by Henry Miller
They ate breakfast in customary silence, dividing the newspaper between them. He started to warble once, but she made such a wry face the words died in his throat.
“I’m going for a short walk first,” he announced, after he had finished his second cup of coffee.
“For inspiration, I suppose?”
“No, to pick up a Jane. That’s what you wanted me to say, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t hurry on my account. I won’t be here when you get back. I wouldn’t think of interfering with your . . . er, writing.”
She gave him a cadaverous smile and started to collect the dishes and pile them in the sink where they would remain until the next meal.
“The hell with you,” he thought. “For my part, you can go and drown yourself.”
She went into the next room and began to pound away on the fourteenth rhapsody of Liszt. “Go ahead, pound away,” he mumbled to himself. “Break the damned instrument.”
If anything could drive him crazy, it was Liszt. “That Wurlitzer composer! That charlatan with lecherous vigor!” That’s what came of studying music in a convent . . . Her Sister Dorothea! Another George Sand. . .. What wouldn’t he give to shove a big cigar in her mouth and give her a sound slap on the tenderloin! A pack of women lovers—all of them. Someone ought to call in the Society for the Suppression of Vice!
He donned a sweater and cap and started down the street. There was a snap in the air. Things looked bright and inviting. A flock of sparrows flew in and out of the church belfry across the street. It was a somber, stately street they lived on. Houses of worship on every block. So utterly respectable, their neighbors! Wouldn’t think of slipping outdoors without a necktie. . . Rows and rows of brownstone houses, with massive doors and iron-barred windows. Every few doors a physician—with good old American names. “Dr. Edward Mitchell Swan”: five dollars a visit—homeopath, pince-nez, “How is Granny?” . . . The neighborhood had a quieting effect, nevertheless. His mind commenced to show signs of working peacefully. He began to reminisce.
Fine! Perhaps he really would go back, after a while—not end up in a burlesque hall. He’d show her he meant business. ... If only he could get her out of his mind! She loomed up on his cerebral frontiers like some nasty carrion bird. “My vulture!” he thought, and smiled a feeble smile.
He walked along thus, pondering on queer incidents in his past, stopping now and then to inspect an interesting facade, thinking about the women he had failed to make, and wondering all the time, in the back of his head, just what he would sit down to write about. That was the pity of it... so much hectic gadding about, so many friends who seemed created for the sole purpose of pestering him to death. All manner of useless inroads on his precious time. Nothing accomplished.
The soliloquies he conducted in the street, or in the subway, or in bed nights, when his mind raced like a millstream—he could capture none of these when he sat down before a blank sheet of paper. What extraordinary confabulations he held with himself! “Get it down, get it down!” he repeated aloud, clenching his fist and waving it mechanically. . . .
For some time he had been walking along in this abstract muddle but partially aware of his environment. Suddenly it came to him that he was following a familiar route. He was heading toward the old neighborhood, where he had spent his youth. The prospect delighted him. It happened to him a number of times, when he let himself go, that he found his steps directed toward that dear old neighborhood with its quaint tumbledown shanties, its gas tanks, its ferry slips, and a squalid, teeming ghetto life.
He emerged from a maze of crooked, woebegone streets onto the broad highway of Bedford Avenue, which smiled in its melancholy senescence like a snaggle-toothed courtesan. What was it about Bedford Avenue that tickled him so? Not the upper reaches, mind you, where the dour bourgeoisie dwelt in smug, stiff apartment houses, where they went for an airing of a Sunday afternoon in swallowtails and plug hats. (Yes, they still wore plug hats on Bedford Avenue—but only on Sunday afternoons, after a swill-fest and a turn in the Men’s Bible Class.) . . . No, that wasn’t the part he cared about. Down near the fountain, where the avenue first broadens out and begins to take on dignity—that was the section.
But what in the name of Lucifer were they doing to his Bedford Avenue? Each time he went back to it, it got worse. It was like a venerable patriarch who has but one frock coat in his wardrobe which he brushes carefully before going out for a walk. And despite his care, now and then a button falls off, or the elbows shine, or it begins to fray at the cuff. But the lines remain. Nothing can alter that. You can see it came from a good shop, that it’s substantial. You don’t have to look at the label to make the discovery. The way it hangs—that tells the story!
