by Henry Miller
“To come back to our friend. . . . I wasn’t too unkind to him, was I? You know damned well I’ve never refused a man help when he asked for it. But he didn’t want help. He wanted sympathy. He wanted us to try to dissuade him from accomplishing his own destruction. And when he had melted us with his heartbreaking stories he wanted to have the pleasure of saying no and leaving us high and dry. He gets a kick out of that. A quiet sort of revenge, as it were, for his inability to cure himself of his sorrows. I figure it doesn’t help a man any to encourage him in that direction. If a woman gets hysterical you know that the best thing to do is to slap her face good and hard. The same with these poor devils: they’ve got to be made to understand that they are not the only ones in the world who are suffering. They make a vice of their suffering. An analyst might cure him—and again he might not. And in any case, how would you get him to the analyst? You don’t suppose he’d listen to a suggestion of that sort, do you? If I hadn’t been so tired, and if I had had more money. I’d have tried another line with him. I’d have bought him some booze—not just a bottle, but a case of whiskey, two cases or three, if I were able to afford it. I tried that once on a friend of mine—another confirmed drunkard. Do you know, he was so damned furious when he saw all that liquor that he never opened a single bottle. He was insulted, so he pretended. It didn’t faze me in the least. I had gotten rather fed up with his antics. When he was sober he was a prince, but when he got drunk he was just impossible. Well, thereafter, every time he came to see me, as soon as he suggested a little drink, I poured out a half dozen glasses at once for him. While he was debating whether to touch it or not I would excuse myself and run out to buy more. It worked—in his case, at least. It cost me his friendship, to be sure, but it stopped him from playing the drunkard with me. They’ve tried similar things in certain prisons I know of. They don’t force a man to work, if he doesn’t want to. On-the contrary, they give him a comfortable cell, plenty to eat, cigars, cigarettes, wine or beer, according to his taste, a servant to wait on him, anything he wants save his freedom. After a few days of it the fellow usually begs to be permitted to work. A man just can’t stand having too much of a good thing. Give a man all he wants and more and you’ll cure him of his appetites in nine cases out of ten. It’s so damned simple—it’s strange we don’t take advantage of such ideas.”
When I had crawled into bed and turned out the light I found that I was wide awake. Often, when I’ve listened to a man for a whole evening, turning myself into a receiving station, I lie awake and rehearse the man’s story from beginning to end. I like to see how accurately I can retrace the innumerable incidents which a man can relate in the course of several hours, especially if he is given free rein. I almost always think of such talks as a big tree with limbs and branches and leaves and buds. Roots, too, which have their grip in the common soil of human experience and which make any story, no matter how fantastic or incredible, quite plausible, provided you give the man the time and attention he demands. The most wonderful thing, to carry the image further, is the buds: these are the little incidents which like seeds a man will often plant in your mind to blossom later when the memory of him is almost lost. Some men are particularly skillful in handling these buds; they actually seem to possess the power to graft them on to your own story-telling tree so that when they blossom forth you imagine that they were your own, though you never cease marveling that your own little brain could have produced such astonishing fruit.
As I say, I was turning it all over in my mind and chuckling to myself to think how clever I was to have detected certain definite falsifications, certain distortions and omissions which, when one is listening intently, one seldom catches. Presently I recalled how he had admitted some slight fabrications only to emphasize that the rest of his yarn was pure wool. At this point I chuckled aloud. Rattner was tossing about, evidently no more able than I to close his eyes.
“Are you still awake?” I asked quietly.
He gave a grunt.
“Listen,” I said, “there’s one thing I want to ask you—do you believe he was telling the truth about himself?”
Rattner, too tired I suppose to go into any subtleties of analysis, began to hem and haw. In the main he thought the fellow had been telling us the truth. “Why, didn’t you believe him?” he asked.
“You remember,” I said, “when I touched him to the quick . . . you remember how sincerely he spoke? Well, it was at that moment that I doubted him. At that moment he told us the biggest lie of all—when he said that the rest was all true. I don’t believe that any of it was true, not even the story about knowing your friend. You remember how quickly he married him off to his sister? That was sheer spontaneous invention. I was tracing it all back just now. And I remembered very distinctly how, when you were discussing your friend the architect, he always told his part after you had made a few remarks. He was getting his clue from you all the time. He’s very agile and he’s certainly fertile, I’ll say that for him, but I don’t believe a damned thing he told us, except perhaps that he was in the army and got badly bunged up. Even that, of course, could have been trumped up. Did you ever feel a head that was trepanned? That seems like solid fact, of course, and yet somehow, I don’t know just why, I could doubt even what my fingers told me. When a man has an inventive brain like his he could tell you anything and make it sound convincing. Mind you, it doesn’t make his story any less real, as far as I’m concerned. Whether all those things happened or not, they’re true just the same. A minute ago, when I was mulling it over to myself, I caught myself deforming certain incidents, certain remarks he made, in order to make the story a better story. Not to make it more truthful, but more true, if you see the difference. I had it all figured out, how I would tell it myself, if I ever got down to it. . . .”
