Assorted Prose (5 page)

“What happens when we’re dead?” I asked.

“The infinite never-to-be-defiled subtlety of the late Big Sid Catlett on the hushed trap drums,” he continued, mad with his own dreams, imitating the whisks, “Swish, swish, swishy-swish SWOOSH!”

The sun was breaking over the tops of Mr. Linderman’s privet hedge, little rows of leaves set in there delicate and justso like mints in a Howard Johnson’s roadside eatery. Mitzi Leggett came out of the house, and Gogi stopped the scooter, and put his hands on her. “The virginal starchblue fabric; printed with stylized kittens and puppies,” Gogi explained in his curiously beseechingly transcendent accents. “The searing incredible
innocence
! Oh! Oh! Oh!” His eyes poured water down his face like broken blisters.

“Take me along,” Mitzi said openly to me, right with Gogi there and hearing every word, alive to every meaning, his nervous essence making his freckles tremble like a field of Iowa windblown nochaff barley.

“I want to,” I told her, and tried to, but I couldn’t, not there. I didn’t have the stomach for it. She pretended to care. She was a lovely beauty. I felt my spokes snap under me; Gogi was going again, his eyes tightshut in ecstasy, his foot kicking so the hole in his shoesole showed every time, a tiny chronic rent in the iridescent miasmal veil that Intrinsic Mind tries to hide behind.

Wow! Dr. Fairweather’s house came up on the left, delicious stucco like piecrust in the type of joints that attract truckers, and then the place
of the beautiful Mrs. Mertz, with her
canny
deeprooted husband bringing up glorious heartbreaking tabourets and knickknacks from his workshop in the basement, a betooled woodshavingsmelling fantasy worthy of Bruegel or Hegel or a seagull. Vistas! Old Miss Hooper raced into her yard and made a grab for us, and Gogi Himmelman, the excruciating superbo, shifted to the other foot and laughed in her careworn face. Then the breathless agape green space of the Princeling mansion, with its rich calm and potted Tropic of Cancer plants. Then it was over.

Gogi and I went limp at the corner under a sign saying ELM STREET with irony because all the elms had been cut down so they wouldn’t get the blight, sad stumps diminishing down the American perspective whisperingly.

“My spokes are gone,” I told him.

“Friend—ahem—
zip, zip
—parting a relative concept—Bergson’s invaluable marvelchocked work—tch, tch.” He stood there, desperately wanting to do the right thing, yet always lacking with an indistinguishable grandeur that petty ability.

“Go,” I told him. He was already halfway back, a flurrying spark, to where Mitzi waited with irrepressible womanwarmth.

Well. In landsend despair I stood there stranded. Across the asphalt that was sufficiently semifluid to receive and embalm millions of star-sharp stones and bravely gay candywrappers a drugstore twinkled artificial enticement. But I was not allowed to cross the street. I stood on the gray curb thinking, They said I could cross it when I grew up, but what do they mean grown up? I’m thirty-nine now, and felt sad.

 
WHY ROBERT FROST SHOULD RECEIVE THE NOBEL PRIZE

O
NCE PER FORTNIGHT
or so a letter comes to this column accusing its author of the sin of “fuddyduddyism.” While such charges, phrased as they usually are in the quasi-literate elisions of what I believe is termed “hip” slang, and signed as they are as often as not by a gluey scrawl in the latest mode of “action painting” (or whatever such dribble is dubbed by its dupes), do not by any means undermine the calm of one who has been steeped since youth in the broadening classics of post-Homeric literature, nevertheless perhaps the charge should be disposed of once and for all before I set forth a proposition which I believe will contribute no little toward world sanity.

For one thing, I have always been a friend of modern literature, and continue to be. My quarrel with it arises only where it seems to me diffuse and decadent, as in Proust, or obscure and obscene, as in Joyce. I have for thirty years, much against the advice of my more expediency-minded friends, refused to board the bandwagon of T. S. Eliot, with all the aridity of spirit and religious obscurantism it represents, and neither have I embraced the megalomaniacal political systems of two much overrated versifiers, William Yeats and E. Pound. Indeed it is my conviction that there is less sense and fun in all five of these above-mentioned writers than exists on any random page of
Penrod
, by Booth Tarkington. No, while I am in full sympathy with the mainstream of present-day writing, I by no means subscribe to its eccentric fringe manifestations, and if this makes me a “rogue and petty slave” to the peddlers of the latest symbol-bloated bosh, so—to paraphrase the Latin—be it.

I confess that I feel most at home amid the lusty wits and wise hoydens
of the eighteenth century. There I find human content
ad profusio
. By Dickens’ time the disease has already started of which Henry James is to be an agonized paralytic victim, and Joseph Conrad another (though some of his descriptions of salt-water are good)—the disease of endlessly pecking like nervous chickens at the wonderful and unified fabric of human experience. The question proper to the narrative artist is not
Why
do we do things? but
What
do we do? In asserting that this century has not yet produced another
Pamela
I am not quarrelling with its modernity; rather I am saying that it is not modern enough. I do not think that one who (as has been my honor to have been) was among the first to hail the talents of Mrs. Buck and Somerset Maugham need have any self-doubts as to being retrograde.

