Boris comes to the door in a beautiful smoking jacket. He looks very pale and frail and withdrawn, as though he had been in a deep reverie. As soon as I mention “Max” his face lights up. He’s heard about Max.
I have a feeling that he’s grateful to me for having brought Max home. Certainly his whole manner is one of warmth, of sympathy. We go into the studio where Boris flops on the couch; he throws a steamer blanket over his frail body. There are two Jews now in a room, face to face, and both know what suffering is. No need to beat around the bush. Begin with the suffering . . . plunge right in! Two kinds of suffering—it’s marvelous to me what a contrast they present. Boris lying back on the couch, the most elegant apostle of suffering that ever I’ve met. He lies there like a human Bible on every page of which is stamped the suffering, the misery, the woe, the torture, the anguish, the despair, the defeat of the human race. Max is sitting on the edge of his chair, his bald head dented just below the crown, as if suffering itself had come down on him like a sledge hammer. He’s strong as a bull, Max. But he hasn’t Boris’s strength. He knows only physical suffering—hunger, bedbugs, hard benches, unemployment, humiliations. Right now he’s geared up to extract a few francs from Boris. He’s sitting on the edge of his chair, a bit nervous because we haven’t given him a chance yet to explain his case. He wants to tell the story from beginning to end. He’s fishing around for an opening. Boris meanwhile is reclining comfortably on his bed of sorrow. He wants Max to take his time. He knows that Max has come to suffer for him.
While Max talks I snoop about looking for a drink. I’m determined to enjoy this seance. Usually Boris says immediately—“What’ll you have to drink?” But with Max on hand it doesn’t occur to him to offer drinks.
Stone sober and hearing it for the hundredth time Max’s story doesn’t sound so hot to me. I’m afraid he’s going to bore the pants off Boris—with his “facts.” Besides, Boris isn’t keen on listening to long stories. All he asks for is a little phrase, sometimes just a word. I’m afraid Max is making it all too prosaic. He’s in Vienna again, talking about the clean soup kitchens. I know it’s going to take a little while before we get to Basle, then Basle to Paris, then Paris, then hunger, want, misery, then full dress rehearsal. I want him to plunge right into the whirlpool, into the stagnant flux, the hungry monotony, the bare, bedbuggy doldrums with all the hatches closed and no fire escapes, no friends, no sortie, no-tickee-no-shirtee business. No, Boris doesn’t give a damn about continuity; he wants something dramatic, something vitally grotesque and horribly beautiful and true. Max will bore the pants off him, I can see that. . . .
It happens I’m wrong. Boris wants to hear the whole story from beginning to end. I suppose it’s his mood—sometimes he shows an inexhaustible patience. What he’s doing, no doubt, is to carry on his own interior monologue. Perhaps he’s thinking out a problem while Max talks. It’s a rest for him. I look at him closely. Is he listening? Seems to me he’s listening all right. He smiles now and then.
Max is sweating like a bull. He’s not sure whether he’s making an impression or not.
Boris has a way of listening to Max as if he were at the opera. It’s better than the opera, what with the couch and the steamer blanket. Max is taking off his coat; the perspiration is rolling down his face. I can see that he’s putting his heart and soul into it. I sit at the side of the couch glancing from one to the other. The garden door is open and the sun seems to throw an aureole around Boris’s head. To talk to Boris Max has to face the garden. The heat of the afternoon drifts in through the cool studio; it puts a warm, fuzzy aura about Max’s words. Boris looks so comfortable that I can’t resist the temptation to lie down beside him. I’m lying down now and enjoying the luxury of listening to a familiar tale of woe. Beside me is a shelf of books; I run my eye over them as Max spins it out. Lying down this way, hearing it at full length, I can judge the effect of it better. I catch nuances now that I never caught before. His words, the titles of the books, the warm air drifting in from the garden, the way he sits on the edge of his chair—the whole thing combines to produce the most savory effect.
