Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  He frowned. "Somebody else was talking to me about gossip. Everybody around here sort of goes for it." Lanya was still not in the bar. He looked again at Newboy. "She knows your friend Mr Calkins."

  "It is a small city. I wish Paul Fenster had felt a little less-up tight?" He gestured toward the notebook. "I'd enjoy seeing some of your poems."

  "Huh?"

  "I enjoy reading poems, especially by people I've met. Let me tell you right away, I won't even presume to say anything about whether I think they're good or bad. But you're pleasant, in an angular way. I'd like to see what you wrote."

  "Oh. I don't have very many. I've just been writing them down for . . . well, like I say, not long."

  "Then it won't take me very long to read them-if you wouldn't mind showing them to me, sometime when you felt like it?"

  "Oh. Sure. But you would have to tell me if they're good."

  "I doubt if I could."

  "Sure you could. I mean I'd listen to what you said. That would be good for me."

  "May I tell you a story?"

  Kidd cocked his head, and found his own eager distrust interesting.

  Newboy waved a finger at the bartender for refills. "Some years ago in London, when I was much younger than the time between then and now would indicate, my Hampstead host winked at me through his sherry glass and ask'ed if I would like to meet an American writer staying in the city. That afternoon I had to see an editor of an Arts Council subsidized magazine to which my host, the writer in question, and myself all contributed. I enjoy writers: their personalities intrigue me. I can talk about it in this detached way because I'm afraid I do so little of it myself now, that, though I presumptuously feel myself an artist at all times, I only consider myself a writer a month or so out of the year. On good years. At any rate, I agreed. The American writer was phoned to come over that evening. While I was waiting to go out, I picked up a magazine in which he had an article -a description of his travels through Mexico-and began the afternoon's preparation for the evening's encounter. The world is small: I had been hearing of this young man for two years. I had read his name in conjunction with my own in several places. But I had actually read no single piece by him before. I poured more sherry and turned to the article. It was unpenetrable! I read on through the limpest recountings of passage through pointless scenery and unfocused meetings with vapid people. The judgments on the land were inane. The insights into the populace, had they been expressed with more energy, would have been a bit horrifying for their prejudice. Fortunately the prose was too dense for me to get through more than ten of the sixteen pages. I have always prided myself on my ability to read anything; I feel I must, as my own output is so small. But I put that article by! The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it! I assumed I had received that necessary betrayal and took my shopping bag full of Christmas presents into London's whiter mud. The editor in his last letter had invited me, jokingly, to Christmas dinner, and I had written an equally joking acceptance and then come, two thousand miles I believe, for a London holiday. Such schemes, delightful in the anticipation and the later retelling, have their drawbacks in present practice. I'd arrived three days in advance, and thought it best to deliver gifts in tune for Christmas morning and allow my host to rejudge the size of his goose and add a plum or so to his pudding. At the door, back of an English green hall, I rang the bell. It was answered by this very large, very golden young man, who, when he spoke, was obviously American. Let me see how nearly I can remember the conversation. It contributes to the point.

  "I asked if my friends were in.

  "He said no, they were out for the afternoon; he was babysitting with their two daughters.

  "I said I just wanted to leave off some presents, and could he please tell them to expect me for dinner, Christmas day.

  "Oh, he said. You must be-well, I'm going to be coming to see you this evening!

