A totality of success in this was realized by him in night dreams sometimes, when he knew new languages intuitively. There was once that he spoke Basque that he had never seen nor heard; he spoke it with a shepherd on the top of a mountain. There was once that he spoke old Phoenician with a most odd traveler. It was Casey's liking for languages which later led to his acceptance by John Schultz and his entry into the Dirty Five.
The eighth of the worlds to which Casey withdrew was that of Art. Casey was awkward with pencil, pen, brush, and knife; he could find no medium. But he could visualize and compose and arrange, and he never had a doubt that he was right in his feeling. Even Finnegan had respect for his judgment. Mostly he closed his eyes and created. It was a tragedy that the world's greatest artist could find no medium of expression.
The ninth of the worlds in Casey's head was that of the over-turners. Casey was a revolutionary from the beginning and he hated the rich. His own father was rich, but Casey thought that he was poor. Gabriel Szymansky had two shops that were back to back, facing on two different streets, with a foot passage under the alley. On the rich street he was an antique dealer, on the poor street he was a pawnbroker. He did well, but he talked a tight bargain and (being stingy) gave his son the impression that he was poor.
Anyhow, Casey aligned himself with the poor, and not with the placid poor. He imagined the workers coming out of the packing houses armed with hackers and saws, and the truck-drivers with tire irons and lengths of chain: the steelworkers would bring some kind of puddlers or pokers, and the torpedoes with their sawed-off shotguns would line up with the rising workers like Jean Lafitte and his pirates with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Artillery would be set up in the streets and parks. Skyscrapers would be toppled with a few terrible volleys, and all the factory smokestacks also. Then a fire would be started greater than the original Chicago fire (which had no social significance) and the whole town would be left in cinders. Casey liked to recite the lines of Belloc:
‘And melt the gold their women wore — And hack their horses at the knees,
And hew to death their timber trees — ’
The tenth of Casey's worlds was worldliness, always set about five years in the future, and that from the time when he was no more than five; and with himself as a man of money and prestige and social worth. He would have a flash car and a flash girl, someone like Evelyn or Mary Jean or Mary Carruthers, whichever one grew up prettiest. He would have a rack full of tuxedos and that other kind of suit, and would be lionized by the people he chose to be with. This was the only one of the dreams that ever came true, for now it had done so.
Casey did, in one way or another, have his choice of those three girls. He did have an uptown apartment, and he did make the best bistros. He went where the conversation and music were the finest according to his own ear and appreciation. Nor was this entirely ashes when it came to him.
The eleventh and twelfth facets of his hidden worlds were the least attractive, for they contained the real flaws of his character, flaws he could never conquer. One of them was a deep sadism which included torture reveries of animals and beautiful girls. The other was a catalog of revenges. He considered himself much wronged, and for dozens of persons he had designed revenges, subtle and sensuous, some of them frightening. These would resolve all the many grudges that he held. But he accumulated grudges faster than he was ever able to devise revenges.
During one of those weeks that they were together, Casey told these old day and night dreams to Finnegan. He would not have told them to anyone else even of the Dirty Five. There was one other thing about Casey that will be mentioned just once and then never referred to again. This is because he was all too aware of it and his friends had conspired never to notice it in the hope of his forgetting it a little. Casey was very good-looking; he was handsome; his appearance was outstanding. He looked larger and stronger than he was. He looked more humorous and more friendly than he was. There was no better looking man anywhere, ever.
And now that this is understood, there will be no more reference to the appearance of Casey.
2.
Casey went to high school at St. Bonaventure's, a boarding school forty miles from his home; and when he went there he left many of his old dreams behind. In St. Martin's Hall, the boys lived, not in dormitories, not in small rooms, but in chambers, six boys to a room. Each boy had a black-blanketed bed, a wall locker with wardrobe and shelf, a study desk, and a chair. There was also a large center table, and bookshelves on which were furnished a Dictionary, Bible, Missal, Rule of St. Benedict, and an Atlas. The rest of the books were the boys’ own.