In sharp contrast to the twitching spectres of what I have heard amusingly described as “era-itis” stands Robert Frost. His craggy snowcapped figure puts me in mind of the splendid quatrain of Karle Wilson Baker:

—lines that Frost himself would doubtless be proud to claim as his own. Frost’s poems do not always rhyme, and in fairness this may be objected to them. But we must balance this defect with larger considerations. His English is always intelligible and rarely contains ill-digested scraps of some fashionable foreign tongue. While there is nothing in his vision as grotesque and ungainly as the God of orthodox theology, yet his poems at their eloquent best provide the vague sense of reassurance which this God at
His
best provided. Finally, he is thoroughly American; in his works we seem to perceive the humanism of Jonathan Edwards, the pragmatism of Fenimore Cooper, Thoreau’s bile, Whitman’s effluvia, and Hamlin Garland’s choler. Frost as a man combines the tang of wood smoke with the flexible strength of cantilever construction; I can think of no better way for the Nobel Prize Committee to make amends for the carnival of French Existentialists and Mississippi stream-of-consciousness purveyors who have recently degraded this award than to
award it to him. It will strike a blow for healthy sanity in literature and in life. I offer this advice to so august a committee with my diffidence considerably bolstered by the knowledge that in this opinion, at least, I have the eminent company of J. Donald Adams, Orville Prescott, Maxwell Geismar, and Henry Seidel Canby, to name but a few.

 
CONFESSIONS OF A WILD BORE

P
ITY THE POOR BORE
. He stands among us as a creature formidable and familiar yet in essence unknowable. We can read of the ten infallible signs whereby he may be recognized and of the seven tested methods whereby he may be rebuffed. Valuable monographs exist upon his dress and diet; the study of his mating habits and migrational routes is well past the speculative stage; and statistical studies abound. One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes
each year
one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience. But in all this vast literature (and this is not to disparage the scientists who have selflessly carried forward their research, nor the generous philanthropic foundations that endowed their gleaming laboratories) one grave defect persists: the bore is always described externally, in a tone of distance and distaste. Hence the central question—what makes a few people bores when the rest of us are so fascinating—remains cloaked in mystery. Yet bores, unlike Red Indians, were not here to greet the Pilgrims. They do not, like rabid bats, come up from Mexico. No: the shameful truth, suppressed by both the public press and the spokesmen of our federal government, is that bores are created
out of our own number
. Each year, a few healthy Americans, whether by alchemy, infection, or unscrupulous recruiting methods among the alumni, are converted into bores. How can this happen? The riddle of borogenesis has defied solution for several reasons. For one thing, by their very natures bores are the most difficult and unappetizing class of society to interview, and have been shunned where prostitutes, alcoholics, and juvenile delinquents have been (sociologically) embraced. For another, bores have themselves
heavily infiltrated
the very psychological sciences that should be grappling with the problem! But the chief, and most impressive, obstacle is that
bores are oblivious of being such
. A mature,
fully feathered bore absolutely believes that he is just like anybody else—if anything, cuter; so he has no recollection of becoming one. Hence superstition continues to hold court, and what is actually a disease is still widely regarded as a vice.

I have been prompted to these reflections by a remarkable document pressed upon me, with a wild, pleading look of apology, by an insufferable person as I was leaving a dinner party he had utterly ruined with his ceaseless prattle. Though it will strike some tastes, no doubt, as too morbid for print, I submit it in the interests of sunlight, reason, and mercy:

How innocently [
the document, written in a fluent hand on several hundred sheets of lawyer’s yellow foolscap, begins
] it all began! I noticed a faint, not disagreeable itching in the back of my throat whenever anyone else talked for as long as two or three minutes. I would shake my head vigorously, and think that the sensation would pass, but by the fourth minute the itching became so unbearable that I
had
to interrupt. At first, my remarks bore a deceptive pertinence to the topics under discussion, and I flatter myself that in those early months no one but my wife, whose canny blue eyes developed a defensive narrowing tic, noticed anything amiss.

My first total blackout occurred toward the end of August. It had been a very warm August, but that evening a little breeze sprang up off the bay, and my wife and I attended a dinner party with a few of our dearest friends. Never, I thought, had the food been so delicious, the wine so subtle, the ladies so lovely, and the gentlemen so sturdy, acute, and wry. Our conversation on the veranda seemed a veritable dance of ideas, counterthrusts, and graceful laughter. I was dazzled to think that here, in this specific house on the North American continent, Mankind’s tortuous climb toward civilization had at last borne fruit. Imagine, then, my amazement when, in the private closeness of our car, as I hummed a popular air in celebration of a perfect night, my wife turned to me and snapped, “Why did you talk so much? You bored everybody silly.”

“I?” I protested. “I said little, but that little, well.”

“Stuff!” she snapped. “Your tongue didn’t stop for four hours. You drove poor Maggie Wentworth absolutely to sleep. And as for Horace, you brought on a bilious attack that had him hiccuping like a cricket.” [
Several pages of such dialogue are here expunged
.
—ED.
] Even now, I find it difficult to believe that her impression of the evening is the correct one.
One piece of evidence, however—admittedly circumstantial—emerged to support her case. The Wentworths never had us back, though
they
owe
us
.

After this seizure I was more watchful of myself. I deliberately curtailed my conversational offerings, even in relation to subjects upon which I was plainly the best informed and possessed the most lively and intricate opinions. I made myself, as it were, a mere supplier of footnotes, and artificially withheld from my fellow-humans the riches of information and nuance I knew to be within me. I was on the verge of shucking this (as I thought) foolish and inhibiting cocoon when late one night, as I was briefly qualifying something someone else had said—scarcely, indeed, qualifying; merely restating his gist in more lucid and understandable terms—I noticed, to my horror, that a delicate but distinct glaze had overspread the faces of my auditors. It is impossible to convey the macabre effect. It was not so much that their eyes had gone out of focus (for some eyes were staring fixedly at me) or that their mouths had sagged open (for some mouths were rigidly clamped shut): It was the curious uniformity of complexion, as if with one swipe their faces had been painted with the same lacquer, an impalpable coating whose emotional color, translated into visual terms, was the yellow of distant wheat fields seen through a grimy train window. And, though I paused, gagging on my terror at this disgusting omen,
I went right on talking
. It was then that I realized that I was a hopelessly ill man.