CHAPTER EIGHT

 

            STRANGE how things fall out sometimes.  You may curse and pray, gibber and whimper, and nothing happens.  Then, just when you’re reconciled to the inevitable, a trapdoor opens. Saturns slinks off to another vector, and the grand problem ceases to be.  Or so it seems.

       It was in this simple, unexpected way that Stasia informed me one day, during Mona’s absence, that she was going to leave us.  If I hadn’t had it from her own lips I wouldn’t have believed it.

       I was so stunned, and so delighted at the same time, that I didn’t even inquire why she was leaving.  And she, apparently, was in no hurry to volunteer the information.  That she was fed up with Mona’s theatrical ways, as she hinted, was hardly sufficient reason for this sudden break.

       “Would you mind taking a walk with me?” she asked.  “I’d like to say a few things to you in private before I go.  My bag is packed.”

       As we left the house she asked me if I had any objection to strolling across the bridge.  “None at all,” I replied.  I would have consented to walk to White Plains, if she had suggested it.

       The fact that she was leaving awakened my sympathies.  She was a strange creature, but not a bad one.  Stopping to light a cigarette, I sized her up, detachedly.  She had the air of a Confederate soldier back from the war.  There was a forlorn look in her eyes, but it was not devoid of courage.  She belonged nowhere, that was obvious.

       We walked in silence for a block or two.  Then as we made the approach to the bridge, it oozed out of her.  Softly she spoke and with feeling.  Simple talk, for a change.  As if confiding in a dog.  Her gaze was fixed straight ahead, as if blazing a trail.

       She was saying that, all in all, I hadn’t been as cruel as I might have been.  It was the situation which was cruel, not me.  It would never have worked out, not even if we were a thousand times better than we were.  She should have known better.  She admitted that there had been a lot of play-acting, too.  She loved Mona, yes, but she wasn’t desperately in love.  Never had been.  It was Mona who was desperate.  Besides, it wasn’t love that bound them as much as a need for companionship.  They were lonely souls, both of them.  In Europe it might have worked out differently.  But it was too late for that now.  Some day she would go there on her own, she hoped.

       “But where will you go now?” I asked.

       “To California probably.  Where else?”

       “Why not to Mexico?”

       That was a possibility, she agreed, but later.  First she had to pull herself together. It hadn’t been easy for her, this chaotic bohemian life.  Fundamentally she was a simple person.  Her one problem was how to get along with others.  What had disturbed her most about our way of life, she wanted me to know, was that it gave her little chance to work.  “I’ve got to do things with my hands,” she blurted out.  “Even if it’s digging ditches.  I want to be a sculptor, not a painter or a poet.”  She hastened to add that I should not judge her by the puppets she had turned out – she had made them only to please Mona.

       Then she said something which sounded to my ears like high treason.  She said that Mona knew absolutely nothing about art, that she was incapable of distinguishing between a good piece of work and a bad one.  “Which doesn’t really matter, or rather wouldn’t matter, if only she had the courage to admit it.  But she hasn’t.  She must pretend that she knows everything, understands everything.  I hate pretence.  That’s one of the reasons why I don’t get along with people.”

       She paused to let this sink in.  “I don’t know how you stand it!  You’re full of nasty tricks, you do vile things now and then, and you’re terribly prejudiced and unfair sometimes, but at least you’re honest.  You never pretend to be other than you are.  Whereas Mona … well, there’s no telling who she is or what she is.  She’s a walking theatre.  Wherever she goes, whatever she’s doing, no matter whom she’s talking to, she’s on stage.  It’s sickening…. But I’ve told you all this before.  You know it as well as I do.”

       An ironic smile slid over her face.  “Sometimes….” She hesitated a moment.  “Sometimes I wonder how she behaves in bed.  I mean, does she fake that too?”

       A strange query, which I ignored.

