" so

"

Are you kidding?"

"Does your family know you're out?"

He rolled his eyes indifferently.

"Lost?"

"Nah," he pouted.

I started to grab him under the arms to pick him up-maybe he'd had a

fight and was sulking--but as soon as I touched him he winced and

bellowed.

"No! Don't touch me!"

"What? You break something?"

"No, stupe. Can't you see? You'll ruin it! The angel!" I didn't know what he meant and took a deep breath.

"Just get away, will ya? I'll showya, don't worry."

I backed away a few feet to watch. Moult seemed better, and was

eyeing the kid from a safe distance like he was booby-trapped. Very solemnly and deliberately the kid sat up, holding his arms out to the side like one of the old ballet dancers. Then in one motion he sprang to his feet and turned on us proudly. "There!" he said, pointing.

He was right; in the snow was the impression of an angel in full flight.

"A little didactic," Moult muttered to me, "but still an angel." Then he rolled over closer, intrigued. "Hey," he said, "How'd you do that?"

"Easy," the kid said, wiping his nose. "Just lie on your back without moving and sweep your arms up and down like you were flying."

Moult put the rabbit beside him and lay down. But the kid yelled and stamped his feet.

"No. Naah! You gottado it easy!"

He took Moult's head in his hands and eased him back. He was still too eager, however, and again broke the mold.

"Itoldya, buddy. You gottado it easy."

"Try it over here," I said. "There's a good smooth spot."

Moult came over, careful not to scuff the fresh snow, and began

again gingerly. "

You can do it on your stomach if you want," the kid continued, "but

then you'll get snow up your nose holes."

Moult was flat and I lay down next to him, carefully taking note of our

51

wing space. The kid looked down at us.

"OK," he said, "now fly!"

I waved my arms slowly in a half circle like a signalman. Moulton did

the same. At one point our respective arcs intersected and our knuckles brushed. "

"Slow, hey," warned the kid. "Easy does it.

We were hovering. I took short compact breaths, careful not to arch my back and ruin the outline.

"OK," the kid said again. "That's good. OK! OK!" Moult and I looked to him.

"OK, now's the harder part. Gotta get up. But no hands, see? Or

you'll bust it sure."

Then he held my feet. I sat up slowly. My groin burned from the

running. But after some effort I was up. And Moult was too. With the kid's help. We rolled forward on our haunches, up and away from the impressions.

"Not bad at all," the kid said, "pretty good."

They were, too. One medium gruff angel and a large indifferent one on either side of the kid's smaller perfect one. Ours seemed to careen more, like helicopters. But they were good, considering.

"Say," Moult said. "Say now, that's all right."

The kid wiped his nose. "OK." "Moult," I whispered, "Moulton, we got to go." He nodded, for the first time in a long time actually awed.

And you," I said to the kid, "you better get home. Your mother's probably going crazy wondering where you are.

The idea seemed to strike him as a fact, but he lay down again.

"Sometimes," he said, "I make 'em with just one wing. Then they look sadder, or like somebody carrying a fan or a hom or a big ax."

"Yes, that is what they would look like," said Moult, caching our bunny carcass within his parka again.

"We got to get going," I said. "So long, kid." "

"

"Yeah, bub," he said. "I'd wavetoya, butI'd break it."

We crossed the field at a trot. We didn't look back or talk. We had

thought him dead from a distance, but all he was doing was starting his own business.

52

The snow was heavier now, spooling webs in the crotches of trees,

ringing the blackened, burned-out stumps. At the Popular Forest boundary, Cowboy Bear sprang up, thanking us for once again being considerate. Since the morning, somebody had drawn a large tumor on the lap of his red jeans. At the highway, two plainclothesmen in a pastel ranch- wagon were looking bored, and we gave them a wide berth.

Then, as we as we crossed the last of the brush, the lawns opened up, the Christmas lights regilded the road, and over the PA warning system they were still playing the old incomprehensible carols.

Two, two, the mywhite boys Dressed aU in green 0

•••

One is one and all alone And evennore shall be so.

Ah, dinner, my eyes read, dinnertime.

It was well past curfew, so I stepped up the pace, and quickly outdistanced Moult. Through the kitchen window I could see Mom

chopping something up. She looked pissed.

Maybe she had been arguing. But in the blue capsule of light she looked like a veteran navigator figuring a mission that was by now second nature, though still potentially death dealing. The nature of second nature, denatured.

I went in by the back door and took off my boots in the hall.

"So," Mom said without looking up, "the hunter is finally home."

"And," I said in my most officious voice, "we gotta rabbit!" As I held it up for her, she put up her hands and screamed.

"Wherever did you get that?" she moaned.

"Monks."

"What?"

"The guys at Precious Blood."

"Jesus Christ! Fred!"

"What's going on up there?" my father yelled up from the basement.

"Your son just brought a dead rabbit into the house

" ...

"

A thoughtful pause from the cellar .­ "and be sure the garbage lid's on tight. We don't want anybody getting

"Well, get it outside

tularemia.'

S3

,

....

..

"It was a free gift," I pleaded.

"Well, you can just take it right back to whoever gave it to you." She was

hacking atthe turnips and potatoes as if they were snakes.

"Let's eat it, Mal" "Oh? And who's going to dean it? And who's going to cook it? And

who's going to degrease the pot?"

"Moulton's favorite is hassenpfeffer."

"Oh no, sonny boy. Not on Christmas Eve. We're not going through that Moulton routine again."

"But Mom "

" ...

You've got one nice sister, John, and that should be enough for

you."

I forced a grin.

"Your Dad and I are tired of Christmas," she said, more to herself than me. "We don't expect you to understand."

I saw it wasn't any use, so I got my boots back on and went out to the

garage. Across my eyes was running and wash up good before we eat.

She didn't even have to say it. I dropped our rabbit into the garbage and slammed the lid down as hard as I could.

A strong wind had come up from the plains. We would have to dig all

morning to free ourselves. Dad had already been shoveling a path. He was never much good at receiving free gifts. Dad's problem is that, to keep from anger, he is fey. And I'm getting pretty fey myself. The best defense is a good feyness.

No doubt I will be accused of precocious cynicism, willful and quite unbelievable for a boy my age, of carrying on when I should have been respectful, played it straight, grim faced and doomed. But at least I won't spend the rest of my life yelling, "Give it back, give it back!" I grew up wanting to say something that would break your heart. Now I'll settle for a little voice that will break out of character. It's getting tougher all the time to match the names to the faces.

I actually wasn't all that depressed. It's just very still, that's all. .

.

.

Static. Enormous static. We live at the end of the road, and Dad has

promised to build us a turnabout so you won't have to back out any mor�a teardrop, he calls it. Which will be handy when he gets around 54

to fixing the car. It's still, it's dark, butthedark, frankly, has never

bothered me. We make too much of the dark; we suffer only from our lack of shadow there, and if we can make up the mauve wolves and

purple bears who eat us in our dreams, then we can also cast our mind's thick shadow on the blackness, and remember when we sit up screaming that we're the only animals who watch our visions, whirring versions of ourselves, being devoured. Those animals who eat us in our sleep are there to wake us, our best pets.

My jaw was hurting something terrible, my ankles were raw, but I got out the flashlight and followed my tracks back toward the field. At the end of the drive I had to duck down into a culvert as the Beautification Police went by; their violet searchlights were quickly extinguished by the storm.

In the field I found the angels easily and recounted the three of them.

It was snowing harder. In another hour they would be obliterated. My own best

witness, of course, had left the scene. And Moulton was

playing guessing games again, crouched and hiding from me somewhere. I didn't call for him. He wouldn't be back. What the hell. If Mom and Dad can't even go along with Moulton, they're in pretty bad

shape. Whose story would they believe?

For him I won't apologize.

You remember from the Good Book there's really only two ways that

things, I mean when no prophets are handy and the air isn't exactly ringing with ghostly voices. One way is through "a dream," and the other is a "visit from an angel." Sometimes the angel visits in

we come to learn

the dream, but more often than not you have either a dream or a visit from an angel. That is why there has been so much argument about

religion. Remember, for example, what happened when Herod sent the Wise Men out and they tried to give their presents away? And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their country byanotherway. That is very different, for example, than Gabriel appearing before your mother, say, or the various voices from above or below, sometimes even from within--voices from rocks, winds, bushes, etc. Now the difference, see, is that if the message comes toyou in a dream, you're asleep, right? So you can't do much about it. And when ss

you're awake, and a big invisible voice suddenly comes out of the third balcony, you can't do much about that either. It's only when you're both awake and the angel comes that you can ask a meaningful question like "Howshall I know this?" That was a longtime ago, and now we have neither angel nor hidden voice, dream nor temple; only words and

will--and a few rocks and bushes, of course. This is how we live now. No difference between sleep, dream, and waking, no difference between bodiless voices, voiceless bodies, their various homes.

I know that Rita would put me down for trusting my eyes and not my

feelings. Believe me, if you can, I would believe in my puerility and perishability if I could; but Rita, if I don't know what's happened to us, how am I supposed to feel about it? We have lost our Second Nature, that's for sure, and the lesson seems clear enough: No more Surplus!

For the moment, I felt a trifle trite, immobile. If I hadn't known

better, I might have thought I was suddenly much afraid of dying. I

glanced up at the blazing red towers of Precious Blood. No doubt the monks would take me in, train me for some worthy mission. But I Will be no ordinary orphan. If I die, I will die like an insect, balanced, upright in amber, with no excuses and perhaps even no resentments, a "prophet" being merely a man who knows he will die without having cured the people he loves.

But I would not die yet; because, simply, it was time for dinner. It's only that sort of thing which cannot be put off indefinitely. And I'd need a better explanation for Mom and Dad this time-perhaps one they will regret?

I knew then that I could no longer rely on the tape or my play brother to see me through; it wasn't necessary to forget the words of others, only to stop repeating them merely. I didn't know how exactly this would work out, but I resolved to put both out of mind. Somehow I would have to learn to get along somewhere between fantasy and the facts.

This was the second new thing to happen to me today. I didn't know if it was a good or a bad thing, any more than I knew if you would call this a

good or a bad time. But it must happen a lot.

Back at the house, I tightened up the garbage lids before going in.

Then I screwed up my face, dropped my voice, said my name over and S6

just a sound, held my balls in both hands, and opened my eyes as wide as I could. The tape was gone. Ifelt, Rita, like one of those pioneer trappers in the old videotapes-in a cave overnight, say-when my new and more tractable Indian guide turns to me and screams the forest is too quiet! We are sitting before our fire. We have carried too many carcasses with us for too many days. We have eaten all over until it was

there is

....

All the books left to us were about going into the forest-you know, those jaunty forays by the young-in- heart, passaging their rites, having, in spite of their deadly earnestness, some surprising adventures, which

somehow added up to more than that disguised and venal quest for the treasure of themselves. All well and good. But now we know that in the

middle of the forest, in the heart of the garden, on the bottom of the ocean, at the very center of the planet, there is only the intriguing

wreckage of a machine that no longer works.

My guide is humming softly-wordless rhythms, bands of light. We discuss coming out of the forest one day soon, hides tanned and contoured about our shoulders, wearing necklaces of teeth and claws over our hearts, which will inspire marvelous rumors which will become barefaced, outrageous stories which will make some sense of our most recent and most incredible survival

57

Desire William S. Wilson

La grande douleur de l' hom me, qui commence

des l'enfance et se poursuitjusque a la mort, c 'est que

regarder et manger sont deux opera­ tions differentes. La beatitude bernelle est un etat ou regarder c' est manger, -Simone Weil, "Contradiction," La Pesanteur et la Grace

Turning and climbing, the double helix evolved to an operation which had always existed as a possibility for mankind, the eating oflight. The appetite for light was ancient. Light had been eaten metaphorically in ritual transubstantiations. Poets had declared that all that is is light, that this peach, and even this persimmon, is light. But the peach which mediated between light and the appetite for light interfered with the taste of light, and obscured the appetite it aroused.

The appetite for actual light was at first appeased by symbols. But the simple instruction, promulgated during the First Simplification, to taste the source of the food in the food, led to the ability to eat light. Out of the attempt to taste sources came the ability to detect unpleasant chemicals. These had to be omitted. Eaters learned to taste the animal in the meat, and the animal's food and drink, and to taste the waters and S8 TriQuarlerly

sugars in the melon. The discriminations grew finer-children learned to eat the qualities of the pear as they ate its flesh, and to taste its slow ripening in autumn sunlight. In the ripeness of the orange they learned to recapitulate the history of the orange. Two things happened. First,

the children were quick to surpass the adults, and with their unspoiled tastes, and their desire for light, they learned the flavor of the soil in which the blueberry grew, and the salty sweetness of the plankton in the

fish, but they also became attentive to the taste of the sunlight. Soon there were attempts to keep fruit of certain vintages. The pears of a

superbly comfortable autumn in Anjou, or the oranges of Seville from a year so seasonless that their modulations of bouquet were unsurpassed for decades. Fruit was eaten as a retrospective of light. Second, the change in diet from tasting food as sunlight led to being able to live on light. Children of each new generation grew more clearly, until children were shaped as correctly as crystals. The laws governing the operations of growth shone through their perfect exemplification. Life became in­ tellectually transparent.

The principles of growth, so obviously systematic, had seemed to emerge inexplicably from random change. The achievements of the species in development were attributed to chance. But this explained nothing more than that there was to be no further attempt at explana­ tion. This theory, which saw chance provoking life into an empty future, was opposed by a theory which posited a principle mysteriously and progressively manifesting itself in the advances of evolution. The partisans of chance studied random distributions. The vitalists praised the life force.

But after several generations had supplemented their diet of flesh and fruit with light, and had experienced accelerations of evolution, the correct principle became self-evident: that evolution propels itself by an

inclination toward its next probable achievement.

Evolution had been read with the influence either from the past or from com present relationships, neither of which accounted either for the direction of change or for the stability of the emergent level of

achievement. The truth is that the determining influence in evolution is from the possible future toward which the species turns, guided not by chance but by real future probabilities. The energy for movement into the future is potential energy, deriving from the present position relative S9

to the future probability. The probabilities are of different

degrees, and

these differentials constitute the gradients that shape the field.

Evolution inclines toward probabilities.

No one would have known, as mankind entered a future guided by the

future open to it, that man could have opportunity to eat light. As the double helix turned, and turned again, the eyes enlarged, the stomach contracted. As some organs became vestigial, others transformed their

functions, and the eye resumed some tasks it had abandoned early in its

phyletic past. The optic nerve tract expanded and reached directly into the hypothalamus and the hypophysis, with the effects on skin pig­ mentation which we are familiar with. The body revealed unsuspected potentialities for photosynthetic functions, and we certainly can appreciate the way the appendix adapted to purposes which had no precedent in phylogeny. Such changes were speeded up when the principle of the voluble helix was understood, and when evolutionists learned to decode the message in the molecules which mirror DNA and RNA. Then the future probabilities could be simulated in a field of

present probability functions, and several generations of development could be compressed in an embryo grown within the field. This very

speedup, or spiraling, had a further accelerating effect; and, in ways not well understood, the effect modified the cause, for modifications of the

gastrointestinal and optic systems modified the message of the DNA molecules. The key could stay the same, yet find that it worked in a dif­ ferent lock. These microscopic effects in genetics have been the model for the experiments on the total future. With our present compre­ hension of the macroscopic future as probabilities real enough to put a strain on the present, we are able to modify the present in order to develop leanings toward a desirable probability. We can, if we so desire, choose our communal future.

If we read now that an early people ate each other with their eyes, we

of course misinterpret the relationship. They could not, as we do, eat the

light reflected from another person, nor taste the colors of the beloved.

The early appetite for light is difficult to understand, based as it is on no experience, and necessarily more frustrating than satisfying. Their comprehension of themselves as thickenings of light was sometimes advanced, although marred by guilt at interfering with the light. The taste for water, attested to in the literature, has been convincingly 60

explained as an anticipation of the thirst for light. We may regard water as proto-light.

Yet, too, one must note the possible advantages for early man if he had been able to eat the light reflected from others. From the specimens preserved cryogenically, we see the array of colors ranging from black and brown through pink. Delicious people. It is as though all possible shades were achieved within these colors, and there is evidence that we would have had much to envy, and much to eat, in the reflections from a young person. No wonder that the viewing of cryogenic bodies is limited to scientists.

Today, and let us celebrate this fact, we can eat the light of our be­ loved, warmed by compassion or cooled by intellectual feeling. And if we are surprised, and some of us disappointed, that the light is now only green-well, such was the vital probability awaiting us. We have, after all, an increase in the energy available for further evolution; we can use the energy of our position relative to the probabilities in the future to reach the future we desire. The full use of this energy is just beginning to be explored, and we have the opportunity open to few generations to create our best opportunities. We must not slacken in our desire now if we desire a future. The pressure of certain

probabilities on the present

increases the momentum of evolution, and as the voluble helix turns, and turns us away from this improbable satiation, we can see that the shadow cast on the present from the future is not black but rain­

bowed, brilliant with lemon-yellow, plum-purple, and cherry-red. I have

patience with those who say that their appetite for light is satisfied.

Or that they are bored. I have myself a still unsatisfied desire for green: eucalyptus, celadon, alarazaine, tourmaline, and apple. no

61

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1

Intersection Ian McEwan

We all killed him there on the pavement outside the shops, together

him, lying there expecting help. That is how I see it, and since I was the closest, since it was my lips, my knee, my I was the one forearm, you should see something in the way I see it. you all made kiss him as he died there under my face, and I was the one who kissed him, though I had no choice. We all had choice and no choice

we all crushed the life out of

...

that morning. That old lady who screamed sharply tried to turn back into the crowds, she was choosing all the time

.....

Those at the back,

the ones I never saw, only felt-they were as guilty. My choice was to crouch on all fours right there on his breathing body, the man with the

leather briefcase leaning over me, tottering, saying" Steady on"

...

some

flowers in a cellophane wrapper belonging to the lady in the red coat.

None of us alone wanted him dead, as persons we never killed or wanted to kill, at home we were upset for a while, as citizens we intended no

harm

....

I am sure of that because it was an ordinary Tuesday morning

down High Street. The pavements were crowded with shoppers doing

ordinary things-that is the real horror, right there-in the shopping center of a small English town, good-morning people buying groceries, 63 TriQuarterly

tins of soup, balls of string, a morning you could forget by the after­ noon. But for a

that is what it was when the wall public lynching closed in around me, when the legs buckled near me I knew there was a will here, not the sum of its parts There was the pushing, the holding back, the calling out, the old lady's scream, and the wrapped flowers, a purpose which was not anybody's purpose, an intention which no single ...

....

person could claim. The moment had its own intention, but there can be no intention without

people, and we were the shoppers, lynchers, torturers, passers-by my lips were crushed into his mouth and my knees welded to his groin. When I saw him first he was alive, and when I got up, after they pulled the people away, he was dead and dear Something must have meant then, there must have been something be­ hind all that. How do you kiss, strangle, and emasculate a man and say it was an accident? There are always causes, and causes inside causes out­ side causes, like Chinese boxes. That is why I say a lynching, a murder by so many people, which one is guilty? None and all? I hit the old lady I admit to that and do with me what you want for it, it is enough we are all guilty. I got her in the face with all my remaining strength, with a I cannot say I did not mean to smash her face tightly clenched fist. ...

....

....

...

because for me it was this: that when I stood up from the dead man, left

off kissing him and breathing the dead air from his lungs, the outrage of it all was already upon me, and my withered sense of here we were

dusting down our suits, smoothing back our hair, wandering back to our previous purposes, checking our lists and watches to correct the error in our morning, now in talking groups straightening out a version for the All that, and standing in the High Street of homeside, for homicide our English town, outside the shops by the intersection, the teeth marks of the dying man in my lower lip, the man whose teeth we made cold, all that and the old lady grubbing at my feet saying, "I've lost the clasp off so I hit her and she went down pretty fast, I can tell you my handbag" ....

...

that, and I was not sorry.

The sunlight falls on his knuckles, his page, his pen, ceasing at the

wrist, at the tunnel of his black coat, this sun through the company office window showed his knuckles less distinct than their shadows

....

He pulls them into the shade on this, his side of the desk at the precise moment he stands, scraping back the chair. "Well? Who wants what?"

64

Jacky, who likes him, pretends not to hear, wanting attention, ticking off a ledger there. Robert his friend says, "Cucumber and beef," lifting his head. "And Jacky? What about you, Jacky?" "Oh well, nottoday, I it's a diet," she swivels, she explains, she pats her hair-do in think I'll conciliation. Taking Robert's two shillings, he concludes with a sudden jerk of his elbow, "Cucumber and beef then," and through the partition door he pauses, hanging back sulkily anxious he turns his body back into the office, only his face and right shoulder visible to them. "Sure, Jacky?" But only Robert turns to him, looking up blankly while from the door he holds the moment, waiting to include her who, believing he has gone, glances up, trapped now in the question hanging over in his look. "What?

No, I'mjust you know, not for me thanks," she titters. "Thought I'd ask you again to make sure." "No thanks."

Through the open door of the broom cupboard across the passage, he sees the lonely ash man, Mr. Ball. Ash down the front of his lapels, across the back of his shoulders like dandruff, falling on the shine of his shoes, blueing the nub of his yellow fingers and thumbs. "Mr. Ball?"

Ash from the grey comers of his eyes, clotting in streaks the ocherwhite moustache, this ash in the bronchial volcanoes of his cough and ...

...

...

...

the rasp of his voice, the sad ash man of the company trash. "Mr. Ball?"

He leans by his desk carving the detritus from his pipe, a curved old man

....

"All right, all right, not deaf, heard you first time, you want

them keys again." Blygh stands outside with a two shilling coin in his hand which he holds up. "Going to the shop, what'll it be?" Mr. Ball

softens, lowers. "Ah, the shop is it.

..

yes

...

no, I don't think so." He

rattles his shapeless jacket, bringing from the left pocket a match box, holds it high, shaking it level with his ear and hears one match inside.

"Yes, bring a box." Blygh waits for money, but Mr. Ball is right inside now, bending over his desk hacking for air, so he passes on down the

corridor, watching his polished shoes against the cracked linoleum over which he strides

...

to Mr. Mitchell's door.

John Fisher and his mother. John Fisher stands oblivious in the center of the small room while his mother flies round him like a bee, touching

briefly at his tie knot, shirt buttons, at his fly zip, and up to his hair, tutting at the scuffs and wrinkles. But he waits. Stay away from the canal, off the road, no trees or strange men, clean handkerchief, back at 6S

one

...

she drones. It is over now and he is out into the garden, away in

the morning from the grey light of his prefab home, the gravy light

...

to

his pram-wheeled cart on its side in the muddy grass from which he lifts

it with a string onto the path-two weeks in the building, the wasted

nails, the splintered slats from a bomb site door, the string from his mother. He pulls his white painted cart from the shadow his house throws on the garden into the lane which runs between the grey pre­

fabricated homes. He pulls his clumsily painted white cart, John Fisher the skimpy boy, knowing it needs only ballast now to hold down the back wheels. He steers it through the latch gate down the paved lane, past the

oblong homes, like his own but for the numbers on the doors and the things in the gardens-past all these, pushing against the fresh morning with tears already for the wind and with a tiny dribble from his nose rubbed now the length of his sleeve. How can he stop from running when the lane is straight like a rail track with gates for telegraph poles to hurtle the wheels shrieking, the wind tearing wet faced by him, behind the bouncing loose slats across the cracked stones, each post and fence swish inside his speed as the pulse of sprinting blood-to pound the now catching at his heels morning from his mother and take his cart .•.

...

unless he holds that arm stiff, behind the rattle of effort and moment,

catching at his breath

...

released from the two-week task. All this done,

and all it needs is ballast to hold it by him, ballast was the word his

slowing to a walk by the open ground ballast is the word he learned last night, ballast, not a weight, not a stone, not a holder down, though all these things, ballast, his father having been in the Navy, he told him of salvages bringing oozed ships up from the slime, unseen for years, even history, with submarines which slipped away under hulls from sight and deeper still where there were no fish but the strangest staring ones, submarines sometimes not returning in the air he slows to a shuffle to think of not returning, and this is what ballast is, that made balloons of gas rise in the air, bigger than ships, his father told him, and showed him an old photograph ripped by an explosion which spilled the passengers to the ground and burned the rest, this was ballast, of how it pinned the spinning wheels of racing cars to the inside of the bend, and showed him a real stopwatch, promised it to him for his tenth birthday as he put it back in the cotton wool wrapping, the watch to time the fastest round the tightest bends, and father said, once in the Navy ...

...

66

...

ballast held them to the rush of the tiny throbbing steel clip which

springs back ready at the touch of the silver button. In a pramwheel cart you need ballast like ships, submarines, balloons, and a hun­ dred-miles-an-hour racing cars. Passing the comer shop, he says the word over and over again, now faster, blowing it, bouncing it, spitting as he turns Blast Blast Blast the final sound, shouting it all through a garden gate to fetch his friend, leaving his white cart by the ...

...

fence.

At the beginning of her busy morning cut short, Mrs. Radcliffe walks

gravel, from the light to the shade, from the shade to the light, her big garden cut in half in the low morning sun's light sliced by her house She walks, waits for the man to come, in and out of the shade by the laurel bushes; stooping to the geranium beds she sees frail, beaded cob­ webs strung between the leaves and hooks them off, possessive and a mere mechanic to set her Tuesday morning, bored, waiting for him her special morning, in motion, for the second car will not start. She comes off the lawn onto the gravel again, feeling the sharp stones through her expensive shoes which bring her to the side of her car, her Morris Minor squat on the drive, an insolent Mickey Mouse smirking at her morning, its uses piling up against the clock of this her only real day, the light of which now touches the top of her head as she leans by the wing on the

.

.

.

.

...

.

.

.

.

The wind tugs at her brown silk scarf and she tucks it into the warm

lining of the tweed two-piece, her brisk clothes for ordering the day, her morning for ordering the world accelerating away from her now as she leans on the stupid car. Earlier she said on the phone, "It just will not start. Is there any need to tell you more than that? You must be dealing with this sort of thing every hour of the day Goodness knows you charge enough for what you do. I would be grateful if you would send a man over. I simply cannot afford to be without the car this morning."

"If you could just tell us what happens when you press the starter, Ma' am, it'll make things easier for us." She placed the receiver on the glass-top, wavy-leg table and outside pulled and listened several times, checking unsurely each impression against the other. "It makes a faint clicking sound," she said, "but one which I can hardly hear at all." She moves round the front of the car, measuring her steps and the twelve minutes since the phone call to the garage, measuring her steps to hold ....

67

down the irritation of being pinned by the weight of other people's

slowness

...

and so to calm herself she sifts the morning's luxury of

commitment and closed decisions, purpose and articulation. The ad­ monition of Mr. Grise, wealthy, reputable shop owner, his standards

betrayed by a single fault, but all the same it could not be overlooked consumers must be protected and some were not so eloquent for their rights, so sleek Mr. Grise would bow away to concede, knowing she ordered food for the Woman's Guild. That the lapsed time might have cloyed the immaculate preparation of the brisk hour before breakfast, she hurries back into the house, crossing the shade line, now by the wheels of the car, into the house by the glass table where there is a mirror, and here she looks trailing her fingers expertly over the in­ tangible derangement of clothing, sucking in her lips, retracing the firm red line, dabbing with a tissue, pushing upward with her tongue as a test, reddening her face with dust she takes from a screw-top pot and rewriting her eyes, scrupulous author mistaking nothing. Mrs. Rad­ cliffe stands in her open doorway, waiting and watching the garden, not wishing now to risk the new perfection of her toilette in the breeze and there it is now, the expensive sound of gravel under wheels, the mechanic and his van. He climbs out, leaving his door open and smiling toward her equally, "Morning, Ma' am. What happens when you press ...

...

the starter, Ma'am?"

You say I saw enough, but I wish I could say I saw him go down, to be

there from the beginning to the closed end, instead of finding him there

already, as if I was chosen and pushed onto a stage halfway through a I could never know exactly what was going on. Molly said I play could get a special kind of string, waxed string, for these parcels to Japan, and she knew I would be free at this time to shop for it, the usual classes being at their exams. And I knew nothing, just searching up High Street like thousands of others getting what they needed and did not need. It was new to me, the streets at this time of day, because I work most of my time, so now the details are stark in my mind as if they were the brown, freckled hands of the shop assistant prepared for me turning upward like flowers, telling me that there was string and string but they had run out of waxed string, would I care to come back the tomorrow, and then holding back the door, "Good morning, sir." ....

...

...

68

newspaper vendor with only air for his voice, screaming at the top of his whisper as I came round the corner to go up High Street, stretching out

the paper toward me as if he had written it all himself. I saw two children

through a supermarket window, their faces immobile in their passion­ less riding of the painted mechanical monsters, they sat obediently

waiting for the senseless motion to end, and outside a linen shop I saw a an incon­ salesman demonstrate ironing-board covers to no one spicuous morning to be forgotten over lunch. But let me tell you of the sounds. Here were pockets of people wedged together, jammed on the pavements where they had chosen to be, distributed in and out of shops by their wills and needs, pushing and pulling together, carrying their children in their arms or on their backs or leading them by the hand or wheeling them by in carriages, carting their food in baskets and boxes these people transacting the stuff of their lives, and what sounds did they make? There was traffic-I took that for granted-and nothing else but the resounding click-clack of shod feet over paving stones and the cracks of paving stones, unnoticed as the earth is beneath the stones ...

...

themselves. No human shouts or murmurs, all strangers and inhuman I never noticed this silence in the street noises, soles and pistons before, so ordinary and strange, like discovering your best friend was a ....

robot all along. I staggered after Molly's string into one shop halfway up, directed to another at the top of the street, so along and up I went like the others, herded onto the pavement by the passing cars on the

road, threatened by our own inventions. I remember I was staring at the

ground nobody saw and I was on the inside, farthest from the curb, then across from the intersection pressed against the shop windows the jammed legs parted in a tunnel and suddenly I could see clear across to the pavement edge, like a tunnel in a snowstorm, to where he was lying one in the half on his back, half on his side, lying there, leg gutter, the among passing feet. I crossed easily to him, not much alarmed, my steps sprung with self-righteousness. My indignation took me to where he lay to where I knelt beside him to drag him right onto the pavement, to loosen his tie, to feel for his pulse, doing these things as if I ...

...

was alone in a deadwood

forest, because no one came beside me and said

What's wrong? or helped me lift him, or found a telephone in a shop.

But I was already bitter and expected nothing, I acted alone and even wanted to be alone, being one man helping another. His pulse was 69

normal I think, though I know nothing of these things, and his

breathing was deep and soft like a sleep, so to help that sleep I took my jacket off and rolled it up for him as a pillow which I slid under his head while some coins which he clenched in his fist spilled loose into the passing feet. I was wrapped in myself, in my own doing, and the coins brought me back to a man on the pavement needing medical, not sym­ bolic, help. So snatching at the coin within my reach I flung it straight up into the faces of the shoppers still stepping around us, knowing us to be two gutter drunks but I flung the coin up to where their minds were, shouting, "Get this, here's amandying and none of you cares a shit." That stopped a few and hurried a few by, and those gathering "What seems to be the round, their stupid, eager faces staring down a heart attack?

Is he all right? trouble?

No, too young for that. ...

...

...

Well, I knew someone

"

"Call an ambulance!" I screamed that

up, flinging the words like the coin in their faces, my anger half a fake because I felt right, being the only living one among the deadwood, the

being alive enough to despise, and though I did not know it then I was enjoying myself. They swayed and mooed like cattle, confused in themselves, awkwardly hovering around this flypaper of a scene, one of them saying, "Someone is going now." The ones atthe front were not speaking, while the ones behind them were muttering, thinking perhaps I was a doctor, since there was authority in my defiant kneeling there, pretending to hate them all. The gathering grew and soon it was a crowd. one

Blygh slows down near Mr. Mitchell's door, which lies at the end of a very long corridor, anticipating the lecture he will receive, the ordeal of he holds back and the old man's fumbling mind and daily conclusions thinks of the lecture he has already suffered today, a torrent at break­ fast time from his landlady, and of why the old set about the servile young with their weight of words and half-ideas, the vaunted mediocrity of self-expression to which Jacky's tittering and hair-do and crossed, secretarial knees belong too, even while they attract him. And she, his landlady, her great thighs spread over his breakfast, planting her hands on her hips, begins to speak while he finds strength from the greasy plate to shut her out, the up and down of her voice like a broken old seesaw, its lilts and falls and whines of self-congratulation and J-told­ you-so pouring over Blygh, who stares in front of him, trying to cut her ...

70

from the corner of his eye

...

it should be enough she takes the rent.

"Diet? Well I've always said and you can laugh if you want because I know when I'm right you're the shape you are and that's the end to it

because you take Mrs. Frampton next door what's been on diet since I knew her and no thinner by a hair when you look at her no sugar no

potatoes no bread no butter no drink I says to her myself the other day I says Where's it all getting you Rose? You should let yourself go I says

You won't always be young and what'll you have to look back on?

...

it's

like them that go on about giving up smoking begging your pardon Mr.

Blygh because I know you're trying to give it up yourself but you see what I'm getting at don't you Mr. Blygh you could be knocked down any time of day or night and then what good will missing out have done for take me look at me for instance not wishing to boast and your hurts? all that but I've never once." With the corner of a piece of bread he swabs up the remaining grease on his plate, and still talking she takes away the plate and pours him another cup of tea to hold him there while she stands at the sink, rattling the dishes against the knives and forks, always talking over her shoulder, her hands find and clean and place on the red plastic rack each object in the suds, her back toward him bulging between the ties of her apron as if she might burst from her sink, from her thousand cleaning tasks, finally swamp him, drown him in her torrent "If you see what I mean Mr. Blygh not a day since I was thirty-four touch wood, and nor will I spend a day in there touch wood again till they corne to take me away and who's to say what." From the sink she crosses to the cupboard under the stairs, and bends down ...

...

...

....

inside there, her voice still on, muffled now beside the brooms and mops, and then bursting out clear again as she emerges, slightly puffed, holding his shoes by the heels, holding them up for him to see. "They're as clean now as the

clean shoes for a clean day you first put them on day's work I always say and no lodger leaves this house without them because." She sets them down by his chair and back at the sink takes up a cloth to begin the drying, and recounts the story of Mrs. Frampton's dog put down while Blygh pulls on his polished shoes, feeling, as he does so, further encased in her infinite box of words. He says goodbye, leaves the house, and crosses the street to find the sunlight on the other side. ...

Now outside Mr. Mitchell's door, he passes his hand in benediction over

his tie and over his head, touches up the blessed shine of each shoe on his 71

calf, and waits there, his knuckles poised for voices inside, and then knocks.

John Fisher and his friend. Waiting for Joey, leaningfirstthis way and that, squinting into the sun which slides across the space between

the drainpipe and the wall, he traces the lines of brickwork with his it should not be alive finger and crushes a green fly on the porch post in winter. Finally Joey too is free, pursued down the path to the gate by the conditions his mother shouts after him, weighing on their freedom to slough her off they run, this time into the low and blinding sun which splinters through the cold-wind tears and makes prisms. Joey listens to the story of ballast, its going under, letting up, holding down pinned wheels, the explosion and the stopwatch promise, the necessity of ballast for their cart, a large stone to jam in the back on which, once ...

...

there, the driver could lean his elbow while the other hand holds the

string to steer. Joey says, "It needs to be a big one and you won't find those anywhere but at the place I know." The place he knows is a rockeryin a garden surrounded by a wire fence where they hang now like prisoners watching through, both scared and each waiting for the other to speak first, waiting to be dared. Finally Joey, two years older, speaks first. "I could get it, I could walk straight in there and get it," while John Fisher watches him under his arm which hangs on the fence.

"What about the dog?" and he points to the sign nailed to the gate. Joey knows there is no dog, he walks past this garden every day on his way to school and there has never been a dog, but he pauses, not wishing to de­ "I'm not afraid of dogs anyway." John Fisher stands value the feat back from the fence and lets his hands drop to his side, searching without knowing it for a way to let his friend retrieve the stone, the ballast, and to keep his own valor intact. Joey says again, "I'm not afraid, I'd just go in and take it" and waits for the other to admit his fear, but some obscure pride checks John Fisher and makes him taunt instead, "Why don't you, then?" "Because it's not my cart, why should I ....

get it if it isn't my cart?" John Fisher turns back to the fence and runs his fingers over the lattice, a vague image in his mind of the lines of cement he traced while waiting this morning, hearing himself blunder on, "I'm not scared either, but I don't feel like going." Joeyauto­

matically senses the weakness of this. "You said we needed a stone for 72

ballast for the cart. You said we really needed it, so you're scared, dead scared." And John Fisher retreats further, "I'm not scared,you 're

scared," sensing the final stages of a ritual. Joey says, "If it was my cart I'd go in there without thinking." "If you really weren't scared of go­

ing in there it wouldn't make any difference if it was your cart or not."

"All rightthen, dare me." "I dare you." "No, you have to dare me something. "You can share my cart, yours as much as mine and not just pretend." John Fisher crosses his heart and hopes to die while Joey gets ready to climb the fence and gives his last instructions. "If someone comes you've got to cough like this, get it? And if I'm not back in five minutes you have to tell someone, all right?" John Fisher watches his friend climb the fence, his heart banging like the wheels of his cart, "

unsure now of it all.

She stands in the doorway while he comes toward her, squinting into

the sun, and she says, "Nothing at all, as I told the man on the phone a

little while ago." She stares down at him and begins to walk down the stone steps, arriving at the bottom one as he does. The mechanic, pale,

stubbly, with symmetrical pimples dulled to orange in the sunlight through which he smiles irregularly, his teeth sloping one way and another, he smiles at her, flowering up his hand cheerfully, pointing with the other toward her car. "Soon have that fixed, won't we?" He

pivots on his heel, away from her into his van, taking from it a large canvas bag which he carries like a doctor to her car, sick on her only busy morning. At a short distance she holds herself together against the wind, watching as he hooks open the bonnet and whistles exaggeratedly brisk she thinks, and the large movements of trunk and elbows as he catches at the supporting rod, fixing it there and, stepping back to ponder, he glances at his wrist for the time and picks from his bag a scoop like spanner, and, bent over the engine, he calls out to her over his shoulder, "How long you had her?" While Mrs. Radcliffe, resentful, passes back a step sharply, "A year or so, I believe," and then more sharply, "Can you hurry? I do have a busy morning, you know, and you were a long time getting here." But onlyjust begun, he unbends slowly from over the engine, the spanner still poised, the black-streaked brown overalls by the grey car, he smiles over to her who is uneasy now for her sharpness and his sure smile He dangles the spanner and, ...

....

73

straightening, he nods to her, "Well, that depends, doesn't it?" and his sloping grin disappears once more under the bonnet. She wheels away onto the lawn, striding quickly to smother her sense of losing the situation in the exchange, annoyed that she is placed when she should be placing, she goes round by the low hedges, flicking by and stopping near the wall

...

she tells herself how this is a man she has hired, summoned

from a distance, a servant to her morning

...

whose engagements were

tumbling from order. She brightens at the thought of them, even though they are dissolving now in the morning SUnlight, slanting behind her back and spangling on the leaves in her garden, in her time She brightens to the articulation in her mind of the unique minutes of those meetings, decisions, subordinates, the luxurious right of generalization allowed her by her position. But her morning, this morning in this delay, is coiling like a clutched spring which will whip free and hurl her to the appointed times, to Mr. Grise who will concede to her brisk and per­ fumed power, who will bow and say Madam. Children if only she had been allowed children, who could have drawn and scooped her clear of that spinster energy which sends her now flicking across the lawn between ....

...

the bushes as she thinks of her business which children could have

drainedintosanity,paledintotheleisureofactstobeaccomplishedfor their ends and not the luxury oftheir means, could have dug from her the small kernel of real necessity where now she has the shell, the twigs but not the tree. The honed committee woman of points of order and working parties, who preserves behind her starched walk a schoolgirl's stumble and tortured giggle, who wrote, "If he looks at me tonight I'll faint," in her convent diary, wanders halfway back to the car, looping round to the laurels where she was before, she stands still and goes

One must not be lulled, in this interelection year, through her mind into letting one's attention to the ward be diminished, for fmally it will all show to our discredit, when, at the end of polling day, the votes are counted, though it must be said, and I say this from quite some years of experience, that the subdued interest in local politics has always counted ultimately to our advantage, but this, of course, is no reason why we should count on this albeit precarious factor, on the contrary Which in my experience has always been a factor of considerable im­ portance that the success of follow- up care must hinge fmally on the .••.

....

74

attitude of the patient to the social worker or welfare officer

....

That

the suggestion box has always proved a grand success, while the Guild's coffee mornings, I'm sure you all agree, have been far more satisfactory under the rota system, a system we devised last month, a system which in

"Hey, when d'you have her serviced last?" Crashing in on her thoughts, oblivious of the niceties of distance, he gestures across to her, holding up for her to see some black piece of her car, and with so much preventing her shouting back, she goes to him, drawn in to answer his question and arriving on the other side of the car by the wing mirror with the schoolgirl at her side, she says, "I'm afraid I know nothing about these things. My brother deals with that. I'm sure both cars go in fairly regularly." He snorts gleefully that she should be so wrong, and grinning again he brings round the two spark plugs, pushing them close up to her face, pointing with a little finger, while she leans back, her upper lip curved slightly in disgust, trapped by his insistence and not able to move her feet she pretends to look at the grime between the gap which, he tells her, is preventing ignition. Intent that she should see and know-or is he playing her around ?-he makes her find the black on the meaningless pieces. "S'yer plugs, see. Clean these and you'll be away." He returns to the front of the car and, slotting the spanner round the next plug, he smiles suddenly at her again, "Keep' em clean or you'll always be having trouble. Your brother'll tell you that."

Distrusting him completely now for the possible innuendo, she circles round to the front of the car till she is directly behind him and says, for her own part in the controlling game, "Have you been in this business a long time?" She trails an upward lilt on the last words, almost on tiptoe, poised for his answer to let her down to the firm pavement of conversation where she belongs but his body, turning this way and that with the swiveling of the spanner, does not straighten for her, and whether he does not hear her or ignores her she cannot know, she cannot repeat her so she walks away and leans by question or pretend she never asked it the boot, toying with the gravel stones at her feet. He files and blows clean each of the four ceramic pieces, and then, jiggling them in his my experience

...

...

...

hand, he walks to the boot, but round the other way so that he comes up behind her where she leans, and says (and she almost forgets to tum round), "About three years itis now, Ma' am." She does tum round, and 7S

already the sloping grin is halfway to the front, disappearing now be­ hind the car's upraised lid to replace the pieces in his hand, whistling up and down as he screws them in, one by one.

