“How high does it go?”
“He's gotten as high as fifty, but he'd take a thousand. He could be persuaded to take even more; he's unscrupulous. You couldn't go wrong at any price. It'd be worth a hundred thousand some day.”
“You really think so, Jimmy?”
“A new Leonardo would bring that, and this boy is better.”
“Well, we can't be sure that he's better,” Trinali said, “but we know that he's just as good. You consider the four or five genuine ones of Leonardo and then you think what a few hundred more would be like and you say ‘Boy, he's good.’ But what if the four or five were the only good ones and the rest were dogs? Besides, we should consider that Adam Scanlon is only twenty years old. He should paint for seventy years yet. And consider, you will have one of his early ones. I think you'll be lucky to buy it for fifteen dollars.”
“Hell, I can paint myself. I might paint a Mandarin.”
“What did you ever paint, Hans?” Jimmy asked him.
“I painted hundreds of square yards for the carnivals: pictures of all the acts, motorcyclists and monsters, and the dance of the swords, and the houris, things like that. I painted Edgar the Seal, and Zippo the Fire-Eater. Lots of times I'd hear people come out of the shows and say that they weren't as good as the pictures. I bet more people have seen my pictures than those of Adam Scanlon.”
“Maybe you're a primitive,” said Jimmy. “We ought to promote you and make a fad out of you. We can't seem to make a fad of any of us. A good Primitive will beat an Orthoclast. An Orthoclast is a Cubist who believes that everything in the world has a natural cleavage, and he paints it cloven in the attempt to show matter inside-out. And a Primitive is almost as good as a Tone-Control Artist.
“A Tone-Controller considers colors only as their musical equivalents, and orchestrates all the hues to create vibrations that only the more intense of us can comprehend. One can enjoy a Tone-Control painting as well with one's back to it. The Ambient vibrations are the whole thing. The Visual Index may be ignored, and often is.”
They drank some of Trinali's old wine. Then they drank some of Hans’ new wine. And Trinali mixed the two together. “It is a dialectic,” she said, “the interplay of action that began before the wine was born: the action of brother water and brother vinegar, or brother sun and brother bacteria. Then we put the old wine in new bottles and the new wine in old bottles in scriptural contradiction, and voila! The synthesis, the Trinali Cocktail! I would write an ode to Trinali with a wine glass in her hand, were it not that the hand already holds the glass and that I have already used the title;
‘Trinali holds a half-globe of sheer crystal
That is like the transparent sphere of Fifth Heaven.
It is on a stem which, though fragile, is strong enough to hold the dome of Fifth Heaven.
And in this little glass is the mystery of death and resurrection.
It isn't very hard to make wine; this is the way:
Use a quart of water to each quart of grapes,
And a pound of sugar to each quart of juice.
Put the grapes in the water and let it stand for a week;
Strain it and put it in a cask with the sugar.
Put in more sugar and a little brandy if you feel sorry for it.
Let it gestate. Its gestation period is six months.
Or there is a potato wine that you can make in thirteen days.
You can start it at the new moon,
And it will be ready to drink at the full moon.
Now, isn't that a simple thing to do?
But when you do it, a God is born.
This is the Resurrection and the Life.
Do you know the meaning of the Genie in the Bottle?”
This is the God imprisoned by the dry desert people who hate the God.
You can imprison the God in a bottle,
But it sure is hard to keep the cork in!’
“Don't you think it would be nice if I died young?” Trinali asked. “I should have died when I was nineteen, and now I'm twenty. But if I had died before I was twenty, I wouldn't have written my greatest Ode, To Trinali in a Rainstorm. I hadn't come that far yet. My style matured late. It has reached its full bloom only within the last eleven days. But now I believe that I have written enough in my High Period to amaze the ages, and I am still young enough to die with effect.”
“Do you have it planned?”
“Oh no, that wouldn't be in the code at all, Hans. It would be nice to drown, but I'm a good swimmer, and it is not romantic to die of cramps. Any action on my part will be intuitive and mystic. Perhaps it will come at the time when I am writing one of my greatest Odes: To Trinali on the Brink, or To Trinali with Clarity.”
6.
The beach was rough and cut up by canyons and ditches running inland It was narrow and pounded by an unusually heavy surf. And this was the graveyard of the old trees; this was the driftwood shore to which Trinali always came. It was like an old elephant's graveyard with huge piles of bones. Some of them were too huge for elephant bones; they were of the mammoths who were before the elephants. Some of them were too huge for mammoth bones; they were of the behemoths who were before the mammoths. And the oldest and largest of all were the bones of old Leviathan himself who was made before the other giants. It was Trinali who suggested this image; but, one suggested, it took hold of all of them. She had always called this conglomerate of driftwood the Elephants’ Graveyard.
To an expert (Trinali) all the cast-up wood was different.
“Now, here is a stogy log,” she said. “It will never be anything else. It has been through the Maelstrom and over the Cataract and around the Horn. It has nosed the ribs of old Spanish ships and been in the Green Castles under the Continental Shelf. But it hasn't been inspired or deepened. It hasn't caught fire from the sea-born iodine or the gold-dust in its veins, nor learned the secrets of the plankton.