It was something like that with Bedford Avenue. . . . The “sheenies” could come, stick a funny little star on the steeple top, and christen the church a synagogue. They could take an old brownstone front, and with renovations make it into a cozy little fur shop, or a Parisian millinery store . . . any damned thing you want! But the form was there; the lines remained. Nobody could take that away. ... It was idle for anyone to deny it: New York belonged to the Jews. Everywhere you went, there were Kosher signs, garish mansions for banquets and weddings, delicatessen shops with pastrami, sturgeon, “lox,” smelly cheeses and wursts hanging in the window . . . and coleslaw dressed with a vomit. In course of time comes the dentist, and puts a little white sign in his window: “Painless Dentistry.” He lies. There was only one such benefactor in Brooklyn: “Painless Parker.” . . . And in the wake of the dentist comes the chiropractor, the masseur, and the music teacher—bleating like stuck pigs for a crumb of business. Whatever, whoever it was, it made no difference. They were all making a living, advertising themselves, getting pupils or patients, selling their nostrums and their indigestible comestibles.
Why did he detest them so, these long-suffering and (as every one admits) perfectly harmless people? They didn’t damage the country, did they, with their merchant ideas and their bogus intellectual life? No, not that exactly, but—to put it succinctly, “they smelled bad.” One doesn’t like to harp on distasteful subjects, but that was precisely the case: they smelled bad! They were like the disgusting creatures Virgil mentions: they soiled everything. Where they were, life was coarsened, cheapened, vulgarized. Sacred or profane: a human life, a discarded vest, a woman’s virtue—everything was smeared with a price-mark. ... It wasn’t only Bedford Avenue, the entire metropolis was worm-eaten.
If you pressed them hard enough they admitted it themselves, these wandering ones. Try it sometime. Get them in a corner. Just rub their noses in the dirt, and then ask them for a little plain talk. “Out with it, blatherskites! Own up, shitepokes! Who’s responsible for this mess?” Watch them whine and whimper, offer flimsy excuses: Russia, the pale, pogrom-makers, the whole category of bromidic absurdities. Press them a little further. . . . “Who’s asking you now to use dirty handkerchiefs? Is there any law against clean linen in this country? Why do you insist on throwing your refuse into the street? Haven’t we given you garbage cans . . . don’t we collect your dirt for you every day?” ... Oh, they’ll give you an answer to that, too. Argue themselves black in the face. In the end, they’ll admit it: “they love dirt!” It’s just as natural for them to be filthy as it is for the Germans to be tidy, for the Irish to be poor, and the Catholics ignorant. “It must be in the blood,” he told himself. The poor, lousy, mangy devils! Just the same, he could never get used to it. If he could only bawl them out publicly, or clout their fat behinds with a barrel stave! Whew!
At the fountain he loafed awhile, enjoying the fine tingle of spray, musing, smiling quietly as some funny little incident out of his boyhood leaped to mind. He recaptured an image of himself walking along the street with Dr. Carmichael on his arm. They were going to the Clymer Police Station to notify the sergeant that his wheel had been stolen. What a stinker Carmichael was! Was there a more cantankerous principal in all Brooklyn? Always holdi
ng out for decorum, the veriest stickler for propriety. Pretending to be outraged when he found them playing tag in the toilet. Never gave one a chance to explain. But what fun it was, slamming those toilet doors, climbing over the partitions, turning all the spigots on. . . . Perhaps they did wreck the joint, but what of it? Boys will be boys. And what did it matter, in the long run, if a few toilet seats were broken? Misdirected energy, that’s all. . . . But you couldn’t tell Carmichael that. The old crab didn’t have a friend in the world, unless it was his battered skullcap. Fancy an old fusspot like that walking through the cold corridors. A pious peacock, with his nose in the air. Garbed in the same old pinhead suit... a Presbyterian monitor with a paunch, and chronic catarrh. They used to say he was “nuts” on the Latin teacher, that he got her to stay after hours and help him with his office work. Office work, raspberries! Maybe that’s why he used to visit the Latin class so often, letting on that he did so in order to keep his hand in; asking foolish questions about Julius Caesar, the Lupercalia, and Vercingetorix. And that simpering way he had of droning his Latin. Trying to make us believe he was cultivating our ears so that we might appreciate Cicero’s noble cadences.... Worse than a priest at it! Then making us translate at sight, saying he would try it himself, too, when all the time the old geezer knew the book backwards. A sly old fox he was, keeping one eye on the nefarious practices of Catiline and the other eye on her nibs, perched on the high stool with a brilliantine smile, applauding him whenever he said something clever— something she called clever, for no one else could detect his cleverness! (Unless one could call it clever to expatiate for a whole period on the pooh-pooh theory of language.)
