Great Circle: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  —Not the first, either.

  —What do you know about it?

  —Oh, I’ve been here and there myself, and in and out, and up and down, and heard a thing or two, some from your own lips, before this.

  —Too true, too true. I’ve always been your best case, Bill, your richest specimen. What on earth would you have done without me. I’m one of those talented fellows who combine all the madnesses in one—paranoia, dementia praecox, manic depressive, hysteria—name another. And so I watched faces on the screen—large weeping faces, eight feet high and five feet wide, with tears the size of cannon balls on the common and teeth like gravestones in the snow. Eyes—! You never saw such eyes. Like glassless windows in a ruined church. I think bats were coming and going out of them and into them. And the hair was like high-tension wires, and I saw a louse the size of a sparrow being electrocuted. It was great. Did I ever tell you of the time I stole a girl’s hat in the University Theater?

  —No.

  —Then I won’t. Now don’t tell me what Freud thinks a hat means.

  —What do you think a hat means.

  —If I were a Martian, strayed to earth, long after the death of the last man, I could reconstruct the whole of human civilization from one female hat. Preferably one of those early specimens with a lot of ostrich plumes. But this is a hypothetical question and I won’t go into it. The truth is, I want to cry.

  —Go ahead and cry.

  —No, I can’t. You’ve become my alter ego for the moment, the skeptical and analytic part of myself, and you disapprove of crying. So do I. Did you every cry at a prize fight? No? Why, Bill, I’m surprised at you. I don’t think you can have been to any prize fights. Everybody cries at a prize fight. The tears of Christ. You can buy them at the soda fountain, if you can get near enough to buy anything, which you seldom can, between bouts. And on Vesuvius once—but that was long ago, far away, and besides it was in the spring.

  —You’re a riot. I wish to God I could take this down. But I don’t doubt you’ll remember it.

  —Why should I. It’s my business to forget.

  —So you think.

  —So it is.

  —The ostrich puts its head in the sand.

  —I’m an ostrich, one of the best. An Arabian sparrow. Hiding my head in the desert of memory.

  —I don’t think you’d better drink any more. You’re pretty well advanced.

  —Not at all. How easily whisky comes out of a bottle—did you ever notice? Just like that. I think I’ll sit down. I think I’ll lie down. I think I’ll put this nice cold silk cushion on my face. Oh, that’s grand. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. And so I came back from New York, in response to a note from Fred (nice fellow, Fred) and found a hat, a man’s hat, a dirty felt hat, just as he predicted, on the chair in the front hall. What a melodrama. I had foreseen, in the train, every detail—that’s my way, Bill, I always foresee. So the hat wasn’t really a surprise at all. I was so sure it was there that I let myself in very quietly, like a cat, and banged the door behind me, and went up to the hat. It occurred to me to address the hat in Elizabethan style. O thou, most treasonable shape 0’ the human head, cornuting horror … but there were gloves also, and a stick—and what do you think of this—this is the dirtiest touch of all—a pair of humble muddy galoshes. Side by side, so meek and subservient, waiting for their exhausted master.

  —For God’s sake, Andy.

  —Yes, for God’s sake. You shrink from the horror, the plain physical horror, just as much as I did. Isn’t it wonderful? What a symbol, what a symbol. The hat, the stick, the gloves, the galoshes—a little constellation in the front hall, of which the meaning was plain even to me, who am no astronomer. I saw the whole life which they signified: Thomas Crapo, idealist, scientist, professor of biology, my friend, excellent tennis player, frequenter of wrestling matches, lover of Beethoven, but also the lover of my wife. And the apartment was so quiet, Bill! I could have heard a pin drop—and perhaps I did. A hairpin. Ting! And then silence.

  —I’ll shut the window. It’s getting cold.

  —I hear a snowplow.

  —It’s one o’clock.

  —Where?

  —Here. One hour past midnight in the human soul.

  —Then we’re getting on. If I were a dead leaf I would swallow myself.

  —Why wait to be a dead leaf.

