Plexus (20 page)

“Do you ever read a book any more?”

He laughed. “I guess not, Henry. I'm waiting for you to write some. Maybe then I'll read again.” He lit a cigarette. “Oh, now and then I do pick up a book,” he confessed rather sheepishly, “but it's never a good one. I've lost all sense of taste. I read a few lines to send myself to sleep, that's the truth of it, Henry, I can no more read
Dostoevski now, or Thomas Mann, or Hardy, than I can cook a meal. I haven't the patience…nor the interest. You get stale grinding away in an office. Remember, Hen, how I used to study when we were kids? Jesus, I had ambition then. I was going to burn up the world, wasn't I?
Now
… aw well… it doesn't matter a damn. In our racket nobody gives a shit whether you've read Dostoevski or not. The important thing is—
can you win the case?
You don't require much intelligence to win a case, let me tell you that. If you're really clever, you manage to stay out of court. You let somebody else do the dirty work. Yeah, it's the old story, Henry. I get sick of harping on it. Nobody should take up law who wants to keep his hands clean. If he does he'll starve.… You know, I'm always twitting you about being a lazy son of a bitch. I guess I envy you. You always seem to be having a good time. You have a good time even when you're starving to death. I
never
have a good time. Not any more. Why I ever got married I don't know. To make some one else miserable, I suppose. It's amazing the way I gripe. No matter what she does for me it's wrong. I do nothing but bawl the shit out of her.”

“Oh come,” I said, to egg him on, “you're not as bad as all that.”

“Ain't I, though? You should live with me for a few days. Listen, I'm so goddamned ornery I can't even live with myself—
how do you like that?”

“Why don't you cut your throat?” I said, giving him a broad smile. “Really, when things get that bad, there's no alternative.”

“You're telling
me?”
he cried. “I have it out with myself every day. Yes sir”—and he banged the wheel emphatically—“every day of my life I ask myself whether I should go on living or not.”

“The trouble is you're not serious,” I said. “You only have to ask yourself that question once and you know.”

“You're wrong, Henry! It's not as easy as all that,” he
remonstrated. “I wish it were. I wish I could toss a coin and have done with it.”

“That's no way to settle it,” I said.

“I know, Henry, I know. But you know
me!
Remember the old days? Christ, I couldn't even decide whether to take a crap or not.” He laughed in spite of himself. “Have you noticed, as you get older things seem to take care of themselves. You don't debate what to do every step of the way. You just grouse.”

We were pulling up to the door. He lingered over the farewell. “Remember, Henry,” he said, feathering the gas pedal, “if you get stuck there's always a job for you at Randall, Randall and Randall's. Twenty a week regular.…Why don't you look me up once in a while? Don't make me run after you all the time!”

“I feel in myself a lift so luminous,” says Louis Lambert, “that I might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral.” This statement, which Balzac voices through his double, expresses perfectly the secret anguish of which I was then a victim. At one and the same time I was leading two thoroughly divergent lives. One could be described as “the merry whirl,” the other as the contemplative life. In the role of active being everybody took me for what I was, or what I appeared to be; in the other role no one recognized me, least of all myself. No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself. It needed only a few moments, seemingly, of shutting out the world for me to be restored.
But it required much longer stretches—of being alone with myself—to write. As I have frequently pointed out, the business of writing never ceased. But from this interior process to the process of translation is always, and was then very definitely, a big step. Today it is often hard for me to remember when or where I made this or that utterance, to remember whether I actually said it somewhere or whether I intended to say it sometime or other. There is an ordinary kind of forgetting and a special kind; the latter is due, more than likely, to the vice of living in two worlds at once. One of the consequences of this tendency is that you live everything out innumerable times. Worse, whatever you succeed in transmitting to paper seems but an infinitesimal fraction of what you've already written in your head. That delicious experience with which everyone is familiar, and which occurs with haunting impressiveness in dreams—I mean of falling into a familiar groove: meeting the same person over and over, going down the same street, confronting the identically same situation—this experience often happens to me in waking moments. How often I rack my brains to think where it was I made use of a certain thought, a certain situation, a certain character! Frantically I wonder if “it” occurred in some manuscript thoughtlessly destroyed. And then, when I've forgotten all about “it,” suddenly it dawns on me that “it” is one of the perpetual themes which I carry about inside me, which I am writing in the air, which I have written hundreds of times already, but never set down on paper. I make a note to write it out at the first opportunity, so as to be done with it, so as to bury it once and for all. I make the note—and I forget it with alacrity.… It's as though there were two melodies going on simultaneously: one for private exploitation and the other for the public ear. The whole struggle is to squeeze into that public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody.

