By
A tragicomedy
Aristodemus was only half awake, and he did
not hear the beginning of the discourse; the chief thing which he remembered
was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy
was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an
artist in comedy also.
Prithee, nuncle, keep a
schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie.
I would fain learn to lie.
King Lear
The
Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in
checking this mad, wicked folly of Woman’s Rights, with all its attendant
horrors, on which her poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of
womanly feeling and propriety.
Queen
I
was awakened at about ten in the morning by female voices. It was their Sunday morning Consciousness
Raising meeting. I’m not hostile to
Women’s Liberation, but my window was stuck open, and I was trying to
sleep. I blocked them out with my new Koss head phones the previous Sunday. I was working on an article for Playboy
Magazine entitled, “Mick Jagger and Wilhelm Reich,”
and I was analyzing the Rolling Stones’ new album, “His Satanic Majesty’s
Request.”
Cab
driving had given me a terrible case of constipation. Unfortunately, I was into colonic
irrigations and I thought, or felt like, I needed one.
With 25 women sitting Indian style in a great
circle just outside my painted-open window and with my bathroom on the same
side of the house as they were, I thought, or felt, that I shouldn’t take
one. (The difference between thinking
and feeling, at this level, has never been clear to me.)
I
lay on the mattress, listening to their ejaculations: one of them pronounced
marriage obsolete, and there was an objection from a woman who had a “beautiful
relationship.” Marriage is Obsolete said, “Yeah, but does he
do the dishes?” Laughter. A growling sound wound itself around the
laughter and, at the laughter’s edge, transformed itself into the words, “Men are defective women.” The voice was thin and strained. It formulated another sentence that was a
witches’ brew of sounds dancing tantalizingly close to sense. It was chopped into by another voice. I made out the words, “Frustration that women feel in being
defined by men.”
A third voice shrieked into a pregnant
silence, “I
feel like you’re dumping a truckload of shit on my head.” I looked out of the window and saw a young
and beautiful, but hauntingly sad face framed with long black, curly hair,
streaked prematurely with gray. She
said, “This is all bullshit.” She had a
slight foreign accent.
I
got up and walked into the living room, wearing only my underpants. Pinson
stirred behind the Japanese folding screen that Penelope had placed in front of
his bed. It formed a door between our
rooms: the original had been taken off.
I
was hungry, but didn’t know what to eat.
I wouldn’t allow myself to eat bacon and eggs because of the cholesterol,
the saturated fat and the salt, and I wouldn’t drink milk because I thought I
was allergic to it (I probably was.) I
had read that Rilke had a passion for Quaker Oats and
I had discovered that oatmeal is an excellent food, but I was sick of it. I thought about Cheerios but couldn’t stand
the thought of eating them without milk.
I put some water on the stove for coffee, went back into the living
room, sat on the floor and stared at the wall.
Pinson
stumbled groggily out of his room, wearing only pajama bottoms. Rubbing the top of his rarely combed mop of
honey-blond hair, he asked,
“How was your night dad?”
He
was 22 years old. I was 25.
“Same as usual.” I
said, truthfully.
His
voiced boomed out in a morning basso, “Real boring huh?”
His
California-tanned torso grew from powerful, bandy legs. The cross between Spanish Basque aristocrat
and Irish peasant produced a nobility of form and feature combined with a hint
of deformity, even decadence. He had a
wandering left eye and a massive, prognathous jaw
that gave him a spiritual and yet animalistic appearance. He looked to me at that moment like an issue
of Socrates and Helen of
“No,
not exactly boring.” I answered
defensively.
“Oh,
you don’t want to talk about it. All
right, that’s fine,”
he said with mock serious hurt.
“No,
it’s just too complicated, I’ll tell you some other time.” He went to the refrigerator, peeled off three
or four slices of bacon, placed them into a frying pan
and placed two waiting eggs on the counter.
In a few minutes the air was redolent with the smell of bacon and
eggs. My stomach began to churn.
“Fuck
it,” I thought.
“I’m
going to have a bowl of Cheerios.”