       “I’m more normal than you would ever think,” she continued.  “My defects are all on the surface.  At bottom I’m a shy little girl who never grew up.  Maybe it’s a glandular disturbance.  It would be funny, wouldn’t it, if taking a few hormones daily should turn me into a typical female?  What is it that makes me hate women so much?  I was always that way.  Don’t laugh now, but honestly, it makes me sick to see a woman squat to pee.  So ridiculous…. Sorry to hand you so trivia.  I meant to tell you about the big things, the things that really bother me.  But I don’t know where to begin.  Besides, now that I’m leaving, what’s the point?”

       We were not halfway over the bridge, in a few minutes we would be among the pushcart vendors, passing shops whose show windows were always stacked with smoked fish, vegetables, onion rolls, huge loaves of bread, great cartwheels of cheese, salted pretzels and other inviting edibles.  In between would be wedding gowns, full dress suits, stovepipe hats, corsets, lingerie, crutches, douche pans, bric-à-brac galore.

       I wondered what it was she wanted to tell me – the vital thing, I mean.

       “When we get back,” I said, “there’ll undoubtedly be a scene.  If I were you, I’d pretend to change my mind, then sneak away the first chance you get.  Otherwise she’ll insist on going with you, if only to see you home safely.”

       An excellent idea, she thought.  It made her smile.  “Such a thought would never have occurred to me,” she confessed.  “I have no strategic sense whatever.”

       “All the better for you,” said I.

       “Talking of strategy, I wonder if you could help me raise a little money?  I’m flat broke.  I can’t hitchhike across the country with a trunk and a heavy valise, can I?”

       (No, I thought to myself, but we could send them to you later.)

       “I’ll do what I can,” I said.  “You know I’m not very good at raising money.  That’s Mona’s department.  But I’ll try.”

       “Good,” she said.  “A few days more or less won’t matter.”

       We had come to the end of the span.  I spotted an empty bench and steered her to it.

       “Let’s rest a bit,” I said.

       “Couldn’t we get a coffee?”

       “I’ve only got seven cents.  And just two more cigarettes.”

       “How do you manage when you’re by yourself?” she asked.

       “That’s different.  When I’m alone things happen.”

       “God takes care of you, is that it?”

       I lit a cigarette for her.

       “I’m getting frightfully hungry,” she said, her wings drooping.

       “If it’s that bad, let’s start back.”

       “I can’t, it’s too late.  Wait awhile.”

       I fished out a nickel and handed it to her.  “You take the subway and I’ll walk.   It’s no hardship for me.”

       “No,” she said, “we’ll go back together … I’m afraid to face her alone.”

       “Afraid?”

       “Yes, Val, afraid.  She’ll weep all over the place and then I’ll weaken.”

       “But you should weaken, remember?  Let her weep … then say you’ve changed your mind.  Like I told you.”

       “I forgot,” she said.

       We rested our weary limbs a while.  A pigeon swooped down and settled on her shoulder.

       “Can’t you buy some peanuts?” she said.  “We could feed the birds and have a bit for ourselves too.”

       “Forget it!” I replied.  “Pretend that you’re not hungry.  It’ll pass.  I’ve hardly ever walked the bridge on a full stomach.  You’re nervous, that’s all.”

       “You remind me of Rimbaud sometimes,” she said.  “He was always famished … and always walking his legs off.”

       “There’s nothing unique in that” I replied.  “He and how many million others?”

       I bent over to fix my shoelaces and there, right under the bench, were two whole peanuts.  I grabbed them.

       “One for you and one for me,” I said.  “You see how Providence looks after one!”

       The peanut gave her the courage to stretch her legs.  We rose stiffly and headed back over the bridge.

       “You’re not such a bad sort,” she said, as we climbed forward.  “There was a time when I positively loathed you.  Not because of Mona, not because I was jealous, but because you didn’t give a damn about anyone but your own sweet self.  You struck me as ruthless.  But I see you really have a heart, don’t you?”

       “What put that into your head?”

       “Oh, I don’t know.  Nothing in particular.  Maybe it’s that I’m beginning to see things in a new light now.  Anyway, you no longer look at me the way you used to.  You see me now.  Before you used to look right through me.  You might just as well have stepped on me … or over me.”

