Henry Miller's
TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
Digital electronic transcription by John O’Loughlin
Transcription Copyright © 2023 Centretruths Digital Media
_____________________
FOREWORD
to
HISTORIA CALAMITATUM
(the story of my misfortunes)
Often the hearts
of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are soothed in their sorrows,
more by example than by words. And
therefore, because I too have known some consolation from speech had with one
who was a witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which
have sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is
of himself ever a consoler. This I do so
that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in
truth nought, or at the most but of small account, and so shall you come to
bear them more easily.
PETER
ABERLARD
_________________
On the Ovarian Trolley
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with
dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.
From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which
enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady
and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was
a jangle and a discord. In everything I
quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the
unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my
own worst enemy. There was nothing I
wished to do which I could just as well not do.
Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to
surrender because I saw no sense in struggling.
I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted
by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not
a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not
sympathy that made me so. It was purely
negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped anyone expecting that it would
do me any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs
seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a
change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted: it was
something to make me puke. I had no more
need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I
would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.
What was most
annoying was that at first blush people usually took me to be good, to be kind,
generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess these virtues, but if
so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous,
loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy.
Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for
everybody and everything.
From the very
beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in
a false way. I had need of nobody
because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded
of me I balked. That was the form my
independence took. I was corrupt, in
other words, corrupt from the start.
It's as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young
the poison never left my system. Even
when she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent; most children
rebel, or make a pretence of rebelling, but I didn't
give a damn. I was a philosopher when
still in swaddling clothes. I was
against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an effort it was
only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap. And if you can tell me why this should have
been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing
can eliminate it. I heard later, when I
had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge?
Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is
offered you gratis? The earliest
remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the gutter, the frost on
the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls
in the kitchen. Why do people live in
outlandish climates in the temperate zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are
naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never
realized that there were "warm" countries, places where you didn't
have to sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and
exhilarating. Wherever there is cold
there are people who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young
they preach to the young the gospel of work - which is nothing, at bottom, but
the doctrine of inertia. My people were
entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots.
Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness,
to say nothing of righteousness. They
were painfully clean. But inwardly they
stank. Never once had they opened the
door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap
into the dark. After dinner the dishes
were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was
neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were
ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow
never came. The present was only a
bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not
one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.
In my bitterness
I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better to condemn myself. For I am like them too, in
many ways. For a long while I
thought I had escaped, but as time goes on I see that I am no better, that I am
even a little worse, because I saw more clearly than they ever did and yet
remained powerless to alter my life. As
I look back on my life it seems to me that I never did anything of my own
volition but always through the pressure of others. People often think of me as an adventurous
fellow; nothing could be farther from the truth. My adventures were always adventitious,
always thrust on me, always endured rather than undertaken. I am of the very essence of that proud,
boastful Nordic people who have never had the least sense of adventure but who
nevertheless have scoured the earth, turned it upside down, scattering relics
and ruins everywhere. Restless
spirits, but not adventurous ones.
Agonizing spirits, incapable of living in the present. Disgraceful cowards, all of them, myself included. For there is only one great adventure and that is inward
toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.
Once every few
years I was on the verge of making this discovery, but in characteristic fashion
I always managed to dodge the issue. If
I try to think of a good excuse I can think only of the environment, of the
streets I knew and the people who inhabited them. I can think of no street in
I was the evil
product of an evil soil. If the self
were not imperishable, the "I" I write about would have been
destroyed long ago. To some this may
seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have happened did actually
happen, at least to me. History
may deny it, since I have played no part in the history of my people, but even
if everything I say is wrong, is prejudiced, spiteful, malevolent, even if I am
a liar and a poisoner, it is nevertheless the truth
and it will have to be swallowed.
As
to what happened ...
Everything that
happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of a contradiction. Until the one for whom this is written came
along I imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solution
to all things. I thought,
when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of
something which I could bite into.
Instead I lost hold of life completely.
I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I found
nothing. But in reaching out, in the
effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless
found something I had not looked for - myself. I found that what I had desired all my life
was not to live -if what others are doing is called living - but to express
myself. I realized that I had never the
least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something
which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all,
nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which
I had stifled every day in order to live.
Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of
effort, I cannot say what I think and feel - that bothers me, that
rankles. From childhood on I can see
myself on the track of this spectre, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but
this power, this ability. Everything
else is a lie - everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon
this. And that is pretty much the greater
part of my life.
I was a
contradiction in essence, as they say.
People took me to be serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless,
or to be sincere and earnest, or to be negligent and carefree. I was all these things at once - and beyond
that I was something else, something which no-one suspected, least of all myself. As a boy of
six or seven I used to sit at my grandfather's workbench and read to him while
he sewed. I remember him vividly in
those moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a coat, he would
stand with one hand over the other and look out of the window dreamily. I remember the expression on his face, as he
stood there dreaming, better than the contents of the books I read, better than
the conversations we had or the games which I played in the street. I used to wonder what he was dreaming of,
what it was that drew him out of himself.
I hadn't learned yet how to dream wide-awake. I was always lucid, in the moment, and all of
a piece. His daydreaming fascinated
me. I knew that he had no connection
with what he was doing, not the least thought for any of us, that he was alone
and being alone he was free. I was never
alone, least of all when I was by myself.
Always, it seems to me, I was accompanied: I was like a little crumb of
a big cheese, which was the world, I suppose, though I never stopped to think
about it. But I know I never existed
separately, never thought myself the big cheese, as it were. So that even when I had
reason to be miserable, to complain, to weep, I had the illusion of
participating in a common, a universal misery. When I wept the whole world was weeping - so
I imagined. I wept very seldom. Mostly I was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good time.
I had a good time because, as I said before, I really didn't give a fuck
about anything. If things were wrong with
me they were wrong everywhere, I was convinced of it. And things were wrong usually only when one
cared too much. That impressed itself on
me very early in life. For example, I
remember the case of my young friend Jack Lawson. For a whole year he lay in bed, suffering the
worst agonies. He was my best friend, so
people said at any rate. Well, at first
I was probably sorry for him and perhaps now and then I called at his house to
inquire about him; but after a month or two had elapsed I grew quite callous
about his suffering. I said to myself he
ought to die and the sooner he dies the better it will be, and having thought
thus I acted accordingly: that is to say, I promptly forgot about him,
abandoned him to his fate. I was only
about twelve years old at the time and I remember being proud of my
decision. I remember the funeral too -
what a disgraceful affair it was. There
they were, friends and relatives all congregated about the bier and all of the
bawling like sick monkeys. The mother especially gave me a pain in the
ass. She was such a rare, spiritual
creature, a Christian Scientist, I believe, and though she didn't believe in
disease and didn't believe in death either, she raised such a stink that Christ
himself would have risen from the grave.
But not her beloved Jack! No,
Jack lay there cold as ice and rigid and unbeckonable. He was dead and there were no two ways about
it. I knew it and I was glad of it. I didn't waste any tears over it. I couldn't say that he was better off because
after all the "he" had vanished.
He was gone and with him the sufferings he had endured and the
suffering he had unwittingly inflicted on others. Amen!, I said to myself, and with that, being
slightly hysterical, I let a loud fart - right beside the coffin.
This caring too
much - I remember that it only developed with me about the time I first fell in
love. And even then I didn't care
enough. If I had really cared I wouldn't
be here now writing about it: I'd have died of a broken heart, or I'd have swung
for it. It was a bad experience because
it taught me how to live a lie. It
taught me to smile when I didn't want to smile, to work when I didn't believe
in work, to live when I had no reason to go on living. Even when I had forgotten her I still retained
the trick of doing what I didn't believe in.
It was all chaos
from the beginning, as I have said. But
sometimes I got so close to the centre, to the very heart of the confusion,
that it's a wonder things didn't explode around me.
It is customary to
blame everything on the war. I say the
war had nothing to do with me, with my life.
At a time when others were getting themselves comfortable berths I was
taking one miserable job after another, and never enough in it to keep body and
soul together. Almost as quickly as I
was hired I was fired. I had plenty of
intelligence but I inspire distrust.
Wherever I went I fomented discord - not because I was idealistic but
because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of
everything. Besides, I wasn't a good ass
licker. That marked me, no doubt. People could tell at once when I asked for a
job that I really didn't give a damn whether I got it or not. And of course I generally didn't get it. But after a time the mere looking for a job
became an activity, a pastime, so to speak.
I would go in and ask for most anything.
