Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

  Dan discovered the wine bottle before him was empty and called to Barney to bring more wine. “Barney is my wine steward,” he explained to me with a twinkle.

  Barney rose, left with the solemnity of a man with a sacred trust. On that first visit, I was inclined to look on Barney as a comic character. But, later, when we got to be friends, I changed my idea considerably.

  Barney was a former prize fighter, a man of little mind, and that, bruised and battered. He had character of a sort but he could hardly be called a virtuous man. His code of ethics was, I’m afraid, elastic on occasions. He won a middleweight championship by a tactic considered by him to be completely honorable, but considered so, I’m afraid, by him alone. Five minutes before the main bout in which Barney was to challenge the champion, he shuffled over to the champion’s dressing room. The champion was sitting relaxed on a rubbing table, his robe over his shoulders.

  Barney went to him, said, “Lo, Champ,” and straightway let him have all he had with a left and a right, knocking him back and down to the floor and out completely.

  “I laid him out like a rug,” Barney said, telling me the story later when we became friends.

  Barney went on into the ring and waited. The champion was fifteen minutes late arriving and he was still groggy. He had to show up because he could never admit that Barney had already knocked him out. (That, Barney explained, was the basic idea of his strategy.)

  “He came out goofy an’ I polished him off in de first like a buttered duck,” Barney told me.

  Later, in a return bout, the former champion polished Barney off, and for good. But Barney did not seem to mind. He had had his day.

  Barney was a grim man. He had no sense of humor whatsoever. His speech, oozing out of his battered mouth, was colorful in some ways but so monotoned was it and, most of the time, so mutilated that it was quite often unintelligible. But there was one thing sharp and clear about the punch drunk Barney, and that was his devotion to Dan. It was extraordinarily solemn and fanatical. Injury and death meant little to Barney in the ordinary course of life. But where Dan was concerned they meant nothing. He would, I am sure, have considered it a pleasure to maim or kill, even, for Dan’s sake, and as for himself dying for Dan, he would unquestionably have considered that a privilege.

  While Barney was gone for the wine, Dan extolled him to me, saying he was one of the few men in the modern world with a true sense of the value of loyalty. Dan put great store by loyalty. Character of any sort was to him far more important than intelligence or creative ability or charm. (Dan was a great believer in college athletics and, especially, football. The colleges no longer taught character, he said, nor even tried to, but athletics did, after a fashion, inspire a certain kind of heroism and could, on occasions, inspire honorableness. The loyalty of the students to a football team, though the team itself was entirely made up of obtuse and greedy mercenaries, could be, as Dan saw it, a vigorous exercise in character.) He spoke of Barney as if he were a warrior, a shining soul who carried a banner and carried it high.

  When Barney came back with two bottles of wine, one in each hand, it was hard for me at that moment to see in the pudgy hulk of the body and in the scarred coarseness of the face anything resembling a shining soul with a banner carried high. The picture Dan gave of him was, I felt sure, born of his determination to see in everybody what he would call the image of God.

  Barney set one bottle of wine down before Dan. The other he carried around the table, refilling glasses as he went. Archer, when Barney approached him, swiftly put his hand on top of his glass to signify he wished no more. He had still to finish his first glass. Archer was in all ways a cautious man. I learned later that he had his own lock put on the door of his room upstairs and that he had his windows barred against burglars. He was as wary as he was possessive.

  Dan noticed Archer’s abstemiousness. “We have another brand that’s a little lighter, if you’d like it, Justus.”

  Archer shook his head. “Enough’s enough.”

  Dan nodded. “I agree with you there, Justus, though I must say it’s a matter of temperament as to what constitutes enough. For me a little is never enough. For me, a little wine is like a twenty-minute cruise of the Caribbean or a ten-minute vacation in Palm Springs. None at all is far more satisfying.”

  Tim chuckled, amused at Dan’s illustrations. Archer gave the little gray man a cool, impersonal look. “I consider self-discipline to be good for a man,” he said levelly. “It makes him, among other things, more perceptive.”