       “I’ve been wondering,” she mused, “how the two of you will get along, once I’m gone.  In a way it’s I who have held you together.  If I were more cunning, if I really wanted her all to myself, I would go away, wait for the two of you to separate, then come back and claim her.”

       “I thought you were through with her,” said I.  I had to admit to myself, however, that there was logic in her observation.

       “Yes,” she said, “all that’s past.  What I want to do now is to make a life for myself.  I’ve got to do the things I like to do, even if I fail miserably…. But what will she do?  That’s what I wonder.  Somehow I can’t see her doing anything of consequence.  I feel sorry for you.  Believe me, I mean it sincerely.  It’s going to be hell for you when I leave.  Maybe you don’t realize it now, but you will.”

       “Even so,” I replied, “it’s better this way.”

       “You’re certain I’ll go, eh?”  No matter what happens?”

       “Yes,” I said, “I’m sure.  And if you don’t go of your own accord, I’ll drive you away.”

       She gave a weak laugh.  “You’d kill me if you had to, wouldn’t you?”

       “I wouldn’t say that.  No, what I mean is that the time has come….”

       “Said the walrus to ---“

       “Right!  What happens when you leave is my affair.  The thing is to leave.  No back bending!”

       She swallowed this as one does a lump in the throat.  We had come to the summit of the arch, where we paused to view the retreating skyline.

       “How I hate this place!” she said.  “Hated it from the moment I arrived.  Look at those beehives,” she said, indicating the skyscrapers.  “Inhuman, what!”  With an arm extended she made a gesture as if to sweep them away.  “If there’s a single poet in that mass of stone and steel I’m a crazy Turk.  Only monsters could inhabit those cages.”  She moved closer to the edge and spat over the rail into the river.  “Even the water is filthy.  Polluted.”

       We turned away and resumed our march.

       “You know,” she said, “I was brought up on poetry.  Whitman, Wordsworth, Amy Lowell, Pound, Eliot.  Why, I could recite whole poems once upon a time.  Especially Whitman’s.  Now all I could do is gnash my teeth.  I’ve got to get out West again, and as soon as possible.  Joaquin Miller … did you ever read him?  The poet of the Sierras.  Yes, I want to go naked again and rub against trees.  I don’t care what anyone thinks … I can make love to a tree, but not to those filthy things in pants who crawl out of those horrid buildings.  Men are all right – in the open spaces.  But here – my God!  I’d rather masturbate than let one of them crawl into bed with me.  They’re vermin, all of them.  They stink!”

       She seemed on the point of working herself into a lather.  Of a sudden, however, she grew quiet.  Her whole expression changed.  Indeed, she looked almost angelic.

       “I’ll get myself a horse,” she was saying now, “and I’ll hide away in the mountains.  Maybe I’ll learn to pray again.  As a girl I used to go off by my lonesome, often for days at a stretch.  Among the tall redwoods I would talk to God.  Not that I had any specific image of Him; He was just a great Presence.  I recognized God everywhere, in everything.  How beautiful the world looked to me then!  I was overflowing with love and affection.  And I was so aware.  Often I got down on my knees – to kiss a flower.  ‘You’re so perfect!’ I would say.  ‘So self-sufficient.  All you need are sun and rain.  And you get what you need without asking.  You never cry for the moon, do you, little violet?  You never wish to be different than you are.’  That’s how I talked to flowers.  Yes, I knew how to commune with Nature.  And it was all perfectly natural.  Real.  Terribly real.”

       She stopped to give me a searching look.  She looked even more angelic now than before.  Even with a crazy hat on she would have looked seraphic.  Then, as she began to unburden herself in earnest, her countenance changed again.  But the aureole was still about her.

       What derailed her, she was trying to tell me, was art.  Someone had put the bug in her head that she was an artist.  “Oh, that’s not altogether true,” she exclaimed.  “I always had talent, and it cropped out early.  But there was nothing exceptional in what I did.  Every sincere person has a grain of talent.”

