rful therapeutic effect upon me, these catastrophes which I
proof-read. Imagine a state of perfect immunity, a charmed existence, a life
of absolute security in the midst of poison bacilli. Nothing touches me,
neither earthquakes nor explosions nor riots nor famine nor collisions nor
wars nor revolutions. I am inoculated against every disease, every calamity,
every sorrow and misery. It's the culmination of a life of fortitude. Seated
at my little niche all the poisons which the world gives off each day pass
through my hands. Not even a finger-nail gets stained. I am absolutely
immune. I am even better off than a laboratory attendant, because there are
no bad odors here, just the smell of lead burning. The world can blow
up -- I'll be here just the same to put in a comma or a semi-colon. I may even
touch a little overtime, for with an event like that there's bound to be a
final extra. When the world blows up and the final edition has gone to press
the proof-readers will quietly gather up all commas, semi-colons, hyphens,
asterisks, brackets, parentheses, periods, exclamation marks, etc., and put
them in a little box over the editorial chair. Comme, ca tout est regle
...
None of my companions seem to understand why I appear so contented. They
grumble all the time, they have ambitions, they want to show their pride and
spleen. A good proof-reader has no ambitions, no pride, no spleen. A good
proof-reader is a little like God Almighty, he's in the world but not of it.
He's for Sundays only. Sunday is his night off. On Sundays he steps down from
his pedestal and shows his ass to the faithful. Once a week he listens in on
all the private grief and misery of the world; it's enough to last him for
the rest of the week. The rest of the week he remains in the frozen winter
marshes, an absolute, an impeccable absolute, with only a vaccination mark to
distinguish him from the immense void.
The greatest calamity for a proof-reader is the threat of losing his job.
When we get together in the break the question that sends a shiver down our
spines is: what'll you do if you lose your job? For the man in the paddock,
whose duty it is to sweep up the manure, the supreme terror is the
possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to
spend one's life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can
get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is
involved.
This life which, if I were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so
forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degradation, I welcome now, as an
invalid welcomes death. It's a negative reality, just like death -- a sort of
heaven without the pain and terror of dying. In this chthonian world the
only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter
what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.
Everything is on one level, whether it be the latest fashion for evening
gowns, a new battleship, a plague, a high explosive, an astronomic
discovery, a bank run, a railroad wreck, a bull market, a hundred to one
shot, an execution, a stick-up, an assassination, or what. Nothing escapes
the proofreader's eye, but nothing penetrates his bullet-proof vest. To the
Hindoo Agha Mir, Madame Scheer (formerly Miss Esteve) writes saying she is
quite satisfied with his work. "I was married June 6th and I thank you. We
are very happy and I hope that thanks to your power it will be so forever. I
am sending you by telegraph money order the sum of ... to reward you ..."
The Hindoo Agha Mir foretells your future and reads all your thoughts in a
precise and inexplicable way. He will advise you, will help you rid
yourself of all your worries and troubles of all kinds, etc. Call or
write 20 Avenue Mac-Mahon, Paris.
He reads all your thoughts in a marvellous way! I take it, that means
without exception, from the most trivial thoughts to the most shameless. He
must have a lot of time on his hands, this Agha Mir. Or does he only
concentrate on the thoughts of those who send money by telegraph money
order? In the same edition I notice a headline announcing that "the universe
is expanding so fast it may burst" and underneath it is the photograph of a
splitting headache. And then there is a spiel about the pearl, signed Tecla.
The oyster produces both, he informs all and sundry. Both the "wild" or
Oriental pearl, and the "cultured" pearl. On the same day, at the Cathedral
of Trier, the Germans are exhibiting the Coat of Christ; it's the first time
it's been taken out of the moth-balls in forty-two years. Nothing said about
the pants and vest. In Salzburg, also the same day, two mice were born in a
man's stomach, believe it or not. A famous movie actress is shown with her
legs crossed: she is taking a rest in Hyde Park, and underneath a well-known
painter remarks "I'll admit that Mrs. Coolidge has such charm and
personality that she would have been one of the 12 famous Americans, even
had her husband not been President." From an interview with Mr. Humhal, of
Vienna, I glean the following ... "Before I stop," said Mr. Humhal, "I'd
like to say that faultless cut and fit does not suffice; the proof of good
tailoring is seen in the wearing. A suit must bend to the body, yet keep its
line when the wearer is walking or sitting." And whenever there is an
explosion in a coal mine -- a British coal mine -- notice please that the
King and Queen always send their condolences promptly, by telegraph.
