The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  It was as if someone had taken a meat cleaver and cut out Barlow’s entrails. He knew that Derleth was exasperated, and Wandrei and Loveman hated him, but until that moment, he hadn’t realized how much they hated him, or what evil they were capable of. They had taken Lovecraft from him. And Lovecraft was, in a way, all that Barlow had. Now that he was banished from the society of Lovecraft’s friends, he had no idea how to go on living. He went to San Francisco and rented a room at the YMCA on Turk Street, where he wrote poems about flowers and sleep and trumpets and caves and Howard and Aztec gods who were really just Howard in disguise. There was something about the order of a poem that appealed to him, something about its compactness. It was like pulling a noose tight around the world, but even Barlow could see that tightening a noose was not the same thing as living. Every night he went up to see Clyde, the third and oldest of the Beck brothers, in his apartment on Telegraph Hill. Clyde was in the middle of being divorced by his wife; he spent a lot of time sitting in an armchair by the window, smoking a pipe and reading William Butler Yeats. He and Barlow got drunk often. Once, they went to a Mexican restaurant where Barlow tried to speak to the waitress in Spanish, only to discover that she was Irish—“black Irish,” Clyde joked. He was studying Celtic literature and everything looked Irish and gloomy to him. Clyde’s company probably kept Barlow from killing himself, but even so, after a while Barlow got tired of him. Being slandered had awakened his capacity for hatred, and like any new emotion, it came out wildly. He hated men with beards, then he grew a beard and hated men without them. He hated the fans who wrote Lovecraft memorials in their putrid little magazines, and he hated the millions of human beings who didn’t know who Howard was. On the anniversary of Howard’s death, he dragged Clyde to a German restaurant: he wanted to drink to forget, but he talked about Howard all night, and wouldn’t let Clyde change the subject. What he really wanted, he thought, was to enrage everyone, so they’d be like him, and love him, finally, for what he was.

  Groo Beck moved to San Francisco in the winter. He had grown a beard for the World’s Fair,* which made him look like an Irish Jesus, and Barlow fell in love with him. They moved into an apartment near Clyde’s. It had only one bedroom, and one bed, which folded out of the wall. Barlow and Groo named the bed Montresor, after the villain in the Poe story. Each time one of them folded it up, they would shout, “For the love of God, Montresor!” as if somebody were trapped within. That was the most fun Barlow had with, or in, the bed. But there were other games to play: Groo and Barlow dressed as cowboys and outlaws, and roamed North Beach, looking for strange things to eat in the Italian groceries. They threw olives at the harbor seals and lurked in Golden Gate Park, making weird birdcalls. Barlow thought he might be coming to life again, that San Francisco might have saved him, but really he was just a guest at a costume party. When he figured out that all the people he knew there, who claimed to have discovered their true, free selves, were, in fact, dressed as people, he became frantic. He wrote poems about love and gardens and vines and sleep, but they didn’t release him from the feeling that he was not living. Was the secret to try harder, or not to try at all? Was there a secret? Trolley tracks winked at Barlow like prostitutes. The Golden Gate Bridge waggled its fingers. Over here, it whispered, your people are here, at the bottom of the Bay. He told Groo that he was going crazy, and Groo told him to see a doctor.

  With a rationality that struck Barlow, in retrospect, as being totally miraculous, he took Groo’s advice and met with a warm gray woman named Barbara Mayer, who had an office in the youth center on Eighteenth Street. He told her everything. “How do I go on living?” he asked. She rolled a sucking candy around in her mouth. “Well,” she said, “is there something you want to do?” “I want to live,” he said. “Robert,” she reproved him, “living is not an activity. Why don’t you go back to school?” He thought that might be all right but didn’t know what to study. “What about business?” Barbara asked. But after what had happened with Derleth and Wandrei, Barlow knew all he wanted to about business. “What about anthropology?” he suggested. He thought that by learning about different people and different languages he might forget his own problems. Barbara looked him over. “That’s not a bad idea,” she said, “but you’re going to have to shave your beard, and please, please, stop wearing spurs.”