There was quite a wall, a cattle-crowd wall around me there, strangers

pushing and mooing and looking down at me on exhibition with my charge, faces through shoulders over heads like bricks, creamy pale faces like apple flesh, all tiptoeing to know, but not to know too much.

Someone should have come through to touch us, or at least him on the ground, but there were no hands at all, only looks and shrugs, and they could not bring themselves away nor stop asking each other how long had he been there, or what was wrong with him, mewing their questions to one another out of curiosity only, not love. Looking up at the cemented faces to spot a friend, I felt alone by the man on the pavement, chasing his live pulse from his wrist to his temples to his throat, bending over his face like Lear to catch at his faint

breath, which was regular

...

(because we were in the street)

he was sleeping with half his face buried

in my rolled jacket, the legs straight and polished shoes lolling. Kneeling

there I was ready for violence of some kind, to flail into that dull cloth

pack striking head from shoulders. I thought if I was walking by, another person and yet remaining myself, would I, seeing what they saw now and piling round me as they were, crowd in with them or pass by?

And I like to think I would pass by and forget the matter, indifference would have been better than their curiosity. So, Christ help me, my eyes were scythes at their ankles, my hate a pack of hounds at every stitch to their clothing and every vulnerable pore of their undifferentiated skin to pull it from their bones as I knelt there waiting for the ambu­ ...

lance. And if you are to convict me for the blow that cracked an old

lady's jaw, then you should send me to hell for the carnage I dealt out there on the pavement to the growing mob of spectacle gluttons. They were a wall round me, pressing in on all sides, so that when I saw a skin graze on the temple of the fallen man, the light was crowded out for me to see if it was fresh from his fall, though it seemed an unlikely place--a long purple graze caused by something sharp. I spoke up to a business­ man who held a briefcase, "Could you all move back a little way?" for it was impossible now for me to see to the edge of the circle, and he re­ peated my request over his shoulder and the bunched overcoats behind 76

and someone further back said it too, but nothing stirred. So the City

lady in a red coat who was carrying flowers wrapped in cello­ which for a phane turned into the crowd and tried to push it back moment seemed to work for it gave by a foot or so, but then like a sea it lapped forward again, leaving me less space than before and able to see I suppose they were pushed forward-by the curious on tiptoe at less the fringes who did not want to miss a street show. I had less light and I could hardly see the graze at all, which I touched now and found sticky man and a

...

....

and warm, more water than blood. Soon the knees of those behind me

gently nudging my back and shoulders, their close breathing made it fetid and damp in the ring, and for a moment I was amused by them flocking round, and amused at myself for thinking that because I hated them I could move them with my hate. Facing where I knelt was the woman in the red coat, her hands and arms spread a little to keep her from treading on the head of the unconscious man at her feet, the wrapped flowers tucked under her elbow, pressed against her side. Sud­ denly she was jostled forward by the unseen swarm behind her, she began to topple and only steadied herself by her hands on my head, and while she pushed herself back the neatly wrapped flowers fell into the gloom by the sleeping man's shoulder, the red and white colors lost in the cloth light, and she muttered to no one, "I'm sorry. Sorry." In the dryness of my own feelings I was going forward on my knees to stretch

were

across and find them for her when I saw from the corner of my eye the

eyes of an old woman

...

hooded, bagged, twisted about their strings

like despoiled plants, they yawed and fluttered across mine and the other faces, strained, limp, tea-bag eyes, fluttering with mild and

growing terror, she turned fumbling back into the crowd with an intui­ tive desperation, her red-caked mouth working with silent frustration and old women's superstitions, while my hands were still open for the flowers. Caught there between my dry intention and this sudden transmission of fear struck across to me by those feeble eyes, I felt a cold shot of adrenalin freeze my stomach to my bowels and my legs began to shake All this happened faster than I can tell it, for while I was seeing the gathered crowd newly through her eyes, as mindless but living towers with a poised, unknown collective will, I was trying to scramble to my feet with the desperation of the old woman, I was rising on one knee and catching at the sleeve of the businessman who teetered backward on ....

77

his toes, let his arm drop and fell sideways, knocking me to the ground

where I dropped on all fours onto the body of the breathing, uncon­

scious man. The pavement where I had been kneeling had been swal­ lowed up, there was nowhere else for me to fall, and here I struggled to

spread my weight before twisting up and trying to stand again, and as I did so I saw the old woman turn back into the disappearing space and, making a brightly painted 0 with her mouth, gave out a parched little scream, dropped her handbag, and flailed with her puny old arms against those who stood behind her. I saw she was alone like myself, and as I pushed up again I saw them raise their hands against her terror, I saw the grunting crowd try to turn upon itself and the old woman losing her balance and sliding onto my half-raised shoulder. I saw them all buckle under each other's weight, and, glancing up, the last thing I saw was the smallest circle of SUnlight, and I was thrown back onto the breathing man's body.

When Blygh enters, Mr. Mitchell, this is an old trick, does notlook up from his pretended writing and sudden reflection

...

for his morning

has been spent by the ftreside with his newspaper, his age and family

giving him a position in the firm but not a job, and these little tricks are daily pastimes for a grand old man. Blygh gently closes the door and crosses the soft carpet to the Ah, Blygh Well?" the old man pretending fastidiously each morning not to know the purpose of his visit. "Thought you might like a sandwich from the shop, Mr. Mitchell." So that the old man lays down his pen and swivels his seat in surprise, ftshing for the pocket watch from his fob. "Good God, not eleven already is it, Blygh?" snapping the watch lid wide open while the other stares at the base of the desk, pantomiming, "Yes, sir, just past eleven." The morning paper is at Mr. Mitchell's elbow and he takes it now into his lap, rustling to order the well-thumbed pages His brow furrowed for what he is about to deliver and tutting for the state of the world, he raises himself slowly on the arms of his chair and comes round the desk toward Blygh, holding the paper in one hand and coughing into the other. He taps the front page with his lugubrious forefmger, "See and walks behind Blygh till his back is warmed by the fire, here," and so that Blygh, to be polite, must turn on the spot in the senile gloom of the luxury office. Holding the paper behind his back as if in a guessing game, he begins, "Now you're a smart lad, got your future in name

••

....

..•.

...

78

front of you and who can say they do not envy you for that? Anyone who

reads the paper once a month can tell you the world is full of maniacs, crazy maniacs, pillaging, shooting, raping, guerrillas, communists, fascists, call them what you want but you can be sure of one thing and

that is they are all out for what they can get and decency-call me old­ fashioned if you like but I still believe in decency-decency can go to the

dogs

" ....

Halflistening as Mitchell goes on, Blygh eases his neck in his

collar and wonders atthe sureness that some possess in their version of the world, and their ease in deliveringitto him, crushing him with it, both this man and his landlady. Mr. Mitchell spreads out the paper for him to

large photograph of a crowd mobbing an embassy limousine and the caption underneath, "Bolivian Curfew Riots," and Blygh begins to Tired by the high sun and the long official delay, the children drift ( crying round their parents' legsfor water or coatedpeanuts, we waited where there was no shade, by the airport, movedfirst this way and then that by the security police, visited by the bored reporters who came out of the cocktail lounge every halfhour to see ifanything was going to happen. None of them stayed to hear the president oftheLeague speak and some of us, on the land seizures by the military and the new rents driven to it by the dust and mosquitoes, began tofight among ourselves.

We had been waiting thereforfour hours and the oldpeanut man,for all the trade we had brought him, shouted at us that we were all trouble­ see the

...

...

makers, and then he spat in the dust and rode his bike away, and my brother said, I guess he ran out ofpeanuts By the time the cars did ....

by, halfof us had given up and gone home and the rest were tired andfeeble, and worse, there were three big cars and there was no knowing which one he was going to be in, so we had to split up into three groups which made it, in the heat and the dust, a poor affair. But the reporters were there angling their cameras, and afterwards when I was coming away I heard one of them say there was some good copy, ) while Mitchell presses especially in view of theAmerican elections world is insane, that is most of it. A few have kept their head, on, and one of these is England, for all else that might have happened here.

In England, Blygh, men are still equal before the law. In England a man-or a woman, Blygh-is safe on the pavement (but what was the point? It was peaceful enough, it had to be, though the dust kicked high enough to look different through a camera, and the security police come

.••.

"

...

moved in as soon as the cars were gone and made random arrests even as 79

people were walking away. They took my brother and afew others, kept them in a cell all through the night and kicked them around and let them out at dawn. I waitedfor them all night across the road and when they came out we walked together, about ten of us, across the town in the half-light to my sister's and no onefelt like speaking) and safe on the streets at night. We change governments without bloodshed, we settle our disagreements round a table and no one goes to jail for his opinions, no one tells the newspapers what to print. And whatever changes we have undergone, certain traditional values still hold, Blygh-the family, the monarchy, individual rights, a sense of how far you can and how far he leans back a little to catch his breath you cannot go. The point" I' m coming to is this, Blygh. Many young men of your age and ability are leaving their country for work elsewhere, big money and so on, but what your generation must come to terms with is what exactly are you leaving. Are you happy in your present job, Blygh?" Sensing the question only in the old man's inflection and his sudden change of posture, he says, "Yes," but too quickly, too nervously, and to soften it he says again, reflectively this time, "Yes, thank you, Mr. Mitchell, very happy in fact, yes." Well, thatis a good thing, you know, because there's another side to this going abroad, the simple matter of one's responsibility to the country, to keep up what we hold precious here. Not thinking of going abroad, are you, Blygh?" "No, it hadn't crossed my ...

...

••

..

.

.

.

nund ,SIr. ""Good ,go, od

...

.

we11 ,ah ,wh at was It, th en.?" "S an d WlC h es,

sir. I was going down to the shop and

" ...

"Good God, is it eleven al­

ready? Make that a round of beef. A round of beef will do nicely," and he gives Blygh a coin. "Thank you, Blygh." "Thank you, sir." "Thank you." "Thankyou."

John Fisher and the ballast. Joey kneels by the fence and sobs

dramatically for his breath, the great stone at his side, while John Fisher waits uneasily for the right moment to pick up the stone, and asks, "Was there a dog?" Joey pauses before he replies and catches his words between breaths. "I saw a kennel but there was grass all round it. I don't

think there's been a dog for years, it there, sudden like

...

...

it was pretty scary, though, seeing

but I moved fast, it could never've got me

because I ran in zigzags

" ....

He subsides with his boasts. John Fisher

takes confidence from his friend's boasts. "I kept a good lookout, and 80

when you were over the fence I saw this man coming down Nightingale

Lane, and he had a white stick,

...

that's why I didn't cough, because he

tapping the fence with his stick, so I got the cart out of the way where he was going to tread and I was on the other side of the path when he came past, holding my breath because blind people can hear anything, and then he came up level with me and he's got dark glasses on, so I can't see his eyes, and I thought maybe he can see after all and he could be looking right at me standing there holding my breath, and just when I'm letting my breath out he walks off and I didn't know if he knew anything or not." They babble in the keen elation of their recent dangers, the stolen trophy at their feet lying between them as if it was breathless too, waiting to become ballast. John Fisher lifts it to the back of the cart and turns it round and round to wedge it firmly but he finds no slot for its mass, for it tapers at one end into a long finger was blind. He was

of stone. Joey says, "We'll have to break it," and John Fisher

immediately turns the idea away, "Break it? You can't break stone."

But Joey already has the stone against his chest and is shifting his hands His friend clenches his under it to lift it higher, almost to his chin eyes closed at what seems forbidden, though he could not say why only that you cannot break solid and undisturbed stone, you cannot interfere but Joey has his hold now and, jacking his whole body suddenly down, he dashes it to the pavement with his eyes closed too.

After the crack and the silence which follows it there are three pieces, two large ones and the finger of stone, fatter now than it was before.

They jigsaw the two pieces into the back, wedging them between the slats, the ballast at last. Joey picks up the third piece and shouts, "I know I know I know what this can be," and bending down he pushes the stone against the front wheel. Then, standing up, he shrieks out, kicks it flying free, "Chocks away!" like they have them for planes and racing cars and the old blasphemy is erased in the laughter a chock for taking off, for parking solemnly on hills, a chock for shouting' 'Chocks and the ballast there too, away!" which they do now a hundred times the whole thing complete. John Fisher has the string taut and ready to pull, Joey bends by the front wheel fiddling with the chock in a com­ plicated way, and waits in a heavy pause before he knocks it clear and shouts "Chocks away," and John Fisher is away like a stone from a catapult, and free with the flying white cart at his heels clattering over ....

...

'

...

...

...

...

81

the pavement cracks, the stone posts swishing by his head, both of them

screaming out for the speed of it Joey, the slower, falling behind calls out, "Which way, which way?" to his friend who is pursued by the ...•

ballast-held crasher, who calls over his shoulder, "Into town

...

up the

Intersection," his words snatched and dispersed by the wind.

What are the real things? The car on her only important morning will not go, a man has been hired to repair it, now she can continue

...

that is

all. The ceramic bits, the spots of dirt, his insolent grins and sure advice are mere kinks in the chain of her causes and

effects, mere confusion

and little messes which she tries to wipe away. "Will it go now?" He stands back and knowingly wipes his hands on the thigh of his overalls,

"Well, why don't you hop in and try it out?" and as he carries his tool

bag to the back of his van she feels sure once more that she is being for it laughed at. "Why not give it a try?" And what else can she do? suddenly seems complex beyond words the way he strips her of stature ...

and makes her go wrong

....

She is a woman like all women to him, who

know nothing about cars, nothing about the things that are to him the real things. From beside the van he instructs her levelly, "You give it a start now," and again she feels part of a process, sits in the front seat, turns the ignition, and the car starts the first time

...

as if to teach her a

lesson, the spoiled child who does not look after her toys. All that is left to her is to wait till he leaves, when she can restore herself in front of the He comes over to mirror, but he will punish her more before that. where she sits, dusting his hands together, "Rightthen," and towers triumphantly over where she sits, trapping her for real this time because ...

she cannot rise while he blocks the car door. She stares straight ahead and waits for him to leave, but he leans through the open car window

and turns the engine off, "See what I mean?" and her politeness forces her to twist her neck to look at him-in this way motoring offenders are

intimidated in their cars by policemen-" See what I mean, starts like a

dream." She feels his bulk weighing down upon her and blocking out the sky

' ...

'You give those plugs a doing over once in a while and you'll

have no trouble." Back in his van, he winds down his window to call out

"Goodbye." Still sitting in her car, she does not reply and the last she sees is the flash of his grin disappearing up the drive. Back by the glass table and mirror, she erases the invisible marks of her defeat, restores 82

herself and rehearses her morning

....

Mr. Grise, the Ward meeting,

hospital committee, and smart and brisk again, Mrs. Radcliffe once more, she is into her car, into her schedule, and away.

I think it was the businessman who fell across my back because I felt

the briefcase slide past me, and it was he who pinned me on all fours, my knees in the groin and my elbow in the chest of the sleeping man on the

pavement, who only gasped automatically at the impact. Still thinking I could push my way through and worried that we would crush his groin, I humped this way and that, swearing at the sprawling and kicking fools on my back who knew too much now and wanted to be back at their

shopping. It passed through my mind quickly the unconscious man waking now to this, the terror and trauma of staring suddenly up at crushing, writhing bodies heaped above you. I began some kind of leverage with my ankles, just finding the ground and beginning to move the bodies above my own, and hearing above me a cacophony of remote inhuman grunts and the whine of a child pinned down somewhere. But just then the whole weight intensified to cruelty, the grunts became gasps, the whining ceased, and I was being pressed in a new way into my man, my forehead against his, and so that our faces should not be crushed I fatally brought my forearm from off his chest to hold us apart, but it was his death, for it wedged under his chin, caught there by the weight of bodies, and fighting to free my arm I felt collapse under it the gristle and muscle of his tubes. The pressing became hotter, harder, and in the gloom his eyes so close to mine made one cyclops eye, a airless, big and bulging cyclops eye as he died, and I was screaming out in terror ...

...

of this eye which strained and burst and leaked onto my own eyes,

dribbled down between our locked cheeks, or was I weeping at the

weeping of the dead man while the weight burned hotter on my neck, gouging my face into his, my mouth terribly into his already cold mouth, devouring his teeth with my lips they pierced my lips to the gums, sucking dead air from the tortured mouth into which I screamed and spat, wanting mercy and reprieve from the cyclops eye eating my face, pouring its eye-this eye of my own death staring up strapped to me, and the utter distillation of my panic-the threat of assimilation into this ...

corpse who drank my saliva, for my tongue was swollen with shit fear to swallow the dribble from his eye, and my own screaming all around me, 83

perhaps there was the snapping of bones too-l could not tell because my ears began to pop with the weight. Then it all eased as one by one they pulled them off and at last we could all stand, tottering and feeling our ribs and breathing again, watching an ambulance take away a child on a stretcher. We stood about flexing our arms and legs, and some were beginning to speak of what they had felt and thought, I heard some while at our feet was the dead man, his eyes, oh his eyes and laughter the red trickle from between his legs imagine it-and then he was covered with a red blanket, a nice red blanket. The relief of, the speak­ ing of, the smiling of the public passers-by, the self-congratulation of survival and already spilling this way and that back down the street away ...

...

from the Intersection, no one seemed to see the man under his blanket,

they were busy again buttoning down to their morning, siphoning off what they cared to remember. I stood by, blank and cold, watching but not hearing and perhaps fifteen minutes passed when suddenly at my feet there was the old lady (How had she survived?) grubbing on the pavement by the edge of the red blanket, muttering that she had lost the clasp of her handbag and that no one cared. I can say that if she had not stood up where I was standing, if she had not been muttering to herself, then she would not have caught on her frail jaw all my unleashed hate, nor if in the beginning she had my cold, blank fist smashed her face offered something. On the pavement I found a tapering piece of rock and I thought it could have caused the purple graze I saw on the dead man's temple, so I left it by the blanket. I also found some coins and left ...

...

them there too.

John Fisher and the white cart. Past the sorting office the shoppers

pack the pavement, so he and Joey steer it on the road, close to the curb, a real car it is now, belonging to the Highway Code. Their friend Richard lives on a hill and he has a flagpole in his garden, and a sub­ machine gun with a battery, a Davy Crockett hat, and a leather football, and his mother makes orange drinks for his friends

....

And Richard

lives on the other side of the town, which means a real journey, a real

destination, doing and going like all the other cars in the High Street on their way to the Intersection. Round the clock tower at the top of the hill and down the main shopping street, Joey and John Fisher, a part of

things, adult things like purpose 84

....

The gutter is cobbles and the cart

bounces silently in the roar of traffic and the blare of horns, but the

ballast holds it down the way it should. At the end of the street, John Fishersays, "The chock have you got it, orit's bounced out the back." ...

Joey does not have it and they stop to consider, John Fisher saying, "I've got to be home at twelve," and they carry on without it, there is no time to go back if you are really part of things the way they are.

Mrs. Radcliffe at the red light, her left foot stiffening from holding down the clutch, is too tense with the anticipation of her first

encounter-Mr. Grise-to disengage the gear. Her brisk words are al­

ready in the corners of her minutely flexing lips, and as she moves for­ ward with the flow again, down from the clock tower her mind races ahead through the day, and only the feeble jolt of her wheels throwing up a rock reminds her of the small mess of the morning which is fading from her mind as she leaves it further and further behind.

Stepping from the senescent office gloom into the street (one cucumber and beef, nothing for Jacky, one box of matches, and a round of beef), needling through the swarm, moodless at first, swinging one way and then the other, pivoting at the hips to sway past prams and blundering old men, pressing by the shop windows and into the strident babble of infants, mothers, sellers, singing their needs to each other's faces, pulling and pressing, rubbing backs and shoulders, colliding and avoiding, cramming legs, wheeling across the street, and heads of hair streaming under striped colored awnings, sagging with fresh rain, cooing out names, smiling recognition, a fresh-vegetable breeze in the gust up High Street, people blocking and cascading out of shops holding pencils, booming serenades from discount hi-fi stores, yellow searing orange for "Slashed Prices" and "Bargain Once Only Offers Exclusive to and movement sinuous and bobbing, a vortex swarm of myriad intention to routinely shop, to gaze, to meet, to talk, mouths, tongues, lips, teeth, an anarchic dance with fingers spread to listen sideways headed Blygh on up High Street past rancid plastic fruit in a cafe window and joyous real spilling from wooden crates on stands, the fruiterer bending over to wrap fruit in newspaper and nodding on prices and the weather, and farther up a boy hosing fish down on white marble, sprinkling ice for their freshness. Two girls, wet eyed and laughing "

...

...

8S

bundling a mattress from a van to a shop, stop halfway in helpless shaking mirth, blocking the pavement till two young men lift it for them while some cheer and the girls toss their hair, on and up where a lady spills her lemons which begin to roll back down the street and are smartly gathered by a wiry man with his feet, faking a famous footballer to ironic cheers, past the gaudy heaped tins in the supermarket window and monstrous posters black and luminous

...

all this, all this, and

passing the other way push chairs and overdressed babies, a black dog running by with clouds from his pink mouth, two boys with a homemade cart, a man carrying new gardening tools, all past Blygh, who threads his way through, liking this town, this now, this out of the office, this coiled spring between his feet and the pavement, the coins in his fist, the air, and so on up to the Intersection thinking, "I like din, rout, babble ...

this, I like this, I like this and I am here

86

" ....

from 98.6 The children of Frankenstein Ronald Sukenick

It's one of those days one of those enchanted days that justifies their idea. The sky is blue the air crisp and they know they're right their only

regret is that more people don't see fit to get out of it once and for all and live this way. Some kind of magic is at work everyone gets along so well

they don't even need to talk they communicate by empathy there are days like this lately. People sing and whistle as they do their jobs hug one another even Ralph is working in the garden. A pink Cadillac bobs down the dirt road like a boat on a choppy sea and stops in the clearing the driver gets out a tall thin greying man in a grey business suit and steel­ rimmed glasses. Everyone stops what he's doing the man looks around approaches Bud and Branch I'm looking for George he says. What for they say. I'm his father Hey it's Lance's father come on in Where's Lance at says Wind. Not Lance George says Lance's father I'm George's father.

You used to be George's father say Bud and Branch. Now you're

Lance's father.

Ohreally.

He's changed his name.

Oh really.

87

TriQuarterly

Who's here sings Blossom from the other end of the monster.

Lance's father.

Lance has a father asks Blossom.

Lance comes in Hi he says.

Hello George thought I'd visit.

They call me Lance here.

Oh really.

Sit down.

I've been sitting in the car. So this is it.

Yes we built it.

Still doing carpenter's work.

That's what I am a carpenter. Lance introduces everybody just then

Cassiopeia drifts through without any clothes on And this is Cassiopeia says Lance.

Ohreally.

Can you stay for dinner.

No. He sits down. Lance sits down. Neither says anything for a while.

I hear the Lakers are winning says Lance.

Yes they're way ahead.

Again silence Lance' s father drums on the arm of his chair. He looks around his lips pressed tight. Suddenly his mouth curls open Stupid he snarls.

You and your kind sneers Lance his face flushed.

Again silence. After a while Lance's father asks You need money.

You know I don't take money.

Still fighting the revolution.

Yes.

Responsibility Lance's father begins.

The hell with it says Lance. Dawn comes over This is Dawn myoid

lady.

Ohreally.

Dawn sits down.

Mother says Lance.

You ask about your mother.

Ahshit.

There's a long silence. Finally Dawn says You're a lot alike. They both

glare at her murderously. After a while Lance's father looks at his watch.

88

What time is it says Lance.

Time for you to get a haircut.

It's people like you begins Lance.

I have to leave says Lance's father he gets up. Nice seeing you George.

When are you coming home for a visit.

When they bury you.

Grow up George. You never did. Too much masturbation I suppose.

I'll come to piss on your grave.

Grow up son. That's all I ask. It's never too late. Lance's father

trudges off to his car. Dawn takes Lance's hand it's shaking. You didn't have to say that.

Lance shrugs.

You are a lot alike.

Lance gets up and peers into one of Valley's mirrors. Then he picks up

glass. Two three times. Till all the glass is gone and the mirror gives back nothing but opacity. a candlestick and smashes the

While it's true that Eucalyptus does not suffer from negative hallu­

cination and therefore can see things that other people can't it's also true that sometimes she sees things that aren't really there in other

words positive hallucination thinks Cloud. For everything you pay. Why

things always doubled in contradiction this way. Either way you choose you lose. It's always this or that when you need both Cloud is beginning to think there's something wrong with the whole culture.

Body or soul. Dream or reality. Reason or feeling. Vision or sanity. Love or power. Eucalyptus' perceptions amount almost to clairvoyance yet at the same time she's afraid of what she sees a real Cassandra why is that. are

Is it because the order of what she sees threatens the order of our lives not least of her life. Eucalyptus is angry about his making love with

Dawn at the potlatch You know it was just a special occasion says Cloud.

What's that got to do with it.

Well jesus everyone was making love with everyone we were all

making love together like that German holiday Grinsing or whatever they call it.

You're not going to reduce us to the level of a lumpen orgy.

Well what about you and Wind for that matter.

That's different.

That's different. Why is that different.

89

That was just friendly passion. Dawn likes you. She likes you more than Lance.

That's ridiculous.

I know she's laughing behind my back.

Come off it.

I don't see why you want to humiliate me this way. Are you trying to

drive me crazy or what.

My god I love you what do you want from me.

I don't know she says.

Well I don't know either.

What should we do.

Cloud sighs. Look it up in the WholeEarth Catalog he says.

Actually it's hard for Cloud to know what Dawn likes and what she doesn't like. She was seduced by her brother when she was a kid and she sti11likes him. He's okay she says mildly. He's three years older they used to sleep in the same room when they were little. Her mother was a drunk the kids used to climb into one another's beds at night when they were scared maybe it went on a little too long they put her brother in a different room when he was twelve. But he went on playing with her he used to set her on the freezer in the basement and feel her up her mother was away in institutions half the time her father didn't pay much

attention. They were alone a lot they used to get awfully excited fmally he deflowered her she was about thirteen it was on the freezer. She

didn't like it. After that he'd make her do it she guessed it was kind of rape he threatened to tell the father she was a slut sleeping around

with all the boys. Then of course she got to like it actually she says it was the best thing that was happening to her around then her life was really

pretty shitty at the time it was around when her mother was permanently committed. She thought dates were stupid she'd come home from the movies with some pimplyjerk who would try to kiss her goodnight and she could hardly wait to kick him out and get it on with her brother.

After a while she stopped going out on dates to the point where her father got worried and started trying to talk to her about boys.

Meantime there were whole days when she and her brother would lie around the house balling they were some of the happiest times of her life she tells Cloud, It went on for about a year every now and then her 90

brother would make a resolution to stop like teenage boys with masturbation but he would always come back to her it was too good.

Dawn says she doesn't feel any guilt not that she's aware of she thinks

she's had more love in her family life than most people she knows. After a while it just sort of petered out her brother would ask her to ball one of his friends now and then and she could usually dig it then she sort of fell in love with one of them for a time she was sleeping with both him and her brother the boy didn't know of course. Then her brother found a

steady and started urging her to date a lot of boys he didn't think it was healthy for a girl going on fifteen to be screwing her brother all the time he told her. After that they would get it on in a friendly way occasionally till her father died and they went off to different relatives but mostly it was out of affection and nostalgia. Now he's married and has three kids who she likes to go see but she thinks she still wouldn't mind getting one off with him except he's really straight now and tends to get a little un­ comfortable about the whole thing. Which she can understand because after all he did exploit the hell out of her when she didn't know what she was doing but then he didn't know much better and she didn't put him down. So if she doesn't put her brother down for child rape what the hell does she put down Cloud wonders. It's true she likes to put down Lance

she says Lance is basically a lunk but she likes him too and she likes to make love with him. And it's true she likes to screw but she can't have an orgasm unless her arms are raised back over her head which means she can't embrace him so Cloud ends up feeling like he's doing something to her that she's not doing back to him what do you make of that.

Cloud is getting TV transmissions from the moon through Euca­

lyptus' ass. There are astronauts up there and they're sending back shots of the lunar landscape to Mission Control Center in southern Frankenstein or wherever it is. WhyOoud is gettingthe pictures through Eucalyptus' ass he can't say. Maybe it's because there's no television set in the settlement and the one thing he really wants to see is coverage of the moonshot though that doesn't really explain much. Maybe it's because the hemispheres of Eucalyptus' ass are a lot like the moon. That could be because the transmission is coming through the hemispheres not the hole. In any case Eucalyptus says that's the nicest thing he's ever said to her. Then she goes back to sleep. That's the nice thing about 91

Eucalyptus she takes things in stride. Some things. The dark side of Eucalyptus is that there are some things she doesn't take in stride. Cloud is lying in bed with Eucalyptus pressed against her. The lunar landscape is grey- brown and soft -edged as ifit had been melted then covered with dust. Above the horizon the sky is black. All very barren but quite beautiful a nice place to get away from the clutter. As he was saying Eucalyptus has a dark side as well as a bright like the moon. The dark side you never see that's why it's dark you just know it's there from the things that pop out now and then. Like when someone is afraid of let's say brussels sprouts. Eucalyptus acts like the rug is going to be yanked out from under her. Then she would be left spinning in midspace like the moon. Alone. When Eucalyptus was a kid her parents got divorced.

She went to live with her mother. Then when her father remarried she went to live with her father and stepmother. Then when her father got

divorced again she went to live with her mother and stepfather. When her mother and father split she was old enough to go to college. Be-

sides it didn't matter any more. Eucalyptus was already blasted into orbit. Her parents chipped in for the shrink but after three years she

dropped psychoanalysis not because it did no good but because she didn't want to spend the rest of her life preparing for the rest of her life.

She thought she would just forget about everything and do something practical and worthwhile so she dropped out of college and became a nurse but it just flattened everything out. Then she met Cloud and got involved in what he calls psychosynthesis and things got more in­ teresting. Psychosynthesis is the opposite of psychoanalysis but apart from that Cloud refuses to define it. Cloud feels that life is a lot like a novel you have to make it up. That's the point of psychosynthesis in his

opinion to pick up the pieces and make something of them. Psycho­ synthesis is based on the Mosaic Law. The Mosaic Law is the law of mosaics a way of dealing with parts in the absence of wholes. Vat zen.

The children of Frankenstein are not psychological creatures they are creatures of biology and chance. First the parents create the children

according to their dreams then the children create the parents in their image. The parents it turns out are probabilities of the cosmos acting through nature. They are not to blame in fact they are a lot like other children. This is a big relief all around. Bud and Branch have long since 92

forgiven their parents. And forgotten them. They assume their exis­ tence somewhere in Frankenstein collected in retirement homes like

aged orphans. In their place Bud and Branch postulate The Big Mother.

The Big Mother exists because she has to exist. Bud and Branch know very little about The Big Mother but they speculate that she is fat.

That she would give you whatever you want if she could. That she cares for you in a casual way that is she cares for you but not about you. Anything but overintense and very good-natured. Bud and Branch like to think of Blossom as a manifestation of The Big Mother. It's clear that Blossom is into a Big Mother trip. Indulgent but not obsessive. Her genius is to let things come and to let things go. Let

things flow. She no longer has to filter events through the particular dis­ tortions of her psychology psychology was the trademark of a previous era. What we have instead of psychology is imagination. In any case psychology was always the science of imagination but as a medical science was obliged to treat it like a sickness. For Bud and Branch imagination is a cure what does it cure why itself of course. It cures psychology. Which is to say it cures nothing it's just a beginning but a beginning has one great advantage it allows us to proceed. Once we can proceed we see that there are degrees of imagination Bud and Branch talk about this a lot. Bud and Branch think they have just enough imagination they don't want too much imagination what for. Blossom has more imagination than they have but she needs it to get together what she's doing that's why she's into the Big Mother trip. Enough imagination to deal with your particular allotment of biology and chance that would be their standard if they were to imagine a standard.

They think that Lance doesn't have enough imagination he has so little imagination they can't even tell where he's at. Where he's at is he has so little imagination he's completely at the mercy of what happens to him that's where Lance is at. Wind thinks that Lance is like a force of nature he thinks that's terrific but Cloud understands that a force of nature is

simply the product of every other force of nature in the Great Computer in the Sky and Cloud thinks it far better to program than be

programmed. The only way to program rather than be programmed in Cloud's opinion is to gather new data to expose oneself to the unknown to increase one's allotment of biology and chance. If the Great Com­

puter is horizontal which it is then Cloud thinks it best to be vertical 93

which he is with all the risks of verticality. Cloud feels that in Franken­ stein the old programs are inadequate this is what he calls The Problem.

Thus mutations become possibilities even though ninety-nine and nine­ tenths of a hundred are doomed. Cloud thinks he may be a mutation.

Bud and Branch think he may be crazy. They think he has too much im­

agination. What for. What for because through psychosynthesis Cloud can imagine Bud and Branch. He can imagine the whole settlement. He can imagine that they're all mutations but different mutations. He can imagine they're all doomed and he can imagine their different dooms.

The only thing he can't imagine yet is himself. That cheers him up.

Cassiopeia no longer believes in nature. She is the first to make this claim and the others are skeptical of it. Things are cool between her and Blossom. Cassiopeia tells Blossom that Big Mother is a nature trip and she should come off it. She says it may be fun to play boy scouts and girl scouts for a while but that nature is already part of the intergalactic zoo of specimens that can no longer support themselves in the cosmic environment. She says that in a few decades nature will survive as an

indulgence of nostalgic philanthropists in the form of special preserves within the global city. The only one who can relate to this is Ralph after all the whole trip of the settlement is a nature trip getting back to the earth or as Cloud insists on putting it getting back to earth. But of all the settlers Ralph is the one who is closest to nature close enough that he doesn't have to believe in it. Besides which if he believed in anything he doesn't any more. Ralph isn't bitter it's just that he feels like he sees beyond everything especially beyond believing in things. It used to be when he felt shaky all he had to do was think about potatoes that doesn't work any more now he doesn't want to think about potatoes. He stopped wanting to think about potatoes the day he saw the Condor. Nowwhen he's shaky he thinks about the Condor and it makes him shakier. So when Cassiopeia starts talking to him about the cosmic flux now it almost makes sense to him. It almost makes sense to him when she says

that nature is just a fleeting episode in the cosmic flux and that it will wash away along with you along with me. It almost brings tears to his eyes to be able to think of consciousness as a brief eddy in the cosmic stream it's such a relief to let it go at that. So one day Pulsar is going

through his let's go for a walk routine with Ralph when he finally rouses 94

Ralph from his inertia Pulsar leads him to the vegetable garden where Cassiopeia is sunning nude in the broccoli patch and finally it happens.

Pulsar you pimp thinks Cassiopeia still she hasn't had a man since she left Golgotha and it's no secret that Ralph is attracted to her. Ralph would tell her later that it was the blue glow around her head that finally broke his resistance that he thought he could see a pulsing blue halo around her head as she lay there. He also tells her that she comes like a tidal wave and she explains how they used to work on perfecting their orgasms at the Planet Krypton as it used to be called orgasm is the closest we come to union with the cosmos orgasm and meditation and death she'd have to teach him how to do it Then they did it again and after that a third time and it's a fact that in the place where they did it the broccoli grew bigger and bluer and tastier than in all the rest of the broccoli patch.

Lance's first Search and Destroy Mission occurs when they wake up

morning to find the old teepee they had left standing cut down and ripped to shreds. He gets out his Mitsubishi 1300 picks up his rifle gets Dawn on the back of the big machine with hers and guns up the old logging road into the forest. There's a certain area of the wilderness he wants to check out he says and it will take overnight to do it. They leave one

the bike on the side of a dirt track in the middle of the forest and head off into the trees with backpacks. Lance won't tell Dawn exactly what

he's looking for. Maybe he doesn't exactly know. Whatever it is they don't find it When they get back to where they left the bike late next afternoon they find it smashed and burned. There are no clues except Lance thinks maybe he can make out one of the famous footprints he's

always talking about though Dawn says she doesn't think it's a footprint or maybe she just can't see it. They hike back into the settlement two days late Lance still furious. Nobody's going to get away with trashing his bike he doesn't care who or what it is. Wind asks him if he has any idea who did it.

Whoever's doing all the rest of the shit says Lance.

Got any ideas.

Yeah I got some ideas.

You think it's those bikers.

Nope.

95

Who then.

I'll keep you posted says Lance.

A visit from Mr. Stamp. In the deputy sheriff scar. Mr. Stamp is not

only the food stamp dispenser and the sanitation inspector he is also the deputy sheriff. Bud and Branch are shirting green because of their marijuana crop in the upper field but Bud and Branch can relax. It seems there are complaints in the town. The complaints in the town have to do with the Bikers and the Truckers. The Truckers live in rebuilt trucks and buses pickups remade to look like the Gingerbread House or Alice

in Wonderland or Pioneer Homesteads fantastic pieces of Disneyland

rolling around the landscape or converted school buses painted like psychedelicized rainbows they travel in various loose caravans stopping here and there for unpredictable periods of time. The Bikers trip out in packs of varying sizes at unpredictable intervals. The Truckers believe that all property is held in common yours mine and theirs they will come and take a tool they may need without asking you but next time they are in the area they may drop off a hundred boxes of cat food they've picked up somewhere else which may come in handy if you happen to have a lot of cats. The Bikers have a different idea about property they believe that all property including women is theirs for the taking and they take it whenever they get the chance. In consequence of their conflicting philosophies the two groups have come into increasing conflict along the road and the resulting violence has inflamed the rednecks needless to say these groups aren't very popular to begin with. So Mr. Stamp has come to serve a warning to the settlement. About what. About possible reprisals that he might not be able to prevent.

Against who.

Against you.

Why us why not against them.

They're not around.

But that doesn't make any sense.

Maybe not but don't say I didn't warn you.

Cassiopeia has been missing her children something awful she gets Ralph to drive her over to Golgotha so she can see about them. Altair or Joseph as he is now called they discover that the Golgothans have taken new names all the men Joseph all the women Mary Joseph isn't 96

there. So they put Lyra Libra and Lepus into the Log Cabin and drive them back to the settlement. There's just about enough time for an emotional reunion between the three children and Pulsar when Joseph arrives at the settlement. He drives up with Joseph in a 1951 Ford pickup

grayish rusting doors is painted in rough white lettering the words JESUS CHRIST! Joseph formerly Altair jumps out of the pickup and runs to Cassiopeia Whore of Babylon he says. Where are the children. Luckily for Cassiopeia the children are out of sight Cool it she says. Joseph formerly Betelgeuse who is a big muscular bimbo moves up behind Joseph and stands there breathing and opening and closing his big hands like he's squeezing oranges.

If you think you're going to sneak the children away from Jesus and raise them up in sin you're making a big mistake baby says Joseph.

Come off it says Cassiopeia.

Those children are coming back to Jesus where are they.

Maybe they'll visit Jesus now and then if Jesus is nice to them but right now they're staying with me.

You dare take his name in vain you spaced-out slut. He shall freak you out. He shall freak you out with his love. Repent or else.

Heavy says Cassiopeia. You're really something else. on each of whose

Our Lord wants those children and he shall get them. Either now or he'll come and get them later baby.

Is that some kind of threat.

It so happens that Buck is visiting the settlement this afternoon and

he comes over in time for the end of this exchange. Come on over to the River Queen he tells Cassiopeia. You won't have to worry about Jesus over there

Fatty and her friends will zap him soon as he walks up the gangplank.

Joseph glares at Buck. You shall perish he says.

Drop dead says Buck.

She's staying here says Ralph.

Who appointed you says Lance who comes up with some of the others.

Are you looking for trouble we're already in enough trouble.

What trouble you mean the Truckers and the Bikers says Ooud.

Truckers and Bikers hell who do you think is trying to wreck this settlement.

Well who then Sasquatch.

You think that's so impossible says Lance Ooud can't stop himself 97

from laughing. Lance looks at him as if he'll never forgive him and stalks off. What's with Lance says Dawn who's just walked up.

He's worried about the Missing Lunk says Cloud. What's eating him all he does lately is hunt and lie around. What is this a community or a

permanent vacation he's starting to piss me.

Hell what's wrong with a vacation says Bud and Branch.

Nothing except a vacation can't last forever says Cloud.

Well maybe we all need a vacation from this vacation says Blossom.

You think we can go back now says Cloud.

No says Eucalyptus. Cloud and Eucalyptus look at one another. Then

they both look from Buck to Joseph.

Well then where can we go says Cloud.

Eucalyptus gets up at dawn every morning to do her exercises. She does them in the patio under the redwood tree. The exercises are her own combination of Hatha yoga T' ai Chi and meditation. She starts doing the exercises and then after a while the others straggle into the patio one by one rubbing their eyes open yawning and join her to begin to follow what she is doing. After a while the whole settlement is gathered under the redwood tree doing the exercises with Eucalyptus. When they are done there is a feeling among them that the parts have become a whole. At least that was the way it used to be. Lately fewer and fewer people come. Yesterday only Dawn and Cloud came. Eucalyptus won­ ders whether the settlement is losing its charm. The way Eucalyptus uses the word charm it means several things. Eucalyptus believes in charms that is incantations spells. She believes she can charm people. She wears charms that bring her luck. And in her good moments she feels she leads a charmed life. This is not one of her good moments. She has awakened with a feeling of dread. Everything is flattened out there's no life in any­ thing. No charm. A pile of tarpaulins against the house is lethally inert.

A rusting motor block near it emanates death. Even the redwood looks ragged seedy. Cheap. Cheapened by their settlement around it. Life is cheap and death is cheap. She does her exercises mechanically. For Eucalyptus the settlement was always an enchanted place. If the enchantment goes out of it there's nothing left. A collection of derelicts with a half-baked idea. A colony of demoralized orphans trying to give 98

one another what none of them have. Of course Wind and

Valley are an

exception. The exception. Since Valley left Blossom Bud and Branch for Wind they have seemed on a long honeymoon. They are completely apart. Yes and that's the trouble. But still. As Eucalyptus does the exercises things gain dimension. Her muscles loosen her blood begins to flow. And Blossom Bud and Branch are doing all right. Except that they seem to have seceded from the rest of the settlement. Her breathing deepens she begins to feel her center. And Ralph and Cassiopeia have something going. Finally. Though she doesn't think Cassiopeia is going to last here. Then there's Dawn. Dawn is always the same. That's the trouble she keeps thinking there's more to Dawn but it never appears.

Why doesn't Cloud see that. She's afraid Cloud is moving out of contact.

Cloud and Lance. Out of contact but in different directions. Dawn appears and starts to loosen up. Then Lance. Then Cloud, Eucalyptus feels balanced. Things begin to come alive. The tarpaulins are now

harmless and the motor block is merely inert. Blossom Bud and Branch appear for once. Ralph and Cassiopeia. The redwood soars above them.

