Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas

by Gass, William H.

  Take a punk kid from a gang—say—put him in a pisspit—well—what’s he going to do next—how’s he going to like getting showered by his rivals? Or by his own pals? And suppose when he’s out he gets even. To land in the pit again for—what?—for good? forever? till he dies of acid rain? The fact was, Penner claimed, his plan would avoid the huge loss of useful labor which confinement involved, eliminate most prisons (a few would be continued for bloodletters or other dangerous incorrigibles), and ease the need for guards (a job which created its own brutes). The courts could act quickly because errors in judgment wouldn’t cost years of life, and apart from psychological consequences, punishments in pits were disgraces, like being stuck in the stocks, which intended no physical harm. Penner proposed the latter’s revival, as well as the custom of shaving the hair of miscreant women and parading them naked through the streets, including other practices perfected during the Cultural Revolution, not omitting many social humiliations: wearing the dunce’s hat, having one’s ears boxed or emblems of rank removed, a swagger stick snapped over an outraged knee, ceremonial robes ceremonially ripped, or being forced to march in a parade of shame—mooned by a multitude—to endure catcalls and jeering, to suffer even the dunking stool, or be compelled to perform various acts of contrition, to crawl as the snake was condemned to in the dust, to wear sackcloth and ashes, the horns of the cuckold, the crown of the king of fools. There are precedents of every kind: Jesus was jeered.

  The belief that the physical character of the pisspit was basically benign was disputed, I remember, because there were many who argued that even a few hours in such a poisonous environment would lead to injuries to the eyes, the mouth, the lungs, and so on, and to diseases which might show up much later.

  So stay out of the pisspits, Luther sternly replied. And people will stay out. I promise. He extended a hand which held a spoon. The pits are pragmatically perfect. The pits will work.

  Several tables had been shoved together and Penner sat in the middle of a group—a few homely young women, but mostly men—and waved his spoon, rapping the table with the bowl when he made a point. Just as the body is soiled by the excrement it makes and carries, so the soul, you see, is blackened by its dirty deeds, hence the appropriateness of using bodily fluids as punishments—spitting on faces fastened in the stocks, for instance—because punishment is always levied against the body, isn’t it, even when it is the inner character—the spirit—that commits the crime. He turned to a rather pudding-faced young woman and wondered which would be more satisfying to her: to know that the punk who’d snatched her purse was going to see jail for a few months, or to be given the opportunity to spit in the punk’s eye, even though he’d be collared in the city square only for the working day. Or … or kiss him on the mouth despite his tendency to bite? The girl’s smile faded. Suppose he’d cut the screen on a summer eve and entered your bedroom and entered you as you tried to sleep—suppose—and he’s now in a hole below you, and you can defile him with the same organ he defiled—how would that feel? Finally, clearly embarrassed, she covered a small smile and half a giggle behind a warding hand. What, I wondered, had she done earlier to deserve her present little penalty. Perhaps she had tried to attach herself. Penner had said, as if warning me, that to affirm yourself as a disciple was already to have betrayed your master.

  Suppose, the Master grimly concluded, we really forced society’s enemies to eat shit. How many crooks would be willing to risk the perpetration of a seven-spoon crime?

  The evening over, Penner left for his apartment. I caught up with him after leaving an excessive tip at my table for inattentive service, as I’d been taught, and we talked off and on while we walked, although he was clearly still unhappy with me. I surprised him by chatting at first about nothing in particular: I asked how he was, what he was presently studying, what his plans were—that sort of thing. Finally, in front of his digs, he asked me if I admired his secret revenge. Well, I said, it’s hardly secret, Luther, everybody knows you wrote that pamphlet, after all you signed it at the end. He sneered. I’d have to say—he sneered at length. My “Immodest Proposal,” if accepted—if acted on—would signify society’s intention to take revenge against those who offended it; such aims would not resemble mine. Penner’s look annoyed me, so I stood my ground though my head was blank about his meaning. He continued his sneer into his tone as if it were a second feature. You don’t enjoy the paradox? Most people—right?—who’ve read or heard about my suggestion are outraged. Disgusting, they call it; repulsive, they call me. These are people comfortable with long penal terms and with cruel executions. These are people who raise no great outcry about chain gangs or prison rape or the common corruptions of prolonged confinement, the brutalities of guards, the laxity of parole boards, the happiness that fills impoverished small towns when they learn a prison will be built nearby and the citizens can furnish it food and guards and the blackest of markets.

