NOVELS BY WRIGHT MORRIS IN BISON BOOK EDITIONS
Date of first publication at the left
1942 My Uncle Dudley (BB 589)
1945 The Man Who Was There (BB 598)
1948 The Home Place (BB 386)
1949 The World in the Attic (BB 528)
1951 Man and Boy (BB 575)
1952 The Works of Love (BB 558)
1953 The Deep Sleep (BB 586)
1954 The Huge Season (BB 590)
1956 The Field of Vision (BB 577)
1957 Love Among the Cannibals (BB 620)
1960 Ceremony in Lone Tree (BB 560)
1965 One Day (BB 619)
1967 In Orbit (BB 612)
In Preparation
1958 The Territory Ahead (BB 666)
1962 What a Way to Go (BB 636)
1963 Cause for Wonder (BB 656)
1972 War Games (BB 657)
Also available from the University of Nebraska Press
Wright Morris: Structures and Artifacts
Photographs 1933–1954
Conversations with Wright Morris (BB 630)
Edited by Robert E. Knoll
© 1957 by Wright Morris
All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Morris, Wright, 1910–
Love among the cannibals.
I. Title.
[PZ3.M8346Lo5] [PS3525.07475] 813’.5’2 76-16574
ISBN 0–8032–0880–4
ISBN 0–8032–5842–9 pbk.
ISBN 978-1-4962-0263-5 ePub.
“Nay further, we are what we all abhor, Anthropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth…”
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici
The manners, the manners: where and what are they, and what have they to tell?
HENRY JAMES, The American Scene
This chick, with her sun-tan oil, her beach towel, her rubber volleyball, and her radio, came along the beach at the edge of the water where the sand was firm. Soft sand shortens the legs and reduces their charms, as you may know. This one pitched her camp where the sand was dry, slipped on one of these caps with the simulated hair, smoked her cigarette, then went in for a dip. Nothing particular, just a run-of-the-mill sort of chick. She was out beyond the surf when I noticed that the tide was dampening her towel. I got up and dragged it back alongside our own. When she came out of the water I explained what had happened and she thanked me without being coy. She dried her hair and accepted one of our cigarettes. We got to talking, the way you do, and since everyone in California is from somewhere else it gives you something, at the start, to talk about. She was from Dubuque. The one in Iowa. Married a boy from Port Chester during the war. That didn’t pan out, so she had come to California on a scholarship good for fifty bucks. All she had to do was earn her own living and raise the other three hundred twenty-five. She lived with two other chicks at the school and they all worked as waitresses at the same Wilshire drive-in. They all liked California, but they thought the people were cold. Her childhood had not been too happy and her mother often complained that her father was too small for a satisfactory sexual partner. Her mother didn’t use those words, of course, but that was what she meant. If her father had not been so conventional it might have worked out. Why were men so perverse they always had to be on top?
That’s what she said. She said why are men so perverse. Then she asked me if I had any ideas, and I had a few ideas but what I said was that the conventional sort of thing, with maybe a million years behind it, had a lot to recommend it. How do you know what’s conventional now, she said, was conventional then? Her shift at the drive-in began before I had an answer to that.
I’d never seen her before. I’ll probably never see her again. She was twenty-two or -three, I suppose, and I’ll be forty-one the ninth of September, having lived and Love Among the Cannibals loved more or less conventionally. Things can change in twenty years. More, I mean, than I have changed myself. When I was her age I didn’t know beans. She knows too much.
I did ask her, just before she left, what she thought of that movie of the Kansas picnic where the frustrated schoolteacher tears the shirt off the visiting bum. I was born in Kansas. I went to a lot of picnics as a boy. But in my time, the big scene would have been the other way around. The lady’s, not the gent’s, shirt would have to be torn. I asked her what she thought of that scene and she said it was a fine job, artistically speaking. You see what I mean? Things have changed. I carried her volleyball and wet towel to the road, where she took a bus, one that went down Wilshire, then I bought two cans of beer for Mac and myself and walked back to the beach.