Another scale. Another measure. Then Wind and Valley show up even Wind and Valley. Looking like they know something special. They all move

99

together. They all move together. Together. Together. Together.

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1

Miss Clarity and her unfortunate charisma Eugene Wildman

Back when Miss Clarity was the reigning SM queen of the Upper West

Side, she would entertain her neighbors across the courtyard by having her slaves put on various theatrical performances. It got to be we could count on these entertainments as regular weekend events. Come nine or ten 0'clock on Saturday and Sunday mornings and the crack of a bull­

whip would bring us awake with a start. Standing in the courtyard window would be one of her pathetic creatures, wearing pajamas and looking out at us with wild -eyed fright.

Generally Garity's taste ran to the tragic. She had a real fondness for the classics. But her naturally fine sense of spectacle led her soon to grand opera. There would come the swish of a whip, a squeal of pain, then a quavering voice rising into song, singing passionately exquisite arias from Tosca, Aida, Don Giovanni. Another crack from her bull­

whip and a second slave would be driven to the window to join the first in a duet. Garity loved duets. A good deal of work went into these perfor­ mances too, because those slaves knew that Garity never settled for anything less than perfection.

Fact is, Garity was beginning to find the straight SM scene a little cloying. Not that she was going soft or anything. She would be the last to 101 TriQuanerly

deny that what most men needed was a rigorous diet of leather and discipline. It was just that the format was getting restricting.

What was happening was that Clarity was beginning to conceive of herself as an artist in protoplasm. She now realized that SM was only a means to a very limited end. Punishment in itself was a drag. It was the possibilities of the medium that turned her on. That and the concept of magnitude, which she had an instinctive feeling was where it was at.

From those first courtyard productions, she now turned her very con­ siderable energies to the creation of rituals. What she was moving to­ ward was a new kind of theater; one that would involve every man in the

entire city, and could get them all caught up at once in a vast conceptual action that would make mincemeat out of their own paltry little goals and intentions. In the back of her mind was a vast final seppuku, a mass

hara kiri presided over by herself and her girlfriend Allgood, who would -

appear wearing priestess robes on the final night ofthe theater to dis­

tribute glass daggers to all the members of the audience.

But first what she needed to do was find a way to make players of everyone.

Not for a minute did she doubt the success of her scheme. Clarity was one of those

people who saw relationships everywhere. There were men whom she acknowledged as her slaves who hadn't even met her yet. She saw hidden interconnections in everything. It was all very obvious to her.

It's just zen, she said. Moreover she was one of those people who are born natural catalysts. This was because she was very yin all the way inside and completely surrounded by yang on the outside. This was the way she explained it to her friends. It created an incredible force field wherever she went, upsetting everything and everybody, and drawing people around her like a magnet. The yang on the outside acted as a shield and the yin all the way inside made her impervious to harm, yin being completely fluid.

She decided to call the new venture Gone Theater.

The idea for the theater developed almost by chance. You are a com­

plete shit, she told her favorite slave, the managing editor of the NY Types, one night, beating him into submission. How can I redeem my­ self, Mistress? the poor slave said groveling. Go to ten cultural events on ten successive Tuesdays, she said: I'll do anything you say, the slave swore up and down, but what kind of events? Shut up, you

102

fool, she said,

I'm thinking. Quit your job tomorrow and rent an empty theater for me.

Anything, anything, the slave said, and that was the beginning of the Clone Theater.

Pretty soon the Tuesday series was a regular "in" thing. The turnout was marvelous and a wide variety of types attended, all of them imagining they were being drawn by the series offerings because (unlike Garity) they were unable to penetrate beneath the surface of appear­ ances. Every fuckup who had anything to atone for was drawn there by the fantastic effect of the yang field that was set up.

It was a far cry from those early days of Garity and Her Singing Slaves. Garity was now at the point where she was the most charismatic person in the city. Very few people realized it yet, but absolutelyevery­ body had by now become involved with her. Nothing could counter that force. She had more slaves than she could possibly know what to do

with. Except that she knew exactly what she was going to do with them: the mass hara-kiri at the Gone Theater. Garity and Allgood were ecstatic.

Only one person could possibly hope to prevent this devastation­ Slim Sage. There was not much chance that Slim could survive either.

But he was totally yin, and if anyone could enter that force field and make it back out again, he could. In spite of her advantage, in spite even of the certainty of triumph, that was far too much yin for her comfort.

Clearly she had found a match. She turned her attention to strategies of putting his yin to her own advantage. Slim will go down like all the rest only faster, Garity announced to Allgood. But Slim Sage had his own plans.

The most striking feature of Miss Garity's Gone Theater was its un­ usually high degree of civilization. At the intermissions and afterward people held stimulating conversations on Important Subjects. It was all very mannered and cultured. Clarity circulated everywhere, smiling, chatting, spreading immense amounts of yang discomfort. Which just moved the level of civilized discourse many notches higher. And which suited Garity to a T. What Garity had long ago noticed, even way back on the Upper West Side, when she was into nothing more complex than running a stable stable of slaves, what she had noticed was that the more miserable she made her slaves feel, the better they performed and the more anxious they were to sing. That is, the more she put the pressure 103

on, the higher the level of civilization became. And ultimately it was

civilization that Garity was out to get.

Puck civilization, she said to her girlfriend Allgood one night. But

why all the vehemence? Allgood asked perplexed. Clarity smiled with the pure pleasure of anticipation. Because the Clone Theater is about to move off the page, that's why. When she said that, a sense of well-being filled her and she felt calm and fully in control. This was her metier.

Lissen, she said, I know you been scuffin around with that Slim character. Well you tell him that nobody works in flesh like I do, and that I'll give him a chance to get out of town but that's the only chance I'll give him. Clarity figured she had a sure thing. With all that yin Slim

Sage had in him, he'd never be able to stay out of disaster range. Poor doomed yin moth, the yang flame Clarity thought.

What an attitude.

Well without you can full you have to empty, without you can medi­ cine you have to no medicine. Those are the rules. Yin yin is yang, yang yang is yin. You can't stop it either.

That's the way it happens to work. It happens to work that way.

And I'm not much into Garity now anyway. You don't be at a point so

long.

No matter it was nice.

You can't.

Well here's what with Slim Sage. Poor Slim, he fell hopelessly in love.

He really couldn't do nothing about it. You know. Like it's not even him

almost. She is in love too but she can't know it yet. Because she's so

Clarity. So Slim is on top of that part. He goes to pay her a visit.

Garity he listens to himself saying Garity. He is distraught. You don't understand he says. Oh it's you she says feigning casual come back tomorrow but he is in the room already. She yawns. Power he says it doesn't work the way you think. She yawns again. Power he says you don't understand it. I'm so sleepy she says.

But why talk about Garity at all? When something ends it ends. Ends is finished. It cuts off. You move on.

Why fantasize?

You have to be firm. No way you have to say.

104

Resolutely. No way.

The integrity of the path no matter what.

Just watch you say.

Slim is power because he's so yin. Which is why he can know what about Garity. It's not the way you think he says. But she has fallen

asleep. It's upto Power.

Clarity lay there mumbling in her sleep. Garity is Power Garity is Power she kept mumbling over and over. She doesn't see at all Slim said.

Well he said I guess I'll stay the night and in the morning I can run it down again. Doesn't see at all he thought beginning to doze stretched out next to Garity on the bed relaxing relaxing relaxing. All of a sudden the cat went into heat.

Garity's cat went into heat Tuesday Thursday Friday in the fall quarter Monday Wednesday Friday winter quarter Tuesday Thursday Friday spring quarter out of residence summer and any old time you crossed it on off days. The eat's name was Bessie Moon Smith.

Bessie started yowling something unbelievable. It was pathetic. That cat didn't let up for one single second. By the time the morning came around Slim Sage had been rolled scrambled and juiced but good.

What a mess. He stared at the window with rusted fi eyes adams apple bobbing at 111000. Garity refreshed from her night of slumber woke up with a smile. You were saying she said. Not a peep from the cat.

Well Slim Sage had to move fast. He bought a ticket for the first train heading west. Then he went around town putting up posters saying Art Gone Work Slim Sage Tuesday. Everywhere you went you saw them.

Art Gone Work Slim Sage Tuesday.

Hal thought Garity that does it. A mistake at last. When Slim shows I'll be standing by the podium to introduce him as his own concept. Slim Sage will be the Art Gone Work. My Art Gone Work. So much for him.

But Slim Sage had notions of his own.

Tuesday came and no Slim anywhere. Garity was up there at the po­ dium by herself while the hyped-up crowd milled around getting more and more restless by the second. What is Art Gone Work they began to chant what is Art Gone Work turning in a flash into an unruly un­ civilized mob. Garity was just a taste rattled, lost just a tiny bit of her cool her edge. You bastard she thought. It was beginning to dawn on her what the Art Gone Work was. lOS

The crowd wasn't far behind either. It's you someone yelled and

They began applauding and yelling her name. It's Clarity it's Clarity applause and shouts. And then one last thoughtful touch. Slim Sage pulled up outside in a cab walked through carrying a 2 x 4- foot red paper cutout heart all torn and stained and fraying around the edges hung it around Clarity's neck, then back out into the cab and off to the train station. You bastard she thought you bastard you made an object out of me she was absolutely mortified. And that was the end of it the Clone Theater is only a memory.

Six months later she received a letter from Slim he was living someplace out West. The letter said: someone else and someone else.

49 Ko. What takes place is believed in only after it has been accomplished. There will be

great progress and success. Advantage will come from being firm and correct. Occasion for

repentance will disappear. No blame.

Water fire Garity kept thinking water fire conflict resolution. Bessie Moon was off on a tear triggered by only God knows what maybe the

arrival of the letter. It was supposed to be an off day. All night long Bessie Moon groaned while Clarity turned it over in her head you bastard you bastard turning over and over. In the morning she came to a decision. Two

days later she wrote back:

Without number. I fixed the cat. No more blues? Damn.

And that's that.

See. Noway.

It completes itself.

It has other fish to fry.

It's up to Time.

106

Bon Papa reviendra (suite et fin) Albert Guerard

Twenty-one days to crawl from Tangier into warm and shark -infested Caribbean waters. A triumph for Vetling, roused repeatedly from his bunk littered with bread crumbs to improvise repairs and rescue con­

necting rods. A triumph too for Papandriu in the engine room, naked except for wide belt and revolver, keeping the three nameless slaves at their shoveling. A sweating giant of a man, given to Olympian oaths and long silences, who single-handed subdued a band of fifty rebels in Crete! Twenty-one days of indomitable westward crawling, plowing the changeless sea: a time of monotony and dreams. But a time, too, for ambitions and longings to awaken, and rising pressures to be exerted on.

Mathilde- Dessaignes. Hadn't the deterrent done everything that was asked of it, both at Lipari and Tangier? There was a growing accord, not yet shared by Garcia and Mathilde, that the time had come to put the Agracorinth's facilities to good use (both the swaying antenna and the cylinder planted in its womb) in the service of democratic liberation.

Haiti, groaning under misgovernment and corruption, longed for Bon Papa's return.

Mathilde- Dessaignes tried to resist these pressures.

107 TriQuanerly

His own impulse was to defer invasion in favor of careful and ex­

pensive preparations. Expensive, at least, for someone. Wouldn't it take months or even years to purchase and assemble the necessary equip­ ment, and to contract for the training of special forces? Prolonged negotiations for the chartering of the necessary planes, even three or four planes, and the Miami-based pilots to fly them? The DC-3 of the photograph was, alas, no more than a rusting hulk in a small French airport, since he had sold the engines under the illusion that he would never leave Paris. Now he longed for the services and advice of Keeley, who had vanished into the jungle of New York-sucked under (for all one knew) by Ninth Avenue zealots planning a liberation of Puerto Rico.

An invasion of Haiti would involve contracts, intermediary corpor­ ations, contributions-all of which would take time.

The afternoon in Tangier revived his old appetite for planning in­

vasions, but not for the blunt act of invading. Those shrewd bankers of Rabat and Fez, peering at him slyly over their coffee cups! Their solemn talk of millions! The trade policy of a revitalizedHaiti? Would he pur­ chase Moroccan manganese? It occurred to Mathilde, with a sickening sense of

guilt, that he had been on the Agracorinth for over a month without making the slightest inroad on Bienvenido Garcia's fortune, which everyone knew to be fabulous.

So it was time for a closer rapprochement than the daily hand­

shaking at the cocktail hour and the bowing to each other's mistresses.

He invited Garcia for an intimate tete-a-tete in his salon-study. An hour for black cigars and priceless Barbancourt rum, with no mistresses or bodyguards to inhibit them.

Mathilde uncorked the rum with a final sharp twist of the wrist. It might have brought to Garcia's mind, for a nostalgic moment, the gesture of strangling an opponent in self-defense. Mathilde poured sparingly but with love. They drank to each other's health. And drank to their respective homelands. A large wall map behind Mathilde's desk represented the island they had shared, depicted in two colors, its spiny ridge of mountains and always disputed frontier.

Garcia: This is indeed exceptional rum. Superior even to ours.

Mathilde: The best in the world. There is no reason why you, Garcia, shouldn't be the exclusive distributor in Santo Domingo. A lucrative arrangement for us both.

Garcia: Me in Santo Domingo? You are joking.

108

Mathilde: Not at all. And have you ever thought, as a safe investment and protection against inflation, of Moroccan manganese?

Garcia: Moroccan manganese! What would I do with manganese?

Mathilde: Sell it. (Pouring a second smallportion of rum into Garcia's empty glass, a thimbleful.) Savor the bouquet before you drink. I could guarantee a regular profit of 30 percent.

Garcia: Your mind again runs to money, my friend. I who have plenty

enjoy my retirement thinking of other things.

Mathilde: I speak to you seriously, as to myoId companion in the repudiation of communist scum. What is money if it lies in a bank gathering dust? Money was made for investment and the protec­ tion of progress and stability. There are things I would sell only to you, and only because of confidence in your political sympathies. can

Let us not beat about the bush. What would you say to atomic

machine guns, semi-automatic, capable of being moved and fired

by two men? And of killing a thousand in one burst?

Garcia: Discarded by the Americans?

Mathilde: Precisely. Not by reason of any defect but because they had many more than they could use. Most of them were never fired after leaving the factory. Perhaps it was also a diplomatic gesture, to give up these guns. I forget the details.

Garcia: And where are these machine guns?

Mathilde: There are several caches. A share of the guns I keep for myself. The rest I can make available to you on two _months' notice.

Two months or less.

Garcia: Two months! In two years I will still be on this ship. I intend, in fact, to remain indefinitely. Even if I contemplated adventures,

which I do not, I would not depend on such guns. I see them now­ sunk at the entrance to some secret cove whose location has been

betrayed to the usurpers. No more invasions!

Mathilde leaned forward and lowered his voice. Greed tore at him and gnawed. He was ready in this hour of awakened

energies to risk anything. His hand trembling slightly, he even poured more rum.

Mathilde: My friend, I let you in on a secret. Nicaragua has two bombs, Chinese in origin, which they bought from Indonesia. But also they need money.

Garcia: So? Mexico must have forty by now.

109

Mathilde: You miss my point. Nicaragua is willing to part with one of the two bombs. The other it keeps as a deterrent, and for hemi­

spheric solidarity. There are few to whom Nicaragua would sell.

You, of course, are one.

Garcia: Who wants obsolete Chinese bombs?

Mathilde: Obsolete perhaps. Yet how much would be left of

Managua if this obsolete bomb fell? How much of Santo Domingo? Or my beautiful Port-au-Prince? We are small nations interested only in internal order and security. We do not need the great bombs.

Garcia: But if there is only the one bomb?

Mathilde: Between us we could share this bomb in the interests of peace. (Holding out his arms in a comradely gesture.) We could­

with the threat of the single bomb--overthrow the usurpers in both our countries.

Garcia: And which of us would have physical possession of this

instrument of order and peace? I think one of us might use it as a deterrent

against the other.

Mathilde: These are details. A joint commission Garcia: I see, a joint commission. It would not be the first. And the ...

cost?

Mathilde: Paltry. A bagatelle for a man with your fortune.

Garcia: Be more precise.

Mathilde: One million dollars, this sum to include rental of the plane.

Who ever heard of the restoration of order and justice at so cheap a

price?

Garcia: I am grateful that you include the plane. For one million

dollars.

Mathilde: Then you consent to give the matter some thought? I ask

only a minimal down payment, possibly fifty thousand. Garcia, Garcia! Already I see the plane cruising above our two countries, at first to protect our joint return, ultimately to thwart invaders.

Garcia: Enough of this foolery! (Rising, draining his glass.) There will be no return, none at least by me, none to Santo Domingo. As for your own life, it is yours to throwaway. If you think seriously of invasion

...

Mathilde: In time, in time! For the moment I make only prepara110

tions. I speak only of the plane and the Nicaraguan bomb, a

provision for the distant future. No, the invasion is not for tomorrow.

Garcia: For me it will be never.

Mathilde's mind cast itself months and even years ahead: indistinct years of shrewd purchases and sales and ofleisurely planning for in­ vasion. Years during which the still minuscule bank account in

Switzerland could grow, and his two daughters reach marriageable age.

But his immediate household contemplated instead the present, and

counted in terms of weeks and even days. Their homesickness increased as the

Agracorinth crawled under ever warmer skies.

Even the motherly Madame Mathilde emerged from a silence that had lasted many months. A sudden torrent of complaints! She had all but frozen in the apartment on the Rue Hamelin, had been insulted by the servants in their villa on Cap Ferrat. And now to live in squalor equal to that of the old times in Harlem, but with the added humiliation of

Eugenie Desbordes.

"You forget yourself, dear one," Mathilde protested. "Eugenie was thrust upon us as a political necessity. A formal and moral connection with the mulattoes."

"She is almost as black as me. Is she a political necessity on the ship?"

"She will be if we return to Port-au-Prince."

"Then you will return? Bon Papa reviendra?"

"Of course."

"But now?"

"After a reasonable delay."

"A reasonable delay! Have you any idea what I, who suffered with you in Harlem, have suffered since? Deprived of my family! Deprived of

the archbishop? Only the Church gave my life meaning, and the

charities organized in my name. What will happen to the girls in the

orphanage? Who is to purify their morals? You have your life, Mathilde. Your money and your soldiers and your petite amie. At least let me have mine."

Mathilde was astonished by this tirade, which was resumed the fol­

lowing morning. Eugenie Desbordes, moreover, had begun to pester him both night and day. At first he fled to the sanctuary of the fourth room with its sacred odors of goat urine and dung and its squawking III

chickens groomed for sacrifice. But even the hungan-priest was now

urging an immediate return to Port-au- Prince. He had not had a day's peace since leaving Haiti. Everything in Paris was terrifying: the police­ men blowing their whistles, the concierge and her vicious complaints, the proprietress of the boulangerie at the corner. Black Senegalese students in wild uniforms, who looked at him insultingly. But worst of all had been those weeks under the island volcano, casting foul smells by day and breathing fire by night.

The hungan spoke gloomily of vengeful ancestors, and of the protec­ tive and beneficent forces of Nature, betrayed by Mathilde's unnatural absence. The anger of Damballah-Ouedo.

"You must return to those who love you."

"In time, in time."

"Port-au- Prince and the Palace were terrible enough, for a man born in Caye Thomonde. But at least in the Palace I had a room for sleeping

quite separate from the sanctuary. An honorable life. A maid brought coffee to my bed in the morning, and freshly baked rolls."

Yes, yes. Everyone has had to make adjustments."

"I cast the shells again and again. I listen to the voices. I am on my knees for hours. Three times last night I found myself possessed. Every sign and every voice urges you to return." "

"You think the country needs me?"

"Without a doubt."

Thus the priest. And Eugenie Desbordes? Three times a week,

punctually, she lay beneath Mathilde's body still partly clothed in the white nightshirt. And three times a week resumed her pleas for an im­ mediate return to the waiting fatherland. She murmured Creole en­ dearments, expertly stroked the president's member, pulled the lobes of his ears. Sensuality was preceded, each time, by political discussion. Her body squirmed in irritation.

"Ouf! You are again putting on weight! This life of idleness is ruining you. Think of the excitements of the old times, which kept your body in good trim. Do you remember the National Assembly rising as one man when you made your unexpected appearances? They rose because they felt both terror and love. Like Napoleon! Where was Napoleon at your age? Wasting his life on a ship? No, no! Think of the military band playing in the Palace gardens. Think oflying in a pool under the flowers, 112

with rum or ices brought when you waved your hand. And the bureau­ crats cooling their heels outside your office, hoping for an audience!"

"The bureaucrats defrauded me."

"It won't happen again. Your years in Paris will have prepared you to cope with them. Besides, you can appoint new bureaucrats and prosecute the old ones. A clean slate. I have many cousins who long to serve

you."

"No doubt, no doubt."

"But what are you waiting for?" A sudden slip of silken thigh, a sharp

jerk of the hip to redistribute more comfortably the presidential bulk.

Moreover, this movement left her lips firmly pressed against his right ear. A fluttering that always excited him; her tongue darted like a ser­ pent's. She detected continuing hesitation in his silence. Suddenly, to establish moral domination, she slid from beneath him, wrenched free, and then whirled upward in the dark; and was securely seated astride him. A gymnastic triumph! She rocked back and forth, massaging his

shoulders. "Why don't you say anything?"

"I am thinking."

"Thinking! But what kind of life is this for a real man, a man of your abilities? BonPapareviendra! But when, when, when? Are people to laugh when they hear your name? Am I to keep my head lowered in disgrace?"

"No one is laughing."

"How do you know? Everyone laughs at failure. But the same ones would cheer the moment you set foot on land."

"The time is not ripe. Invasions require organization."

"No need for organization. The restless rich people and the starving poor ones will rise together. Think of Napoleon landing in the South of France. How well I remember that story! Every step he took brought new soldiers to his side."

"I think instead of Napoleon III landing at Boulogne. He was ar­

rested on the beach."

"The man with the little beard? Ti Barbe? He lacked your charm and your masculine power. Also I am sure he lacked your voice. Remember

you will be broadcasting. Napoleon III could not broadcast. Also he did not have this ship with its terrifying weapon."

"What do you know about weapons? You are a flower, little one."

113

"I saw what happened at Lipari."

"There were perhaps five thousand souls at Lipari. In Haiti nearer five million."

"Five million who love you. Even the small children are brought up to call you Bon Papa."

"Do you think that is still true?"

"Of course."

"Well, well. Perhaps we will go back next summer. I need at least that

long for preparations and contracts, if the opportunity is not to be wasted."

"If you love me, you will invade now.

"

The Committee for Student Liberation, as the days grew warmer, became excited and redoubled its efforts. The listingAgracorinth

steamed slowly into greener waters, deterred by a slight uncertainty of

destination but encouraged by the friendly trades. Members of the

polyglot crew (in the absence of immobilized officers) helped with navi­ gation. Then a first landfall, the northernmost tip of the Virgin Islands: a low green line and beating surf. Through powerful glasses they saw high palm trees that brought tears to the eyes.

The following day, within sight of Puerto Rico and its northern coast now, the committee dipped into reserve funds and went on the air. It broadcast from four to five, when listeners would have risen refreshed from siesta. To talk freely in Spanish at last! What matter if the call to

by Puerto Rican students, or by Dominicans or Cubans, or even by homesick exiled ones in Tampa and Miami? The same principles applied universally. A purification of the collegios and universities, to befollowed by the redemption of other institutions. moral regenerationforall. Resignation of Freedom as contagious corrupt rectors and deans as an indispensable beginning, with students to seize and maintain control of the curriculum. Free admission to the arms was first heard

...

law schools without examinations, since the law schools breed the next

generation's bureaucrats. An abolition ofcompulsory military service.

Amnestyfor all political prisoners. Sanctuaryfor all university buildings. An immediate alliance with the working class. Wasn't that the root of evil in all countries speaking the noble mother tongue? The aristocrats by mere accident of birth must go, surrendering to aristocrats of the mind.

114

Iturbide and Seguros alternated at the microphone, speaking so

rapidly that Beetrare could catch scarcely a word. At the rate they were paying for broadcasting time, there could be no dramatic pauses or silences. Even Angelita, a grudging listener at first, was impressed.

She had, in fact, begun to think in terms of a prolonged sojourn in Port -au- Prince, and of Saturday nights at Eugenie's Cabane Chou­ coune. A villa on a friendlier hillside than the one they had occupied on Capri, with the aristocrats of Petionville as neighbors. A pool surrounded by flaming flowers. Bougainvillea. Was there anything to prevent her from visiting the Casino every night? Or, indeed, from urging Garcia to take over its management?

Beetrare, listening, shared the committee's excitement over this return to a green virgin world of coral-fringed islands longing for liberation. He too had picked up the first rumors of a possible Haitian invasion. Even Harold H. had spoken (if laughingly) of getting mail in Port-au- Prince. But what could he say of all this in his English-language broadcasts? "Send your requests to Art Beetrare, poste restante, Port­

au-Prince, Haiti!" Good enough. But what did he understand of latino student ferment, really, or of Haiti for that matter? And who was

listening? San Juan and the Virgin Islands were within easy range, and the northernmost Leeward Islands-sleepless retired British remittance men in Antigua or Anguilla, listening over a last rum and tonic. Even drunken American compatriots somewhere "on the beach," spending the night in a dockside bar. There were all the disaffected students, and the revolutionary black people too, who had emigrated to Cuba. Still he could not visualize them, any of them, listening to his voice, though they would enjoy the old music: Stormy Weather, Red River Valley, Straw­ berry Lane, Time on My Hands. His own audience was in Europe, his listeners-in the desolate camps, or on hotel balconies, or in trailers

parked in rutted lanes.

For them, Beetrare knew, his voice would have grown feebler and

feebler, as the Agracorinth crept across the Atlantic, leaving Africa and the Canaries behind. An ingenious man like Percy Morisette, one who owned a very powerful set and had a silvery antenna rising high above

his trailer

Percy no doubt hung on and could still hear his voice. But what of poor Jonquil Beard? He imagined her under the covers in her dark room, turning the dial with trembling fingers, trying to pick the 115

...

thread of his voice out of the mad whistling sounds. The voice fading,

fading, then gone.

His confidence in Percy Morisette was not misplaced. On the

thirteenth day out of Tangier a radio message arrived, which Bruce F.

typed and delivered with a queer grin: KEEP IT UP SPIDER OLD BOY DON'T LET ANYONE DISCOURAGE YOU AM ENJOYING THE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY THOUGH PROBABLY EXAGGERATED PLAY MORE OLDER TUNES FROM THE TROPICS GOOD LUCK TO THE AGRACORINTH

AGRONAUTS PERCY MORISETTE.

Beetrare listened also to the broadcasts of Mathilde- Dessaignes, who now talked every

evening from eight to nine. Interludes of Haitian melody while he caught his breath. Eugenie Desbordes had begun to listen regularly in the studio. She watched the president intently with her small oval face cupped in her hands, as though to encourage and even guide him by her presence. Harold H. sometimes came too, and sat beside her. And even the president's wife ventured once into the second­ class dining room, prompted by curiosity and distrustful. Did the honeyed words (which once held crowds spellbound on the Place de l'Independance) actually leave the ship? Or was she a victim of a fraud?

Were they even anywhere near Haiti, and the beautiful bare mountains of home?

Beetrare, with occasional help, found he could follow much of what Mathilde- Dessaignes said. He listened with an enthusiasm that glowed more and more

brightly. Wasn't there something he himself could say in his own English-language broadcasts to hasten the return of Haitian democracy? Mathilde (as they crawled along the interminable Puerto Rican coastline) never referred to an actual invasion. He spoke instead of a "climate of conciliation" in which economic recovery could take

place, and the restoration of the individual freedoms. International amity was important. A recognition of Haiti as a mecca for tourists, the jewels of the Antilles. How was a reinvigorated tourism possible without the scouring of the docks, or repaving of the street leading from the airport to the resort hotels? When would the Haitian thirst for a genuine popular democracy at last be slaked, and votes really be counted?

Two days passed, and the actual shores of the home island came into sight, the Monte Cristi of the old explorers, and the Dominican coast­ line infested by sharks. Mathilde's proposals become more specific and 116

practical. What would a legitimate Haitian government turn to first, after the release of all political prisoners? Economic recovery I He would invite sealed bids from the American construction companies­ not only to repave the streets but even to restore the telephone service, now silent for almost forty years. Sealed bids too for a modernizing of the hospital and the rural clinics. An honest government would neces­ sarily, as a step toward internal stability and the recovery of national honor, purchase at least one modern weapon.

The weapon would be there, or at least the plane carrying it, for everyone to see. Mathilde described the silvery plane, flagship of the Air Force, eternally refueled in mid -air, hovering protectively over the capital: a reassuring drone by night and day. There were friendly coun­ tries (he could assure them from his private knowledge) willing to sell such a weapon for a reasonable price. The suggestions became more practical. Mathilde- Dessaignes, after the years of lazy retirement, the slow strolling of the Boul' Mich', then the months of serenely vague broadcasting for funds, was carried away by the brilliance of his own proposals. Why had none of his predecessors thought of a consortium of the resort hotels that would do away with brutal competition and enrich the national treasury? Was there any reason why (with Garcia's millions to back him, and a modern weapon floating overhead) the railroad to St. Marc should not be reconstructed or even pushed on to Cap Haitien?

Mathilde found his impulses drifting more and more in the direction of an actual invasion, rather than one existing only on paper.

The pressures were rising and tightening: the accusing stares of his hungan and of Madame Mathilde. And the long fingernails of Eugenie Desbordes, digging into his arm and back. Beginning even to hurt as she rocked back and forth above him persuasively, in the very moment of more

ecstasy.

A solitary hour in his study, with both doors locked, while he cast up accounts. His mind revolved his readings in Haitian history, and

his oral examination for the Ph.D. at Columbia, which he had

incomprehensibly failed. What did invasion involve, if one came by sea rather than overland with a wild band of cacos to terrorize

...

and

always assuming, of course, that dissidents of all classes would flock to his banner?

The great difference this time=an asset lacking to every leader of the 117

people from Toussaint to Duvalier, Christophe to Magloire-was the presence of the Agracorinth in the harbor of Port-au- Prince. The shining cylinder of aluminum or silver that actually seemed to grow larger as one watched! Nearly every invasion, he recalled (the Ph.D. candidate making outlines and notes) involved the Bureau de la Place, the Bureau de I' Arrondissement, the National Prison, and the Palace.

To seize any two of the four normally meant control of the country.

Always assuming the gendarmerie

...

Mathilde found his mind racing

past these details to control of the Barbancourt rum factory, to the Casino and the national lottery, to the Palace of Finance itself. One of

his first patriotic acts would be to float a loan: a guaranteed 9 percent, to which all his defrauding mulatto enemies would be compelled to

subscribe.

The small, nagging question of personal safety?

There were always the foreign legations to which one could, in the event of failure, rush for safety. And more than one deposed president

had walked rather than run to the docks, waving a top hat in farewell to

weeping crowds, before boarding a ship bound for Jamaica. He visu­ alized himself (if worse came to worst) climbing hastily back on board theAgracorinth. But was that in fact the worst? There was also the house of the historic Oscar Etienne, so thoroughly demolished that the next morning only the foundations could be seen. Or, worse still: the liquidation of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, seized from his asylum in the French Legation and torn to pieces by a mob--his arms affixed to poles and paraded through the streets, not only the staring head.

His predecessors: the beadroll of great names, memorized by the children of the wealthy before being packed off to school in France?

...

Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave (1915-1922) had been allowed to retire peacefully from office, as had that more fortunate President Sam (P. A. Tiresias Simon, 1896-1902). Two presidents had been legally re-elected. But of the other twenty-nine, deposed either peacefully, through revolution, or by being blown up? Faustin Soulouque, Boisronde-Canal, F. Deus Legitime, Florvil Hippolyte, Michel Oreste and OresteZamor, Auguste, Borno, Duvalier, Magloire. The very names could set one to trembling.

At this moment of reflection, Mathilde, looking out his window, saw 118

with alarm that they had actually come in sight of brown land, a thick

tongue rising from the sea. It was the island of Gonave. The tongue was in a yawning mouth formed by two familiar coastlines, with Port -au­ Prince deep at the back of the throat.

It was too late to tum back.

The Casino and its revenues, coveted by Angelita, were offered instead-to Harold H. as an inducementto remain. Already the hungan and Eugenie Desbordes had left on their secret missions-the hungan to make contact with rebel leaders in the slums, Eugenie to rouse the

mulatto aristocrats.

Mathilde was now broadcasting four hours a day, almost within sight of Port-au- Prince. After dark, the faint lights of the city were visible just

Morning and afternoon a scarred band of Gonave fishermen, some fifty in all, drilled on the broiling shore, using sticks in place of guns. Petit Toto commanded them, pointing the submachine gun for emphasis. Any day now, reinforcements were expected (by night, rather, a fishing boat gliding silently) with both men and guns.

Mathilde could not keep his mind on the details of a landing. It raced over the horizon.

ahead to the months and years to follow. He came to Harold H.' s office for a definitive conference, bringing with him a fresh bottle of Barban­ court rum. An extravagance he could afford, with the factory practically

in his hands.

Mathilde: Why shouldn't theAgracorinth stay indefinitely? A

friendly home port. Cooperation by the police, rather than the hostilities of the Riviera! No problems of provisioning.

HaroldH. And no frogmen to try to blow us up?

Mathilde: On the contrary, the armed forces would be supporting you.

Harold H.: As my silver plaything would be supporting you. Indefi­

nitely

...

Mathilde: Precisely.

HaroldH.: The pleasures of a sedentary life? A villa in Petionville, where I can drink your rum and twiddle my thumbs. No thanks.

Mathilde: That's not what I propose. Not at all. I see you instead as an active force in the

political life of the country. Behind the

scenes, of course, behind the scenes, since you have no black blood.

119

I offer you the management of the Casino, with only 5 percent

reserved for the nation.

HaroldH.: A generous offer. However, I think Angelita has that in mind for EI Toro.

Mathilde: I am the president, I will make the allocations. Besides, Garcia is sulking. He will have nothing to do with me. I could help him double his fortune. Instead he keeps his millions in the Swiss bank and in his safe. He turns his back on the invasion.

HaroldH.: Too bad. However, I'll have to pass up the Casino myself.

I want to keep moving.

Mathilde: You're not abandoning me!

HaroldH.: Not yet.

Mathilde: Not yet! What does that mean?

Harold H.: I mean I'll cover your landing. But that's all. Pulverisation de la ville, sure, if they don't let you land. Aneantissement, des­ truction totale, la pest�anything you want to threaten. But once

you've landed, you're on your own.

Mathilde: But you're missing an opportunity! If you don't want theCasino

...

Harold H.: I've been missing opportunities all my life. It's almost a matter of

principle.

Mathilde: A share in the Barbancourt rum factory? Management

of one of the hotels?

HaroldH.: I'm sorry. I guess I'm incorruptible.

Mathilde: What a thing to say! But can I at least count on you for the landing?

Harold H.: Yes. You can count on me for that.

Mathilde's broadcasts became more menacing. He could offer, al­ most in the same long breath, punitive destruction of the city or total re­

covery of the economy. He would resolve the ancient conflicts, t()()--()f rich and poor, mulatto and black. Always assuming the gendarmerie

...

A remarkable accident lent credibility to his promises and threats,

only five days after they had anchored off Gonave. A two-seater recon­ naissance plane with Air Force markings came out late in the morning 120

to investigate. A sturdy plane, veteran of many other attempted inva­

sions. It hovered discreetly at perhaps two thousand feet, photograph­

ing the ship and the Gonave fishermen drilling on the beach. But then, instead ofretumingto Port-au-Prince, it made a slow yet steep descent toward the ship, almost a glide, with the engine's drone drifting away. It dipped to within a hundred feet of the sea, then curved easily up and zoomed across the deck, in range of even a small revolver awkwardly fired. But no one fired. It moved past them slowly enough for the two black faces to be clearly visible, leaning suicidally over the side of the plane, in open air, unprotected. A plane, it now appeared, of the most ancient vintage, over fifty years old but all the more reason to seem ...

indestructible.

It had tempted them in vain to fire. A minusculeplane, more fitted for dusting crops than testing ultimate weapons! They had to admire its

audacity. It climbed sturdily back to two thousand feet, circled for more photographs, and dove again. Once again it came within a hundred feet of the water, then pulled easily out of its dive and swept across the deck, the two black faces visible once again, leaning far out. The pilot was shaking his fist. The maneuver was repeated four times. But on the final run, the plane made no apparent effort to come out of its dive, and instead plunged into the sea. They waited in vain for something to float to the surface: at least a fragment of wing or propeller, if not the two black airmen.

Two hours later, in response to this mysterious event, a radio message came from Port-au-

Prince, unsigned but obviously bearing official

sanction. It spoke of the need for a reconciliation of all the nation's

political forces. It seemed to promise, though not in so many words, that Mathilde's landing would be unopposed. What happened after this bloodless return would be up to the people to decide in the usual free, democratic way.

The invasion force landed shortly after midnight, brought ashore by the Agracorinth' s lifeboats: Mathilde at the head of his Gonave

fishermen-guerrillas, and carrying a large Haitian flag. Petit Toto, the only man who was armed, brought up the rear. He could try to return any hostile fire, in the event of a betrayal. Also, he could deter any im­ pulse on the part of the guerrillas to break ranks and disperse.

But there was no hostile gunfire.

121

In fact, there was nothing. Mathilde was alarmed by the emptiness of

the docks and by the moonlit silence of the city. There were no police to welcome him with open arms or to arrest him. No soldiers on patrol to crush him or to defect. No customs officials. There were even no taxis to

take him to the Hotel Bellevue, which he had chosen as a temporary

headquarters. Even the impoverished who ordinarily slept in the streets had taken cover.

But where was everyone else? The aristocrats, he surmised, would

have withdrawn to the heights of Kenscoff to wait out the revolution­

confident that gas or germs, if released, would not rise that high. The

paranoid president would doubtless spend the whole night at his desk, trembling, surrounded by white-robed priests. A cock or two would be sacrificed. But which way would the gendarmerie move?

The night was very silent under a cold tropical moon: the quiet of the grave.

The hungan suddenly appeared beside him. A white wraith who seemed to have come from nowhere. He had, in fact, stepped from be­ hind a great mound of bananas ready for shipment. He announced that

the Hotel Bellevue was ready to receive them. It had been formally

requisitioned: gardens, pool, facilities, personnel. The hotel was strategically located near the docks, should retreat prove necessary after all. Yet it was not far from the Presidential Palace, or from the

gendarmerie and its great stock of weapons.

Mathilde went there to await reinforcements from the Internal Resistance: on foot, picking his way through the cobblestones of the Grande Rue. The bridal suite was to serve as his headquarters: Empire

furniture, a desk of gleaming mahogany. A white telephone still attached to the wall, though it had not functioned for nearly forty years.

His wife and Eugenie Desbordes, in a show of solidarity, were already

settled in adjoining rooms.

The stillness of the city, the next morning, was oppressive. No one had

appeared on the streets. No sign of the taxis either, with armed tanton­ macoutes to ride beside the drivers. Mathilde sat at his desk or strode

through the empty lobby, waiting for reinforcements. Incorrigibly he found himself listening for the telephone to ring.

But his reinforcements, it appeared, were waiting for him to make 122

Agracorinth had fallen silent. Only his Gonave fishermen, encamped by the pool, gave reassuring signs of life, and the few hotel employees peering from behind doorways.

Late in the morning Eugenie Desbordes emerged in pajamas to harangue him on his pusillanimity. Meanwhile the Committee for Student Liberation, which had landed at dawn, had scoured the city in search of student leaders. But they too found no one, not even a taxi.

Rebels and police, mulattoes and blacks, the rich and the poor who

some decisive move. The

spent their lives in the streets, handcarts and taxis-all had vanished into the silence of rickety houses or gardens hidden by high hedges, swallowed up as into the earth and the Grande Rue's open drains.

By mid-afternoon, however, some eighteen hours after Mathilde's landing, a few of the normal sounds of city life had resumed. From a room on the second floor, Mathilde peered out hopefully on the Grande Rue, its rubble and open sewers, and saw the familiar beggars crouching against shaded walls. The population was beginning to emerge from hiding, as though the revolution were over. The shops remained closed.

People on the streets, yes, but none waving flags and none moving toward him. Looking down at the pool, Mathilde was surprised to see that the number of Gonave fishermen-guerrillas had diminished.

Harold H., meanwhile, made his way to the Oloffson. Two-thirds of a

century before, President Sam, seeking asylum, had scaled the wall at the foot of its garden. Harold H.'s dream+-one that put Mathilde in the

presidency but left Eugenie in his arms, sharing a room at the Oloffson -had not yet materialized. Alone in the pool (for all customers and all but one servant had fled), he floated on his back, staring up at the arching trees and flowers Eugenie had described. Around the pool chaise-longues and tables for cocktails, but discouragingly empty.

He waited for word of Mathilde's success.

But Mathilde, on the threshold of power, remained hesitant and afraid. Each time he emerged from his meditations beside the dead

telephone, a few more of his followers had left him. His mistake (Eugenie remarked) was to have paid them too generously in advance.

Three or four had probably drifted off in search of a cockfight where they could double their fortunes. Still others, sliding to the end of the pool and garden, then suddenly gone, had doubtless sought out the 123

white muslin delights of the girls in the Ville des Fleurs. A third group would have gone off to the Casino, where the roulette tables would

already have reopened, impervious to revolution.

Petit Toto was one of the last to leave. Eugenie Desbordes, on one of her many frenzied missions of the day, had seen him vanish up the

Grande Rue riding a bicycle. And she ? Was she alone in seeking out

potential leaders to discover which way the wind would blow?

By six 0' clock, dazed and demoralized, and sodden with expensive rum, Mathilde had ceased to think of the orations he would give from the balcony of the Presidential Palace. He thought instead of the com­ forts of the Agracorinth the luxuries of his Paris apartment. The area of the pool and hotel garden was now empty. The last of the Gonave fishermen had slipped away, forgetting all guerrilla discipline and their hours of training on the beach. His wife too had disappeared, together with the hungan. A familiar perfume hung thickly in the empty room where Eugenie Desbordes had been. On the rumpled bed, a message ,

scrawled on hotel stationery of polished ivory bond: AU REVOIR PAPA IE TE DETESTE!

Only the hotel employees now remained. And these, Mathilde felt certain, were policemen and tanton-macoutes in disguise. He sur­ rendered to them.

In all this time, in the pool or on the terrace of the Oloffson, Harold H. heard no gunfire at all. He was halfway through his dinner (solitary among the long row of tables, no Eugenie at his side) when he heard that Mathilde had been arrested and the revolution was over.