And they always attend the important races, though the other day, according
to the copy, it was at the Derby, I believe, "heavy rains began to fall,
much to the surprise of the King and Queen." More heartrending, however, is
an item like this: "It is claimed in Italy that the persecutions are not
against the Church, but nevertheless they are conducted against the most
exquisite parts of the Church. It is claimed that they are not against the
Pope, but they are against the very heart and eyes of the Pope."
I had to travel precisely all around the world to find just such a
comfortable, agreeable niche as this. It seems incredible almost. How could I
have foreseen, in America, with all those firecrackers they put up your ass
to give you pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my
temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes? Over there you think of
nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially
every man is presidential timber. Here it's different. Here every man is
potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a
miracle. The chances are a thousand to one that you will never leave your
native village. The chances are a thousand to one that you'll have your legs
shot off or your eyes blown out. Unless the miracle happens and you find
yourself a general or a rear-admiral.
But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is
so little hope, that life is sweet over here. Day by day. No yesterdays and
no tomorrows. The barometer never changes, the flag is always at halfmast.
You wear a piece of black crape on your arm, you have a little ribbon in
your button-hole, and, if you are lucky enough to afford it, you buy
yourself a pair of artificial light-weight limbs, aluminium preferably.
Which does not prevent you from enjoying an aperitif or looking at
the animals in the zoo or flirting with the vultures who sail up and down
the boulevards always on the alert for fresh carrion. Time passes. If you're
a stranger and your papers are in order you can expose yourself to infection
without fear of being contaminated. It is better, if possible, to have a
proof-reader's job. Comme ca, tout s'arrange. That means, that if you
happen to be strolling home at three in the morning and you are intercepted
by the bicycle cops, you can snap your fingers at them. In the morning,
when the market is in swing, you can buy Belgian eggs, at fifty centimes a
piece. A proof-reader doesn't get up usually until noon, or a little after.
It's well to choose a hotel near a cinema, because if you have a tendency to
oversleep the bells will wake you up in time for the matinee. Or if you can't
find a hotel near a cinema, choose one near a cemetery, it comes to the same
thing. Above all, never despair. Il ne faut jamais desesperer.
Which is what I try to din into Carl and Van Norden every night. A world
without hope, but no despair. It's as though I had been converted to a new
religion, as though I were making an annual novena every night to Our Lady of
Solace. I can't imagine what there would be to gain if I were made editor of
the paper, or even President of the United States. I'm up a blind alley, and
it's cosy and comfortable. With a piece of copy in my hand I listen to the
music around me, the hum and drone of voices, the tinkle of the linotype
machines, as if there were a thousand silver bracelets passing through a
wringer; now and then a rat scurries past our feet or a cockroach descends
the wall in front of us, moving nimbly and gingerly on his delicate legs. The
events of the day are slid under your nose, quietly, unostentatiously, with,
now and then, a by-line to mark the presence of a human hand, an ego, a touch
of vanity. The procession passes serenely, like a cortege entering the
cemetery gates. The paper under the copy desk is so thick that it almost
feels like a carpet with a soft nap. Under Van Norden's desk it is stained
with brown juice. Around eleven o'clock the peanut vendor arrives, a half-wit
of an Armenian who is also content with his lot in life.