  Yes, I said. And? Well, their complaints about my “Immodest Proposal” reveal them to be hypocrites of the deepest dye. The dye and its depth is there for those—like me—who see—to see, he said with satisfaction smearing his face like jam. This evening, I talked with a guy who was willing for the state to emasculate rapists, yet he was furious with me for my proposal, and called me an anarchist and an un-Christian creep. Think of that. These Christians would renail Christ if they thought it meant a second chance at salvation.

  One of the immense moral advantages of my pisspits is that—well—they don’t bring you face-to-face with the person you aim to punish exactly—but they do require a kind of confrontation, and some people don’t like that, they prefer to hire executioners and have their vengeance done at a distance.

  Well, Luther, the idea isn’t exactly new, I remember I replied. The visitor can still see, in the dungeon of the castle in Regensburg, the deep hole where the Elector put his enemies, and where, as the guide euphemistically puts it, guards enjoyed reposing their relief. But people may not wish to return to such medieval practices in a world which is supposed to be modern.

  I had committed a calamitous offense. No, two. It was instantly obvious. Penner’s grin was a grate made of nails.

  Are you hanging out at the Sidewalk Café these days? Most evenings, Penner said. I’m holding court. Tomorrow the subject is suicide. Have you discussed the revenge of the unearned windfall or the calamity of sudden celebrity yet? (No reply.) No time for tête-à-têtes then? You can come if you want, Penner replied with a shrug. I’m being sloughed, I thought, but merely said good night. It was our last conversation.

  Journal entries suggest it was about the same time as the foo-faraw caused by the pamphlet that Luther Penner was roped into Harriet Hamlin Garland’s sordid little social circle. I know of her only secondhand, though it may indeed have been she—the pud-faced girl—maybe really a woman, the light was inconclusive—whom Luther had embarrassed in the café. Anyway, she bore some relation to Hannibal Hamlin Garland, a writer of modest attainments whose autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, is sometimes remembered, and her name certainly celebrates that relation, if perhaps too raucously.

  Luther’s notoriety drew her to him like blood draws the shark, and soon he was a fixture in her salon, a salon he despised, as his journal entries amply attest, but one he suffered because he sensed in her total self-absorption and stubborn persistence a type ripe for his instruction. In this he was not mistaken. From what he writes of her, Harriet Hamlin Garland was a lady fashioned, it seemed, entirely of library paste and venomous malice; she possessed, he wrote, a soapy denseness of mind ideal for persistence and self-deception, because not only would she never take no for an answer, she rebounded from every snub with a resilience rubber might envy, and oozed on the course of her self-promotion like pus from a perfectly infected wound. It was not that she did not notice she was being ignored or insulted, waved away like an annoying gnat, for if the persons who did not render her sufficient devotion were deemed to be of no further use,
she would turn on them like a hole card from a winning hand, and show her true nature; but if use were there still to be found, she would swallow every distasteful scrap she was thrown like a camp dog, snarling only at strangers, biting only the dying or the dead.

  All gall, Penner concluded, was divided into three parts: Harriet, Hamlin, and Garland.

  In short, she’d never know—because she couldn’t comprehend—well, she’d understand, all right, and be angrier than ever—when she’d been the object of someone’s revenge, but the pain would have to be pushed past—ignored—if there were still profit to be seen in the relationship.

  Her circle was made of incompetents and designed to contain outcasts—Luther understood himself to have the latter quality—so that they would finally feel they had a home: a lesbian or two, excessively fat people, several who blew horns in bad bands, poets so wretched they could hardly stand to hear each other’s voices, as Penner observed it, but people nevertheless of numerous hues who understood the considerable advantage of their handicaps. She practiced yoga herself like a child beginning piano, read about Buddha with hush in her eyes, and used mysticism like smelling salts. Kerouac had inserted his fingers into her early youth (that was Penner’s phrase), but her views now reflected the Beats only distantly. She was a soured visionary. One had to admire her, and Luther Penner did, because Harriet Hamlin Garland picked up every rebuff the way Sisyphus did his rock, and soldiered on.