       She was trying to make clear to me how the change came about, how she became conscious of art and of herself as an artist.  Was it because she was so different from those about her?  Because she saw with other eyes?  She wasn’t sure.  But she knew that one day it happened.  Overnight, as it were, she had lost her innocence.  From then on, she said, everything assumed another aspect.  The flowers no longer spoke to her, or she to them.  When she looked at Nature she saw it as a poem or a landscape.  She was no longer one with Nature.  She had begun to analyse, to recompose, to assert her own will.

       “What a fool I was!  In no time I had grown too big for my own shoes.  Nature wasn’t enough.  I craved the life of the city.  I regarded myself as a cosmopolitan spirit.  To rub elbows with fellow artists, to enlarge my ideas through discussion with intellectuals, became imperative.  I was hungry to see the great works of art I had heard so much about, or rather read about, for no one I knew ever talked about art.  Except one person, that married woman I told you about once.  She was a woman in her thirties and worldly wise.  She hadn’t an ounce of talent herself, but she was a great lover of art and had excellent taste.  It was she who opened my eyes, not only to the world of art but to other things as well.  I fell in love with her, of course.  How could I not do so?  She was mother, teacher, patron, lover all in one.  She was my whole world, in fact.”

       She interrupted herself to inquire if she was boring me.

       “The strange thing is,” she resumed, “that it was she who pushed me out into the world.  Not her husband, as I may have led you to believe.  No, we got along well, the three of us.  I would never have gone to bed with him if she hadn’t urged me to.  She was a strategist, like you.  Of course, he never really got anywhere with me; the best he could manage was to hold me in his arms, press his body to mine.  When he tried to force me I pulled away.  Evidently it didn’t bother him too much, or else he pretended it didn’t.  I suppose it sounds strange to you, this business, but it was all quite innocent.  I’m destined to be a virgin, I guess.  Or a virgin at heart.

       “Oof!  What a story I’m making of it!  Anyway, the point of it all is that it was they, the two of them, who gave me the money to come East.  I was to go to art school, work hard, and make a name for myself.”

       She stopped abruptly.

       “And now look at me!  What am I?  What have I become?  I’m a sort of bum, more of a fake than your Mona really.”

       “You’re no fake,” said I.  “You’re a misfit, that’s all.”

       “You don’t need to be kind to me.”

       For a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears.

       “Will you write to me sometime?”

       “Why not?  If it would give you please, why of course.”

       Then, like a little girl, she said: “I’ll miss you both.  I’ll miss you terribly.”

       “Well,” I said, “it’s over with.  Look forwards, not backwards.”

       “That’s easy for you to say.  You’ll have her.  I’ll….”

       “You’ll be better off alone, believe me.  It’s better to be alone than with someone who doesn’t understand you.”

       “You’re so right,” said she, and she gave a shy little laugh.  “Do you know, once I tried to get a dog to mount me.  It was so ludicrous.  He finally bit me in the thigh.”

       “You should have tried a donkey – they’re more amenable.”

       We had reached the end of the bridge.  “You will try to raise some money for me, won’t you?” she said.

       “Of course I will.  And don’t you forget to pretend to change your mind and stay.  Otherwise we’ll have a frightful scene.”

      

There was a scene, as I predicted, but the moment Stasia relented it ended like a spring shower.  To me, however, it was not only depressing, but humiliating, to observe Mona’s grief.  On arriving we found her in the toilet, weeping like a pig.  She had found the valise packed, the trunk locked, and Stasia’s room in a state of wild disorder.  She knew it was quits this time.

       It was only natural for her to accuse me of inspiring the move.  Fortunately Stasia denied this vehemently.  Then why had she decided to go?  To this Stasia lamely replied that she was weary of it all.  Then bang, bang, like bullets, came Mona’s reproachful queries.  How could you say such a thing?  Where would you go?  What have I done to turn you against me?  She could have fired a hundred more shots like that.  Anyway, with each reproach her hysteria mounted; her tears turned to sobs and her sobs to groans.