The room is in a state of complete disorder, as usual. The enormous table is piled with books and manuscripts, with penciled notes, with letters that should have been answered a month ago. The room gives the impression somehow of a sudden state of arrest, as though the author who inhabited it had died suddenly and by special request nothing had been touched. If I were to tell Max that this man Boris lying on the couch had really died I wonder what he would say. That’s exactly what Boris means too—that he died. And that’s why he’s able to listen the way he does, as though he were at the opera. Max will have to die too, die in every limb and branch of his body, if he’s to survive at all . . . The three books, one next to the other, on the top shelf—almost as if they had been deliberately arranged that way: The Holy Bible, Boris’s own book, the Correspondence between Nietzsche and Brandes. Only the other night he was reading to me from the Gospel according to Luke. He says we don’t read the Gospels often enough. And then Nietzsche’s last letter—“the crucified one.” Buried in the tomb of the flesh for ten solid years and the whole world singing his praise . . .
Max is talking away. Max the presser. From somewhere near Lemberg he came—near the big fortress. And thousands of them just like him, men with broad triangular faces and puffy underlip, with eyes like two burnt holes in a blanket, the nose too long, the nostrils broad, sensitive, melancholy. Thousands of sad Jewish faces from around Lemberg way, the head thrust deep into the socket of the shoulders, sorrow wedged deep between the strong shoulder blades. Boris is almost of another race, so frail, so light, so delicately attuned. He’s showing Max how to write in the Hebrew character; his pen races over the paper. With Max the pen is like a broomstick; he seems to draw the characters instead of inscribing them. The way Boris writes is the way Borin does everything—lightly, elegantly, correctly, definitively. He needs intricacies in order to move swiftly and subtly. Hunger, for instance, would be too coarse, too crude. Only stupid people worry about hunger. The garden, I must say, is also remote to Boris. A Chinese screen would have served just as well—better perhaps. Max, however, is keenly aware of the garden. If you gave Max a chair and told him to sit in the graden he would sit and wait for a week if necessary. Max would ask nothing better than food and a garden . . .
“I don’t see what can be done for a man like this,” Boris is saying, almost to himself. “It’s a hopeless case.” And Max is shaking his head in agreement. Max is a case, and he realizes it. But hopeless—that I can’t swallow. No, nobody is hopeless—not so long as there is a little sympathy and friendship left in the world. The case is hopeless, yes. But Max the man . . . no, I can’t see it! For Max the man there is still something to be done. There’s the next meal, for example, a clean shirt . . . a suit of clothes . . . a bath . . . a shave. Let’s not try to solve the case: let’s do only what’s necessary to do immediately. Boris is thinking along the same lines. Only differently. He’s saying aloud, just as though Max were not there—“Of course, you could give him money . . . but that won’t help . . .” And why not? I ask myself. Why not money? Why not food, clothing, shelter? Why not? Let’s start at the bottom, from the ground up.
“Of course,” Boris is saying, “if I had met him in Manila I could have done something for him. I could have given him work then . . .”
Manila! Jesus, that sounds grotesque to me! What the hell has Manila got to do with it? It’s like saying to a drowning man: “What a pity, what a pity! If you had only let me teach you how to swim!”
Everybody wants to right the world; nobody wants to help his neighbor. They want to make a man of you without taking your body into consideration. Its all cockeyed. And Boris is cockeyed too, asking him have you any relatives in America? I know that tack. That’s the social worker’s first question. Your age, your name and address, your occupation, your religion, and then, very innocent like—the nearest living relative,
please! As though you hadn’t been all over that ground yourself. As though you hadn’t said to yourself a thousand times—“I’ll die first! I’ll die rather than . . .” And they sit there blandly and ask for the secret name, the secret place of shame, and they will go there immediately and ring the doorbell and they will blurt out everything—while you sit at home trembling and sweating with humiliation.
Max is answering the question. Yes, he had a sister in New York. He doesn’t know any more where she is. She moved to Coney Island, that’s all he knows. Sure, he had no business to leave America. He was earning good money there. He was a presser and he belonged to the union. But when the slack season came and he sat in the park at Union Square he saw that he was nothing. They ride up on their proud horses and they shove you off the sidewalk. For what? For being out of work? Was it his fault . . . did he, Max, do anything against the government? It made him furious and bitter; it made him disgusted with himself. What right had they to lay their hands on him? What right had they to make him feel like a worm?
“I wanted to make something of myself,” he continues. “I wanted to do something else for a living—not work with my hands all the time. I thought maybe I could learn the French and become an interprète perhaps.”