It was this inner turmoil which my friends detected in my comportment. And it was the lack of it, in my writings, which they deplored. I almost felt sorry for them. But there
was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self. This “perversity” always voiced itself thus: “Reveal your true self and they will mutilate you.” “They” meant not my friends alone but the world.

Once in a great while I came across a being whom I felt I could give myself to completely. Alas, these beings existed only in books. They were worse than dead to me—they had never existed except in imagination. Ah, what dialogues I conducted with kindred, ghostly spirits! Soul-searching colloquies, of which not a line has ever been recorded. Indeed, these “excriminations,” as I chose to style them, defied recording. They were carried on in a language that does not exist, a language so simple, so direct, so transparent, that words were useless. It was not a silent language either, as is often used in communication with “higher beings.” It was a language of clamor and tumult—the heart's clamor, the heart's tumult. But noiseless. If it were Dostoevski whom I summoned, it was “the complete Dostoevski,” that is to say, the man who wrote the novels, diaries and letters we know,
plus
the man we also know by what he left unsaid, unwritten. It was type and archetype speaking, so to say. Always full, resonant, veridical; always the unimpeachable sort of music which one credits him with, whether audible or inaudible, whether recorded or unrecorded. A language which could emanate
only
from Dostoevski.

After such indescribably tumultuous communions I often sat down to the machine thinking that the moment had at last arrived. “Now I can say it!” I would tell myself. And I would sit there, mute, motionless, drifting with the stellar flux. I might sit that way for hours, completely rapt, completely oblivious to everything about me. And then, startled out of the trance by some unexpected sound or intrusion, I would wake with a start, look at the blank paper, and slowly, painfully tap out a sentence, or perhaps only a phrase. Whereupon I would sit and stare at these words as if they had been written by some unknown hand. Usually
somebody arrived to break the spell. If it were Mona, she would of course burst in enthusiastically (seeing me sitting there at the machine) and beg me to let her glance at what I had written. Sometimes, still half-drugged, I would sit there like an automaton while she stared at the sentence, or the little phrase. To her bewildered queries I would answer in a hollow, empty voice, as if I were far away, speaking through a microphone. Other times I would spring out of it like a jack-in-the-box, hand her a whopping lie (that I had concealed “the other pages,” for instance), and begin raving like a lunatic. Then I could really talk a blue streak! It was as if I were reading from a book. All to convince her—and even more myself!—that I had been deep in work, deep in thought, deep in creation. Dismayed, she would apologize profusely for having interrupted me at the wrong moment. And I would accept her apology lightly, airily, as though to say—“What matter? There's more where that came from… I have only to turn it on or off… I'm a prestidigitator, I am.” And from the lie I would make truth. I'd spool it off (my unfinished opus) like a man possessed—themes, sub-themes, variations, detours, parentheses—as if the only thing I thought about the livelong day was creation. With this of course went considerable clowning. I not only invented the characters and events, I acted them out. And poor Mona exclaiming: “Are you really putting all that into the story? or the book?” (Neither of us, in such moments, ever specified
what
book.) When the word book sprang up it was always assumed that it was
the
book, that is to say, the one I would soon get started on—or else it was the one I was writing secretly, which I would show her only when finished. (She always acted as if she were certain this secret travail was going on. She even pretended that she had searched everywhere for the script during my periods of absence.) In this sort of atmosphere it was not at all unusual, therefore, that reference be made occasionally to certain chapters, or certain passages, chapters and passages which never existed, to be sure, but which