With Casey were Hinnegan, Johnny Carruthers, Dominic Vinobianco, and an old enemy Germany Metzger. These all got along well. In many combinations, Casey would not have gotten along at all. For the sixth boy there was always one senior in the room for room captain. Here too they were fortunate, for they had that perennial senior, Buttercup Butler. Buttercup wasn't very smart. He looked like an owl, but he did have a sort of wit. He was the smallest boy in the room and was no help with the lessons as a senior is supposed to be. Hinnegan was a farm boy.
“In a way he was like you, Finn,” said Casey as he told him about them. “His name wasn't Hinnegan, I don't believe: it was Hannigan or Hanlon or O’Hanlon or such. But since I have known you I have reconstructed him in my mind to rime with you, so he is Hinnegan now and that is the way he is going to be.”
Vinobianco was from Elgin. Johnny Carruthers came with Casey from Chicago, as did Germany Metzger.
Casey kept notebooks while at school. In one he wrote down everything he thought about. In another one he wrote down everything that he read. He read 251 books, but it takes three pages to list them and you'd skip it anyhow. If you read, you also have read them; if you don't, then you wouldn't care to hear about them. The only reason to list them would be as part of a guide on how to construct another Casey, and there is none who doesn't believe that one Casey is enough. But what he actually thought about in High School was summed up in the first notebook:
I. It is better to be a fool than dead, or halitosis is better than no breath at all.
II. Never pitch a low inside to a pigeon-toed batter.
III. Russian fiction is like German music, the best in the world. Someone wrote that.
IV. ‘Our anger against fools is a natural faculty of conservation, like the sensitiveness of the nerves of the skin.’ Belloc wrote that.
V. ‘Everything that is commonly called poetry in the mother tongue may in some way be traced back to William Count of Poitou.’ He wrote that too, or else somebody that I read at about the same time.
VI. ‘Happiness is a journey, not a destination.’
VII. Magnesite is used chiefly in the manufacture of refractory bricks for furnace linings.
VIII. Iscamyl Acetate is commonly known as Banana Oil.
IX. You add three to the skull index to get the cephalic index. This means that there are more live round heads than dead ones. I know one live round head who is going to be a dead one if he doesn't stop fooling around.
X. If you can learn to play the musical saw you've got it made, but it's not something you just pick up. Hinnegan is teaching me. They learn things like that on farms.
XI. The volume of a sphere is the diameter cubed times pi divided by six. A lot of people don't know that. I was the only one who knew it today.
XII. They don't know what color Cro Magnon man was because you can't tell from bones. He may have been a shine.
XIII. A K (hard C) sound in Latin turns into an H sound in German or English. And an F into a B, and a P into an F. A G in Greek is likely to be a ZH in Russian, and it would be a K in German or English. This is known as Grimm's Law.
XIV. Power Factor is the cosine of the angle of lag between voltage and current in an A.C. circuit.
XV. Venice, Italy is further North than Vladivostock, Siberia. You could win bets on this if people weren't so damned afraid of being
taken.
XVI. Bakelite is made out of formaldehyde and gum arabic. Hinnegan and I have started a book and are going to write down all the formulas in the world.
XVII. Putty is made out of chalk and linseed oil.
XVIII. The beard of wheat is called the awn, and the chaff-cup is the glume. A lot of people don't know these words.
XIX. There are left-handed and right-handed rocks depending on the way they are formed and the type of cleavage. A lot of people don't know about this.
XX. Dutch Friesian is the nearest language to English. There is a sentence that is the same in both languages: ‘Good butter and good cheese Is good English and good Fries.’
XXI. It is fun to say the Great Spiral Nebula of Andromeda, but hard to bring it into a conversation. The same goes for the Magellanic Clouds. But you can bring in one you can bring in the other.