       That she would have me all to herself, was of no importance.  It was obvious that I didn’t exist, except as a thorn in her side.

       As I say, Stasia finally relented, but not until Mona had stormed and raged and pleaded and begged.  I wondered why she had permitted the scene to last so long.  Was she enjoying it?  Or was she so disgusted that she had become fascinated?  I asked myself what would have happened had I not been at her side.

       It was I who couldn’t take any more, I who turned to Stasia and begged her to reconsider.

       “Don’t go yet,” I begged.  “She really needs you.  She loves you, can’t you see?”

       And Stasia answers: “But that’s why I should go.”

       “No,” said I, “if anyone should leave it’s me.”

       (At the moment I really meant it, too.)

       “Please,” said Mona, “don’t you go too!  Why does either of you have to go?  Why?  Why?  I want you both.  I need you.  I love you.”

       “We’ve heard that before,” said Stasia, as if still adamant.

       “But I mean it,” said Mona.  “I’m nothing without you.  And now that you’re friends at last, why can’t we all live together in peace and harmony?  I’ll do anything you ask.  But don’t leave me, please!”

       Again I turned to Stasia.  “She’s right,” I said.  “This time it may work out.  You’re not jealous of me … why should I be jealous of you?  Think it over, won’t you?  If it’s me you’re worried about, put your mind at ease.  I want to see her happy, nothing more.  If keeping you with us will make her happy, then I say stay!  Maybe I’ll learn to be happy too.  At least, I’ve grown more tolerant, don’t you think?”  I gave her a queer smile.  “Come now, what do you say?  You’re not going to ruin three lives, are you?”

       She collapsed on to a chair.  Mona knelt at her feet and put her head in her lap, then slowly raised her eyes and looked at Stasia imploringly.  “You will stay, won’t you?” she pleaded.

       Gently Stasia pushed her away.  “Yes,” she said, “I’ll stay.  But on one condition.  There must be no more scenes.”

       Their eyes were now focused on me.  After all, I was the culprit.  It was I who had instigated all the scenes.  Was I going to behave?  That was their mute query.

       “I know what you’re thinking,” said I.  “All I can say is that I will do my best.”

       “Say more!” said Stasia.  “Tell us how you really feel now.”

       Her words set me back on my heels.  I had the uneasy feeling that she had been taken in by her own acting.  Was it necessary for me to be put on the grill – at this point?  What I really felt like, if I dared to speak my mind, was a scoundrel.  An utter scoundrel.  To be sure, it had never occurred to me, in making the suggestion, that we would be obliged to carry the farce to such lengths.  For Stasia to weaken was one thing, and in keeping with our bargain, but to be exacting solemn promises of me, to be searching my very heart, was something else.  Maybe we had never been anything but actors, even when we thought we were sincere.  Or the other way round.  I was getting confused.  It struck me with a force, suddenly, that Mona, the actress, was probably the most sincere of all.  At least she knew what she wanted.

       All this ran through my head like lightning.

       My reply, and it was the truth, was – “To be honest, I don’t know how I feel.  I don’t think I have any feelings left.  Anyway, I don’t want to hear any more about love, ever….”

       Like that it ended, in a fizzle.  But Mona was thoroughly content.  Stasia too, it seemed.

       None of us had been too badly damaged.  Veterans, that’s what we were.

 

And now I’m trotting around like a blood-hound to raise money, presumably so that Stasia may take off.  I’ve already visited three hospitals, in an effort to sell my blood.  Human blood is at twenty-five dollars the pint now.  Not long ago it was fifty dollars, but now there are too many hungry donors.

       Useless to waste more time in that direction.  Better to borrow the money.  But from whom?  I could think of no one who would offer me more than a buck or two.  She needed at least a hundred dollars.  Two hundred would be still better.

       If only I knew how to reach that millionaire pervert!  I thought of Ludwig, the mad ticket-chopper – another pervert! – but with a heart of gold, so Mona always said.  But what to tell him?