Now and then I get a cablegram from Mona saying that she's arriving on me
next boat. "Letter following," it always says. It's been going on like this
for nine months, but I never see her name in the list of boat arrivals, nor
does the garcon ever bring me a letter on a silver platter. I haven't
any more expectations in that direction either. If she ever does arrive she
can look for me downstairs, just behind the lavatory. She'll probably tell
me right away that it's unsanitary. That's the first thing that strikes an
American woman about Europe -- that it's unsanitary. Impossible for them to
conceive of a Paradise without modern plumbing. If they find a bed-bug they
want to write a letter immediately to the Chamber of Commerce. How am I ever
going to explain to her that I'm contented here? She'll say I've become a
degenerate. I know her line from beginning to end. She'll want to look for a
studio with a garden attached -- and a bath-tub to be sure. She wants to be
poor in a romantic way. I know her. But I'm prepared for her this time.
There are days, nevertheless, when the sun is out and I get off the beaten
path and think about her hungrily. Now and then, despite my grim
satisfaction, I get to thinking about another way of life, get to wondering
if it would make a difference having a young, restless creature by my side.
The trouble is I can hardly remember what she looks like, nor even how it
feels to have my arms around her. Everything that belongs to the past seems
to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their
vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time-bitten mummies stuck in a
quagmire. If I try to recall my life in New York I get a few splintered
fragments, nightmarish and covered with verdigris. It seems as if my own
proper existence had come to an end somewhere, just where exactly I can't
make out. I'm not an American any more, nor a New Yorker, and even less a
European, or a Parisian. I haven't any allegiance, any responsibilities, any
hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I'm neither for nor
against. I'm neutral.
When we walk home of a night, the three of us, it often happens after the
first spasms of disgust that we get to talking about the condition of things
with the enthusiasm which only those who bear no active part in life can
muster. What seems strange to me sometimes, when I crawl into bed, is that
all this enthusiasm is engendered just to kill time, just to
annihilate the three-quarters of an hour which it requires to walk from the
office to Montparnasse. We might have the most brilliant, the most feasible
ideas for the amelioration of this or that, but there is no vehicle to hitch
them to. And what is more strange is that the absence of any relationship
between ideas and living causes us no anguish, no discomfort. We have become
so adjusted that, if tomorrow we were ordered to walk on our hands, we
would do so without the slightest protest. Provided, of course, that the
paper came out as usual. And that we touched our pay regularly. Otherwise
nothing matters. Nothing. We have become Orientalized. We have become
coolies, white collar coolies, silenced by a handful of rice each day. A
special feature in American skulls, I was reading the other day, is the
presence of the epactal bone, or os Incae, in the occiput. The
presence of this bone, so the savant went on to say, is due to a
persistence of the transverse occiputal suture which is usually closed in
foetal life. Hence it is a sign of arrested development and indicative of an
inferior race. "The average cubical capacity of
the American skull," so he went on to say, "falls below that of the white,
and rises above that of the black race. Taking both sexes, the Parisians of
to-day have a cranial capacity of 1.448 cubic centimeters; the Negroes 1.344
centimeters: the American Indians 1.376." From all of which I deduce nothing
because I am an American and not an Indian. But it's cute to explain things
that way, by a bone, an os Incae, for example. It doesn't disturb his
theory at all to admit that single examples of Indian skulls have yielded
the extraordinary capacity of 1.920 cubic centimeters, a cranial capacity
not exceeded in any other race. What I note with satisfaction is that the
Parisians, of both sexes, seem to have a normal cranial capacity. The
transverse occiputal suture is evidently not so persistent with them. They
know how to enjoy an aperitif and they don't worry if the houses are
unpainted. There's nothing extraordinary about their skulls, so far as
cranial indices go. There must be some other explanation for the art of
living which they have brought to such a degree of perfection.
At Monsieur Paul's, the bistrot across the way, there is a back room
reserved for the newspapermen where we can eat on credit. It is a pleasant
little room with saw-dust on the floor and flies in season and out. When I
say that it is reserved for the newspapermen I don't mean to imply that we
eat in privacy; on the contrary, it means that we have the privilege of
associating with the whores and pimps who form the more substantial element
of Monsieur Paul's clientele. The arrangement suits the guys upstairs to a
T, because they're always on the look-out for tail, and even those who have
a steady little French girl are not averse to making a switch now and then.