  —Ah, I see, you’re bored, and quite rightly, with this harangue. Poor fellow, that’s the unfortunate duty of analysts, isn’t it? They only sit. I forget my Milton. But, seriously, have you ever found Christ’s hat in your front hall? And his gloves and stick and galoshes? You wonder what to do. You feel—as you should—like an intruder. How can you most tactfully announce your inconsiderate arrival. It would be tactless to go to the bedroom door—don’t you think—and say, Are you there, darling? Or perhaps darlings. It might be better simply to go to the bathroom and pull the chain, which would give them a cheerful warning that father was come home again. But there is this murderous impulse, too—have you ever killed a fly, or thrown a baby out of a window? I have, from time to time. Oh, my God. Look—I see my pulse on the radial side of my wrist, at the joint. I’m a doomed man, thank heaven. This is that blood that brought me where I am. You can throw the hat out of the window, of course—and perhaps that’s the best solution, though not the easiest. Hat equals schaden-freude. Bilingual pun, Bill, which does you credit. But why not open the bedroom door dramatically, and stand there frozen for a moment, eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves? I don’t like the smell of this cushion—I believe you’ve been entertaining young women here, Bill, and I think I recognize—do I recognize—yes, I’ve certainly come across that before. Now where was it?

  —It doesn’t matter—go ahead.

  —Yes, go ahead. Forward into the untrodden—but that’s an unfortunate suggestion. Do angels fear to tread? Not by a damned sight. And he was such an angel, such a white man, so gentle, so good, so shy—his little mustache is so neatly clipped with his nail scissors, on Tuesdays and Fridays always, and he always blows his nose before going to bed, and every penny he spends he puts down meticulously in his little notebook. Cup of coffee at Liggett’s—five cents. Carfare to Boston and back—twenty cents. Boston Evening Transcript—three cents. But I’m forgetting about Michelangelo. Do you suppose Michelangelo ever saw the sea?

  —The sea?

  —Yes, the sea. You know, the ocean, the bounding main. That thing that has waves, and bears ships, and laughs unarithmetically at the moon. Did he ever see it? I wonder. I wonder if he wanted to get back to it. What do you think. Don’t sit there and grin at me!

  —Go on, let’s get back to it. A little free association, please! While I have a drink and try to catch up with you.

  —Oh, my God, I’m a fool, a bloody, bloody fool. Why am I always in such a damned panic, in such a hurry to make decisions, why do I run round in mad circles like a beheaded hen?

  —You know pretty well why.

  —For six months I’ve been doing it—I’ve done no work—I’ve drunk like a fish and gone from one wild party to another. An unreasoning terror, a terror that had no particular shape—nightmares one after another too, I’d wake up sweating, my heart beating like hell—dreams of falling, dreams of climbing and falling, desperate efforts to carry monstrous loads up broken and rotten ladders, fantastic scaffoldings which fell away beneath me as I climbed—night after night.

  —You saw it all coming. You were already aware of the insecurity of your position—perhaps you even wanted all this to happen. Perhaps you were precipitating it. God knows your way of living can’t have made Bertha like you any better, can it. I’m surprised she hasn’t rebelled or broken out before.