XXII. The Gypsies claim that they founded Rome and that it is named for them, the Romanies. They have the same word for Yesterday and for Tomorrow; for To Begin and To End. And they have the same word for Life and Death, Meropen. They never get mixed up because of the way they use them. Pal is a Gypsy word, and so is chiv for knife. And stir when it means prison; their word is stiropen.
XXIII. There is a poltergeist in the bell tower of Subiaco Hall. Hinnegan and I went there without a light at midnight on a bet. We had sacks thrown over our heads by somebody, and got beaten up, and it wasn't a poltergeist that did it. We think we know who did it. But that doesn't prove that there isn't a poltergeist there. There isn't any way to prove that there isn't anything. Because you never see one doesn't prove that there isn't one.
XXIV. A Free Martin is a sterile heifer born a twin to a bull calf. Heifers born twins to bulls are nearly always sterile. I've learned a lot about farms from Hinnegan.
XXV. Hinnegan says the Milesians were in Ireland before the Flood. I tell him that the only way we could know about this would be if Noah had brought two Irishmen onto the ark along with two of all the other animals. This made him kind of mad. Hinnegan doesn't have a scientific mind.
XXVI.Girls with skinny legs and sort of double-jointed wrists are likely to be witty. Girls with black hair and blue eyes are snooty.
XXVII. Sloe gin dates one as an adolescent. The only people who drink it are high school children. Hinnegan and I have started to take a shot of whisky every morning and night with a tot glass of hot water. We consider this a more grown-up drink.
XXVIII. When you see signs like Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, the first letter isn't a Y, it is a Thorn, an Old English TH. A lot of people pronounce it Y instead of TH.
XXIX. The word Surround isn't related to the word Round. It is a short doublet form for Superundate, to be completely covered as with waves. An Island isn't a body of land completely surrounded by water. A Lake is a body of land completely surrounded by water.
XXX. Almost all the arable land in the world was once worm casings.
XXXI. Juliet was only fourteen years old. I tell Mary Catherine that that is as old as we are and that we ought to get married before we are too old to enjoy it. She says no. Mary Catherine has more sense than I have.
XXXII. Who is a great man? Leonardo wrote: ‘Why following on great pestilences the rivers become deeper and run clear, though previously they were wide and of but little depth and always turbid.’ And he wrote even sillier things than that.
XXXIII. Aristotle wrote: ‘The Lynx conceals his urine because it is used for many purposes, usually the making of signets.’ And that's one of the best things he wrote, not the worst. I had a dime ring with a yellow stone and I told Mary Catherine it was made out of dog's such but she got mad.
XXXIV. I had a howler picked out in Locke, but then I went on reading for a long time, and when I came back to the howler it didn't mean what I thought it meant at first.
XXXV. Johnny Carruthers says that the will is indestructible. The mind and the will survive death. Since hypnotism is by the will you could be hypnotized by a dead man.
XXXVI. Dominic has a sister named Annina. I keep thinking about her all the time.
XXXVII. Johnny Carruthers had a book, Physics Without Mathematics. This is like a head without brains. People who don't like mathematics are people who don't like to think. People who can't learn mathematics are people who can't think. Mathematics is the whole thought of Physics; Mathematics is almost the whole of thought.
XXXVIII. A good rule is ‘Don't read about it; read it.’ In most cases the originals are clear but the interpretations by others are muddy. I read three books about Shaw and couldn't find what Shaw was about; then I read Shaw and found what he was about. Then I read his Quintessence of Ibsenism, but couldn't see what Ibsen was about. I had to read Ibsen to see what Ibsen was about.
XXXIX. The Great Lakes are the American Mediterranean. Their hinterland is more fertile, their coasts more varied, their Africa better watered, their Greece more green, their Spain more wooded, their Illyria nobler, their Italy more golden, their grain higher, their men taller. All this, and Chicago too. And Chicago is the capital of the world, the city that is in the center of the sea that is the center of the continent that is in the center of the world. A lot of people don't know how I feel about Chicago.
