Meanwhile, it was very lively in parts of the country, and I myself, walking to the sanctuary of my room, heard one evening the tender love call of the male cat for the female. And I knew it was not lust that herded me, as cattle are herded, to the bed of the lonely harlot whose sad room overlooked the alley between Mariposa and Tulare Streets. Nevertheless, it was not without tenderness that I was sent through the darkness of the hall to the earth on the floor below, and my own life, and often it was with virtue and truth that those lips, which I knew all men had touched, touched finally my own, partly in love and partly in articulation of myself and herself, while thus we were the same, though in evil.
On the whole, however, the festival in Venice was dull and unpleasant to the memory, which is certainly our only reality, apart from instant pain or instant pleasure.
The letters of Giacomo Puccini. Farewell to Munich. A single scene from the ballet of the French postcards is hardly enough to establish a tradition of sterility for writers of prose, and certainly not enough to restore Baudelaire to the pavement in Paris. However, the eyes of Maupassant remain to this day the eyes of a Christian saint. The swift gliding of the river Seine is no parallel, but it will do. There is imitation in anything any man may do, and in the matter of escaping loneliness the imitation is pathetically obvious and tawdry.
We have a pretty slick continuity, one man, and then another, one dead thought emerging from another dead thought; time passing, the Pacific washing away the hours. Days spent with something female of mortal substance, in the sun, by the sea, beneath trees, amid talk.
The tide of heaven, if we were to trouble about it, swells daily to the very door of our lives, yet we walk generally to the seashore to hear the whisper of our monotony; our beloved waves drown the clear fluids of silence and we stand awake and alive.
In 1918 jazz arrived. It existed always, but in 1918 it reached music where it was emphasized. It is wrong to blame the war for this. A school of minnows, darting in a shallow stream, is jazz. A school of tired office girls, darting in a deep tub of New York ooze, is also jazz. The very small difference is not worth noticing: the minnows live in the water naturally, while the girls perish in it naturally, and whatever happens is to be accepted as proper under the circumstances. If prosperity is preferable, this is what to expect.
The fertile soil of the valley was the bed of vine roots, the fountain where they drank. I remembered (in the fiction room) how when, as it sometimes happened, I clipped off a good twig, a twig which would have borne fruit, I would feel guilty of a spiritual misdemeanor, and would therefore ask the vine, as one might ask a mother whose child one has unintentionally hurt, to forgive me. This would happen apart from speech, apart from actual articulation, but it would happen just the same. It would be because I could not bear to destroy a decent thing without experiencing regret, without begging forgiveness.
Again the vines were green with foliage and all the Armenians were going in their automobiles to the vineyards and gathering the tenderest leaves for the spring feasts. The children, born in California, stood among the vines, plucking the young leaves, holding dozens of them in their hands, speaking in Armenian. The leaf of the vine is a food, and the taste is never to be forgotten, even by those who are not Armenians. To Armenians the taste is the very taste of Armenia, and by eating the food each spring all Armenians, wherever they may be, declare to God and Armenia that they have remained loyal. Gathering the leaves of the vine is no small matter, and it is not purely an affair of the table.
For the present, we may presume that the war is beginning to be over, years after the dead have been counted and plans for a new war made, but alas it is not so, and the war is nowhere near beginning to be over. There is no longer any noise (except in the moving pictures of the war, in which the war is being waged all over again; this time on behalf of art), but the unbrave soldiers who have survived are just beginning to cry out because they were forced to be unbrave, because they were unmanned, loosened, driven mad.
All the remaining vices remain unknown, and the dawn, during which man is ill, the dawn of experimentation occurs. There is no sorrow, there is no joy, there is no more than the asking about sorrow and joy. Drama is impossible because everyone is interested in himself, as an experiment, and will not therefore perform any rash act for its own sake, as an inevitability, and the result is that no man can be jealous of any woman, or vice versa. The blurring of specific character among universal precepts is whole, and man, the individualist, is a lie for the next generation. Man is a document, the subject of bad poems. There is no dignity anywhere, not even among peasants, they having been slowly introduced to the vulgarity of modern conveniences, contraceptives, civil rights, etc. They having been taught to read the newspapers. The aspects of experimentation are few. Man is awake, he knows he is awake, he denies destiny, he wishes to observe and he wishes above all things to observe himself. This brings about a state of irresponsibility, Pirandello aiding.