But
there was no milk. I decided to go
jogging and pick up a quart of milk on the way home.
Those
were the days before jogging was a national obsession. I loved to run. But if you ran down the sidewalk in your
shorts you got the same reaction you would get today if you walked down the
street in your swimming suit. Jogging
wasn’t in yet. But I didn’t care. I got a quarter and a penny for the milk, put
on my shorts and tennis shoes, and sprinted on the balls of my feet all the way
to Bushrod field three blocks away, on the other side
of Telegraph Avenue, and crossing Telegraph avenue smiled again in amazement at
the great, elevated Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket to my right. When I returned with my quart of milk, the
meeting was just breaking up.
Twenty
women, pretty and ugly, intelligent-East-Coast-Jew and stupid waitress, poured
into the street, and twenty pairs of eyes looked at the ground with studied
indifference. What do you say to a naked
man carrying a quart of milk, especially after your consciousness has been
elevated? Tilly
walked down the stairs wearing her “hot pants.”
She had a voice that sounded like metal scraping concrete, but she had
extraordinary legs. I said “hi,” as I
had for the past three months and she said “hi” back, but that was as far as I
ever got. The only other times I had
talked to her were when she was trimming the giant hedge between our
houses. When she was cutting the hedge,
she seemed to have a maniacal, malicious grin on her face and she almost literally
talked to me through the shears. But she
almost always wore shorts and she really had incredible legs. In fact, I was so taken with her legs the
first time I saw her, that I didn’t even notice that her left hand had been
amputated from the wrist down. She
handled the shears so deftly that it was easy to overlook. I never got anywhere with her in those
conversations and I always felt defeated somehow, and I would slink away with
dry mouth and visions of her legs dancing in my head. Neither of us seemed to know the extent to
which one can, or cannot build a relationship on legs.
I
turned the corner into our driveway. An
old pickup truck with homemade wood side panels was blocking the driveway. It had large hand-painted lettering on the
side, “Moving and Hauling.” It looked
like it came straight from the set of a 1950’s Amos ‘n Andy television
show. A very tall, thin black man named
Rufus, about 35, was standing by the front door of the truck. He was talking to a black high school student
named Julian who had silky, Hershey bar skin.
Rufus grinned at me as I walked past and said with an uncle Tom voice,
and a revolutionary smirk that he pretended to hide, that he wasn’t going to
block the driveway for long. There were
two houses on our lot and he and 5 year old Rodney and Rodney’s mother and
boyfriend lived in the front house.
I
walked up the wooden steps and across the deck and through the front door that
we left open, night and day, even though we lived on 60th street, at the edge
of the ghetto: there was nothing of value in the house to steal. Pinson was watching the Super Bowl on our
five dollar television set. I mentioned,
casually, that I had just said hello to Tilly.
I
knew that I would get the same reaction as usual, in
fact it was so predictable that I hesitated before saying anything. “Oh those legs. If I could only get my
hands on them.”
He stretched his hands out as if he were
about to grab her tanned legs and massage them in mid-air.
He
spoke in a tiny voice that sounded like it was part of a dream and he rubbed
his hands together like some miser thinking of his money, and his eyes glowed
with inner fire.
His
girlfriend, Penelope, had very thin, milk-white legs. She also had very large breasts that I
saw every night when she walked through my room to the bathroom, after
sex.
I
walked past the television set and into the kitchen, ignoring his ecstasy. I poured milk into a large bowl of Cheerios,
sliced a banana into it, put a gob of honey into the bowl, and then returned to
the living room.
“Are
you working tonight?” I asked.
“Huh? Yeah,” he answered without looking at
me. I had decided the year before that
football was a waste of time but he was still a fanatic.
We
watched the game in silence for a few minutes before I ventured further, “What time do you
have to be at work?”
He
looked at me as if he wanted to study the look of rudeness and insensitivity
itself, and then, shaking off his amazement answered, “
Pinson
was descended from Irish peasants but his Basque grandfather had owned all of
I
debated whether I should go to my room without saying anything or say something
and risk being ignored or pierced with another incredulous look.
