IT is my last dinner at the dramatist's home.  They have just rented a new piano, a concert grand.  I meet Sylvester coming out of the florist's with a rubber plant in his arms.  He asks me if I would carry it for him while he goes for the cigars.  One by one I've fucked myself out of all these free meals which I had planned so carefully.  One by one the husbands turn against me, or the wives.  As I walk along with the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few months back when the idea first occurred to me.  I was sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding ring which I had tried to pawn off on a garçon at the Dôme.  He had offered me six francs for it and I was in a rage about it.  But the belly was getting the upper hand.  Ever since I left Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie.  It was so much a part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it.  It was one of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold.  Worth a dollar and a half once, maybe more.  For three years we went along without a wedding ring and then one day when I was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a jewellery window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was stuffed with wedding rings.  When I got to the pier Mona was not to be seen.  I waited for the last passenger to descend the gangplank, but not Mona.  Finally I asked to be shown the passenger list.  Her name was not on it.  I slipped the wedding ring on my pinkie and there it stayed.  Once I left it in a public bath, but then I got it back again.  One of the orange blossoms had fallen off.  Anyway, I was sitting there on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when suddenly someone clapped me on the back.  To make it brief, I got a meal and a few francs besides.  And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if only he had the courage to demand it.  I went immediately to a café and wrote a dozen letters.  "Would you let me have dinner with you once a week?  Tell me what day is most convenient for you."  It worked like a charm.  I was not only fed ... I was feasted.  Every night I went home drunk.  They couldn't do enough for me, these generous once-a-week souls.  What happened to me between times was none of their affair.  Now and then the thoughtful ones presented me with cigarettes, or a little pin money.  They were all obviously relieved when they realized that they would see me only once a week.  And they were still more relieved when I said - "it won't be necessary any more."  They never asked why.  They congratulated me, and that was all.  Often the reason was I had found a better host; I could afford to scratch off the ones who were a pain in the ass.  But that thought never occurred to them.  Finally I had a steady, solid programme - a fixed schedule.  On Tuesdays I knew it would be this kind of a meal and on Fridays that kind.  Cronstadt, I knew, would have champagne for me and homemade apple pie.  And Carl would invite me out, take me to a different restaurant each time, order rare wines, invite me to the theatre afterwards or take me to the Cirque Medrano.  They were curious about one another, my hosts.  Would ask me which place I liked best, who was the best cook, etc.   I think I liked Cronstadt's joint best of all, perhaps because he chalked the meal up on the wall each time.  Not that it eased my conscience to see what I owed him, because I had no intention of paying him back nor had he any illusions about being requited.  No, it was the odd numbers which intrigued me.  He used to figure it out to the last centime.  If I was to pay in full I would have had to break a sou.  His wife was a marvellous cook and she didn't give a fuck about those centimes.  Cronstadt added up.  She took it out of me in carbon copies.  A fact!  If I hadn't any fresh carbons for her when I showed up, she was crestfallen.  And for that I would have to take the little girl to the Luxembourg next day, play with her for two or three hours, a task which drove me wild because she spoke nothing but Hungarian and French.  They were a queer lot on the whole, my hosts....

      At Tania's I look down on the spread from the balcony.  Moldorf is there, sitting beside his idol.  He is warming his feet at the hearth, a monstrous look of gratitude in his watery eyes.  Tania is running over the adagio.  The adagio says very distinctly: no more words of love!  I am at the fountain again, watching the turtles pissing green milk.  Sylvester has just come back from Broadway with a heart full of love.  All night I was lying on a bench outside the mall while the glove was sprayed with warm turtle piss and the horses stiffened with priapic fury galloped like mad without ever touching the ground.  All night long I smell the lilacs in the little dark room where she is taking down her hair, the lilacs that I bought for her as she went to meet Sylvester.  He came back with a heart full of love, she said, and the lilacs are in her hair, her mouth, they are choking her armpits.  The room is swimming with love and turtle piss and warm lilacs and the horses are galloping like mad.  In the morning dirty teeth and scum on the windowpanes; that little gate that leads to the mall is locked.  People are going to work and the shutters are rattling like coats of mail.  In the bookstore opposite the fountain is the story of Lake Chad, the silent lizards, the gorgeous gamboge tints.  All the letters I wrote her, drunken ones with a blunt stub, crazy ones with bits of charcoal, little pieces from bench to bench, firecrackers, dollies, tutti-frutti; they will be going over them now, together, and he will compliment me one day.  He will say, as he flicks his cigar ash: "Really, you write quite well.  Let's see, you're a surrealist, aren't you?"  Dry, brittle voice, teeth full of dandruff, solo for solar plexus, g for gaga.