Harold H. waited three days for some sign of life from a member of

Mathilde's family, if not from the police. He returned to the

Agracorinth. The ship continued to hover a quarter-mile offshore, listing disreputably, with a faint curl of smoke. With every hour (and given its silence after the Mathilde landing), it must have appeared less dangerous to the Haitian authorities. Less likely to pulverize the city or On the third afternoon Harold H. went ashore, disseminate plague consulted with the American consul, was turned away by the indignant parents of Eugenie Desbordes, and had a cup of coffee with the minister of foreign affairs. ...

124

The American consul and the minister were in complete agreement

thing: no incident had occurred. Not even for ten minutes had Mathilde set foot in Port-au-Prince. A whole day and night in the Bellevue, with a ragged band of guerrillas from Gonave? Impossible!

One would have heard about it! Ca se saurait! Moreover, it was simply not true that a single-engine two-seater plane with Air Force markings had plunged into the bay. All planes had been accounted for.

The Mathilde- Dessaignes dossier had in fact been closed eighteen months before, in Paris, after an unsatisfactory interview. It had never been reopened. This was the official word of the police, which Harold H. had to accept. It was evident that Mathilde had already taken his small place in the dark abyss of his country's history. He had disappeared into the past, leaving behind (on the Agracorinth) only a few personal be­ longings, which Harold H. turned over to the police: the safe, the suit­ cases and photographs, the several chickens, a goat.

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Five pieces Andrei Codrescu

The women of Transylvania The women are bent over, their spinal cord curves toward the back of

their necks, they look like question marks, all dressed in black, covered from head to toes by long woolen babushkas, they have long staffs and look like old witches. You can tell the old from the young only on the

night of their marriage and the way you can tell is by marrying one, buying one. If she turns out to be old after you buy her in marriage, it's your tough luck. There is no one to complain to. The women can be seen climbing out of their houses on ceramic ladders and crossing the narrow roads to the wooden wells. The wells of the village are all in one place, seven of them, on top of a hill. A big wooden crucifixion painted a pale blue stands in front of the wells and the women cross themselves before

drawing water. The legends of the well water make this a major operation. From the frog-turned -prince to the veil of Satan everything can be drawn out of the water. One is careful and especially the women, their nature is most inclined toward the manifestations of the uncanny, and they are careful. They can't draw from the wells when they have

their period. From the top of the Well Hill you can see the whole village, the architecture of which is extremely hostile to the whole feminine 127

TriQu&rterly

agent in nature, the houses are tightly packed mud solids, they stand up straight and smooth, there is only one window per house and it is covered with the bladder of a pig, dried and stretched across, instead of glass.

Each house seems to be built in opposition to the one next to it, there are no

tunnels, only walls. Compare this to the architecture of sea peoples,

the villages are facing the sea, the houses are often interconnected and

the women sit together. Not here. You might be able to guess the women's age from their hands when they draw water, but you must be

awfully good at it because their hands are much alike, bark with caked mud in the cracks. After they fill their wooden pails they return to their houses, climbing patiently, this is cliff face, some houses are at the very top of the huge boulders, and they climb for a very long time, careful not to spill any, excruciatingly slow like in Japanese movies. In Japan, though, there is a need for that discipline of water because there isn't any, but here in the mountains the springs abound, likewise small rivers and lakes. Yet punishment for building a well in your own back yard or drawing water by tapping a spring is DEATH. There is no ready explanation for this practice.

Getting a cup of coffee at the Orange County Airport Two of us have shoes on. One of us is barefoot. The lady in the orange uniform behind the pillar is watching us. We enter the Airport Coffee Shop. You can't enter the Coffee Shop unless you have shoes on, says the lady in the orange uniform. One of us gives his shoes to the one of us who is barefoot because the one of us who is barefoot looks like she is

barefoot while the one of us who gives her his shoes looks like he always has shoes on. We enter the Airport Coffee Shop. No, no, says the lady in the orange uniform, one of you has no shoes on. But he looks like he

always has shoes on says one of us. No, no, says the lady in the orange uniform, he has no shoes but socks are OK. One of us who has both shoes and socks on takes off his shoes and gives them to the one of us who is barefoot. We enter the Airport Coffee Shop. No, no, says the man at the cash register, one of you has no shoes on. But the lady in the

orange uniform said that socks are OK, says one of us. No, no. We leave the Airport Coffee Shop. We walk into a Bank. I have to cash a check says one of us who has socks on. He walks up to the teller and gives her

the check. She looks at his socks. No, no, you can't cash this check, she 128

asks one of us.

says. We leave the Bank. Is there another coffee shop, There is, says someone looking at the shoes of one of us who looks like

she is always barefoot, there is Coco's. We walk into Coco's. You can't sit in the dining room, says the man behind the cash register, because one of you has no shoes on. But you can sit at the counter, he adds. There is no room at the counter. Every seat is taken by men wearing shiny black shoes. Can we have two napkins and some tape, says one of us, so we could make a pair of shoes? No, no, the man behind the cash register says, it's a nice idea but that's all it is: an idea. We leave Coco's.

Shoemaker in the sky, says the one of us with socks on, please finish my

shoes: I need a cup of coffee.

The queer poets' seance

"The timefor queer poets is past. What you have in the new 'gaypoetry' is the living sad example of what happens when an aristocracy becomes

'minority, 'when sophistication is replaced by militancy," said Cavafy by tapping lightly on the table after we had asked him for the third time what his opinion was. "Let's callRimbaud next," said Margaret, the a

red-faced medium from Wisconsin. Rimbaud didn't answer. He must have been busy. Next we called De Sade and asked him what he thought of hippies. He must not have been in a very good mood because he gave

long lecture on snakes and what we could possibly learn by attending a congress of vipers, copperheads, and water moccasins.

Cocteau, Sappho, and Hart Crane could not be found. Walt Whitman answered in riddles such as "The story of my poetry is the story of being surpassed by my own understanding." Shakespeare failed to materialize. We all went home. It was not a very good night for calling

us a

queer poets.

The long opera

for Ron Sukenick

Inside a strange car which is really a room turned inside out with the

upholstery and the family portraits on the outside sits a very peculiar man singing the Dictionary. He is going on thirty-three, he has sung for twenty years and now he is singing the word" OUT" and his voice isn't coming back except as a recorded message over the telephone singing the word" OUT" after each loud beep but not in the original voice it 129

was recorded in & in other

languages" AFARA" "FUORI" "DEHORS" etc. and in his astonishment he forgets to close his mouth and the ourside invades him completely until it's daylight and the tourists are coming in through his ears & face to have a look at the Singing Telephone.

The wild wild west "There will always be a bit of the phony in me but I'm losing my fear of darkness." He kept on loading the mule because the night didn't

following him from the bushes in which I was hiding.

These were peppermint bushes and I'm allergic to the stuff. The mule was loaded, the man got on it, and I got out and killed him. Bending over the body, I was surprised to find that the man was a woman. My shot had caught her square between the eyes. I put my hand between her legs.

She was still warm. "God, make her alive again!" I said, and God heard my prayer because she stirred and spread her legs. I am a woman too, so I wasn't at all surprised. After going down on her with my chapped desert lips and making her come I took off my rags and lay next to her and she did the same to me. Next day we walked into town, bought a couple of sacks of flour, and kept going west where the gold was, and after an encounter with sixty bandidos we got there safe, where our husbands were waiting for us with sinks full of dirty dishes. answer. I was

130

Two pieces Michael Benedikt

The nipplewbip

Besides, what else could this be, this toothpick with the long eyelash attached to it with a spot of glue? And, oh, here come the fervent horse­ men

riding down from shoulders now, in order to lift up the T-shirt or

brassiere. Devils, torturers, these fiends know all too well that too much talk about the nipplewhip could cost the poet his or her fellowship! The

poet and her/his love poems sink together into a gloom of handkissing. Meanwhile, all over the part of town with no taste, and no art,

laughing people are flinging themselves directly into the path of the nipplewhip.

CiIThosis of the liver

Only a mother should be asked to suffer what he did to his liver; none­ theless, he worried so much about it that before long it took on the character of a daughter; in his imagination it was dressed up in a little wig, and its scars all became smiles in the momingwhen she gurgled so sweetly in his early embrace, and his emotions of affection flowed like pure, untroubled running water. How well he remembered its child­ hood, its growing years which went by so swiftly-almost too swiftly, he 131

TriQuarlerly

wistfully thought-full, incredibly rich years in any case. How much time they spent together, how very close they were! There were of course other beneficial friendships in her early youth as well: her close con­ nection with her next-door neighbor, Little Miss Kidney; not to mention her sympathetic responses, which caused all the neighbors pleasure, to a certain vagrant and mysterious creature who used to drift around the neighborhood, and who some said would have died without her solici­ tations-her first and favorite pet, Pituitary. How they used to love to run along together through the forests of flesh, along with another forest creature, that veritable domesticated beaver, the ever-active

Pancreas, with whom she would regularly go swimming

....

And then, in

the midst of all these thoughts, a fact was thrown up to him by fate:

surely there would come a time when one day she would slip into her grown-up clothing, a clinging sheath of peek-a-boo net design; and some day soon after, he reflected, full of bitterness, she would meet a promising young man of medical bent, a date would be set up between them, and she would be taken out.

132

...

from Mabel: a story Robert Creeley

Seeing video-tape interview last night of four women, mostly young, who had been raped-one four times in a two-week period, newly arrived in New York from an upstate small town. And when she goes home, to be

safe, walking down street she knows by heart, someone there tries it.

And at this point she's so frustrated, freaked, and just plain angry she beats him up.

And. Who is it. Who's inside all this, who outside-where. Carolee

laughs, saying, "they think there's some kind of broken glass in there."

Or, "don't call me strong, layoffthat 'male measure' of 'reality: Is it water rna. My hair' s wet, my hands are all blood. A sandwich of pure meat, he used to say, floats by like adisattached pier. I got kids, man, I got kids-who are" girls" their mother (put quotes around that) "bore"-through the water, let us say, to that far distant shore.

In the head, mind pounding at the image, that hysterical face, very possibly one's own. He didn't know he was homosexual until they had tied both hands behind his back, spread his legs, and fucked him­ having beaten him for some hours previous. "

,

133

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Or-androgyne. Melt me. C/says, no go-we ain't got it, nothing out front, no tool, so to speak, nothing to prick with, no club to wave in the air, threatening.

There is a sense, you have to give it to me, you're holding out, you cock

teaser, you bitch. The chief of police in Berkeley says quite quietly he believes it must be the provocation these young women offer, for

example, hitchhiking, or simply walking the streets after six in the evening, say, with their present modes of dress. "No young woman or, more accurately-I cannot quote him because his language has rotted in my mind like garbage-"No girl of mine would But you would, and have-and endlessly fantasize its substance. The chief of police of any city in the country seems now afalsie, a dildo, an instrument of obscene intent factually.

You know they all want it. He dances, wiggling and croaking in falsetto. Oh, my dear "That is just absolutely terrific! The only thing we can now do is play another piece by Bach Again. And if they were home, and if they were safe, and if they were good, and if they would listen-as the monstrously gross thing, with breasts, with spread legs, lifts up, in Sweden, with sweetly sick candy colors, permits the entry, into her, of daily crowds, hordes, of persons, rushing to be born no doubt-or just to see what it's like inside there. They never knew it was so roomy, for example, nor that they'd have friends eating popcorn alongside.

This is notthe "playhouse" in the park's playgrounds for the kids, where they watch as the guy keeps the knife at her throat while groping her, and someone, a volunteer, steps up from the audience to light his cigarette since his hands are busy. Back home they wonder how Mabel is making out and hope she has remembered to write them as she said she "

...

"

...

...

"

....

would.

But my own hair, brown, grows long and tickles my back, and my breasts point provocatively, and myclit grows slick, and I finger it,

faster, and faster, and-ahhh. And I amonlyaman, and a husband, and a father. I am not to blame.

I used to pray in the night for the unexpected, though devoutly

prayed-for, advent of some heavy number with unidentifiable "arms" and "legs" though the wings I could spot on the instant as "it" flew 134

through the window, and into my arms. I thought it was God in drag, possibly. I thought that no one would blame me for this communion.

With this dear thing. Libel laws alone would prevent the violation of personal privacy. Elsewise they dragged her through the field by her hair, claiming that she had asked for it-that insistent phrase-and for two thousand years had done nothing else but bother them at their labors. Whereas the thing had no possible occasion finally but that created in our meeting=-despite it was only in my mind or its-and was not offensive in the least.

Is it a "hank ofhair"-a table, achair? Did you sit down, or stand up, in

that body? Can't we dance, can't we melt, into one another--so good?

Dear thing.

I feel so righteous, reallycool! I have the world, no less, altogether

within the strictness of my entirely just and responsive mind. And, dear

ladies, no possible harm shall now come to you-because? Because I am here, and my wise and fond regard protects you from all harm, from all

misunderstanding or misuse-and hand in hand, you and us, me-s, will stagger on until I really gettired, or bored, or just forget the whole business until some meat package thumps me to consciousness-and I smile, and love and be, most truly, aman.

Here homage to Leonard Cohen, who remarked that more has gone down apropos ofthe two- inch pinch of skin just fore of a woman's vent

than possibly from any other cause whatsoever. Which is to say, real

estate, man's estate, to sit in state-Les Etats- Unis! God bless George

Washington, the first Presidentto put wooden teeth in the place he most expected to find them-his own mouth. How simple, once one knows the answer. And you walk around in the echoing tunnels nothing at all to be these sewers which are feared, shores, mydear: a channel for draining a ,

pond.

Was it Voyage to the Bottom of the Night, or TheMillPond's

Gone, that most influenced you as a youth? Did you walk hand in hand with yourself? Did you hide round the corner when

your sister,

you gay devil, stomped from the bathroom with fresh flesh gleaming

rose? Was your mother your first love? Jim

the setting sun catches his extended

goes out for a long one and

quivering body in its last glowing so-called ray. There are sighs deep down in Rosedale for this youth's 135

acquiescent ability. We'll have him for supper I We eat him on the spot!

Therefore why was it, when discovered on the parking lot's pavement with the young woman who was atthe time my best friend's girl, thatthe

policeman said, go home? We sat, sad years later, she and I, and we were waiting to hear Charley Parker for the first time for either of us. She told attempts to become an actress had foundered and that she was living with a practically famous novelist who was in Palm Springs for a while, and the world had got vague and out of hand. Across from us was an me

old friend who eventually put me down as well, but that night he just looked at her, distant, didn't he said remember her, although she tried to locate herself for him, Helen, but he didn't respond and no doubt had

his reasons.

There was another friend who'd come to the island we then lived in, or on, for an abortion, and I happened to run into her at the restaurant of the

small pension where she was staying. She looked markedly down and ill, she hadjust had the operation and was still bleeding heavily. I was a young

thoughtful, I thought, of women, but beyond that-because it is a true abstraction-I really liked her and invited her to come back to the

man

house with me, and stay with us until she felt better. Later that same

evening another friend, a warmly decent one, came on to her, she was very handsome, and she tried to explain her disinterest, but he couldn't let go of it till some one of us made clear what was the cause of her preoccupa­

tion. Then, of course, he backed, off, confused, suspicious even that she

might now not like men at all.

In my head-in men's heads generally, put it-is something like a memory or perhaps more accurately the sound, thefeel, of water. One cannot live finally too f arfrom the sea, it is endlessly a place ofinitial

being. I want, one day, to sail away on it, go out, forever.

Today, in the meantime, we were talking, after the class was over, of ways in which men might be called, or referred to, by women. Onewoman suggested brother. This, another friend, aman, said, atleastimplied family. With me, with my grandson, for instance, I would welcome, even yearn for, the hierarchic title that gives our relation its place in our male imagination of the world: grandpa. My own father died when I was so 136

young I neverfeltthat experience articulately. which is to say, I can never remember calling anyone consciously "father" in that precise way.

And yet. I don't know. So much has rotted in the distortions of this con­

sciousness, this presumption of reality, that I would yield its rationales and logics not very painfully at all. Or not-perhaps. Even would fight

without mind at all, toprotectthem.

More literally, I had been thinking of Mabel, dumb, poor thing, in this case, hoping for help possibly if she thought of anything at all. She is drab

beyond description, and invites really nothing of any consequence. She is poor, in body, in pocket, in life. Myself, who so projects beauty, a clarity of women, am impatient and irritated by her simple fact. I do not want my own life to know her. She frightens me. She invites a penitence I do not yet understand.

137

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Remember me to Camelot: A novel written by Naomi Ruth Sunder, a character in the novel Family Life Russell Banks

1 -Be good toKay, Rex instructed his eldest son, Bif. Your mother's never been on her own

before, she doesn't know how to take care of

herself, Son, he explained to the boy.

I stood somberly in the center of the living room with Hunter and

Rory, fighting back the tears, proud of our three little boys, our little men, but proudest of Rex, my husband, because I understood the deep pain he was feeling at this, the moment of his departure. He was leaving us-perhaps forever.

Our country in her need had called him from the side of his loved ones, and he had no choice but to go. Rex was a major in the Air Force

Reserve, and his unit had been activated for combat duty in Vietnam, which at that time I couldn't even have located on a map. They needed all the veteran pilots they could get, and Rex, in Korea more than a decade earlier, before Bif was born, had been one of the best in the skies.

He had been almost legendary, and as he leaned down to kiss me

goodbye, I saw him wink away a tear with a brave grin, and I knew that he was still one of the best.

139

TriQuarlerly

We kissed, long and joyously, and then he patted each of us on the top of the head and walked out the door to the waiting car.

2 It was true, what Rex had said to Bif-I had never been on my own

before, and I didn't know how to take care of myself. I had been the only child of protective parents, raised in Sarasota, Florida, where, as a fif­ teen-year-old girl trying out for the cheerleading squad, I had met Rex. He was two years older than I, a junior and the captain of the football team.

We fell in love that autumn, the season I made the cheerleading

squad and the football team went undefeated, and from the first ours was love that never wavered or wandered off center. Rex was everything I wasn't, and thus it was only with him and through him that I felt com­ pleted. He was stern and disciplined, sophisticated yet roughhewn, gentle but at the same time demandingly straightforward.

And there was a sense in which I completed him, too, for I allowed him to be tender and naive, shy and insecure=character traits he other­ wise would have been ashamed of and would have denied himself.

3 As soon as Rex graduated from Sarasota High, we got married. It was

the summer of 1950 and the second half of the twentieth century had

just begun. How were we to know that war with the Orientals would break out and, within a year, with me pregnant, would separate us?

Rex went to Texas as an Air Force cadet and earned his wings in

record time. I closed up our little apartment, put our wedding gifts and

furniture in storage, and went home to live with my mother and father.

Three weeks after Rex had left Texas for Korea, I gave birth to our first son, Rex, Jr., whom Rex in his letters instructed me to call "Bif,

"

the

by which he had been known when he played fullback for Sara­ sotaHigh.

Even from that great a distance, Rex was a doting father. My parents and I would laugh gaily over his long letters, filled with careful instruc­ name

tions as to how we should care for his namesake and how my parents

should care for me. In some ways, Rex was able to make it seem that he had never left. In my heart, though, I knew how far away he really was.

140

4 But now it was twelve years later, and just as the Vietnam war was

different from the Korean, Rex's absence from his family was different.

Over a decade had passed between the wars, and our life together and our lives

separately had changed in many subtle ways.

When Rex had come back from Korea, taller, leaner and, yes, harder

than when he had left, we had been able to resume our life almost as if there had been no interruption at all. And in a real way-for, when he had been drafted, our life together had not yet had a chance to begin­ there was no interruption. As if his absence had never existed, and as if

begun at all, we were able to begin anew.

We bought anew, three-bedroom mobile home with a cathedral ceiling in a mobile-home park over by the Bay, and Rex went back to work for his father's plumbing company, ajourneyman plumber as be­ fore, starting at the bottom as before. But -The sky's the limit! he used to say to me, late at night as we talked in bed of our plans and hopes for

we had not

the future.

I was newly pregnant with Hunter and, touching my swelling womb,

feeling the life stir there, knew how right he was.-Oh, Rex, not even the sky can limit us! I would tell him, as he drifted peacefully off to sleep.

5 Hunter was born, a healthy, bright child, serious and intense from birth,

just as Bif had been boisterous and cheerfully gregarious from birth.

Hunter's personality brought out another side of Rex, a side I hadn't seen before. With his second son, Rex was

somber, morbid almost, en­

couraging in the boy-and thus in himself-activities that were solitary, physically strenuous, and somewhat dangerous, such as hunting and deep-sea fishing, rock climbing, scuba diving. Was this a result of his war experiences, things he wouldn't talk about, couldn't talk about, even to me? I wondered helplessly.

-What else are you going to do with a boy named Hunter? Rex would tease me whenever I asked him why, for example, he was encouraging his son to hunt alligators in the swamps with Negroes.

-But he's only a boy, I would plead.

-A boy's only a small man, he would explain to me.

I was no less concerned over Rex's enthusiasm for Bif's adventures in 141

sports-Uttle League baseball, Pop Warnet football, playing for two or three different teams at a time, day and night, throwing, batting, kicking balls, sobbing exhausted and disconsolate whenever his team had failed to humiliate the other.

6 When our third son was born, I named him Rory, after Rex's father, and

determined to protect him, if possible, from the several influences of his father that 1 was fast learning to be frightened of.

As aspects of his whole personality, Rex's fierce competitive pride, his love of sports and danger, and his occasional dark fascination with soli­ tude did not in any way alarm me. But in our sons, one or another and sometimes several of these aspects became dominant, intimidating and,

eventually, I feared, killing the milder, sweeter traits which in Rex made me love him-his tenderness, his shyness, his naivete, and his insecurity.

Immediately, it seemed, Rex sensed my protectiveness toward Rory, and he subtly undermined me, encouraging and thereby instilling in his youngest son yet another negative aspect of his own personality.

-You're like your mother, he would tell him. All emotions. Now, your mother is a wonderful woman, and I'm pleased that one of my sons is like her, so don't go thinking I'm putting you down, Son.

But of course poor Rory thought his father was rejecting him, so the

only emotion he allowed himself to feel with passion was anger-raging, explosive anger, even as a child.

7 Thus it was with deeply mixed emotions that I watched my husband in his Air Force major's uniform stride down the steps of our blue mobile

home, cross the pebbled driveway to the white convertible waiting for him at the curb, pausing a second at the sidewalk to give Bif's soccer ball

friendly boot into the goal in the side yard. And then, flinging his flight bag into the back seat, he jumped into the low-slung car without opening the door and signaled to the lieutenant to take off-which, with a great roar of exhausts and squealing of tires, the lieutenant did.

Little did 1 know that I would never see my husband, my beloved Rex, again. If 1 had known it, or even had suspected it (I was so enthralled with the man that 1 imagined him winning the war quickly and a

142

returning home in a season), I never would have allowed myself to feel the wave of relief that swept over me as he drove away. I did not then un­ and naturally I felt terrible for having it, as if I derstand that

feeling,

possible. Without him, I had no reason for living. I knew that I loved him deeply. Why, then, did I feel

were an evil woman. Rex had made my life

this hatred for him?

8

Happily, the feeling swiftly went away, and I began to miss Rex awfully. I stayed up late night after night writing long, amorous letters to him (one thing about my Rex, he was a marvelous lover). My days were busier than ever, taken up completely with the boys and my house­ keeping.

Then one night, late that summer, I was startled from my letter­ writing by a telephone call from the Tampa hospital. There had been a terrible accident, the doctor told me, on the causeway between St.

Petersburg and Tampa; and my mother and father, who had driven over to look at a new Golden Age planned community, had been killed. I quickly got my friend Judy from the trailer next door to baby-sit and took a bus to Tampa, as the doctor had suggested, to identify my poor mother and father.

-Yes, it's they! I sobbed.

The doctor, a kind, handsome, youngman with a blond moustache, comforted me by holding me in his arms. -There, there, he said, you'll be all right. They went together, he reminded me. Think how much that would have meant to them.

I wiped my tears, blew my nose, thanked him for all his trouble, and

walked slowly out of the hospital into the cool, palmy night, terrified.

9

Now I was truly on my own-in spite of what Rex had said to Bif. He had known as well as I that a twelve-year-old boy can't take care of a twenty­

eight-year-old woman. He had said it mainly for Bifs benefit, not mine-so the boy would feel the proper responsibility, regardless of whether or not he could act on it.

At first, I had felt sorry for Bif, who was trying hard to live up to the terms of his charge, but then, as he began increasingly to order me 143

around, I started to feel anger toward him. As long as my mother and father were still alive, I was able to get Bif to stop worrying over me

simply by assuring him that Grandpa was taking care of us all while Daddy was away in Vietnam. But after the accident, even that assurance was no longer possible.

Then finally, one evening six months after my parents' death, all my anger flooded over. I served the boys a supper of turkey hash on toast, leftovers from the roast turkey of the night before, and Bif slammed his little fists down on the table and said loudly, -We never had to eat this crap when Dad was at home I What makes you think it's any different now?

I slapped him across the mouth with my open hand as hard as I could,

sending him spinning off his chair to the floor. After calling Judy over to baby-sit, I stomped out and caught the bus to Tampa.

10 I arrived home again just before dawn (the doctor, Ben, insisted on

driving me in his new Buick sedan), exhausted, slightly woozy from the gin-and-tonics, and, in spite of the endless shame I felt, still raging. The combination of guilt and anger was almost too much to bear, and I was afraid I was going mad, though Ben assured me that I was not, that it was perfectly normal for the wife of a man in the service to feel this way.

I sent Judy home, and while I waited for the boys to get up for their breakfasts, I sat down and tried to write a letter to Rex. I began the letter many times, tearing each new attempt to shreds just as I got to the place where I had to tell him I had let Ben make love to me. I couldn't do it. I

just couldn't make that man's life any more painful than it already was.

I remembered his last letter to me, received the day before: Kay, honey, even though I'm 9,000 miles away from you and the boys, my heart and mind are there with you, believe me. I still feel that I'm the King in that little kingdom. I feel like a government-in-exile or something, waiting for the signal from you, or from somebody, that it's okay to return. (Hey, I'd better be careful or the military censors wiD think I'm talking politics, eh? Ha, hal)

At last I heard the boys happily slamming each other pillows, and

wearily I got up and started setting the table for breakfast.

144

11

That very afternoon, I received the letter from Washington, D. c., the

Department of Defense, informing me that Rex's plane had been shot down by the enemy while on a mission over North Vietnam, and he had been taken prisoner. He was now a POW and, as far as they knew, he was not injured.

In that one brief moment, as I read the letter, I felt my life turn over

and go back to zero and start anew, the opposite of drowning. I still loved Rex, of course, but deep inside, I said a prayer of thanks to the

North Vietnamese gunners who had shot him down. I would never be able to explain that gratitude to anyone, I was sure, and I probably could not explain it even to myself, but I could not deny to myself that I felt it, no matter how hard I tried. And

though I was not especially proud of the

feeling, neither was I ashamed of it.

I joined a group of POW wives from central Florida, and for a while went around with them, speaking to groups of men who were said to have influence in Washington in ways that would somehow benefit the POWs. But I could never quite understand how POWs or their wives could benefit from a more aggressive war policy, so I dropped out of the group. I took good care of my sons and our home, saw Ben about once a month, and just sort of cooled my heels for a while.

12

Gradually I became used to the idea that I was on my own and therefore had no choice but to take care of myself. I enrolled in night school and got my high school diploma with an ease that astounded me. I went on a diet and exercise program and studied yoga at the Sarasota YWCA. I started sending Rory to a reading clinic, because of his disability, and no

longer insisted that the boys get their haircuts where their father had always got his. I started trying new foods, exotic dishes, and occasionally took in an X-rated movie with Ben. I took driving lessons, got my license, and borrowed the money from a bank to buy a Japanese station wagon.

Rex would have forbidden me to do all these things, if he'd been there, and when the war is finally over and he has been repatriated, he will come home again, and I hope we both can sit down and cry for what has been lost. If he can't do that, I will leave him.

145

The notebooks of Antony Lamont Gilbert Sorrentino

A bag of the blues How does such perfection come to pass? How is it so nurtured, so

brought to clear and dazzling fruition? Other females by the thousands enter into this the teary world yet do not blossom into orange butter­

flies like Daisy, glorious flowers, amarillo nodding gently, beautifully in the mellow sun of long and luscious summer afternoons, the fields

awaiting splendid autumn, the rusty-red and orange-yellow hues and tints that do enchant the eye. But greater than the flittering butterfly and sweeter still than any flower stands she, all in her splendor. More than splendor, whisper many men who've moved for years in circles all agleam with lissome women, winsome wives, and mistresses of famous muliebrity. Delightful damsels, haughty, laughing ladies hidden ineffectually behind their burning blushes. Yet none so proud as Daisy fair, none crimson so enticingly. There is a claret in her face. She is a credit to her race.

Over what rooftops of what mammoth city did the sun come beaming the day that she was born? On what sea-laved coast of this great con­ tinent did moon cast her loony beams the quiet night that saw her here arrived? None can say or dare to even hint since all think silently yet 146

TriQuatterly

strongly that her gracious form, so pure and radiant, appeared like Aphrodite, to whom she might be a sister, suddenly, full-blown and grown, modest hands concealing partially her charms, upon the trackless vast and heaving sea, spawned in fairy foam, breakers thun­ dering her praise. So they think! But know that she is mortal, more's the wonder then that she should be so pretty.

I place her in Venusian fantasies upon a stage, an honor scroll so

lightly grasped in her delovely hand, the parchment stating Daisy fair to be the most remarkable and wondrous pupil in her school, blue-ribbon girl! I can see the judges' eyes. She must have made the cutest bow. 0 fair streets of what bowery Flatbush that she danced upon, delirious they sweated sycamores and salvia, butternuts and phlox. Her black hair and ebon eyes the perfect complement to her chaste uniform of navy blue, her modest jumper with starched white blouse the screen for her young

virgin's body, pure and alabaster, a beauteous fountain of exquisite planes and curves immaculate. Fontbonne! Fontbonne Daisy. Head bent, soft nape opalescent 'neath her coalblack tresses, thus she studied Latin, algebra, science, trigonometry, and mental health.

Nursing. And there she now appears in white, a walking dream, a dreamy walker, Atalanta, Flossie Nightingale, the brave broads of cruel Corregidor brought to you courtesy of silver screens, behind her, crisp blue skies of afternoon October, crisp white wind. Below, a team plays football. They offer up their bruises and their sweat and blood to Daisy.

Beside me, in a bar. 0 college! In dark apartment in an orange dress. I am stricken by thick Berlioz, fat tones first heard with her, those soft hands washing coffee cups, later dark nights upon cold sands, the sea close pounding, her graceful Roman lips, her fine Hebraic nose, luminous the face beneath me, freezing winds. In yellow skirt and blue print blouse she walks with me down roads all milky in the moonlight.

We can hear the crickets singing. Cars vague on other roads and we sit en­ tombed in youth, her black sweater and her slacks melting into melting blackness of the willow plunging. Will she remember me? Does she remember? Who will have now a quietthoughtfor all I lost so silently?

The fall rains? Moonlight on the lake? In a tavern in the misty Bronx we made promises both of us broke ruthlessly. That orange dress, cashmere coat. A bit of silk about her throat. Smiling while behind her tolled the bells of Brooklyn. LaGuardia the lofty looked gigantically down.

147

I hear her

leading cheers. Rah! I see her calming fears. Ah! The one bright spot against the brown pain of the hospital, she lightens agonies with perfect French, oh la! Eyes across a crowded party goes the old cliche and yet. Across the noise she came to me and spoke her name.

Daisy. Darling D, your brown-and -tan checked dress and beige high heels glitter in my dreams. Your vodka crackling as your lovely laughter, love medo. Love me always and forgive me for the Christmas Eve I left, for everything, Halloween, Labor Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and all the numbed and nasty New Year's Eves. For leaving, for staying, cruelty, praying, all my fault. I see you walk away across the smoky park into the gloaming. Farewell! Sad girl. I cry on the phone for your return.

That thou shouldst enter under my roof. Beneath me move the trees beneath which reel the drunks. Lees. Speak but the word and my soul shall be healed. Silence save for pigeons on the roof. And bitter tears.

She is lovely. She's the maid makes men moan childishly their fond

desires. Walks out of the night. Entrancing. Walks into the light.

Enchanting. Hearts on fire with romancing. Under thick suburban leaves she says 0 yes. Under the copper beech on a bench past which the

glassy bay flows syrup toward the open sea, 0 yes. Moans and groans in the dark, the starlight mirrored in her hair, her odor fair, 0 yes. Her hair coiffed in my reverie in smooth chignon, her blackgold earrings, sweet Latin fumy in her eyes. I fall, we fall. You like it? You keep it! A cabin, once a small garage, with flagstone patio. There we sat. Golden deities, immortal. Peach rose beneath her tan, rose peach, my tan on hers and rain on the roof, we stood in the torrent and kissed, my body shaking with a fever. Years later her kidsmooth hands slipped into mine while carols rang while skaters waltzed. Shoppers bought and sellers raved.

Grey grim evening swiftly fell on old Manhattan. Then the starless night and snow.

Gown the color of a pumpkin, homage to the fall, in spacious living room with harvest

lights, gleaming grand piano. There did I make my way through the lost leaves, russet, crunching, smoke spiced the air.

Hello. How the lamp gleamed on her hair, so carefree and cosmo­ politan. Silvery dream of youth rewarded with silvery dream. Famous snake that chews its luscious tail. I'll permit her to not bite her nails but instead to grow them long and pearly. Color of morning. Which she may hold against her suit, her fingers spread. Color of moon.

148

I found her sweet, in linen suit, night black. I found her greeneyed.

Found her browneyed. Her slow smile came across the dark air of the

porch. The willow weeping bitterly into the river, rock away. Place me there in silver beams! Chase me through my sunset dreams. The rainbow arched to Europe and we walked beneath it. We moved upon the beach.

The screams of gulls. In an orange dress. Sitting in my chair I watched her smooth her stocking, frozen smile as suddenly she turned to face me, carmine. The empty wire hangers in the closet set up music when we entered it. Mr. and Mrs. Bravado. Was it true that I punched the green fence that enclosed the field upon which young men smashed their limbs for her most careless glance? I desire nothing but the bluest Buick ever

made, with whipped cream top and spanking whitewalls. To match

the color of her father's hair. Silky J ewess, it must have been that fine­ drawn Catholic forehead and the rosary beads that hung between her

breasts. How she healed the hurts of doomed and dying desperadoes.

When she changed the sheets her skirt slipped up and my stars, Daisy!

Firm thighs, her tarblack hair and violet smile. So that the sick would

rise and whistling gambol to their graves.

What fascinating world did she escape to before this sudden re­

appearance? Erect wife of ex-football star, now a huge success in the financial world, novel in the works? Skull and Bones, Porcelli an, old Eli Nassau. Vast windows that command Madison or Vanderbilt. Or did she stride the cobalt shores of Florida, down in sunny Dade? Through rosy glasses how the chalky beach turned pink. And here is handsome lo! A CCNY grad, his auburn curls aglisten with intelligence and

hubby, rose

oil, his workout body wet with handball sweat. Rum and maple and

a full mustache. Golden

Daiquiris and rosydawn Bacardis. Then the night all licorice and spearmint.

In the eye of the mind at the end of the bar. I send a drink to her,

my

heart in miniature afloat in it, a Valentine Fizz, concocted of blood and desire. Her eyes were dark, ah! Thick hair, full lips. A smile of old San

Juan, still streets in deepest purple shade. Outside, winter wonderland.

Will she adore me? She waited in the rain. Over coffee her slender

fingers spread against the table top, a golden chain around the first one and on that chain a car key. That fantastic carriage waited, skyblue magic carpet. Beyond the city all the roads were choked with snow and suddenly the warm sun brought forth palm trees! But I walked back into 149

my life. Later on she wed an artist, a painter of paintings? A writer of

books. A man for whom too often just the page was real, persistent strain of dread pen fever that thinned out his blood. A sad case, a des­

perate Dan, arrogant and bitterly satirical, a dreamy vacancy about the eyes, hewas on Sundays sullen, Mondays moody, Tuesdays tough; wavering on Wednesdays, thick on Thursdays, Fridays fatheaded,

Saturdays silly. Out of such what he liked to call steadiness and per­ severance came the endless pages few read and fewer praised. The man who braved the beach at Coney Island! I can't drive I muttered I think and we bade fond adieu. In the rain.

So the years, as well they might, they passed. Erratically I hear of her,

the gentle nightingale, samaritan in white. She has been observed a­

motoringthrough bosky Jacksontown; there she stands in sterile Santa Fe, communing with lorenzo scrub; in the Rue Royale her precious frame is cooled by an antique ceiling fan, a Bogie Breezeking; one gent spotted her in downtown San Francisco de la Cupcake where poems die at thirty-two degrees; a fool on a hill. Much of her time was spent gazing lazily into the sea all bottlegreen and creamy-that was in old Gotham town. To variegated Vegas-there you feel free!-she fled. Totalliber­ ation with lgrms, swmg pi, tv, air cond, and babystg. In vasty desert where the one-armed bandits prey, where the dimsouled losers play, where all say together: It's healthy! It's sunny! It's a dry dry heat!

Against the flickering mirage her swanny uniform, shiny as a silver buck. She was also glimpsed in rainy San Antone nibbling neatly on cabrito, munching while the mariachis played their bright vermillion tunes. AneyedescriedherassheetaNeccoonthedecko'theStaten Island ferry. Everyone back on the bus and hurrah for St. George! Can that be she before the roaring pifion blaze in Christsblood Range? Sold!

It's healthy! It's sunny! It's a dry dry cold! And now in smartly tailored Harris tweed, trim in soft brown walking shoes with modish cloche she strolls the steelblue black and golden canyons of fabled Manahatta, which yet she will beat, on her crisp way to view the latest in the way of modern art-all made for her, zany painters cluttering the canvas in her name! Telegrams arrived placing her in Sausalito, cozy 'mid the cups and pottery, the margarine sun has made a halo round her hair. Now she's seen wining and diningwithJ. Armstrong, A.A.B., the naval hero of the fierce fight on the broad Potomac. A farflung correspondent 150

aims to tell me that she's in the arms of Hosie Martin, the sheepshearing

king, within the sound of mission bells down---<>le-Mejico way. He's the millionaire turned gourmet cook who shakes up God's own Ramos

Fizz; in a pinch he puts out Royal'Punch. But then who's the knockout

dreaming on the banks of the mighty Mississippi in lazy Memphis town? My informant wired that if it warn't Daisy then he's crazy. She appears. She disappears. She steals your heart away! On a picture postcard of a sunset all spumoni, a tourist scrawls the news of the full figure of a female proud against the western sky, musing on a mesa in Coconino County-who else but Daisy? Flash! A tomato slicer name of Garry Bee has placed her, sweet arms holding eleven--count 'em­ British writers in a large sedan heading for the lots. In sum, intel­ ligence has come fixing her: you name it-she's been there. Often anonymous, alias who? darkly incognito, in banging city and snoozing town, communiques poured in of a wonder woman who got what she wanted when knowing what it was she wanted to want. After the leventy­ seventh report these seemed to be her preferred personae: Alice Awk­ ward in Abilene; Baltimore's own beautiful Belle; Clarissa Cuddles, the cynosure of Cincinnati; Dora Darling of Denver; Eleanor Envy of Erie, Pa.; faithless Frances from Flint; Green Bay's good Grace Gulp; Hannah Hots, the Hartford hoyden; the Indianapolis imp, Inez Impure; Jane Joint, Jackson's joy; Kora Kalm of Kalamazoo; Lima's lewd Lena

Lust; musical Mary Moan, lush Miami's maiden melodious; Newark's new Negro, Nina Nonsense; Omaha's oddball, Olivia Ogle; in Peoria, Patricia Perfidia; Queenie Quenynte from Quincy; ravenous Rose Room, the rage of Reno; Sheila Sham, the shame of Shreveport; temperate Tess Trueheart, Tulsa's true treasure; Una Unique in Utica; Violeta Virago, the virgin vile of Venice; Wanda Wiles, Watchung'S whiz; XinaXanthodont, the xantippe of Xenia, yummy Yolande Yes, the yen of Yellow Springs; and Zenobia Zealot of Zook. Yet underneath these visages so different lay, of course, the unpolluted heart of sunny

Daisy. She'd look sweet on any street.

She came in dreams to me as well as waking, scrubbed and silv'ry, in

filmy deshabille, knowing full well how to please a he-man! Blushing with modesty, flushing with shame, attar of innocence. Sometimes at even, when old God threw his mantle cool all about the earth and

sizzling Sol did lower weary bones into his tub pacific, she'd materialize 151

for me, a dark shy girl among her tittering schoolmates, blinding beauty in her First Communion dress, white veil, white

stockings, and white

patent leather shoes, all in a state of grace by Christ. In her white hand her missal white, a cross of gold upon its cover. Empty from her holy fast she eyes the good grey priest, old Father McPenance, agleam as well in his own white and gold. Hallelujah! 0 Lord, I am not worthy whispers she. I woke to emptiness and gloom, world without end, vague

rustling

in the air. I rushed back wildly then to Nodland, forgetting hope, for­

getting supper, forgetting all that good get-up and go for her honey face, her willow frame, her milky breasts, her splendid thighs, her calf so firm and ankle slim, her smile muy tropical. Once upon a twilight dreamy she brought me cakes and cookies, wine and cheese, electric bulbs and laughter, freshly laundered clothes, her body glimmering in sandwhite flannel suit; on a thick and humid August midnight she arrived in bloodyred,ablazingtorchinhand, the flames reflected in her ember eyes, her face as if she'd seen a ghost; hopefully stammering of sweet amour she came on a rainy April eve, her thighs whispering in nylon smooth below the hem of her green sheath; in the middle of a night of violent storm she touched me in my bed in violet gown (to match her

suffering smilel) to beg my pardon for her lack of care; in watered silk the blush of rose at just that moment when the sunset is dissolving, she entered, all in a swoon of joy for love of me; one bitter night, the thunder vying with the blizzard fell, she came when only evil spirits are about, in black dress, stockings, shoes, her pearls all black and lips obsidian-I woke and mourned the death of our desire. The thought must perish and be banished too.

