Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Oh," Kid said. "He just saw me? . . . and you're leaving? Hey, that's too bad." Fighting the tingling and the sluggishness, he pushed himself up and started toward the kitchen. "You want some coffee, Mr Newboy?"

  "Thank you," Newboy said, and called, "Yes."

  "What-" through the doorway-"did you want to see me about?"

  In the white crock, the coffee sploshed and plopped. Outside Mr Newboy was unsnapping his case.

  "I don't know where the milk and sugar is."

  "I take it black."

  Kid released the plastic spigot, moved a second cup under for himself, (the stuff in the can: cold) and carried them, out to the couch, the foreknuckles of both hands burning.

  "Oh, thank you."

  "What-" sitting next to Newboy-"did you want to see me about?"

  "Well. I thought you'd like to take a look at these." Wide ribbons of paper came up from the plaid lining. "And these." Now a sheaf of black paper. "And this. This is the cover."

  On thick, textured paper, were the centered letters:

  BRASS ORCHIDS

  He took the-"Oh, my hands aren't too clean . . ." "Go on, this is just a sample."

  -took the cover which suddenly curved down as he

  held it by the corner, propped it with his other hand and

  read again:.

  BRASS ORCHIDS

  "And those are the galleys, which you have to look over." Mr Newboy indicated the papers lying now across Kid's knee. "Fortunately, it isn't too long. Thirty-six pages, I believe. Counting cover. There may be some awful mistakes. It'll be printed on slightly better paper than that. I'd argued for a larger typeface-"

  BRASS ORCHIDS

  "-but Roger explained, something I suppose we're all aware of, that here in Bellona we often have to make do."

  "Oh, yeah." Kid looked up and let the title of his book embed that part of his consciousness reserved for reality, while he expunged it from the part called dream. The transition came easy, but with a firmness and inevitability he associated with comprehending violence. He was joyous, and upset, but could just distinguish that the reactions were contiguous, not consequent.

  "These are the illustrations. Again, we have Roger's sense of theatricality to contend with. I'm not at all sure they're in good taste. Frankly, I don't think poetry needs illustration. But he asked me to show them to you: the decision is yours, ultimately."

  He was about to say, They're all black, when he caught glintings in the matt stock.

  "They're black ink on black paper," Mr Newboy explained. "The only way you can really see them is to hold them up to the light and look at them from the side. Then the light catches on the ink. Roger feels that since the poems take so much of their imagery from the city, he's used some of what he feels are the most striking pictures from his newspaper. But he's printed them this way -I don't believe there's been any effort to correlate particular pictures with particular poems."

  Kid nodded. "That's a good idea." He tilted another picture to catch, in sudden silverpoint, burning buildings, people gaping, and one child, in the foreground, leering into the camera. "Oh, yeah!" He laughed, and looked through the others.

  "Have you any idea when you'll be able to look over the proofs? The Times is notorious for typos. Your book was set on the same machinery."

  "I could do it now." Kid put down the pictures and picked up the galleys. "How many pages did you say it was?"

  "Thirty-six. I went over it once myself against your notebook-we'd rather hoped for a typescript; and when you pushed that into my hands, that evening, I was a bit worried. But your fair copies are very neat. You know, you have at least four completely distinct handwritings?"

  "It's never been too good."

  "But your printing's perfectly legible." Newboy pawed La the case. "Here ..." He gave Kid the notebook.

  It fell open in Kid's hands:

  Poetry, fiction, drama-I am only interested in ...

  Kid turned back the book to the page with his poem (a middle draft of Elegy), then picked up the galleys. Moving ribbon from ribbon on his lap, saw, printed, ELEGY go by, and caught his breath. The letters were so much sharper and more serene than ink on notebook paper.

  He let a random line of print tug his eyes across. Words detonated memories intense enough to blot the fact that they were not his-or, at least, this wasn't . . . or ... Behind his lips the teeth hung open; now his lips pulled apart. He took a silent breath. My poem, he thought, terribly excited, terribly happy.