I
ducked my head into the living room and said, “I’m going to read those books I got
from the library and work on the article.”
I
knew he would think it was a gratuitous and pointless thing to say, that he
would think, “So
what. Why are you telling me? Why don’t you watch the Super Bowl like
everybody else?”
Without
waiting for a response, I added, “I hope it’s a good game,” and I went to my room and began reading in
the stack of books by my bed and jotted down the following quotes, and
interspersing them into my notes from two nights of cab driving:
“Toil on, dull crowd, in extacy,” he cries,
“For
wealth or title, perishable prize
While
I these transitory blessings scorn,
Secure of praise from nations yet unborn.”
Samuel
Johnson
From Orville Prescott:
According to
“Most novels are read by women.”
“Joseph and his Brothers is stiff, pompous, and dull. Doctor Faustus, as a novel, is clumsy,
stilted and wholly tedious.”
For a novel to sell, the characters must seem, 1, believable, and 2,
interesting, 3, must have a story-- that is what happens next must be
important- seem worth going after by a reader.
The Man without qualities by Robert Musil:
An antiroman of more than 2000 pages.
Ten years in the writing -- the hero is an antihero, no ambition, no goals,
lives through passionate experience- negating the passion. The hero pursuing fame, fortune, etc. is
negated, hence the novel is negated. He
escapes from the mythology of adventure, of passion, of social and
psychological analysis.
After Proust, the novel is no longer an attempt to see the world
objectively.
The antihero has renounced job, function, vocation, he is 32 years
old, a lieutenant, he could have become a captain, a general, but he
quits. Mathematician, he could have
become an engineer, a professor dans une faculte, but instead, he
becomes a dilettante without passion. The rest is “arrivism”
for him, suris (reprieve).
Irving Babbit says of Renan
(p.293) “The
high quality of his charm is attested by the very fact that it eludes all
analysis. The highest art should be thus free
from any trick or mannerism that can be caught or imitated ... In short, Renan has
accomplished the rare feat of having a style without being a stylist. He tells us that he was always the least
literary of men: he was even ready to
proscribe all systematic teaching of rhetoric and composition as tending to
instill into the young the dangerous heresy that expression has a value
independent of what is expressed.
He
spent a whole year “toning down” the style of the “Vie de Jesus.”
Racine tells us that the audience was afraid at the first
performance of his comedy, Les Plaideurs, that “it
had not laughed according to the rules.”
Babbit can scarcely conceive to what extent men once
allowed their personal impressions to be overawed and held in check by a
body of outer prescriptions.
From Bernard De Voto, The
World of Fiction:
Mark Twain hated revision... He
abandoned as much of it as he could to William Dean Howells or anyone else who
would work out on his text. None of his
principal books received anything that can fairly be called a second draft.
I
have said that I believe Thomas Wolfe a bad novelist and that there was
probably no help for him, he probably could never have written otherwise than
he did.
It
is terrifying to think of, but Tolstoy rewrote his colossal book [War and
Peace] seven times.
Leon
Trotsky, Fourth
International
Both Turgenief and Tolstoy called Dostoevsky’s
The House of the Dead his best work and ranked it above The Brothers Karamazov
and his other novels which repelled them.
Dostoevsky’s French translator said to Gide:
“with (Crime and Punishment) the talent of Dostoevsky stopped
growing....(after it, he would) continue to beat his wings but would turn in a
great circle of fog, in a more and more troubled sky... (The Possessed) is a
confused book, badly constructed, often ridiculous and burdened with
apocalyptic theories... I won’t stop before the Brothers Karamazov either, or
the common admission that very few Russians have had the courage to read this
interminable story to its end.”
Gide, Dostoevsky
Flaubert is not a writer.
Le
Figaro
I
have been re-reading, or trying to re-read, Stendhal’s novels; frankly, they
are detestable.
Sainte-Beuve
Herman Melville ceased writing, almost entirely, for forty years,
because there was not one man in the whole of America to celebrate Moby Dick,
Pierre, The Piazza Tales.
Edward
Dahlberg