To seek the sane men is to walk alone, sadly.
Working with the peons, though, I kept in touch with the earth. And I picked up a little Mexican.
The most notorious event of history, if one is thoughtful about such occurrences, was not the crucifixion of Christ, but the discovery of America. The crucifixion resulted in Christianity which at its best has been useful and at its worst a form of romanticism for those not writers. On the other hand, the discovery of America (the continent itself) resulted in the moment we now know, in Lincoln, Tom Sawyer, Hollywood, Hearst, and the NRA. Other consequences are innumerable, and if one is to choose between a man and a continent, one must be a materialist not to choose the man; still, it is distressing to try to be a Christian when the name enjoys such capitalistic disgrace, when the greatest Christian church is so fat, so purely ornamental, and so statistical about the soul.
I refer, finally, to the vineyard, from which I have come. I refer, as a last word of these days on earth, to the soil which I have known and which has known me and in which I was nourished.
We had quarrels, of course; the peons and myself and the Greek Stepan, but mostly our conversations were of eternal things, shadows and so on. Stepan, who worked against his better judgment, being by birth a gambler, was nevertheless able to regard his labor in the vineyard as worth the time involved. Twenty years from now, he said, for this work my chin shall be firmer, and my hand, in dealing the cards, shall be swifter, which is important, since I shall have to cheat.
Also Rubio, the tall peon, spoke, but only when silence became too burdensome for him. He was interested mostly in food, fearing, more than death, starvation. One day he asked: What do you eat, you Armenian people? and I told him we ate grape leaves. I myself, I said, eat bread and print. He could not understand how a man could eat print, so I explained to him that food was used by man to nourish the soul, but that in doing so it also stimulated the basest of passions, and that therefore it was advisable to use any substitute that accomplished the end more artfully. And, I said, compared with print no substitute is worth talking about, certainly not love.
Ah, he replied in serious Mexican, you people who read books . . . ah, I cannot be like you. How do you do it?
In the great fiction room of the public library I used to remember the vineyard under the sun, and our talk of eternal things.
Aspirin
Is a Member of the
N.R.A.
Remember above all things the blood, remember that man is flesh, that flesh suffers pain, and that the mind being caught in flesh suffers with it. Remember that the spirit is a form of the flesh, and the soul its shadow. Above all things humor and intelligence, and truth as the only beginning: not what is said or done, not obviousness: the truth of silences, the intelligence of nothing said, nothing done. The piety. Faces. Memory, our memory of the earth, this one and the other, the one which is now this and the one that was once another, what we saw, and the sun. It is our life and we have no other. Remember God, the multitudinous God.
There were nights, in New York, when my hair would freeze on my head, and I would awaken from sleeplessness and remember. I would remember stalking through print, the quiet oratory of some forgotten name, a quiet man who put something down on paper: yea and yea and yea. Something wordless but precise, my hair frozen, and the small attic room in the heart of Manhattan, across the street from the Paramount Building, and myself in the room, in the darkness, alone, waiting for morning. I used to leave my bed sometimes and smoke a cigarette in the darkness. The light I disliked, so I used to sit in the darkness, remembering.
One or two faces I saw coming across the Continent: the boy with a bad dose, riding in the bus, going home to his mother, taking a bad dose with him from a South American resort, talking about the girl, just a young kid and very beautiful, and God, what a pain, every moment and nothing to do about it. He was eighteen or nineteen, and he had gone down to South America to sleep with a girl, and now he had got it, where it hurt most, and he was drinking whisky and swallowing aspirin, to keep him going, to deaden the pain. York, Pennsylvania, a good town, and his people living there. Everything, he said, everything will be all right the minute I get home. And the sick girl, going back to Chicago, talking in her sleep. The language of fear, the articulation of death, no grammar, exclamations, one after another, the midnight grief, children emerging from the grown girl, talking.