Name me your heavenly harlots and virginal dames! Daisy will put

them to shame. Her derriere would make a Sunday face for them. I am

reminded of a hefty wench by name of Babs LaBoca, spawned in large heartland where the corn roams free and no word e' er discourages. By many thought to be the sheer epitome of female splendor, the Planter's

Punch, the caviar, the squeeze play, and the banana split with walnuts and an extra dollop of whipped cream, this upstart turned into a

rutabaga when held against our Daisy. Another babe, Luba Checks, the younger sister of the wolfgirl, Loba de Crochet Rouge, while well versed in the minor poets of the fm de siecle, was also quite a dish. Enter D: whish! the broad has disappeared in the storm of adulation that broke 152

upon our darling's shining sconce. Meanwhile, the latter reddened fetchingly. Sis Loba, clicking and gnashing her lupine teeth horrif­

ically, did a dozen former swains of her kid sister eatthat night, yet nothing helped restore Miss Checks the Younger to her former reputa­ tion. Daisy laughed low in her porcelain throat, her pearls all moony in the starlight. Then there was dark Sydelle, Our Lady of the Staghorn Sumac, who spent her youth stiffnippled and a-daze, kissing puberty­ stricken boys until their groins turned blue and ached. Her coffee­ colored eyes boiled as her tongue supreme sought out their yearning tonsils. Then to the lakeland of New Jersey Daisy came one soft June night and the goddess of the groves removed to Oklahoma. I could go on and on, weaving old yarns of languorous lovelies with new needles -of Pat the Pink of freckles in the porchlight; lanky Lona Labios, the Coke sucker; Margy Van Cortlandt, Miss Labor Day of 1948; Diana Roofe, a sweetheart if there ever was one; Mary Philomena Marshall, with lavender spring coat and cross of palm; Rose Bexar on the Alamo, chewing on a Coney Island, and many more who exuded waves of womanhood. But each male fantasy, 0 shame! played out in bluelit boudoirs of the mind, starred always Daisy as its ingenue. In silks and lace, in casual duds, mixing cocktails, laying plates, in taffeta and nylon, mashing spuds, hanging curtains, laughing gaily, spraying Windex, cranking ice cream, shelling peas, carrying the sprightly con­ versation, smooth in spandex, long of leg, wide of mouth, bright of teeth and deep of bosom, wrapping gifts and waxing floors, trimming bright the Christmas tree! and each small act had as its coda: Love.

In bed. On floor. Behind the sofa. Against the wall. In basket, bath, or bloom. in the foyer. On the kitchen table, nookie in the the breakfast nook, on easy chairs and carpets and a bet. Love laughing, panting, tears and smiles and yelps and moans and those musky odors dizzying, the kind that make a fellow leave the town. Ask Young Goodman Brown. Ask Pastor Christian Baptist who laid his Bible down. All for the love of Miss D. Dream, sweet upon her seat, her lustrous gams at forty­ five degrees gesturing toward heaven. All the while she's reading a good book and listening to everything with warm smile and her patient understanding. What is life without a wife? Peaches and cream with Daisy!

I tortured and enthralled myself a thousand times imagining her as 153

my gay companion on merry madcap tours of the incandescent city and

its most exclusive spots. Would it be beer in Flynn's, with pretzels and

the hoi polloi, dropping coins in the jukebox, nimbly hopping the honest vomit of the working man? She shone a blinding light through all the

smoke-it was her teeth the whiteness of a cloud, that turned that trick. ,

Another fashionable spot, dubbed the Lion's Den by the jovial and drunken lamb who owned it, might serve as the scene wherein this gorgeous girl and I could quaff a nightcap of that good Green River, guaranteed to clean old leather and unclog your drains. At Pat's, the Pabst is passing lovely in the afternoon and fine old Gallagher's, the

Subway Inn, might show us to our elbows in the free lunch, while Martin, King of the Ducks, soothes our ears with imported Oirish Oil. In immaculate Anel's my snowy shirtfront and her shoulders chaste

make that flower never to be found in a bouquet; their Mallarme cock­

tails (white creme de menthe and ocean spray) are world renowned. I ache when I think of the ecstasy of D and me, fresh returned from our

Chinese honeymoon, sharing Presbyterians in quiet Carroll's or gulping

glt5g in stout Leif Eriksson's, pie-eyed sailors reeling to the floor. And who of those who make up the legion of the absolute select has not heard of Henry's and its stained glass windows that bathe the mellow room in rainbows of a Sunday afternoon? How I've dreamed of Daisy there, her midnight hair a thousand points of color! In the intimate Pink Poodle Room in back, where it is always twilight, there you feel knees. We swill the nutty brew in Fritz's and in Lento's, while the angels sing, we order pizza pie du jour beneath the plaque commemorating Monte Count's brave contribution to romance. I've even thought (a shamel) of jazzing her in Papa Joe's, a hump for joy! That topers' retreat, the Melody Room, has often been my dreamy spot in which I got the lass so boiled.

Cheap thrill to come. Just a few blocks down, in the quiet hush of ele­ gance that spells White Shutter, I see the envy in a score or more of bluestraw eyes, the wash and wears standing to attention as I enter with my dilly Daisy. Oh how sweet! Surprise. They mumble with their whorish pink ladies and their salty Margarets malcontent. Did I men­ tion dancing with that delicacy beneath the orange lights of clammy Imbriale's? Another pipedream. Lastly a thought I hardly dare ac­ knowledge. Black with sin, blue with desire, red with embarrassment, and green with envy is the lulu played out in the Keg, so dark by day as well as night that the waiters grope their way with flashlights and the 154

customers are seen in fitful beams occasional to be dumb with lust, their

bodies on the floor so many thrashing limbs. Were I to tell of my desires anent my one alone and this cabaret-but let it lie. A sigh. Many a

cherry was plucked in that gloom. May saints preserve them! Let us pray.

Forgetting for a moment, forgetting-as if I could forget!-to set down here for my delight and the envy of posterity that they did never know her, I hasten to amend this oversight, I mean the magic that her voice worked upon my poor, my yearning soul. Have you ever heard mission bells ringing? What music doth the bard's thousand twangling instruments convey to the imagination? Or the yingle yingle of a pair of fine-wrought Swedish campanellas? None of them at best could ever match the thrilling tenor of this lady's sweet vibrato, the trim sophis­ tication of her yells. 0 husky huffs and puffs! In gardens soft and dark as midnight-blue velour, I place her avocado tones, her tonsils tremulous. Those decibels I fleshed in desirous tossing on my lonely cot set my brain to singing and all my skin to ache. To hear the trombone of her sighs, the oboe of her muttering! I wished that I might be a pair of ears. Her coughs were violin sonatas and love words drifting on her breath the song of Solomon Viola. When she laughed my mind was filled with images of silken legs and thighs close-hugged by lace edged garters. And her singing was a brace of shining heels. Thus did I vex myself, her voice so protean, invading my imagination. Her creamy sighs chinchilla, her chats raw silk-in her mouth the dullest argot turned pistachio and peach and French vanilla. A gelati, a spumoni, a -

cannoli, a tortoni! In my dreams I sucked the sweetness off her tongue. I woke to the all-alone blues, that empty bed, big eight-wheeler rollin' down the track, far hoot of whistle, vague sounds or memories of sounds

softly slipping out the window. A moment of self-abuse and I could face my coffee, hoping that the percolator's pops would not throw up to me the maddening delight of hearing Daisy belching quietly. There was no noise that she could make, real or imagined, too crude for sly old List'nin' Tom. Brp! Frt! lip! Znp! Sht! Wrf! Bch! Onf! Upf! I reveled in them all! Tell me, then, I whisper to the walls, why this pus-bitter gall of solitude? I want her close to me forever, one enormous never-ending female noise. 0 joys! Toys for the lonely eardrum. So I mumbled to intolerable privacy.

Waiting in the rain for me, recurrent dream desire, her soft coat ISS

swirling as she turns, soft calves, chocolate knitted dress with touches here and there of orange. Or snow. Or did it merely look like snow? I envision neon lights burning through the New York gloom. Fog falling silently, churning down Bronx streets. A sloe gin fizz a maiden pure's delight. A whiskey sweet for sour me. Tinsel, blinking Xmas lights, dark streets outside, a thin snow drifting down to welcome in the New Year.

Blank eyes of a dripping, sodden creche, the flaking infantJesus, her sloe eyes in mine, damp black kid gloves, a key glinting on the leather. An orange radiance suffused the living room, her long legs glowing in the firelight, snow silent, thick against the windows, faint voices raucous far away. She picked up the pillow. Bower of bliss. I am dazed by my cease­ less obsessions. We might as well be comfortable, so I have her say.

Always. I hear the milk tones of her voice, a virgin, a whore, a woman totally aware of every dark perversion, an innocent. Naked in knee socks and Mary Janes, a golden fuzz upon her belly, soft between her legs. Tall in sepia corset and shining patent leather boots, a dildo tightly strapped around her loins, eyes flashing fire mysterious and catlike in a brocade domino. The bells of midnight mass hover over, hang between our groans, abandoned, our venery. I want her waiting in the rain for me.

The trees are lashed by autumn winds, everyone has gone, the lake is grey and kicks up cream afar. In the shelter of the lake pavilion we em­ brace. She will be mine forever, not grow old, I will not grow cold, our

pleasures various yet stable. As the sea. Her sighs. The skies black, swiftly moving toward Parsippany. The youthful bodies of July and August home now, cabins closed, the cottages all locked and shuttered, browning lawns and the numbed birds on the boughs. She kisses me, a nun. Sun in her mouth. Then coffee in the only open restaurant. Onthe tablecloth a blue car key. Orange mums in heavy water glasses, brown glass ash trays. I want a lovers' meeting with her in December, waiting in the rain for me. All the Christmas Eves she's ever had with lovers,

friends, her husbands, and her relatives-I want them mixed and

brought together in the perfect antidote to cure my gnawing misery of desire. She is under the tree, crackling night, clear and frozen stiff, on her hands and knees, her dress around her waist, cool buttocks in a

frame of lace and hose. Come all ye faithful! I am the worshipful mala­

droit who enters her, carols booming, only I. Santa Claus in lights above the rimy lawns. She hands me a scotch and water and we trim the tree, 156

blue lights and shining platinum. In white unmentionables, flushed

with lust, she waits for me to enter from the bathroom. We perform

gloriously in the mirror, drunk with wonder at this couple's lewdness.

Soft jazz, small night light. That it will perish or thatit has not been makes it no less sweet. The memory makes me twist with bitterness. I

take her from the party and we head for home. In a black dress, picture hat, and pearls. I touch her in the cab. Rain pearling on the windshield.

We go to it with soft oaths and vile obscenities there on the couch. Thick

fog and silent night, 0 darling Daisy! Bells ringing far, we hiss erotically through our teeth. The sun limps up. The dream dies out.

My heart is cracked for none of it has ever been nor will it ever come to be, my darling, delicate and tall. Cracked heart, childhood image from the comic strips, oho, a funny valentine. But in the chest the pieces float apart and are thought to be invaders to be ravaged and assaulted by the blood, alarmed. Dearest girl. I have lived with her for so many countless years, I have been to her all the things she wanted, all she did not want.

On the sunny street, a ring, the Virgin Mary under celluloid. She stands against the background of October Lake, cigarette smoke white and stilled, it is September always in the photograph. She brings her television set and clothes to the apartment, a broken kite flutters in the tree below. Her small hand reaches toward a blue hydrangea, there are

apple blossoms on a tree. She is in a gingham dress, checked brown and orange. And now the wind screams across the Sound and we are close, the rain battering the roof. On the smooth old flagstones in the dying

golden from the afternoon, in her white shorts she adores me. Pure lady, forgive me everything, even in my fantasies.

Shattered heart, the splinters neutralized and swept off in the blood.

Until there is no heart at all. Black hair and blacker eye, scintillating Daisy, your violet smile, white teeth. Gentle twilight, gloomy, always gentle twilight as the day gives up. How does such perfection come to pass? And pass. I enter the dream again, terrified and happy. Old song.

Deep night. Blue.

sun we face each other

157

from Lyrics for the bride of God Section: La Traviata Nathaniel Tarn

Before lmowing her The morning, fresh with spring boughs,

their muslin round her form already as she emerges from pigsty to the streets, her clogs ringing, smudges of ash on her cheek.

When everyone had ceased to hope, when no object of possible belief existed any longer, when all cards had been stacked on love's behalf

against the looming dark=-she brought her faultless taste to town, her fragrant curls into the tapestry.

First: a child of the wild wood. Then a peasant, to the capital.

Then, picked up by so and so, Montmorency. Then settled in rooms.

Thelacob's-ladderofherfame: opera, balls, Tortoni's, on the arm of this or that frock coat of green moire.

She had the hush of death in her perfect mouth, her teeth

framed the throat of consumption, her skin ran with blue veins, she leant against fireplaces mildly, she strangled in asides, men saw their own ennui

perfectly reflected in her pallor.

And taken at last, after death, by the wings of an imagination.

Not a great one, but a popular one, with a thousand avid hearers 158

TriQuarlerly

bringing her favorite flower on stage as to a wedding.

The cortege followers sitting in subscribed stalls.

Made poetry, with an aside here and there, by one imagination: This is what I had of her, a great love it was, after the fashion­

Chateaubriand, Byron, Hugo, the Sage of Weimar suffered for this:

sighed for this love to be placed on the boards and worshipped.

Her insignificance. What is this story, after all, this life

of a courtesan of Paris in the days of the great heterae+

their names a Homeric list to be appended hereafterasides the author cannot verify tortured in the French prose the sentence wandering as the spider wanders over silk walls, under the bed where her lovers lie altogether in their death,

moaning with her moan and coughing out their lungs, where she gives them back their splendor in the moment of dying?

2

Abandoned by the regents of this life,

by the frail queens in their humid bodies, I ask of the dead what part of history they own, what they can bring me in this night of spiders.

(Though there had been a body recently, middling between those I have known / splendid in walk at night, naked from bed, long, slender, to the window frame, door, and beyond, leaving a wake of perfumes ...

but she has gone to Kalifornia to fornicate with another, whom she does not love.

In the humid Eastern dusk I am left with spiders on the wall, and spiders in the mind.)

A government as sinister as any known to men

staining all stretches of these States. At night, the spiders move on the gloss of my mind towards perfection. Her scent of love among my fingers, short hairs among my fingers.

We shall ask of wisdom, simply, what it still has to offer, we shall ask in this watershed what minds

remain,

what conversation is extant to bring mind and mind together to justify communion of the body.

159

The Second Empire source books say those thirty years were the years of confessional writing,

perfect accord of life and art, courtesy of avowal never known since as fine:

A lover's gift to the reading eye

of a public too eager to give itself in return.

Eylau and Austerlitz consumed, the flags a memory.

Waterloo of arms and spirit.

3 Before knowing her, I know her perfections arose

beautifully in those days than any since out of a boil oflace, the contrast being between flesh revealed and flesh covered­ sylphlike neck, heave of cameoed breast, juncture of arm and breast, where ringlets fall, just grazing the shoulders.

Music begins. Various degrees of commitment to this image: various artists' say: changing her name, romanticizing her, layer on layer of persona over the gathering legend. more

The masks of the powerful over the skull.

All government, plunging towards Empire again denatured, officials

sick of a sickness in the air, a gathering loudness of moneys,

bloat purse of time / and the people thwarted the body politic apologizing to the father of the people Dite a la giovinne si bella e pura: 0 Young America how lost you are among your provinces, your one glazed eye

stripping the secrets of your fathers' sins! and her eyes in a smile of compassion, so

pardoning among her luxuries, her loveliness so piteous,

excusez-moi d' etre ainsi parmi vous, sans etre a la hauteur I that am bought with fortunes, lost with them:

spider in iron web.

160

My river in the dark Her voices, in a Paradise of first flowers, each one a return to our earliest memories when she said "Go in peace, John, and in my protection,

this confederacy your servant unto the Alleghanies, go in the warmth of the polity, Sebastian,

these tribes your warrant unto the Adirondacks, Go in the pipe smoke of brotherhood, Martin, unto the desert mountains and Quebec."

My river flows in the dark tonight, welcoming home.

The history of my passions, great tree out of the river, the waters curving round its trunk towards the sea.

Roots: each one a cathedral buttress, joining the trunk

high in the air where her mouth presses against the dark, the trunk itself gnarled with years, the boles: children.

Each one with a tree of his own in the surrounding streams.

And soaring into the branches, all the arms of my pleading, all my desire white- fanged; the forms emprisoned there within the body of the tree / into the leaves, colossal umbrage over the river, traversed by swallows, martins and swifts of summer, tearing the air as if with witch claws-

I caught her footsteps in the dark, walking up and down,

felt her tread in the carpet of leaves, she declared herself a wise virgin, read in much lore,

though innocent oflove.

I knew her profile that I had never seen in this life, being a child in her splendid days, as she served tea in London, waiting for the walls to close in.

And of a woman so much older, so much unmet down here, can it be

predicated: the thigh's lining, that secret humor, the dark hair-a choice of dark or blonde, but dark I imagine, and of the exact length of the hair, UP, UP, to the PROFILE: in the photos, dead many and the lighthouse over the James River years, ? ...

Back of that, the mothers of the divine conglomerate,

black-skirted, cowled like nuns, elegant, 161

their voices whining to puppies in a foreign accent,

among them one adolescent whose blood was to be mine, past river of becoming, risen out of corsage,

first-morning-flower, serious lips above a set of chin, severe, nose of young eagle, eyes under brow, severe,

middle parting of hair, severe / but, overall, a softness like that of creation before it had memorized the rosters.

White correspondences of dresses, Sundays, in Paris, in the Bois de Boulogne, with the phaetons passing, broad alleys greened with lawns at the margins, picnic tables, white cloths and white porcelain, set for Iefive o'clock.

She lies underneath me, flesh welcoming as a bed after travels, I sleep in her hollows and dream in each of her valleys another dream.

Waking, I open her doors, into deeper dreams with no beginning.

(Paint me your eros, he had said: submit your archetypes.)

Of a sudden: she, bone, white, unyielding. Into my ear on the left, little finger exploring, her chin into my throat, knuckles inside my sockets. The cushions deflate: I fall into bone pits.

The shank is thin like a flute, but without music-the elbow

digs into my ribs. A shudder wrenches cock and balls.

Disembowelment.

She was flying over Chikago away from me into Kalifornia and already she was writing to say she missed me out of our dark, and would return, after savoring, of course, what Kalifornia had to offer, but it seemed to me / she was so far / so far / it was unspeakable how far /

and I felt dull with the dullness of several centuries between us as if I had never met this incarnation of her.

And, as for me, I was working my way through the historical stacks, state by state in alphabetical order, now close, now far, and the polity was sinking under history for the first time totally, the headman pathetic in his fineries exposed for what they were.

Woman's expensive, art's prices follow Alexandre Dumasfils to Sarah Bernhardt:

"My Dear Sarah, Allow me to offer you a copy of La Dame awe Camelias which has become rare.

162

What makes this copy unique is the also you will find inserted atthe 212th page which is very close to the letter in the printed text at that point.

This letter was written

by the real Armand Duval some forty years ago : it doesn't make him any younger.

His age was your own son's today.

The letter turns out to be THE ONLY PALPABLE THING to have survived that story.

You own it as of right

since it is you who have just resurrected the dead past.

Keep it in any case

lovely evening, last Saturday, and as an unworthy keepsake of my very great admiration and warmest gratitude. as a souvenir of the

With this, I applaud you with all my strength and embrace you

with all my heart. A.D. 1/28/1884."

Alexandre Dumasfils to Marie Duplessis:

"My Dear Marie, I am not rich enough to love you as I would wish, nor poor enough to be loved as YOU would desire it.

Let's both of us forget: a name which must, by now, be quite indifferent to you, a happiness for me become impossible.

No use telling you my sadness, since you already know how much I love you.

Farewell.

You have too much heart to misunderstand the causes of my letter, too great a mind not to forgive it me. A thousand memories.

A.D. 8/30/1845."

Marguerite Gautier to Armand Duval: "When you will read this note, Armand, I will already be another's mistress. We're through.

Go back to your father my friend, dite a la giovinne, si bella e pura, -your sister chaste, our misery unknownat whose side you will soon forget what this lost Marguerite

you loved a moment will have made you suffer, 163

who owes you the few happy moments of a life she hopes ends soon.

Marguerite Gautier."

To Marie Duplessis, alias Marguerite Gautier, alias Violetta Valery:

Madam:

Anxious to redeem an adolescence distinguished by no romantic

adventures, I beg the honor to be received into your bed-there to enjoy the favors so inordinately praised by those fortunate enough to have been your contemporaries. It is said of you, despite the great care you have of adorning your beauty, and of administering to it with all the resources at your lovers'

commands, that you are a woman of heart and

wit, rather than a plaything of riches. I am a poet, born of the underworld, now come to rest in a small corner of Pennsylvania in the United States. My youth was spent in dreams of unachievable love.

Above all, I have always regretted not being born in the time of phaetons and silver clouds, white picnics in cool parks, and all the refinements of

music and dance I associate with the waltz. It is not so much that I have been unloved by women-or even that I have not enjoyed the favors of a

great courtesan-but rather that, like men of my temperament born under any clime, I have rarely exhausted my passions in the one and

only, but have always run after the many in a desperate attempt to make time stop. o Violetta, Marguerite, Marie, Alphonsine,

by whatever name they call you, I learn that, when Alexander met you in his troubled search,

the camellia you wore at your breast was still tinged with red.

Wherefore you told him to return it when it would have faded­ or, in my reading, when it would have become again white.

Know of my intimacy that I am so kindred to the blood of woman

that the great meetings of my life have taken place under its sign.

Welcome me back, then, to where there are no fathers and mothers, take me to the altar of your body in the keep of perfect time,

and, since you cannot hack the scent of any other flower, believe me

Always yours in a perfumeless time. Nathaniel Tarn. 6/9/1973.

164

Fathers and sons "Follow me to the TheatreFran�ais.

Box-door opens. Stopped by my frock coat.

I turn: Alexander, my son, detains me.

Close eyes. Pop head through door. He reassures me.

Indeed, no sooner eyes closed, I feel on my lips the pressure of shivering lips (her mark), feverish, burning.

Open eyes: adorable young woman, 20-22, en tete a tete with Alexander.

Recognize her from several visits to the Theatre: Marie Duplessis."

"I, Alexandre Dumas, pere: You, beautiful child?

Marie: Yes. You have to be raped it seems?

I: Say that aloud! They may believe you!

M: Oh I know very well that's not your reputation!

But then, why are you so cruel to me?

Twice I've invited you to the Opera Ball.

I: In front of the clock, attwoa.m.?

M: You see! You did receive my letters!

I: Perhaps.

M: Then why didn't you come?

I: Because from one to two in the morning, in front of the clock,

only wits of 20-30, or older imbeciles, disport themselves.

As I'm fully forty, I would be classified among the imbeciles by objective observers. I do not choose to be humiliated.

M: I fail to understand.

I: A girl like you only calls men of my age

when she needs something from them.

What can I do for you? I am at your disposal, I offer you protection, and you need not fake love.

M: Ah (she sd., with a charming smile,

veiling her eyes with long, black lashes,) then we shall go to see each other some time, Sir, shall we not?"

{Sir. Darling. I am a student, and you are a professor. I am tired of the

ignorance of my peers of the male gender and would like to use my option of taking an older lover You will teach me everything you have learned in your long travels, in your exhaustive readings and your ex.

165

periences of womankind. I will begin by telling you my life: birth (my), parentage (my), schooling (my), college days (my), young lovers (my), sex experience (my), difficulties in achieving orgasm. I know you will sit there, wondering whether you will ever get a word in edgeways, and I shall be distressed, thinking that I may bore you and impose. Yet my tongue runs away with me, and my desire to drag you into my world and wrap you tight in its web until you are unable to remember a single one of your thoughts. Then, hopefully, you will write poems for me of inexpressible grandeur.)

My father, methinks I see my father!

-Where, my Lord?

In my mind's eye, gay blade in his young twenties, thinking himself the heir to Shakespeare in our garret, throws me across the room in a fit of temper, throws me to college like a dog to kennelsyears of harrowing exile (my mother dying,

love will not tarnish for her destroyer).

Later, rid of permanent women, drowned into work, to replenish the cup others will drain from nightly,

reaches the night, 44, with a son he is proud of, 22:

they boulevard together: an idyll.

Sequences oflovers, astonishing: appetites for work and sex as large as each other. This society knows itself well. I could spend a lifetime, in wonderment, collating the meetings, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day.

A calling on B. B dining with C. C fucking D. And round the circle.

Women at home, and women of the world, have the same thoughts, same dresses, same preferments, same reading lists.

The energy of these people! The forty-volume oeuvres, giants in appetite and in achievement. And still the time to knot sargassoes nightly between sheets!

2

Though living at home and available, theoretically, every moment, a father can abandon his son. A father can omit to praise his son, though he speak well of him to everyone behind his son's back.

Thus the work that the son does goes into a bottomless vase.

166

The son acquires no knowledge of fatherhood, moves ignorant as an untrained animal into his own

conceptions. His own son

will gift him the bird of his soul, and he will smother it,

delay the feeding of the bird until the bird dies, clawing at the mixture of sand and seed that carpets his cage.

Or the son will appear to the inner father in his dreams,

sprouting up like a mushroom from under a table, at a gathering, and they will have a good time together, the inner father stifling his tears of recognition, unable to see his own shadow.

Thus the sins of the fathers, visited on several generations.

I have given away my own children, like a cannibal to an overlord.

Since you were never able to be my father, I'll go into exile and there build the only manhood I can achieve, far from your house.

And I'll say to you: Marry my wife / take her as your wife or your child, no matter, and take the

offspring of my loins as your children also.

Pay them and keep them alive with the moneys you have saved for me and let me use the moneys I have earned with the sweat of my brow

for the erection of my own house. And I shall look for, in the love of very young women, whose lips mix my seed with their mothers' milk scarcely dry on their lips, my own land, I shall build up my own colonies, with their own products and crafts:

"Those children: for they have been my wife, my hawks, my hounds, my cards, my dice, and, in total, my best content," and "Those countries I ofttimes used to call my children, and well I might,

for few fathers ever paid dearer for so little content."

"They had heard that we were people come from under the world TO TAKE THEIR OWN WORLD FROM THEM."

Changing graves "I looked at her with love, nearly with terror,

thinking of what I was about to suffer for her­ foreknowing it."

Singing out of desperation the end of romantic tradition, my own course changing in the middle of the poem 167

because I no longer believe in love the way I had believed it to inform our breathing:

Perregaux transferring the grave (married in Kensington, from Brompton Row, Anglice, 2/21/46, no; 106. folio 53, vol. i, The Book ofMarriages) making her countess: D2 opening the grave with his double: the eyes two dropped pits, the lips gone over the teeth bared like ape fangs; the hair that had run like a river de tenebris, taut on green hollows 1 a stench from the whole compost,

"The eyes! did you see the eyes? I" he cried in his cerebral storm-that was to cure him in fifteen days' coma' 'from a moral illness."

2

What is desperate is that we can't ensnare the fullness of the word she spoke in its own moment,

that generosity fades, attention peaks and falls so that there is

nothing left of her we had thought,

literally, to live for, but reputation. And that is the crop of the oeuvre: the romantic marasmus: fevers, obsessions, rages,

anything to delay love that has gone to seed, a hunger satiated, a thirst quenched, the passage of her delineations into a model of the soulso that the beloved at last is

emptied, drained, and, her womanhood lost, bows out in her despair, diminished beyond blood ...

"Her affections broken, time after time 1 obeisance to the needs of passing entanglements 1 jumping from love to love, after love, after love-not knowing, alas,

why she choked off so quickly a nascent tenderness, a dawn of

she had become indifferent to everything,

paying no more attention to love today than to tomorrow's passion."

168

hope,

3 "She had lived the life a little, Sir, if you'll pardon the saying.

Now the poor lady's dead, and her remains

heavy or as light as an honorable woman's.

There were complaints about her in this row.

I told them, I did, fat twice-a-year bankers trailing their own flowers, and see what flowers! carving tears on tombs they've never wept!

Believe me if you will, Sir, I never knew this lady: nevertheless, I love her, the poor child, I take good care of her, and let her have camellias at the market price. as

She is my favorite dead.

We, Sir, must love the dead: we are so busy with them we

scarcely have the time to love anything else."

Marie, you are older now.

You have survived up to twenty-eight, and I am no longer D2.

I am about as old as Dl, when he nearlydrave his son mad,

and as D2 when he had settled into la belle morale.

Furthermore, you are not sick in any way, though your analyst's bills put Marguerite's expenses in the shade.

I am supposed to entertain the arguments you used so brilliantly to prove to D2 that he could not afford you­

though now it's a matter of status, profession, good sense rather than the madness of whores.

We have thirty-five days before your disappearance

After which you will settle for the West Coast and a comfortable bore who happens to be your thesis advisor.

Is it any wonder, then, that I half receive you

into my half-raised arms? In my Delaware garden cancer at work

harries the rose crop.

There is half a rose,

perfectly opened in one half, the other cut away, gone where the caterpillars mash dead petals, the mud of your face ground in death.

169

Letter to a friend on my lady of now "New Hope, 5/14/73, Dear X, My lady of now compares favorably with the average Amerikan beauty, and her name is Helen. Had she been pointed out to Paris by Aphrodite,

exchange for Troy, she would have had no grounds for complaint.

My lady of now is more Amerikan than Pokahontas, more pertinent to the culture of both coasts, ignoring all between: but she is about to implement her education by seeing the Rokkies. as the

I met my lady of now in unlikely circumstances in a village nearby whose name signifies ground for Hope.

She is divorcing, but, since nothing is simple, she has a lover

three thousand miles away from here who satisfies her partly.

She has just come back from a visit to him and we have something like thirty-five days to spend together

before giving each other up, when she becomes againLa Traviata.

I looked at her with great love, even more with terror, thinking

of the great suffering I was about to enter on her account.

On the evening of her return she told me in detail, and with awesome perspicacity, the reasons we couldn't make it.

Six hours later, joy achieved, she told me that she loved me.

I recognized the old yearning for completion in my own feelings,

sinking of the gut at the thought of her when she is not nearby, and even when she is nearby, and so close to my eyes I am blinded. a

My lady of now has a delightful physical presence. Especially the region between waist and knees, of a silken fullness the golden kine were made of in the sun's gardens.

A Danae of gold, herself the golden rain, her hair down there

honey and pepper, and the juices running from her: apricot.

Her breasts pear perfectly, though stretch-marked at the sides, silver under the line of gold she measures her exposure by.

Her shoulders fill my hands and her armpits bury my nose and her navel sweats with a promise of showers as we move to couple.

My lady of now is writing her thesis, and enjoys that compulsion more than the pleasures of being in love. Aesthetic needs skeletal, lowbrow in music, 'New Hope' in taste--she treats her car with the contempt of a goddess. When waking in the morning, she is disturbed by birds rather than automobiles, 170

she is unmoved by nature and thinks my love of flowers ridiculous.

She tells me I will not wean her from her compulsions when I try to explain that our freedom should be used and enjoyed.

I watch her relaxation in the night like a fanatic,

but she leaps from bed to library at the first hint of daylight all the same. Thinking on Dumas

and his analysis of prostitution!adultery (telling her his preface should be translated for a feminist magazine), and thinking also of S. and his graduate student c., whose compulsion with papers is as great as Helen's with her thesis, I suppose to her an era in which we men could be kept by our struggling intellectuals.

She says yes after all the years the female will has been held under.

If we are moving towards universal prostitution, as Dumas foretold,

then it would be nice if we men could relax a little now, I say, but I am reminded we would have to cook the bacon and serve it if the balance of provider and provided were to be upheld.

Yes, friend, these are problematic times. I have borrowed my Helen from her future in Kalifornia at the foreskin of the Amerikan earth.

I try hard to remember whatever it is that I have learned of romance in the belief that, under her compulsions, my Helen remembers also.

We have had our compulsions in our own day, and now take second place.

When she says she entered recently the technological age of masturba­

tion, or suggests Vaseline for an experiment, I harden still, with the blood of hope, and an obscure commitment to the eros of our twentieth century.

And I bell her sweet tits to my eyes,

thinking our children will forgive us this one last trespass before their making is taken out of our hands altogether. Best, etc." from Section 10: Addio romantica ...........................

Through Plainfield-Grossinger, in sight of Mont Real, equivocal charm of frontiers, through elegant Woodstock Hassidic summer places,

Bennington's lovelies, back towards Pa. in muggy heat, monsoon, 171

to the raped

body of Nouvel Espoir,

warped furniture, mice in the files, and spider's sweat,

Singing Guiseppe still, his Violetta, not one magnifico paid for her portrait to leave her smile behind in elegyseven drawers in her night table, one lover to each

day of the week (de Villemessant), siren of souls: not one / not back alive (Gautier), and "Dame aux Camelias, mystere de notre epoque," conceived by swallowing a pearl Her habits pall upon him like a shroud, o Europe, weary catacomb of so much hope! ...

"II est difficile de ne pas voir ce que cherche Ie XIXeme: UNE SOIF CROISSANTE D'EMOTIONS FORTES est son vrai caractere," Stendhal, 1817, Frenchman.

Walking all night, insomniac, head in a huge kashmir (red), her body lost in the tent of a white gown ("the Holy Land to the Promised Land"), burned all her letters except thirty (Romain Vienne): those lost in San Francisco earthquake when Sarah Bernhardt broughtLa Dame to Atlantis -check dates and details-

sombre / elegiac/attachments (e.g. Franz Liszt) lost without trace in the biography: She goes, la Romantica, from dead eye-level,

she goes, la Gnostica, from between Scylla and Charybdis, she rises, la Esoterica, from the Sinai peak-

she is taken with cold in her bones, with his poems in her eye sockets, decomposed, running, shredded by mice in files, slimed by spider feet in boxes,

decomposed by fungus at the edges of flesh, she has passed into his soul so completely that mortal woman is diminished beyond blood.

172

HER BOOKS: SELECTED LIST

6 vols.

Rabelais

1 vol.

Cervantes

1 vol.

Prevost Moliere LaFontaine Marivaux

1 vol.

2vols.

Svols.

2vols.

Rousseau

1 vol.

Goethe

7vols.

Chateaubriand

9vols.

11 vols.

Byron Hugo

4vols.

Sue

3vols.

Lamartine Alexandre Dumas, Pere

28vols.+ 3vols.

Vigny

11 vols.

Thiers

8vols.

Scott

1 vol.

Musset

? vols.

Pound

? vols.

Stevens

? vols.

Williams

? vols. ? vols.

Rexroth Patchen

? vols.

Olson

? vols.

? vols.

1 vol.

Duncan .

Mac Low New American Poetry

"Et puis, pour enfinir avec toutes ces histoires, to escape this pain, to avoid it forever,

para matar ala muerte una vez enfin

" ...

Nathaniel Tarn, 1973,

American.

And he chose between two

sightings, for lack of time:

old covered bridges, built like barns: Labor's Cathedrals­

the solid "Lovejoy": the "Sunday" 's elegancerather than bare white breast above the hill

talking to sky in whole earth-language, computer to 173

computer,

thou, fifty words per minute, Atlantic system (Andover, Maine) EARTH STATION INTELSA T AND SHE PASSES ONCE MORE, SPREADEAGLED OVER EARTH

her voice a whisper from white space, while the bridges span our lives into Atlantis

and the mountains sit it out and North: Ontario

and North: Quebec, The Maritimes,

and North: My Newfoundland, my Labrador! and flat pole at the top, in soar of snow, white skullcap of the dream, or still or scudding,

Antarctic template from the South's sole root and the mountains sit it out: and North

...

The last illusion

(When I had parted from her, who held me seven years) to the land at the other end of the wind,

lovely island through the world's age shaped like a whale in the wine-blue ocean, beyond the sunken precinct where philosophers had ruled, the singing shrine where no sorrows reign, where the roses are like weeds in the streets of town, where no punishing wind, no snow, and never rain foil tools at work in fields, while men bask under trees,

and corn's self-sowing and self-harvested

(not tenderness for sons, duty to age, nor love lowed to wife that should have

gladdened her)

to the land whose rivers may well have led to Eden,

the first sin skirted on the shoals, which is nothing but the name the past gives to the future,

the first, or apple, sin: 0felix culpa! the second sin of corn: 0felix culpa secunda!

174

sailing for wisdom with compass and canvas beyond the borders of the inhabited world to a place where there is a denudation of people, where the birds talk like scholars in many languages (my men being slow and old when we came to that gate chose to deny the world in the sun's track ) and with our stern turned towards morning ...

but the island was peopled with playful children believing paper spoke and asking beads from the sky,

begging for colors from the sky in trade for corn, that were too cheap in the salons of turquoiseand we were those who had come from under the world to take their own world from them.

Quicquid praeter Africam, etEuropam est, Asia est: Was this Cathay?-these were not wise enough to be souled

...

And it came to me in a dream, when I was grappled by them, that I was brought before a splendor of feathers and ordered to lay my head down on a stone, but the child came from beside him and took my head in her arms asking my life. Whereat, she was given it, and I made a son to the King. Being later told

this was a simile of entrance into kingship, no genuine danger­ but took it out a little on my reading public and also that the land at the other end of the wind was full of nubile beauties who sang and danced for men,

after which they took us into their house and everyone wanted me, crying' 'Love me, love me," so that it seemed I could not have endured so many loves /

but this was not prostitution as it turned out, nor even free love, nor the beginning of commune,

but merely the offering of a companion, for a luxury at night.

2

She had argued that she would give up her wealth and follow me that was now the one man on earth she could abide. As she said

this, her black hair glistened as if moist with mist, or it could have been tears from her native sky. She confessed she had been 175

born on the great island at the end of the world, and that it was time she returned there in any event to savior the natives. For she had adopted an orphan child by mail the month before. She

spoke of her youth as half a horse, when she raced the clouds in the southern deserts, and of her battling with waves as tall as towers under the spruces of her birthright. Whence from half­ snake, she had gone to fish, and finally bird, in other realms of north and west. She possessed the land, dueiia thereof. And was ready to purchase many acres more, on our two accounts.

But had not reckoned with the languor

that had crept into her bones in the ancient world where she had sat for years oblivious to the people in blaze of music. She had become addicted to the culture of the terminal empires, denying

and neglecting the simple crafts of her own yard.

It was opera for her every night, fine meals,

camellias every morning, and pearls,

it was the company of fine gentlemen, who, more or less discreetly,

kept her in the style to which she had become accustomed.

And when she had attempted to tum towards what she had

thought was "home," maps and charts had powdered in her hands-and had we followed her directions, we would have lost

ship and crew both in great batter of rock. .When the oldest woman of Europe landed on her native shore, many dusky maidens came to her crying, and holding shoulders, whose Pocahontas, and Malitzin, and Tekakwitha, and Sacajawea, and J acataqua, lamenting: "Now thatthou art come, Maria Colomba, daughter of doves, must we lie down and be reduced to dust?" But she undressed herself of her crinolines, and appeared in the perfection of her own darkness, and ordered them that they should denude themselves likewise, and follow names were

her in the dance. Whereupon the scenario was enacted as afore­

said-but here, I enjoyed them all one after another

....

Only,

when I awoke in the morning, it was as if fallen from a great

height, from an ocean cliff, and there was not one companion of them all to bind my wounds and comfort.

176

3 And I am become as a land of ghosts as a tree full of

bird-song but no birds

where the mist clings to branches like cotton

and the wind sings mourning From the other side, it was as if we had been calling for this, as

if the weight of our need was such that it had magnetized the seas, and called a great pole to ourselves up from the place

where the sun sets, and which we had named: the western gate. and had placed all our dreams there, in who knows what hands

...

and as if all the singers had assembled on the shores of the old

land, standing before the flattened doors and tables at the edge of the cliffs that had seemed to be made as springboards for the

great passage, and with but a short elegy for those they were to leave behind-who had lost the sense of hearing-they all, with a common accord in

history, leapt into the westering sea, and were carried by fish or whale or albatross to the furthest edges of ocean

...

there, with darker women than themselves, to make new races

...

but, having carried choice gifts to the king of the land, who, though he did not at first condescend to like them, became at last

possessions that he turned all the energies of his people to their fabrication, and made slaves of them until they also wanted nothing but these goods, and, at last, the whole land having been delivered into the hands of those whose chief busi­ ness it was to make, advertise, barter and sell these goods, at whatever price, at whatever sacrifice and whatever beastliness in the reduction of men to animals of burden, who were no longer so enamored of

THE PEOPLE: so that the

ghosts at last, even they, had lost their tongues

...

then it seemed indeed that we HAD come from under the world to take their own world from them

177

...

4

The last woman of the old dispensation has gone back to her dust.

And the first woman of the new world is going back to her dust.

She keeps on changing the color of her hair, as in a movie, she becomes a blonde on the way to Kalifornia, West of the West, she is an androgyne going out into Space, which is west of Kalifornia,

lugubrious in the night of spiders, they all leave for distant lots.

And when the people of this continent have made their shopping list:

the oil of the other people of the world and their labor, the blood of the other people of the world and their labor, the flesh of the other people of the world and their labor,

they then fall to buying health and happiness and parity freedoms, then they think of purchasing a second automobile and a frigidaire and three sets of air-conditioning devices and a radio-clock-t. v. and all that done, they come to the places they have baptized

with all the variants of the word Hope, which means hope for bargains:

Hope- Well, and Hope-Truly, and New Hope, and Good, Clean, Used-Hope, and, leaving behind any reality whatsoever, they buy the shoddy, the useless, the ugly and the bad in the name of the singers of liberty who left our world so long ago.

At night, when everyone is drunk, they piss on the trees of the town, and they shit in the streets, and they masturbate in the parking lots, and then they bugger the injun princess in the municipal square where they had left her only some years back as she bounced out of the forest:

infin eke'[ marfu sovra noi richiuso

178

...

Joyce, Beckett, and the postmodem imagination IhabHassan

for Hans Mayer

The Editors

TriQuarterly Northwestern University

Evanston, Illinois 60201 Gentlemen: In a time of disingenuous explanations, one hesitates to explain. Let

Cordelia's silence reign. But silence has its disingenuousness that silence itself knows. And so I am prompted ambiguously to explain the

paracritical essay herewith enclosed.

The original occasion of the essay was an opening speech of the Samuel Beckett Colloquium, held at the Berlin Academy of Arts in October 1973. But the original occasion seems to have become part of a palimpsest. My speech at the Academy contained vestiges of two speeches I had given earlier, one at the Second International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin (later published in Journal ofModem Literature) and the other at the University of Northern Illinois (later 179

TriQuarterly

published in Boundary 2). Furthermore, when I sat down to revise my speech, for inclusion in a book edited by Hans Mayer and Uwe Johnson, I realized that several events had intervened between the writing and rewriting of it. I had, for instance, experienced the Colloquium itself, heard its various papers and participated in its discussions. I had read some of the reviews of the Colloquium which appeared in German and Austrian newspapers. And I had delivered another speech at the Modem Language Association in Chicago. It occurred to me that the concept of the theater as a room with a fourth wall mysteriously missing is no longer inviolate. Why, then, should an essay preserve the illusions of another day?

