Contents and Introduction

by Les Weil

  I met him on the street (O'Farrell Street, just above its junction with Market) ; we paused equally; and then he asked very reasonably if I would be willing to take a drink with him. I was interested in him; I wanted to know which way he was moving; and so I agreed. I felt like the hunter, jostled somewhat by eccentric happenings, but still intent upon the quarry.

  We went into a bar, and kept silent for a time; and then Batzer said,

  "I've decided to take up your goddamned duel -you understand, take it seriously."

  I nodded, gravely, though I believed that in fact he could not help taking the duel seriously.

  "I understand that so long as I keep on in my own name, and don't imitate you, I'll be all right," he said. "Do you agree to that?"

  "Your principles can be whatever you want -you can try anything," I answered. "Feel free to make use of my principles if you like. When you get hold of them they'll be sometbing new."

  "Fair enough," he said. "You're very generous, even -"

  "Justice is what I'm after," I said. "That's been the thing right along . . ."

  "Okay, all right!" he said. "Then let me defy you. You're cruel; you're intelligent; -you're the most vulnerable man I ever met, and you're going to lose this duel, though I may not win it."

  "I hear you," I said -and I hated him. The glossy filament over my eyes -it was bright, I knew; and I wanted it to mean something.

  "You're a fool, that's it," he said. "I think you want to die, just to have a perfect peace.""

  I kept silence, and yearned for his destruction.

  "You're too goddamned careful -and to hell with you," he said, and got up; and before I could control him, he was gone.

  Susan and I lived together for almost six months, under great stress, and finally we agreed that I ought to seek academic employment once again and for that, of course, I had to leave the Bay Area. I wrote letters: I got a job at a junior college in San Diego; and that made necessary another painful leavetaking.

  Susan and I were aware of what we were doing; we were giving each other up, for we could not get along -

  "It wasn't a good idea, somehow," she said. "That seems strange -we . . . sought each other out."

  "I've grown quarrelsome," I said.

  "You've been wonderful," she said.

  I nodded, and looked at my little son in his crib. I spoke the word goodbye, and touched his little hand, that flexed itself at my touch, impersonally, like an anemone.

  "I don't really know where I'm going, little son," I said.

  To Susan I said, "I've grown difficult, haven't I?"

  She looked at me, and then away; her awkwardness answered for her -yes, I had grown difficult.

  "Tiresome next," I said. "I'd better be going. It's a long drive-"

  Not long after my departure, she found a new protector, and she married him; I understand that she is leading the suburban life now, in San Mateo.

  I took in these changes in my life -I suffered. My wife and children were dear to me, and my other son, and Susan; how could I not feel victimized? But I did not stop writing, and I was accomplishing my best things. Radical Change was begun in San Francisco and finished in San Diego. Words came, and I could criticize the order of their happening, and then it could seem that they appeared again, quite newly.

  I never performed so well at any other time. Something got into me; my power found its occasion. I think there can be no doubt that my troubles enriched me temporarily, for though my principles had always been sound (I mean my literary principles), my perception had not always been apt. My experience had not provided me with anything to bear against-

  The cost of such power comes high, certainly, and I like to think that I have always been too intelligent to pay such a sum voluntarily (though if I had paid voluntarily, the work would have turned out vicious).

  A year or so after Radical Change came out (early in 1950: to a perfect silence), Batzer sought me out in San Diego; we met in a bar near my apartment, and he had a proposition to test me with.

  "You appear to have taken up my principles," he said. "I mean my old ones: the idea just occurred to me, the other day.

  Haven't you been following passion? -intellectual pride and lust. I've thought that -

  I silenced him with a gesture, and said, "I have not taken up your principles. I invite you to believe that a man's performance can fall off from sound principles . . . I've been foolish, just possibly -But if I had your principles, I'd have your troubles, wouldn't I?"

  "How do you know what my troubles are?" he said.

  At that, I had to pause; indeed, I could not recall that he had any troubles, that easygoing man!

