“She’s got cystitis and you can’t ball them then or the germs might penetrate in you and then you have to piss all day.”
“Really?”
“That’s what I hear. Irene has this on and off. It started when she was a little chick. She has that and some other hangups I got to be patient with, but that’s the nature of her nature.”
“What sort of hangups?”
“She was a fucked-up nigger-struck chick when I took her on. She had nothing she believed in herself. I straightened her out in the main ways because I gave her an example, that I believed in my blackness.”
“What does she believe in now?”
“Me more than herself, and sometimes she believes in God, which I don’t.”
He said nothing more about her.
“I’m writing hard,” he told Lesser. He wore wire-framed, blue-tinted granny glasses and had grown a bushy mustache to go with his goatee.
Bill had nailed up pictures of W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Blind Lemon Jefferson on the wall of his new kitchen-office. It wasn’t a bad place to work, Lesser thought, though it looked a little barren and wasn’t so well daylit as the upstairs place. A wash of shadow hung in the light.
Although Lesser feared it would not be long before Levenspiel chanced on Bill’s new furniture, he left a bottle with six red-and-white carnations in it on a shelf in his new office.
“Luck with your new book,” he wrote in large letters on a sheet of typing paper. Partly he left the flowers in relief to have Bill out of his flat. Lesser felt he hadn’t worked in an age.
Bill, perhaps embarrassed by the carnations, said nothing in the way of thanks for anything, except once he remarked there might be a diddle of black in Lesser’s blood.
In the Babylonian past a black slave socks it to a white bitch from the Land of Israel?
Bill insisted on showing the writer the first chapter of the novel he had recently begun. Lesser asked him not to just yet, but Bill said it would help him know if he had started off right. He said this was a brand-new book although there were some scenes from the other novel, brought from Mississippi to Harlem, where most of the action would take place. Bill asked Lesser to read the chapter in his presence. He sat in Harry’s armchair, wiping his glasses and looking at a newspaper on his knees as the writer, chain-smoking, read on the sofa. Once Harry glanced up and saw Bill sweating profusely. He read quickly, thinking he would lie if he didn’t like the chapter.
But he didn’t have to. The novel, tentatively called Book of a Black, began in Herbert Smith’s childhood. He was about five in the opening scene, and nine at the end of the chapter; but in truth he was an old man.
In the opening scene, one day the boy drifted out of his neighborhood into a white neighborhood and couldn’t find his way home. Nobody spoke to him except an old white woman who saw him through her ground-floor window, sitting on the curb.
“Who are you, little boy? What’s your name?”
The boy wouldn’t say.
In the afternoon this old-smelling white woman came out of the house and took the boy by the hand to the police station.
“Here’s a boy that’s lost,” she said.
He wouldn’t answer the white pigs when they asked him questions. Finally they sent in a black cop to find out where he belonged.
“Can’t you talk, boy?”
The boy nodded.
“Then talk and tell me where do you live at.”
The boy wouldn’t answer.
The black cop got him a glass of milk to drink, then lifted the boy into his car and drove into Harlem. They walked from street to street, the policeman asking people sitting on the stoops if they knew this kid. No one did. Finally a fat black woman, fanning herself though the day was cool, said she did. She led them two blocks up the street to the tenement where she said the boy lived.
“Do you live in this here house?” asked the cop.
“He sure do,” said the fat woman.
The boy said nothing.
“You sure are a terror,” said the cop. “If you was mine I would blast you ass.”
In a flat on the top floor of the house they found the mother drunk in bed. She was naked but did not pull up the blanket.
“Is this you boy?”
She turned her head and wept.
“I asked you to tell me is this you boy?”
She nodded and wept.
The cop left the boy there and went downstairs.
The woman wept.
The boy smeared a slice of stale bread with some rancid lard and went down to the street to eat it.
In the last scene of the chapter the mother has a visitor who drops in every other night.
… He was an ofay who liked to pretend to talk nigger talk. It made him feel good to do it though it was fake black talk. He did not come from the South, he came from Scranton, Pa. He came to my mama because she charged one dollar and it wasn’t before long that he used to get it for free. And also my mama did all the things he wanted her to do. Sometimes he left us a loaf of sandwich bread on the table or a can of pears, or string beans, or mushy canned fruit. I remember he left a can of tomato paste that my mama smeared on the bread and gave it to me to eat. Sometimes he also gave her two packs of Lucky Strikes. My mama was about twenty-seven years then and I was nine years old. On the street they called this guy “Rubber Dick.” He was a tall stringy Charlie with long legs and a big prick. He liked to take it out and show it to me and scare me off. I hated him and had thoughts to kill him off with my zip gun but was afraid to. I told my mother to warn him to stay out of the house but she said she didn’t mind having him for company.
“Is he comin here tonight?” I asked her.
“Well, he jus might.”
“I hope he dies before he gets here. I hope I kill him if he comes in this here room.”
“I gon wash your mouth with soap if you say that word again.”
“I got nothin to be shame of.”
“He treats me real fine. Las week he buy me a pair of pretty shoes.”
I know he didn’t buy her no shoes.
I left the house but when I came back to eat some supper, he was there, smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette.
