by Philip Roth
“Oh,” said Hem, “I read that one. Book about catching a whale.”
“Well, it’s not about that,” the slit said, and flushed, pure American Beauty rose.
Hem laughed. “Well, you got the degree in Literatoor, Vassar—tell me, what is it about?”
She told him that it was about Good and Evil. She told him the white whale was not just a white whale, it was a symbol. That amused Hem.
“Vassar, Moby Dick is a book about blubber, with a madman thrown in for excitement. Five hundred pages of blubber, one hundred pages of madman, and about twenty pages on how good niggers are with the harpoon.”
Here the pole jerked. Hem came off his chair and the little Cuban kid who was our mate that year started in shouting the only English word he knew—“Sail! Sail!”
After the sixth white pennant was raised and the slit had measured Hem’s sail at eight feet, he resumed quizzing her about the name of the G.A.N. “And no more blubber, Vassar, you hear?”
“Huckleberry Finn,” the slit said gamely—and flushing of course, “by Mark Twain.”
“Book for boys, Vassar,” said Hem. “Book about a boy and a slave trying to run away from home. About the drunks and thieves and lunatics they meet up with. Adventure story for kids.”
Oh, no, says the slit, this one is about Good and Evil too.
“Vassar, it is just a book by a fellow who is thinking how nice it would be to be a youngster again. Back when the nuts and lushes and thieves was still the other guy and not you. Kid stuff, Kid. Pretending you’re a girl or your own best friend. Sleeping all day and swimming naked at night. Cooking over a fire. Your old wino dad getting rubbed out without having to do the job yourself. The Great American Daydream, Vassar. Drunks don’t die so conveniently for the relatives anymore. Right, Frederico?”
Hem had to stop here to catch another sailfish.
According to the slit this one measured only five feet eleven inches. She shouldn’t have said “only.”
Trying to joke it off, Hem said, “Never be a basketball star, will he?” but it was clear he was not happy with himself. You might even have thought that seventh sail was a symbol of something if you were a professor of Literatoor.
I sat with Hem and we drank, while the Cuban kid fiddled with the fish and the slit wondered what she had said that was wrong. When it was clear the fishing was ruined for the day the kid took in the lines and we started home, the terns and the gulls giving us the business overhead.
“The slit wasn’t thinking,” I said.
“Oh, the slit was thinking all right. Slits are always thinking in their way.”
“She’s just a kid, Hem.”
“So was Joan of Arc,” he said.
“You’re taking it too hard,” I said. “Try not to think about it.”
“Sure. Sure. Ill try not to think about it.”
“She didn’t mean ‘only,’ Hem.”
“Sure. I know. She meant ‘merely.’ Hey, Vassar.”
“She’s a kid, Hem,” I warned him.
“So was Clytemnestra when she started out. But once they get going they don’t leave you anything. You can count on that. Hey, Vassar.”
“What are you going to do, Hem?”
“Sharks like fresh slit as much as the next carnivore, Frederico.”
“Don’t be a prick, Hem.”
“Lay off my prick, Frederico. Or you’ll go too. Ever see a shark take after a raglan-sleeve coat with a sportswriter in it? That’s the way the Indians used to get them to charge the beach, by waving a swatch of Broadway hound’s-tooth at them.”
The slit from Vassar who had come South that year to be a waitress and learn about Real Life was showing gooseflesh on her storky legs when she approached the great writer to ask what he wanted. In all that they had taught her about great writers at Vassar they had apparently neglected to mention what pricks they can be.
Hem said, “Tell me some more about the Great American Novel, Vassar. You don’t meet a twenty-one-year-old every day who is an authority on fiction and fishing both, especially from your sex.”
“But I’m not,” she said, as pale a slit now as you might ever see.
“You go around judging the size of sailfish, don’t you? You have a degree in Literatoor, don’t you? Name me another Great American Novel. I want to hear just who us punks are up against.”