  Barlow took courses at the Polytechnic Institute, in Spanish and anthropology and European history. At first he didn’t bring his books to class, or take notes. When he lost interest in what his teachers were saying, he went to Golden Gate Park and took a nap on the lawn. Sometimes he felt like he was playacting and sometimes he felt like he was falling through space, and everything around him was also falling, with incredible speed, but lightly, and this seemed like it would go on forever. He got C’s and C-minuses on his midterms. Barbara twisted her hair into a knot and secured it with a pencil. “Robert,” she said, “it doesn’t seem like you have much aptitude for these subjects. What if we put you in a trade school? You could become a commercial illustrator.” Maybe I really am nothing, Barlow thought. Maybe I deserve nothing. Then he heard an exasperated little voice, which was himself, shouting that everyone else can do this, and, in fact, everyone does, and why, Robert, why not you? So he began the almost impossible work of loving the world.

  He enrolled at Berkeley and studied with Alfred Kroeber, whose famous friendship with Ishi, the last of the Yahi Indians, was two decades past. Kroeber was a firm and distinguished Yorkville German who claimed to be in favor of fun but never had time for it himself. He worked his students hard. The worst mistake you can make, Kroeber taught, is to see another person through the lens of your prejudices. And the second-worst mistake is to think you aren’t looking through the lens of your prejudices. It was a paradox, to which the answer was, to know your subject as specifically as you could. To know it as if it were your own life. For a long time, Barlow hated it. He didn’t understand why Kroeber made him sort bone fragments, or learn the names of plants, or, memorably, make fire with sticks. Barlow wasn’t going to do any of those things. He was going to study handsome young men with queer customs! And yet Kroeber saw something in Barlow that Barlow himself had not seen. He invited Barlow to his house in the Berkeley hills, a big construction of weathered redwood that, like Kroeber himself, gave the impression of being precisely what it was. Here Barlow met Kroeber’s daughter, Ursula: at the time, a wide-eyed eleven-year-old whose favorite pastime was to let grown-ups imagine they were educating her.* “Robert,” she said, “tell me about the pyramids!” “They were burial chambers, Ursula. Vast burial chambers.” “I know that, Robert, but why are they pyramidal?” “I don’t know, Ursula.” “Well, Robert, I have an idea. You know that four is the number of death, in China and Japan . . .” She loved science fiction and was surprised to learn that Barlow had been friends with Lovecraft. Although, she said, she didn’t much care for Lovecraft’s work. It was frightening and somehow inhuman. Ursula gave Barlow an insight into her father: Kroeber, she told him, had been married once before, to a pretty, dark-eyed woman whose photos were still to be found in his study. “She died of tuberculosis,” Ursula said, “a long time ago, when my father was still working with Ishi. You know who that is, don’t you?” Barlow knew. “Well,” Ursula said, “when my father’s first wife died, my father went to see Ishi, who was making arrowheads in his room in the museum. Ishi didn’t say anything, he just smiled at my father and went on making arrowheads. He knew my father was sad, and this was his way of consoling him. Imagine? Ishi had lost everyone, his whole tribe, but he could still console my father. It makes you wonder who was saving whom, doesn’t it?” “I suppose,” Barlow said. “My father still misses her,” Ursula said. “Now, look at this story. I got to the part where the spacemen land on Mars, but I can’t decide what the Martians look like. Why do people always imagine them as green?” “Probably so they stand out against their background,” Barlow said. Ursula looked at him reproachfully. “Robert, that�
�s very stupid! What creature would evolve to stand out against its background?” Barlow helped her with her stories, and in return, she helped him to understand what he was doing. Anthropology wasn’t ant-work. It was a way of laying up consolation against the time when you would be bereft.