“Wheah at is Elsie?” he asked me in nigger talk and I said I didn’t know.
He looked at me in a way that was supposed to witch me and he sat on the bed with a shit smile on his mouth.
“I gon wait for her.”
He told me to come over to him on the bed, he wouldn’t hurt me.
I was scared so nauseous I thought if I moved one teensy bit I would crap in my pants. I wanted my mother to come back fast. If she came back I would not mind what they did to each other.
“Come heah, boy, and unzip mah pants.”
I told him I didn’t want to.
“Heah’s a nice tin cints piece you kin have.”
I didn’t move at all.
“Heah’s a quotah mo. Now unzip mah pants and the money is yo’s. Bof the dime and the quotah.”
“Don’t take it out, please,” I asked him.
“Not till you show me kin you open yo mouf wide an covah yo teef wif yo lips like this.”
He showed me how to cover my teeth.
“I will do it if you stop talking nigger talk to me.”
He said honey he would, and also I was a smart boy and he loved me very much.
He was talking like a whitey again.
Lesser said it was a strong chapter and praised the writing.
“How is the form of it?”
“It’s well formed and written.” He said no more than that, as they had agreed.
“Damn right, man. It’s strong black writing.”
“It’s well written and touches the heart. That’s as much as I’ll say now.”
Bill said that in the next chapter he wanted to get deep into the boy’s black consciousness, already a fire of desire and destruction.
He lived that day in a potless triumphant high.
Lesser read aloud a passage he had written in a notebook; “I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing the top thing in the world.”
“Who said that?”
“John Keats, the poet.”
“Fine dude.”
“And here’s something from Coleridge: ‘Nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise.’”
“Copy that down for me, man.”
Depressed, one useless morning, dispossessed of confidence in himself as writer, as he sometimes was, Lesser, shortly before noon at the Museum of Modern Art, stood before a painting of a woman done by a former friend of his, a painter who had died young.
Although he had sat at his desk for hours, that day for the first time in more than a year Lesser had been unable to write a single sentence. It was as though the book had asked him to say more than he knew; he could not meet its merciless demands. Each word weighed like a rock. If you’ve been writing a book for ten years time adds time to each word; they weigh like rocks—the weight of waiting for the end, to become the book. Though he struggled to go on, every thought, every decision, was impossible. Lesser felt depression settle on his head like a sick crow. When he couldn’t write he doubted the self; this expressed itself in reservations about the quality of his talent—was it really talent, not an illusion he had dreamed up to keep himself writing? And when he doubted the self he couldn’t write. Sitting at his desk in the bright morning light, scanning yesterday’s pages, he had felt about to throw up: language, form, his plan and purpose. He felt sick to death of the endless, uncompleted, beastly book, the discipline of writing, the overdedicated, ultimately limited, writer’s life. It needn’t be so but was for Lesser. What have I done to myself? So much I no longer see or feel except in language. Life once removed. So against the will he had taken the morning off and gone for a walk in the February sun. Lesser tried to put his thoughts out of mind as he walked. He named his unhappiness “depression,” and let it go at that; for though he presently resisted everything concerned with writing he could not forget he wanted more than anything else to write a fine book.
It was a warmish cold day of snow melting, and he drifted aimlessly uptown, pretending not to be thinking of his work, whereas in desperate truth he was scribbling away in the head—it came to not much. Though the writer was not crippled he walked with a limp. He saw with a limp, nothing quite meets his gloomy gaze or fastens there. He is missing something —that begins in an end. He thinks of settlement, compromise, a less than perfect conclusion—how many will know the difference? But when he sneaks around his malaise and sees himself once more at his desk, writing, he can’t imagine he will settle for less than a sufficient ending, the one that must be if the book is to be as good as it must. Anyway, Lesser, after a dozen blocks, admits that whatever presently afflicts him is not an incurable disease. A man is entitled to be momentarily fed up. All he has to do to scare the puking bird off his skull, dispel the despondency that keeps him from working, is go back to his desk and sit down with his pen in his hand; asking not what the writing will or won’t give him. So it’s not the whole of life but who holds the whole of life in his two hands? Art is an essence, not of everything. Tomorrow is a new day; finish the book and the day after comes bearing gifts. If he began once more to work, settled, calm, at it, the mysterious ending, whatever it was or might be, would come of itself as he worked. My God, here it is on paper. He could not conceive how else it would come. No angel flies into his room with a scroll revealing the mystery baked into a loaf of bread, or hidden in a mezuzah. One day he would write a word, then another, and the next is the end.
But the longer Lesser walked the winter streets, the less he felt like returning home and at last gave up the struggle and decided to take a holiday. Big laugh if holiday comes by default. You couldn’t do—for whatever confused reason—what you wanted most to do, ought this minute to be doing, for in essence the job was almost done—hadn’t he invented every step that led to an end? Hadn’t he written two or three endings, a combination of endings? You had only to choose the right one and put it down once and for all; perhaps it needed one final insight. Then you could, after the book was there, reconsider your life and decide how much of the future you wanted to invest in writing—something less than past investment of time and toil. He was tired of loneliness, had thoughts of marriage, a home. There was the rest of one’s life to live, uncertain but possible, if you got to it. Harry promised himself to take at least a year off after finishing this book before beginning another. And the next would go three years in the writing, not seven, not longer. Ah, well, that’s the future, what do you do with a holiday? Since it has been months that he had stepped into a gallery and prowled amid pictures, Lesser, on Fifty-third Street, walked west to the Museum of Modern Art, and after wandering through the permanent collection not really looking—he found it hard to be attentive—stopped in the last room, before his former friend’s abstract and fragmented “Woman.”