Rattner began to protest that I was too sweeping in my judgment, which only served to remind me of the marvelous poem he had recited for us.
“I say,” I began again, “what would you think if I told you that the poem which he got off with such gusto was somebody else’s? Would that shock you?”
“You mean you recognized it—you had heard it before?”
“No, I don’t mean to say that, but I’m damned sure he was not the author of it. Why did he talk about his unusual memory immediately afterwards—didn’t that strike you as rather strange? He could have spoken about a thousand things, but no, he had to speak of that. Besides, he recited it too well. Poets aren’t usually so good at reciting their own things. Very few poets remember their verses, particularly if they’re long ones such as his was. To recite a poem with such feeling a man has to admire it greatly and a poet, once he’s written a poem out, forgets it. In any case, he wouldn’t be going around spouting it aloud to every Tom, Dick and Harry he meets. A bad poet might, but then that poem wasn’t written by a bad poet. And furthermore, a poem like that couldn’t have been written by a man like our friend who boasted so glibly about turning out crap for the magazines whenever he needed to earn an honest or a dishonest penny. No, he memorized that poem because it was just the sort of thing he would like to have written himself and couldn’t. I’m sure of it.”
“There’s something to what you say there,” said Rattner sleepily. He sighed and turned over, his face towards the wall. In a jiffy he had turned round again and was sitting bolt upright.
“What’s the matter,” I asked, “what hit you?”
“Why my friend what’s his name . . . you know, the architect who was my buddy. Who mentioned his name first—he did, didn’t he? Well, how could he be lying then?”
“That’s easy,” I said. “Your friend’s name is known to millions of people. He selected it just because it was a well-known name; he thought it would add tone to his story. That was when he was talking about his inventions, you remember? He just made a stab in the dark—and happened to strike your friend.”
“He seemed to know a hell of a lot about him,” said Rattner, still unconvinced.
“We
ll, don’t you know lots of things about people whom you’ve never met? Why, if a man is any kind of celebrity we often know more about him than he does himself. Besides, this bird may have run into him at a bar some time or other. What sounded fishy to me was marrying him off to his sister right away.”
“Yep, he was taking a big chance there,” said Rattner, “knowing that I had been such an intimate friend.’’
“But you had already told him you hadn’t seen each other since you were buddies together, don’t forget that. Why he could have given him not only a wife but a half dozen children besides—you wouldn’t be able to disprove it. Anyway, that’s one thing we can check up on. I do wish you’d write to your friend and see if he knows this guy or not.”
“You bet I will,” said Rattner, getting out of bed at once and looking for his notebook. “You’ve got me all worked up about it now. Jesus, what licks me is that you could have entertained such suspicions and listened to him the way you did. You looked at him as though he were handing you the Gospel. I didn’t know you were such an actor.”
“I’m not,” I hastened to put in. “At the time I really believed every word he was telling us. Or, to be more exact, I never stopped to think whether what he was saying was so or not so. When a story is good I listen, and if it develops afterwards that it was a lie why so much the better—I like a good lie just as much as the truth. A story is a story, whether it’s based on fact or fancy.”
“Now I’d like to ask you a question,” Rattner put in. “Why do you suppose he was so sore at Roosevelt?”
“I don’t think he was half so sore as he pretended to be,” I answered promptly. “I think his sole motive for introducing Roosevelt’s name was to get us to listen to that scurrilous poem he had cooked up. You noticed, I hope, that there was no comparison between the two poems. He wrote the one on Roosevelt, that I’m positive of. Only a bar-fly could cook up such ingenious nonsense. He probably hasn’t anything against Roosevelt. He wanted us to admire the poem and then, failing to get a reaction from us, he got his wires crossed and connected Roosevelt with Woodrow Wilson, the demon who sent him to hell.”
“He certainly had a vicious look when he was talking about the war,” said Rattner. “I don’t doubt him for a minute when he said he had murdered plenty of men. I wouldn’t want to run across him in the dark when he was in a bad mood.”
“Yes, there I agree with you,” I said. “I think the reason he was so bitter about killing was that he was a killer himself . . . I was almost going to say a killer by nature, but I take that back. What I do think, though, is that the experience in the trenches often brings out the killer in a man. We’re all killers, only most of us never get a chance to cultivate the germ. The worst killers, of course, are the ones who stay at home. They can’t help it, either. The soldier gets a chance to vent his feelings, but the man who stays at home has no outlet for his passions. They ought to kill off the newspaper men right at the start, that’s my idea. Those are the men who inspire the killing. Hitler is a pure, clean-hearted idealist compared to those birds. I don’t mean the correspondents. I mean the editors and the stuffed shirts who order the editors to write the poison that they hand out.”
“You know,” said Rattner, in a soft, reflective voice, “there was only one man I felt like killing when I was in the service—and that was the lieutenant, the second-lieutenant, of our company.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I’ve heard that same story a thousand times. And it’s always a lieutenant. Nobody with any self-respect wants to be a lieutenant. They all have inferiority complexes. Many of them get shot in the back, I’m told.”