The principal thing is not to get a dose; at times it would seem as if an
epidemic had swept the office, or perhaps it might be explained by the fact
that they all sleep with the same woman. Anyhow, it's gratifying to observe
how miserable they can look when they are obliged to sit beside a pimp who,
despite the little hardships of his profession, lives a life of luxury by
comparison.
I'm thinking particularly now of one tall, blonde fellow who delivers the
Havas messages by bicycle. He is always a little late for his meal, always
perspiring profusely and his face covered with grime. He has a fine, awkward
way of strolling in, saluting everybody with two fingers and making a bee
line for the sink which is just between the toilet and the kitchen. As he
wipes his face he gives the edibles a quick inspection; if he sees a nice
steak lying on the slab he picks it up and sniffs it, or he will dip the
ladle into the big pot and try a mouthful of soup. He's like a fine
bloodhound, his nose to the ground all the time. The preliminaries over,
having made pipi and blown his nose vigorously, he walks nonchalantly over to
his wench and gives her a big, smacking kiss together with an affectionate
pat on the rump. Her, the wench, I've never seen look anything but immaculate
-- even at three a.m., after an evening's work. She looks exactly as if she
had just stepped out of a Turkish Bath. It's a pleasure to look at such
healthy brutes, to see such repose, such affection, such appetite as they
display. It's the evening meal I'm speaking of now, the little snack that she
takes before entering upon her duties. In a little while she will be obliged
to take leave of her big blonde brute, to flop somewhere on the boulevard and
sip her digestif. If the job is irksome or wearing or exhaustive, she
certainly doesn't show it. When the big fellow arrives, hungry as a wolf, she
puts her arms around him and kisses him hungrily -- his eyes, nose, cheeks,
hair, the back of his neck ... she'd kiss his ass if it could be done
publicly. She's grateful to him, that's evident. She's no wage-slave. All
through the meal she laughs convulsively. You wouldn't think she had a care
in the world. And now and then, by way of affection, she gives him a
resounding slap in the face, such a whack as would knock a proofreader
spinning.
They don't seem to be aware of anything but themselves and the food that
they pack away in shovelsful. Such perfect contentment, such harmony, such
mutual understanding, it drives Van Norden crazy to watch them. Especially
when she slips her hand in the big fellow's fly and caresses it, to which he
generally responds by grabbing her teat and squeezing it playfully.
There is another couple who arrive usually about the same time and they
behave just like two married people.
They have their spats, they wash their linen in public and after they've
made things disagreeable for themselves and everybody else, after threats
and curses and reproaches and recriminations, they make up for it by billing
and cooing, just like a pair of turtle doves. Lucienne, as he calls her, is
a heavy, platinum blonde with a cruel, saturnine air. She has a full
under-lip which she chews venomously when her temper runs away with her.
And a cold, beady eye, a sort of faded china blue, which makes him sweat
when she fixes him with it. But she's a good sort, Lucienne, despite the
condor-like profile which she presents to us when the squabbling begins.
Her bag is always full of dough, and if she deals it out cautiously, it is
only because she doesn't want to encourage him in his bad habits. He has a
weak character; that is, if one takes Lucienne's tirades seriously. He will
spend fifty francs of an evening while waiting for her to get through. When
the waitress comes to take his order he has no appetite. "Ah, you're not
hungry again!" growls Lucienne. "Humpf! You were waiting for me, I suppose,
on the Faubourg Montmartre. You had a good time, I hope, while I slaved for
you. Speak, imbecile, where were you?"
When she flares up like that, when she gets enraged, he looks up at her
timidly and then, as if he had decided that silence was the best course, he
lets his head drop and he fiddles with his napkin. But this little gesture,
which she knows so well and which of course is secretly pleasing to her
because she is convinced now that he is guilty, only increases Lucienne's
anger. "Speak, imbecile!" she shrieks. And with a squeaky, timid
little voice he explains to her woefully that while waiting for her he got
so hungry that he was obliged to stop off for a sandwich and glass of beer.
It was just enough to ruin his appetite -- he says it dolefully, though it's
apparent that food just now is the least of his worries. "But" -- and he tries
to make his voice sound more convincing -- "I was waiting for you all the
time," he blurts out.
