B007RT1UH4 EBOK (23 page)

All because I have been away for 3 days, on a neighboring island, working frantically on this novel. Which looks so
bad
. But here: you see, what you say in these letters—most specifically this last—upset me because the pictures you draw, the facts you offer, are just as this novel is growing. It is a good novel, terrific, the whole thread of the story, the happenings, the franticness. The man who (metaphorically) sells himself to the devil, the young man hunting so for father figure, chasing the older to his (younger’s) death. And the “girl”—who finally compleatly loses her identity, she who has tried to make an original myth is lost because her last witness (a fellow who takes heroin) is sent to jail—the young man (‘hero’) the informer. Here the frantic point: that it all
happened
. Not really, maybe, but with the facts in recent life and my running, it
happened.
All the time, every minute the thing grows in me, I “think of” (or remember) new facts of the novel—the Truth About the Past (alternate title). (The title is
Ducdame, called ‘some people who were naked
’). But this growing fiction fits so insanely well with facts of life that sometimes I can not stand it, must burst (as I am doing here). And
then
I
ruin
it by
bad writing
. Like trying to be clever—this perhaps because I am afraid to be sincere? But I watch myself ruin it. And then—because when I was writing in college I went so over board, now it must be reserved, understated, intimated. Or bad bits of writing just run on. Look: “There are few instances when we are not trying to control time; either frantically urging it on, or fearfully watching its winged chariot ragging by, spattering us with the mud that we call memory.” Isn’t that
awful
. You see, it just happened, was out of my control until the sentence reached the period. To be facile can kill what
must
be alive.

That’s why I hated Wolfe—that he cried out so. Because my point is, no crying out, no pity. We are alone, naked—and nakedness must choose between vulgarity and reason. Every one of us,
responsible
. Still those lines you quote (Wolfe) excite me horribly. Not to have Forster’s understatement. No room for Lawrence’s lust. Perhaps Flaubert, or Gide. But I am not good enough as they. It is sickening this killing the best-loved—work.

Now
I should like to see you, if you could look at this thing, flatly condense (parts of) it—the writing, exposition. God I know all this fear, but have no sympathy with it. Fools. I can not afford to be one.

As though your letter anticipated what I am just putting down as fiction.

I can’t come home before June. Because of money. Always that. After June I can live on Long Island, not before summer though, you see? Must work on this goddamned canal until April, hope to save around 600$, enough to live on until June and get home. I hate it, paid 12$ a day—or night—to
waste
. Now it is 10:15pm—and I must be at the canal at 11, “work” until 7am. But I have to because of money. Perhaps good I don’t have money, crazy in love with the daughter of this local island’s governor—not Mex, Panamanian, but Spanish. Splendid nose. Good Werther love, doesn’t trouble her. It is hell not to have either the time nor the money to
live
.

Then there is a man here with a sail boat going to Sweden. And if the novel suddenly looks too
bad
I may go, he needs someone to work, a very small boat, sail boat.

God the running, running. You
understand
it, don’t you? I almost do. But if I can’t make a
good
novel then I must keep running, until I know all through me—not just as a philosophical fact, as
truth
which I “believe” and am trying to sell—but can sit down and know without having to try to sell it (writing) to
everybody
.

Thanks. I shall
write
you.

W.

Ducdame, called ‘some people who were naked’
: “Ducdame” is a nonsense word from Jaques’s song in Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
, which he facetiously defines as “a Greek invocation to call fools into a circle” (5.2.53). “Some people who were naked” probably derives from Pirandello’s play
Naked
(see 7 April 1948).

time [...] its winged chariot: an image from Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” (c. 1650).

Wolfe [...] those lines you quote: perhaps Socarides quoted those lines near the end of
Look
Homeward, Angel
(1929): “Inevitable catharsis by the threads of chaos. Unswerving punctuality of chance. Apexical summation, from the billion deaths of possibility, of things done.” WG was so struck by the phrase “unswerving punctuality of chance” that he used it in all five of his novels (
R
9,
J R
486, CG 223,
FHO
50, 258,
AA
63).