That wasn't the last past of the notebook. There was much more to it. Casey learned all this while in high school. A lot of people didn't learn near as much.
3.
Casey started to college in the fall of 1938. He went on and off until mid-spring of 1942 when he joined the army. He went to Notre Dame, to DePaul, to Northwestern, to Marquette, and to the University of Chicago. He went to two other colleges whose names he never mentioned later. They never mention his name either. Casey had a lot of bad luck with his colleges. It was mostly his fault. Eight or ten weeks was as long as he would stay in one school. Then he would leave under a cloud. He would disappear for days, he would turn up in police court, he would go on benders, he would write poetry for Poetry, he would sit in back-rooms and play ‘Moon’ around the clock.
It was in those days that he started the first of the Crocks. The idea dated back to St. Bonaventure's. There had been a school paper there called the Towers. It had been dominated by the boys from Gregory Hall, and the ‘Towers’ on the masthead were the high towers of Gregory. Then the boys in St. Martin's brought out the Chambers. St. Martin's was called the Chambers, as it had six-boy rooms, chambers; all the other halls had only dormitories or two-boy rooms.
This Chambers was in manuscript only and the mastheads, each drawn individually by Audifax O’Hanlon, showed a row of chamber pots very similar in silhouette to the Towers of Gregory.
So it happened one afternoon that Casey was drinking in a College Inn instead of attending a lecture called Essence and Quintessence at College. Now the name of a thing is part, but not all, of the essence; and it is not the quintessence. But in the beginning it has to have a name.
The first three of the Crocks were the Nattkarlet the Night Charley, and the Nocnik which is Polish. These were always clandestine student magazines, but never outrageous except in some manuscript versions. Their continuums today are much worse than when Casey had them. The Pot as now circulated is foul, the Night Charley is definitely salacious. To Karkik Kariki adds constant reference to an attributed old Greek trait to its Greek name. None of this is what Casey intended. Casey was never filthy. There was high country humor in what Casey put out, and some real worth.
Casey started one or more of the Crocks at each of the seven colleges he attended, but he always lost control of them after two or three weeks. There are many imitations today. A manuscript Orinal circulates at the University of Mexico, and a Tucalul is behind the Iron Curtain.
Casey moved the last of the Crocks to the back-room of Duffey's bookstore and brought it out there on a little press. It quickly reached a few dozen people around the country, even became known in a sort of way, enough so that Casey was ticketed for future reference.
Casey at this time had come into money
from his father's estate. He used a lot of it, but he kept careful count. Never in his life did he run out of it.
Casey ran around a lot with the girls. There was Mary Catherine, the sister of his friend Johnny Carruthers. There were Evelyn and Mary Jean whom he had known all his life. And Annina Vinobianco. Most of the time he was engaged to Mary Catherine, but it was on and off so much that they sometimes forgot which one had the ring.
When Casey was in college, Mary Jean got married. This suddenly made her very desirable to him. Mary Jean had black hair and blue eyes; she was snooty. She had always had more money; now she had a great deal of money. She had always had her own way; now she made a great show of having her own way. She kept Casey completely subject to her, though he did not realize that this was the fact.
Casey joined the army suddenly. This was at the suggestion of the husband of Mary Jean. It was a peculiar interview. Casey was afraid of Hillary the husband.
“If you were a man, Casey,” Hillary told him, “I would kill you. I cannot in conscience kill such an overgrown and unformed larva. You can be down at the station in twelve minutes and you can enlist in the army. You are going in my car with this man here, and I know that you will be there in twelve minutes. And I know that you will join because you are afraid to do anything else, and besides this man with you is going to insist upon your joining. When you come back in a few years, you may be a man, and then I can kill you. Isn't that something to look forward to, Casey?”
Casey was only six months short of being a man legally and this hurt him. But he was afraid, and he enlisted. He joined the army in April of 1942 and had an interesting time of it for four years.
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