  “Unquestionably,” Dan agreed. “And especially in your case, Justus, where writing is almost a religious rite. But as for me—” he held his glass of wine up to the light “—I’m afraid it’s a different story. Did I ever tell you how I became I realist?”

  Silence indicated he never had. He took a great drink of wine, laughed softly to himself.

  Chapter 8

  “It was in my youth,” Dan began, “when I used to pay more attention to what I saw in print than I do now. Reading Joseph Conrad’s letters, I was fascinated by the discipline he practiced, giving up meat and almost giving up eating, so as to sharpen the sensitivity of his writing. Now there, I said to myself, there is the way to become a wise and vivid writer. It did not occur to me at the time that Cervantes did not write so nor Balzac nor Horace nor Dante nor Marlowe nor Shakespeare nor many other writers I admired. Straightway, I decided I would sharpen the sensitivity of my writing. I would become more perceptive, as you would put it, Justus.”

  He drank and laughed to himself again. “I gave up meat and wine and practically stopped eating. I went to bed early and rose with the dawn when, we are told, all creative intelligences are most awake. I became a veritable Carthusian. And my discipline began to transform me. I developed the most extraordinary lucidity. My mind was soon like a darting beam of light and my senses became as alert to the physical world as the delicate glass bells in a Japanese garden are to the moods of the wind. I wrote stories, sensitive stories that the more exclusive of the magazines purchased. Critics proclaimed me. I was included in the fanciest of anthologies, especially those by editors who subscribed to Chekhov’s idea that a story to be good should have neither a beginning nor an end.

  “In fact, one anthologist who mistook the first part of a two-part story for the whole story (although, for that matter, the second half of my story had very little finality to it, either), praised me effusively because, he said, I had made no effort to cater to public taste, having left the end of the story up in the air, where it belonged, soaring off into the realm of wider significances.

  “I realized now I was no longer writing for the self-indulgent masses but only for the superior, self-sufficient few who, in the clarity of their intellects, could see my stories soaring off into the realm of wider significances.

  “What happened to me was quite radical. Before my reformation, when I should have been diffuse and slovenly from meat and wine, I had always tried to tell a complete story. I believed what the mad Nietzsche had so sanely said, ‘Anyone can make a beginning, only a genius can make an end.’ I knew I was no genius but I had always striven to make an end. Now, I was no longer interested in making an end. I was no longer interested in design.

  “What had happened, of course, was that my particular form of asceticism had made me a decadent. In Paul Bourget’s description, a decadent writer is one who cares more for the chapter than the book, more for the page than the chapter, more for the paragraph than the page, more for the sentence than the paragraph, and, finally, more for the phrase and words than the sentence. And that is what I had become exactly. I could no longer see the story for the words. I had finally become that worst of all decadents—the realist.”

  Dan stared into his wine, shaking his head in unbelief as he recalled the man he once had been. “I began to be word conscious. I shied from adjectives as if they were poisons. I gave up adverbs almost completely. I became a thin, sharp noun-and-verb man. And my life changed accordi
ngly. I began to live a noun-and-verb life. I began to be very good at arithmetic. I became a fanatic for incisiveness in speech and manners. I spent hours checking my bank account. For the first time in my life, I began to worry about money and the threat of destitution in my old age. I took out insurance on everything from my life to the hedge in the back yard. Then, I took out insurance to protect that insurance in the event the day came when I could not pay the premiums.”

  Dan refilled his glass with wine. “It was an extraordinary experience. Life grew to be more and more complicated. I became a slave to detail, a fusser over food, and a fanatic for an orderly desk. The thought of unanswered mail began to torment me. All sorts of things became problems to me that had never been problems before. I worried about my figure and became concerned about the length of my life, and went on an even more rigid diet. I worried about my posture and my vision and my hearing and the fuzz on my tongue. The spots I had always had before my eyes now swirled before me like a flock of sea gulls over a fishing boat.”