"Liar!" she screams. "Liar! Ah, fortunately, I too am a liar ... a good
liar. You make me ill with your petty little lies. Why don't you tell me
a big lie?"
He hangs his head again and absent-mindedly he gathers a few crumbs and
puts them to his mouth. Whereupon she slaps his hand. "Don't do that! You
make me tired. You're such an imbecile. Liar! Just you wait! I have more to
say. I am a liar too, but I am not an imbecile."
In a little while, however, they are sitting close together, their hands
locked, and she is murmuring softly:
"Ah, my little rabbit, it is hard to leave you now. Come here, kiss me! What
are you going to do this evening? Tell me the truth, my little one ... I am
sorry that I have such an ugly temper." He kisses her timidly, just like a
little bunny with long pink ears; gives her a little peck on the lips as if
he were nibbling a cabbage leaf. And at the same time his bright round eyes
fall caressingly on her purse which is lying open beside her on the bench.
He is only waiting for the moment when he can graciously give her the slip;
he is itching to get away, to sit down in some quiet cafe on the Rue du
Faubourg-Montmartre.
I know him, the innocent little devil, with his round, frightened eyes of a
rabbit. And I know what a devil's street is the Faubourg Montmartre with its
brass plates and rubber goods, the lights twinkling all night and sex
running through the street like a sewer. To walk from the Rue Lafayette to
the boulevard is like running the gauntlet; they attach themselves to you
like barnacles, they eat into you like ants, they coax, wheedle, cajole,
implore, beseech, they try it out in German, English, Spanish, they show
you their torn hearts and their busted shoes, and long after you've chopped
the tentacles away, long after the fizz and sizzle has died out, the
fragrance of the lavabo clings to your nostrils -- it is the odor of
the Parfum de Danse whose effectiveness is guaranteed only for
a distance of twenty centimeters. One could piss away a whole lifetime in
that little stretch between the boulevard and the Rue Lafayette. Every bar
is alive, throbbing, the dice loaded; the cashiers are perched like vultures
on their high stools and the money they handle has a human stink to it.
There is no equivalent in the Banque de France for the blood money that
passes currency here, the money that glistens with human sweat, that passes
like a forest fire from hand to hand and leaves behind it a smoke and
stench. A man who can walk through the Faubourg Montmartre at night without
panting or sweating, without a prayer or a curse on his
lips, a man like that has no balls, and if he has, then he ought to be
castrated.
Supposing the timid little rabbit does spend fifty francs of an evening
while waiting for his Lucienne? Supposing he does get hungry and buy a
sandwich and a glass of beer, or stop and chat with somebody else's trollop?
You think he ought to be weary of that round night after night? You think it
ought to weigh on him, oppress him, bore him to death? You don't think that
a pimp is inhuman, I hope? A pimp has his private grief and misery too,
don't you forget. Perhaps he would like nothing better than to stand on the
corner every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them piddle. Perhaps
he would like it if, when he opened the door, he would see her there reading
the Paris-Soir, her eyes already a little heavy with sleep. Perhaps
it isn't so wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste another
man's breath. Better maybe to have only three francs in your pocket and a
pair of white dogs that piddle on the corner than to taste those bruised
lips. Bet you, when she squeezes him tight, when she begs for that little
package of love which only he knows how to deliver, bet you he fights like a
thousand devils to pump it up, to wipe out that regiment that has marched
between her legs. Maybe when he takes her body and practises a new tune,
maybe it isn't all passion and curiosity with him, but a fight in the dark,
a fight singlehanded against the army that rushed the gates, the army that
walked over her, trampled her, that left her with such a devouring hunger
that not even a Rudolph Valentine could appease her. When I listen to the
reproaches that are levelled against a girl like Lucienne, when I hear her
being denigrated or despised because she is cold and mercenary, because she
is too mechanical, or because she's in too great a hurry, or because this or
because that, I say to myself, hold on there bozo, not so fast! Remember
that you're far back in the procession; remember that a whole army corps
has laid siege to her, that she's been laid waste, plundered and pillaged. I
say to myself, listen, bozo, don't begrudge the fifty francs you hand her
because you know her pimp is pissing it away in the Faubourg Montmartre.
