OPUS 21 (6 page)

Alone, I could react.

As now, I thought of my wife and my daughter and the insurance and the banks.

And having finished with that, I turned to rue.

Feeble fool. Wretched clot!

How little of what you felt and thought did you take the trouble to express!

When your corpse follows your brother's to the crematory in Gdynia, what epitaph?

Here lies a minor author--an excessive curiosity and a penchant for investigation--

who never bothered to write up his reports.

So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase.

I knew: I never got it said.

Isn't it true of you, also?

Didn't you know--and weren't you always on the verge of saying so--when you had to go to the movies, lunch, the bathroom, bed, or the jute mill in quest of new shoes for baby?

Yanh-yanh.

Each generation learns enough too late to pass it to the next, for when the learning's accomplished the newcomers have always been educated ahead of the achievement--in ignorance.

So when will cradles be rocked by wise men and good women?

They never know it will take a thousand years, and perhaps a thousand times a thousand years; they think it will be tomorrow; that is the trouble with them--it is the trouble with them all.

I lay in the Palace Polonia, with the European cars blatting in the sacrificial street and the trains hooting across the moribund way and it vividly occurred to me that in a few more years Hitler's men would blow down these corridors and blow up those cobblestones. I lay in Jericho.

I thought, finally, about a palm frond.

There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament, came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal.

While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning--the meaning of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea--but the felt significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process completed itself in that instant--a change came in the endocrines. Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite--the yin-yang--and hence, sometimes, joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along.

I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then, and all its other meanings. And that was that.

I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea. That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as usual.

Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea.

My shoulder was disjointed and full of slime. Certainly. My left leg was also paralyzed. I was ankylosed and calcified and atrophied. But of course. Agony--
sic
. What was left of me might be a stumblebum but the outside part could somewhat swim still and the inside part could fly.

My brother was dead.

There was work to do.

To hell with Dr. Jerkski, great man of the Institute.

I would frustrate every specialist in Poland.

Take up your bed and totter, Wylie.

It required a year for the doing--in Warsaw and Paris, Manhattan, Connecticut, and California. Then I had entirely recovered. Trauma excepted. Now that is what I thought of in the space of time it took to smoke a cigarette on my divan at the Astolat--

that, and several thousand more items. That is why, so to speak, I had nodded courteously at the Ghoul.

He is always hanging around.

One has only to turn one's head fast enough-and there he is. Most people, by the cortico-schizoid mechanism I have described a few pages back, partition him off.

He is not behind me, they convince themselves.

But he is.

There are always exactly enough Ghouls to go round.

Billions of people apply the blindfold technique in another way: He is not a Ghoul, they say, but the God of Heaven.

The Eternal Grocer, who will dole out milk and honey forever. The Great Conductor whose baton will direct my Everlasting Harp. The Keeper on the Inexhaustible Preserves who will set infinite game before my arrow in the Happy Hunting. Chairman of the Greens Committee of the Elysian Fields. The Sublime Pander who will fit an houri to me on the hour, each hour, and I shall be the Paramour of Paradise. The Universal Usher who will take the stub of my ticket and lead me to my seat in the Reserved Section at the Right Hand. What asinine measurements of man are furnished by his Heavens!

My own opinion of the Functions of the Ghoul is different, as I am gradually trying to imply here. And I am certain, furthermore, no one really believes, in his heart, that such heavens be. His mouth says it, his cortex confirms it, and his heart gives him the lie; so he has his Hell.

For how could Nature come to as tawdry an end as Heaven?

Even human nature?

I told the Ghoul, after this sweating, to get behind me, like Satan, while I cut my serial.

4

This is the way of it.

You take out an adjective here, an adverb there, a prepositional phrase yonder--

and so gain a line.

You make the first mark on a tally sheet. When you have four marks set parallel, you cross them with the fifth. When you have a row of twenty-eight marks, you have removed one page. When you have forty of these, you have completed the task--provided they are distributed through the installments in such a fashion that each part will be tailored to the desired length.

It was a story of manners--a light thing, with a plot.

I had enjoyed writing it.

I did not enjoy the cutting.

Every syllable scratched out is likely to take away some quality of a character upon which a subsequent event will turn. It is necessary to remember to the last detail what is removed and what remains. The elimination of a noun in the first installment may reduce the impact of a scene in the last. The contraction of a scenic description may ruin the comprehensibility of the hero's actions later on in the tale. And, when the most careful economy has been achieved, the goal of decimation may still be at a distance so that the writer is obliged to select this situation, that dialogue, yonder tender scene, and recast the whole in briefer compass, the while omitting no cogent phrase or fact, however trifling.

It is a big puzzle and a hard job.

It took me, I should think, another quarter of an hour to stowaway my Ghoul completely, divert attention from the prick in my throat, and become immersed in the running words.

My editors say I am a good professional.

And that, my liberal-intellectual critics add, is all: a capable hack.

O liberals.

O cognoscenti.

O critics. I give you my death-wish--and the atom bomb for its consummation.

Why didn't you study it sooner?

You copied into your literature whatever you saw on washroom walls--and little else--while brighter boys copied Bohr's equations from blackboards.

Both were true.

Both were real.

One was old.

The other new.

And where are you tomorrow?

Anyway, as I was suggesting, I write for money, usually.

I enjoy it--the writing and the dough. If writing isn't fun, I give it up. And I spend the money.

Here today and marlin fishing tomorrow.

Here today and at the couturiers with Ricky tomorrow.