Boris flashes me a look. I see that that struck home. The dream of the Jew—not to work with the hands! The move to Coney Island—another Jewish dream. From the Bronx to Coney Island! From one nightmare to another! Boris himself three times around the globe—but it’s always from the Bronx to Coney Island. Von Lemberg nach Amerika gehen! Yea, go! On, weary feet! On! On! No rest for you anywhere. No comfort. No end to toil and misery. Cursed you are and cursed you will remain. There is no hope! Why don’t you fling yourself into his arms? Why don’t you? Do you think I will mind? Are you ashamed? Ashamed of what? We know that you are cursed and we can do nothing for you. We pity you, one and all. The wandering Jew! You are face to face with your brother and you withhold the embrace. That is what I can’t forgive you for. Look at Max! He is almost your double! Three times around the globe and now you have met yourself face to face. How can you run away from him? Yesterday you were standing there like him, trembling, humiliated, a beaten dog. And now you stand there in a smoking jacket and your pockets are full to bursting. But you are the same man! You haven’t altered an iota, except to fill your pockets. Has he a relative in America? Have you a relative in America? Your mother, where is she now? Is she down there in the ghetto still? Is she still in that stinking little room you walked out of when you decided to make a man of yourself? At least you had the satisfaction of succeeding. You killed yourself in order to solve the problem. But if you hadn’t succeeded? What then? What if you were standing there now in Max’s shoes? Could we send you back to your mother? And what is Max saying? That if only he could find his sister he would throw his arms around her neck, he would work for her until his dying day, he would be her slave, her dog . . . He would work for you too, if you would only give him bread and a place to rest. You have nothing for him to do—I understand that. But can’t you create something for him to do? Go to Manila, if needs be. Start the racket all over again. But don’t ask Max to look for you in Manila three years ago. Max is here now, standing before you. Don’t you see him?
I turn to Max. “Supposing, Max, you had your choice . . . I mean suppose you could go wherever you like and start a new life . . . where would you go?”
It’s cruel to ask Max a question like that, but I can’t stand this hopelessness. Look here, Max, I’m running on, I want you to look at the world as if it belonged to you. Take a look at the map and put your finger on the spot you’d like to be in. What’s the use? What’s the use? you say. Why just this, that if you want to badly enough you can go anywhere in the world. Just by wanting it. Out of desperation you can accomplish what the millionaire is powerless to accomplish. The boat is waiting for you; the country is waiting for you; the job is waiting for you. All things await you if you can but believe it. I haven’t a cent, but I can help you to go anywhere you wish. I can go around with the hat and beg for you. Why not? It’s easier than if I were asking for myself. Where would you like to go—Jerusalem? Brazil? Just say the word, Max, and I’ll be off!
Max is electrified. He knows immediately where he’d like to go. And what’s more, he almost sees himself going. There’s just a little hitch—the money. Even that isn’t altogether impossible. How much does it take to get to the Argentine? A thousand francs? That’s not impossible . . . Max hesitates a moment. It’s his age now that worries him. Has he the strength for it? The moral strength to begin afresh? He’s forty-three now. He says it as if it were old age. (And Titian at ninety-seven just beginning to get a grip on himself, on his art!) Sound and solid he is in the flesh, despite the dent in the back of his skull where the sledge hammer came down on him. Bald yes, but muscles everywhere, the eyes still clear, the teeth . . . Ah, the teeth! He opens his mouth to show me the rotting stumps. Only the other day he had to go to the dentist—his gencives were terribly swollen. And do you know what the dentist said to him! Nervousness! Nothing but nervousness. That scared the life out of him. How should the dentist know that he, Max, was nervous?
Max is electrified. A little lump of courage is forming inside him. Teeth or no teeth, bald, nervous, cockeyed, rheumatic, spavined, what not—what matter? A place to go to, that’s the point. Not Jerusalem! The English won’t let any more Jews in—too many of them already. Jerusalem for the Jews! That was when they needed the Jews. Now you must have a good reason for going to Jerusalem—a better reason than just being a Jew. Christ Almighty, what a mockery! If I were a Jew I would tie a rope around my neck and throw myself overboard. Max is standing before me in the flesh. Max the Jew. Can’t get rid of him by tying a sinker around his neck and saying: “Jew, go drown yourself!”
I’m thinking desperately. Yes, if I were Max, if I were the beaten dog of a Jew that Max is . . . What then? Yeah, what? I can’t get anywhere imagining that I’m a Jew. I must imagine simply that I am a man, that I’m hungry, desperate, at the end of my tether.
