Stories for Chip (36 page)

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Aedicule

The enclosing planes of walls, floor, ceiling. Subsidiary planes in tiers supported by the vertical members—posts, legs, brackets. A light bulb hangs from the ceiling. His room is characterized by rectilinearity. He unpacks his boxes and arranges the books on shelves, tacks prints to the walls, disposes of his clothing into drawers.

Without are trees, weeds, grasses, haystacks, cathedrals, crowds of people, rain, bumps, animals ground into meat, billboards, the glare, conversations, radiant energy, danger, hands, prices, mail, the same conversations.

The artist is obliged to structure these random elements into an order of his own making. He places the ground meat in the icebox, arranges the crowds of people into drawers. He carves a smaller church and places it in the larger church. Within this artificial structure, each figure, isolated in its own niche, appears transfigured. Certain similarities become apparent. More and more material is introduced. New shelves must be built. Boxes pile up below the steps. The sentences swell from short declarative statements into otiose candelabra. Wax drips onto the diapered floor. Styles conflict. Friends drop in for a chat and stay on for the whole weekend. At last there is nothing to be done but scrap the whole mess and start from scratch.

Whitewash. Sunlight slanting across bare walls. Drawn curtains. Vermeer's eventless studio.

He paints a picture of the table and the chair. The floor. The walls. The ceiling. His wife comes in the door with a plate of doughnuts. Each doughnut has a name. He eats “Happiness.” His wife eats “Art.” The door opens. Their friend Pomposity has come for a visit.

II.

Yesterday, all told, he got three letters from Pamela. Passion that can express itself so abundantly, though it may forfeit our full sympathy, is a wonderful thing to behold. Given the occasion, how readily we all leap into our buskins! And if we are not given the occasion outright, we will find it somehow. Madame Bovary,
c'est nous!

When every high utterance is suspect. We must rely on surfaces, learn to decode the semaphore of the gratuitous, quotidian event.

Oh, the semaphore of the gratuitous, quotidian event—that's beautiful.

For a long while I pressed my head against my purring IBM Executive and tried to think of what constituted, in our lives here, a gratuitous event. There seemed far too much significance in almost anything I could remember of yesterday's smallest occasions. I returned most often to:

Raking leaves. Not, conscientiously, into a basket for burning, but over the edge of the escarpment. Like sweeping dust under a rug. Jim came out on the porch to announce a phone call from my brother Gary. He has been readmitted to Canada with immigrant status. Then, back to my little chore. Jim said he hates to rake leaves. “Because it reminds you of poems in
The New Yorker?
” I asked. He laughed. No, because it reminds him of his childhood. Weeding the towering weeds in the back lawn, unmowed since mid-August. The two most spectacular weeds I tamped into a coffee can and set beside our other plants on the table in the bay of the library.

Strings of hot peppers, predominantly red, hanging unconvincingly on the pea-soup kitchen wall. Jane's handicraft. Staring at them as I gossiped with Jim. About? Literature, probably, and our friends.

Judy bought a steak, and Jane made beef stroganoff and a Caesar salad, both exemplary. The flavor of the sauce, the croutons' crunch.

Chess with Jim before dinner, with Jane after I'd washed the dishes.

Jane cut Jim's hair. Dylan was skipping through the scattered curls, so I swept them up and put them in the garbage.

At what point was I happiest yesterday: as I raked leaves and washed dishes or when I was writing this story? At what point was Jane happiest? At what point was Jim happiest?

Was Jane happier than Jim? Was I happier than either? If not, were both, or only one, happier than me? Which?

I spend too much time lazing about indoors. I overeat. I smoke a package of cigarettes every day. I masturbate too often. I am not honest with myself. How, then, can I expect to be honest about others?

Happiness is not important.

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The Conversion of St. Paul

The acquisition of certain knowledge (as Augustine shows us) is possible, and men are bound to acknowledge this fact. The knowledge of God and of man is the end of all the aspirations of reason, and the purification of the heart is the condition of such knowledge.

The city is divided by schisms, as by innumerable rivers. His single room on Mississippi Avenue overlooks an endless genealogy of errors, sparrows, roofs. He has, by preference, few friends. He reads, each evening, of the great dispute over the nature of the Trinity. Demons in the form of moths tickle the bare soles of his feet. He fills his notebooks with theories, explanations, refutations, apologies—but nothing satisfies him. Of what solace is philosophy when each sequent hour reveals new portents of a sure and merited destruction, innumerable portents?

He cannot endure the strength of these emotions.

He writes:

To be happy, man must possess some absolute good: this is God. To possess God is to be wise. But none can possess God without the Son of God, who says of Himself, I am the truth. The truth namely is the knowledge-principle of the highest, all-embracing order, which, as absolutely true, produces the truth out of itself in a like essential way. A blessed life consists in knowing by whom we are led to the truth, in what we attain to the truth, and how we are united to the highest order.

That much seems to be clear.

Often (of this he did not write) the walls of the room warped. The old man from next door came and stared at him as he lay there in the bed. Crook-backed and dirty (a magician probably): the name “Sabellius” burnt into the gray flesh of his high forehead.

In the churches, the gilded sculptures of Heresy and Sedition. Plastic dissembling itself as trees, weeds, grasses; simulating entire parks. The seeming virtues of his friends were only splendid vices. Their faces were covered with giant worms.

He distinguished between the immediate and the reflective consciousness, which concludes itself in unity, by the most perfect form of the will, which is love. Does the Holy Ghost proceed from the communion of the Father and the Son?

Explain the hypostatis of Christ. Tell me you love me. Define your terms.

He fell on his back and saw, in the clouds, the eye of the whale. He saw the river burning and his friends destroyed.

And no one listens to him. No one. No one.