“But here is one worth taking. It is convoluted like a Conch and armed like an Octopus. It has gained in aspect from all that it has met in the water and under the sun. It has fraternized with the Giant Squid and gained from its shapeliness. It has looked the Oyster in the eye and learned from it Humility. It has leapt with the Dolphin and plunged with the Porpoise: and before that, in its first life, it shaded Georgia cattle and had honeybees in its hollow heart. It went down to the Green Death, and came up a talkative and reminiscent old ghost. And now it will be transformed by the magic saw and knife and wood-rasp of Trinali into a leering lamp that nobody can look at only once.”
This old wood graveyard was the meeting place of the crows and blackbirds who came from the near woods and called and taunted the busy sea-birds. It also has an attraction for the butterflies who came from the meadows by the dozens and flew about its old branches.
“Salt and Sulphur,” said Schraffenberger who was with them. “Butterflies, like cattle, will come to salt. It makes them glossy. You can tell the difference on those who've had access to it. I'm serious.”
Francis Schraffenberger was with them, as well as Fitzjames and Adam Scanlon. This latter, who was possibly as good as Da Vinci, had set up his things and was painting a seascape with a High Renaissance sky over it. Like Da Vinci, Adam Scanlon worked best with an audience to talk to. “You see,” Adam explained, “the sky was different during the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It isn't just the aging of the paint. It isn't just one painter copying another. We may take it for observed fact that the sky had more red and brown in it, a slyer touch of green, an added purple in the gray, more rose in the shading of the cumulus. And thunderheads had more green light in their black.
“This is a High Renaissance sky that I am painting now. But you will immediately notice that the Sea is older. This is a symbolic painting of a New Heaven over an Old Abyss. This is the Sea of the Low Middle Ages after the Empire died. There was dread on the Ocean then and seafaring had slackened. There were red lights under the water and they gave the impression of abysmal depth.
You will notice also on the Sea the absence of a Ship, but have you understood that the absent ship is the Argo? How have I suggested this? Even Hans who will sail on the Argo has not understood this.
“Were I painting a later Sea (say of the sixteenth century) it would be bluer. Blue was the period signature. And were this a still later seascape (eighteenth century) I would begin to insinuate a little more green again, for there we were completing a cycle. Do you believe that I imagine this?”
That is the way Adam Scanlon talked. That is also the way Leonardo talked, as we have it from very old men who knew him in their youth. But Adam was the better talker.
For lunch, Trinali had a basket half-filled with old bread from Lupido's. Schraffenberger had gigged a long fish which they split with an axe; it was too tough for a knife. They gutted it and spitted it over an open fire and ate it with the bread. Hans noticed about Trinali for the first time, as he watched her work, that she was herself made out of driftwood and had cypress knees. She wasn't pretty, whatever she thought of herself. She was rough and sea-stained, but she was remarkably convoluted and full of sea-born iodine.
“Fish and old bread,” said Fitzjames. “These are the foods of poverty, for we are all poor except Hans who is rich.”
“We have as much as the Lord had,” said Trinali. “And if a multitude should come I would feed them also. I have that talent.”
But Hans their rich uncle had brought a case of beer so they did well.
After lunch, Scanlon painted another seascape, but of a different time and place. These were very good, and it was easy to see why he could command as high as fifteen dollars a picture, and why the only ones who really understood the two of them classed him with Leonardo.
Trinali wrote a poem: To Trinali in the Old Wood Graveyard on the Dead Sea:
‘Trinali is a lot like Lot's wife;
She is also a lot like Lot.
She never was one of the bad ones.
It wasn't her fault that the damned place burned down.
She always told the other girls they hadn't ought to carry on like that.
But when there's a fire it sure is hard not to look at the fire engines.
One thing always bothered her: they never mentioned the trees.
Whatever happened to the Green Groves of Gomorrah?
Some of those trees are here, much changed;
There's a lot of salt in them,
And there's marks of an old fire and the wrath of God.
Now Trinali likes to sit under one of the trees that used to shade
The old saloon on the corner of Beelzebub and Hell-Raiser Streets
Where they crossed just about Infinity Square.
You know the place I mean, there the Brimstone Combo played:
With Birsha on the Diatonic Harp,
Shinar on the nine-stringed Kithara,
Bera on the B-Flat Trumpet,
That big African Zoar on the Drums,
And Schemember on the Ram's Horn.
This was the saloon where all the people were not bad;
In fact, this is where the Seven Just Men used to come for a toddy every night.
It is still cool under the old trees in the Elephants’ Graveyard;
But the Dead Sea burns in the awful sun,
And all the Birds over it are Devil Birds.’
Trinali announced that she had enough driftwood. Then they drove to a miserable tidewater swamp where she cut cypress knees. She took her shoes off and waded in. The sun went down and the insects came like clouds. Hans turned on the headlights of the rented truck, and Trinali chopped in their glare.
“No man, be he not insectivore or mad, goes willingly into a swamp,” Schraffenberger said. That was the opinion of all of them. They didn't help her. She chopped knees large and small. She tossed them, some of them half again her own weight, into the back of the truck. After a while the boys forcibly put her into the back of the truck along with the things and drove away.