       I was passing Grand Central Station.  Would run down to the sub-basement, where the messengers were herded, and see if anyone was there who remembered me.  (Costigan, the old reliable, had passed away.)  I sneaked down and looked over the crew.  Not a soul I could recognize.

       Climbing the ramp to the street I recalled that Doc Zabriskie was somewhere in the neighbourhood.  In a jiffy I was leafing the telephone directory.  Sure enough, there he was – on West Forty-fifth Street.  My spirits rose.  Here was a guy I could surely count on.  Unless he was broke.  That was hardly likely, now that he had set up an office in Manhattan.  My pace quickened.  I didn’t even bother to think what kind of cock and bull story I would trump up…. In the past, when I would visit him to have a tooth filled, it was he who would ask me if I wasn’t in need of a little dough.  Sometimes I would say no, ashamed of myself for imposing on such a good nature.  But that was back in the eighteenth century.

       Hurrying along, I suddenly recalled the location of his old office.  It was that three-storey red brick building where I once lived with the widow, Carlotta.  Every morning I hauled the ash cans and the garbage pails from the cellar and placed them at the kerb.  That was one of the reasons he had taken such a fancy to me, Doc Zabriskie – because I wasn’t ashamed to soil my hands.  It was so Russian, he thought.  Like a page out of Gorky…. He loved to chat with me about his Russian authors!  How elated he was when I showed him that prose poem I had written on Jim Londos, Londos the little Hercules, as he was called.  He knew them all – Strangler Lewis, Zbysko, Earl Caddock, Farmer what’s his name … all of them.  And here I was writing like a poet – he couldn’t get over my style! – in order to show it to a sports writer he knew.  He begged me to show him more of my work.  Had I written anything on Scriabin?  Or on Alekhine, the chess champion?  “Come again soon,” he urged.  “Come any time, even if your teeth don’t need attention.”  And I would go back from time to time, not just to chew the fat about chess, wrestlers and pianoforte, but in the hope that he would slip me a fiver, or even a buck, on leaving.

       I was trying to recall, as I entered the new office, how many years it was since I had last talked to him.  There were only two – three clients in the waiting room.  Not like the old days when there was standing room only, and women with shawls sat red-eyed holding their swollen jaws, some with brats in their arms, and all of them poor, meek, down-trodden, capable of sitting there for hours on end.  The new office was different.  The furniture looked brand new and luxuriously comfortable, there were paintings on the wall – good ones – and all was noiseless, even the drill.  No samovar though.

       I had hardly seated myself when the door of the torture chamber opened to evacuate a client.  He came over to me at once, shook hands warmly, and begged me to wait a few minutes.  Nothing serious? he hoped.  I told him to take his time.  A few cavities, nothing more.  I sat down again and picked up a magazine.  Poring over the illustrations I decided that the best thing to say was that Mona had to undergo an operation.  A tumour in the vagina, or something like that.

       With Doc Zabriskie a few minutes usually meant an hour or two.  Not this time, however,  Everything was running smoothly and efficiently now.

       I sat down in the big chair and opened wide my mouth.  There was only one little cavity; he would fill it immediately.  As he drilled away he plied me with questions: how were things going? was I still writing? did I have any children? why hadn’t I looked him up before? how was So-and-So? did I still ride the bike?  To all of which I replied with grunts and a roll of the eyes.

       Finally it was over.  “Don’t run away!” he said.  “Have a little drink with me first!”  He opened a cabinet and got out a bottle of excellent Scotch, then pulled a stool up beside me.  “Now tell me all about yourself?”

       I had to make quite a preamble before coming to the issue.  That is, where we stood at the present moment, financially and otherwise.  At last I blurted it out – the tumour.  Immediately he informed me that he had a good friend, an excellent surgeon, who would do the job for nothing.  That stumped me.  All I could say was that arrangements had already been made, that I had already advanced a hundred dollars toward the cost of the operation.

       “I see,” he said.  “That’s too bad.”  He thought a moment, then asked: “When must you have it, the balance?”

       “Day after tomorrow.”