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An excerpt from his letter of Sept. '66:

The large, looming discovery: Samuel R. Delany. I had read a few of his books and been quite impressed and assumed he had been writing for three hundred years and was roughly ten million years old. God, I should have known (and if I'd read the jacket notes would have) … by the time he was 22, he'd had four books published. The last three of these are a trilogy, and his best work. He's about 2
4/2
5 now, with eight books. And he's beginning to think about shorter work …. “Chip” has the strongest, most vital personality I've discovered in the sf clan. That young, and writing like that! (This is the larger part of my current depression—that he does it so much better than I.) Read his books and you drown in poetry.

And this, a letter to his wife:

Glad to hear that you and Tom are getting along so well and things are working out; also, of course, very glad to hear that you're working. I'm really damned pleased that you like him so much. Tom is a fantastic influence on everyone he comes near. I find it difficult to be with him for more than a few minutes without having the urge to get right to work on something better than anything I've ever done before. I don't know if I have mentioned it, but Tom is beyond doubt the only person I know to whom I'd apply words like “genius.” In ten years or so, he's going to be quite, quite well-known and quite, quite respected. What is he, and what are you working on; and are you, and is he, serious about the poetry magazine? I hope so.

That radiant quality of mind is something he shares with Mike, with John Sladek, and with Pamela.

And then (though not chronologically):

I'm constantly amazed, Tom, at the similarity of our tastes, expression, and ambitions. If we were French poets, I'm certain we'd think it necessary to form a “school” about ourselves: arguing with the establishment and among ourselves, bitching at traditions, j'accusing all over the place, emitting manifestoes, issuing bulls, belching intent everywhere we walked, excreting doctrine and should-be's, generating slogans, shouting what we collectively think, and having a hell of a lot of fun doing it all … I don't think anyone has ever done that in sf, have they? Poetry, art, music, other writing reeks with such focused groups (I'm led to think of this by just having read a book on contemporary poetry, in which the movements of the projective-verse poets and deep-image poets were detailed; it sounded like so much fun, and everyone concerned got so much out of it, and you can't argue that they wham-bang turned the tides of poetry).

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A Schematic Diagram

Linda began her affair with Gene in high school. Sometimes Linda wanted to marry Gene. Sometimes Gene wanted to marry Linda. Gregory married Lois. Ben married Nancy. Doug married Sue. Linda and Gene took a flat with Paul. Gene married Marion and moved to Montreal.

Bereft, Linda sailed to London on the
France
. At the university she met Ahmet.

Jerry had an affair with Lois. Gregory was almost killed in a motorcycle accident. Jerry went to Europe. When he returned, a year later, to New York, he subleased Paul's apartment. Paul went away and wrote a novel. He returned and collaborated on a second novel with Jerry. They went to London.

Linda wanted to marry Paul. She had an affair with Jerry. The three of them lived together in Ahmet's flat. After an unhappy and brief affair with Bob, Paul went away and wrote about it. Jerry moved out of the flat and had a brief and unhappy affair with Nancy.

Doug and Sue went to London. She hated London and returned to the States. Doug had an affair with Linda. Jerry had an affair with a different, younger Linda. Mr. Nolde had an affair with the first Linda. Linda was very unhappy. She wanted to marry Jerry. She wanted to marry Doug.

Paul returned to the States. He decided to sublease the Williamses' house with Sue. Doug grew worried and returned to the States. Ben was very upset. He refused to give Linda Doug's phone number.

Gene and Marion went to London.

III.

The artist, when he makes his art, shares a common fate with Rousseauistic man: he begins free and ends in chains.

And other metaphors (for instance, the furnishing of a room) to express the fact that at this point I know pretty well the nature of everything that must follow to the end of “Reredos” (which was the title it preserved through the entire first draft).

Both Jim and Jane are doubtful about the merits of this story. They seemed to enjoy the preceding sections at the première in Jane's studio (she had just finished a handsome gray nude; we were all feeling mellow), but they questioned whether that wider audience who will read my story to themselves, who have never met me and, likely, never will, would find it relevant or interesting.

What a wider audience ought to know (bear in mind, reader, that this is the frame, not the story):

Four years ago, when I was in advertising, I wrote a story called “The Baron, Danielle, and Paul,” which portrayed, behind several thick veils of circumspection, my situation during the previous year, when I had been living with John and Pamela on Riverside Drive. That story appeared, revised, as “Slaves” in the
Transatlantic Review
. Before it had come out, I was living with Pamela again, this time in London and with a different John, a recombination that Jim (before he had ever met Pamela) used as the basis for an amusing piece of frou-frou called “Front and Centaur.” After he had met her he wrote “Récits,” which is a kind of love story and in no way frivolous. (It, too, was taken by the
Transatlantic Review
.) Then Jim came here, to Milford, and almost immediately Jane wrote a story about the three of
us
: “Naje, Ijm, and Mot.” Two days ago Jim sent this off, immaculately typed, to McCrindle, who edits
TR
.

In these successive stories there is a closer and closer approximation to the “real” situation. Thence: this. (Which will almost necessarily go to McCrindle too. If he rejects it?
New Worlds
? Jim is co-editor there.)

A bedroom farce with all the doors opening onto the same library. Stage center, a row of typewriters. On the walls, posters advertising the
Transatlantic Review
.

But beyond the fleeting amusement of our prototypical incests, the story does (should) raise a serious question. Concerning? Art's relationship to other purposes, let us say. Or alternatively, the Artist's role in Society.

Why do I write stories? Why do you read them?

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The Semaphore

The maples, whose leaves he would so much have preferred to rake, grew far up the hill, beyond even the most reckless gerrymandering of the boundaries of the backyard. The leaves that he was in fact raking were dingy brown scraps, mere litter, the droppings of poplars.