“I didn’t say you were up against—”
“No!” roared Hem. “I did!” And the gulls flew off as though a cannon had been fired.
“Name me another!”
But when she stood there mute with terror, Hem reached out with a hand and smacked her face. I thought of Stanley Ketchel when she went down.
She looked up from where Hem had “decked” her. “The Scarlet Letter,” she whimpered, “by Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
“Good one, Vassar. That’s the book where the only one who has got any balls on him is the heroine. No wonder you like it so much. Frankly, Vassar, I don’t think Mr. Hawthorne even knew where to put it. I believe he thought A stood for arsehole. Maybe that’s what all the fuss is about.”
“Henry James!” she howled.
“Tell me another, Vassar!”
“The Ambassadors! The Golden Bowl!”
“Polychromatic crap, honey! Five hundred words where one would do! Come on, Vassar, name me another!”
“Oh please, Mr. Hemingway, please,” she wept, “I don’t know anymore, I swear I don’t—”
“Sure you do!” he roared. “What about Red Badge of Courage! What about Winesburg, Ohio! The Last of the Mohicans! Sister Carrie! McTeague! My Antonia! The Rise of Silas Lapham! Two Years Before the Mast! Ethan Frome! Barren Ground! What about Booth Tarkington and Sarah Orne Jewett, while you’re at it? What about our minor poet Francis Scott Fitzwhat’shisname? What about Wolfe and Dos and Faulkner! What about The Sound and the Fury, Vassar! A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing—how’s that for the Great American Novel!”
“I never read it,” she whimpered.
“Of course you haven’t! You can’t! It’s unreadable unless you’re some God damn professor! You know why you can’t name the Great American Novel, Vassar?”
“No,” she moaned.
“Because it hasn’t been written yet! Because when it is it’ll be Papa who writes it and not some rummy sportswriter in his cute little cottage by the lake in the woods!”
Whereupon a large fierce gull swooped down, its broad wings fluttering, and opened its hungry beak to cry at Ernest Hemingway, “Nevermore!”
Or so he claimed afterwards; I myself didn’t know what he was carrying on about when he shouted up at the bird, “You can’t quoth that to me and get away with it, you sea gull son of a bitch!”
“Nevermore!” the gull repeated, to hear Hem tell it later. “Nevermore!”
Hem raced down to the cabin but when he returned with his pistol the gull was gone.
“I ought to use it on myself,” said Papa. “And if that bastard sea gull is right, I will.”
Here he stumbled wildly over the deck, stepping blindly across the slit, and leaned over the side to watch his shadow in the water … “Frederico,” he called.
“Hem.”
“Oh, Frederico; it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I wrote my first story—a boy-reporter of nineteen! Eighteen—eighteen—eighteen years ago!—ago! Eighteen years of continual writing! eighteen years of privation, and peril, and stormtime! eighteen years on the pitiless sea! for eighteen years has Papa forsaken the peaceful land, for eighteen years to make war on the horrors of the deep! When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a novelist’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected … I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering b
eneath the piled centuries since Paradise! God! God! God!—crack my heart—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! Close! Stand close to me, Frederico; let me look into a human eye. The Great American Novel. Why should Hemingway give chase to the Great American Novel?”
“Good question, Papa. Keep it up and it’s going to drive you nuts.”
“What is it, Frederico, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Papa, Papa? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this writing arm?” he asked, raising the pistol to his head.
“All right, Hem, that’s enough now,” I said. “You don’t even sound like yourself. A book is a book, no more. Who would want to kill himself over a novel?”
“What then?” said Papa, and turned to look at the decked slit. It was to her he said sardonically, “A whale? A woman?”
Only it wasn’t the same kid who had boarded with us at dawn that morning who answered him. A few hours with a man like Hem had changed her forever, as it changed us all. That’s what a great writer can do to people.
“Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” snorted the slit.