Well, the Jewies settled his hash. . . .
“Wouldn’t you boys like to do some extra reading so as to become more familiar with your Virgil?”
Sammy Mankowitz speaks up instanter. “I can’t. I gotta help muh fader in der store.”
“But wouldn’t you like to pass with honor, Master Mankowitz?”
“Naw . . . I jes wanna pass. I’m goin’ in fer dentistry soon as I’m tru.”
“How about you and you,” he asks, feeling out the Gentiles in the class.
“Me eyes are weak.” ... “I’m taking music lessons.” A bagful of excuses. Not a damned soul interested in the rites of the Lupercal, or the Lives of Plutarch. He shakes his head pathetically. “It’s a different generation, Miss Dillon.” That’s all he says, and closes the book. As Carmichael closes the door behind him Izzy Lefkowitz blows a snotter.
“Is that nice?” tweets Miss Dillon. “I want the boy who made that horrid noise to come right up here.”
Silence.
“I’ll give the young gentleman who was guilty of such misbehavior just three minutes to stand up and offer me his apology.”
More silence.
“May I leave the room, Miss Dillon?”
“Yes, Mr. Wright. I’m certain it wasn’t you.”
She taps the desk impatiently with her ruler, hoping that the culprit will be man enough to announce himself and spare her the injustice of punishing the others along with him. She waits a few more minutes, then looks at her watch. “Very well, we’ll all stay after hours and conjugate irregular verbs. We’ll do that for the rest of the week.”
Master Lefkowitz murmurs under his breath: “You big hunk of cheese!”
“What are you mumbling so for?” she demands fiercely, almost certain that he was the culprit.
He whines piteously: “I gotta help me fader.”
Moloch laughed softly as he reflected on Izzy’s trickery. Izzy was true to form: anarchic, and without honor. When they fell into a trap the herd instinct asserted itself. They fled then into the arms of Karl Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and hid their long noses in the sands of Anti-Semitism. Thenceforth, until the sweat glands have exuded the last drop of soul-quaking panic, they espouse with the full vigor of their stribilious temperament the philosophy of work. This lasts until the philosophy is annihilated by discussion.
But aren’t they intellectual, you say. To be sure. They have a dry intelligence which condones deceit, which elevates cheating to the point of supreme virtue. Fool! That’s what they have intellects for. It takes a stupid goy to recite his paternosters, to try for a hundred percent when sixty is all that is required to pass. . . . But they produce some great men, some rare geniuses, do they not? Admitted—but why the soft pedal when it comes to talking about imbeciles, cretins, hydrocephalics, crooks and thugs, cadets and whoremongers? . . . Every great scientist, every great author, every great leader of the world has been a Jew— sometime or other!
Meek and humble, you think? Because you see them plodding along on Canal Street, or East Broadway, with their heads in their beards? Not a bit of it! Get him alone and every Jew will admit his superiority. The world couldn’t get along without them. They’re a leaven in the body politic—it’s that tosh you’ll hear. . . . Who wrote your Bible? Who gave you a Savior? Who produces your motion pictures? Who underwrites your operas and symphonic concerts? Who conducts them? Who writes the world’s masterpieces? Who discovered Salvarsan? Who organized the needle trades? Who gave us the eight-hour day? Who supplies the teaching staff in the public schools? Who is at the bottom of this infernal, ceaseless agitation for more sewers, brighter lights, bigger theaters, gayer neckwear, shorter skirts, sheer hose, furs in summer, municipal golf courses, public baths, Catholics for the White House, emancipation for the Negro, and so on and so on? Come to find out, there are only a few things they overlooked. Lacunae: Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton—a few odd names like that; a building here and there: St. Peter’s or the Taj Mahal; the world of premodern painting. God knows, was Rembrandt a Jew? One can’t be sure anymore. Not when a Jew is elected mayor of the holy city; not when they tamper with the father of Parsifal and the author of Jean Christophe. If this nonsense continues, one may soon expect to hear Bernard Shaw announcing his Semitic lineage. . . . However, there are one or two we may be fairly certain of: the Buddha and Confucius. But this is strictly without reference to the Jewish Encyclopedia. . . .