“Listen, Boris, we’ve got to do something! Do something, do you understand?”
Boris is shrugging his shoulders. Where’s all that money going to come from? He’s asking me! Asking me where it’s going to come from. All that money. What money? A thousand francs . . . two thousand francs . . . is that money? And what about that dizzy American Jane who was here a few weeks ago? Not a drop of love she gave you, not the least sign of encouragement. Insulted you right and left—every day. And you handed it out to her. Handed it out like a Croesus. To that little gold-digging bitch of an American. Things like that make me wild, furiously wild. Wouldn’t have been so bad if she had been a plain whore. But she was worse than a whore. She bled you and insulted you. Called you a dirty Jew. And you went right on handing it out. It could happen again tomorrow, the same damned thing. Anybody can get it out of you if only they tickle your vanity, if only they flatter the pants off you. You died, you say, and you’ve been holding one long funeral ever since. But you’re not dead, and you know you’re not. What the hell does spiritual death matter when Max is standing before you? Die, die, die a thousand deaths—but don’t refuse to recognize the living man. Don’t make a problem of him. It’s flesh and blood, Boris. Flesh and blood. He’s screaming and you pretend not to hear. You are deliberately making yourself deaf, dumb and blind. You are dead before the living flesh. Dead before your own flesh and blood. You will gain nothing, neither in the spirit, nor in the flesh, if you do not recognize Max your true brother. Your books on the shelf there . . . they stink, your books! What do I care for your sick Nietzsche, for your pale, loving Christ, for your bleeding Dostoievski! Books, books, books. Burn them! They are of no use to you. Better never to have read a line than to stand now in your two shoes and helplessly shrug your shoulders. Everything Christ said is a lie, everything Nietzsche said is a lie, if you don’t recognize the word in the flesh. They were foul and lying and d
iseased if you can derive a sweet comfort from them and not see this man rotting away before your very eyes. Go, go to your books and bury yourself! Go back to your Middle Ages, to your Kabbala, to your hair-splitting, angel-twisting geometry. We need nothing of you. We need a breath of life. We need hope, courage, illusion. We need a penny’s worth of human sympathy.
We’re upstairs now in my place and the bath water is running. Max has stripped down to his dirty underwear; his shirt with the false front is lying over the armchair. Undressed he looks like a gnarled tree, a tree that has painfully learned to walk. The man of the sweat shop with his dickey slung over the armchair. The powerful body twisted by toil. From Lemberg to America, from the Bronx to Coney Island—hordes and hordes of them, broken, twisted, spavined, as though they had been stuck on a spit and the struggle useless because struggle or no struggle they will sooner or later be eaten alive. I see all these Maxes at Coney Island on a Sunday afternoon: miles and miles of clear beach polluted with their broken bodies. They make a sewer of their own sweat and they bathe in it. They lie on the beach, one on top of the other, entangled like crabs and seaweed. Behind the beach they throw up their ready-made shacks, the combination bath, toilet and kitchen which serves as a home. At six o’clock the alarm goes off; at seven they’re in the subway elbow to elbow, and the stench is powerful enough to knock a horse down.
While Max is taking his bath I lay out some clean things for him. I lay out the suit that was given to me, the suit which is too big for me and which he will thank me for profusely. I lie down to think things over calmly. The next move? We were all going to have dinner together over in the Jewish quarter, near St. Paul. Then suddenly Boris changed his mind. He remembered an engagement he had made for dinner. I wangled a little change out of him for dinner. Then, as we were parting, he handed Max a little dough. “Here, Max, I want you to take this,” he said, fishing it out of his jeans. It made me wince to hear him say that—and to hear Max thanking him profusely. I know Boris. I know this is his worst side. And I forgive him for it. I forgive him easier than I can forgive myself. I don’t want it to be thought that Boris is mean and hard-hearted. He looks after his relatives, he pays his debts, he cheats nobody. If he happens to bankrupt a man he does it according to the rules; he’s no worse than a Morgan or a Rockefeller. He plays the game, as they say. But life, life he doesn’t see as a game. He wins out in every sphere only to discover in the end that he’s cheated himself. With Max just now he won out handsomely. He got off by squeezing out a few francs for which he was handsomely thanked. Now that he’s alone with himself he’s probably cursing himself. Tonight he’ll spend twenty times what he gave Max, in order to wipe out his guilt.
The Henry Miller Reader Page 17