  Harriet Hamlin Garland has become as valuable to me as a laboratory to a scientist, Penner wrote. Her resentments mirror mine, invert them, give them a new and novel look. “Here is a woman who deserves to be dumped, who is dumped, and who won’t take dump for an answer.”

  A year later, after Luther was made an instructor at the college, so well had his wooing of the faculty obtained him advancement (over the weak opposition of poor Professor Hoch, who feared another inundation, and despite the notoriety of Penner’s pamphlet, whose force faded like red in the wash), Harriet Hamlin Garland enrolled in one of his classes, to sit at his feet, she said, but only “to pour water on their clay,” Luther wryly concluded.

  Yet from Harriet Hamlin Garland, for instance, Luther learned how to systematically misunderstand whatever was said to him by those he had determined were his enemies. If an opponent argued for Y, Penner would congratulate him for defending Z. He turned out laudatory reviews of works in his field which distorted them beyond repair or recognition, and condescended to his betters with a suave show of politeness which they had to accept, and which left them furious. “I do by dint of careful design what HHG does by thoughtless instinct.”

  Fulsome in his praise of someone in a private moment, Penner would lamely laud that same gull at a public one. His journals are replete with derisions of this kind, and encounters of which he gives detailed descriptions. Casting aside pooks as no longer relevant, he soon stole Harriet Hamlin Garland’s smile, which was small, quick as a twitch, and entirely symbolic. It resembled a smirk but was too short to signify satisfaction. He called it a “smill.” This adopted tic Penner would insert like punctuation between pieces of his speech where it warned his auditors that something witty, cute, or clever was coming: “After some study [smill] I have come to the conclusion [smill] that people actually approve of crime [smill] so long as they can feel sure that others will be its victims.” (Here he would raise his eyebrows quizzically as if doubting his own declaration.) “Since comics, crime, and sports [smill] are all they want to read about in the newspapers [rising eyebrows].” The entire performance was quite unnerving. “Without crime life would be too boring to be borne; without scandal there’d be nothing to discuss.”

  So why was he trying to prevent it, I wondered when I saw this observation. Was that to be the revenge whose profit would be the pleasure of starting a Bring Back Crime movement?

  It occurred to Luther at last to use his hostess as an implement in one of his secret revenges. He would draw the deserving victim into Harriet’s circle, where the mark would sail in slow orbits through a sea of fatuous expressions (Penner meant both phiz and phrase) which the gull would at first find flattering (another of Penner’s alliterations), “blown by a breeze made of self-congratulation and other pufferies.” The Garland group so leaned against one another, it was like adding a fresh face to a house of cards, and once properly propped, the new knave was indispensable.

  Yet Luther liked the fawning, it appears. He had at last a respectable position; in his narrow world he was widely, if not always happily, known; there were, for his pleasure, devotees, acolytes, faithful followers. From parlor to pub, from couch to café, he carried his coterie and broadcast his message.

  Then suddenly, he left them all in a lurch so extreme the house came down as if its table had been tipped. Penner publicly—as publicly as he could manage—repudiated his opinions in a letter to the editor of the freebee press, attacked his own pamphlet as poisonous, the poetry of his pals as putrid, and the basis of their previous association as hypocritical and self-serving. “Mallarmé has canceled his Tuesdays. Nor will there be any more coffee served me on pink plastic trays.” “The old days are dead, the old ways are over, past wrongs must be righted,” he wrote. “The pits will prevent nothing, although they will make punishing dumb bunnies more fun.” The result of this recantation was to make “An Immodest Proposal” momentarily an item of interest again. “It’s like a bubble of spit at the tip of everybody’s tongue,” one critic complained.