  —Now be fair about this, Bill, be fair. I admit it wasn’t too good. But I think you go a little too far when you suggest that I wanted this to happen. Does a man deliberately want to cut himself in two? Jesus. Does he deliberately seek to be abandoned? Jesus. Does he carve out his own heart and throw it to t
he dogs? Jesus. No, I decline the gambit, thank you. Just because I vaguely foresaw and feared the thing doesn’t mean I wanted it. I know I’ve been a damned fool. Why did I get into that rotten affair with Molly? God knows. But even that might not have done any harm if it hadn’t been for the party in Prescott Street, when we all got drunk and took our clothes off and did a Russian ballet, and so on and so on, and that damned fool little Mary Thurston running all over town telling about it, just because some idiot of a Ph.D. student, a philosopher, thought he was a satyr and tore her shirt off. Those are the damned trifles that ruin our lives. Precarious, precarious. But nothing to the precariousness of the mind. I still believe I shall go insane. All of a sudden, my mind stops—goes blank—I can’t either think or feel. I forget the simplest things, names, events—things I’ve known all my life. I carry my laundry into the Western Union telegraph office. Wild fits of shyness come over me, the kind I used to have when I was a kid, and I stand foolish and speechless, leering like an idiot, forgetting where I am and what I’m there for. The other day at the bank I found I couldn’t write—my hand began to shake—God knows why—and I couldn’t even sign my own name. The cashier looked at me in astonishment. I really thought I’d gone mad. I looked out of the window, trying to think of something, saw the sunlight, saw the window of my old room in Gray’s Hall, with my initials still carved on the window sill after all these fifteen years, and the pen shook in my hand, and then I tried again, pretending for the cashier’s benefit that I’d merely been doing a little calculation. Calculation! Good God, I was calculating for my very life. Then I managed by making a series of separate feverish little tremulous strokes to get a few quivering marks on to the paper, which bore no resemblance to my signature at all. Mr. Howe looked at it in surprise, but made no comment. I suspect he thought I was trying deliberately to disguise my handwriting so that the check wouldn’t be charged to my own account. Now what the hell was that all about. I walked out shaking like the well-known aspen leaf, or a stricken doe, or something, and went straight to Molly’s apartment, without even knowing what I was doing. Her door was unlocked and I walked in. She was taking a bath, and yelled at me in alarm from the tub, not knowing who it was. I opened the door and looked at her. She threw a sponge at me. Then I went back to the sitting room and stared at the cactus on the window sill, which had just given birth to a purple blossom. It was very beautiful. She came in and said she was surprised at me. She was obviously rather pleased. We sat down on the couch, she in her kimono, and she expected me to make love to her. Instead, I cried, and she was the most astonished woman you ever saw in your life. When that was over, she gave me a gin and ginger ale, and I told her my dream about the sea. I’m always dreaming about the sea. We all know what that means, don’t we? I’m going to be born again one of these days. Oh, yes, we rise again. Back to the womb, and forth once more we swim, like the mighty hero of the Kalevala, after nine months in submarine caves. We all crowded to the railing on the port side, where the captain was pointing to the masthead of a sunken ship, a masthead from which a pennant still fluttered. It was a sunken galleon. I knew that, even before the tide went out and revealed it to us all—the tide went out in no time, and there, behold, was a little island, submerged at all but low tide, and on its shore was the little galleon. We got out of the ship and walked up the shingle beach to the galleon, and I climbed up on to its deck and it was very strange, it was a little museum of seashells and pearls and precious stones, the decks were lined with glass cases, and all of them filled with beautiful—indescribably beautiful—cowry shells and razor shells and wentletraps and corals and ambergris and black pearls and God knows what. I was enthralled. And to think—I reflected—that these poor fellows, four hundred years ago, after collecting these rare and lovely things from parts of the world and all the oceans, should at last have been overtaken by fate and their marvelous collection buried here with them and forgotten. I examined great scarlet shells like butterflies, and blue shells like dragon-flies, and red sponges, and flying fishes with wings of opal and gold. Never have I seen such concentrated beauty. It was all my childhood dream of treasure-trove come true. All those dreams of finding nests of buried gold coins, marbles made of moonstone, jackstones of silver—you know what I mean. I climbed down again to the beach and walked round to the stern of the ship—and there, what do you think? was a skeleton standing with his hands folded on a rusted musket, standing upright as if to guard the ship with its treasure, and staring with empty sockets at the name of the ship, which I saw, when I looked up, was Everest. Ever rest. Now what do you make of that, Watson. But I had no time to loiter—the tide was rising swiftly again, the captain called us, and back we went to our own ship, and no sooner were we on the decks once more than the tide had risen, the little galleon, with its melancholy guard, was engulfed, and all that remained was the fluttering pennant. And so we sailed away. I told this dream to Molly—oh, yes, I know what it means, I daresay the old fellow is my father—and before she could comment on it I told her we were going to the Greek’s for lunch, and so I helped her to dress, handing her odds and ends of clothing, and I picked the damned little cactus flower, which made her really furious—she stamped her foot and I thought she was going to have a cry herself—but she recovered and we went to town in a yellow taxi. And that was that. And, oh, yes, we went afterwards to a hockey game at the Garden, and she was bored to death, though I gave her a hot dog and a bag of peanuts to keep her happy. I think she thought I’d gone crazy.

  —You wanted her to think so.