  "I'm doing all right," he said. "The lawyers for that divorce action picked me clean, but I've been having some luck writing for TV lately. That doesn't leave me much time for serious fiction, but one of these days I'll get ahead of the game, and take some time off.

  "Still, I'd be willing to call off the duel if you want," he said. "It's -uncomfortable, somehow. I feel as if people are watching me."

  I looked at him steadily, and said, "You know you're losing, and you want to quit before anyone finds out."

  "That's not true!"

  "Well, quit if you think you can . . . but you can't. We're in this thing together, I'm afraid -

  "I suppose we are. Hum! When you put it like that, it doesn't sound so bad. If it's unavoidable-"

  "It's unavoidable, all right . . ."

  "Then we might as well be comfortable -let's have another drink! Why, we might as well be friends. Charlie -that's your name, isn't it? . . ."

  Then we got drunk together, and conversed readily. Work in television had humanized him; and bad luck had modified me, somehow. I felt the need of someone to talk to. Though I was suspicious of sympathy, I craved it. I explained my troubles, and Batzer discussed some of the tricks of the TV writer's trade.

  We parted cheerfully; and then my serious troubles began. I took up drinking because it was possible; it was something I could do. I had trouble with my alimony payments (for I was meagerly paid at the junior college, and had no income from my books).

  And I was having very great difficulty in finding subjects for my work: that curse (and only pride can produce an honest curse, like mine) had done something to my abilities. Pride is a form of loyalty -it is an absurd loyalty to oneself; and loyalty is a foe to reason. I had looked too much to myself, admiring what I saw there, when I might have been serious and scornful.

  It may be that my last stores of justice went into Radical Change.

  I learned that in cursing Batzer I had in fact been cursing an exiled part of myself; and the exile returned, hair dripping from the underseas -

  Painful accounting. I turned to a kind of paranoia for relief. I took my time; I left the junior college in San Diego for another in El Centro, and there was an incident involving a teacher at the high school.

  She was a formidable woman, robust and healthy, isolated in middle life against her strongest wishes. She had been married twice, and had five children by the first marriage; she took care of them; and she feared growing old, who had been persuaded -by her times! -to squander her youth at the cradle and the kitchen.

  Just under 45 years old when I first knew her, she had a firm body, a light step, and a drying face. The features bluntly exposed themselves to the parching wind of that fierce climate; she was wilful, and had an eye for an opportunity.

  We carne together, heavily, and our intention was to review possibilities within the range of sexual pleasure. We were severe, and somehow the dreary and perverse augmented themselves into a furious joy.

  What else might we have done? Our bloom was gone. We went often to a motel in a grove of date palms, with an abandoned water tank at the rear of the lot; the buildings were of light frame construction that the coolers caused to vibrate, constantly, while that air smelling of drenched straw what it could not modify.

  Our fury was mad -suitable to down upon us, that singed
and baffled village on the edge of its artificial sea.

  Noon was never exact there --it the hairy fronds of the great palms.

  Water at the faucet smelled fresh, opposing the air; and the air was sparkling and brilliant, friendly to the cicada and the mourning dove

  Naturally it came about that I gradually moved in with my lady; after a time, I was in effect living at her house. I drove the children to their various destinations -the dentist, a party, the school; and I looked after my lady's requirements, as our fury persisted, feeding on itself.

  And gradually I began to hate her -quite without valid reason, as I now understand. Such is the nature of my malady. I accused her in small things and then in large (I was jealous, for example, and who can say whether I had reason?). There began to be unpleasant little scenes at the college, and finally a wicked scene at the Dean's office -and it is clear to me that I have a depleted awareness of the merits of authority.

  The Dean suggested that he had been having reports about what he called my private life - "which is your business, of course, Mr. Haskell. But this is a rather small community, and the college is sensitive. Do you understand that we have to be? We're a public institution -"

  "I understand that you're contemptible," I said, and I can remember the peculiar sensation that followed that statement: it was in my chest, and resembled my idea of the sensation there ought to be if one of the great veins burst an inch away from the heart.