      Upon the balcony with the rubber plant and the adagio going on down below.  The keys are black and white, then black, then white, then white and black.  And you want to know if you can play something for me.  Yes, play something with those big thumbs of yours.  Play the adagio since that's the only goddamned thing you know.  Play it, and then cut off your big thumbs.

      That adagio!  I don't know why she insists on playing it all the time.  The old piano wasn't good enough for her; she had to rent a concert grand - for the adagio!  When I see her big thumbs pressing the keyboard and that silly rubber plant beside me I feel like that madman of the North who threw his clothes away and, sitting naked in the wintry boughs, threw nuts down into the herring-frozen sea.  There is something exasperating about this movement, something abortively melancholy about it, as if it had been written in lava, as if it had the colour of lead and milk mixed.  And Sylvester, with his head cocked to one side like an auctioneer, Sylvester says: "Play that other one you were practising today."  It's beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good cigar and a wife who plays the piano.  So relaxing.  So lenitive.  Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air.  Yes, her fingers are very supple, extraordinarily supple.  She does batik work too.  Would you like to try a Bulgarian cigarette?  I say, pigeon breast, what's that other movement I like so well?  The scherzo!  Ah, yes, the scherzo!  Excellent, the scherzo!  Count Waldemar von Schwisseneinzug speaking.  Cool, dandruff eyes.  Halitosis.  Gaudy socks.  And croutons in the pea soup, if you please.  We always have pea soup Friday nights.  Won't you try a little red wine?  The red wine goes with the meat, you know.  A dry, crisp voice.  Have a cigar, won't you?  Yes, I like my work, but I don't attach any importance to it.  My next play will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe.  Revolving drums with calcium lights.  O'Neill is dead.  I think, dear, you should lift your foot from the pedal more frequently.  Yes, that part is very nice ... very nice, don't you think?  Yes, the characters go around with microphones in their trousers.  The locale is in Asia, because the atmospheric conditions are more conducive.  Would you like to try a little Anjou?  We bought it especially for you....

      All through the meal this patter continues.  It feels exactly as if he had taken out that circumcised dick of his and was peeing on us.  Tania is bursting with the strain.  Ever since he came back with a heart full of love this monologue has been going on.  He talks while he's undressing, she tells me - a steady stream of warm piss, as though his bladder had been punctured.  When I think of Tania crawling into bed with this busted bladder I get enraged.  To think that a poor, withered bastard with those cheap Broadway plays up his sleeve should be pissing on the woman I love.  Calling for red wine and revolving drums and croutons in his pea soup.  The cheek of him!  To think that he can lie beside that furnace I stoked for him and do nothing but make water!  My God, man, you ought to get down on your knees and thank me.  Don't you see that you have a woman in your house now?  Can't you see she's bursting?  You telling me with those strangulated adenoids of yours - "well now, I'll tell you ... there's two ways of looking at that...."  Fuck your two ways of looking at things!  Fuck your pluralistic universe and your Asiatic acoustics!  Don't hand me your red wine or your Anjou ... hand her over ... she belongs to me!  You go sit by the fountain, and let me smell the lilacs!  Pick the dandruff out of your eyes ... and take that damned adagio and wrap it in a pair of flannel pants!  And the other little movement too ... all the little movements that you make with your weak bladder.  You smile at me so confidently, so calculatingly.  I'm flattering the ass of you, can't you tell?  While I listen to your crap she's got her hand on me - but you don't see that.  You think I like to suffer - that's my role, you say.  O.K.  Ask her about it!  She'll tell you how I suffer.  "You're cancer and delirium," she said over the phone the other day.  She's got it now, the cancer and delirium, and soon you'll have to pick the scabs.  Her veins are bursting, I tell you, and your talk is all sawdust.  No matter how much you piss away, you'll never plug up the holes.  What did Mr. Wren say?  Words are loneliness.  I left a couple of words for you on the tablecloth last night - you covered them with your elbows.