It's her money and her pimp. It's blood money. It's money
that'll never be taken out of circulation because there's nothing in the
Banque de Prance to redeem it with.
That's how I think about it often when I'm seated in my little niche
juggling the Havas reports or untangling the cables from Chicago, London,
and Montreal. In between the rubber and silk markets and the Winnipeg
grains there oozes a little of the fizz and sizzle of the Faubourg
Montmartre. When the bonds go weak and spongy and the pivotals balk and the
volatiles effervesce, when the grain market slips and slides and the bulls
commence to roar, when every fucking calamity, every ad, every sport item
and fashion article, every boat arrival, every travelogue, every tag of
gossip has been punctuated, checked, revised, pegged and wrung through the
silver bracelets, when I hear the front page being hammered into whack and
see the frogs dancing around like drunken squibs, I think of Lucienne
sailing down the boulevard with her wings outstretched, a huge silver condor
suspended over the sluggish tide of traffic, a strange bird from the tips
of the Andes with a rose-white belly and a tenacious little knob. Sometimes
I walk home alone and I follow her through the dark streets, follow her
through the court of the Louvre, over the Pont des Arts, through the arcade,
through the fents and slits, the somnolence, the drugged whiteness, the
grill of the Luxembourg, the tangled boughs, the snores and groans, the
green slats, the strum and tinkle, the points of the stars, the spangles,
the jetties, the blue and white striped awnings that she brushed with the
tips of her wings.
In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled;
along the beach at Montpamasse the waterlilies bend and break. When the tide
is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the
muck, the Dome looks like a shooting gallery that's been struck by a
cyclone. Everything is slowly dribbling back to the sewer. For about an hour
there is a death-like calm during which the vomit is mopped up. Suddenly the
trees begin to screech. From one end of the boulevard to the other a
demented song rises up. It is like the signal that announces the close of
the exchange. What hopes there were are swept up. The moment has come to
void the last bagful of usine. The day is sneaking in like a leper ...
One of the things to guard against when you work nights is not to break your
schedule; if you don't get to bed before the birds begin to screech it's
useless to go to bed at all. This morning, having nothing better to do, I
visited the Jardin des Plantes. Marvellous pelicans here from
Chapultepec and peacocks with studded fans that look at you with silly eyes.
Suddenly it began to rain.
Returning to Montpamasse in the bus I noticed a little French woman opposite
me who sat stiff and erect as if she were getting ready to preen herself.
She sat on the edge of the seat as if she feared to crush her gorgeous tail.
Marvellous, I thought, if suddenly she shook herself and from her
derriere there sprung open a huge studded fan with long silken
plumes.
At the Cafe de l'Avenue, where I stop for a bite, a woman with a swollen
stomach tries to interest me in her condition. She would like me to go to a
room with her and while away an hour or two. It is the first time I have
ever been propositioned by a pregnant woman: I am almost tempted to try it.
As soon as the baby is born and handed over to the authorities she will go
back to her trade, she says. She makes hats. Observing that my interest is
waning she takes my hand and puts it on her abdomen, I feel something
stirring inside. It takes my appetite away.
I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender. As
soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the
loose. In America she'd starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her
but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away
or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of a
female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded
appetites of the male.
I am speaking naturally of that world, which is peculiar to the big cities,
the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by
the machine -- the martyrs of modern progress. It is this mass of bones and
collar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh on.