  "I laughed again, surprised. Very well, I said, I look forward to it. We shook hands, and I hurried off. He seemed affable and I gained interest in the coming meeting. First rule of behavior in the literary community: never condemn a man in the living room for any indiscretion he has put on paper. The amount of charity you wish to extend to the living-room barbarian because of his literary excellence is a matter of your own temperament. My point, however, is that we exchanged no more than seventy-five or a hundred words. Virtually I only heard his voice. At any rate, back at Hampstead, as sherry gave way for redder wine, I happened to pick up the magazine with the writer's article. Well, I decided, I shall give it one more chance. I opened it and began to read." Newboy glared over the rim, set down the glass without looking at it and pressed his lips to a slash. "It was lucid, it was vivid, it was both arch and ironic. What I had taken for banality was the most delicate satire. The piece presented an excruciating vision of the conditions under which the country struggled, as well as the absurdity of the author's own position as American and tourist. It walked that terribly difficult line between grace and pathos. And all I had heard was his voice! It was retiring, the slightest bit effeminate, with a period and emphasis oddly awry with the great object of fresh water, redwoods, and Rockies who spoke with it. But what, simply, had happened was that now I could hear that voice informing the prose, supplying the emphasis here or there to unlock for me what previously had been as dense and graceless as a telephone directory. I have delighted in all of this writer's work since with exquisite enjoyment!" Newboy took another sip. "Ah, but there is a brief corollary. Your critics here in the States have done me the ultimate kindness of choosing only the work of mine I find interesting for their discussions, and those interminable volumes of hair-splitting which insure a university position for me when the Diplomatic Service exhausts my passion for tattle, they let by. On my last trip to your country I was greeted with a rather laudatory review of the reissue of my early poems, in one of your more prestigious literary magazines, by a lady whom modesty forbids me to call incisive if only because she had been so generous with her praise. She was the first American to write of me. But before she ever did, I had followed her critical writings with an avidity I usually have only for poets. A prolific critic of necessity must say many absurd things. The test is, once a body of articles has passed your eye, whether the intelligence and acumen is more memorable than the absurdity. I had never met her. To come off a plane, pick up three magazines at the airport, and, in the taxi to the hotel, discover her article halfway through the second was a delight, a rarity, a pleasure for which once, in fantasy, I perhaps became a writer. And at the hotel, she had left a letter, not at the desk, but in my door: She was passing through New York, was in a hotel two blocks away, and wanted to know if I would meet her for a drink that evening, assuming my flight had not tired me out. I was delighted, I was grateful: what better creatures we would be if such attention were not so enjoyable. It was a pleasant drink, a pleasant evening: the relation has become the most rewarding friendship in the years since. It is rare enough, when people who have been first introduced by reputation can move on to a personal friendship, to remark it. But I noted this some days later, when I returned to one of her articles: Part of the measured consideration that informed her writing came from her choice of vocabulary. You know the Pope couplet: When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,/The line too labours and the words move slow. She had a penchant for following a word ending in a heavy consonant with a word that began with one equally heavy. In my mind, I had constructed a considered and leisurely tone of voice which, even when the matter lacked, informed her written utterances with dignity. Using the same vocabulary she wrote with, I realized, on the evening we met, she speaks extremely rapidly, with animation and enthusiasm. And certainly her intelligence is as acute as I had ever judged it. But though she has become one of my closest friends, I have lost practically all enjoyment in reading her. Even as I reread what before has given me the greatest intellectual pleasure, the words r
ush together in her vocal pattern, and all dignity and reserve has deserted the writing; I can only be grateful that, when we meet, we can argue and dissect the works before us till dawn, so that I still have some benefit of her astounding analytical faculty." He drank once more. "How can I possibly tell if your poems are good? We've met. I've heard you speak. And I have not even broached the convolved and emotional swamp some people are silly enough to call an objective judgment, but merely the critical distortion that comes from having heard your voice." Newboy waited, smiling.

  "Is that a story you tell to everybody who asks you to read their poems?"

  "Ah!" Newboy raised his finger. "I asked you if I might be allowed to read them. It is a story I have told to several people who've asked me for a judgment." Newboy swirled blunted ice. "Everyone knows everyone. Yes, you're right." He nodded. "I wonder sometimes if the purpose of the Artistic Community isn't to provide a concerned social matrix which simultaneously assures that no member, regardless of honors or approbation, has the slightest idea of the worth of his own work."

  Kidd drank his beer, resentful at the long-winded-ness but curious about the man indulging it.