  When taken to task by those who perceived this volte-face as an act of treachery, Luther Penner is reported to have replied that Ludwig Wittgenstein had done no differently when he rejected the Tractatus, confounding his copycats—who knew only how to meow as he had taught them—by setting off in a diametrically opposite direction, gathering a group of new strays as he went along—whom he would train to bark instead of mew, and piss on posts instead of scratch.

  I perceived Penner’s new tack as a masterstroke (the preemptive betrayal of those who would certainly have betrayed him before long), because most people naturally, if naively, believed he had come to his senses, as sometimes happens, and would now embrace imprisonment, favor capital punishment where appropriate, encourage neighbors to spy on one another, and support the other humane measures—such as dog patrols, wiretaps, sting operations, search and seizure—which are commonly urged in order to reduce crime in communities. Nevertheless, though his letter had achieved a … well, mostly secret revenge … it was not yet a transcendental one, since for that even the revenger must be unconscious of what he’s done, and unaware, while reaping it, of any reward.

  Harriet Hamlin Garland did do things by thoughtless instinct. That is: her self was her narcotic and put itself to sleep. Which placed her above Penner on any scale measuring transcendence. She was of course surprised and hurt by his recantation, but that only meant his doctrines were all hers now; and the fact that it was a woman who was spreading such proposals through the state—that she had, in effect, embraced what were popularly believed to be venereal views—simply enlarged her, increased for some the attractiveness of her circle (such are our times); so if Penner’s clique had flown the farm when he chucked his recantation at them (as one wit remarked), Harriet Hamlin Garland soon had recooped, gathering a new group she deemed worthy by—as it were—crowing mightily every morn; and after a few months not many remembered that it was Penner’s pamphlet she was preaching from. She merely gave his views a new (rather appropriate) name: the Justice Restoration Movement. The eagerness with which some women took to these ideas and staunchly served under the banner of victimhood unnerved not a small number of husbands. They forgot that there have always been furies.

  I don’t believe Luther Penner had calculated that Harriet Garland would simply steal his proposals and stump the state with them, but there she was, on the road, leading a picket line in front of the capitol. “Make Pits Happen,” the placards said. “It’s the Pits,” they avowed. “The Pits Shall Be Our Pendulum,” they sang.
And got plenty of TV coverage. And were the lucky butt of anchorperson puns. Which spread her message like margarine. I saw a bumper sticker which read: Your John or Mine. Less public, though popular, were the cardboard coasters which encircled a black hole with the pointedly censored injunction: “Put the … its in the Pits.” The worst by far was: “I Pit Out.” At least, I thought so. And of course the entire brouhaha was called—doubtless deservedly—the piss war.

  I have always wondered who the writer of these dubious slogans was. It could not have been Harriet Hamlin Garland. She hadn’t a bawdy brain cell, she wasn’t a cutup, and had no wit in her longer than the word. It occurred to me that maybe—just maybe—Penner had been planning some sort of campaign, and that Harriet had appropriated his publicity propaganda too.

  Whatever the reason—whether Penner was discouraged and disgruntled, or had another aim—he disappeared from more eyes than mine; and when, at last, I mustered the courage to approach his parents for an interview, I learned that they knew nothing of his whereabouts, nothing of his reputation, still less about the pamphlet “An Immodest Proposal,” with which I made bold to acquaint them. They were quite predictably horrified. Father’s eyebrows rose like a pair of startled birds. Mother’s mouth painfully pursed. I tried to put their son’s project in the best possible light; that is, find a place for them from where they might be most likely to perceive it favorably.

  Penner’s father, who cursed Kaltenborn with such quiet gusto, had no trouble understanding the basic tenets of his son’s philosophy. His mother followed lamely along. But neither grasped the beauty of the pure revenge, which I was left to explain as best I could. I cast about for examples they would understand. I cast about and cast about. The cowbird. “The cowbird,” I said. The cowbird’s revenge is pure because the cardinal, in whose nest he lays his eggs, raises the cowbird’s brood in ignorance of the interloper’s true nature. The revenge in question becomes transcendental when we realize that the cowbird hasn’t a clue either. The cowbird is simply being cowbirdy, and cannot boast of his success because he doesn’t know that he’s succeeding.