  "I couldn't help reading some of your notes. I've always found it amusing, writers pouring out pages and pages of analysis on why they can not write-lord knows I've done it myself."

  "Huh?"

  "There were many, many places where I found your aesthetic analysis let me into some of the more difficult things you were trying to do in the actual work." Mr Newboy picked up his coffee cup. "You have a fascinating critical mind, and quite a bit of insight into the problems of the poem. It made me feel closer to you. And of course, the most important thing, is that the poems themselves deepen considerably in the light of your-"

  Kid's head was shaking. "Oh . . ." He closed his mouth again, opened it, with a moment's urge, luminous in its strength, to allow misconception to become deception.

  Newboy paused.

  Blinking through the after urge, the pause indicating he was already found out (he pawed his fragmented memory for some previous intent to deceive, to support him in what he wished to reveal), said: "All that other stuff-hey, I didn't write that."

  Newboy's grey head went a bit to the side.

  "I just found the notebook." The desperation of embarrassment subsided, his heart was left hammering heavily and slowly. "It was all filled up with writing, but just on one side of the page. So I used the other sides for . . . my stuff." A final pulse of heat behind his eyes.

  "Oh," Newboy said trying to retain his smile, "this is embarrassing. You didn't write those journal sections?"

  "No, sir. Only the poems."

  "Oh, I ... well, I guess . . . oh, really I am sorry." Newboy let the smile become laughter. "Well, I really feel that, once more, I've made myself look quite silly."

  "You? No," Kid said, and discovered himself angry. "I should have said something. I just didn't think of it when I gave it to you that evening. Really."

  "Of course," Mr Newboy said. "No, I simply mean your poems are your poems. They exist of themselves. In the same way nothing I could say about them is going to change what they are, nothing you could say-or anything I mistakenly thought you said-is going to change that either."

  "You think that's true?"

  Newboy pursed his lips. "Actually, I don't know whether it's true or not. But truly I don't see how any poet can write who doesn't think so."

  "Why are you going away, Mr Newboy?" Kid had begun the question to make a connection: But now it seemed equally apt for severing one, and Newboy's embarrassment and his own confusion seemed better left. "Can't you work here very well? Bellona doesn't stimulate you?"

  Newboy accepted the severance, acknowledging his acceptance with another sip. "In a way, I suppose you're right. Every once in a while something comes along to remind me that I am-though not as often as I would sometimes like-after all, a poet. What is it Mr Graves says? All poetry is about love, death, or the changing of the seasons. Well, here the seasons do not change. So I'm leaving." Behind coiled steam, the grey eyes gleamed. "After all. I'm only a visitor. But circumstances seem to have contrived to change that status with a rapidity thoroughly disquieting." He shook his head. "I've met some very pleasant people, seen some fascinating things, had a wealth of rich experiences-just the way the city was represented to me. I certainly haven't been disappointed."

  "But not all of the things that happened to you were pleasant?"

  "Are they ever? No, Roger has arranged to get me as far as Helmsford. There some people can take me to Lakesville. There's still transportation there. I can get a bus across to the airport at Pittsblain
. Then-back to civilization."

  "What was so unpleasant here?"

  "Not the least was my initial meeting with you."

  "At Teddy's?" Kid was surprised.

  Newboy frowned. "Outside the wall, in back of Roger's."

  "Oh. Oh, yeah. That." He sat back a little on the couch. The projector rolled between his vest flaps. He did not glance down, and felt uncomfortable.

  "Inside those walls, I'm afraid," Newboy pondered, "are all the intrigues and personality clashes that-well, that one might imagine at a place like Roger's. And they are beginning to bore me." He sighed. "I suppose such things have driven me from one city to another all my life. No, I can't say Bellona was misrepresented. But even for me, at my age, not all of its lessons have been kind."