      He's put a fence around her as if she were a dirty, stinking bone of a saint.  If he only had the courage to say "Take her!" perhaps a miracle would occur.  Just that.  Take her!  And I swear everything would come out all right.  Besides, maybe I wouldn't take her - did that ever occur to him, I wonder?  Or I might take her for a while and hand her back, improved.  But putting up a fence around her, that won't work.  You can't put a fence around a human being.  It ain't done any more.... You think, you poor withered bastard, that I'm no good for her, that I might pollute her, desecrate her.  You don't know how palatable is a polluted woman, how a change of semen can make a woman bloom!  You think a heart full of love is enough, and perhaps it is, for the right woman, but you haven't got a heart any more ... you are nothing but a big, empty bladder.  You are sharpening your teeth and cultivating your growl.  You run at her heels like a watchdog and you piddle everywhere.  She didn't take you for a watchdog ... she took you for a poet.  You were a poet once, she said.  And now what are you?  Courage, Sylvester, courage!  Take the microphone out of your pants.  Put your hind leg down and stop making water everywhere.  Courage I say, because she's ditched you already.  She's contaminated, I tell you, and you might as well take down the fence.  No use asking me politely if the coffee doesn't taste like carbolic acid: that won't scare me away.  Put rat poison in the coffee, and a little ground glass.  Make some boiling hot urine and drop a few nutmegs in it....

 

      It is a communal life I have been living for the last few weeks.  I have had to share myself with others, principally with some crazy Russians, a drunken Dutchman, and a big Bulgarian woman named Olga.  Of the Russians there are chiefly Eugene and Anatoly.

      It was just a few days ago that Olga got out of the hospital where she had her tubes burned out and lost a little excess weight.  However, she doesn't look as if she had gone through much suffering.  She weighs almost as much as a camel- backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like excelsior.  She has two big warts on her chin from which there sprouts a clump of little hairs; she is growing a moustache.

      The day after Olga was released from the hospital she commenced making shoes again.  At six in the morning she is at her bench; she knocks out two pairs of shoes a day.  Eugene complains that Olga is a burden, but the truth is that Olga is supporting Eugene and his wife with her two pairs of shoes a day.  If Olga doesn't work there is no food.  So everyone endeavours to pull Olga to bed on time, to give her enough food to keep her going, etc.

      Every meal starts off with soup.  Whether it be onion soup, tomato soup, vegetable soup, or what not, the soup always tastes the same.  Mostly it tastes as if a dish rag had been stewed in it - slightly sour, mildewed, scummy.  I see Eugene hiding it away in the commode after the meal.  It stays there, rotting away, until the next meal.  The butter, too, is hidden away in the commode; after three days it tastes like the big toe of a cadaver.

      The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly appetizing, especially when the cooking is done in a room in which there is not the slightest form of ventilation.  No sooner than I open the door I feel ill.  But Eugene, as soon as he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and pulls back the bedsheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep out the sunlight.  Poor Eugene!  He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bedsheets and the washbasin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: "I am a slave!"  Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times.  And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings.

      But about the smell of rancid butter.... There are good associations too.  When I think of this rancid butter I see myself standing in a little, old-world courtyard, a very smelly, very dreary courtyard.  Through the cracks in the shutters strange figures peer out at me ... old women with shawls, dwarfs, rat-faced pimps, bent Jews, midinettes, bearded idiots.  They totter out into the courtyard to draw water or to rinse the slop pails.  One day Eugene asked me if I would empty the pail for him.  I took it to the corner of the yard.  There was a hole in the ground and some dirty paper lying around the hole.  The little well was slimy with excrement, which in English is shit.  I tipped the pail and there was a foul, gurgling splash followed by another and unexpected splash.  When I returned the soup was dished out.  All through the meal I thought of my toothbrush - it is getting old and the bristles get caught in my teeth.