Hence the present paracritical essay, a palimpsest of times, places,

voices: TIME

PLACE

OCCASION

VOICE

June 1969

Dublin

Second International James

Speech

Joyce Symposium

Spring 1970

Wherever read

Journal of Modern Literature

Printed essay

February 1973

DeKalb

English Graduate Colloquium.

University of Northern

Speech

Illinois

Spring 1973

Wherever read

Boundary 2

September 1973

Milwaukee

Writing the speech for the Beckett Colloquium Samuel Beckett Colloquium.

October 1973

West Berlin

Printed essay Pencil and eraser

Speech and

Berlin Academy of the Arts

discussion

November 1973

Wherever read

Various newspaper reviews of the Colloquium

Newsprint

December 1973

Chicago

Speech

February 1974

Milwaukee

English II. Modern Language Association Writing the present paracritical essay

eraser

Writing this letter to the editors

eraser

Final reading of MS at TriQuarterly

reading

Das Werke Samuel Beckett.

Translated

Suhrkamp Verlag

essay as part of book

TriQuarterly 34

Printed essay

April 1974 Summer 1974

January 1975

Spring 1975

Milwaukee Evanston Wherever read

Wherever read

Pencil and Pencil and

Editorial

Even so, this chronology is much simplified. Under "VOICE,

"

for

instance, I note "Speech," but various speeches assume different audiences and vocal timbres. Or I note "Printed essay," though no two 180

media have the same extensions in space and time. Again I wonder: is a word written, read, or heard truly the same word? Perhaps none of this

finally matters so long as the final effect coheres. But which effects do we consider final?

I suspect that the literary act is more gratuitous, its frames more

contingent, than we admit. These frames, which are historical, philosophic, geographical, social, personal, and always verbal, often shift or collapse. Our perceptions are released within them, released or restrained. But our perceptions are realized also when the frames

accidentally break or strain. Suddenly, what one frame excluded another contains. And what we now see will never be the same in another frame. Thus chance makes philosophers of us all-and politicians too.

The example, of course, is Watergate. Events which remained invisible or inaudible within one cadre

suddenly became vivid or shrill, assaulting

political sense, in a cadre of another kind.

The present paracritical essay, then, is conscious of its contingen­

our ethical or

cies as well as of its form. Like so much current literature, it is self­

reflexive--up to a point! For I have too strong a sense of my own reality, my own mortality, to surrender myself to a game of vanishing mirrors. Still, there are times when consciousness needs to interrogate itself; there are times, too, when forms need to disconfirm other forms.

All our arts attest to this need in peculiar ways. Can criticism--or what once went by that name--remain unchanged? Somehow I sense that even the most intelligent editors would deny criticism the right of every mental act: to invent itself anew.

Perhaps this is the place to say a word about "paracriticism."

Certainly, it is not mimesis of art or science or life. I call it para­ criticism because literature is part of its substance, though critical method is only one of its several modes. I might simply say that in a paracritical essay I do not write wholly as a critic or scholar-nor yet do I impersonate poet, novelist, or playwright-but try to find my voice in the singular forms that speculation and this postmodern age seem to require. These forms make mixed use of disconfirmation and dis­ continuity, of space, silence, self-query, and surprise. All of which is not to echo an old echo: criticism is dead! (It was one of you, gentlemen, I believe, who argued the" death of death as a metaphor.") Surely one 181

may choose a mode of one's own without condemning all others to death! Nor am I certain that this mode satisfies my own critical sense of

what paracriticism should become; at best, it is a start.

Let me now clarify an implication of this letter. My wife said to me the other day, "Why don't painters and musicians have editors too?" She

meant, I think, that verbal languages are more heavily mediated by culture than other kinds oflanguages. This is an ambivalent boon. Our voices still command the widest attention of our fellow beings, but our voices are seldom purely our own. This letter is itself proof. I address not

only readers but editors as well. There are, at TriQuarterly, two of you, an editor and an executive editor too. I cannot assume that

you will

always agree: one may think I have gone too far, and the other that I have hardly gone far enough. Thus my statement will be doubly mediated.

But I must end before some wit remarks that my text is shorter than my pretext. In a time of disingenuous explanations, explanations must

be made to confess their own disingenuousness. I address this letter to the editors; yet I know you both, personally, well enough. Indeed, it was at your friendly and cautious behest that I undertook to write this letter

in the first place. I will not date it, however, for I feel that it is both

transient and timeless: an eternal small recurrence in the world of letters.

Sincerely, IhabHassan

Conventional prologue: Mr. Vice President, Dr. Mayer, Ladies and Gentlemen, MaitreBeckett in absentia:

Our subject is an extraordinary man of letters, a Nobelist who felt

obliged to write Eh, Joe, Lessness, Echo, Breath, an author enigmatic, exiguous, and exact.

Our subject is indeed literary, but let us also recall where we stand: in Berlin, where beautiful trees exhale silently into the night and a great stone scar marks the face of the city. Beneath that scar lies a wound that will not heal. It is the wound of history, more ancient than the Great 182

Wall of China; it is the wound of human consciousness itself. That wound is my hidden theme, and I will return to it shortly.

But my immediate, my open task is fortunately more simple: it is

merely to provoke some general questions about Samuel Beckett. To do so, I must begin by explaining my title, which seems at once banal and bizarre. Thus, at least, I can anticipate some worthy critics of the press, invisibly present in this room.

The explanation is, like my title, in three parts.

Part one: Joyce

The title places Beckett between Joyce and postmodern authors. But

why Joyce, instead of Proust, say, about whom Beckett has written a sharp slim book, or instead of Kafka?

The connection, of course, is partly personal. Imagine this scene, rendered according to the biography of Richard EHmann: A comfortable room, pleasantly sordid in the middle class way. There are chairs everywhere.

Two men, taU and lank, sit together, legs crossed, toe of the upper leg under the instep of the

lower. They do not speak. Joyce is sad for himself, and Beckett sad for the world. Lucia is not In the room. Sam has not reaDy come to see her.

The connection is partly biographical. We know how much Beckett admired the master of silence, exile, and cunning, how eagerly he

learned, how he served in great and small ways. But the connection is not only biographical.

Joyce and Beckett represent two ways of the imagination in our cen­ tury. Joyce and Beckett, two Irishmen. They divide the world between them, divide the Logos, the world's body. One, in high arrogance, invents language anew, and makes over the universe in parts of speech.

The other, in deep humility, restores to words their primal emptiness, and mimes his solitary way into the dark. Between them, they stretch the mind's tether until it begins to snap. Two babblers of eternity, born in Ireland, electors of exile.

Joyce and Beckett represent two antithetical ways of the imagination -the Promethean Artist and the Artist as Anti-Prometheus.

Joyce

says, "I can do anything with language I want." (This does not prevent

Nora from fretting, "Why don't you write sensible books that can understand

183

?")

people

Perhaps Beckett also can. But he believes art to be a "fidelity to failure," a "Pythagorean terror"; its obligation is to its own impos­ sibility. Beckett chooses to write in a foreign tongue because "it has the right weakening effect."

Thus, Finnegans Wake embraces all; it is a type of Dream. In contrast, How It Is voids itself through a geometric structure; it is a sort of Number. As Elizabeth Sewell says in The Structure ofPoetry, the language of Dream creates a world in which all is substance, all significance; everything is there at once. But the language of Number empties the mind of reference; it creates a world of pure and arbitrary ratio, an order hollow and white.

The two books engage in a tug of war; the dream of Finnegans Wake

pulls againstthe geometry of How It Is On the one hand, Joyce renders the collective experience of mankind in puns of infinite reverberations, yet reduces all that experience to a single utterance, a seamless unity.

The last sentence of the book curls back to complete the first. The .

purpose is atonement, at-one-ment, of contradictions. Beckett, on the other hand, offers a representative experience, a segment in an endless series. Bern is to Born what Born is to Pim. Thus from zero to eternity, not three but an endless number of people will be caught in a

procession, crawling between victims and tormentors. With berserk mathematics, Beckett actually works out some permutations on any given million creatures, as he does on any 777777 beings in search of a sack.

These two writers are also major temperaments of different kinds.

Joyce is born a Catholic, Beckett a Protestant. For one, history is a cyclical confession; for the other, it is a solipsist cry, vanishing in its own echo. Nature has a place in the work of the former, but where is it in the work of the latter? Against the anima of Joyce, the animus of Beckett; against the illusion of generation, the illusion of waste. Different gates of the erotic body. Anna Livia Plurabelle feels during copulation: "Leary, leary, twentytun nearly, he's plotting kings down for his villa's extension! Gaze at him now in momentum! As his bridges are blown to babbyrags, by the lee of his hulk upright on her orbits, and heave of his But Molloy thinks: "Perhaps after all she juniper arxin action put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me.

But is it true love, in the rectum?" "

....

.

184

..

Similarly, the words of Joyce, storyteller of the Wake, emanate from the flesh of woman and finally return to it: "untitled mamafesta memorializing the Mosthighest." And Shem the Penman, we recall, is his mother's choice; even his excretions are transmuted alchemically into indelible ink. But the words of Beckett, storyteller, emanate from an absent father and spatter the world at seeming random; the Unnam­ able, by his own admission, defecates his tales. Against the anima, the animus.

There are many more contrasts that we can draw between Joyce and

Beckett; the academic mind seems to re-joice in these diversions. But what is the point of such contrasts? Perhaps three points: a. The contrasts between Joyce and Beckett reflect the "anxiety of

influence" which Harold Bloom defines as "the melancholy of the creative mind's desperate insistence upon priority." In other words, how does the original daemon of young Beckett, standing in the shadow of all the authors who preceded him, all the way back to Homer and the

poet of Ecclesiastes, and down to Joyce, make a place for himself in the sun? It is, after all, rather late in the literary day, perhaps later than we think. Beckett redefines originality as a flight from originality,

imagination as an escape from amplitude, language as silence. In the anxiety of genius, Beckett does not attempt to surpass Joyce; he "negates" him by his own example. Negates? Yes. Beckett redirects the endeavor ofliterature and turns Joyce into a "classic." Has Beckett

himself already turned into a "classic"? b. The contrasts between Joyce and Beckett also hold every new writer in an invisible grip; the literary predicament is continual. For the difficulties that Beckett encountered in relation to Joyce are com­

pounded in the case of the young writer who must cope with both Beckett and Joyce. There they stand at the antipodes oflanguage, de­ fining the outer limits of contemporary literature. How, then, can a postmodern genius exceed these limits? The answer, perhaps, is that such a genius will surely know. Still, we should appreciate his theoret­ ical dilemma. Will he opt for a new centrism, a new classicism? Or will he discover still another frontier that neither Joyce nor Beckett

foresaw? The questions are not idle. Every major work of the imagin­ ation enables other works of the imagination at the same time that it excludes certain imaginative possibilities from further use. This 185

principle is taken to its parodic limit in Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

"

Digression: Yes, dear Critic of critics, I am a dropper of names. But come, let us examine your irritation together. True, names can distract,· they can

betray pretension and pedantry; worst of all, they can substitute allusions for thought. But what is the true source ofyour annoyance? I will not accuse you ofhaving read and remembered less than I; for my memory is like a bottomless sieve. But it is your sense of critical relevance that I challenge. You have come with a preestablished idea of the limits of the subject, of the names within bounds and without.

Permit me to stretch.

The contrasts between our two authors conceal a deeper affinity,

c.

and this affinity, this secret contact, is of special interest to postmodern

literature. Is there, I often wonder, an insistence on pure mind, a kind of gnosticism, which unites Joyce and Beckett? The monstrous effort of

Finnegans Wake strains, beyond its puns and infinite sounds, beyond its noise, toward a region of articulate silence; that, of course, is the region which the works of Beckett occupy, and around which much of postmodern literature circles. In this region of articulate silence, the game is pure mind, the game is consciousness caught in the im-mediate moment of its self-imitations, self-declarations, whether in the

permutations of the archetypes of HCE or in the combinations of Molloy's sucking stones at the beach. For at bottom, this "comedy of exhaustive enumeration," be it Joyce's or be it Beckett's, is an exercise in mentalism, a secular kind of gnosis. It is interesting that Marxist critics, who have a rather solid sense of historical reality, should note and comment obliquely on this phenomenon in literature. What Lukacs calls the" ghostly" element, what Benjamin calls" allegory," are results of similar "dissolutions" of reality. In Beckett's works, the aversion toward physical reality can be expressed in the image of a man discarding his bicycle, discarding his body itself.

In the matter of gnosticism: a long parenthesis:

The new gnosticism assumes the convergence of myth, art, and 186

.

technology in developed societies. I have spoken on this subject elsewhere, and so here I can be brief. Allow me to quote from a speech which I delivered at the Modern Language Association of America, in Chicago, December 27, 1973. Anachronistically, a speech within a speech: The convergence of myth, art, and technology has been many years in the making. It began two or three million years ago when the human brain exploded into biological evolution. There is evidence of it in the

ofAltamira and Lascaux. But the best evidence may still lie buried in our dreams. Prehistoric man slept and slept, and he dreamt.

Paradoxically, Lewis Mumford says, "It was the dream that opened man's eyes to new possibilities in his waking life. May we conclude that story, art, and technic share the primordial legacy of dream? caves

"

.

.

.

Beginnings are only beginnings. They may befictions, like middles and ends, fictions to make a storyjust. Let us start somewhere in the middle of our story. Hegel will do. Here is Erich Heller in The Artist's Journey into the Interior: In both the early Romantics and Hegel, the human mind puts forward a total claim for itself, a claim in which revolution and eschatology are uneasily mingled. The world must become

imagination and poetry, say the Romantics; and Hegel says, the world must become rational consciousness. But the poetry meant by the Romantics, and the rational consciousness meant

by Hegel, have much in common: above all, the ambition of the human mind to dominate the real world to the point of usurping its place.

The movement, then, is double. Romantics begin the colonization of the subconscious; their inwardjourney into Dream begins the

dangerous effort of reclamation of which Freud was a part. Hegel insists on projecting Reason outward, and his rationalization ofhistory also prefigures the dominance ofscience. By 1900, Henry Adams, wonder-struck at the GreatExposition in Paris, could write: Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house outside, the break of

continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could be discovered between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.

So here it is: convergence, the invisible transactions offaith and energy, the sudden and incomprehensible intrusion of a new power in history, 187

the manifold connections between religious myth, literary reflection, and miraculous technology. The Virgin and the Dynamo-like Hegel's

World Spirit?-point to the new gnosticism

....

But what of our own century? There is a darker aspect of this convergence. Myth, art, and technology come together in certain political systems of the right, left, and middle. This has ledEmst

Cassirer to observe in The Myth of the State: It has been reserved for the twentieth century, own great technical age, to develop a new

technique of myth. Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon-as machine guns or airplanes. That is a new

thing-and a thing of crucial Importance.

Manufactured myths attempt thefusion of archetype and neotype.

They also assume the technological extension and enforcement of fictions: a new omnipotence of thought. Grand inquisitors now possess all the resources of science to shape and enlarge the human needfor miracle, mystery, and authority. This is a point that contemporary writers, since Aldous Huxley, have understood too well.

But I am dwelling on the destructive aspect of this convergence, which can be creative or destructive as we wish it to be (some would

disagree). The crucialfactor has become not technology but, rather, the growth of theoretical knowledge of which technology is only a part. This growth, DanielBell argues in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, this increase in consciousness, is the majorforce ofchange, aforce powerful enough to alter the ancient structure of human instincts, human needs.

The politics ofDaniel Bell are not my own. His argument,

nevertheless, stresses the new role of consciousness in our material world. How long will this world remain material? We have already heardAmold Toynbee speak of the "etherealization" of civilizations by

religion, and heard BuckminsterFuller speak of the' 'emphemeraliza­ tion' of society by technology. Their voicesjoin the slogans of the world (Romantics), the World as Reason iHegel), the World as Virgin and Dynamo (Adams). as poetry

And now afurther step. Speaking as a physicist, Gerald Feinberg .

states:

'there is probably no level of consciousness in which the con­

scious being [ourselves] will rest content until the sway of consciousness 188

is extended indefinitely.

"

The statement occurs in a work entitled

The Prometheus Project, which proposes a scientific extension of

mind�s in the theology of Teilhard de Chardin, as in thefantasies

of Olaf Stapledon or UrsulaLeGuin.

This idea ofan extended and unmediated mind is not restricted to sciencefiction: the new gnosticism pervades culture ...

Item: The visionary architect, Paolo Soleri, calls his latest book The

Bridge Between Matter and Spirit Is Matter Becoming Spirit; and another great architect, Louis Kahn, says: "We are actually born out of light, you might say. I believe light is the maker of all material. Material is spent light...

Item: Dr. Jose Delgado of the Yale Medical School states: "Weare now talking to the brain without the participation of the senses. This is pure and direct communication=I call it none-sensory commu­ nication.

"

Earlier, Marshall McLuhan predicted that electric

technology would" by-pass languages infavor of a general cosmic consciousness.

"

Item: Thefather of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, once speculated:

"One might conceivably travel by telegraph, in addition to traveling by train or airplane,

..

i.e., teleportation. But also telepathy, as suggested

we'll discover

by BuckminsterFuller in an interview: "Possibly scientifically that telepathy is, infact, ultra-ultrahighfrequency electromagnetic wave propagation.

Item: ThelateJimiHendrix, Black Orpheus and rock star, once said: "It's music It's electricity that will take us all to that spiritual high I call the electric church Mind expansion someday it's going to ...

...

"

....

....

...

carry me all the way there, too: pure mind.

"

Item: CharlesLindbergh, aviator, adventurer, technologist, writes:

"Gradually, I diverted hoursfrom aviation into biological research.

How mechanical, how mystical was man?

Will we discove� that ...

only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies?"

Item: Douglas Davis, artist and experimental esthetician, concludes in Art and the Future: A History I Prophecy: "Art,

technology, and even science seem to me three veils for the sameface, three metaphors that cover, then dissolve, into a single reality. That centralfact is the probing, discovering purpose of man. "

189

Item: CarlFriedrich von Weizsiickerstudies the reciprocities ofyoga and physics at his institute near Munich. What hypothesis may emerge

from these studies?

This noetic tendency has begun to affect or infect even the word-flesh

of literature. It is not only William Burroughs who sees the word as a "virus" attacking our damaged" central nervous system, preventing usfrom enjoying "non- body experience.

Other postmodem authors, less extreme, stillfantasists to the marrow, want to dissolve the given "

"

world, absorb its intractable and conditioned elements, tum it into a vision, dream, or afflatus, tum it into consciousness. The effort, however parodic, expresses the ambivalent will to total consciousness: Beckett stands on one side of this effort-and on the other, that old

artificer, Joyce.

This speech, though delivered early in the morning, was greeted with considerable applause, and letters of congratulations (three exactly) followed in the ensuing weeks. But I was not deceived. My speech was

unsystematic. This seems to disturb American scholars more than it does German scholars of a certain school--or is it perhaps the reverse?

Part two: the postmodem imagination

The new gnosticism IS shrouded in speculation; let me abandon it for another speculative topic. In my title, Beckett refers back to Joyce and refers forward to the postmodern imagination. What does this term

"postmodern" precisely mean?

Imprecisely, it means the exhaustion of modernism. It means that certain writers and critics sense a development in Western literature which justifies a new concept, a new name. But to say that postmodern differs from modem is to define neither, and to define the difference even less. In

truth, this question would make an excellent topic for

another symposium.

Alarums and diversions:

May I respectfully suggest such a symposium at theAkademie der Kiinste in the nearfuture? My introduction of the word postmodern into the Beckett Colloquium was met with considerable dismay. It was 190

felt that I should have been able to give a systematic definition of the term, as well as present a report on Beckett, within twenty terran

minutes.

Perhaps a pedantic note may prove harmless here. These are publications relevant to the question ofpostmodernism: Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature State University of New York, Binghamton, N. Y.

TriQuarterly 26 (Winter 1973), Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois.

John.Barth, "TheLiteratureofExhaustion;

"

Atlantic Monthly (August

1967).

Ihab Hassan, "POSTmodernISM," New Literary History, IV(Fall

1971).

Ronald Sukenick, "The New Tradition,

"

Partisan Review, XXXIX,

No. 4 (Fall 1972).

RaymondFederman, ed., Surfiction, Swallow Press, Chicago (1974).

Such notes, however, have never refuted human passions. The irritation with the term postmodernism cannot be soothed with

bibliographies. Some will cry, Hereisanotherfadorfashion, another instance of the enforced obsolescence in our cultural life. Others will whisper to themselves, We have barely understood modernism; must we now start to learn about postmodernism? Others still, taking a more reasonable and patient stance, will simply ask, Is this distinction really necessary? (All, of course, including myself, resent beingforced to witness the unseemly spectacle of our own posthumous selves. ) But with all due regard to Death, the question must still be asked, Is this distinction really necessary? A great British savant-was itArthur Eddington orJamesJeans?-used to lecture Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on the wave theory of light, and Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday on the quantum theory. Likewise, I think, literary history can be viewed alternately in a perspective of continuities and dis­ continuities. In theformerperspective, what Iperversely callpost­ modernism is simply an extension of modernism; and the latter, as everyone knows, is a development ofsymbolism, which, of course, is 191

itself a specialization of romanticism-and who is there to say that the romantic concept of man does notfind its origins in the great European Enlightenment? Etc. In the latter perspective, however, continuities maintained on a certain level of narrative abstraction (i.e., history) are resisted in the interests of the quiddity and discreteness of art, the space that each work or action creates around itself. Hence the perspective of discontinuities, which the work ofSamuel Beckett especially demands.

Hence, too, the postmodem hypothesis.

Alarums end.

Thus I return to the distinction between modernism and postmodern­

ism. Perhaps a few names, a few points of reference, may serve as a start.

In French literature. Modern: Gide, Valery, Proust, Claudel, Andre

Mauriac. Postmodern: Genet, Ionesco, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Henri Michaux.

In American literature. Modern: Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Heming­ way, Eugene O'Neill. Postmodern: Barth, Barthelme, Burroughs,

Pynchon, Sam Shephard.

In German language literature. Modern: Georg, Rilke, Mann, Benn, Musil. Postmodern: I dare not make judgments in this audience, but I would ask you to consider who is and who is not postmodern among the following names, listed alphabetically: Becker, Bichsel, Enzensberger, Grass, Handke, Johnson, Walser, Weiss.

In Irish literature. Modern: O'Casey, Yeats, Joyce. Postmodern:

Joyce, Beckett.

Now, hearing these names, one might be inclined to conclude that modernism is simply the earlier movement which burst on the scene just before and after World War I, and that postmodernism is the later movement, which began to dominate Western literature after World War II. But this is a simplification. There are older writers, like Borges and Nabokov, whom I would call postmodern and younger writers, like John Updike, whom I would call modern. Furthermore, there are important points of contact between modernism and postmodernism: Duchamp, dada, surrealism, the fiction of Kafka, the plays of Brecht, Alexanderplatz, Berlin, Finnegans Wake. Also, some writers, like 192

Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead. begin as modernists and

develop, in Why Are We in Vietnam?, into postmodernists. Finally, there are many writers, like Camus, Boll, and Bellow, whom I would be

unable to classify in this simple diacritical scheme.

Obviously, then, the differences between modernism and post­ modernism are not only chronological: they are also typological; that is, they refer to types of the imagination, configurations of language, and sensibility. What are the essential typological differences? Once again, I have time only for unrefined distinctions.

Modernism, as I see it, was essentially authoritarian in form and aristocratic in its cultural spirit. However jagged or ironic it allowed itselfto be, it retained its faith in art, in the imaginative act, even at the edge of cultural dissolution. Think now of Proust, Valery, Yeats, Lawrence, Mann, Rilke, Eliot, Faulkner. There may be irony in these writers, but the spirit of anti-art is foreign to their spirit. Orpheus sings his song with a premonition of his ritual (recurrent) dismemberment; yet still he believes the song will reshape the earth and perhaps heaven.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, is essentially subversive in form and anarchic in its cultural spirit. It dramatizes its lack of faith in art even as it produces new works of art intended to hasten both cultural and artistic dissolution. Orpheus is not only dismembered; his severed head seems to sing of sinking even as it sinks in the river Hebrus. Think of Barth's Chimera, Sukenick's Out, Federman's Double or Nothing, Saporta's Composition No. 1, Butor'sMobile, Cortazar'sHopscotch.

Hierarchic, ceremonious, complex, allusive, detached, the modernist authors, with their enormous technical inventiveness, still place the forms of art, the artifacts, between themselves and the self-parody, the consummate self-reflexiveness of postmodernists. The trend is toward the effective dematerialization of art, its conceptualization; the implied is from the role of the artist as heroic maker to his role as absurd, change and still cunningly heroic, player. Once again, this change is not simply chronological.

The point can be illustrated with reference to two artists, two contemporaries: Pablo Picasso (modernist) and Marcel Duchamp (postmodernist). Picasso may be the" greater" artist; that is not in question. It is the contrast in their practice of art that concerns us.

193

Cubist Picasso was a formalist in the sense that dada Duchamp never was. But that is not all. The role also

changes. As Harold Rosenberg says, "A public figure, or one engaged in forcing himself on the public, the artist was no longer so much a source of art objects (Picasso, Matisse) as he was an agonist displaying trophies of victory over society (Duchamp, Warhol}."

An incongruous note on Marcel Duchamp and Uwe Johnson: The art of indeterminacy: Duchamp, Kafka, Beckett. Implied is the

postmodern idea of art without artists, artists without art. Complex transparencies of desire. Geometry and chess. A supreme intelligence ofnegation.

Dear Stieglitz, Even a few words I don't feel like writing. You know exactly how I feel about photography. I

would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography

unbearable.

There we are.

Mfectueusement, Marcel Duchamp.

Alias Marchand du Sel; alias Rrose Selavy, alias Mona Lisa with a mustache. Onlylohn Cage really knew how to praise him-twice: in a series ofplexigrams entitled Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel and in the statement: "The rest of them were artists. Duchamp collects dust...

But of course, all art has not become anti-art. Perhaps that is why,

speaking with Uwelohnson during a coffee break after my speech, I kept dropping my coffee spoon on the carpet. Perhaps that is also why, sensing here our affinities as well as differences, he kept recovering my spoon with dismaying speed. His was the last gesture.

Uwelohnson: Art with its indissoluble integrity. If there is anyone to write the story of the contemporary secular saint, west ofSolzhenitsyn, it will belohnson. (Since I wrote this sentence, Solzhenitsyn has been exiled to the West---so muchfortopical criticism.)

Incongruous note ends.

This is as much as I can do here to distinguish modernism from

postmodemism. I should now like to make a further hypothetical distinction within postmodemism itself, between its closed (pessimistic) 194

and its open (optimistic) tendencies. In doing so, I emulate the mock

symmetries of Beckett: "Do not despair: one ofthe thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." Augustinus dixit.

On the one hand, the closed tendency of postmodern literature

manifests itself in the cool articulations of absurdity, in comic or bitter

self-subversion. Literature begins by parodying itself, reflecting itself,

questioning itself ad absurdum, and ends by abolishing itself, either literally (the silence of Genet) or symbolically (the silence of Beckett).

Needless to say, it is the latter who remains the dominant presence in this experimental trend which is sometimes called avant-garde, thus

betraying its affinities with modernist elitism. In any case, the spirit of its authors seems anti-romantic; and their esoteric interests tend toward

linguistic, structural, mathematical, typographical, and game theories.

For instance, Raymond Queneau. Or the younger writers of Tel Quel: Philippe Sollers, Jean Ricardou, Robert Pinget, Claude Ollier, absurdists of a very special kind.

A brief literary history of the absurd: a. Romanticism: not

absurd at all, only irrationalist. The cult of the

redemptive imagination, of the sovereign dream. See Albert Beguin, L' Arne romantique et Ie reve. This returns in surrealism. h. 'Pataphysics and dada: thefirst as the' 'science ofimaginary solutions, "which explores the laws governing exceptions and explains the universe "supplementary to this one" (AljredJarry),· the second as reason used against itself, or perverse rationalism, which "applies itself to everything, and yet is nothing; is the point at which Yes ...

...

and No, and all opposites, meet c. Existential or heroic

to the end, even after

...

"'(Tristan Tzara).

absurdism: reason insisting on its lucidity

discovering that reality and reason are incom­ mensurate. Thus, the heroic absurdism of "the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe" (Albert Camus),' the hero of rationalism as Sisyphus. d. The absurdism of consciousness: nothing heroic here,' conscious­ ness is merely condemned to live with its absurd inevitabilities and entropies, its ''fidelity tofailure" (Samuel Beckett). Reason as 195

solitude, as suffering akin to saintliness, or as a theater of the absurd. e. Chosisme:

quite simply' 'the world is neither significant nor absurd. It is Around us, defying the noisypack ofour animistic or protective adjectives, things are there" (Alain Robbe-Grillet), ...

Agnosticism toward reason. In the background, the shadowyfigure of Raymond Roussel f. Gamesmanship: the absurd as language with its infinitefictions, as consciousness imitating itself in laughter and verbal games,' sometimes desperation or sterility gaily concealed. Hence "the death of the author (Roland Barthes),for each reader now becomes his own author; and the purpose offiction becomes to "unmask its own ." fictionality, to expose the metaphor of its ownfraudulence.

(Raymond Federman). Tel Quel again. In short, reason as self- reflexive, "objective" play. .

.

.

.

History ends.

The open tendency of postmodern literature, on the other hand,

pretends to reject the idea of the avant-garde, pretends to reject, in fact, the idea of highbrow or elitist art of any kind. This tendency immerses itself in culture or ideology. In America particularly, it goes Pop; it allies itself with science fiction, detective stories, reportage, pornography; it seeks out other media, such as film, television, tape, rock music; and it sometimes embraces mysticism and the occult. Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsburg exemplify certain aspects of it.

Another aspect is exemplified in the writings of John Cage, which unite the computer and the I Ching, poetic randomness and utopian reflec­ tion, technology and Zen. But in the end, what will these categories, these distinctions, prove?

Part three: Beckett It may seem that I have hardly spoken about the central term in my title:

Beckett. This impression must be quickly corrected. In my preamble, I

stated that consciousness is my hidden theme. The quest for a total verbal consciousness in Joyce, the quest for a minimal verbal conscious­ ness in Beckett-both express the

postmodern will to dematerialize the world, to tum it into a gnostic reality, a fantasy.

196

A quick salutation: We were waitingfor a taxi. In casual conversation, myfellow

symposiast, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, conjoined the names ofSamuel Beckett and Teilhard de Chardin. Of course. Does not the work of Beckettmirror, in its austere, parodic way, Teilhard's "noosphere"?

In any case, I am gladfor this opportunity to salute Mayoux. At the end of all our sessions, a tall girl with clear slate eyes came up to me and asked, Why didn't the symposiasts recognize one another in dialogue, disagreement, or intellectual salute?

Salutation ends.

Fantasy-the unchecked, the quintessential activity of the fiction­ making mind-reigns in postmodemism. And it is this activity that Beckett represents, in all its scrupulousness and in all its poverty, as he writes and rewrites "imagination dead imagine," all the way back to Descartes, and back to Nietzsche, who noted the obvious: "What can be "

thought must certainly be a fiction. Yet the mentalism of Beckett is qualified by the world of objects. These objects-yes, even legs and hands-possess an intractable, malicious existence, like mathematical surds; their obduracy is never wholly conquered by mind. Still, living among these objects, the characters of Beckett aspire to a state of mind in which objectivity, of things or persons, is no longer problematic. Like the Ancient in Shaw's Back to Methuselah, they whisper, "The day will come when there will be no people, only thought." And though they pray for surcease of consciousness, they imply that consciousness is eternal.

Thus Beckett, a minimalist of consciousness, manages to create supreme fictions of our age--and shyly earns a Nobel Prize thereby.

Waitingfor Godot has become a slogan for our times. Why? Its language, of course, like the language of Beckett's other works, has the uncanny power of purity and mystery-like the language of Marcel Duchamp. But I doubt that the works of Duchamp would have stirred the inmates of San Quentin, as a performance of Godot did in 1957. "It was an expression," wrote an astute prisoner, "symbolic in order to avoid all personal error, by an author who expected each member of his audience to draw his own conclusions, make his own errors. It asked 197

nothing in point, it forced no dramatized moral on the viewer, it held out no specific hope."

(Quoted by Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the

Absurd.) Is this the stuff of which Nobel literature is made?

The question is serious. We can understand Beckett's relation to

Joyce. We can even understand his uneasy relation to the postmodem imagination with its gnostic will, its comic and absurd logomachias, its structures of subversion, its solipsism and its eroticism, its mixed

media, its explorations of the problematics of the book as physical

object (McLuhan, Butor), its anti- Promethean conception of the author (Shem the Penman, "sniffer of carrion"). But the question still remains: whence the authority of Beckett's sequestered imagination, its paradoxical presence, almost its popularity?

Saturday afternoon, October 27.

My colleague, MelvinFriedman, gave a paper at the Colloquium on the development ofBeckett studies, from their secretive origins to the present. I wondered aloud about the enigma ofliterary "reputations, and how they are made. Hans Mayer elaborated on the question with reference toSchopenhauerandKafka, two "obscure'tfigures suddenly thrust into the light. It was past the midpoint of the Colloquium, and I sensed a certain anxiety in the air, a mute urgency to make Beckett relevant, while a war raged in the Middle East and U.S. troops went on worldwide alert. Marxists on the panel and in the audience made a careful casefor Beckett's work as a critique of a decadent, bourgeois society. Yet somehow Beckett refused to become serviceable. I could not account to myselffor the irrelevant power of this writer a mile away from the Berlin Wall. Ifoundmyselfthinkingaboutframes. Somehow, Beckett had becomeforusframed. His earlier booksframed his recent microworks: his neutrality contained, enhanced, the changing commitments of the day. Do we not view everything throughframes?

Frames which distort, which gather and intensify the energies of a society, which, finally, make what theyframe superfluous. And what was theframe ofBeckett? Most immediately, it was the Colloquium itself. Ifound myself becoming more anxious asframes of my own life began toflash through my mind. But not all that anxious: I dined that evening at the Grill of the Berlin Hotel, with my wife and Professor and ,.

198

Mrs. Wolfgang Iser, on pheasant. The cadre was most pleasant.

Saturday ends.

The question remains unanswered: why Beckett now? Why indeed this Colloquium? One might answer: the Colloquium meets in order to discover whether it should have met. One might also answer: the

Colloquium meets because the subject requires a colloquium. The quibbles of critical self-consciousness are endless. The answer is finally personal. .

Beckett, I think, fills the present because, in an age of cant, no writer has revealed a greater absence of cant. (To the German translator: can

English word "cant"? Please include this note itself in the German translation. ) This capacity is not only verbal.

Beckett may delight structuralists by his statement: "I am interested in the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe in them." And he may please absurdists by his disquisition on the three' 'modes of ululation," especially "the laugh oflaughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the salute of the highest joke." Or again, he may appeal the laugh to everyone else by his indeterminacies. Yet for me, the heroic ascesis of Beckett lies in endurance, in the ineffable persistence of the "suffering of being." When all else is negated, this remains. Ifhabits, of which language is the deadliest, deaden, only the "suffering of being" awakens all human faculties to their own irony and their own mystery.

Beckett conceived of his work as "fundamental sounds made as fully as possible" and refused "to accept responsibility for anything else." To what else should he be made responsible? Without great faith in art or in language, without benefit of ideology or dogma, Beckett still manages to regulate his sounds in a way that excludes neither poetry nor love. I say love; I have not forgotten its horrors. The relations of

we render the pun on the

...

Beckett's characters, master and slave, parent and child, husband and

wife, certainly reveal bondage, cruelty, autism. Yet these characters suffer, suffer alone and have nothing to fall back upon except each other. I sense a great charity in Beckett, a charity delayed to the end of

time yet charity still, and it is akin to love.

199

A ldnd of epilogue Men and women came together at the Berlin Academy, and dispersed

again. Did we all come together to talk about Beckett? and And to eat pheasant? And how talk about Beckett?

Last aside.

I

In the audience there is always someone who says or thinks: II know Beckett personally, know him well, and he would be shocked (or

amused) to hear

" ...

What does this really mean? Forget literary

vanity, forget literary snobbery. Is thefriend ofBeckett simply saying, "My idea ofBeckett is a privileged idea, a richerandfuller Beckett"?

Or is thatfriend expressing some unconscious outrage that there is always an Other (Beckett himself as well as any speaker about Beckett) whose reality casts a shadow? Or is thefriend made uneasy by a mode of reference and discourse (in the third person) which implies not only the absence ofBeckett but also his death, hence the death of thefriend "-he himself, hence ours? Yet in his objection- "I know Beckett. asserts his life. And ours? .

.

Aside ends.

Yes, how talk about Beckett? Is there some public way of keeping his terror and charity alive? Can a colloquium turn its own intellectual

contingencies, its own disconfirmations, into discovery, into per­ formance and surprise? Is the answer some kind of paracriticism?

These questions are tokens of my gratitude for standing here, and may provoke some happy answers.

200

Neural neighborhoods and other concrete abstracts Joseph McElroy

It was late at night (as some tales still begin), and I now know she was crazy. And through some collaborative release that I dismissed a moment later in that New Hampshire summerhouse surrounded by

woods full of snow, I found myself telling her that what I was after in

what I was writing was the relation between Outside and Inside. But then I saw in a motion of her mouth that she had understood me, and I wondered what! had meant. Was it anything beyond an owlish and

possibly abstract �ormulation? I decided my miasma had slid across hers, and I let it go at that.

I hadn't, in 1957, read Bachelard's ThePoetics of Space or Ballard's Love & Napalm: Export U. S. A. I had onlyjust read Lolita and hadn't

yet seen a relation in Nabokov between love and science. And it was a

long time yet before a friendly city oceanographer-less through what he said about the Hudson no longer flushing itself than through what he said about Marine Interface--stimulated in my doubly attentive brain a sentence beginning, "Only define the interface, and Hark, hark, the shark! By stroking of its teeth I have found out electricity-but no, not its teeth, its back, where long informations "

...

201 TriQuarterly

diagram out to my touch like a skeleton power raised to its body's surface.

I dismissed the Outside- Inside remark that winter night because I

had been led to believe that this was no way for a writer to think about

writing fiction. It wasn't just that one should think in scenes and images. I had done that when I was twenty-two or -three, recapturing the heavily freighted subway of my early nightmares. But in those turgid pages I all too calmly scrapped, where was clear motivation, where was integral personality and moral stability, what was the good of all these rich words greedily swamping whatever distinction might then have been visible between me and what was around me? I showed these

beginnings to the wrong people too often. I was urged to write stories.

Stories-instead of these displaced passions.

There was good advice by accident in the not-so-good. But good advice is hard to take, and even the not-so-good emphasized a more rational view of what was possible or (in the closet-commercial piety of the phrase) what worked. Now that I try to think about it, all I see is my own lack of independence; If someone had organized a quest to find that cyanometer Ruskin invented to measure the blue of the sky, I would have gone along as easily as on a hunt for the Crystal Skull or the Lost

City of Atlantis. A certain kind of regular, sensitive American novel was what I let myself think I ought to write, like those short stories which the often admirable John O'Hara said so many bad first novelists never had been able to manage.

Like the New York I had temporarily left, a remark of Saul Bellow's in Seize the Day haunted me-that Tommy Wilhelm "reflected long and then made the decision he had rejected twenty separate times."

But what happened to me when I read Michel Butor's Degrees was a matter of confidence more than decision. It was much more than a

grandiosity of obsession in Butor's hero from which I took a kind of leave to go back to my own deepest senses of disorder, and to accept them. But I know there was self-indulgence in the way I believed in Degrees; and whatever else I formulated in planning my own book, A Smuggler's Bible, I did not quite fairlyjudge the truth I told myself about this insidious, heart-entangling, tediously poignantly ambitious French book that turned such beautiful attention away from entertainment to achieve (at least in the translation of an old 202

acquaintance of mine whom I had not seen in years but from whom I had always felt strangely might come one day a message important for me) a gesture almost American.

For at the origin of Butor's Degrees there is an impossibility: the

Paris lycee teacher Pierre Vernier, no matter how many energies,

schemes, and spies he uses, can never assemble the record which is to be somehow equivalent to the lives of the schoolboys whose relations to each other, to him, and to their studies have been the releasing im pulse for his odd project. And I wonder if Butor, amid his preliminary maps,

diagrams, lists, and families, ever faced with the severity of retrospect the exact nature of the main action. He might have decided that-whatever Vernier's failure could say about the impossibility of comprehensiveness and about the relation of this impossibility to energies of inference and schemes of inclusion-this reaching out to other lives through widening rings of relation depended too much on an instability in Vernier, which may lead a reader to question the authority of what is presented and to sum up the book in the judgment tqat from the start we knew Vernier wouldn't make it and would be engulfed by the information he sought. This novel, so French in substance and SUbject, and in some of its precise surveys not so far from Alain Robbe­ Grillet's prescriptions as it might seem when compared to Butor's more successful Passing Time, is close also to whatever is good and bad in that American impulse Wright Morris deplores in The Territory Ahead: to set out to do more than can be done and then take credit for a

grand and moving failure.

If one knew enough about the private minds of novelists, one could write a scandalous history of pretext. Still, the source of Degrees was much more than self-indulgence dissolved and embodied into the hero's desire to contain, describe, and measure; for Butor foresaw that even if his hero was to collapse, the structure increasing methodically from an idea which was a function of his incipient collapse would be at last its own defense-dense in the fullness of attention

given to a mass oflife.

What I found for myself in Degrees was a theme that may not be in the book at all. I found it somewhere between the obsessional plan

(which I would now try) and the massed actualities of ordinary life (which I would always be in the middle of-jobs, games, lusts, fears, the hand on the edge of the tub, the father and son on a silent Sunday on the 203

Brooklyn Heights docks staring up at the draping arc of a greasy hawser to the high rusty bow of a South American freighter). The theme I found between seemed to require a certain abstraction in the style of its statement: and this theme was the powerful and mysterious coexistence of continuity and discontinuity.

Easy to say.

Continuity, discontinuity, each in the other.

The attentive reader would be forced to have both. The eight seg­ ments of A Smuggler's Bible would be equal memories but sequenced chapters; islands but interpenetrations; fresh-found independences yet at the same time collaborative voices of the narrator's suppliant, tyrannical identity.

There would be gaps. There must be. And I had never liked all those

natural, graceful transitions. I accepted gaps.

Was I confusing form with its chaotic SUbject? Almost, but not quite.

A near-mandala, someone said? Pieces of eight? Parody of a first novel? Why not.