  —Of course I did. But also I didn’t. Now just how do we dissect that out. But I’d prefer to have a drink. I’ll have a drink. This is to Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Melville, bisexual wonders of the transient world, magicians of the epicene, bastards of heaven and hell. Here’s to you, Mike, old boy. May your shadow never grow less, nor your fifth leg shorter. And so they went to hell all three to learn the fraud of Calvary. Good old Mike—I know all about him. His best friend was a homosexual, a minor artist who is now forgotten, and none of whose works survive, one of the lesser Florentines, a small man with a beard, a courageous coward, an exquisite, with a taste for scarlet in dress and a passion for perfumes and silks. A gentle fellow, he carried himself well, square-shouldered and erect, and his sword he managed with a grace, though he never put it to use. He had red lips and green eyes and a thick Florentine cad’s curl swept away from the fine feminine forehead, and his nose was proud and and of good breeding, and his accent in the reading aloud of poetry was of the very subtlest and finest. He was older than Michelangelo and richer, and his purse was open to his friend, for he could be, though a miser by nature, generous with those he loved. But this fellow betrayed him. Yes, he betrayed him. He left his hat in the hall, and his sword too, and his scarlet-lined cloak. So Michelangelo studied Plato, and modeled the titubant Bacchus, which is commonly considered his most ignoble work. And why was all this? Ah, Bill, you may well ask. Unable to draw Michelangelo to himself as he wanted to do, he took the next best course—viz., to wit, i.e., he took Michelangelo’s mistress. Surely you understand that? And so we have a rare kind of incest, we have—and a sort most painful to the heart. Now if you had a brother, Bill, and you had also a sweetheart, and this brother, behind your back, slept with your sweetheart—would you be unhappy? But I’m tired.

  —I’m not surprised. Why don’t you lie down again.

  —What about you, Bill? I feel damned guilty about you. Have you got lots to do tomorrow.

  —Nothing that counts. This is much better. I’ve got a patient at twelve and nothing before that. So don’t worry.

  —Why do I talk such tripe.

  —I think there’s method in your madness.

  —Madness in my method. It’s all the same. You must forgive me. I’d do the same for you, Bill. I’ve got to talk, and talk frantically. This is what I’ve been unconsciously looking for for a week. Something is broken. What is it. I don’t know. Suddenly I’m becoming, or try
ing to become, a child again. Now why is that—do I see it? I half see it. But, my God, Bill, how sick it makes me to mix so much that’s fraudulent with all this—at one moment what I say to you is genuine, at the next it’s almost deliberately a fake. I daresay you see through the fake with your fierce analytic eye, and so it’s all the same. A calculated fantasy or lie is as good as a dream, for your purpose.

  —Just about. Your fantasies are pretty transparent. Which I perceive you’re quite aware of.

  —Oh, am I, b’gosh.

  —Anyway, you fit them in pretty well.

  —In the pattern, you mean, the preconceived pattern.

  —The preconceived role.

  —Oh, Christ, yes. Isn’t it disgusting.

  —Not at all. I sympathize with you. You’re all right, Andy. Why not get really drunk, and let yourself go. It won’t do you any harm.

  —I’ve been drunk too much, and it does me no good.

  —It’s all the path to regression. Healthy enough, too. There’s nothing wrong with regression, so long as you don’t stick in it. It’s really, in such a case as yours, a sign of creative growth. You’ll eventually come out of it with something new.

  —To be sure. You mean I’ll get rid of that damned little winged pig, that revolting little symbol of disguised sensuality, that little pretence of idealism, that sweet little romance as to the facts of life.

  —I didn’t say that. You said it.

  —You might just as well have said it. Don’t be so niggardly. What the hell is it, Bill, that gives you such a sedentary kind of composure? I believe at bottom you’re afraid of life, and your calm is the calm of the abnegationist.

  —Perhaps.

  —Now you choose to be Buddhistic.

  —You choose to think me so.

  —I believe you’re a coward.

  —Thou sayest.

  —Now you’re playing at Christ.

  —Well, spit on me, and become the wandering Jew.

  —I hate you extraordinarily, Bill. You’re simply revolting, when you put on this superior manner, this know-it-all air, as if you were God. You think you can look right through me, don’t you. Oh, yes, you see every little shred of dirt and rot in my festering soul. And you have an unfair advantage in having known me for fifteen years or so. And in having known Bertha, too.