  He sipped his wine meditatively. “My stories began to appear in more and more anthologies and to win more and more acclaim. From the critics, I mean. I was likened, in my style, to winter sunlight. This pleased me no end. I began to live in a world of winter sunlight, looking down with abhorrence on the flaming colors of a Francis Thompson or the raptures of the Psalmist. The thought of the excesses and exuberancies of Shakespeare distressed me. How the emotionalists, as I called them, from St. Augustine to Villon had managed to survive was a mystery that I planned one jay to investigate and expose.

  “I began to see all sorts of weaknesses and inferiorities in my friends. In a short time, indeed, it was hard for me to meditate on any one of them without suspicion. I developed toward them a cool charity of toleration of which I was very proud. Life began to be logical and completely comprehensible. I took to looking in the mirror and admiring myself. I compared myself to some metal that was being tempered. I thought of changing my name to Steel, as other egomaniacs had done. All the totalitarian despots had been, I remembered, writers, and realistic writers, too. Where, asked my growing ego, would this superiority of mine end? In my vigorous walks in the challenging dawn, I permitted myself glimpses of a possible—an incredibly audacious future. I was master of myself. With that, I said, begins the mastery of others.”

  Dan mused a grave moment. “God knows where I might have ended. I tremble now when I think how close I came to losing my soul. But salvation came, and from a strange source—the insurance companies. I abhor insurance companies as the creators of fear, but in my case, I must give them credit. In the days of my decadence, they came to my rescue.” He smiled around the table at us. “It so happened that the time came when I, superior though I was, could not meet the premiums on my insurance policies. The intellectual magazines paid little for my stories and the anthologies paid nothing at all. This underpayment and nonpayment I did not object to. I considered them part of the penalty of my superiority. But the insurance company made no distinction between superior and inferior persons. The notices of premiums due went inexorably to all. They came inexorably to me.

  “In my new lucidity, I was deeply annoyed. First, I had to drop the insurance policy that protected my policies. Then I had to drop all of those precious policies that protected me against fire, theft, burglary, robbery, breakage, injury, sickness, earthquakes, erosion, termites, loss of one eye, loss of two eyes, deafness, loss of one hand, loss of two hands, water damage, wind damage, loss of one leg, loss of two legs, and so on and on to death. It was the protection against death that I hated most to give up. With that gone, I felt helpless and abandoned, like the savage who believes he will not see paradise unless he is buried with bread and meat for the journey after death.

  “The agent who had sold me the insurance wrote me letters of warning, then letters of pleading, and then finally called on me himself. Howard was his name, and he was a very superior man indeed. Young though he was, he was already one of the leading insurance men in New England. Slender, athletic, forceful, alert, lucid, he pinned me to the wall and pierced me at a hundred points with his rapier mind. Insurance, he said, was not merely something that gave you peace of mind and kept you from a pauper’s grave. More than that, it was an expression of a man’s manhood, a defense of man’s dignity. When one was young and had his health, he could hold off the world. But come the older years and weariness and illness and inadequacy, and ultimately death, that’s when insurance is father, mother, nurse, friend, and undertaker. The cash value, the loan value, the endowment opportunities of a policy—the simple idea, indeed, of the existence of a policy—assured one of a happy and independent life. How many more good and generous friends had a man with a large insurance policy, he said, than a man with a small policy or a man, unthinkable though it was, with no policy at all. Being insured, he maintained with some eloquence, gave a man a feeling of security that no amount of religion could. It was, briefly, the only sure investment in happiness and self-respect obtainable by man.

  “Well—the lucid arguments appealed enormously to me, as they had before. It was not that I had given up the philosophy that made me buy insurance in the first place. It was merely that I had no money to continue paying my premiums. Thus I fell from dignity and manhood and became one of the unthinkables, the poor creature with no policy at all.