End of story, nearly. As I did not want to let him out of my sight in that murderous mood, I brought Hem along with me to see the Mundys take their first workout in a week. John Baal, the big bad first-baseman the sentimentalists used to try to dignify by calling him “Rabelaisian “—the first two syllables would have sufficed—was in the cage, lofting long fly balls out toward a flock of pelicans who were cruising in deep center. “I’m going to get me one of them big-mouthed cocksuckers yet,” said John, and sure enough, after fifteen minutes of trying, he did. Pelican must have mistaken the baseball for something good to eat, a flying fish I suppose, because he went soaring straight up after one John had hit like a shot and hauled it in while it was still on the rise. When I went to the telegraph office that night to file my story, Papa was still with me, muttering and miserable. The slit had already packed her diary and boarded the first train back to Poughkeepsie. I was not in such good spirits myself.
“Big John Baal of the Mundys,” my story began, “was robbed of a four-bagger during batting practice this afternoon in Clearwater. Credit a pelican with the put-out.
“He looked at first glance like any other pelican. He was wearing the grayish-silvery home uniform of his species, with the white velvety neck feathers and the fully webbed toes. The bird was of average size, I am told, weighing in at eight pounds and with a wing spread of seven and a half feet. On close inspection there seemed nothing unusual about the large blackish pouch suspended from the lower half of his bill, except that when they pried the bill open, the pouch was found to contain, along with four sardines and a baby pompano, a baseball bearing the signature of the President of the Patriot League. The pelican was still soaring upwards and to his left when he turned his long graceful neck, opened his bill, and with the nonchalance of a Luke Gofannon, snared Big John’s mighty blast.
“We had pigeons when I was a boy. My old man kept them in a chicken-wire coop on the roof. My old man was a pug with a potent right hand who trained in the saloons and bet himself empty on the horses before he evaporated into thin air when I was fifteen. He loved those pigeons so much he fed them just as good as he did us—bread crumbs and a fresh tin of water every day. A boy’s illusions about his father are notorious. I thought he was something very like a god when he stood on the roof with a long pole, shaking and waving it in the air to control the pigeons in their flight. And the next thing I knew he had evaporated into the air.
“The press and the players are calling the pelican’s catch an ‘omen,’ but of what they can’t agree. As many say a first division finish as a second. That is the range of some people’s thinking. Of course there are the jokers, as there always are when the utterly incomprehensible happens. ‘Forgive them Father,’ begged the suffering man on the cross one Friday long ago, and the smart Roman punk betting even money the shooter wouldn’t make an eight in two rolls looked up and said in Latin, ‘Listen who’s trying to cut the game.’
“The learned Christian gentleman who manages the Mundys is not happy about what Big John Baal is going to do with the dead pelican, but then he has never been overjoyed with Big John’s sense of propriety. Mister Fairsmith, a missionary in the off-season, tried to bring baseball to the Africans one winter. They disappointed him too. They learned the principles of the game all right but then one night the two local teams held a ceremony in which they boiled their gloves and ate them. ‘The pelican represented as piercing her breast is called “the pelican vulning herself” or “the pelican in her piety,”’ Mister Fairsmith reminded Big John. ‘She then symbolizes Christ redeeming the world with His blood.’ But Big John is still going to have the phenomenal bird stuffed and mounted over the bar of his favorite Port Ruppert saloon.
“I loved my old man and because of that I never understood how he could disappear on me, or play the ponies on me, or train in taverns on me. But he must have had his reasons. I suppose that pelican who made the put-out here in Clearwater today had his reasons too. But I don’t pretend to be able to read a bird’s brain anymore than I could my own dad’s. All I know is that if the Mundys plan on breaking even this year somebody better tell Big John Baal to start pulling the ball to right, where the pasture is fenced in.
“But that’s only one man’s opinion. Fella name a’ Smith; first name a’ Word.”
* * *
Nursing Ernest all day, I had been forced to compose the story in bits and half-bits, which accounts for why it is so weak on alliteration. As it says over the door to the Famous Writers’ School in Connecticut: A Sullen Drunk Packing A Gat Is Not The Best Company For An Artist Finicky About His Style.