And the faces of people in the streets, in the large cities and in the small towns, the sameness.
I used to get up in the middle of the night and remember. It was no use trying to sleep, because I was in a place that did not know me, and whenever I tried to sleep the room would declare its strangeness and I would sit up in bed and look into the darkness.
Sometimes the room would hear me laughing softly. I could never cry, because I was doing what I wanted to do, so I couldn’t help laughing once in a while, and I would always feel the room listening. Strange fellow, this fellow, I would hear the room say; in this agony, he gets up, with his hair frozen, in the middle of the night, and he laughs.
There was enough pain everywhere, in everyone who lived. If you tried to live a godly life, it didn’t make any difference, and in the end you came up with a dull pain in your body and a soul burning with a low fire, eating its substance slowly. I used to think about the pain and in the end all I could do was laugh. If there had been a war, it would have been much easier, more reasonable. The pain would have been explicable. We are fighting for high ideals, we are protecting our homes, we are protecting civilization, and all that. A tangible enemy, a reasonable opposition, and swift pain, so that you couldn’t have time enough to think about it much: either it got you all the way, carrying you over into death and calm, or it didn’t get you. Also, something tangible to hate, a precise enemy. But without a war it was different. You might try hating God, but in the end you couldn’t do it. In the end you laughed softly or you prayed, using pious and blasphemous language.
I used to sit in the dark room, waiting for morning and the fellowship of passengers of the subway. The room had great strength. It belonged. It was part of the place. Fellows like me could come and go, they could die and be born again, but the room was steady and static, always there. I used to feel its indifference toward me, but I could never feel unfriendly toward it. It was part of the scheme, a small attic room in the heart of Manhattan, without an outside window, four dollars a week: me or the next fellow, any of us, it didn’t matter. But whenever I laughed, the room would be puzzled, a bit annoyed. It would wonder what there was for me to laugh about, my hair frozen, and my spirit unable to rest.
Sometimes, during the day, shaving, I used to look into the small mirror and see the room in my face, trying to understand me. I would be laughing, looking at the room in the mirror, and it would be annoyed, wondering how I could laugh, what I saw in my life that was amusing.
It was the secrecy that amused me, the fact of my being one of the six million people in the city, living there, waiting to die. I could die in this room, I used to say to myself, and no one would ever understand what had happened, no one would ever say, Do you know that boy from California, the fellow who is studying the subway? Well, he died in a little room on Forty-fourth Street the other night, alone. They found him in the little room, dead. No one would be able to say anything about me if I died, no one knew I was from California and that I was studying the subway, making notes about the people riding in the subway. My presence in Manhattan was not known, so if I came to vanish, my vanishing would not be known. It was a secret, and it amused me. I used to get up in the middle of the night and laugh about it quietly, disturbing the room.
I used to make the room very angry, laughing, and one night it said to me, You are in a hurry but I am not: I shall witness your disintegration, but when you are destroyed I shall be standing here quietly. You will see.
It made me laugh. I knew it was the truth, but it was amusing to me. I couldn’t help laughing at the room wanting to see me go down.
But there was an armistice: what happened was this: I moved away. I rented another room. It was a war without a victor. I packed my things and moved to the Mills Hotel.
But it isn’t so easy to escape a war. A war has a way of following a man around, and my room in the Mills Hotel was even more malicious than the other. It was smaller and therefore its eloquence was considerably louder. Its walls used to fall in upon me, with the whiteness of madness, but I went on laughing. In the middle of the night I used to hear my neighbors, old and young men. I used to hear them speaking out against life from their sleep. I used to hear much weeping. That year many men were weeping from their sleep. I used to laugh about this. It was such a startling thing that I used to laugh. The worst that can happen to any of us, I used to laugh, is death. It is a small thing. Why are you men weeping?