       “I tell you what,” he said, “I’ll give you a post-dated cheque.  Right now my bank balance is low, very low.  How must is it you need exactly?”

       I said two hundred and fifty dollars.

       “That’s a shame,” he said.  “I could have saved you all this expense.”

       I was suddenly struck with remorse.  “Listen,” I said, “forget about it!  I don’t want to take your last penny.”

       He wouldn’t listen to me.  People were slow in paying their bills, that’s all, he explained.  He got out a big ledger, began thumbing through it.  “By the end of the month I should take in over three thousand dollars.  You see,” he grinned, “I’m not exactly poor.”

       The cheque safely in my pocket, I lingered a while to save face.  When at last he escorted me to the elevator – I already had one foot in – he said: “Better ring me up before depositing the cheque … just to make sure it’s covered.  Do that, will you?”

       “I’ll do that,” I said, and waved goodbye.

       The same good-hearted fellow, thought I to myself, as the elevator descended.  Too bad I hadn’t thought to get a little cash too.  A coffee and a piece of pie was what I needed now.  I felt in my pocket.  Just a few pennies short.  Same old story.

       Approaching the library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street I found myself weighing the pros and cons of setting up as a bootblack.  Whatever could have put such a thought in my head, I wondered.  Going on forty and thinking about shining other people’s shoes.  How the mind wanders!

       Abreast of the esplanade guarded by the placid stone lions, the impulse seized me to visit the library.  Always pleasant and cosy up in the big reading room.  Besides, I had suddenly developed a curiosity to see how it had fared, at my age, with other men of letters.  (There was also a possibility of running into an acquaintance and still getting that pie and coffee.)  One thing was certain, there was no need to delve into the private lives of such as Gorky, Dostoievsky, Andreyev or any of their ilk.  Nor Dickens either.  Jules Verne!  There was a writer about whose life I knew absolutely nothing.  Might be interesting.  Some authors, it seemed, never had a private life; everything went into their books. Others, like Strindberg, Nietzsche, Jack London … their lives I knew almost as well as my own.

       What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly, without plan, purpose or goal, and then suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.  What I wanted to lay hold of – as if one could ever come to grips with such impalpables! – was that crucial point in the evolution of a genius when the hard dry rock suddenly yields water.  As the heavenly vapours are eventually collected in vast watersheds and there converted into streams and rivers, so in the mind and soul, I felt, there must ever exist this reservoir waiting to be transformed into words, sentences, books, to be drowned again in the ocean of thought.

       Only through trial and tribulation, it is said, are we opened up.  Was that what I would find – nothing more? – in scanning the pages of biography?  Were the creative ones tormented beings who found salvation only through wrestling with the media of art?  In man’s world beauty was linked with suffering and suffering with salvation.  Nothing of the sort obtained in Nature.

       I took a seat in the reading room with a huge biographical dictionary before me.  After reading here and there I fell into a reverie.  To pursue my own thoughts proved more exciting than to pry into the lives of successful failures.  Could I trace my own meanderings, beneath the roots, perhaps I might stumble on the stream which would lead me into the open.  Stasia’s words came to mind – the need to meet a kindred spirit, in order to grow, to give forth fruit.  To hold converse (on writing) with the lovers of literature was fruitless.  There were many I had already met who could talk more brilliantly on the subject than any writer.  (And they would never write a line.)  Was there anyone, indeed, who could speak discerningly about the secret processes?

       The great question was that eternal, seemingly unanswerable one: what have I to tell the world which is so desperately important?  What have I to say that has not been said before, and thousands of times, by men infinitely more gifted?  Was it sheer ego, this coercive need to be heard?  In what way was I unique?  For if I was not unique then it would be like adding a cipher to an incalculable astronomic figure.