I read the story aloud to the telegraph operator, so I could balance up the sentences as I went along, writing the last paragraph right there on my feet in the Western Union office.
Then I turned to see Hem pointing the pistol at my belt.
“You stole that from me.”
“Stole what, Hem?”
“First you steal it and then what’s worse you fuck it up.”
“Fuck what up, Hem?”
“My prose style. You bastards have stolen my prose style. Every shithead sportswriter in America has stolen my style and then gone and fucked it up so bad that I can’t even use it anymore without becoming sick to my stomach.”
“Put down the pistol, Papa. I’ve been writing that way all my life and you know it.”
“I suppose I stole it from you then, Frederico.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“Hear that, bright boy?” Hem said to the baby-faced telegraph operator, who had his hands over his head. “That isn’t what he said. Tell the bright boy who I steal my ideas from, Frederico.”
“Nobody, Hem.”
“Don’t I steal them from a syndicated sportswriter in a hound’s-tooth overcoat? Fella name a’ Frederico?”
“No, Hem.”
“Maybe I steal them from the slit, Frederico. Maybe I steal them from a Vassar slit with a degree in High Literatoor,”
“They’re your own, Hem. Your ideas are your own.”
“How about my characters. Tell bright boy here who I steal them from. Go ahead. Tell him.”
“He doesn’t steal them from anybody,” I said to the kid. “They’re his own.”
“Hear that, bright boy?” Hem asked. “My characters are my own.”
“Yes, sir,” said the telegraph operator.
“Now tell bright boy,” Hem said to me, “who is going to write the Great American Novel, Frederico? You? Or Papa?”
“Papa,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” said the telegraph operator, his hands still up in the air.
“S
o you think that’s right?” Hem asked him.
“Sure,” the telegraph operator said.
“You’re a pretty bright boy, aren’t you?”
“If you say so, sir.”
“You know what I say, bright boy? If I have a message, I send it Western Union.”
The telegraph operator forced a smile. “Uh-huh,” he said.
“Sit down, bright boy.”
“Yes, sir.” And did as he was told.
Hem walked up and held the pistol to the telegrapher’s jawbone. “To Messrs. Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James, in care of the Department of Literatoor, Vassar College, New York. Dear Illustrious Dead : The Great American Novelist, c’est moi. Signed, Papa.”
He waited for the last letter to be tapped out, then he turned and went out the door. Through the window I watched him pass under the arc-light and cross the street. Then because I am something of a prick too, I asked how much the telegram would cost, paid, and went on back to my slitless hotel room, never to see Ernest again.
Every once in a while I would get a Christmas card from Hem, sometimes from Africa, sometimes from Switzerland or Idaho, written in his cups obviously, saying more or less the same thing each time : use my style one more time, Frederico, and I’ll kill you. But of course in the end the guy Hem killed for using his style was himself.
MY PRECURSORS, MY KINSMEN
1. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Well, I tend to agree with Hem—having now done my homework—that the men Miss Hester Prynne got herself mixed up with do not reflect admirably upon the bearded sex. But then make me out a list of a hundred who do? I count it a miracle that the lady didn’t latch onto a lushhead as well. And yet, standard stuff as it may seem to a slum kid like myself to hear tell of a sweet young thing throwing away her life on a lout, there is something suspicious about a beautiful, brave, voluptuous, and level-headed slit such as Hester marrying a misshapen dryasdust prof easily three times her age (who undoubtedly had her posing in all sorts of postures in her petticoats in order for him to get it up, if up it would even go) and from him moving on to a “passionate” affair with that puny parson. Ten to one when they saddled up in the woods, it was Hester mounted the minister and not t’other way about. I admire the girl for her guts but have my doubts about any slit who savors sex with sadists and sissies. I only regret that this big black-eyed dish did not reside in the Boston area in the era of the Red Sox and Bees. I might have showed her something.