“Worse than that sometimes,” said Rattner. “This chap I’m telling you about, why I can’t imagine anyone being hated more than he was—not only by us but by his superiors. The officers loathed him. Anyway, let me finish telling you about him. . . . You see, when we were finally demobilized everybody was gunning for him. I knew some fellows who came all the way to New York from Texas and California to look him up and take a poke at him. And when I say a poke I don’t mean just a poke—I mean to beat the piss out of him. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but the story I heard later on was this, that he was beaten up so often and so badly that finally he changed his name and moved to another state. You can imagine what what’s his name would have done to a guy like that, can’t you? I don’t think he’s have bothered to soil his hands. I think he’d have plugged him or else cracked him over the head with a bottle. And if he’d have had to swing for it I don’t think he would have batted an eyelash. Did you notice how smoothly he passed over that story about cracking a friend with a broken bottle? He told it as though it were incidental to something else—it rang true to me. If it had been a lie he would have made more of it. But he told it as though he were neither ashamed nor proud of doing what he did. He was just giving us the facts, that’s all.”
I lay on my back, when we had ceased talking, with eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Certain phrases which our friend had dropped returned obsessively to plague me. The collection of vicepresidents of the United States, which he had so accurately described, was a most persistent image. I was trying my damnedest to recall in what town I too had seen this collection in a drugstore window. Chattanooga, most likely. And yet it couldn’t have been Chattanooga either, because in the same window there was a large photograph of Lincoln. I remembered how my eye had flitted back and forth from the rogues’ gallery of vice-presidents to the portrait of Lincoln’s wife. I had felt terribly sorry for Lincoln at that moment, not because he had been assassinated but because he had been saddled with that crazy bitch of a wife who almost drove him insane. Yes, as the woman from Georgia had said, we were trying to make a he-ro of him. And yet for all the good he had tried to do he had caused a lot of harm. He almost wrecked the country. As for Lee, on the other hand, there was no division of opinion throughout the country as to the greatness of his soul. As time goes on the North becomes more enamored of him. . . . The killing—that’s what I couldn’t fathom. What had it accomplished? I wondered if our friend had really gone up to the circle and held communion with the spirit of the man he revered. And then what? Then he had gone to a cheap lodging house and fought with the bed bugs until dawn, was that it? And the next day and the day after? Legions of them floating around. And me priding myself on my detective ability, getting all worked up because I uncovered a few flaws in his story. A revolution of the heart! Fine phrase, that, but meanwhile I’m lying comfortably between clean warm sheets. I’m lying here making emendations in his story so that when I come to put it down on paper it will sound more authentic than the authentic one. Trying to kid myself that if I tell the story real well perhaps it will make people more kindly and tolerant towards such poor devils. Rot! All rot! There are the people who give and forgive without stint, without question, and there are the other kind who always know how to muster a thousand reasons for withholding their aid. The latter never graduate into the former class. Never. The gulf between them is as wide as hell. One is born kind, indulgent, forgiving, tolerant, merciful. One isn’t made that way through religion or education. Carry it out to the year 56,927 A.D. and still there will be the two classes of men. And between the two there will always be a shadow world, the world of ghostly creatures who toss about in vain, walking the streets in torment while the world sleeps. . . .
It wasn’t so long ago that I was walking in that same shadow world myself. I used to walk around in the dead of night begging for coppers so that I could fill my empty belly. And one night in the rain, walking with head down and full of nothing but misery, I run plump into a man with a cape and an opera hat and in a faint, cheerless voice I beg in my customary way for a few pence. And without stopping, without even looking at me, the man from the opera digs in his vest pocket, pulls out a handful of change and flings it at me. The money rolls all over the sidewalk and into the gutter. Suddenly I straightened up, stiff and taut with anger. Suddenly I was completely ou
t of the coma, snorting like a bull and ready to charge. I waved my fist and shouted in the direction the man had taken, but there was no sight or sound of him. He had vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared. I stood there a moment or so undecided what to do, whether to run after him and vent my spleen or quietly set about searching for the shower of coins he had flung at me. Presently I was laughing hysterically. Run after him, bawl him out, challenge him to a duel? Why, he wouldn’t even recognize me! I was a nonentity to him, just a voice in the dark asking for alms. I drew myself up still more erect and took a deep breath. I looked around calmly and deliberately. The street was empty, not even a cab rolling along. I felt strong and chastened, as if I had just taken a whipping I deserved. “You bastard,” I said aloud, looking in the direction of my invisible benefactor, “I’m going to thank you for this! You don’t know what you’ve done for me. Yes sir, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’m cured.” And laughing quietly, trembling with thanksgiving, I got down on my hands and knees in the rain and began raking in the wet coins. Those which had rolled into the gutter were covered with mud. I washed them carefully in a little pool of rain water near a post of the elevated line. Then I counted them slowly and deliciously. Thirty-six cents altogether. A tidy sum. The cellar where we lived was near by. I brought the bright clean coins home to my wife and showed them to her triumphantly. She looked at me as if I had gone out of my head.