1906
Joplin comes to the ward where Louis Chauvin lies dying of syphilis, the brain of the twenty-five years old pianist turned to jelly, decomposing through his eyes. Joplin sits by the man’s bed, presses his hand. There is really nothing else to be done and in the rattle and drone of the twenty-five years old’s ravaged breath Scott Joplin can hear intimations of his own doom, waiting for him he knows somewhere down the early decades of this century. He is 39 years old and he has already seen too much although then again perhaps he has seen nothing at all; perhaps the Ku Kluxers are right, perhaps it is the condition of the black man, torn from the righteous nature to his condition to be so quickly, so thoroughly done in: by syphilis, by music, by the ropes and wire of the avenging Klan. Chauvin turns to him, gripped by a sudden lucidity, some sanity slowly clearing his eyes and says: Scott, I have a tune. I have two tunes in my head. I was dreaming, I thought I was dreaming but when I awoke the music went on. They are tunes to make the devil dance, they are the dances of death itself, they are markers —
Rest, Joplin says. Louis, you must rest. Do not try to talk. Really, he should not be here. Why has he come here? His colleague he thought would not even recognize him and now there is this urgent and terrible confluence which is agitating Chauvin, causing his limbs to shake. The tunes, Chauvin whispers, you must listen to them. I do not have the strength to play them. I cannot write them down, I do not know how to write. You must listen, Chauvin says, you must do this for me, and slowly, slowly hauls himself to a half-seated position on the bed, the crook and cast of his skull awful in the sallow light of the charity ward, the cast light through the bars of the bed, the other beds, all of the pauper’s bed, a weird and stricken jungle of vines at the foot of the bed. Chauvin, 80 pounds, a dead man, grips Joplin’s wrist and pulls Joplin toward him with an awful and insistent strength. Here, he says, listen.
Joplin thinks: I came from whorehouses to this. From the back rooms of illrepute and the shaking laugher of clowns to this terrible place. But he listens. He has always listened; to him the act of composition is one of taking dictation, the tunes come and he brings them home. Mozart, he had read somewhere, talked about composition in the same way, not that Scott Joplin is Mozart. Chauvin breathes notes into ear, major and minor thirds and Joplin can find the accidentals, knows just where the minor seconds would be placed to bring on the syncopation. There is syncopation in Chauvin’s voice. The other one, Chauvin says, now it becomes a child, a child whistling. Joplin attends to this second theme which casts its way directly into the major, shuttling off the bargain the first tune had made between major and minor. Yes, he says, I hear that.
It’s good, isn’t it? Chauvin says. He seems energized, flushes in the spangled light. I heard them awake and I heard them asleep. I heard them alive and I heard them dead. So know that they are good, I know that these are the tunes I was given to hear. You must write them, Scott, a new ragtime.
Two tunes are not a tag for me, Joplin says. They are not long enough.
Then four, Chauvin says. His eyes, sunken, take on a terrible urgency. Make another two tunes for yourself and add them, make it a ragtime. It will be yours and mine together. But leave my tunes first, leave my devil dance. Chauvin gargles deep in his throat, falls back on the soiled sheets. Leave me this, he says, leave me at least that evidence, those markers. I have asked nothing of you in all these years, you know this, you know that I wanted nothing.
I will see, Joplin says. The tunes rattle in his head; he knows that they are embossed on his sensibility. There is no danger that they will be lost; he has always been able — always — to retain tunes when first heard. I will do what I can, he says, I can make no promises. I feel my own death, he does not say to Chauvin. What kills you will kill me too; is moving already. The tunes are high and distinct, a terrible clarity. Chauvin, stunned, lies back on the sheets, eyes closed, seems to diminish in passage, dwindles, becomes a child on the heaped and stinking bed. I can do no more, Joplin says, I can promise nothing else.