      When I sit down to eat I always sit near the window.  I am afraid to sit on the other side of the table - it is too close to the bed and the bed is crawling.  I can see bloodstains on the gray sheets if I look that way, but I try not to look that way.  I look out on the courtyard where they are rinsing the slop pails.

      The meal is never complete without music.  As soon as the cheese is passed around Eugene jumps up and reaches for the guitar which hangs over the bed.  It is always the same song.  He says he has fifteen or sixteen songs in his repertoire, but I have never heard more than three.  His favourite is Charmant poème d'amour.  It is full of angoisse and tristesse.

       In the afternoon we go to the cinema which is cool and dark.  Eugene sits at the piano in the big pit and I sit on a bench up front.  The house is empty, but Eugene sings as if he had for audience all the crowned heads of Europe.  The garden door is open and the odour of wet leaves sops in and the rain blends with Eugene's angoisse and tristesse.  At midnight, after the spectators have saturated the hall with perspiration and foul breaths, I return to sleep on a bench.  The exit light, swimming in a halo of tobacco smoke, sheds a faint light on the lower corner of the asbestos curtain; I close my eyes every night on an artificial eye....

      Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible.  The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads.  A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung.  The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enamelled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: "Be sure to close the door."  Why close the door?  I can't make it out.  I look again at the sign but it is removed; in its place there is a pane of coloured glass.  I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief.  A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck.  The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in coloured globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting.  In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absentmindedly throws it out the window.  She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it.  Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography.  I lean out the window and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace.  The sewers are gurgling furiously.  There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.

      I have been ejected from the world like a cartridge.  A deep fog has settled down, the earth is smeared with frozen grease.  I can feel the city palpitating, as if it were a heart just removed from a warm body.  The windows of my hotel are festering and there is a thick, acrid stench as of chemicals burning.  Looking into the Seine I see mud and desolation, street lamps drowning, men and women choking to death, the bridges covered with houses, slaughterhouses of love.  A man is standing against a wall with an accordion strapped to his belly; his hands are cut off at the wrists, but the accordion writhes between his stumps like a sack of snakes.  The universe has dwindled; it is only a block long and there are no stars, no trees, no rivers.  The people who live here are dead; they make chairs which other people sit on in their dreams.  In the middle of the street is a wheel and in the hub of the wheel a gallows is fixed.  People already dead are trying frantically to mount the gallows, but the wheel is turning too fast....

 

      Something was needed to put me right with myself.  Last night I discovered it: Papini.  It doesn't matter to me whether he's a chauvinist, a little Christer, or a nearsighted pedant.  As a failure he's marvellous....

      The books he read - at eighteen!  Not only Homer, Dante, Goethe, not only Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, not only Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, not only Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Villon, Carducci, Manzoni, Lope de Vega, not only Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley - not only these but all the small fry in between.  This on page 18.  Allors, on page 232 he breaks down and confesses.  I know nothing, he admits.  I know the titles, I have compiled bibliographies, I have written critical essays, I have maligned and defamed.... I can talk for five minutes or for five days, but then I give out, I am squeezed dry.

      Follows this: "Everybody wants to see me.  Everybody insists on talking to me.  People pester me and they pester others with inquiries about what I am doing.  How am I?  Am I quite well again?  Do I still go for my walks in the country?  Am I working?  Have I finished my book?  Will I begin another soon?

      "A skinny monkey of a German wants me to translate his works.  A wild-eyed Russian girl wants me to write an account of my life for her.  An American lady wants the very latest news about me.  An American gentleman will send his carriage to take me to dinner - just an intimate, confidential talk, you know.  An old schoolmate and chum of mine, of ten years ago, wants me to read him all that I write as fast as I write it.  A painter friend I know expects me to pose for him by the hour.  A newspaperman wants my present address.  An acquaintance, a mystic, inquires about the state of my soul; another, more practical, about the state of my pocketbook.  The president of my club wonders if I will make a speech for the boys!  A lady, spiritually inclined, hopes I will come to her house for tea as often as possible.  She wants to have my opinion of Jesus Christ, and - what do I think of that new medium?...