It was a way of killing time - no worse, as far as I could see, than
work itself. I was my own boss and I had
my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my own
bankruptcy. I was not a corporation or a
trust or a state or a federation or a polity of nations - I was more like God,
if anything.
This went on from
about the middle of the war until ... well, until one day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately
want a job. I needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided
that I would take the last job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment bureau of the
telegraph company - the Cosmodemonic Telegraph
Company of
The guy who
turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard. He seemed to take me for a college student,
though it was clear enough from my application that I had long left
school. I had even honoured myself on
the application with a Ph.D. degree from
When he picked up
the telephone and demanded the general manager I thought it was just a gag, that they were going to pass me around like that from
one to the other until I'd got fed up.
But the moment I heard him talk I changed my opinion. When I got to the general manager's office,
which was in another building uptown, they were waiting for me. I sat down in a comfortable leather chair and
accepted one of the big cigars that were thrust forward. This individual seemed at once to be vitally
concerned about the matter. He wanted me
to tell him all about it, down to the last detail, his big hairy ears cocked to
catch the least crumb of information which would justify something or other
which was formulating itself inside his dome. I realized that by some accident I had really
been instrumental in doing him a service.
I let him wheedle it out of me to suit his fancy, observing all the time
which way the wind was blowing. And as
the talk progressed I noticed that he was warming up to me more and more. At last someone was showing a little
confidence in me! That was all I
required to get started on one of my favourite lines. For, after years of job hunting I had
naturally become quite adept: I knew not only what not to say, but I knew
also what to imply, what to insinuate.
Soon the assistant general manager was called in and asked to listen to
my story. By this time I knew what the
story was. I understood that Hymie - "that little kike", as the general
manager called him - had no business pretending that he was the employment
manager. Hymie
had usurped his prerogative, that much was clear. It was also clear that Hymie
was a Jew and that Jews were not in good odour with the general manager, nor
with Mr. Twilliger, the vice-president, who was a
thorn in the general manager's side.
Perhaps it was Hymie, "the dirty little kike", who was
responsible for the high percentage of Jews on the messenger force. Perhaps Hymie was really
the one who was doing the hiring at the employment office - at Sunset Place,
they called it. It was an excellent
opportunity, I gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to talk down a
certain Mr. Burns who, he informed me, had been the employment manager for some
thirty years now and who was evidently getting lazy on the job.
The conference
lasted several hours. Before it was
terminated Mr. Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me
the boss of the works. Before putting me
into office, however, he was going to ask me as a special favour, and also as a
sort of apprenticeship which would stand me in good stead, to work as a special
messenger. I would receive the salary of
employment manager, but it would be paid me out of a separate account. In short I was to float from office to office
and observe the way affairs were conducted by all and sundry. I was to make a little report from time to time
as to how things were going. And once in
a while, so he suggested, I was to visit him at his home on the q.t. and have a little chat about the conditions in the
hundred and one branches of the Cosmodemonic
Telegraph Company in
In a few months I
was sitting at Sunset Place hiring and firing like a demon. It was a slaughterhouse, so help me God. The thing was senseless from the bottom
up. A waste of men,
material and effort. A hideous farce against a backdrop of sweat and misery. But just as I had accepted the spying, so I
accepted the hiring and firing and all that went with it. I said Yes to
everything. If the vice-president
decreed that no cripples were to be hired I hired no cripples. If the vice-president said that all
messengers over forty-five were to be fired without notice I fired them without
notice. I did everything they instructed
me to do, but in such a way that they had to pay for it. When there was a strike I folded my arms and
waited for it to blow over. But I first
saw to it that it cost them a good penny.
The whole system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly
corrupt and complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or
order into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against the whole system of American
labour, which is rotten at both ends. I
was the fifth wheel on the wagon and neither side had any use for me, except to
exploit me. In fact, everybody was being
exploited - the president and his gang by the unseen powers,
the employees by the officials, and so on and around, in and out and through
the whole works. From my little perch at
Sunset Place I had a bird's eye view of the whole American society. It was like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically, statistically,
it made sense. But when you looked at it
up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when
you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he
breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and
degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was
worse than looking into a volcano. You
could see the whole American life - economically, politically, morally,
spiritually, artistically, statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out
cock. It looked worse than that, really,
because you couldn't see anything resembling a cock any more. Maybe in the past this thing had life, did
produce something, did at least give a moment's
pleasure, a moment's thrill. But looking
at it from where I sat it looked rottener than the wormiest cheese. The wonder was that the stench of it didn't
carry 'em off.... I'm using the past tense all the
time, but of course it's the same now, maybe even a bit worse. At least now we're getting it full stink.