  While he was at Berkeley, Barlow fell in with a group of poets who called themselves the Activists. Their idea was to get rid of denotation as much as possible and just have language connote things. Under their influence, Barlow wrote jagged, crystalline poems about plains and stars and dead knights who were of course Howard. His fellow Activists encouraged him, but he detected pity behind their encouragement. They thought of him as an apprentice and imagined that he needed them; but it was clear to Barlow from the start that they were the ones who needed him, in order to think of themselves as teachers. He was just playing a part, but he did like how the Activists kept their poems brief. It was a way to tighten the noose so much, you could almost mistake it for the neck. Still, he was relieved to go away in the summers, to Mexico City, where he learned Nahuatl from the great scholar Wigberto Jiménez Moreno. He loved it there. In Mexico, the past was strange and the present was indifferent. You could do what you liked. If you wanted to, you could sleep with men, so long as you didn’t demand that anyone care about it. Even the land was indifferent; even the sky. Barlow had made many friends in the small tangled society of Berkeley poets, but he longed for space and quiet, and a respite from the terrible optimism of Americans, even American poets. He wanted to be among people who knew what it was like to have your guts cut out. By the end of 1942, he had sent all the Lovecraft manuscripts he’d ever possessed to Derleth, with the exception of one: the notebook in which Howard had written “The Shadow Out of Time.” It didn’t matter, because the story had already been published. In 1944, Barlow moved to Mexico for good.

  6.

  Mexico consumed Barlow, and it liberated him. He told Charlie about his adventures among the Tepuztecs, the Copper People, who lorded it over the hills of Guerrero until Cortés came, and who still believed their king would return from the stars; and he spoke about his other adventures, in the fichera bars of Mexico City, where bands bleated out rumbas and boleros in semi-darkness, and he swung in the arms of handsome men to whom he was as strange as if he’d been a ghost. He had a lover, a soft-drink importer named Martín, who bought him a Packard and a villa in the northern suburb of Azcapotzalco. It had a lovely garden, full of jasmine and tuberose, and Martín referred to it as the boudoir, or sometimes, when he was angry, as the hospital. Barlow called it the Casa de Tlaloc, after his favorite of the Mexican gods: Tlaloc was the god of rain but also the lord of Tlalocan, the verdant paradise inhabited by the spirits of the drowned. Barlow’s paradise was work. He translated old Nahuatl documents that the Spaniards had preserved, records of the tribute paid by various peoples to their Aztec masters, chronicles of the city of Tula, legends, genealogies. He wasn’t exactly saving these people from oblivion—the Spanish codices were safe, unless the war jumped the Atlantic—but he liked to think that he was bringing them into the present. Certainly, if it hadn’t been for Barlow, many facts about their strange and terrible lives would have been forgotten. It was tedious, painstaking work, which would go nowhere for months before suddenly resolving itself into an article, or the chapter of a book; but Kroeber had trained him for that. The problem was how much material there was. When he thought of all there was to translate, and how slowly he had to go, he really did despair, as if he had put out to sea in a rowboat, headed for France, and when he was halfway across the Atlantic, a bird flew up with a message, telling him that what he wanted was in Australia. Barlow’s consolation was that he was making wonder real. Or rather, he wasn’t making anything: he was finding real wonders. The world contained them and always had. Six days a week, twenty-nine days a month, Barlow went to bed with a headache and a sour feeling in his heart, as if he’d been trying to animate a huge dead body with his own blood. The seventh or thirtieth or thirty-first day, he sprang up, his heart pounding, as enchanted by the fact that he was Robert Barlow, in Azcapotzalco, D.F., Mexico, as he would have been by a talking fish, or a horse with wings.

  He was, he had to realize, no one’s apprentice. He was a teacher. It amazed him. And when the war ended, and soldiers started showing up in his classes—big-shouldered; older, in some cases, than he was, but just as selfish as six-year-old children—that was even stranger. Barlow worked day and night to shovel what he knew into the cooling furnaces of their minds, and he was often infuriated by how coolly they took his instruction. He explained to them what Kroeber had taught him about loss and consolation, but the students were utterly uninterested. They wanted merely to be thrilled. So Barlow tried to thrill them, with stories of sacrifice and conquest, extortion and pride, and sometimes it worked, but most of the time teaching, too, left his heart sour. It made him feel that his body was too small, too frail; that his spirit was withered in a way that became obvious when it tried to lift the weight of authority. He envied Don Pablo’s apparently effortless charm, his Oxford accent, his cape, his spats. He complained to Martín about this, and Martín asked the obvious question: “What has he written, Robert? Who hears his accent, on paper?” “Maybe I should live on paper,” Barlow said, bitterly. “If you did,” Martín pointed out, “I couldn’t kiss you.” But Barlow slid away. “Hold on,” he said, “I’m almost done with this chapter.”