“I wish you could have known them, Finnegan,” said Hans as he told about them that summer. “I have often wondered whether they had talent.”
“I'll not contribute to the heresy that the world is small,” said Finnegan. “It's as large as it should be. Naturally I knew Scanlon when I was van Ghi.” “Well, is he?”
“As good as Leonardo? About as good. When I knew him several years ago he had become a solid professional. All professionals are competent. Some are better than others. He was better than others. I speak as one of the half-dozen men in the country really able to appraise these things.”
“Yes, I know,” said Hans.
7.
Back in town the Bohemes went to Lupido's. There they joined Endymeon Ellenbogen. Endymeon, like the rest of them, was a genius. “My name is Elmer,” he said, “Elmer Eggleton Ellenbogen. The first name I legally changed. My mother cried when I did it. She is also sad that I have spent such a large portion of my patrimony. Much of it has gone to the subsidy presses. But how else could Dawn Country have seen the light of day? Or Shenandoah Saga? Or The Man From Minneapolis? These are my three published novels. All have been solid successes with the people who count. The question is whether I can afford any more such solid successes.
“My poetry is uncollected and unpublished, but I recite without invitation, and everybody capable of understanding it has already heard it. It is classified for nine volumes: Sonnets and Succotash, Corn Country Cantos, Arena del Mar, Hellas Remembered, Rhineland Reverie, Broken Cisterns and Living Water, Salt Water Stanzas, Rain before Morning, and Fog-Horn Symphony. It is really an amazing body of work.
“And there are my translations. The Arabs say that days spent in the Chase do not count in the length of life. I believe that talent devoted to translating is not subtracted from the total talent that it is given a man to express. I have done the Greek Anthology and the Spanish Gold Book. I have done Horace. Do you know that he has been translated more than two hundred times, and yet mine is the only readable version in verse? I have done Petrarch. I will do the Elder Edda as soon as I learn Icelandic. Do you know Icelandic?”
“Yes,” Hans said.
“That's odd. I didn't ask the question to get an answer. You're new. Who are you?”
“Hans.”
“Hans, I love a good listener. Never change. Monosyllables of assent are enough. You couldn't be listening to a better man.”
“Endymeon writes popular songs,” said Trinali.
“She says that with a certain contempt,” Endymeon commented sadly, “and yet it is better to write a popular song than an unpopular song. Mine is the low estate of one who would do pot-boilers and cannot even get the fire started under the pot. And now the wolves have eaten off both of my legs up to the knees.”
“What songs do you write?” Hans asked.
“It-could-have-been songs, waiting-in-the-rain songs, a-fortune-teller-told-me songs, ship-without-a-sail songs, shanty-town-stomp songs, Chicago-hot songs, I-come-from-good-old-Texas-and-I-won't-take-off-my-boots songs, green-eyed-baby songs, I-remember-my-mother-in-her-Sunday-smock-I-remember-the-bee-trees-and-the-old-butter-crock songs, spring-never-comes songs, sorry-I-missed-you-sorry-we-met-never-forgive-you-never-forget songs, golden-hair-doll songs, Sally songs, Helen songs, stars-in-your-eyes songs. That will give you an idea.”
“Where do you peddle them?”
“Places like this. The singers can only learn six tunes, but my songs will fit one of them always. Anna Louise who sings at the Cyclone Cellar gave me a dollar and a half for exclusive rights to one of them tonight. Anna Louise is more individual than the other singers. She can remember only one tune, but I write good words for it. Then they introduced me as the composer of the new smash hit, and Cyclone Samenoff who runs the Cyclone Cellar gave me a drink at the bar. Also, when they passed the hat for the composer, I got a dollar and eighty-five cents. Of course I seldom realize that much on one of my smash hits. It was unusual. Also I go to work at the MontMart at two o’clock and play t
ill morning. The pianist, on past performance, will collapse at exactly two o’clock. I will get a dollar for the shift and something in tips. Now this might not seem like a lot to you, but it is when you're poor.”
“You don't feel like a lightweight when you write jump-bump googies?”
“I don't, Hans, but sometimes I pretend that I do. It makes good regretful copy. This is a stanza I wrote today:
‘The spider works in the corner,
And the small mice work all night,
And the whole wide world is the mourner
For the things you kept not bright.’
“These are stanzas addressed to myself. This is to be the second of four stanzas. I am looking for a climax line for the fourth stanza, and I will build the rest back from there.”
“Endymeon is a sculptor also,” said Trinali.
“I have had to repress that phase. In November I will be twenty-one and I will get the rest of my money. Then I will buy another block of marble. There is a mystery about the last block I had. I bought it from another sculptor when I took my room. It was already there and never worked.
“I carved a group of nereids from it. I sold the piece for a handsome figure. But when the time came to make delivery I could not begin to get it out of the room. You have heard of people building a boat in the basement. But dammit the whole block had got in there some way. The landlord said that he didn't know how it had gotten in, but none of the windows and doors were damaged; and they damnsite weren't going to be damaged getting it out either, he said.
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