By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps
of messengers. My office at Sunset Place
was like an open sewer, and it stank like one.
I had dug myself into the first-line trench and I was getting it from
all directions at once. To begin with,
the man I had ousted died of a broken heart a few weeks after my arrival. He held out just long enough to break me in
and then he croaked. Things happened so
fast that I didn't have a chance to feel guilty. From the moment I arrived at the office it
was one long uninterrupted pandemonium.
An hour before my arrival - I was always late - the place was already
jammed with applicants. I had to elbow
my way up the stairs and literally force my way in to get to my desk. Before I could take my hat off I had to
answer a dozen telephone calls. There
were three telephones on my desk and they all rang at once. They were bawling the piss out of me before I
had even sat down to work. There wasn't
even time to take a crap - until five or six in the afternoon. Hymie was worse off
than I because he was tied to the switchboard.
He sat there from eight in the morning until six, moving waybills
around. A waybill was a messenger loaned
by one office to another office for the day or a part of the day. None of the hundred and one offices even had
a full staff; Hymie had to play chess with the
waybills while I worked like a madman to plug up the gaps. If by a miracle I succeeded of a day in
filling all the vacancies, the next morning would find the situation exactly
the same - or worse. Perhaps twenty per
cent of the force was steady; the rest was driftwood. The steady ones drove the new ones away. The steady ones earned forty to fifty dollars
a week, sometimes sixty or seventy-five, sometimes as much as a hundred dollars
a week, which is to say that they earned far more than the clerks and often
more than their own managers. As for the
new ones, they found it difficult to earn ten dollars a week. Some of them worked an hour and quit, often
throwing a batch of telegrams in the garbage can or down the sewer. And whenever they quit they wanted their pay
immediately, which was impossible, because in the complicated bookkeeping which
ruled no-one could say what a messenger had earned until at least ten days
later. In the beginning I invited the
applicant to sit down beside me and I explained everything to him in
detail. I did that until I lost my voice. Soon I learned to save my strength for the
grilling that was necessary. In the
first place, every other boy was a born liar, if not a crook to boot. Many of them had already been hired and fired
a number of times. Some found it an
excellent way to find another job, because their duty brought them to hundreds
of offices which normally they would never have set foot in. Fortunately McGovern, the old trusty who
guarded the door and handed out the application blanks, had a camera eye. And then there were the big ledgers behind
me, in which there was a record of every applicant who had ever passed through
the mill. The ledgers were very much
like a police record; they were full of red ink marks, signifying this or that
delinquency. To judge from the evidence
I was in a tough spot. Every other name
involved a theft, a fraud, a brawl, or dementia or perversion or idiocy. "Be careful - so-and-so is an
epileptic!" "Don't hire this
man - he's a nigger!" "Watch
out - X has been in Dannemora - or else in Sing Sing."
If I had been a
stickler for etiquette nobody would ever have been hired. I had to learn quickly, and not from the
records or from those about me, but from experience. There were a thousand and one details by
which to judge an applicant: I had to take them all in at once, and quickly,
because in one short day, even if you are as fast as Jack Robinson, you can
only fire so many and no more. And no
matter how many I hired it was never enough.
The next day it would begin all over again. Some I knew would last only a day, but I had
to hire them just the same. The system
was wrong from start to finish, but it was not my place to criticize the
system. It was mine to hire and
fire. I was in the centre of a revolving
disk which was whirling so fast that nothing could stay put. What was needed was a mechanic, but according
to the logic of the higher-ups there was nothing wrong with the mechanism,
everything was fine and dandy except that things were temporarily out of
order. And things being temporarily out
of order brought on epilepsy, theft, vandalism, perversion, niggers, Jews,
whores and whatnot - sometimes strikes and lockouts. Whereupon, according to this logic, you took
a big broom and you swept the stable clean, or you took clubs and guns and you
beat sense into the poor idiots who were suffering from the illusion that
things were fundamentally wrong. It was
good now and then to talk of God, or to have a little
community sing - maybe even a bonus was justifiable now and then, that is when
things were getting too terribly bad for words.