  "I curse you bastards who run things," I said. "I curse your bleached faces and suitable neckties-"

  -And there was more; but it does not matter. An episode (as the psychiatrists call such things) developed; I was allowed to rest for a few weeks; and to finish out the term; then I was discharged, and within the next four years I taught at five different junior colleges, up and down the state.

  I had a course; I elected exemplary ruin, for I remained ambitious.

  And now I have achieved a formidable quiet here on the shore of the Pacific (not far from Santa Barbara, in a eucalyptus grove). Novels are not written at such places! The worst is over, surely, and I am almost contented here. I admire the provident men who see to the arrangements (though they overwhelmingly persecute me, on occasion: the therapy of electric shock is meant to induce convulsion).

  It is Batzer who pays my bill here: having incurred my curse, he now feels an obligation, and he is excessively generous. There is a tennis court, some iron statuary, a tremendous lawn . . . The house (of the 1890's) is of brown stone, and looks out over the ocean. There is a beach; the grounds are fenced above it. When I go walking, I see elderly people trimming the hedges, frivolously.

  Batzer was here, not long ago -a good friend now. I asked him if he was writing novels, and he said,

  "No, no novels. I'm too old for that. I write TV scripts, however. And you, Charlie, how about you?"

  "The same, the same. I'm too old; and they restrict my reading here, you know ... They restrict me pretty severely! I'll grant that a novel can be dangerous -that was always my position, after all. The only people who really oppose censorship are idiots who don't believe in the power of literature . . . I'll never write again."

  We were out by the woven-wire fence, overlooking the beach, and I said,

  "Nowadays I'm pretty calm . . . Sometimes I think about Japan out there -a literary people, typhoons in the landscape, delicate ladies. Henry James would say that it ought to be claimed for sensibility . . . our sensibility. Perhaps something could be done with the Americans who went out there as conquerors, after the war."

  "You could do it," Batzer said.

  "No. Oh, no. I'm afraid not! I'm permitted to confess, these days, but not to write . . . . Listen, Batzer, what are we supposed to think about our idiotic duel?" And I stared at him.

  "I don't know," he said. "I think I may have left the field-"

  "I've thought that," I said. "I believe I frightened you -that was a good thing to have done!"

  Then he smiled, and said, "You kept me out of the madhouse, I think. My excesses were taking me very far . . . but who knows? We're brothers, after all -brothers of the ravaged life. Though I'm sure you'll be out of here before long, the psychiatrist has given me some very interesting reports . . ."

  "Interesting," I said. "Of course. I'm an interesting case; and all I ever wanted was to be an interesting mind . . . . Well, it's a rare man who gets what he wants out of life."

  After Batzer departed (to be back next week, he says), I wandered over the rich lawn, smelling the wind off the Pacific, and it seemed clear to me that I must be a brave man, perhaps some kind of hero. You ought to believe that!

  As for Batzer, he is something less . . . oh, something pretty small. He is almost happy these days, having remarried -indeed, he is very kind.

  And he never writes anything except for money.

  In Training

  A Sketch

  Edward Loomis

  At sixteen, the fighter was five feet, nine inches tall, and weighed 125 pounds; he was bony and thin -his head was large, and his expression was alert and wild. In movement he was precise, and his senses were acute: he could hear little sounds a long way off, and once he remarked that he could see the air move, when he wanted to.

  By nature a fine boxer, his blows were larger than they would be when he matured, they occupied a generous arc, and they were controlled; his lean body was deepening in its perfect tone.

  He was brave (and so were most of the men he fought and defeated in the next twenty years) : he had learned to fight on the New York streets. As a boy he had hunted alleys for diversion, and run from the police; he had been a thief, he knew his life by hand--

  In 1925, at the age of seventeen, he turned professional (after 136 amateur fights); he was a winner, and by 1928, already a welterweight, he was acknowledged to be on his way to greatness. He had a gift for dancing; he loved a party, and he took his pleasures -they were occasional and irregular; his training was austere, and he lived for his fights, which gave him the joy of his body, firm on his bones and swift in its multiple attitudes.