  "The aesthetic equation," Newboy mused. "The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industralized society which has learned to distrust magic-"

  "You're here!" Lanya seized his arm. "You look so bright and shiny and polished. I didn't recognize you!"

  He pulled her against his shoulder. "This is Ernest Newboy," glad of the interruption. "This is my friend Lanya."

  She looked surprised. "Kidd told me you helped him up at Mr Calkins'." She and Newboy shook hands across Kidd's chest. "I'm staying there. But I was let out for the evening."

  "I was there for days but I don't think I ever got a night off."

  Newboy laughed. "There is that to it, yes. And where do you stay now?"

  "We live in the park. You mustn't look astonished. Lots of people do. It's practically as posh an address as Roger's, today."

  "Really? Do the two of you live there together?"

  "We live in a little part all by ourselves. We visit people. When we're hungry. Nobody's come to visit us yet. But it's better that way."

  Newboy laughed again.

  Kidd watched the poet smile at her banter.

  "I wouldn't trust myself to hunt you out of your hidden spot. But you must certainly come and see me, some day during the afternoon." Then to Kidd: "And you can bring your poems."

  "Sure." Kidd watched Lanya be delightedly silent. "When?"

  "The next time Roger decides it's Tuesday, why don't you both come around? I promise you won't have the same problem again."

  He nodded vigorously. "All right."

  Mr Newboy smiled hugely. "Then I'll expect you." He nodded, still smiling, turned, and walked away.

  "Close your mouth." Lanya squinted about. "Oh, I guess it's okay. I don't see any flies." Then she squeezed his hand.

  In the cage, neon flickered. Music rasped from a speaker.

  "Oh, quick, let's go!"

  He came with her, once glanced back: the back of Newboy's blue serge was wedged on both sides with leather, but he could not tell if the poet was talking or just standing.

  "What have you been doing all day?" he asked on the cool street.

  She shrugged closer. "Hanging out with Milly. I ate a lot of breakfast. Jommy is cooking this week so I really had more than I wanted. In the morning I advised John on a work project. Kibitzed on somebody's Chinese Checker game. After lunch I took off and played my harmonica. Then I came back for dinner. Jommy is a love, but dull. How was your job?"

  "Strange." He pulled her close. (She brushed his big knuckles with her small ones, pensive, bending, removed.) "Yeah, they're weird. Hey, Newboy asked us up there, huh?" She rubbed her head against his shoulder and could have been laughing.

  Her arm moved under his hand. "Do you want this back now?"

  "Oh. Yeah. Thanks," and took the orchid, stopping to fix the longest blade in his belt loop. Then they walked again.

  He did not demand a name. What does this confidence mean? Long in her ease and reticence, released from an effort to demand and pursue, there is an illusion of center. Already, presounded, I am armed with portents of a disaster in the consciousness, the failure to suspect, to inspect. Is she free here, or concerned with a complex intimacy dense to me? Or I excuse myself from her, lacking appellation. Some mesh, flush, terminal turned here through the larynx's trumpet. The articulate fear slips, while we try to measure, but come away with only the perpetual angle of distortion, the frequency of an amazed defraction.

  In the half-or rather four-fifths dark, the lions looked wet. He brushed his right knuckles against the stone flank in passing: It was exactly as warm as Lanya's wrist, brushing his knuckles on the left.

  How does she find her way? he wondered, but thirty steps on realized he had anticipated the last dark turn himself.

  Distant firelight filigreed through near leaves. Lanya pushed them aside and said, "Hi!"

  A shirtless man, holding a shovel, stood knee deep in a ... half-dug grave?

  Another man in a denim shirt, unbuttoned, stood on the lip. A young woman in a scrape, her chin balanced on both fists, sat on a log, watching.

  "Are you still at this?" Lanya asked. "You were this far along when I was here this morning."

  "I wish you'd let me dig," the young woman said.