Chauvin says nothing. Conversation is over, everything is finished. Twenty-five years old, a boy when Joplin had first met him, an adoring boy at the edges of the piano listening, listening with eyes so lustrous, expression so fierce that it could have tenanted the world. This is what he has become but then again this is what Scott Joplin too has become. He stands, walks cautiously through the clumped bodies, the rattling chests, the little aperture between the beds leading him out of the ward. For now. In the hall he pauses, the orderlies looking at him without interest, without disdain, with nothing at all. Just like his public. The tunes are full in his consciousness and he feels rather than hears a third and fourth theme, antagonists but in accord, drop into place. This will write very quickly, very easily, he knows. MAPLE LEAF RAG and ENTERTAINER were like this at the beginning.
HELIOTROPE BOUQUET, Joplin thinks. He staggers into the clamorous night, the notes full before him. He knows that it will be done before dawn and he feels Chauvin impelling him into the night.
1914
Joplin conceives of his largest, his grandest, his most lucrative scheme, the scheme which he hopes will change his life. He will write a grand opera on themes of mythology and transcendence and open it in New York and Europe and it will make his reputation, it will change his life. As HELIOTROPE BOUQUET was his gift to Chauvin, so the tale of Treemonisha will be the world’s gift to him. Earnest and seized with purpose even though he knows that long-accustomed doom will soon enough do him in Joplin embarks upon his task, the shackles of ragtime discarded as his fathers had stripped the shackles of their slavery. He hears the first act finals: the call to dinner. In the far reaches of the charity ward the curtains stir in the emptiness of the vacated bed and slowly wafts through the odor of flowers, sickly and stunted flowers, the flowers and tendrils of Joplin’s history now destiny in the concatenation of all possibility.
The Lady Louisiana Toy
OF need then, and longing, and of the yearning which makes men bum in the night, men lacking any interior, what we once were taught to call “soul,” men who plod and plod then way through the anguished and sterile routine of their circumstance… not reflecting upon that necessity or upon much else, men who were closed in early, taken in disarray from their own warm and living hearts and placed — well, placed where? It is not the nature of our metaphysics to consider this, now when the universe itself implodes so reluctantly and we are told, as if it were a declaration of truth, that this is the end of time.
Of those men, then, and of their uses, of what can be made of them from the sterile detritus of their necessity but first, because there is no understanding any of this without the background, without the helpless, mocking heart of the truth … of the Lady Louisiana Toy first.
In the known places her name was a curse or prayer and m the myriad galaxies not yet discovered or in discovery of hers that presence still might have been a benison, a plainchant, but here, too, and in the huge arcs among the stars where the birds of time themselves swooped, men knelt to her spirit and flesh with imprecations and cries, prayers infused with scatology, joined to a scatology which lifted from the ruins of their hearts. It was a ruinous age, one of blank corruption and discontent, yet one not without a certain romantic necessity, the architecture of desire still present in the space drives, in the whispers of the trawlers of space. In this age there were icons, icons for all of the men without interior which rose unevenly in small arcs from the concavities of the stars, and the greatest of them was the Lady Louisiana Toy whose dreams and spirit passed through the network, amplified to proportion beyond imagining, crushed into the hearts of all who witnessed her. She inspired woe and death, lust and darkness, cries of desperation and climax under the axis of her powerful emoting, that image of herself — and all we might have loved — spread in huge discolored patches through all the devices of dissemination. The treasure of the galaxies, Lady Louisiana Toy, and when she was kidnapped by those we called the Possessors a sigh l
ike all mourning rose from a billion trapped and riven witnesses. What she did was not to be explained, her kidnapping unspeakable and yet this is only the least part of the actress and focused modem known as Lady Louisiana Toy. It will have to do as so much else of this limited document will have to grant service because it is impossible in these final times — or perhaps before them — to convey what had gone on, what it meant, we can only approximate, some sum of an ideal, dim image of the cave, flicker of approximation against the absolute of the cave, that Paolo and Francesca of the galaxies drifting by in their terrible embrace the closest simulacrum we might find.