  In the dressing room, he drew on his trunks, let go of the elastic waist band, and the elastic snapped down on the hard surface of his waist. He held still, torso as rigid as a post; as he desired a movement, so it occurred. At shadow-boxing, his fists propped in a figure of air, and sweat was an ease upon his tight skin--

  In the ring, he performed his brilliant habit, and from time to time he taught it a new subtlety. As he moved, a graceful vigor ascended in his legs -it grew complex as it included the power of his thighs, and was then ready to leap into his trunk and there be concentrated for a blow that would look handsome and mild ... its numbing shock was his gift to the audiences of his time, who were ready to be astonished.

  In 1931, he was married: he was now a full-sized welterweight, and sometimes had trouble making the divisional limit; his body was sleek. In 1932, in his 67th professional fight, he knocked out the welterweight champion, in a title fight, and he began to develop a new sense of his dignity -he was thought to be arrogant. In serving ambition, he was devoted to training, and only at intervals to his wife, who appeared at his summons.

  He developed a train of followers (he fed them, and made them occasional gifts), and they supplied his social pleasures. He had a golfer to discuss his swing. He had a valet. He had a jester, and the jester had a wife whom he sometimes found amusing -she slept with him, now and then, and kept quiet. He maintained two cars (Cadillacs), and he traveled in state ...

  In 1933, he relinquished the welterweight championship in order to fight as a middleweight. The critics advised him that his light, limber body was not suited to the middleweight division, whose ablest members, at 160 pounds, were near the limit of possible strength for boxing -mighty soldiers of a select army, and brave as Achilles . . .

  At a weight of 156 pounds, he met the middleweights, astonished them, and accepted a punishment more severe than any he had known. He mastered the champion; and in 1935,
for the first time in his life, he began to be a little uncertain. Training was a habit that he loved; and now he began to tire of it. His routines were indispensable; when he abandoned them for a few days after a fight, he felt lonely and depressed, but he could imagine other routines . . .

  When he was in the city, he went running every morning, in the park, and it was his custom, as he moved, to practice feints, blocks, and the beginnings of his punches. He wore heavy work shoes, a sweat suit, and a cap in the cold weather; he ran three or four miles, and might run as many as eleven or twelve. After his run, he had breakfast -what his trainers called a clean breakfast: poached eggs, a piece of toast, a cup of tea; then he went to bed, and slept calmly.

  Rising at 11:30, he held his court until it was time to go to the gym for his workout, and that was at two o'clock, when he walked into the gym prepared for certain kinds of greeting. Other fighters looked at him; the hangers-on said, "Hey, Champ!" He kept quiet. When he was dressed, he put himself through a systematic exercise; after six rounds of this, he had his hands bandaged, and worked on the light bag for three rounds, and then he was ready to enter the ring. (The bell in the gym would be chiming in his dreams.) Sometimes his plan required him to box several rounds; and sometimes he held the ring alone, shadowboxing, as he felt the light pressure of attention hemming him in, outside his concentration.

  When he was preparing for a major fight, he went to a camp in northern New Jersey, and there intensified his routines, his body answering to his will, and that was his life -he approved of it, and yet he found that he could grow bored; he let himself become interested in the illicit poetry of the peripheries of life.

  One night, returning with his manager and trainer from his camp in New Jersey, he paused in the railway station to look at a scene of departure: a young man his own age was leaving the city; a girl was saying goodbye . . . . The fighter stopped, his blunted, muscular face was mute; he was watching.

  In a little while, those two would have a secret -they were at the edges of their life (their work forgotten), and the music was surely formidable there! The fighter was reminded of the gyms in which he labored: the walls papered with old fight posters, the folding chairs for spectators, the bare radiators. In such a place, everything had a function, immediately apparent-like the hard rubber mouthpiece that shaped his lower face into a mask that other men found frightening. He himself had a function.