It was because of remembrance, I suppose. Death is always in a man, but sometimes life is in him so strongly that it makes a sad remembrance and comes out in the form of weeping through sleep.
And it was because of the pain. Everybody was in pain. I was studying the subway and I could see the pain in the faces of everybody. I looked everywhere for one face that was not the mask of a pained life, but I did not find such a face. It was this that made my study of the subway so fascinating. After months of study I reached a decision about all of us in Manhattan. It was this: the subway is death, all of us are riding to death. No catastrophe, no horrible accident: only slow death, emerging from life. It was such a terrific fact that I had to laugh about it.
I lived in many rooms, in many sections of the city, East Side, West Side, downtown, uptown, Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, all over the place. It was the same everywhere, my hair frozen at night, alien walls around me, and the smile of death in my eyes.
But I didn’t mind. It was what I had wanted to do. I was a clerk in one of thousands of offices of a great national enterprise, doing my part to make America the most prosperous nation on earth, more millionaires per square inch than all the other nations put together, etc. I was paying cash for my sleeplessness, for the privilege of riding in the subway. I was eating in the Automats, renting vacant rooms all over the place, buying clothes, newspapers, aspirin.
I do not intend to leave aspirin out of this document. It is too important to leave out. It is the hero of this story, all of us six million people in New York, swallowing it, day after day. All of us in pain, needing it. Aspirin is an evasion. But so is life. The way we live it. You take aspirin in order to keep going. It deadens pain. It helps you to sleep. It keeps you aboard the subway. It is a substitute for the sun, for strong blood. It stifles remembrance, silences weeping.
It does not harm the heart. That is what the manufacturers say. They say it is absolutely harmless. Maybe it is. Death does not harm the heart either. Death is just as harmless as aspirin. I expect casket manufacturers to make this announcement in the near future. I expect to see a full page advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post,
making a slogan on behalf of death. Do not be deceived . . . die and see your dreams come true . . . death does not harm the heart . . . it is absolutely harmless . . . doctors everywhere recommend it . . . and so on.
You hear a lot of sad talk about all the young men who died in the Great War. Well, what about this war? Is it less real because it destroys with less violence, with a ghastlier shock, with a more sustained pain?
The coming of snow in Manhattan is lovely. All the ugliness is softened by the pious whiteness. But with the snow comes the deadly cold. With the snow death comes a little closer to everyone. If you are pretty rich, it doesn’t bother you much: you don’t have to get up in the morning in a cold room and rush out to an Automat for a cup of coffee and then dive into the subway. If you are rich, the snow is only beautiful to you. You get up when you please, and there is nothing to do but sit in warm rooms and talk with other rich people. But if you aren’t rich, if you are working to make America a nation of prosperous millionaires, then the snow is both beautiful and ghastly. And when the cold of the snow gets into your bones you are apt to forget that it is beautiful; you are apt to notice only that it is ghastly.
A few evenings ago I was listening to the radio, out here in San Francisco. Aspirin days are over for me. I depend on the sun these days. I was listening to a very good program, sponsored by one of America’s most prosperous manufacturers of aspirin. You know the name. I do not intend to advertise the company. It does enough advertising of its own. The radio announcer said the cold and sore throat season had come, and of course it had. I could see snow falling over Manhattan, increasing the sales of aspirin all over the city. Then the announcer said, Aspirin is a member of the N.R.A.
It made me laugh to hear that. But it is the truth. Aspirin is a member of the N.R.A. It is helping everyone to evade fundamentals, it is helping to keep people going to work. Aspirin is helping to bring back prosperity. It is doing its part. It is sending millions of half-dead people to their jobs. It is doing a great deal to keep the spirit of this nation from disintegrating. It is deadening pain everywhere. It isn’t preventing anything, but it is deadening pain.
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze Page 9