They remembered Dante in this era, too. It was, perhaps, that set of cantos, the last of what they remembered. Heavens, the spirit of transcendence, all of this collapses but the purgatorial ring is not to be limned by the laws of relativity or the great, groaning hyperspace drives which opened before finally closing to us the universe.
This is not the story of the Lady Louisiana Toy.
It concerns her and she is at the axis, but of her and her kidnapping there is to be apprehension only by indirection. If it is ultimately her story (we cannot know and It is hard to rule the approximation) that would be only because it deals with the man who stole her back from the Possessors and the planet of the doubled suns where she had been smuggled, plucked her back, still beautiful but irreparably damaged from that prison of unspeakable pain where they had made her — for their pleasure, their pleasure, O brothers! — to cry out her necessity in the tongues of her projection. It is, then, the story of that simple and doomed man, a man very much like ourselves except that he possessed no interior whatsoever, no framing consciousness, no newstape of commentary as he struggled through his own purgatory, who lifted the Lady Louisiana Toy from her imprisonment, took her (but only briefly, only briefly!) for his paralyzed satisfaction and in so doing elevated far beyond his apprehension by the sheer expression of that unspeakable need. How could the stalker Stanley Montana have known then that he was the source of this chronicle, that it was he who triggered its necessity, he who had thought of himself only as a minor character, a wretched ingredient, a tiny actor in the story of the Lady Louisiana Toy, in the earlier and grayly unfolding chronicle of his life? We do not know what he would have said, and this at least is unavailable to us although too much else has been expressed. There are parts of Stanley Montana which, like his very soul, remain swaddled, cannot be apprehended. How did he know, this man, that what he had done would be magnified through the millions of telepathic receptors of the Possessors? How would he know that nothing was performed in secret, that detection no less than yearning would be an expressed and public act? But he could not know, of course, there is no way in which he could have known. This man knew nothing.
There is no understanding this chronicle if it is not known that the man knew nothing.
So this is really the story of Stanley Montana and his undoing, the latter undoing which he brought upon us all. It is the story of Stanley Montana and then necessarily of the ravishing Lady Louisiana Toy, all of it legend, long spoken, then passed out in that savage, blinking instant of revelation when the Lady, magnificent in her captivity and pain, suffused with the pale gold light of her sufficiency, suffused with the knowledge that what the Possessors had done had destroyed her utterly and yet had left her at some other level intact ... in that knowledge she opened her arms and mind to receive his cry, took that strangled confession from Stanley Montana then and with it the shrieking inference which took us to this terrific and ongoing explosion, that explosion which has sealed our doom even as it has closed off our fate and sprung us from that ravaged and beautiful final age in which these events took place. That was the end of this chronicle as we knew it then, although of course it did not feel like an ending as it was witnessed but like a series of acts which, beautiful and terrible in their juxtaposition, seemed to point the way to — well, to where? We did not know that either; in the spaces among the suns we crawled through our scripts, no less fixated, no more thoughtful than Stanley Montana.
This, then, the chronicle. It is offered not in reasonable explanation, there is none, but in humility and hope even as the very act — like the investigations of Stanley Montana — turn in upon themselves.
Dragged from the bed of the Emperor by the savage telepathic Possessors who had stalked her for years, had made their plans well, knew at last what they would do with her, the Lady Louisiana Toy felt them pounce upon her unshielded and now ungifted consciousness and she screamed. She screamed both within and without herself, trying to magnify that scream toward salvation, but it could not be done. She was the treasure of the Possessors now and they had taken her. She had not one moment for farewell, for some righting of accounts long since imbalanced against her.