Lazar Kohn, an inscrutable type, had been a friend of Lesser’s for a short time in their early twenties. He had become successful too soon for the continuance of their friendship—while the future writer was hating himself for not having yet begun. After a while Kohn stopped seeing him; Lesser, he said, spoiled his pleasure in his triumph. When Lesser’s first novel appeared, Kohn was abroad; when his second was published, Kohn was dead. His motorcycle had crashed, one rainy night, into a huge moving van on Hudson Street. His work, it was said, had been going badly.
There was his green-and-orange picture: a woman trying to complete herself through her own will, as willed by the painter. Otherwise she was an appearance of a face and body trying to make it through a forest of binding brush strokes.
The portrait of the woman—Lesser had once met the model at a party but nothing had come of it—had never been completed. Kohn had worked on it for years and then given up. Lesser had learned this from the model, Kohn’s one-time mistress. Kohn, in defeat, after all his labor, doubt, despair he was not making it, nor ever would, had turned the unfinished canvas to the wall; she had eluded him. You work as you always have but with this picture for no reason you can give or guess, except that it means so much to you to do it as it should be done, you can’t this time make it. She isn’t what I hoped she might be. Whoever she is I don’t know and want no further part of. Let time fuck her, I can’t. But friends who had seen the portrait in Kohn’s studio, in various aspects and colors, said the painter had “made it” despite himself, whether he thought so or no; it was accomplished as art whether or not accomplished as subject, or as originally conceived. Whatever he put his hand to was Lazar Kohn and Kohn was a distinguished painter. His friends persuaded him to release the picture to his gallery for sale. The museum had bought it and hung it in its permanent collection.
The picture deepened Lesser’s dejection. Why had it been abandoned? Who knows?—like Lesser, Kohn had had his hangups. Maybe he had wanted to say more than he could at that time, something that wasn’t then in him to say? He might have said it after the motorcycle accident, if he had survived. Or had he been unable to separate the woman from who she really was: she had as self got the better of his art? He could not invent beyond her? She was simply the uncompleted woman of an incomplete man because it was that kind of world, life, art? I can’t give you more than I have given you—make you more than you are—because I haven’t presently got it to give and don’t want anyone to know, least of all myself. Or perhaps it was the painter’s purpose to complete by abandoning, because abandonment or its image was presently a mode of completion? Peace to Valéry. In painting, Lesser thought, you could finish off, total up, whether done or undone, because in the end (the end ?) you hung a canvas object on the wall and there was no sign saying, “Abandoned, come back tomorro
w for more.” If it hung it was done, no matter what the painter thought.
Thinking of his own work, regretting that he had never been able to talk with Kohn about it, Lesser reflected that if he could not complete his novel; in the end something essential missing—the ending—some act or appearance or even promise of resolution, hence the form unachieved; then it was no completed work of art, did not deserve to be a book—he would destroy it himself. Nobody would read it except those who already had—besides himself perhaps some bum who had fished a few pages of a prior draft out of the garbage can in front of the house, curious to know what the words said. Lesser then vowed, as he often had, that he would never abandon this novel, never, for whatever reason; nor would anybody good or bad, Levenspiel, Bill Spear, for instance, or any woman, black or white, persuade him to give it up; or call the job done before he had completed it. He had no choice but to bring his book to its inevitable and perfected end.
Who says no?
As Lesser leaves the last gallery, wondering what would happen if he went home and picked up his pen, a blue-hatted black woman in the lobby drops a mirror out of her cloth handbag and it shatters on the floor. A girl in a voluminous silk-lined black cape coming out of the ladies’ room quickly walks away from it. Lesser, stooping, hands the black woman a large triangular sliver of glass. In it he sees himself, unshaven, gloomy, gaunt; it comes from not writing. The black woman spits on the fragment of mirror Lesser has given her. He backs off. Lesser hurries after the girl in the cape into the street. He had often thought of her, sometimes while writing.
“Shalom,” he says in the street.
She looks at him oddly, coldly. “Why do you say that?”
He fumbles, says he isn’t sure. “I never use the word.”
Irene, a moody type, walks in noisy boots along the slushy sidewalk, going towards Sixth Avenue, Lesser walking along with her, surprised to be though he invents surprises of this sort easily enough in his fiction. She moves with a loose-limbed, slightly pigeon-toed stride, wearing a knitted green wool hat from which her hair pours down her back. Her intricate earrings clink faintly. Lesser is thinking of her as she looked at his party——her short thick skirt and pink blouse, her plump white breasts; of looking up her legs to the conjoining thighs. He remembers her dance with Bill he hadn’t been able to break into.
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