  "Jesus," Kid said. "What's been happening at-"

  "There are, if I can oversimplify," Newboy went on (Kid took a long breath and picked up his coffee), "two concepts of the artist. The one gives all to his work, in a very real way; if he does not produce volumes, at least he goes through many, many drafts. He neglects his life, and his life totters and sways and often plummets into chaos. It is presumptuous of us to judge him unhappy: or, when he is obviously unhappy, to judge the source of it. Be thankful for him, he lends art all its romance, its energy, and creates that absolutely necessary appeal to the adolescent mind without which adult maturation is impossible. If he is a writer, he hurls his words into the pools of our thought. Granted the accuracy of the splashes, the waves are tremendous and glitter and flash in the light of our consciousness. You Americans-not to mention the Australians-are extraordinarily fond of him. But there is another concept, a more European concept-one of the few concepts Europe shares with the Orient-that includes Spenser and Chaucer, but excludes Shakespeare, that includes the Cavaliers and the Metaphysicals, but bypasses the Romantics: the artist who gives his all to life, to living within some sort of perfected ideal. Sometime in his past, he has discovered he is ... let us say, a poet: that certain situations, certain convergences of situations-usually too complicated for him to understand wholly, as they propitiously juxtapose conscious will with unconscious passion

  -they something-between-cause-and-allow a poem. He dedicates himself to living, according to his concepts, the civilized life in which poetry exists because it is part of civilization. He risks as much as his cousin. He generally produces fewer works, with greater intervals between them, and constantly must contend with the possibility that he will never write again if his life should so dictate

  -a good deal of his civilized energies must go toward resigning himself to the insignificance of his art, into the suppression of that theatrical side of his personality of which ambition is only a small part. He stands much closer to the pool. He does not hurl. He drops. Accuracy is again all-important: there are some people who can hit bull's eye from a quarter of a mile while others cannot touch the target at ten feet. Given it, the patterns and ripples this sort of artist produces can be far more intricate, if they lack the initial appearance of force. He is much more a victim of the civilization in which he lives: his greatest works come from the periods art historians grossly call 'conducive to aesthetic production.' I say he stands very close to the pools; indeed, he spends most of his time simply gazing into them. Myself, I rather aspire to be this second type of artist. I came to Bellona to explore. And I find the entire culture here-I cannot be kind-completely parasitic . . . saprophytic. It infects- even inside Roger's carefully closed estate. It's not conducive to my concept of the good life, therefore, if only tertiarily, it damages all my impulses toward art. I would like to be a good person. But it's too difficult here. I suspect that's cowardly, but it's true."

  The coffee, prompting a memory that would not resolve, was again cold in his mouth. "Mr Newboy-" he swallowed and was pensive-"do you think a bad person can be a good poet? ... or is that a silly question?"

  "Not if you're essentially questioning yourself. I mean, we suspect Villon went on to murder and died by the noose. But-and what a dreadfully unpopular notion -he might just as well have simply been writing about the strange people he knew around him; and, when they got him into trouble, gave up his bad company, abandoned writing, changed his name, and went on to die a peaceful burger in another town. From a perfectly practical point of view-and one would have had to have written fairly well to appreciate the practicality-I would imagine the answer is that it would be quite difficult. But it would be absurd of me to pronounce it impossible. Frankly, I don't know."

  When Kid looked up, he was surprised to see the elderly gentleman smiling straight at him.

  "But that question is just your natural idealism speaking." Newboy turned a little on his cushion. "All good poets tend to be idealistic. They also tend to be lazy, acrimonious, and power-crazed. Put any two of them together and they invariably talk about money. I suspect their best work tries to reconcile what they are with what they know and feel they should be-to fit them into the same universe. Certainly those three are three of my own traits, and I know they often belong as well to some very bad men. Should I triumph over my laziness, however, I suspect I would banish all feeling for economical expression which is the basis of style. If I overcame my bitterness, beat it out of my person for good, I'm afraid my work would lose all wit and irony. Were I to defeat my power-madness, my craving for fame and recognition, I suspect my work would become empty of all psychological insight, not to mention compassion for others who share my failings. Minus all three, we have work only concerned with the truth, which is trivial without those guys that moor it to the world that is the case. But we are wandering toward questions of doing evil versus the capacity for doing evil, innocence, choice, and freedom. Ah well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us that." Newboy glanced at the ceiling and shook his head. Dulled organ music came from the stair. He looked down into his case.