But then-and here is what may get me back to Outside and Inside if not to the girl in New Hampshire-I began to fill the gaps. Not only with a very audible sort of dialectic

fight inside the narrator, featuring the attempt of one manic and electronic-seeming part to rule the rest (and make the book go on and on, proliferate its sections and multiply the lurking coherences among them). More important, more risky, the style of these gaps in the design grew to contain among other languages a discursive idiom of explanation. This idiom seemed to go against all I had ever learned. It seemed an unlikely, undramatic idiom, of course confined to very small portions of the book. It seemed also to invite the charge that I was faking connections that were nowhere nearly as much there as the reader was intended to think; i.e., A Smuggler's Bible didn't come together, so I had to explain it together.

Yet I acknowledged this all along; I never hid the gaps. Their fillings even advertised them. And these ambiguous interstitial attempts to bring parts explicitly together (or also to keep them apart as in Nicholas Mosley's Impossible Object) were not even undramatic in the context of a struggle for control of the narrator's personality.

But in one respect I didn't understand what I was doing; and so intense were the tentacles of aggressiveness and intimacy in these bridge 204

sections that in 1964 I would have defended the discursiveness simply as

being no violation at all of the very good old credo preached by my New Critic teachers at college, or by Yeats: Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls

mathematic form, from every abstract thing, from aU that Is of the brain only, from all that Is not a fountainjettlng from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body.

Now, in so far as this prescribes for image, for surface, for the substantial power of detail, I come close enough. My departure from that traditional-sounding but anxiously modern ideal of the wise Irish dreamer who wrote A Vision occurs in what I do with narrative

wholeness or momentum. And when whatever in my work is sensuous, concrete, and organically immediate gets drawn into convoluted

systems like the thrice-separate, truncated, framed portions of process that form the quest of my second novel, Hind's Kidnap those palpable ,

realities can seem atomized from one another. Recompounded. Trans­

sequenced as if in some half-heard argument, so that they must sometimes seem like rhythms run across the lens of a schizophrenic scope.

A Smuggler's Bible was praised for some wholeness or totality in the

midst of disintegration. I'm content with that estimate, especially when it includes comparisons with Malcolm Lowry and William Gaddis. But

that hugely intriguing book with which it was often compared-and which I at last read in '62 when I was well into A

Smuggler's Bible and

which encouraged me to see how far I could get with the

smuggling

metaphor I found in the emptiness of a tacky old hollowed book in a museum in Cornwall-was a feat that I

deliberately aimed to fall short of. The Recognitions-as I scanned it then (even hunting up Clementine materials in the British Museum)-follows its networks of forgery so as at last to organize itself into a convincing grandeur of completion and faith. And this is reflected not so much in many instances of truth imitating imitation and imitation coming true, as in a recognizably pleasurable and old-fashioned yarn. My story in A Smuggler's Bible was designed to fracture.

It was designed to break so that the reader would feel pieces re­ forming as if attracting and acting at distances from each other. But first and last it was designed to break. And as with the narrative, so with the metaphor: designed to break under strains and over distances most 20S

notable in the last chapter (which a friend told me was the one he had not read). where the narrator tries to smuggle himself back over months

and miles of separation into the consciousness of his dying father now

dead. Perhaps an ultimate stability in this smuggling metaphor with its

designed failure (which I hoped would be the opposite of obsolescence) is in Richard Howard's definition of it as "a metaphor for metaphor."

All kinds of things snugor loose inside that uncertain-lidded, hol­ lowed-out bible.

But connections composed of disconnection.

The gaps weren't only between chapters. They were, in another and

nonspatial sense, between modes of experiencing. And the recourse to explanatory language to make up for what the world, the book, and I collaboratively decided could not (or at least must not) be normally or dramatically embodied and shown was a signal of this separation.

Again, the danger: in our life, dominant forces seem increasingly to depreciate the body and the emotions; yet inseparable from these forces are certain means of understanding that cannot be dismissed simply because their clarities are associated with what is called "de-per­ sonalizing.

On the one hand are warm fingers with a fine light of moisture glistening in the crosswise cracks, fine shades of age in the lengthwise wrinkles that belong to you or to someone whom you know and whom you now touch-or if you wish, throw in the finger of a chief petty officer I once knew who lost it to a buzz saw and then to his dog, who picked it up and disappeared with it, clever animal. On the other hand are bones and nerves, chemical compositions, exactly connected to spine and brain in relations that can be diagrammed and formulated with a clarity like that of topographical isobars on an ordinance survey map or of a coordinated grid containing an analysis of stresses. These are measures destined also for our contemplation.

Here and there in the languages of A Smuggler's Bible there runs an idiom of abstract formulation or theoretical explanation. I chose it as a necessary mode evoked by disorders and discontinuities which that first novel of mine grew to accept. What I could not then help doing was to infuse into this analytical explanation a satirical disclaimer. But by the time I reach the technological complexes and city streets of Hind's Kidnap. that defensive attack on system implicit in the clever voice "

'

206

computing the domination of my smuggler narrator in the bridge-gaps of the Bible has been absorbed into a more homogeneous language.

This absorption is not to be confused with what happens in the last bridge of the earlier book. There the manic-repressive-electro-enselfoid voice fails in its plot to be the narrator's "principal part." And it sub­ sides or disperses into a silence that leaves David Brooke together­ ready to find and re-create and successfully fail to reach his dead father.

But I wanted the reader to feel the voice was not dead, would emerge

again and again-this manipulative voice, grandiose, energetic, and (if in a different mood yet under a valuation quite like that of John Barth in Giles Goat-Boy) electronic.

Inevitably the terrain, traffic, neural neighborhoods, and systematic America of Hind's Kidnap would be seen as some form of satire. But the language of the book is subtler than that. And though in my notes

(always just one step behind the next chapter, which opened in front like a vacuum pushing from behind) I jotted structures of images and words, I never formulated for myself the difference between satire and what I was doing. I could no more merely regret and attack systems of city separation and organizational metamorphosis and stultification than I could cast the reverse-simplifications of my "city-pastoral" into anything that asserted the old pastoral imagery.

I was finding a way through some often neologistically pun-corrupted Missing Persons Super Analodigitalexigraph. I wanted composition that would not deny the impersonal clarities of modern systems any more than deny what's really touched in Gary Snyder's" Some Things to Be Said for the Iron Age." And here in Hind's Kidnap, the defined edges and measured processes by which, between Kant and Kierkegaard, my hero set out-to dekidnap places, persons, memories, memory, himself, and a real child different from himself-were not a satirical target at all. One reader spoke of precise, detached shots of city exis­ tence; another of the language developing toward what could be called a mode of thought. These were what I was after.

My sentences got longer in Hind's Kidnap, my syntax more remark­ able. Ifound myself trying to define scenes and objects and the addition of objects and people to scenes, with a coolness of precision while simultaneously surrounding them with" an ultimate undecidability."

That was the phrase William S. Wilson used-with the "undecida207

bility" of the German mathematician Kurt Godell somewhere in his mind-in the catalogue of the 1969 Milwaukee show of New Realist painters.

Understand: I don't reject the moral signthatJ. G. Ballard puts upon his automobiles, rectilinear spaces, wounds, deserted

technological areas: His secretary's car waited by the freight elevator. He touched the dented fender, feeUng the reversed contours, the ambiguousjunction of rust and enamel, geometry of aggression and desire.

(Love & NapGlm: Expon U.S.A. )

Nor am I saying Ballard goes too far in a passage like this one from

the same book-about "our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the

freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of concep­ tualizations

" .•.•

But I have felt, or hoped, that there may be something else in the

styles of efficacy which machine and system open to the mind. I am trying to find a way which can use unsatirically the very styles of abstraction that are part of processes we are right to fear. What I am after is some sequence of contemplation that will use and transmute certain sources of our fears without merely rejecting them.

If I say that Donald Barthelme's rational, complete, and consistent Snow White goes beyond irony and satire to what I will call a chamber of

contemplative equilibrium, I haven't lost sight of a central meaning of the book expressed at the end: She was fond not of him but of the abstract notion that, to her, meant "him." I am not sure that that Is the best Idea.

Agreed.

But the names in Hind's Kidnap embody a different view. Pastoral or

other, they are tokens, and their meaning (which itself is the surname of Cassia) is in part an abstracting, categorizing identity imposed upon

people. Yet my Hind, my Sylvia, my Laura, my Hershey Laurel, my Ash and Peg Sill and Elder Plane (and too many more) are christened by the optical angles, perspectives, and films through which they are seen: and these are not only pollutions, they are also a secret means of revelation like the Hindu Maya of which I make in Lookout Cartridge what Roland Barthes might call "terrorist" use.

208

The narrator Cy in my third novel, Ancient History, recalls an

..

Anti­

Abstraction March" led by the book's alternative hero, the great American celebrity Dom. And I want the reader to connect this with Cy

sitting in Dom's apartment recording its tangible organization of personal evidences so carefully that Cy seems almost to parody descrip­ tions in early Robbe-Grillet, However, Cy is interested also in parab­ olas. And Cy has discovered in the brain what he calls the Vectoral Muscle in a certain triangular arc of movement which is part of-and an instrument for sensing persons in-a field. Also, there is in the book a very immediate but also abstract field theory that is associated with the ultimate destination of the book labeled in its subtly but correctly spelled subtitle, Paraphase: a new time, or state like time, or state of being outside or beside time (phase meaning a "section of time," para meaning "beside," "parallel to," "substituted for").

But again I underlined my scientific invention with a tone of sharp wit. And this, coming as it did from a voice too much like some aggressively insulated Nabokovian narrator, slightly undercut what mattered most. Which was an absolute interest-to be located in these

inventions and in the formulative tendency of Cy's head.

Often here the focus turned upon almost distractingly exact

definition, which unfolded in the contrary midst of an ambient space

mysterious and potential. Now this contrast has in my work-or in my temperament or digestion-little to do with paranoia, a lot to do with discoverable causes, and much in turn to do with some relation between on one side often untouchable

processes beneath appearance and on the other what Piaget calls the special role of mental life: "the achievement of complete mobility and reversibility which are untransferable on the

organic plane."

Clarities: I do not know the meaning of the manned space program.

But I do know that it can both mean less, and be more interesting, than some responses to it declare. When I wrote an

with Apollo 17,

"

essay called "Holding some readers told me they loved the big boom at the

end but couldn't get with the more technical matters I had included. But the very idea of the essay-the significance of the Hold, i.e., the delay,

that night in December '72-was that it could turn one's attention from the big-boom countdown to another aspect of what was happening.

Exactly why the delay.

209

Also, a great field of process not confined to one narrative drama

being watched from the Press Site.

Understand me: the night launch of Apollo 17 made me want to believe in God, made my dazzled eyes and chest imagine grand collaborations in our universe.

But if the delay made one look at that white rocket repressurizing out

there on the pad lit up by a crisscross of xenon searchlights like waterstreams-and feel like Robert Frost's watchers "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep"-it also disappointed one's theatrical expectations and could make one think about facts. This was what the astronauts were

thinking about, and the people at the Launch Control computers, and the people servicing the rocket. The machines and how they work. The forces they enlist and the forces the machines counteract and defend against.

My point is that too often this central substance of space technology is ignored in favor of blast-off kitsch metaphysics (like Norman Mailer's instant Manicheeism), or dubiously knowledgeable satire against the military fictions of the science-industrial complex. I put in this cate­ gory, though the book professes brains not space, William Hjortsberg's Gray Matters, which brilliantly contrives not comic deflation that may come from real experience but, instead, sensational humor released by an unwillingness to give further attention to a complicated subject.

This unwillingness is akin to e. e. cummings' predictable "Space being (don't forget to remember) curved."

There is much to fear, and I don't dismiss Robert Lowell's dooms­

day phrase" Space is nearer" (the particular occasion of which is the excavation of an underground garage in Boston Common). But what is the immediate nature of this experience coming out of NASA for a layman? Much of it is as tangible as the lunar divining rod on the Apollo service module, though much that is beautifully measurable is as far outside the capacity of our senses as the electronic soundings that the divining rod is there to take.

In May 1973 I went back to Cape Kennedy for Skylab. If there were fewer pictures and magnificent charts for the press this trip than for A polIo 17, and fewer press observers (and far fewer sightseers), still the people I talked to seemed more knowledgeable than the crowd in December 1972. They seemed to have done some homework in the main ,

210

Skylab manual, so much more complexly detailed than any of the handouts for Apollo 17. Excitement seemed more precise, as if a tone had been partly set by the nineteen students whose experiments had been picked for Skylab out of 3,400 high school entries.

Gallium arsenide is a crystal semi-conductor used in solid-state electronics; in the vacuum of space we may be able to grow crystals whose perfect elasticity and conductivity will revolutionize timing devices, for instance in hospitals. But also, contemplate the crystal as an emblem of the kind of attention I am urging: for crystallinity is the extent to which the outward and visible form of this solid has been

controlled by its atomic structure. And let true imagination grow from truth.

Yet imagination here must jump such ineffable distances of faith and instrumentation that we will often find ourselves losing the full

authority of our physical senses. And perhaps the greatest single thing at Cape Kennedy, the Vehicle Assembly Building, can seem as elusive as it is gigantically present. In the V AB (525 feet high, 518 wide, 716 long, on piles 160 feet deep) we may look around for a verger or a revelation; the VAB is perhaps the building of the century. In the light of its grids of 70,000 square feet of muted translucent panels, the sizes and scales of low and high bays may seem to cloud function with magic or some intimation of ecclesiastical history, and from the concrete ground or down through the steel mesh along a thirty- fourth- floor catwalk the transfer aisle may look like a nave.

However, what interested the English sculptor Christopher Sander­ son in his

quest for valid structures were certain real relations between

equipment and space. Three magisterially mobile bridge cranestwo with a hook height of 462 feet, one with 166--ride their overhead tracks like giant coordinates. Service-platform enclosures-infinitely adjustable up or down-house rockets like ballistic barrels, or truncate so that from above a booster becomes a stack for a factory or a liner.

As if the designers recalled (and reversed) the human tapering of pueblo doors, each 456- foot high-bay door is an inverted T to accom­ modate not only the vertical rocket moving out toward the launch pad but the vast crawler that carries it. The V AB in its own crystal clarity is the inner and visible structure of an outward and limitless con­

ception.

211

I gaze at a maplike color print whose pocks and variegations. shores and veins, create a cold painterly abstraction independent and

beautiful. In fact, however, this is a composite photo taken by a multi­

spectral scanner, i.e., a sample of what one of Skylab's six kinds of remote sensors were designed to do--and can do even better when calibrated and selectively sighted by a crew.

I run into a textile designer. He comes to all the launches. He takes pictures of the VAB, the hardware, the blast-off; and then in some edge-softening translation he makes silk -screen prints from the developed images. I am more interested in the idea than in what I gather he really does-which is to prod uce some kind of representational illustration. Which isn't what I had in mind.

What do I have in mind? That girl situated in the New Hampshire

night didn't wait. She went off to be confined. But, hell, she knew what I'd meant. How formulate the space which the words of our

collaboration occupy?

Insert: from Rilke's notebooks: And there Is almost no space here; and you feel almost calm at the thought that it is impossible

for anything very large to hold in this narrowness. But outside, everything Is immeasurable.

And when the level rises outside, it also rises in you, not in the vessels that are partially controlled by you, or in the phlegm of your most unimpressionable organs: but it grows in the

capmary veins, drawn upward into the furthermost branches of your infinitely ramified existence. This is where It rises, where it overflows from you, higher than your respiration, Like a beetle and, as a final resort, you take refuge, as though on the tip of your breath that has been stepped on, you flow from yourself, and your lack of hardness or elasticity means nothing any more.

Oh night without obJectS. Oh window muffled on the outside, oh, doors carefully closed; customs that have come down from times long past Oh sUence In the stair- weD, sUence In the adjoining rooms ••••

••••

•••.

Commenting on this passage, which he quotes at greater length, Gaston Bachelard praises the power of the images by means of which "Inside and outside are not abandoned to their geometrical opposition." But he also formulates a meaning whose notable immediacy comes out of its abstraction: •••

to experience [this passage] in the reality of its images, one would have to remain the

contemporary of an osmosis between intimate and undetermined space. (The Poetics 0/

Space)

Formulation is especially suspect among American fiction writers.

Explicit formulation of a theme can shoot its energy. Better to keep secrets even from yourself-your fiction will be more natural, more 212

real, organic. Even the novel's new lawyer Robbe-Grillet can say somewhere that he writes in order at last to find out what it is he is

writing about.

But O'Hara was wrong to say he was "no hairy philosopher." Any

fiction writer is one in some sense by virtue of the words that make the laws that tell the tales.

However, to formulate a position is not necessarily to put it explicitly on view. In the

making of fiction, Henry James's principle is still healthy

and useful. Yet his formula, "Dramatize," shows itself at least as much in the master moralist's melodramatic storytelling linkage of events and moments as it does in individual phrases. Reading Von Doderer's The

Demons, where the historian Stangeler finds essential truth not in anec­ dote but in a crowd of images filling up a space, I think all over again what William Gass in "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" re­ minds me I know: that narrative is itself an abstraction. Moreover, J ames uses language that is not quite what he thought he meant in his word "Dramatize." His is a language of ratiocination----call it abstrac­

tion, not in the sense of withdrawing attention from human feeling but rather in the sense of concentrated understanding withdrawn from the

multiplication of phenomena.

Precise contemplation stirred by modem materials: Consider the fragmented revisions of perspective in Uwe Johnson's The Third Book AboutAchim (a bicycle racer in East Germany). Or the tight assemblage of separated takes in Charles Newman's New Axis, in which the normal elements of social panorama compose into a serial fixity as far beyond lament or satire as it is beyond Winesburg, Ohio. I mean a poise of emphasis in which one is even more conscious of pattern than of the mass of life yet not through any lessening of that mass. Consider Cor­ mac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper, a strange balance of resolved disconnections in which magically separate lives are held close in a system of parallels that equals as if in a chemical sense the solution of Nature. Or Aidan Higgins' Langrishe, Go Down: neutral but urgent phenomena of decline held in a rhythm of energy loss that is also con­ tinuity between (a) the powerful but united responses of participants and (b) a mode of existence independent of an observer-an existence physically absol ute in a pattern that feels like a formula of final forces.

In Isak Dinesen I love the awful grace of the final test yet also around 213

that center, as in "The Roads Round Pisa,

"

find folds of pattern where

life comes true like an imitation of thought. My favorite work of fiction

might be Kleist's novella, MichaelKolhaas; the plainest historical chain of momentums shifts one degree into another curve, and the energy released by the determined rebel expands geometrically and his chosen power joins larger collaborative power not his own.

That story could just have dreamed its way out of some American madness. It has almost nothing to do with the limited, exact reality dreamed by Robbe-Grillet in ProjectforaRevolution in New York. But we are not that austere, and shouldn't be. We had something to learn from Robbe-Grillet, but our novelists have seldom been theoretically thoroughgoing in his French way; and the much vaunted plasticity and precision of Jealousy were never understood over here except as a scholastic exercise that looked thin next to the warm, stunning strokes of intimacy in the prose of any number of American writers, James Agee, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor-and thin as well next to the sheer whole alive alarming intelligence in such work as the stories of Hortense Callisher or Leonard Matthews.

Can it be that there has been too much good writing in America?

Maybe this is why we have little patience with fiction that is not at once out of (to corru pt one of our better critics) "the one bright book of life.

"

The French novelist Leonie Bruel tells me the trouble with American writers is that we write about our own lives too much. If I answer

commonplace with commonplace-to wit, that my life is what I have-I find still a point of agreement with her in that locus within the self sown history where some curiously accidental-feeling collaboration can tum attentive fantasy into a form of freedom. Read Paul Metcalfs Patagoni, where a short history of North American Henry Ford and River Rouge is coupled with a rambling trip into South America under a weird metaphor of brain and body.

I have imagined myself, in the spirit of my divisions, somewhere between N abokov and Mailer. Why Mailer? I guess American hangups, the pursuit of embarrassment American Matter. Mid-'SO'snerve­ house bulletins in AdvertisementsforMyself, half-buried in dreck and energy. Then the American glut, the blurt-and postadolescent pride so messily and flailingly richer than the Hemingway weighing-in ceremonies it is forever invoking. Mailer the writer of pages rather than complete books. Mailer who needs money and whose haste we are ,

214

therefore to forgive as we slowly get through the volume of his prose.

Mailer whose meditation is impulse and whose impulses can't speak

except in reams of other stuff. Mailer who is not quite the risk-taker he'd like to think-particularly in the work itself-but who bugs the

century to entertain him, who asks to be am bushed by experience, and whose celebrity performance is not only an embarrassment of greed but

also an open assault on his own privacy, so that, through some freak

frequency in the urine-sparkling night of missed connections, Inside Norman might come to equal America. I've liked some of his ideas; leave it atthat.

He and Thomas Pynchon would understand the following comment on

Magritte's TheAnnunciation:

ThIs terrifying structure is a neuronic totem, its rounded and connected forms are a fragment of our own nervous systems, perhaps an insoluble code that contains the operating formulae for our own passage through time and space. The annunciation is that of a unique event, the

first extemalization of a neural interval. (Ballard; The Overloaded Man.)

Unlike Pynchon, Mailer will never yield the patience to devise what Richard Poirier (their most interesting expounder) calls in an earlier book A Place Elsewhere. Poirier means less a place in the sense of

Marquez' buoyantly unfolding village in A Hundred Years ofSolitude, or Faulknerpatawpha's own much-surveyed Hundred, than a radical linguistic consistency that displaces existing environments. It happens in WhatMaisieKnew. It happens grandly, if often miasmically, in Absalom, Absalom. It happens in Jerome Charyn's as yet unpublished A Child's History of the Bronx. To take another quite different example, it might have happened in Why Are We in Vietnam? But Mailer was afraid to wait.

Pynchon was not; and (wherever you are, Tom) the elliptical compendium of resultants is Gravity's Rainbow.

From so many foci to be found in this Ulyssean effort-Amer­ icanDog Years (here INSERT two neat Anglo-American notes: on Grass and Pynchon-eels, bananas; on Mailer and Pynchon=the facetious, jocular, hectoring, eventually a bit tiresome humor and irony ofthe don't-bullshit-me American voice, yet also the intuited loss of guts plotted, say, inthe face which shows around' 'the eyes a ruinous system of burst capillaries systematically reminding me that Rockets are supposed to.

disperse about the aiming point in a giant ellipse-the Ellipse of is not feeling too secure here. It is after all his own personal ass whose quivering sphincter is centered right on Ground Zero)

Uncertainty. But Pokier

•

•

••.

••••

215

I would instead here single out what for me is the central interest in

Pynchon's paradoxical patience. I mean something beyond the rocketry's metaphorical connection with eventual unity and with the sexual arc of a death-wish that offers, but may anesthetize and erase the

experience of, a whole reality fulfilled in death as Rilke conceives it in the Tenth Elegy which Pynchon quotes with uncertain force. No: beyond this, but using it, as he so often uses difficult knowledges­ binaries divided by interface, or chemistries divided by a human will to use them and their blank and secret power to use us-is the

deeper thing where metaphor dissolves into identity, and this huge narrative tries to show forth the process of which human life is an

instance; tries to show that process not in order to turn away from our shallow or deep surfaces but to see (or, in some conceptual clarity that is also our own capillary collaboration with them, to break down) the

plasmic structures of ourselves to find in their nonetheless continuing life and form their reality. I no more have' 'patience" with those who dismiss Gravity's Rainbow for its maze and its subject matter, than with those who would disparage the twelve-hour length of Robert Wilson's dance opera, TheLife and Times ofJoseph Stalin. In that work, one of the greatest created for the stage in this century, certain movements often pass so slowly from one side to the other that they seem

part of a system of energy which includes its own contemplation yet is but partly emergent somewhat as the mingled crescendoes of speech at

points in the work are unclearly overheard-in turn like the atomized fantasia of scattered events that constitute Pynchon's characters in Gravity's Rainbow.

His patience is paradoxical in that it is a potent, intelligent will, yet always driven into some parallel or passivity of obsessive elaboration.

The paranoia so explicit and unsatisfying in all the elusiveness of The Crying ofLot 49 is here both more analytically explicit* and often not paranoia at all, but the feeling of terror and passivity bravely returning to their real causes in larger systems that control while being out of some

control.

long poem White?

What might be the relation between his use of Werner Heisenberg's INSERT. Dear Tom: Have you read Charles Simic's

"'So that, seeing a girl on a New York bus with GR in her lap, I would have acknowledged this special companyofGR readers by murmuring to her, "Have you got up to the 2nd Law of Paranoia yet?" But she got off before me.

216

Uncertainty Principle (the partial basis ofthe poem) and your use exemplified in at least one discussion in GR? It may be that Pynchon is too humanly appalled, too much a would- be narrative entertainer, and too temperamentally much the apocalypti­ cian to make a purer and fuller use of his technology and science.

Sometimes in Gravity's Rainbow he can take those pleasures in the "iron age" so tangible in Snyder's simple, direct poem. Pynchon can even come upon that harmonious clarity of attention given to an activity as that experience of attention is defined by Robert Pirsig toward the close of his haphazard Zen and theArt ofMotorcycle Maintenance. But Pynchon seems restive with that sort of clarity.

Reading Gravity's Rainbow at last in the spring of' 74, I felt again and again that it could have been stronger if Pynchon had found a way to crystallize some quantities of chronicle and ambiguous humor into forces of contemplative form that would do more justice to all that he sees and knows. But Gravity 's Rainbow goes very far.

Unlike the American in an English minimum security prison (called Wooton-Under-Edge, I think) passing time with a copy ofGR which soon became popular and famous there, I have no one to pass my copy on to in the jungles and clearings and underground caves of Yucatan.

Sitting at dusk atop a suddenly higher and steeper pyramid and observing the still geometries of shade cast over the vast site by the ruins of a Maya city, I know that it will be a longtime before I distill (if I ever even want to distill) the measures of my imagination into the curious wisdoms of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Why did the Maya invent zero? Because they needed it.

But meanwhile my next step-a book called Lookout Cartridge-has

INSERT.

found a settled system of movement: between London and New York, between gravities, between the pearly stretch-marks around a woman's

groin and the patterns of Stonehenge, between the slow formation of (possibly transformable and marketable) peat in the Outer Hebrides and the screaming tracks of a subway; between liquid crystals peddled to hobbyists and the structure of liquid crystals as they may point toward mind-projection through machines to other minds and as they may relate human being to explicitly formulable forces in nature.

INSERT also between the sealed chambers of lucky contemplation and the smell of an old man telling how wheelwrights used to work.

June 1974 217

...

�chaelStephens'superfiction Jerome KIinkowitz

March 17,1974 Dear Jerry,

Thank you for your book, the essays, and especially the stamps, which I sorely need, I don't know how you knew this. As for digging, let us commence in terms of the literary archeological finds you are after. The first major point between writing about my writing and the other people you have pursued is that most of my best work has never been printed. There are a handful of people, like Gil [Sorrentino], who like my work enough so that I show them what I am doing. It is for this reason that I am reticent about

giving clues to printed works' where­

abouts simply because this work does not represent my output my vi­ sion my ideas etc. And I am also aware that it smacks a bit of Celtic

Victorian preciosity and snobbery to write about a writer's writing which the reader cannot be availed either readily or through assiduous

digging. I say this because I like very much the way you handled both Gil and Ron Sukenick, especially Gil who I feel is a greatly overlooked presence in the literary landscape today, as Cubby Selby told me when I met Cubby in LA some years back, "Gil is the Pound of our era." In the sense that he can respond to divergent talents outside his own realm of 219

TriQuarlerly

what is and is not literature. And he, like Selby, has been quite encour­

aging to me, in the sense that they consider me a writer. That's all a writer needs really, to hell with some other scribe picking away sen­ tences, fixing grammar and spelling, and telling you to read Pound's ABC of Reading.

Does this sound like I am clearing my throat? Well, McNamara, it is St. Paddy's day, and even the tenor John McCormick, who I heard for the first time on the radio yesterday, had to clear his throat before he sang. And really this letter to you is like singing, in the criminal sense-an old Cagney movie say, OK, Mike, sing and we'll make it easy

for you. Tell Officer Klinkowitz how you did it and why you did it, and we'll make it easy for you, he'll put in a good word for you. But you seem to have a humor about yourself out there in Iowa, and to think that you

would like maybe to say something intelligent about my work, this is all

quite flattering, I admit, and I suppose still if it gets you not everywhere, it gets you some place, only you must take it as a given what I suggested earlier, that my best work isn't printed, can't seem to get printed if my agent is any index of this truth, and I am reluctant to reveal the corpses of former works buried in those ugly old magazines that no one will ever find unless I talk.

You write with great sympathy and warmth for Gil and Ron. This is

pleasing to see. Now I am like a stripper removing her clothes. I had stories in Evergreen, Feb. '71, which you say you read, a terrible story

really; also May '71. An essay about Rudy Wurlitzer in April '71 Evergreen. The Voice printed an article in Dec. 26, 1968, Dec. 31, 1970, and Nov. 23, 1972. Also TriQuarterly 26-1 find this story all right. I wish there were some way to get you Gulfweed Voices and the new book StillLife, but that would run into enormous money presently which I do not have-I am not a writer who makes money, never have been. Last year I made about $1.50 from writing, and the year before

wasn't much better, and the year before that was much worse. Some of the paragraphs have appeared here and there, but there is no point in

running that down because the book [Paragraphs] should be out by the end of April. In fact, if you are in no hurry, you can wait until then for the book, and an essay in the forthcoming Mulch magazine (you should write Harry Lewis/R.D. #1/Sugar Hill Rd.! Williamsburg, Mass.

01096 for copies of mag and book, I already wrote him to send you 220

same, but he might forget with book deadlines coming up, I am sure he

is spaced beyond belief). Broadway Boogie 12680 Broadway INYC, NY

10025 is coming out with a story called "Meat Lust," which I rather like.

I'll also enclose in this letter a story everyone hates but which I find quite unusual for its natural flow and artless quality. It is called "Odalisque with Red Trousers "-after the Matisse painting of same name. That should keep you in reading for some time, also bring you up to where I am

today-speechless

....

Our desires are simply stated. We are revolutionaries rampant in the Americas! Poets and

statesmen, in the tradition of former Irish revolutionaries, men of letters, but also men of action. Our tactics are diverse, "total assault," as one Catholic anarchist, Ed Sanders, says. This is our intent, to motivate ourselves in the direction of a radical society, a cultural revolution.

Picture the disorientaton on the part of the police, whether it be New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. For all cops are Irish at heart. Their theory, get the

commie gook mocky shine traitors, but the switch will be, the recalcitrants are micks. Erin Go Brau, alongside the NLF flag, they've been duped, what kind of shenanigans is this, officer?

The next step will be to invade the Irish-American societies throughout the country. Give them what they should have, a Yeatsian second coming. Bring along blacks and browns and yellows, Mexican pachuco bandits, local Puerto Rican winos. All men are Irish at heart. Let the police arrest us on the demonstration lines, and when we appear before the

red-faced, droopy-jowled judge, we will tell him, "We did it for Ireland."

I have spoken about such a program for years to many Irish men and women, in bars or at parties, over a glass of beer, and many of them agree with me, that this is the only relevant Irish tactic, the only patriotic gesture in remembrance of those men who liberated that great nation. Let us begin, then, when we raise up our glasses in salute, in every Blamey Stone or Blarney Rose bar, we will remember Che Guevara, a true Irishman, and raise our glasses high, we will toast, Venceremos! Venceremos!

-The Block Irish Have Come to Roost (Village Voice,I2126/68)

The house was a museum, literally, of natural history, each inhabitont here made the center

of his life a coUection of things, .the mother storing up children, the father collecting beer waste around his beUy, the oldest son a collector of misanthropic dreams, the brother Emmett a collector of He reeled, thinking of them.

-Season at Coole (Dutton, 1972) •.•

The particular time and place in this story of an Irish American family is the -

occasion of son Michael's first visit home since he fled at age fifteen to be a

poet. Earlier in the book each family member has had his or her chapter, except for the three youngest, who share one, and Michael-Mickey Mack, Mackool­ who has none. In story terms, it's been the night before Christmas, climax of a

time when, as a daughter describes it, 221

"

'Daddy gets his period once a year and

for two weeks before Christmas his blood drips everywhere.'

"

But this year

things are worse for Leland Coole, Sr., and the rest of his family. For instance, "Leland Jr. sucked in his meat, tearing pieces from his plate, ravenously, for this Christmas he and the old man had decided to go off the edge of the planet like a brace of ducks in orange sauce together, a duet for father and son, where usually poppa does it now at Christmas, his son Leland will do it a few weeks or months later." Or so says somebody who is telling the story.

"Logic had failed these people years ago," we're told. Here is how some of them act, beginning with the customs inspector at the center of the chaos: Leland Coole, Sr:-These sons, he thought, what a cross to bear, what a pain in the ass worse than the guineas on the docks and the wacky government he worked for, though he couldn't remember who was missing, since he couldn't remember any of their names at that moment, simply thinking to himself, "one of the chiefs must be in trouble." The phone kept ringing, ringing.

He picked up the receiver.

"Hello, Coole residence."

In his most pleasant voice.

The voice at the other end of the phone could be heard screaming.

"I don't care whose residence it is, put your father on the phone."

This is what the Inspector heard: "Your son Michael went crazy and would you please come to Manhattan or we'll have to take him to Bellevue."

But what he heard and what the police said, well, the police said: ''We have a relative of yours and would you please come to Manhattan or we'll have to take her to Bellevue."

But since all his daughters and wife were at home, it had to mean a son [

••.

J

Leland Cook, Ir.:- They are scared shitless because of his size & the terror he inspires in them. Don't he know it, from mother to father on down the faces of the children, he could

wipe them out, make page three of the Daily News.

FORMER MENTAL PATIENT GOES BERSERK KILLS ENTIRE FAMILY WITH RAZOR

But Michael & Emmett would get out of that slaughter, because they don't come by anymore, he'd hunt them down like he did Michael once, when he knew Mackool was tapping his brain for ideas in those books he wrote, that nurd, he's the one Leland wants to get, cut otT his typing fingers, bleed out his tongue, inject blue ink into his veins [

•.•

J

Emmett Cook:-"Mytrouble is, I'm alive at twenty-seven and I'm acting still like I'm

fifteen about to die in one year."

The Inspector was downstairs with his badges, his Knights of Columbus card, an epaulet from his U.S. Government uniform; Leland was there with his underpants falling oft', the children-how they were wonderful in these cases!-gathered around the police like a slew

of Oliver Twists, poor and depraved looking like a Dickens dream of squalor, they were

breaking hearts with their sobs and cries, Don't take our brother, we love him! He's only got six months to live!

222

Emmett was having his morning asthma attack on the porch, as the police marched in to arrest him. Leland was calling from the other room.

"Remember the Post Office, Easter 1916, and who you were named after!"

Mother Rose turned to Leland.

"He was named after my brother Emmett."

Leland was annoyed.

"He was not!"

Inspector Coole was once again, blown-minded, stunned, looking to his wife and older son, the gathered children, the police surrounding Emmett.

"He was named after Robert Emmett," Leland said.

But Mother Rose insisted, he was named after her brother.

Terry stared at the police, who were trying to shoo the children from the room. Emmett's skinny body was draped over one cop's arms, like a cloth, and the piggish-beat-up cop with the bandage had to be restrained by two other officers.

Mother Rose was in the room now.

"He looks like John F. Kennedy this minute."

The police halted, amazed.

They couldn't believe what they heard and went ahead with their arrest, as though she had said nothing.

"Long live Leopold and Loeb!" Leland shouted, as his father attempted to get him to go into the ceDar.

Patrick's chapter is mostly Mackool's, since Pat is the one who seeks out Michael for a talk. And when they meet, "they talked of their tribe, the usual way the conversation went was one Coole was trying to outdo in depravity the other Coole with a story about their, what they called, Family." In terms of the

story, Patrick tells his brother about the latest mad confusion, how two bizarre Coole relatives (half-mad sisters, a story in themselves, which we get in time) are

being detained by the cops (in lieu of Bellevue), and how the old man believes, and is acting out his beliefs, that it's Mickey Mack who's gone nuts.

Behind all these stories is the storyteller, Michael Coole. He is "the watershed child between the alcoholic nation of mother and father, Leland & Emmett," and the younger ones into drugs; he also defines the final triangle of the

youngest, Deirdre, Terry, and Wolfe. The house of Coole has a dining room, a head room, and an attic, and only Michael inhabits them all: "just pick any room, cozy fertile bins where memory never ceased, where fantasy ruled, and he had come once again to wonderland." But this time Mickey Mack Coole is a

visit, not even the visitor, he is the action of a person come to find that "the seeds of his imagination took their powers from these musty rooms, a seven room

house fogged with a million crack ups, a clan of visionaries here," each with their own story but which only a supreme fictionist can fashion into art. We

have the people, as real as can be; they tell us their stories, bizarre as theyseem: but what simultaneously makes it fiction and makes it matter is the artistic

intelligence in, about, above, and behind it. No matter what, says Beckett in the book's epigraph, "All is notthen yet quite irrevocably lost."

223

Waiting for Steve Katz in a Spring Street bar, June 1974 Well, the perversity of my own nature is such that I can create a lot of humor out of my own personal pains. And so the tone of Season at Coole comes out of that particular aspect of my own personality. When I was writing the book a lot of people felt I was brutal, and they were upset that my own family resembled too much the people in the book and that it was an offensive act on the writer's part to do that. In fact just the other day a doctor I know who comes in this bar occasionally had read the book, had read it twice, and was very upset about it.

Q. Has your family read it?

Yeah, my family has read it, too. And that's what he wanted to know, and was very concerned by that. And what I was trying to explain to him

is that first of all the members of my family-my real family-lived

through a correspondent experience. It wasn't that actual experience, but there were enough things in it that were correspondent to it, so that it really was not offensive in the sense that it was a given day-to-day reality for them, to be poor like that and to find escape in that in­ fighting, and the drunkenness and drugs and all those other things. So it may be shocking to someone who didn't grow in experience like that, but to someone who has lived that every day it's not terribly shocking, and it's also in another way triumphant because it shows that you ,

survived it. If you didn't survive it you wouldn't have been able to write about it.

My family background was very much Irish-Irish in the New York sense that they can really respond to someone writing a book, because language is a cultural heritage to them, even in an atrophied culture.

And there is indigenous to an Irish literary life a certain kind of sadness and humor about it, a given in Irish literature from the beginning, and I was always very influenced by it. Even though my family never read that much, there was a built-in mechanism in my mother and father to respond to the fact that it was a lyrical achievement that could transcend any of the degraded quality of the subject matter.

Later in Peter Reginato's Greene Street studio/loft, over burned coffee

You know, it's about everyone's family. We're all dissolving. It's an

establishment. It does not work anymore. It's a bogus kind of system 224

that destroys women and destroys men at the same time, destroys the children that come out of it. So that my writing about it was also being aware of other people's lives being wrecked by that social and cultural

system, and that I was just being the voice of that collective experience.

On a very profound level I don't really think that there are many evils

left in the world. But on a really personal level I think the family thing is a destructive force in our

lives, and it's one that I could really get going

on. In some ways I'm not sure if I should because I know then I'm

politicizing. You know, I'm not really talking about my art, although my art came out of it. I think about William Burroughs when he talks about family in that book of interviews called TheJob that Grove did.

He starts talking about his family and he talks about revolution: you can't have a revolution because the family unit will always be there.

Because it's the most reactionary and destructive force there is. And when I start thinking about it and get angry I realize that it's absolutely true. In some way when I was writing my book a lot of that was in my head-that I really wanted to go out and destroy that shit and make it look so ugly that no one would ever dare get themselves involved in it.

And yet we all do and we all have our optimisms about it. And I don't really see any alternative to it, which is a profound problem of our time.

But we all have a desire to procreate and to flatter ourselves by seeing children that in some way mimic us in a flattering way.

The other profound evil that I've come to realize is poverty, having been in it all my life, and at a certain point it just begins to corru pt you in a very brutal and ugly way. Shaw and O'Neill were very sensitized to this, and lots of other writers, but Shaw and O'Neill in a way that I can

visibly at the moment. Family and poverty are certainly themes in Season at Coole: I was going after the evil of poverty and how it destroys any kind of talent, certainly like with the character Leland-a near literary genius who is done in by his just the insanity of being poor, you know, and how it promulgates itself further. And then the other personal evil is the whole thing of family, and in my own case it was an exaggerated evil because it was so apparent. But I think that everyone I know, whether they cop to it or not, they have that strain running through their lives-a familial profundity that at times can approach despair, because they have a mother and father. see very

...

225

Unhinged from the doors of my cell, Prince S's rabbit Is In the room, I can't remember his name. The motherfucker speaks to me, & I'm loony, Michael Mad Dog, goddam, up & down the merry-go-round my head, It was on Second Avenue, he bummed a cigarette outside the

Fillmore, he said, "tick with me tonight, I'll tell you all about her." I lit his cigarette & he opened a bottle of wine, we whispered into the stuff, got shltfaced together, she (I mean here the Prince S) was off rehearsing a piece of music by Schonberg, 12·tone Earl Schreib paint job, the bartender was speaking to me & the rabbit. The animal's tuxedo covered with New York soot, he voiced strong objections to, "the rats give the rodents a bad name, take myself. I'm clean, not aggressive, like to talk to people, make love, but that's not what I want to talk about, I'm always jumping off tracks," his ears drooped, lower -"The Hare Apparent,"Evergre�n Review(February 1971) ••••

High tide Sconesfor breakfast,' shower, shave, watch a gullfly past the skylight.

Sand covers thefloor in the kitchen, because [forgot to empty my sneakers after walking along the beach at sun up. The pebbles on the linoleum grate along the soles of my barefeet. Besides, a postcard arrivedfrom heaven. The angels are with me now; the angels approve of the way I make love to her. We were talking about a pheasant when the postcard came in the mail. A pheasant of suchfine succulence that we would eat itsfeathers too. I doubt whether the angels understand this devotion to birds. Other mornings I spoke ofwriting a letter to an old girlfriend, but the thought of, she never answers, drove me to go swimming instead. A simple letter I couldfold in thirds, double spaced, and with a direct statement. DearS, miss you still, wish you were here. I guess it seems strange that I should write you after all these years, but myfeelings neverflagged, [wanted to tellyou about my wife and child,

but I suppose that isn't necessary. The boy has my eyes and your nose, his mother's temperament. The bossfired me three weeks agofornot

taking an interest in my work, andI've been living on a wharf at the seashore ever since. My unemployment is transferable, we manage to cut expenses to a minimum and live a healthy, uncluttered life. Your breasts creep into my dreams, and your long body appears whenever I swim toofarfrom shore. I imagine that you get better looking each day, my ownface has assumed a distinct character since we last met. My curiosity would drive me to ask why you never say hello to me on the street, but then I realize it's none of my business, we all have our quirks.