Werther: the suicidal hero of Goethe’s novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774).

To Edith Gaddis

Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone

[late Feb/early March? 1948]

dear Mother—

An outburst. But I
have
to burst out somewhere. Having just spent 50$—but on
what
. Two
magnificent
suitcases. All English made, beautiful leather, locks, &c. Like Brooks sells for 45$ (the small one, I paid 18) and 87$ (big one I paid 23.50$)——Well. So now I
have
my little suitcase to carry about manuscripts in and look like the Fuller Brush man. I should have been a fool to miss it—and since it looks like I am going to spend a rather peripatetic (that means doing things while moving about) youth, all the better.

I have your letter—and hope you do get to Virginia this weekend—I am off to work now, go to Taboga at 6 am tomorrow. Hot spit. With typewriter. This novel, dear God. If only I could stop
living
for a little and
do
it. But you may imagine the sort of life I lead if packing 2 cans of beans, six of sardines, a loaf of bread and a box of cinnamon buns, and going off to an island for 3 days alone excites me so that my handwriting gets like
this
.
Got
to write a novel,
got
to work and save,
got
to go to Costa Rica, to Haiti, to Jamaica,
got
to know people, write letters,
got
to read, study, think, learn—
got
(at the moment) to go to the dentist — — — Isn’t it fantastic? Wonderful? I am going off my trolley—so much. But most of all I
have
got to finish a good novel, don’t I. Because that’s what I’ve set myself to do. And when one
forces
one’s self to rise above the idiotic futility of it
all
, the vanity of human wishes, the acquisition of “things” (vis. luggage)—then it is splendid.

I had wondered about you and the Harvard Club—and am so glad it is as good as you write it.

I don’t think I could
stand
Crime & Punishment
on the stage. Who was this Dolly Hass—Sonia? What an opportunity
that
part would be for a young actress. She could probably never play a part again.

Main reason for this, I have so many
ideas
, for writing. But they must be
written
mustn’t they? You see I suddenly find myself to engulfed with new thoughts, interpretations, impressions, Revelations, that I can’t sit still to finish
one
. Well, you know. I’ll get over
this
. (In psychology we call it Euphoria).

And many thanks. I await the civilised cigarettes and reading matter (if
that
book doesn’t sober me up, nothing will).

So
did
you go to Williamsburg? And be reckless enough (how you and I give ourselves gifts, with
such
guilty pleasure) to take a sleeper. I hope so.

Love,

W.

Fuller Brush man: archetypal door-to-door salesman of the early twentieth century. the vanity of human wishes: title of a pessimistic poem (1749) by Samuel Johnson.

Crime
Punishment
on the stage: opened in New York in January 1948, starring John Gielgud as Raskolnikov and German-born actress Dolly Haas as Sonia.

To Edith Gaddis

Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone

[10 March 1948]

dear Mother.

You were so good to have sent this divination book right off. I have just got it; and of course it is in a way preposterous, and foolishness. But quite exactly what I wanted, and thank you.

Sometimes this life gets so horrid; but then, the time I have set myself runs out in 5 weeks! Dear God, to be ‘free’ again briefly. But then, the reading I have been doing recently (except for the New Testament,
such
a wonder)—has not been of a high character—Dostoevski’s
House of the Dead
—an account of his Siberian imprisonment, and one cannot help but find analogies to the sterile barbarity of the Zone. Incidentally, we haven’t had an extended talk about Americans. I am so glad you managed Virginia. When things are exceptionally woeful, I go in to Panama and simply walk. Such colours, and unarranged humanity, and rest. A lime-green building with brown trim, or another brown with blue, and pink, and so much wonderful white. Tomorrow night I am going in, and Juancho—this kind fellow who is a judge, and could ‘write’, so nice to me, humanly so—is going to play for me the
Messiah
, 35 sides to its recording! How I look forward to it, music is so badly missed.