I
My story begins, like everything else, on the beach. Beaches are the same the world over, you peel down, then you peel off; they serve you up raw meat, dark meat, or flesh nicely basted in olive oil. A strip of sun and sand where the sex is alert, the mind is numb. The beach in question, one of the best, is near where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea. I don’t mean to be ironic. California is that way naturally. It’s hard to do malice to California, but this particular strip might have been in Acapulco, or down in Rio, or along the Riviera. If it’s world brotherhood you want, go to the beach. If you like parallels, the beach is where we came in, and where we’ll go out. Having crawled from the sea, we’re now crawling back into it. That solution of salt in the blood is calling us home. And in a mammary age, what better place to compensate for an unsuckled childhood? Where else, these days, does the pretty matron shyly lower her bra straps, hugging her charms? Not to nourish the future, alas, but to preserve, in sun oil, the present. A season in the sun before going under. Is that what we want? My friend Mac has a colleague who wears on her tanned thigh the white shadow of a man’s hand—his own, as it happens. A climax, of course, to her night-club act. A purely professional assist, in every respect. They often pass the time at the beach together, and one man’s hand is as good as another’s. She sings his songs, so he really belongs in the act.
When people ask me where I ran into Mac, I say the war. We have the stamp of things that came out of it. I’ve pieced together that Mac was born in Brooklyn, but I’ve never really heard him say so. He doesn’t talk. I mean he doesn’t articulate. If he’s in a friendly, expressive mood he might sing his own songs, one of Cole Porter’s, or variations on a number called Dancing in the Dark. That’s Mac. If you add Noel Coward you’ve covered the field. If he has ever felt anything else I don’t think he would recognize it. Which leaves me with a real problem. How to keep him up-to-date. I take an old cliché, soak him in it, then give it just that squeeze of the lemon that leads him to think he thought of it himself. In the flush of that sort of emotion he can speak.
“Man,” he will bark, “it’s great!”
In the song-and-dance business self-confidence helps.
Mac is thirty-eight, just three years my junior, but he looks a good deal younger. He has a round, bland, background-music sort of face. He tends to run a little heavy, his complexion is mottled with what I suppose was teenage smallpox, and he gives strangers the impression he’s a little deaf. He isn’t, but he seldom hears anything. When I’m in a rare sympathetic mood I tell the chicks that he’s listening to his own music. But he’s not. Nor is it what you would call a blank. The absence of any popular song to describe the vacant moods Mac passes his life in will leave most of his life a mystery. Two or three times a month he will roll over and say—he never thinks of anything unless he’s lying down—“I ever tell you how I shot down that ME-109?”
In
fifteen years you can shoot down a lot of 109’s. But that event keeps coming back to him like the theme of one of his songs—a hit song, I suppose, he is still trying to find the music for. He looks to me for the words, but I don’t have them. I never shot down an ME-109 myself.
I had lived with Irwin K. Macgregor for eight months in England without speaking to him. But that was not unusual. Nobody did. He was not the silent type, but the army had silenced him. Like a lot of silent men, he didn’t have much to say, but in an inarticulate sort of way he can be fluent. This fluency consists of a theme and variation. The theme is, “Man, it’s great!” The variation, “It’s great, man!” If you know the army, you know what it would do to a vocabulary like that. “It’s great, man!” will cover most of the verbal problems in the song business, but the army was no song, so Mac had nothing to say. Nothing at all, I mean, until he met me.
Mac was no great shakes as a pilot but we both fagged out the same cold winter, and we were sent upcountry to the same warm spa to recuperate. That’s where we met. The place featured the usual lousy food, but some nice girls from Holland and a grand piano. I didn’t know till he gave the stool a spin, and sat on it, that he played. I’d sit down at one end of the room, with a book, and watch this army-silenced guy dust off the stool with his knuckles, then squat on it and talk. A fluent keyboard lover. A real poet, of sorts, on the black keys. One day he played with a little more schmaltz than usual, and although we hadn’t exchanged a word he looked up and said:
“Like that, eh?”