were “taken for granted” and which, no doubt, had a greater reality (for us) than if they were in black and white. Mona would sometimes indulge in this kind of talk in the presence of a third person, which led, of course, to fantastic and often most embarrassing situations. If it were Ulric who happened to be listening in, there was nothing to worry about. He had a way of entering into the game which was not only gallant but stimulating. He knew how to rectify a bad slip in a humorous and fortifying way. For example, he might have forgotten for a moment that we were employing the present tense and begun using the future tense. (“I know you
will
write a book like that some day!”) A moment later, realizing his error he would add: “I didn't mean
will write
—I meant the book you
are
writing—and very obviously writing, too, because nobody on God's earth could talk the way you do about something in which he wasn't deeply engrossed. Perhaps I'm being
too
explicit—forgive me, won't you?” At such junctures we all enjoyed the relief of letting go. We would indeed laugh uproariously. Ulric's laughter was always the heartiest—and the dirtiest, if I may put it that way. “Ho! Ho!” he seemed to laugh, “but aren't we all wonderful liars! I'm not doing so bad myself, by golly. If I stay with you people long enough I won't even know I'm lying any more. Ho Ho Ho! Haw Haw! Haw! Ha Ha! Hee Hee!” And he would slap his thighs and roll his eyes like a darkie, ending with a smacking of the lips and a mute request for a wee bit of schnapps.… With other friends it didn't go so well. They were too inclined to ask “impertinent” questions, as Mona put it. Or else they grew fidgety and uncomfortable, made frantic efforts to get back to terra firma. Kronski, like Ulric, was one who knew how to play the game. He did it somewhat differently from Ulric, but it seemed to satisfy Mona.
She could trust him
. That's how she put it to herself, I felt. The trouble with Kronski was that he played the game too well. He was not content to be a mere accomplice, he wanted to improvise as well. This zeal of his, which was not altogether
diabolical, led to some weird discussions—discussions about the progress of the mythical book, to be sure. The critical moment always announced itself by a salvo of hysterical laughter—from Mona. It meant that she didn't know where she was anymore. As for myself, I made little or no effort to keep up with the others, it being no concern of mine what went on in this realm of make believe. All I felt called upon to do was to keep a straight face and pretend that everything was kosher. I would laugh when I felt like it, or make criticism and correction, but under no circumstances, neither by word, gesture or implication did I let on that it was just a game.…

Strange little episodes were constantly occurring to prevent our life from becoming monotonously smooth. Sometimes they happened one, two, three, like firecrackers going off.

To begin with, there was the sudden and mysterious disappearance of our love letters, which had been hidden away in a big paper shopping bag at the bottom of the wardrobe. It took us a week or more to discover that the woman who cleaned house for us occasionally had thrown the bag in the rubbish. Mona almost collapsed when she heard the news. “We've simply
got
to find them!” she insisted. But how? The rubbish man had already made the rounds. Even supposing we could find the place where he had dumped them, they would be now be buried under a mountain of refuse. However, to satisfy her, I inquired where the disposal dump was located. O'Mara offered to accompany me to the place. It was way the hell and gone, somewhere in the Flatlands, I believe, or else near Canarsie—a Godforsaken spot over which hung a thick pall of smoke. We endeavored to find precisely the spot where the man had dumped that day's rubbish. An insane task, to be sure. But
I had explained the whole situation to the driver and by sheer force of will aroused in his brute conscience a spark of interest. He did his damnedest to remember, but it was hopeless. We got busy, O'Mara and I, and with rather elegant looking canes began poking things around. We uncovered everything under the sun but the missing love letters. O'Mara had all he could do to dissuade me from bringing home a sackful of odds and ends. For himself he had found a handsome pipe case, though what he intended to do with it I don't know, as he never smoked a pipe. I had to content myself with a bone-handled pocketknife the blades of which were so rusty they wouldn't open. I also pocketed a bill for a tombstone, from the directors of Woodlawn Cemetery.