  "I guess what I want to know, really-" Kid's thumb had stained the galley margin: momentary panic. "Do you think these-" and four fingers marked the paper in a sweep-"that these are any good?" There will be other copies, he thought to ease himself. There will be. "I mean, really."

  Newboy sucked his teeth and put the case on the floor against his knees. "You have no realization what an absurd question that is. Once, when I used to find myself in this situation, I would always answer 'no' automatically, 'I think they're worthless.' But I'm older, and I realize now all I was doing was punishing people who asked such questions for their stupidity, and was only being 'honest' in the most semantically vulgar sense. I really cannot think about poetry in such absolute terms as 'good' and 'bad', or even in the more flexible terms you'd probably be willing to accept in their place: 'well done' or 'badly done'. Perhaps it is because I suffer from all the aesthetic diseases of the times which cause the worthless to be praised and the worthy to be ignored. Well, they have ravaged all ages. But you must leave open the possibility that poetry means far too much to me to vulgarize it in the way you are asking me to do. The problem is essentially one of landscape. I've already made it clear, I hope, that I, personally, have enjoyed the particular complex of interchange between you and your poems, both as I have perceived it and, to my personal embarrassment, misperceived it. If you think my distance insulting, dwell on the complexities in it. But let me pose an example. You know of Wilfred Owen?" Newboy did not wait for Kid's nod. "Like many young men, he wrote his poems during the War; he seems to have hated that war, but he fought in it, and was machine-gunned to death while trying to get his company over the Sambre Canal when he was younger than you. He is generally considered, in English, the greatest war poet. But how is one to compare him to Auden or O'Hara, Coleridge or Campion, Riding or Roethke, Rod or Edward Taylor, Spicer, Ashbery, Donne, Waldmen, Byron or Berrigan or Michael Denis Browne? As war- the experience or the concept-stays a vital image, Owen will stay a vital poet. If war were to be both
abolished and forgotten, then Owen would become a minor figure, interesting only as a purely philological point in the development of the language, as an influence on more germane figures. Now your poems wrap themselves around and within this city as Cavafy's twist and refract about pre-World War Two Alexandria, as Olson's are caught in the ocean light of mid-century Gloucester, or Villon's in medieval Paris. When you ask me the worth of these poems, you are asking me what place the image of this city holds in the minds of those who have never been here. How can I presume to suggest? There are times, as I wander in this abysmal mist, when these streets seem to underpin all the capitals of the world. At others, I confess, the whole place seems a pointless and ugly mistake, with no relation to what I know as civilization, better obliterated than abandoned. I can't judge because I am still in it. Frankly I will not be able to judge once out of it, for the bias that will remain from once having been a visitor."

  Kid, halfway through the second poem in proof, looked up at the silence.

  "The worth of our work?" (Kid dropped his eyes and continued reading.) "People who do not create are always sure that on some inchoate level the creator knows it. But the roster of Nobel laureates I have come so near to joining three times now is cluttered with mediocre writers who have neither elegance nor depth, readability nor relevance: lauded during their lifetimes, they died, I'm sure, convinced they had substantially advanced their languages. Your Mass Dickinson died equally convinced no one would ever read a word she wrote; and she is one of the most luminous poets your country has produced. An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit. Private ones? They are even more misleading."

  Kid turned over the next galley. "You're talking to yourself." Eyes down, he wondered what expression was on Newboy's face.

  "Most certainly," Newboy said after a longish pause.

  "You're really that scared your own stuff isn't any good."

  Newboy paused.