Night club today and novelette tomorrow.

Serial today, book, movie, play.

Sarcophagous tomorrow.

I am at least one two-billion-three-hundred-millionth responsible for the contemporary world and bear the burden gamely. Why not take up my burden and follow me as I, too, follow? The burden of Light.

Or why not take up, better than I have, the same burden and improve upon my shambling progress?

I am the occasionally somewhat rich man who finds the Kingdom of Heaven at hand this day--and the next, discovers in his private concerns and small affluence that the door has narrowed down and his camel is balked by its load. The little acre I have dedicated stays where it is but wants, sometimes, for cultivation. I have sinned; that is why I understand sin. Men have made enough things for me to last fifty lifetimes; I have given them away for newer, more expedient things. Enough substance has been dug out of the earth and grown upon it and sold to me to support a tenementful of more intent philosophers. And I cannot compare myself favorably with other men: perhaps they lacked my environmental opportunities--a Princeton education, for instance--or a youth's experience of Montclair, New Jersey. (What grim lessons!). If, furthermore, my assigns perish with the yuts and their barbarous impedimenta, they will have no reason to remember me kindly.

But these are my problems.

And these are your problems, too.

Do you repent at all?

Or ever act?

Or merely join another lunch club and boost your voice loose? What fagins brought
you
up?

Old Bob Durfree, editor of the magazine for which I'd written so many yarns about Cynthia Davis and Cynthia's silly mother and Cynthia's patient pop would welcome this one. My short stories, my serials, were a branded feature of Bob's magazine.

Struggling years! A hundred serials--froth composed of my blood and sweat and tears--

were written for nothing. And then, at last, Success. Chimes in the mercantile establishments! Fiesta for salesmen! Orgasms in banks! The Cynthia stories belonged more to Bob Durfree's magazine than to me--and nearly as much to the taste of millions as to my taste, although I sometimes put spices in the meringue that offended the flaccid palate of Mrs. America and the lovely abscess she rears as a daughter.

At any rate, I poured it out on Bob Durfree's yarn because of the dignities I have referred to--and in light scorn of those critics who can never tell if silver is alloyed in gold since they do not know what gold is. They will follow their wrong guesses into oblivion. Every time they cried Eureka another true prophet went flat on his face.

It was about five o'clock when my phone rang.

I was surprised it hadn't rung sooner.

People are always calling me up. They want me to talk to Lions, Elk, Moose, and other quadrupeds. I never do. They want me to go on Information Please, or Town Hall, or Breakfast at Sardis. I never go. They want to know what boat to charter for a day's fishing. I always tell them. They want to argue. Me, too.

I thought, friends, relatives. Max, maybe--my brother. I thought, We, the People, asking me to appear as a Voice.

"Sorry--I'm all booked up. Busy. Going to die in a few weeks. Yes--exactly.

Keeps you jumping."

"Phil! This is Paul! I'm down in the lobby!"

"Well, come up." I gave him the room number.

Paul is the eldest of my nephews--twenty-five now, or perhaps only twenty-four.

His last name's Wilson. He is my older sister's only son and he reminds me of myself at that age, sometimes. Gaunt and hectic--continually outraged by the course of human events and continually upset by his own doings as well as his failures to do. Erudite in many things. Phenomenally naïve, all but unteachable, in others. (Maybe I haven't changed as much as I think.) And there is a difference between us of great magnitude.

Where I was an interested but lazy mathematician, Paul is a genius; where I was captivated by every discovery of every science and adept at none, Paul was captured in earliest childhood by physics. We are temperamentally alike, to some degree. But he concentrated and achieved where I dispersed my attention and mastered nothing. He has--

as I have--the familial facility for expression; this is the common property of so many of my relations that when any of them turns out to be inarticulate he is regarded as a sport.

Paul's mother, Georgianna Wylie, was such. Born two years before me, still more years before my brother, sister, half brother and half sister, and dispatched to an aunt after the death of my mother--which occurred when I was small--she was always a nebulous member of the family. A cumbersome, religious woman who wore plain-colored dresses-

-brown, as a rule--and rolled her hair in tight coils, like rusty screendoor springs. An introvert. She sang in the choir somewhere and studied for the missionary field. She never made it. Some remote Wylie cousin fell ill and Georgianna was drafted to take care of her. The illness turned chronic and young Georgianna's assignment became penal servitude. She spent twenty years or so as a peon in a prairie village that straddled a State border. What was never bloom, faded gradually; but it did not quite die out. One night in Minnesota at a camp meeting she met a chemistry professor who had gone to the service for a lark. He had it. He got Georgianna pregnant on the spot--or within harmonium-shot of it--and she died giving birth to Paul.

Wilson, the professor, meantime had done the right thing by her; they were married by an uncle of mine.

"Georgianna," my aunt used to say, "was the most docile, uncomplaining human being on earth. A true Christian. If she hadn't met that vile seducer--that atheist, Willy Wilson--she'd be serving her Lord in some distant land to this very day. She expiated her sin, believe me. The night she died, she said so. 'I'm going, Effie,' she told me. 'Bring up the boy in the Master's steps: I failed her! Willy Wilson insisted on taking the boy--and brought him up a nonbeliever, like himself. Poor Georgianna!

"'I know He has forgiven me!' Those were her last words--excepting for what she said after the delirium set in."

My aunt would frown and shake her head at that point. "Two more mortal hours she lay there, twisting and trying to sit up--with me holding her. And the whole time she cursed the name of Wylie with words you wouldn't believe a girl like that would know.