It is only later, in the afternoon, when I find myself in an art gallery on
the Rue de Seze, surrounded by the men and women of Matisse, that I am drawn
back again to the proper precincts of the human world. On the threshold of
that big hall whose walls are now ablaze, I pause a moment to recover from
the shock which one experiences when the habitual gray of the world is rent
asunder and the color of life splashes forth in song and poem. I find myself
in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost. I have the sensation of
being immersed in the very plexus of life, focal from whatever place,
position or attitude I take my stance. Lost as when once I sank into the
quick of a budding grove and seated in the dining room of that enormous
world of Balbec, I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those
interior stills which manifest their presence through the exorcism of sight
and touch. Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created
I re-experienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to
so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are
sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the
negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of
art. Only those who can admit the light into their gizzards can translate
what is there in the heart. Vividly now I recall how the glint and sparkle
of light caroming from the massive chandeliers splintered and ran blood,
flecking the tips of the waves that beat monotonously on the dull gold
outside the windows. On the beach, masts and chimneys interlaced, and like a
fuliginous shadow the figure of Albertine gliding through the surf, fusing
into the mysterious quick and prism of a protoplasmic realm, uniting her
shadow to the dream and harbinger of death. With the close of day, pain
rising like a mist from the earth, sorrow closing in, shuttering the endless
vista of sea and sky. Two waxen hands lying lifelessly on the bedspread and
along the pale veins the fluted murmur of a shell repeating the legend of
its birth.
In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle of human flesh
which refused the consummation of death. The whole run of flesh, from hair
to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its
thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into
hungry seeing mouths. By whatever vision one passes there is the odor and the
sound of voyage. It is impossible to gaze at even a corner of his dreams
without feeling the lift of the wave and the cool of the flying spray. He
stands at the helm peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio, of time.
Into what distant corners has he not thrown his long, slanting gaze? Looking
down the vast promontory of his nose he has beheld everything -- the
Cordilleras falling away into the Pacific, the history of the diaspora done
in vellum, shutters fluting the froufrou of the beach, the piano curving like
a conch, corollas giving out diapasons of light, chameleons squirming under
the book-press, seraglios expiring in oceans of dust, music issuing like fire
from the hidden chromosphere of pain, spore and madrepore fructifying the
earth, navels vomiting their bright spawn of anguish ... He is a bright sage,
a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the brush, removes the ugly scaffold to
which the body of a man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life. He
it is, if any man to-day possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve the
human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an harmonious line in order to
detect the rhythm and murmur of the blood, who takes the light that has been
refracted inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of color. Behind the
minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the invisible pattern;
he announces his discoveries in the metaphysical pigment of space. No
searching for formulae, no crucifixion of ideas, no compulsion other than to
create. Even as the world goes to smash there is one man who remains at the
core, who becomes more solidly fixed and anchored, more centrifugal as the
process of dissolution quickens.
More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is
moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows
down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse
sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the foetal
world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying
out and the river-beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a
metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow
ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis
there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the
veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light-waves bend and the sun
bleeds like a broken rectum.
At the very hub of this wheel which is falling apart, is Matisse. And he
will keep on rolling until everything that has gone to make up the wheel has
disintegrated. He has already rolled over a goodly portion of the globe,
over Persia and India and China, and like a magnet he has attached to
himself microscopic particles from Kurd, Beluchistan, Timbuctoo, Somaliland,
Angkor, Tierra del Fuego. The odalisques he has studded with malachite and
jasper, their flesh veiled with a thousand eyes, perfumed eyes dipped in the
sperm of whales. Wherever a breeze stirs there are breasts as cool as jelly,
white pigeons come to flutter and rut in the ice-blue veins of the
Himalayas.
The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of
reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of
life requires no decoration; it is essential only that the drains function
adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the balls in
America, is finished. To fathom the new reality it is first necessary to
dismantle the drains, to lay open the gangrened ducts which compose the
genito-urinary system that supplies the excreta of art. The odor of the day
is permanganate and formaldehyde. The drains are clogged with strangled
embryos.
The world of Matisse is still beautiful in an old-fashioned bedroom way.