       From one thing to another – a delicious Träumerei! – until I found myself pondering this most absorbing aspect of the writer’s problem: openings.  The way in which a book opened – there in itself lay a world.  How vastly different, how unique, were the opening pages of the great books!  Some authors were like huge birds of prey; they hovered above their creation, casting immense, serrated shadows over their words.  Some, like painters, began with delicate, unpremeditated touches, guided by some sure instinct whose purpose would become apparent later in the application of mass and colour.  Some took you by the hand like dreamers, content to linger at the edges of dream and only slowly, tantalizingly permitted themselves to reveal what was obviously inexpressible.  There were others who, as if perched in signal towers, derived intense enjoyment from pulling switches, blinking lights; with them everything was delineated sharply and boldly, as though their thoughts were so many trains pulling into the station yard.  And then there were those who, either demented or hallucinated, began at random with hoarse cries, jeers and curses, stamping their thoughts not upon but through the page, like machines gone wild.  Varied as they were, all these methods of breaking the ice were symptomatic of the personality, not expositions of thought-out techniques.  The way a book opened was the way an author walked or talked, the way he looked at life, the way he took courage or concealed his fears.  Some began by seeing clear to the end; others began blindly, each line a silent prayer leading to the next.  What an ordeal, this lifting of the veil!  What a shuddering risk, this laying bare the mummy!  No one, not even the greatest, could be certain what he might be called upon to present to the profane eye.  Once engaged, anything could happen.  It was as if, by taking pen in hand the “archons” were summoned.  Yes, the archons!  Those mysterious entities, those cosmic enzymes, who are at work in every seed, who engineer the creation, structural and aesthetic, of every flower, every plant, every tree, every universe.  The powers within.  An everlasting ferment from which stemmed law and order.

       And while these invisible ones went about their task the author – what a misnomer! – lived and breathed, performed the duties of a householder, a prisoner, a vagabond, whatever the role, and as the days passed, or the years, the scroll unrolled, the tragedy (his own and his characters’) spelled itself out, his moods varying like the weather from day to day, his energies rising and sinking, his thoughts seething like a maelstrom, the end ever approaching, a heaven which even if he has not earned it he must force, because what is begun must be finished, consummated, even if on the cross.

       What need, eh, to read the pages of biography?  What need to study the worm or the ant?  Think, for just a moment, of such willing victims as Blake, Boehme, Nietzsche, or Hölderlin, Sade, Nerval, of Villon, Rimbaud, Strindberg, of Cervantes or Dante, or even of Heine or Oscar Wilde!  And I, was I to add my name to this host of illustrious martyrs?  To what further depths of degradation had I to sink before acquiring the right to join the ranks of these scapegoats?

       As on those interminable walks to and from the tailor shop, I was suddenly seized with a fit of writing.  All in the head, to be sure.  But what marvellous pages, what magnificent phraseology!  My eyes half closed, I slumped deeper into the seat and listened to the music welling up from the depths.  What a book this was!  If not mine, whose then?  I was entranced.  Entranced, yet saddened, humbled, chastened.  Of what use to summon these invisible workers?  For the pleasure of drowning in the ocean of creation?  Never, through conscious effort, never, with pen in hand, would I be able to invoke such thoughts!  Everything to which I would eventually sign my name would be marginal, peripheral, the maunderings of an idiot striving to record the erratic flight of a butterfly…. Yet it was comforting to know that one could be as a butterfly.

       To think that all this wealth, this wealth of the primeval chaos, must be infused, to be palatable and potable, with the Homeric minutiae of the daily round, with the repetitious drama of petty humans whose sufferings and aspirations have, even to mortal ears, the monotonous hum of windmills whirring in remorseless space.  The petty and the great: separated by inches.  Alexander dying of pneumonia in the desolate reaches of Asia; Caesar in all his purple proved mortal by a pack of traitors; Blake singing as he passed away; Damien torn on the wheel and screaming like a thousand twisted eagles … what did it matter and to whom?  A Socrates hitched to a nagging wife, a saint plagued with a thousand woes a prophet tarred and feathered … to what end?  All grist for the mill, data for historians and chroniclers, poison to the child, caviar for the schoolmaster.  And with this and through this, weaving his way like an inspired drunkard, the writer tells his tale, lives and breathes, is honoured or dishonoured.  What a role!  Jesus protect us!