  Always, always, he was holding something. He held his students’ attention when they drooped, sleepy with cheap beer, sunlight, tennis. He held a dictionary in his lap. He held the Culhua Mexica* in his head, the way a politician holds his constituents: he knew the provincial governors, the secretaries, the tax collectors, the high priests, and he tried to keep track of what they all wanted, so that he could read between the lines of their letters, which were full of strange formalities and equally strange abruptnesses. He held Martín’s sorrow in a ball in his hand: Robert, if I were disgraced before my children, I would have to kill myself. When he was awake, he dreamed of putting it all down. When he was asleep, he dreamed of releasing metal spheres which flew out over the ocean and returned to his hands. This, too, made him sad: it was a dream Howard had had in Cassia. He told it to Barlow at the dinner table, which they had moved outdoors, into the shade of some trees. The truth, however, was that Barlow thought about Howard less and less. A curtain had fallen between him and his memories of the two summers in Cassia, the trip to New York, the Providence visit: only four meetings in all, so few, compared with the dozens and dozens he’d had with Martín; and then another curtain had fallen in front of that curtain. The distant past drove out the recent past. In the summer of 1946, Barlow wrote to the library at Brown, offering them all the papers he still had from Howard’s estate, and his own weird fiction library, if they would send him a Chandler & Price 12×18 press, with motor for AC current, 110–120 volts, 50 cycle, with three chases. He wanted to print a newspaper in Nahuatl, so the Nahua could learn to read their own language. Maybe there could be a Nahuatl revival, he thought, a new flourishing of the old culture. Maybe the Nahua could pick up where he would inevitably leave off, when his strength gave out.

  In 1948, Barlow kept the promise he’d made to himself years earlier and crossed the Atlantic. He consulted certain ancient manuscripts in the British Museum library, with a wry smile on his face; then he went over to Paris and did the same in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Once, in Paris, Howard flickered to life in the seat next to his and looked over his shoulder. “My god, Barlovius, what language is that?” he asked. “Surely it must be the Pnakotic tongue, in which the priests of Easter Island recorded their most terrible secrets.” “It’s a list of grain deliveries,” Barlow said. “Although the Spanish priest who copied it seems to have mixed in a recipe for corn gruel.” “Amazing,” Howard said. Then he asked, “Barlovius, what’s wrong?” “Nothing,” Barlow sighed. “It’s just so hard to love the world.” “Why bother?” Howard asked. “After
all, there’s nothing especially lovable about a billowing collection of atoms, spiraling around in compliance with laws that have nothing to do with us.” “So, what do I do?” Barlow asked. “Whatever you want, so long as you don’t embarrass yourself,” Howard said. “But, Howard,” Barlow said, “if I’m just a collection of atoms, why does it matter whether I embarrass myself?” “Because people remember,” Howard said. “And by the way, Barlovius, the light in here is very dim; you should be careful of your eyes.” Then he was gone. Barlow finished his work at the library and went out to get drunk and find someone who would hold him, no matter what it cost.

  When Barlow returned to Mexico City, he found a letter from Martín, who had left him, and a garbled telephone message from Paul Murray, the dean of Mexico City College, congratulating him on his new chair—only, his secretary, Castañeda, had thought to add, the chair never showed up. He assumed the new responsibility as gracefully as he could. The only good thing that came with it was Don Pablo’s friendship: at first Don Pablo wanted Barlow’s support for his expeditions in search of Ice Age artifacts in the Valley of Mexico; then, when he discovered that Barlow had written weird fiction, he confessed that he, too, had once dreamed of being a fiction writer. He invited Barlow to his villa, where he proudly displayed a complete edition of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, re-bound in green leather. Don Pablo told Barlow that for many years he had intended to write a great epic, about prehistoric men who build cities out of ice, and ride mastodons into battle, but he, who once rode with Pancho Villa, had never had the courage to begin it. All he had for his pains were a map, a sheaf of incomprehensible notes, and an encouraging letter from J. R. R. Tolkien, with whom he’d been friendly at Oxford. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Don Pablo asked. “Not at all,” Barlow said, at which point Don Pablo befriended him unconditionally, without prejudice toward his middle-class background or his hungry, furtive glances at Mexican boys.