There is not a ball-bearing in evidence, nor a boiler-plate, nor a piston,
nor a monkey-wrench. It is the same old world that went gayly to the Bois in
the pastoral days of wine and fornication. I find it soothing and refreshing
to move amongst these creatures with live, breathing pores whose background
is stable and solid as light itself. I feel it poignantly when I walk along
the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the whores rustle beside me, when just to
glance at them causes me to tremble. Is it because they are exotic or
well-nourished? No, it is rare to find a beautiful woman along the Boulevard
de la Madeleine. But in Matisse, in the exploration of his brush, there is the
trembling glitter of a worid which
demands only the presence of the female to crystallize the most fugitive
aspirations. To come upon a woman offering herself outside a urinal, where
there are advertised cigarette papers, rum, acrobats, horse-races, where the
heavy foliage of the trees breaks the heavy mass of walls and roofs, is an
experience that begins where the boundaries of the known world leave off. In
the evening now and then, skirting the cemetery walls, I stumble upon the
phantom odalisques of Matisse fastened to the trees, their tangled manes
drenched with sap. A few feet away, removed by incalculable aeons of time,
lies the prone and mummy-swathed ghost of Baudelaire, of a whole world that
will belch no more. In the dusky corners of cafes are men and women with
hands locked, their loins slather-flecked; nearby stands the garcon with his
apron full of sous, waiting patiently for the entr'acte in order to fall
upon his wife and gouge her. Even as the worid falls apart the Paris that
belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms, the air itself is
steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees tangled like hair. On its wobbly
axle the wheel rolls steadily downhill; there are no brakes, no
ball-bearings, no balloon tires. The wheel is falling apart, but the
revolution is intact ...
* * *
Out of a clear sky there comes one day a letter from Boris whom I have not
seen for months and months. It is a strange document and I don't pretend to
understand it all clearly. "What happened between us -- at any rate, as far
as I go -- is that you touched me, touched my life, that is, at the one point
where I am still alive: my death. By the emotional flow I went through
another immersion. I lived again, alive. No longer by reminiscence, as I do
with others, but alive."
That's how it began. Not a word of greeting, no date, no address. Written in
a thin, pompous scrawl on ruled paper torn out of a blank book. "That is
why, whether you like me or not -- deep down I rather think you hate me -- you
are very close to me. By you I know how I died: I see myself dying again: I
am dying. That is something. More than to be dead simply. That may
be the reason why I am so afraid to see you: you may have played the trick
on me, and died. Things happen so fast nowadays."
I'm reading it over, line by line, standing by the stones. It sounds nutty to
me, all this palaver about life and death and things happening so fast.
Nothing is happening that I can see, except the usual calamities on the front
page. He's been living all by himself for the last six months, tucked away in
a cheap little room -- probably holding telepathic communication with
Cronstadt. He talks about the line falling back, the sector evacuated, and so
on and so forth, as though he were dug into a trench and writing a report to
headquarters. He probably had his frock coat on when he sat down to pen his
missive, and he probably rubbed his hands a few times as he used to do when a
customer was calling to rent the apartment.
"The reason I wanted you to commimt suicide ..." he begins again. At tnat I
burst out laughing. He used to walk up and down with one hand stuck in the
tail-flap of his frock coat at the Villa Borghese, or at Cronstadt's --
wherever there was deck space, as it were -- and reel off this nonsense about
living and dying to his heart's content. I never understood a word of it, I
must confess, but it was a good show and, being a Gentile, I was naturally
interested in what went on in that menagerie of a brain-pan. Sometimes he
would lie on his couch full length, exhausted by the surge of ideas that
swept through his noodle. His feet just grazed the book rack where he kept
his Plato and Spinoza -- he couldn't understand why I had no use for them. I
must say he made them sound interesting, though what it was all about I
hadn't the least idea. Sometimes I would glance at a volume furtively, to
check up on these wild ideas which he imputed to them -- but the connection
was frail, tenuous. He had a language all his own, Boris, that is, when I had
him alone; but when I listened to Cronstadt it seemed to me that Boris had
plagiarized his wonderful ideas. They talked a sort of higher mathematics,
these two. Nothing of flesh and blood ever crept in; it was weird, ghostly,
ghoulishly abstract. When they got on to the dying business it sounded a
little more concrete: after all, a cleaver or a meat-axe has to have a
handle. I enjoyed those sessions immensely. It was the first time in my life
that death had ever seemed fascinating to me