      "Great God! what have I turned into?  What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau?  What do you take me for?  Am I am entertainer on salary, required every morning to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses?  Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?  Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon to lift her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first man in a tailored suit who comes along?

      "I am a man who would live an heroic life and make the world more endurable in his own sight.  If, in some moment of weakness, of relaxation, of need, I blow off steam - a bit of red-hot rage cooled off in words - a passionate dream, wrapped and tied in imagery - well, take it or leave it ... but don't bother me!

      "I am a free man - and I need my freedom.  I need to be alone.  I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.  What do you want of me?  When I have something to say, I put it in print.  When I have something to give, I give it.  Your prying curiosity turns my stomach!  Your compliments humiliate me!  Your tea poisons me!  I owe nothing to anyone.  I would be responsible to God alone - if He existed!"

      It seems to me that Papini misses something by a hair's breadth when he talks of the need to be alone.  It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure.  An artist is always alone - if he is an artist.  No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

      The artist, I call myself.  So be it.  A beautiful map this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.  Generated enough ideas to last me three days.  Chock-full of energy and nothing to do about it.  Decide to go for a walk.  In the street I change my mind.  Decide to go to the movies.  Can't go to the movies - short a few sous.  A walk then.  At every moviehouse I stop and look at the billboards, then at the price list.  Cheap enough, these opium joints, but I'm short just a few sous.  If it weren't so late I might go back and cash an empty bottle.

      By the time I get to the Rue Amelie I've forgotten all about the movies.  The Rue Amelie is one of my favourite streets.  It is one of those streets which by good fortune the municipality has forgotten to pave.  Huge cobblestones spreading convexly from one side of the street to the other.  Only one block long and narrow.  The Hotel Pretty is on this street.  There is a little church, too, on the Rue Amelie.  It looks as though it were made especially for the President of the Republic and his private family.  It's good occasionally to see a modest little church.  Paris is full of pompous cathedrals.

      Pont Alexandre III.  A great windswept space approaching the bridge.  Gaunt, bare trees mathematically fixed in their iron gates; the gloom of the Invalides welling up out of the dome and overflowing the dark streets adjacent to the Square.  The morgue of poetry.  They have him where they want him now, the great warrior, the last big man of Europe.  He sleeps soundly in his granite bed.  No fear of him turning over in his grave.  The doors are well bolted, the lid is on tight.  Sleep, Napoleon!  It was not your ideas they wanted, it was only your corpse!

      The river is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights.  I don't know what it is rushes up in me at the sight of this dark, swift-moving current, but a great exultation lifts me up, affirms the deep wish that is in me never to leave this land.  I remember passing this way the other morning on my way to the American Express, knowing in advance that there would be no mail for me, no cheque, no cable, nothing, nothing.  A wagon from the Galeries Lafayette was rumbling over the bridge.  The rain had stopped and the sun breaking through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs with a cold fire.  I recall now how the driver leaned out and looked up the river toward Passy way.  Such a healthy, simple, approving glance, as if he were saying to himself: "Ah, spring is coming!"  And God knows, when he comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.  But it was not only this - it was the intimacy with which his eye rested upon the scene.  It was his Paris.  A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris.  Paris is filled with poor people - the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth, it seems to me.  And yet they give the illusion of being at home.  It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls.

      When I think of New York I have a very different feeling.  New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance.  New York is cold, glittering, malign.  The buildings dominate.  There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit.  A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube.  Nobody knows what it's all about.  Nobody directs the energy.  Stupendous.  Bizarre.  Baffling.  A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.

      When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks my guts.  New York!  The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and, above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves.... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness.  Meaningless.  Absolutely meaningless.  And Forty-second Street!  The top of the world, they call it.  Where's the bottom then?  You can walk along with your hands out and they'll put cinders in your cap.  Rich or poor, they walk along with head thrown back and they almost break their necks looking up at their beautiful white prisons.  They walk along like blind geese and the searchlights spray their empty faces with flecks of ecstasy.