“It’s not a bad tune,” I said, since it sounded familiar.
“It’s great, man!” he said. “I wrote it.”
And he had. I could name you, but I won’t, about a half-dozen tunes he had written before I met him. Not bad, not good. Lacking the master touch. The sort of unheard music you need to fill out a TV program. But his piano was good. It was the piano that gave him his start. He could have sat out the war in a Fort Dix jazz band but he got this idea that he wanted to fly. He thought the war had come along so he could pick up, without charge, the rudiments. He did, all right, and as he points out himself—that’s where he met me. I couldn’t do much for his talent, but I could give the lyrics a certain touch. If the lyrics were good—I mean if the clichés were coined before he was—he had the sort of talent that could almost live up to them. What I’m saying is, as he puts it, we make a great team.
There have been so many corny movies about jazz pianists I don’t have to tell you about them. That’s how he was. I mean he was like all of them. He believed. He even believed in his own stuff. After he met me there was some point in it—some point, that is, believing in my stuff—but up until then it was all a matter of faith. Until he met me all of his songs were songs without words. I took his music and pasted the right sort of labels on it. I used to do that sort of thing for nothing, what we referred to in my youth as amusement, and I found it more amusing than trying to read a book. Sitting there, day after day, I heard the same tunes over and over, and I found it entertaining to write a set of lyrics for some of them. One little tune I liked went something like this:
Roses are nice, violets are too,
But tulips are what I share with you.
Stamen, pistil and pollen connect,
The tulips of Kansas with old Utrecht.
I had reference to a particular piece of light meat from Utrecht. One day Mac played this tune and from my corner of the room I chipped in with the lyrics. It made quite an effect.
“Man, it’s great!” he barked, and with that modest statement the song team of Macgregor and Horter was born. It didn’t help me with the maid from Holland, but it settled me with Macgregor. “You got a talent, man!” he said. “You know what I mean?” As it happened, I did. We’ve been inseparable, as our billing says, ever since.
It’s probably fair to say, as Mac often does, that Love Among the Cannibals I’ve made him whatever he is—is being a man with a fat check from ASCAP every month. In the trade we are sometimes referred to as the poor man’s Rodgers & Hart, since the big-time money has a way of eluding us. It might be that my lyrics, like some cough drops, dissolve very pleasantly on the tongue but have a way of coming back, like the taste of onions, during the night. I don’t really know. But something like the taste of onions is at the back of my mouth right now.
In the Who’s Who in the Missouri Valley—in it at one time, that is—you will see my picture and find me listed as the Shelley of the corn belt. The next year I was drafted. That makes me sixteen years a poet manqué. I understand that the war made some poets the way a man is said to make a woman, but that wasn’t my war, and it had another effect on me. The only poetry I now hear is when Mac brings a chick to the apartment and plays my recording of Eliot reading The Waste Land. He has the record nicked so it retracks when the voice says:
“Hurry up, please, it’s time!”
Something about Eliot’s Oxford accent seems to do the trick. It’s never long before he gets up and turns the record off, and the lights on. Although I’ve stopped writing it myself, I’m responsible for spreading some pretty good lines. Trapped with a chick of the brainy type Mac will say:
“Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?”
If she says lost, he dates her. If she doesn’t, he claims he hasn’t missed anything.