  "Sure," the bare-chested man with the shovel said. He shook blond hair from his shoulders. "Just as soon as we get it going."

  The woman dropped her fists between her patched knees. Her hair was very long. In the distant light it was hard to see where its color was between bronze and black.

  "I wonder where John gets the ideas for these projects," the man in the denim shirt on the lip said. "I was just as happy running off to squat in the bushes."

  The guy with the shovel made a face. "I guess he's worried about pollution. I mean, look at all this!" The shovel blade swung.

  But other than the dozen people standing or sitting over near the flaming cinderblocks, Kidd could see nothing outside the bubble of night the flames defined.

  "Can you actually see what you're doing there?" Lanya asked.

  "Enough to dig a God-damn latrine!" The shovel chunked into earth again.

  "You know," the one on the lip said, "I could be in Hawaii right now. I really could. I had a chance to go, but I decided I'd come here instead. Isn't that too fucking much?"

  As though she'd heard this too many times, the woman on the log sighed, palmed her knees, stood up, and walked off.

  "Well, I really could." He frowned after her, then back at the pile of dirt. "Did your old lady really want to dig?"

  "Naw." Another shovelful landed. "I don't think so."

  Slap-slap, slap-slap, slap-slap went a rolled Times against a thigh. John walked up, cutting out more light.

  Chunk-shush, chunk-shush went the shovel.

  "They're digging it awfully close to where everybody stays," Kidd said to Lanya, "for a latrine."

  "Don't tell me," Lanya said. "Tell them."

  "I've been wondering about that too," John said, and stilled his paper. "You think we're digging it too dose, huh?"

  "Shit," the one who wanted to be in Hawaii said and glared at Kidd.

  "Look," Kidd said, "you do it your way," then walked off.

  And immediately tripped over the foot of somebody's sleeping bag. Recovering himself, he just missed another's head. Millimeters beyond the circle of darkness were chifferobes, bureaus, easy-chairs, daybeds, waiting to be moved from here, to there, to someplace else . . . He blinked in the fireplace's heat and put his hands in his back pockets. Standing just behind t
hree others, he watched the curly-headed boy (Jommy?) wrestle a barrel- "Isn't this great, man? Oh, wow! Look at this. When we found this, I just didn't believe it- It's flour. Real flour. And it's still good. Oh, hey thanks, Kidd. Yeah, push it this . . . yeah, this way." -around the end of the picnic table.

  "Here?" Kidd asked, and grunted. The barrel weighed two hundred pounds at least.

  "Yeah."

  Others stepped back a little more.

  Both grunting now, Kidd and Jommy got it in place.

  "You know," Jommy said, standing back, smiling, and wiping his forehead, "if you're hungry around here, man, you should ask for something to eat."

  Kidd tried to figure out what that referred to when Milly and Lanya walked up. "It's awfully nice to see you here again and helping out," Milly said, passing between Kidd and the fire. The hot places just above his eyes cooled in her shadow. She passed on.

  Lanya was laughing.

  "Why'd we come here?" he asked.

  "I just wanted to talk to Milly for a moment. All done." She took his hand. They started walking through the blanket rolls and sleeping bags. "We'll go sleep back at my spot, where we were last night."

  "Yeah," he said. "Your blankets still there?"

  "If nobody moved them."

  "Hawaii," somebody said ten feet off. "I don't know why I don't take off for there right now."

  Lanya said: "John asked me if you wanted to take charge of the new commune latrine work project."

  "Jesus-!"

  "He thinks you have leadership qualities-"

  "And a feeling for the job," he finished. "I've got enough work to do." Blinking away after-images of firelight, he saw that the blond-haired guy with no shirt now, stood on the lip, shoveling dirt back in the hole.

  He moved with her into dark.

  Once more he wondered how she found her way. Yet once more, in the dark, he stopped first when he realized they had arrived.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I hung the blanket up over a limb. I'm pulling it down." "You can see?"