A throng of children were coming down the street with books under their arms. Lunchtime. Down the avenue a little farther Moloch came upon the Amphion Theatre, the old Amphion where he had sat in the gallery with his mother to see Way Down East. Someone had slapped the Kosher label on the Amphion, too. Rudolph Schildkraut playing in some schrecklichkeit or other. Posters heralded the coming of a female cantor from Abyssinia, a fat tar baby with platyrrhine nose and blubber lips. “There you go. Dig ‘em up out of Africa, Mesopotamia, Tibet, perhaps Alaska, too. Soon the American Indian will be robbed of his ethnologic mystery. . . .”
Was there ever a people who lived so successfully in the aura of the past? It has been proposed that they try assimilation. No go! Like a cold-water cure for excessive public itch. They don’t want to be assimilated . . . much too good for that. But it was going on just the same. There was Donald Fleming and his second wife, Rhoda, a comely Jewess from the ranks of the intelligentsia. They were trying it out—this shopworn solution of the Jewish problem. That is, Donald was doing the assimilating and Rhoda was taking the punishment. When Rhoda’s parents came to visit, they stood in a corner modestly, like a brace of portmanteaus, or a pair of inoffensive candlesticks. On these occasions Donald would generally find a pretext to absent himself, claiming an engagement at the Chess Club. More Jews there. One didn’t mind playing chess with them. But living with them? That was another matter. . . . Not that Donald became an anti-Semite. Oh, no! On the contrary, no one defended the Jew more stoutly than Donald Fleming. He was too stout a defender. One suspected that he was a little silly on the subject. After all, the Jew is fairly well able to defend himself. He’s been doing it now for how many hundreds of years. A Gentile is always a mere tyro at the game. . . . Anyhow, when Fleming got up on his hind legs and began to brag about the Jews he filled one with irritable questions.
So it went. Five of his friends married to daughters of Is
rael. All getting along famously. No divorces, no plate-throwing. Why? Apparently their wives weren’t mere bedmates, hash-slingers, booby prizes. They discussed things together: books, politics, the marriage question, the miracles of Saint Patrick, chess problems, the hundred and one subjects which the ordinary Gentile usually takes to the saloon or the billiard parlor. These Jewish wives showed no reluctance, no finical squeamishness in making the home usurp the attractiveness of the beer parlor. ... Neither did they mess around the house all day and complain of backaches when the husband returned. They went out, and found jobs for themselves, took up plastic dancing, batik work, music lessons, attended free art schools. In other words, they refused to mold themselves into ornaments for hubby to stick in his nose. They lived their own lives, and they fused well.... Take Blanche now. More talent in her than in any of the Jewesses his friends had adopted. What did she do with her gifts? Nothing, absolutely nothing. She knew less and less each day. It never occurred to her to open a score of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ornstein, Honegger. They didn’t interest her. She played the same things over and over—the things she had learned at the convent. Technique: perfect. Presentation: according to Hoyle. Ideas: none. Soul: less than none. He had a feeling that the piano was wasted on her; the washboard would serve better. She had all the motions: proper wrist movement, full pauses, good legato— everything but inspiration. If Sister Dorothea had played an arpeggio thus and so, she did likewise.
He remembered once buying her a ticket to hear Ornstein. She came home raving like a Shakespeare of the madhouse. Fragments of conversation recurred to memory.
“What’s the matter, was he too original?”
“Original? I call it cheap.”
“You didn’t like him, then?”
“He ought to be prohibited from playing anything but his own compositions.”
“Yes, and I daresay you’d get the censors after him for that.”