Before you feel sorry for either of us, let me tell you that we spend our time on the beach, where, if you had our time and money, you’d like to spend yours. We came here, instead of Bermuda, where the sun is also shining, because I had, and sold, this idea for a new musical. New? Well, something in the line of a Latin-American Porgy and Bess. Yankee money, Latin passion, good-neighbor policy, everything. I’ve been to Mexico, which takes care of that, and Mac has listened to a lot of Xavier Cugat. We don’t want it so Latin it might alienate Uncle Sam. Three of the major studios fought for it, and we are now living in what they call a château, in one of the fire-trap canyons, with a view of all the water that is out of reach in case of fire. Mac has a piano, and I have all day at the beach. What I do, I can do anywhere, but Mac can only sound chords at night, or very early morning on the St. Regis roof. He sleeps under the beach umbrella most of the day, then we go out to eat where they have background music, with a girl in the foreground singing Macgregor & Horter’s latest hit. A little after midnight we drive back up the canyon and go to work. Something Mac once read in a muscle magazine led him to feel that sex drains a man’s creative energy. He means the same night. It doesn’t seriously handicap a song writer. Sex is something he takes like vitamins, and it has nothing to do with immortal love, tenderness, loss of sleep, and songs like Stardust. As Mac says himself:
“Sex is sex. You know what I mean?”
I do. It is part of my job. The problem is to find a nice respectable chick who needs a little push along, professionally, and who doesn’t mind a little do-re-mi from a respectable guy. They’re not too hard to find. A little French Bikini number, who needed a very long push, had been on Mac’s hands for the past three weeks, but she had this idea that you don’t need a voice in the song racket. You don’t. But you need more than one close friend.
That side of my colleague’s nature is cut and dried, offers little in the way of complications, and leaves him fairly famished for what he calls the real thing. The real thing is hard to define, but roughly it’s what Charlie Chaplin found, beginning with Paulette Goddard. We might call it The Million-Dollar Baby in the Five-&-Ten Weltanschauung. I think he got it from the song, which he ran into a little early, but he was, and is, precocious about songs. As another man stumbles on Jean Christophe, Kahlil Gibran, or Dale Carnegie, Mac stumbled on the Million-Dollar Baby in the five-and-ten. That did it. That’s what he means by heart.
“It’s got no heart, man!” he’ll say, so I’ll take whatever it is and slip in a few words about how he found her in the automat. A girl with a green stain on her finger from a piece of Christmas jewelry ca
n name her price. Mac will double it.
Like a talent scout in Woolworth’s basement, Mac likes to hang around the record department, waiting for some Million-Dollar Baby to buy one of his songs. When she does he will lean over and say, “Like that, eh?” As a rule she does, having bought it. He will then introduce himself as the author, and the next thing you know he asks the chick if she can sing. Did you ever hear of a girl in a dime store who couldn’t sing? I suppose we have roughly half a million records proving that not one of them can, but the way some of them can’t is interesting. Mac has turned up a dozen or so of them. Any one of these girls will tell you that Mac has a heart of gold, combined with the loftiest Father’s Day sentiments. All of which is true. His Million-Dollar Babies are left untouched. They are all heart, having nothing in common with the chicks, of a respectable sort, who need a little practical push along. They can be found in dime stores, drugstores, hot-dog stands, orange-drink shops, and all those places Charlie Chaplin had the knack of turning them up. Nowadays they can also be flushed at the beach. Million-Dollar Babies with that spring-green Christmas jewelry look.
You never know the other side of an army man until you see him in mufti. But Mac has no mufti. He stepped out of one uniform into what I’ll have to call another. If you have sometimes wondered who it is who really wears the two-tone ensembles that set the new car styling, Mac is your man. That’s why I keep him down at the beach. He’s quite a sight on the beach as well, in his Hawaiian shorts, made of coconut fiber, a cerise jacket with a bunny-fur texture, a sea-green beret, and something like an ascot looped at his throat. Those shops that have the latest thing for men always have something, hidden in one of the drawers, too early for anybody else but just right for Mac. On the beach I let him wear it. He still looks better with it on than off. He has one of those complexions that will never tan, so he passes the day under the beach umbrella. Having no complexion problems I lie in the sun and watch the chicks go in and out of the water. When the beach is crowded I listen for the up-and-coming clichés. That particular morning it wasn’t crowded; we had a little morning fog, which is customary, but I rather like the beach in a cloud of fog. There you are; the sound of the sea is off behind the wall.
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