When I'm alone on the beach, I like to think that I've known nothing but good ladies. WhenI'm withfriends, I tell them you arefine, that you are a complex woman who can't be explained in an evening. With 226

most women, I assume their natural grace but realize you would

have

handled the situation with more poise. This keeps my headfrom

wandering where it doesn't belong,· I can understand how you might forget myfirst name after not seeing mefor so long. My own memory relies on imagination most of the time. There is the sound ofwater breaking on the shore outside. Ifound out yesterday that the sound is called' 'plangency. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a namefor the sound of a man breaking past a woman's thighs, a name for the absence of this sound in my ears now. But the air isfresh, the wind is calm, I see thefishing boats coming infor the day. Today I had sconesfor breakfast; cheese, pears, burgundyforlunch; chicken wings, kale, raw clams, white wine, Portuguese bread, sweet unsalted butter for supper. Love, =Paragraphs (1974) "

Isaac Babel wrote novels that were about two pages long, literally.

The Red Cavalry is just a series of brilliant novels, one after the other.

They're very, very short, some of them are two pages, some five, but never much beyond that. How I did the paragraph was that it started out as an experiment because I was thinking about my own style and the units that I wrote in, and that I wasn't particularly interested in writing a poem, with a line break; and I wasn't particularly interested in writing a story, with a beginning middle and end. I was trying to find out how my thought process worked. I realized that it worked in paragraphs; I had one thing that was a paragraph and it would end there and then I would go into the next movement. So I just sort of started it as a way of refining the way I wrote and as I started doing it-I did about two or three hundred of them-I realized that a lot of them were very separate entities and that they weren't just experiments or anything like that, or

exercises, but that they were actually their own integral form. I liked that idea because it didn't have the burden of being called a poem which a poem does have

today. And it didn't have the burden of having to tell a story, which is something that I've always felt to be a burden because I'm not interested in story. The thing with Season at Coole is that there's practically no story at all. To this day why I still love Joyce is that he was I probably one of the worst storytellers of all time. In Ulysses remember hearing Anthony Burgess speak one time and he was saying ...

227

that the movie version of Ulysses was extrapolating the story and

forgetting aboutthe rest of it, making a movie of the story. He said the thing they didn't realize was that it was probably the worst story ever written, and that the beauty of his writing was something totally different. And I started thinking about that.

Particularly Charles Olson, his essays, was the first influence in terms of how I wrote a sentence and a paragraph, making the paragraph a unit of writing, and using a comma instead of a period for breath pauses, and letting the ends of the paragraph be the real intaking of breath and the longest pause, almost a silence, and then going into the next one. I was talking with a friend of mine who's a very formal English instructor, and he said that to diagram a sentence in Season at Coole is almost impossible because everything about the sentences in the book is grammatically incorrect. I told him what I really love from Camus' notebooks, when he was talking about Balzac and saying that he thought that Balzac was not a genius in spite of his bad grammar but because of it. And since my own grammatical upbringing has been pretty negligible, you know, I went with that right away. Just thinking about American prose writers that I like, I liked Dreiser when I was

really young, and maybe I liked it for that sort of sloppy American grammatical inaccuracy that he had. That is certainly valid to American speech, though. And Frank O'Hara has that in TheLunchPoems, you know, just that the constructions are slightly awry at times, and that's the thing that makes them so artful.

From there [New York) Andrei Codrescu wandered to Detroit (because he read about that city in Celine's "Journey to the End of Night"), hooked up with John Sinclair's Artist Workshop, and learned, as on a tabula rasa, the American language via the street hippies, radical poets, rock records, and later from runaway girls he picked up on 8th Street, the countermen at Blimpie's on Sixth Avenue, and other unaccountable American Sources.

-"These Poems Are Loaded," Village Voice (11131/70) .

The truth is the consistency of the language, and its unnameable ability to create experience, not through language, but language as the experience itself.

-''Reviews: living at the Movies," Valley Advocate (2/6n4)

My whole orientation to words is more lyrical than anything else.

Anything I write has got to have a certain music to it or I don't bother with it. Very often in my work one of the problems is that the music often cuts off any story line. In Season at Coole I happened to maintain 228

that, it's true. But in other writing I've done since then the music got out of hand, but it is still a prerequisite that it has to have that music somewhere. The first person that ever really influenced me in terms of

writing when I was young was Thelonius Monk. I often have this fantasy of someday doing a musical about his life, and putting words to all of his compositions, like Round Midnight. I went through a whole period, when I was about fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, where I used to go see him everywhere; I used to go to the Five Spot every night and listen to him. That was the initial lyrical experience.

I see two influences working in Flats. The first is writers like Beckett and Robbe-Grillet; the second is cowboy pulp novels and Western movies. There is a feeling here like inJohn Ford's silent movie Three Bad Men. Just a couple of raunchy cowpokes shooting the shit at the fire in order to make It through the night, hoping that the sun shines once more so they can see the posse coming, the rattlesnake under a rock, or an Indian in the foothills.

-"A Voice atthe Edge of Things," Evergreen Review (April, 1971)

What Is a geography to say what I say.

Let me be the figure of the inward.

-Alcohol Poems (1973) The seeds of his imagination took their powers from these musty rooms

...

-Season at Coole

It's one of the few things about the book that I had a really thoughtful kind of pre- writing reaction to. First of all I did about eleven drafts of

the book to start with, and so a lot of the quality of my style that looks like a loose-ended spontaneity is a worked -out process that I go through to maintain the illusion that it just came out of me in one burst. With

Mickey Mack the original version that Dutton accepted was done in the first person. So in other words I was the narrator; when I was discussing it with my editor and looking it over at one point, I felt that it was so obvious that it was my story that it would be better if it were in the third person. I never at any point try to give an objective realityofthe story or

ofthese people's lives or anything. So what! came to realize is thatthe voice of the narrator is so SUbjective that it wasn't necessary for a

chapter about Mickey Mack Coole because it was his story all along, and that more than anything else the characters he created were projections out of his own fantasy.

229

Life is afarrago, I said I shimmied up the drainpipe, my

keys locked in the building I

shimmied up: the room whose window I shimmied toward was on the

secondfloorwhereI slept.

Things were awry as I shimmied up the drainpipe toward the window, with its broken panes, within whose demesne my keys were located.

I shimmied up the drainpipe in thisfreezing cold pre-dawn, andI said. iflifeisn 't afarrago then I'm drunk or crazy, of which I might be both. I tried shimmying up the drainpipe earlier, but quarter way I and downward I shimmied, which was not helpful or what I slipped, intended. I shimmied up to the window ledge with its broken pane, and I espied my key ring on the table, the keys locked within the magic circle of the ring. I reached out as though to embrace the keys, and I slipped-fully up the drainpipe I had shimmied now-and then Ifell from the second story ledge, backward, onto the concrete, unhurt, because I was either drunk or crazy so the usual tensions that attend a person trying to break into a second story window did not attend my person.

I lay in the chunks ofglass.

The brandy swelled in my head like a heat, the were

palms of my hands

bleeding.

I looked at my bleeding hands, I said,

"

"Tfeel all right, Ifeelfine.

Chunks of glass stuck in my ass, which I picked, both the ass and the glassfrom the seat of my pants. I threw the pieces ofglass into the bottle-broken street.

Then Ifelt a wann liquid oozing down my ass, down

my trousers to

the back of my knees.

I must be bleeding to death, I said, but then I realized that

my pint of

wine, in my back pocket, had broken. The only real damage was to

my

thigh, which bled like a holy red river down my leg, because the ballpoint pen in my rightfront pocket had punctured the cloth, punctured theflesh and muscle of my upper leg.

The pen hadjabbed my leg as Ifell, the pen's nib ensconced in my femoral. My sunglasses were cracked, and now that I thought about it, my ribs and my back were numbly aching, quaveringfrom thefall. I concluded that this was not a gracefulfall, nor was it a successful 230

ascent, since the import of climbing was to gain access to the window, enter the window into the room, andfrom the room to extract my

to

key

ring with the keys to thefront door.

The day before I had seen an afghan leapfrom afifthfloorwindow around the comer. It was pure grace, as though its ears were desue­ tudinous wings that were about to come back to life. The afghan bounds to the next building; no, it splattered over the concrete below, in utter pain, within minutes dying, it was dead. I neither

yelping yelped nor diedfrom myfall. I learned one thing, and that was to be circumspect upon my next ascent up the side of the building to the room in which I slept. I shimmied up the drainpipe, I spoke to myself, I said: Steady, Martin.

OrI said: Easy does it.

Or: You 've got it now, Buster.

Watchyourstep, MrShigh.

[That's pronounced "Shee, like the good people.]

I shimmied up the drainpipe toward the secondfloorwindow, I placed my cut hands on the window ledge, and with one burst of energy from my blood-wet and alcohol-dripped legs, I am inside the window, I am home, safely.

But then my pants got stuck on the aluminum clasp on the drainpipe, and I hung, legs dangling, thrashing in the ozone, arms wavingfor help.

Life is afarrago, I screamed. A man then walkedpast with his dog, whistling. Iyelledfor help but he kept walking, once looking up as though I were an apparition in the air, he muttered, "The things people do in this town. Then my pants ripped at the crotch, where all the weightwas, andI burstfrom the sky.

-StillLife (1974) "

"

June 11,1974

Dear Jerry, I think it was a good meeting last week and I look forward to seeing

what you do with the material. Right now, shortly after my first verbal

speak about a craft I've always maintained a silence about, I am reflecting on some of your questions and my answers to them. The most

major addition I feel is necessary concerns the notion of using real 231

people as the inspiration for one's characters. We all do this, but, I suppose, in my case, and probably in Gil's case too, the reader seems more concerned how much is real and what is imaginary. For me, they blend so easily, I cannot often find the demarcation line. But I do have several rules, which I didn't mention in the interview, and which I find essential before I sit down to type out a story or book. First, I say, never write to get even. It will always go against you. Second, be like Chekhov, love every character you write about. The second rule is essential-you

can't get into a character, whether you criticize or praise, unless you love them first. Not like. LOVE. With an obsessive passion. The Cooles I love

dearly, or I could never say what I say aboutthem. Ditto in StillLife with BusterShigh and Lady Hand. Ditto in the stories. Well, amigo, I am sure more will follow at both ends of this correspondence. Be well.

Michael

232

The fictional criticism of the future Robert Scholes

Knowing one thing is a way of not knowing something else. If I know the earth is flat, this is a way of not knowing that it is round. Frequently­ usually-knowing something easy is a way of not knowing something hard. With this in mind, I wish to discuss some of the things we know about fiction and criticism-and perhaps to hint at what they prevent us from knowing.

Once we knew that fiction was about life and criticism was about

fiction-and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metafiction. And we know that criti­ cism is about the impossibility of anything being about life, really, or even about

fiction, or, finally, about anything. Criticism has taken the

very idea of "aboutness" away from us. It has taught us that language is

tautological, if it is not nonsense, and to the extent that it is about any­ thing it is about itself. Mathematics is about mathematics, poetry is about poetry, and criticism is about the impossibility of its own existence.

That this hard-won position should prove untenable is not simply a

fault in our critical guides. Having reached such a peak of solipsism is, like climbing Mount Everest, a genuine achievement. But having 233 TriQu8l1erly

climbed Everest, one's choices are limited. One can remain at the peak and perish of inanity, one can fall or jump off, or try to climb down

again. The great trick is to climb down by a different route and thus see the world in another way. One climbs Everest for the sake of the new

perspectives brought back from the peak. My intent in this essay is to put the present situation of fiction and the criticism of fiction in such a new perspective. For I, too, have been to the peak, or near it.

Most of our writers and critics of fiction at the present time can be divided into two major groups, which operate on rather different prin­

ciples. I shall return later to consider more elaborately the nature of these groups-and some others-and the relationships among them, but for the moment they may be characterized in terms of the metaphor already developed here. One group has been to the peak, the other has not. The latter is handicapped by its faith in an outworn creed. The former is also handicapped, but by its loss of faith, its doubt about the very possibilities of fiction at the present time. My primary concern is with this group, because I believe that its experience of doubt-the in­ tellectual vertigo that assails all those who look deep into the verbal abyss-is an absolutely necessary experience for the writer in our time.

To move, to change, even to continue, we must go through this place.

There is no way around it. My faith in the necessity of doubt puts me in a doubly paradoxical position. I must urge some to approach the abyss for the first time, even as I exhort others to pass beyond it. For both of these tasks to be accomplished, it will be necessary to consider in less meta­ phorical terms the nature of the verbal abyss itself before trying to suggest what may lie on the other side of it.

The philosophical anguish I am concerned with here should not be

confused with what some take to be the unique horror of modern exis­ tence, though many students' of literature may seek to blame artistic

difficulties on existential problems. Frankly, I know of no scale on which to balance the horror of modern life against that of any other age, and I am convinced that every age has had its share of horrors for those

sensitive enough to register them. No, the vision I am concerned with here is merely a verbal one, as the vision of a mystic may be considered to

be merely spiritual.

Put simply, contemporary writers and critics have lost faith in the

ability of language to correspond with the nonverbal parts of life. This 234

emphatically, not a problem felt by the great writers of the early twentieth century. Joyce and Proust, for instance, shared a faith in the ability of their verbal art to give coherence to the actualities of the world around them, however much they sensed the inadequacies of

was, most

traditional "realism." But modern critics (like Roland Barthes in S/Z) have shown with devastating irony that even a great' 'realist" like Balzac did not make his linguistic code correspond with reality in-itself, but

simply alluded in his language to other already codified beliefs, other codes which themselves inevitably lack genuine ontological status. Lan­ guage is language and reality is reality-and never the twain shall meet.

Thus say the Kiplings of the new epistemology, nor can we dismiss this intellectual apartheid as mere literary jingoism, for the physicists are quite ready to admit the same shortcomings in their mathematical lan­ guage. All systems of notation offer us models of reality rather than descriptions of it. Nor is the way out of this dilemma to be found by denying its existence. The fiction of the future and the criticism of the future must find a way to accept this situation and continue functioning so as to be useful to mankind.

Here I must digress a bit in order to discuss the uses of fiction in

general, before considering the way these uses relate to the present situ­ ation and the future. Fiction has always been characterized by its ability to perform two functions. Some fictions accomplish both equally, some emphasize one; but a work which accomplishes neither must be a bad fiction or no fiction at all. We may call these two functions sublimation and cognition.

As sublimation, fiction is a way of turning our concerns into

satisfying shape, a way of relieving anxiety, of making life bearable.

Sometimes this function of fiction is called a dirty and degrading word, "escapism." But it is not exactly that, any more than sleep is an escape from being awake, or a dream is an escape from not being in a dream, from being wherever we are when we are asleep and not dreaming. Sleep and dreaming are aspects of life which are important because they are necessary for our functioning as waking beings. A healthy person sleeps and dreams in order to awake refreshed. As sublimation, fiction takes our worst fears and tames them

by organizing them in a form charged with meaning and value. Even the label "escapist" acknowledges that fiction is connected to our actual existence precisely by offering us relief 235

from its problems and pressures. The flimsiest fairy tale plays with our

fears of death and failure by offering us a vicarious triumph over both these terrors. And the tale of terror itself, like the nightmare, offers us

finally the relief of escaping back from fiction into an actuality which seems sweet in mere contrast to the horrors of dream or fiction. But the

sublimation of anxiety and fear is only one of fiction's major functions.

The other is cognition.

In its cognitive function, fiction helps us to know ourselves and our

existential situation. Because fiction does function in this way, it has sometimes been assumed that it must offer us a record of experience or

picture of real life. This is the realistic fallacy, which so much of con­ temporary critical thought has labored to expose. For fiction offers us not transcriptions of actuality but systematic models which are distinct from reality, though they may be related to it in various ways. Tradi­ tionally, realists have claimed a close and direct correspondence

a

between their models and the world around them. This has led to

disputes among them (like the well- known quarrels of Wells and James, or Bennett and Woolf) because each realist felt that his version of reality was called into question by someone else's different version. But to our eyes these disputes seem almost childish, since it is clear to us that each writer presented in his work a model derived from a different aspect of reality and related to it in a different way. Every important writer's work offers us a different system of notation, which has its own focal limits in

abstracting from the total system of existence.

The attempt of James Joyce in Ulysses to use a multiplicity of styles is a function of his awareness of the problem of notation. If each aspect of reality requires a different language, then Joyce would counter by gen­ erating an astonishing variety of narrative codes. But the very fact that Joyce persisted in the proliferation of codes in Ulysses indicates that he still subscribed to the realistic faith and was only resorting to extreme measures to preserve it. But now, with Joyce's example helping to clarify the nature of the problem, this faith is simply unavailable to those who consider carefully the possibilities of fiction. For what we can no longer accept is precisely this Joycean faith in the transcribability of things. It is because reality cannot be recorded that realism is dead. All writing, all composition is construction. We do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it. There is no mimesis, only poiesis. No recording, only constructing.

236

The failure of realism as a faith, however, is balanced by another

failure which has been much less considered. And that is the failure of

fantasy. For fantasy has claimed with considerable vigor a special status in literature. It has insisted that it is capable of nonrealism, of an

imaginative divorce between the fictional models it constructs and the world we all experience. This claim, too, has proved unfounded. No man has succeeded in imagining a world free of connection to our experi­ ential world, with characters and situations that cannot be seen as mere

inversions or distortions of that all too recognizable cosmos. Thus, if we must acknowledge that reality inevitably eludes our human languages, we must

admit as well that these languages can never conduct the

human imagination to a point beyond this reality. If we cannot reach it,

neither can we escape it. And for the same reason: because we are in it.

All fiction contributes to cognition, then, by providing us with models

that reveal the nature of reality by their very fail ure to coincide with it.

Though this distortion may be greater or lesser, there is always distor­ tion.1f there were not, there would be no cognition and no fiction; there would only be reality and us within it, as the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish.

Some writers and critics have seen both sides of the fictional dilemma

clearly. They know that reality can be neither captured nor escaped, and their response has been to redefine the esthetic act itself and argue that all works of the imagination are plagiaristic. The acceptance of this view by writers leads to the production of what has been called self­

reflective fiction, or metafiction-a fiction which, if it is "about" any­

thing, is about the possibilities and impossibilities of fiction itself, as in works like Barth'sLost in theFunhouseor Gass's Willie Masters'

Lonesome Wife. It also leads to the production of what might be called

anticriticism-a criticism which denies the traditional critical impera­ tives without quite accepting the responsibilities of fiction. This anti­ criticism is widely practiced at present by such formidable

figures as

Susan Sontag and Ihab Hassan, as well as a host of lesser folk. It often

involves a good deal of cutting and pasting, which is the critic's timid version of the writer's bold plagiarism.

What we have here is a classic case of loss of faith attended

gation of responsibilities. Everyone is expressing himself

by abne­ by copying

everyone else, and, naturally, no one is listening. Nor is this situation to be dealt with by a few brisk exhortations. It is a

philosophical problem

237

and will require a philosophical answer. Which means that literary

criticism should engage the problem itself and not merely wrestle with the symptoms of it. As Robert Coover pointed out in his metafictional

Pricksongs & Descants, the contemporary writers of fiction "have been brought into a blind alley by critics and analysts." If there is a way out of this blind alley at present, it must be found by writers themselves, of course, but "critics and analysts" should at least feel obliged to help clarify the problem. And the problem is a complex one because it in­ volves both those writers paralyzed by solipsistic vertigo and those who have yet to experience it.

If self-reflective fiction is one response to this dilemma, what has been called the new journalism or the nonfiction novel is another. The

best of the new journalists have accepted, consciously or unconsciously, the view I have been developing here, that both realism and fantasy are

impossible achievements. Thus Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe have adopted highly idiosyncratic or solipsistic attitudes in reacting to the people, situations, and events that they have dealt with in their writing.

The reasoning behind much of the new journalism may be said to function in this way: "Since reality cannot be recorded, all pretense to objectivity is a sham; therefore the only honest position is to admit one's subjectivity, even to flaunt it. And, on the other hand, since reality is finally inescapable, there is bound to be some validity in my wildest flights of personal speculation. Ergo, whatever I feel like saying is worth hearing, and my method will be simply to let it all hang out." There is something to be said for the frankness and spontaneity of this position, but I think that it, too, is an overreaction to the loss of faith in realistic

possibilities. Though all writing is construction, some models may well bear a useful and quite direct relationship to certain aspects of our human situation. It is precisely because the truth cannot be told that we must exercise such great skill and caution in trying to approach it.

Despite its weaknesses, the position of Wolfe and Mailer has more to recommend it than that of Truman Capote, for instance, who promises us boldly at the beginning of In Cold Blood that he will explain why the events he chronicles with such relish ever took place. The failure of this "why" to emerge from Capote's account is partly a measure of his bad faith and partly a failure of the realistic imagination. There is no single "why," of course, because there is no single omniscient perspective on human events. Capote has pretended to us that what is nonfictional will 238

therefore be real or true-and this is simply not the case. The nonfiction novel pretends to offer both a record of the actual and the pleasure of

novelistic certainty about the values involved in this record. Since it can deliver on neither of these promises, the attempt itself is fraudulent, and far less useful to us than the open solipsism of Wolfe and Mailer.

If both the metafictionists and the new journalists have failed to find

viable, continuing solutions to the problem of linguistic limitations, they have done us a valuable service in exploring the nature of the problem,

and they have produced individual works of strength and beauty­

though how durable remains to be seen. Still, the problem remains: How can fiction be most useful to mankind in the

present and the future?

Can it function once again as a criticism of life with a validity beyond the

merely personal? The solution, naturally, lies within the problem. If fictions are model versions of reality, rather than either records of the real or fabrications of the unreal, then we must explore the ways in which such models may relate to our existence. And here we may call upon the history of fiction to help us. For the relationship thought to exist between fictional models and reality has itself changed in time. If we, then, make a critical model intended to

depict such a change as a developing history, this model should enable us to make some projection into the future and to speculate about the possible paths open to fiction at the present time. The model I wish to present here will take as its con­

structive focus an aspect of fictional history which is most apparent as an irreversible

process changing through time. And that aspect is the treatment of fictional time itself.

Every fictional work presents a model which stands in some temporal relation to the world of its composition. This seems simple enough, but it is complicated by the fact that time itself has been conceived of dif­

ferently at different points of history. Mythic fictions are prod uced in cultures that lack a concept of historical time. Myths deal with un­ changing conditions. If they treat the creation of the world-as they often do-they present it as establishing conditions of existence which will remain fixed until the end of time. When myths deal with the time between the Beginning and the End, they treat this time as cyclical, not as linear. This view of the cosmos persists in primitive cultures until cer­ tain technical developments (such as the invention of writing) force them to acknowledge that history exists and they are in it.

Closely related to mythic time is legendary time. Fictions of legendary 239

time represent a stage in the growth of historical awareness. Legendary time has two stages, a then and a now. Then, there were giants in the

earth, or a paradise inhabited by man. Now, men are smaller and the conditions of existence are more constricting. Sometimes legendary time includes the notion of a future (a "then" in the other direction) in which lost greatness will be restored and paradise regained. Legendary

time thus incorporates some notions of past, present, and future, but as distinct conditions-as beginning, middle, and end, rather than as a continuous process of change functioning through specific human

actions. Legendary time should be distinguished from another concept which is also rooted in primitive culture though never entirely sup­

planted, even in the most technologically developed societies. This is the ideal time of fairy tale and romance, a time out of time, which offers us neither beginning, middle, nor end of our own historical process but another time altogether, a time "upon a time"-a whole parallel uni­ verse where events are ordered nearer our hearts' desires than they are in this world.

As cultures enter history, all three of these narrative time-concepts

Myth atrophies, becomes fixed, an artifact from a vanished world. Ideal time retreats to the less sophisticated enclaves in a given

are altered.

culture: the folk, the children, the disabled and disadvantaged. Or it

persists as something condescendingly tolerated by the cultural initiates as an "opiate for the masses." But it does not die, nor does the need of all men to live in ideal time at regular intervals vanish. Daydreams and night dreams are inevitable, and even the worst nightmares have the in­ evitable happy ending-the sleeper's discovering that' 'it was only a dream." When we wake into the nightmare of history, however, this is another story. The third form of primitive time-consciousness that we are considering here--Iegendary time--slowly evolves into historical time. In the very writing of history we can see this process. Herodotus leads to Thucydides, Livy gives way to Tacitus, and even Gibbon seems but a teller of tales alongside Rostovtzeff.

As the shift is made in human consciousness from legendary time to historical time, many other changes also occur. When history is dis­ cerned as a continuous process, the past and the present are perceived as intimately related. At first recurrent cycles are noted, in which history seems to repeat itself. But finally the irreversibility of certain historical processes becomes clear. At this point man may be said to be fully aware 240

that he is in history, as a raft is in a river, and that some things, once passed, will never be seen again. The writing of fiction has of course been deeply influenced by these developments. The novel itself may be

said to have developed and reached its greatest achievements precisely learning to regard the present as history. The rise of the novel as a

by

narrative form was marked by a shift from concern with a legendary to concern with a historical present. By the nineteenth century the

past

novel had clearly established as its raison d'etre the recording of

changes in human behavior. This is precisely what the great realists, from Balzac to Zola, thought they were accomplishing. But something else happened in the nineteenth century, which changed the possibilities for fiction in ways that are just beginning to be realized.

The consciousness that history is an irreversible process led man in­

evitably to a new view of the future. For centuries men had thought of the future as in one sense inscrutable, except as darkly hinted at by oracles and portents, and in another sense as simply more of the present.

One might not know who would be king, but one knew that there would always be one. The King is dead? Long live the King! The idea that the future might be radically different in its social or economic organization was unthinkable until some time in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and the impact of irreversible technological change did not be­ come

apparent until the nineteenth. The result of these and other

developments was that man could finally conceive of the future his­ torically. Having reclaimed the past from legend and the present from chronicle, writers of realistic fiction could begin contemplating the future as a space of time about which novels might be written. But something happens to realism when it is projected into the future.

(Something happens to realism projected backward into the past, too, but that is not our concern here.) The idea of a future different from the

present, but logically connected to it by developments of present cir­ cumstances, gradually impressed itself on writers during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then utopian fictions, which had always been

located outside of human time, could be projected into a historical

future and linked to the present by imaginative extrapolation. And such works began to appear, as did projections of a disastrous, dystopian

future. The first ventures of novelists into the historical future were

mainly of the utopian/dystopian kind, or else were technological 241

boyish men played with new toys created by science. But over the past century the possibilities of future- fiction have been greatly extended. And, what is more impor­ tant, the rate of change in the present human situation has accelerated dramatically. At the same time, and this is the most important change of all, humanity has acquired and is acquiring an unprecedented power romances like those of Jules Verne, in which

to affect its own future.

Recently, as I completed a book on structuralism in literature, I found myself writing the following words on the final page: Man exists in a system beyond his control but not beyond his power to rearrange. The fall of man is neither a

myth from pre.history nor an event at the beginning of human time. It Is a

process that has been occurring for centuries, and It is not so much a fall into knowledge as

into power-the power to work great changes in ourselves and our immediate environment, the power to destroy our planet in various ways, slowly or quickly, or to maintain it and our

life upon it for some time. On various levels of activity, man's ability to exert his power in sell- destructive ways exceeds the ability of his feed-back systems to correct his behavior. The

great failures of our government in recent years have been failures of imagination. What we need in all areas of life is more sensitive and vigorous feedback. The role of a properly

structuralist imagination will of necessity be futuristic. It will inform mankind of tbe consequences of actions not yet taken. But it must not merely inform, it must make us feel the consequences of those actions, feel them in our hearts and our viscera. The structuralist

imagination must help us to live in the future so that we can indeed continue to live in the future. And this task, this great task, as it makes itself felt, will work its changes in the

system of literature. New forms will arise, must arise, if man Is to continue.

Now, contemplating the situation of contemporary fiction specifically, I find myself drawn to the same conclusion. The future, in the immortal

words of Mort Sahl, "lies ahead." The future of fiction lies in the future.

This apparently tautological statement will bear some examination.

I am asserting that the most appropriate kind of fiction that can be

written in the present and the immediate future is fiction that takes

place in future time. And this assertion is based on several lines of argument which I have been presenting here. First, there is the historical argument. My model of fictional history suggests that this move into future- fiction is itself an appropriate historical development, for this form of ficton has been gathering strength for about a century and is currently coming into dominance. Second, there is the ethical argu­ ment' which I have only touched on briefly. According to this argument, our need for future feedback to guide present action makes writers of fiction responsible for the production of imaginative models of the future, alternative projections that can give us some sense of the con242

sequences of present actions. If we accept Jean- Paul Sartre's imperative for literature, that it be a force for improvement of the human situation, and if we nevertheless would not see fiction reduced to the level of

propaganda, then the idea of fiction freely speculating on possible futures must appeal to us.

The third line of argument behind my plea for a future- fiction is a metaphysical one, for it involves the resolution of the solipsistic problem that has proved so crucial for modern fiction. Projected into the future, the problems of realism and fantasy both vanish. There is no question of "recording" the future, or of denying its actualities. All future projec­ tion is obviously model-making, poiesis not mimesis. And freed of the problem of correspondence or noncorrespondence with some present actuality or some previously experienced past, with its records and recollections, the imagination can function without self-deception as to its means and ends. Projections can be held tightly to a line of greatest probability, extrapolating from perceptions of current reality according to current notions of what is probable. But it is also possible to project more freely, discarding as many current notions as possible or accepting as likely things that now seem unlikely. Because we know that the unex­ pected happens continually in the history of science itself, fiction has now a license to speculate as freely as it may, in the hope of offering us glimmers of a reality hidden from us by our present set of precon­ ceptions. In the future, realism and fantasy must have a more intricate and elaborate relationship with one another. The models made by scientists frequently prove to have predictive power. That is, in fact, the common way of establishing their validity. The models of futurefiction need not operate in quite the same way, but they will frequently have a power of their own, which was described by one of the great neglected authors of modern British fiction, Olaf Stapled on. Back in 1930, in the preface to his seminal work of fictional projection, Last and First Men, Stapledon described his kind of writing in the following way: To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a valuable very

exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities.

Today we should

welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not

merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that

many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far is

future, then,

243

to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.

But if such Imaginative construction of possible futures Is to be at all potent, our Imagination must be strictly disciplined. We must endeavour not to go beyond the bounds of posslbUity set by the particular state of culture within which we live. The merely fantastic has only minor power. Not that we should seek actually to prophesy what will as a matter of fact occur; for In our present state such prophecy Is certainly futile, save in the simplest matters.

We are not set up as historians attempting to look ahead Instead of backwards. We can only select a certain thread out of the tangle of many equally valid posslbUities. But we must select with a purpose. The activity that we are undertaking Is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.

Yet our aim Is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction. We must achieve

neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth Is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture. A false myth is one which either

violently transgresses the limits of credibility set by its own cultural matrix, or expresses admirations less developed than those of its culture's best vision.

Stapledon used the word' 'myth" rather differently from the way I have employed that term here (in my more limited sense of the word, myth can no longer be produced), but his meaning is plain. He sees future-fiction as a way of subjecting current values to a "higher" set of values obtained by extrapolating from man's present "admirations."

This is one formulation, among many that could be made, of the serious value of "romances of the future." And Stapledon himself, in works like Last and First Men and Starmaker, has given ample evidence of the

unique power of his personal vision. (Here we may note that Penguin Books' recent issuing of his major works from the thirties and forties is a sign pointing to the coming rehabilitation of Stapledon as an important figure in the literary history of this century.) On another oc­ casion I hope to discuss in some detail the variety of ways in which future- fiction solves the problem of solipsism, but for the present Stapledon's formulation and his example must suffice to illustrate the serious potential of this kind of literature.

My fourth line of argument on behalf of future-fiction is based on my model of the current fictional scene itself. I have already sketched the dilemma of self-reflective fiction and the new journalism, and will not

repeat that here, but move on to examine the situations of traditional realistic fiction and of what is called science fiction. There is a tradi­ tional fiction being published today that is immensely successful in the

marketplace though it has no critical approbation and probably de­ serves little. This fiction is truly "popular" in that it stays carefully 244

within established generic lines and established formulas of expression.

Most of our fiction best-sellers-Jacqueline Susann, Leon Uris, the

Airports and Hospitals of our literary world-fall into this category. It features a strong narrative line, characters with whom readers identify, and a comforting "realism" that purports to explain how things really work in contemporary society, even to the point of suggesting that many of the fictional personages presented are actually real people whose names we all know-especially those people whose private lives are followed so publicly in the National Enquirer and similar scandal sheets. This sort of fiction has one important thing-readers. But it pays a high price for its readership, and they pay a high price for their plea­ sure; for they are led to believe in a reality which is irrelevant to our actual situation in many respects. And precisely because they believe in this reality, they are dangerously uninformed as citizens and human beings who must face real problems.

There is also, of course, a more serious traditional fiction which still

operates on largely realistic principles. It, too, has its successes, which may be represented here by Saul Bellow in America and C. P. Snow in England, who have both been commercially successful and critically

esteemed-though perhaps not equally. This tradition (in my model of the present situation) is in trouble of various sorts, lacking both young readers and strong young writers-but the problem of readership is the most acute. Serious treatment of contemporary life in the realistic manner is

having trouble maintaining its audience. My perception of this problem is similar to that of Charles Newman, who discussed the subject eloquently in TriQuarterly 26. But where Newman laid the problem at the door of the distribution system-" a handmade art in a mass production economy' '-I see the problem as an aspect of our lost faith in the language of realism, which includes both our suspicion of present omniscience and our need for some clear sense of the future. A great part of this attitude is simple impatience with the chronicles of the present, impatience with psychological self-scrutiny, impatience with the details of a time that seems long gone before it can be reduced to

words, edited, printed, and distributed. But, impatience aside, we will turn to the new journalists if it is chronicle we want. From fiction we

expect a more conscious model-building, a more deliberate imaginative process.

245

This same impatience with fictional chronicling becomes more evi­

dent each year in one place where it cannot be ignored-in the work

produced by contemporary realistic writers. It is not only the Barths, Pynchons, Goldings, and Durrells who are producing novels that ap­ proach the methods and concerns of science fiction, but writers who have had considerable experience with, and commitment to, chronicling -like Anthony Burgess, whose Malayan chronicle has been followed by some brilliant excursions into the future, not only the ubiquitous Clock­ work Orange but the less well- known and richer Wanting Seed as well.

One could cite Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins as a similar example of a writer whose concern for the present has led him to romance of the future, and there are other parallel cases, but the most instructive that I know of is the case of Doris Lessing.

For years Doris Lessing has been a classic example of the autobio­

graphical realist, who must wait between each book in order to live through enough material to fuel the next one. What, then, is one to make of the conclusion of her five-volume chronicle of the life of

Martha Quest, Children of Violence, which in the last pages of the last volume calmly moves into the future, after the atomic catastrophe, and

accepts as realities various kinds of extrasensory perception which are forbidden to realism by our current standards of scientific probability?

What indeed? My reading of Doris Lessing's move into the future is a

simple one. She has moved with the times, and sees that the future is the only lever with which we can hope to nudge the present in a better direc­ tion. Which is what Stapledon saw, what Orwell saw, what Wells saw, what Huxley saw, and what the best contemporary writers of science fiction also see. Robert Coover once wrote that we must' 'use the fabulous to probe beyond the phenomenological, beyond appearances,

beyond randomly perceived events, beyond mere history." What Doris Lessing has discovered, and I honor her for it, is that we must use the future in precisely the same way, as a probe into the truth of the present.

The point of this whole discussion has been to suggest that the func­ tion of criticism at the present time is to provide a climate in which

fiction's progression into the future can itself be facilitated by useful feedback. If the best way that fiction can regenerate a criticism of

present life is through the construction of models of the future-and 246

I am convinced that this is the case-then criticism must encourage

writers of fiction to proceed in this direction. My own program as a

practicing critic and teacher of contemporary literature involves some restructuring of the material in my curriculum as well as an extended investigation into the history and poetics of what we call science fiction.

In making this move I am no more alone than Doris Lessing is in making hers. There is already an excellent body of criticism devoted to SF. The journal of the MLA section on science fiction, Extrapolation, is now in its sixteenth year of publication and is the fastest growing periodical among all those surveyed in the September 1973 PMLA, having tripled its circulation in the last two and a half years. There is also a new

journal, Science Fiction Studies, which has begun very solidly indeed. In addition to this, more general critical reviews are taking an interest in science fiction. Last year, for instance (December 1972), College English published an impressive "Poetics of Science Fiction" by Darko Suvin.

Histories and critical studies in book form are proliferating, too, as exemplified by Brian Aldiss' big, useful historical survey, Billion Year Spree. The future is already with us. We need only open our eyes and look at it.

247

Co n tri b u to rs RUSSELL BANKS

,

whose work has

appeared in a number of journals, published two books in the spring of 1975: Family Life (Avon), from which "Family Life" is excerpted in this issue, and Searchingfor Survivors (The Fiction Collective). GILBERT SOR­ RENTINO s "A Bag of the Blues" is from his novel-in-progress, Syn­ '

thetic Ink. Portions of this work have appeared in Partisan Review,

Chicago Review, New Directions, and Vort. A comic masque, "Flawless Play Restored," was published by Black Sparrow Press. RONALD SUKENICK 's most recent novel, 98.6, was published by The Fiction Collec­ tive in the spring of 1975. Mr. Sukenick is the author of two other novels, Up and Out, and a collection, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories.

EUGENE WILDMAN teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, where he is at work on a novel and a collection of stories. He is the author of two novels, Montezuma's Ball and Nuclear Love. Three of MICHAEL

BENEDIKT's books of poetry have appeared in the Wesleyan Poetry Series.

He teaches at Hampshire College where he is at work on a number of prose poems. IAN McEWAN lives and writes in London. First Love, Last Rites, a

collection of his stories, was published in the spring of 1975 by Random House and Jonathan Cape. ROBERT SCHOLES's essay is one of his four

Ward-Phillips Lectures given at Notre Dame, to be collected under the title StructuralFabulations and published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Mr. Scholes teaches at Brown University. WILLIAM S. WILSON is writing a book on the esthetics of the Apollo moon landing. ROBERT CREELEY is a resident of Bolinas, California, but teaches a semester each year at S. U .N. Y. Buffalo, where he is Professor of English. His most recent collection of poetry is Thirty Things (Black Sparrow}. A book of prose, written in collaboration with Marisol and entitled Presences, is forthcoming from Scribner's. Mabel: A Story, excerpted in this issue and a collaboration with Jim Dine, is forthcoming from Black Sparrow. NATHANIEL TARN is presently on leave from Rutgers. He is at work on Atlantis: An Auto­ Anthropology as well as a new book of narrative poems. Mr. Tarn has published a number of books of poetry, among them The Beautiful Contra­ dictions; A Nowherefor Vallejo; The Persephones; and most recently, with New Directions, Lyricsfor the Bride of God. He has also translated from the Spanish (Neruda and others), Maya, and French. JEROME KLINKOWITZ teaches at the University of Northern Iowa. His work includes Literary Disruption/The Making ofa Post-Contemporary American Fiction (University of Illinois Press), and The Vonnegut -

Statement (Delacorte). He is half Irish. MICHAEL SlEPHENS is wholly

Irish and lives in New York. He has written a novel, a collection of poems,

and a book of paragraphs entitled Paragraphs. IHAB HASSAN is Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He is the author of Radical Innocence; The Literature ojSilence; The Dismemberment ojOrpheus; and Paracriticisms.

JOSEPH McELROY lives in New York and teaches at Queens College.

He is the author of four novels: A Smuggler's Bible; Hind's Kidnap; Ancient

History; and most recently Lookout Cartridge (Knopf), portions of which appeared in TriQuarterly 29. Mr. McElroy has contributed essays and reviews to a number of magazines and journals. CHARLES NEWMAN's latest book is A Child's History ojAmerica (Swallow Press). He is also the author of two novels, New Axis and The Promisekeeper. ALBERT

GUERARD is on leave from Stanford University. He is the author of six published novels, including Night Journey and The Exiles. His "Bon

Papa Reviendra (Suite et Fin)" is an excerpt from a more recent unpublished work, Still Talking. Mr. Guerard is presently at work on a study of Dostoev­ sky, Dickens, and Faulkner. ANDREI CODRESCU 's "parents were trivial compared to the number of parental mythologies he later collected. God bless him. There was the Anarchist Father who blew up trains. The Aristo­ crat Mother who made hashish cookies. The Aristocrat Father who drank

himself into a delirium and died with a machine gun in his hands, firing. The Mother Owner of an Art Gallery who traveled extensively to and from Japan and who dropped in for a few hours in New York to give him a couple of

thou. The Father who died hanging in jail. The Mother who gave him money when he was 14 years old to go get himself a room where to fuck his girl­

friends. The Father who tried to assassinate De Gaulle and was caught. The uncle who was a painter in Spain. The other uncles who died violently in Monaco. The scores of illustrious relatives reclining melodramatically in extreme situations. The closest to unadornished truth came Grandmother

(maternal), who always appeared as the old, sturdy peasant woman carrying heavy geese to and from the marketplace and who, at 86, still decapitated the birds herself. In reality she must have been a 6O-70-year-old Jewish woman, fat and knobby, who did indeed buy her own birds and did the cooking for the whole family but had the local rabbi do the killing. What is known for sure concerns dates. He was born in December 1946 in Sibin, Transylvania, Romania. Sibin was (is) an old German settlement filled with churches: On Sundays it smelled like apple strudel. The town fraus wore starched skirts

that covered them to their ankles with a crispy armor. When he came to the age of sex he often fantasized breaking one of those skirts open in front with

his fist and raping it. To the age of sex he came relatively late." WILLIAM E. BIDERBOST was graduated from the University of Illinois in 1967. After

working several years as Art Director/Designer for Chicago advertising agencies, he turned to free-lance illustration and design. He also spent a year at Columbia College in Chicago teaching poster design and fantasy drawing.

His work has appeared in national magazines and has been awarded Certifi­ cates of Merit and Excellence from Communication Arts Magazine, Chicago 4, The Copy Club of New York, and The American Institute of Graphic Arts. Mr. Biderbost is currently working on a playground design for blind children and a series First Picture Books/or Boys and Girls. He is a collector ofpre-l940children's books, games, wood-jointed cartoon dolls, and Art­ Deco kitsch. His illustration for the cover of this issue was inspired by Gilbert Sorrentino's A Bag 0/ the Blues.

A portion of Nathaniel Tarn's "La Traviata" first appeared in Tree.

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