  “Howard was disappointed in me, I know. He seemed to be of the opinion I should sell the house, my books, even my clothes, rather than let my policies go. Sad was the parting between us. I can still see in his solemn eyes as he left, his fear for my unsupported future, his sympathy for the sufferings of my poor, sickly, unattended old age and my dismal demise and burial.”

  Dan drank slowly of his wine. “Howard left here in the afternoon about five o’clock. In the papers, the next day, I read where he was no more. He had gone to bed early that night, after his usual light dinner of milk and crackers and after his customary walk around the block, and had, to use the old expression, ‘woke up dead.’

  “I went to the funeral services at the mortuary. There were not many mourners, not many certainly for so promising and persuasive a man. The lack of mourners made me quite sure that Howard, if his own arguments were correct, had not left much insurance himself. Also, the casket and the trappings were plain and conventional. I didn’t object to this. Next to an ordinary wooden or tin box, the best casket for me, and equally agreeable to the worms, I’m sure, is the cheapest and plainest that money can buy. But they were not to be expected in Howard’s case. One of his best arguments for insurance was what he called ‘the assurance of a felicitous funeral and a fitting interment.’

  “Howard’s funeral made a great impression on me. I was glad he had not invested too much money in his old age. I was so glad, indeed, that on the way home from the funeral I stopped at Dave’s Delicatessen and bought a round of Bel Paesi cheese. At home, Henry found a bottle of wine which he, in his wisdom, had hidden away in the cellar against the day when I recovered my humanity, and we sat down and between us finished the wine and the cheese. We had much music and singing, and that night I felt foolishly happy for the first time since reading the Conrad letters. I was normal again. The next morning I tried my hand at writing crime stories, and I have been trying my hand at them ever since. I must say I find much that is human and Christian in a crime story, for a crime story is a problem in ethics and not in aesthetics, and that, after my noun-and-verb days, I look on as a blessing.”

  He turned to Archer. “Now, please, Justus, don’t misunderstand my story. Realism is not inevitably decadent. Vegetarianism and a starvation diet do not always result in pathological self-awareness. Nor does egomaniacal self-discipline of necessity produce abnormal meticulousness and the loss of the common touch. With me, it was mostly masochistic. My self-discipline was just another form of self-indulgence. With you, it is part of your dedication to a higher life. Out of your asceticism will come, I know, beautiful things. What poem is there more warm a
nd more lovely than St. Francis’ ‘Canticle of the Sun’? And where in literature is there any prose more passionately beautiful than that of St. John of the Cross in his ‘Prayer of the Enamored Soul’? And who were more ascetical than they?”

  Dan then recited the last two paragraphs of the prayer of St. John of the Cross, beginning with the passage, “The heavens are mine, the earth is mine, and the nations are mine; mine are the just, and the sinners are mine; mine are the angels, the Mother of God, and all things are mine: God himself is mine and for me, because Christ is mine, and all for me. What dost thou, then, ask for, what dost thou seek for, O my soul? All is thine, all is for thee, do not take less, nor rest with the crumbs which fall from the table of thy Father. Go forth and exult in thy glory, hide thyself in it, and rejoice and thou shalt obtain all of the desires of thy heart.”

  Dan recited the prayer with a low, passionate sincerity which carried an inescapable conviction of its own. “O sweetest love of God, too little known!” he went on. “He who has found thee is at rest. Let everything be changed, O my God, that we may rest in Thee.”

  And then, when finally, after the fervid beauty of the final sentences he came to the last sentence of all, that strangely sober, almost matter-of-fact but still profoundly pathetic and moving plea, “O Lord, I beseech Thee, leave me not for a moment, because I know not the value of my soul,” his voice was a whisper and in that whisper there was unmistakable pathos.

  “O Lord, I beseech Thee, leave me not for a moment, because I know not the value of my soul.”

  The words seemed to echo in the room for a moment. Then there was the deepest of silences. The only sound was the drip of the spring rain outside. All of us seemed to have taken on an importance immensely above and beyond us, as if, perhaps, for those few moments we somehow had a deep perception of the value of our souls.