Taken from the Emperor’s bed, the Lady Louisiana Toy was placed into the closed box of corporeal transport and taken through secret and powerful means whose technology is unavailable to us and which will defy any reasonable explanation to places not known to any of the conventional historians of the galaxies, and the damaged Stanley Montana must have felt — we theorize as best we can under the circumstances — that thrill of displacement in his own sensibility, felt that he knew of the abduction of the treasured Lady Louisiana Toy before the awful news had been publicly disseminated, and it was at that moment, no later, that his odyssey began. We must consider his reaction as a feeling, it was visceral woe (looking back upon it he theorized) deep in the gut, not thought as we know it, thought being unavailable to Montana, and it was thus without apprehension. He did not know then, might never have known that subsequent events would bring him into the presence of what we called the Possessors, those plundering and predatory aliens of which he had previously known so little, of which Montana had thought nothing at all. His skull was impenetrable, his thoughts limited to his own transparent capacity. Had he but known, that song of regret of the spheres. We will not deal with it. He could not have known anything, of course. Tropism was his response, small and grumbling resistance to the prank the cosmos had played upon him was limited to vagrant drinking and curses.
There were then, as long before and at sometime in the imponderable future as well, so many men like Montana. They suspire in the small bars and lounges, the restaurants and galleyways of all the planets, usually alone, sometimes in groups with their blasted eyes at moments of repose revealing everything. They sit hunched unto themselves, their expressions casting not so much mystery — come to them close in the guise of a sympathetic companion and sketch this out if you will — as entrapment. They are men of small devices and foolishness who hire out their wretched and painful selves not so much for the small compensation which is their excuse but because they are looking for annihilation. They are looking for something so terrible to happen that they will be freely able to abandon the struggle to have their lives make sense and go over the line into that death they have always sought. They can be inspected at our leisure, they will be there again as they have been in all of the annals of that blasted time, and the message will be one of such utter consistency. They have no secrets, their faces are their secret and beat truth to the world.
“That is not so,” Stanley Montana would say, confronted with this assessment. “Leave annihilation to the stars out there, speak to me of thugs and mean streets and the blood that runs toward the blood of killers. This is my business. Essential solutions to old mysteries, drink up, stay out of a coffin, go home.” Do not listen to any of this, regardless of the fervency of Montana’s wink and nod. Observe only the facts of the case, consider the testimony of what the ages have taught us. The thinkers and prophets of this terrible age of which we write knew the truth and they passed it on, the detective (and that is Stan Montana’s self-designation, he is a detective, he would put it on his forms and identifying statement, seeker of solutions, detective for hire) is exquisitely and finally the man who would seek to unravel the primal scene, and come close to the struggling bodies linked on that
bed locked away behind the primal door, turn those bodies — hip ho turn! — to his humble and needful face and identify at last Mommy and Daddy as they go about the heavy and sad business of replicating Montana, reinfusing Montana. This is the business of the detective, to crawl up to the masks hip ho! and ripping them away discover the sad and necessitous faces of none other than old Dad and Mom. Believe this, believe that all the rest of it — the plodding, the compensation, the deductions, the small scrambling connections of their own saddened and diminished lives, the posturing and good old self-annihilation — all of it comes from the need of these brethren to conceal this necessity from themselves.
Oh, really? “Having none of it. Good-bye, then,” Montana would say, raising his hands from the bar in a gesture of perfect and final dismissal, making his plan to move toward another place where inquiries would cease. But all of this is denial, a denial of which Lady Louisiana Toy would more than the rest of us be clearly aware.
Louisiana Toy!
The name itself arouses, even these eons after her kidnapping, her recovery and destruction, these long limping ages after she had spun through the infernal heart of the stars a crazed and incessant longing, a twitch not unlike Stan Montana’s twitch as — hip ho! — he jiggled his leg underneath the stanchion and with blasted eyes considered anachronistic possibility. Descriptions and holographs abound these centuries later of this lady of sorrows; she is one of the most famous of her or any time at all, and yet none of them can conjure but an approximation, so great the force which she could bring without even trying to bear. Capacious bosom, longing arms, lips and eyes reproduced on a billion transceivers, the image of lust and connection for all of us febrile doomed of the Republics and the lady herself, sad and witnessing, watching all of this at the secret heart of her own possibility, carrying her own difficult way through the annals of her life with the sad sustenance, the dignity and the self-knowledge of the truly possessed.
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 46