But on the whole, the important thing was to keep hiring and firing; as
long as there were men and ammunition we were to advance, to keep mopping up
the trenches. Meanwhile Hymie kept taking cathartic pills - enough to blow out his
rear end if he had had a rear end, but he hadn't one any more, he only imagined
he was taking a crap, he only imagined he was shitting on his can. Actually the poor bugger was in a
trance. There were a hundred and one
offices to look after and each one had a staff of messengers which was
mythical, if not hypothetical, and whether the messengers were real or unreal,
tangible or intangible, Hymie had to shuffle them
about from morning to night while I plugged up the holes, which was also
imaginary because who could say when a recruit had been dispatched to an office
whether he would arrive there today or tomorrow or never. Some of them got lost in the subway or in the
labyrinths under the skyscrapers; some rode around on the elevated line all day
because with a uniform it was a free ride and perhaps they had never enjoyed
riding around all day on the elevated lines.
Some of them started for
When he arrived
in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he
did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he
explained to me later, if he didn't sharpen the pencils first things off the
bat they would never get sharpened. The
next thing was to take a glance out the window and see what the weather was
like. Then, with a freshly sharpened
pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he kept beside him
and in it he gave the weather report.
This, he also informed me, often turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot thick or the ground
covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not shuffling
the waybills around more speedily, and the employment manager might also be
excused for not filling up the holes on such days, no? But why he didn't take a crap first instead of
plugging in on the switchboard soon as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery
to me. That too he explained to me
later. Anyway, the day always broke with
confusion, complaints, constipation and vacancies. It also began with loud smelly farts, with
bad breaths, with ragged nerves, with epilepsy, with meningitis, with low
wages, with back pay that was overdue, with worn-out shoes, with corns and
bunions, with flat feet and broken arches, with pocketbooks missing and
fountain pens lost or stolen, with telegrams floating in the sewer, with threats
from the vice-president and advice from the managers, with wrangles and
disputes, with cloudbursts and broken telegraph wires, with new methods of
efficiency and old ones that had been discarded, with hope for better times and
a prayer for the bonus which never came.
The new messengers were going over the top and getting machine-gunned;
the old ones were digging in deeper and deeper, like rats in a cheese. It took ten minutes to reach
The Y.M.C.A.,
eager to improve the morale of working boys everywhere in America, was holding
meetings at noon hour and wouldn't I like to send a few spruce-looking boys to
hear William Carnegie Asterbilt Junior give a
five-minute talk on service. Mr. Mallory
of the Welfare League would like to know if I could spare a few minutes some
time to tell me about the model prisoners who were on parole and who would be
glad to serve in any capacity, even as messengers. Mrs. Guggenhoffer
of the Jewish Charities would be very grateful if I would aid her in
maintaining some broken-down homes which had broken down because everybody was either infirm, crippled or disabled in the family. Mr. Haggerty of the Runaway Home for Boys was
sure he had just the right youngsters for me, if only I would give them a
chance; all of them had been mistreated by their stepfathers or
stepmothers. The Mayor of New York would
appreciate it if I would give my personal attention to the bearer of said
letter whom he could vouch for in every way - but why the hell he didn't give
said bearer a job himself was a mystery.
Man leaning over my shoulder hands me a slip of paper on which he has
just written - "Me understand everything but me no hear the
voices." Luther Winifred is
standing beside him, his tattered coat fastened together with safety pins. Luther is two-sevenths pure Indian and
five-sevenths German-American, so he explains.
On the Indian side he is a Crow, one of the Crows from
And then there is
Ferdinand Mish - how could I have forgotten him? He has been waiting in line all morning to
get a word with me. I never answered the
letters he sent me. Was that just? he asks me blandly. Of course not. I
remember vaguely the last letter which he sent me from the Cat and
In the beginning
I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the clamps below. I had ideas and I executed them, whether it
pleased the vice-president or not. Every
ten days or so I was put on the carpet and lectured for having "too big a
heart." I never had any money in my
pocket but I used other people's money freely.
As long as I was the boss I had credit.
I gave money away right and left; I gave my clothes away and my linen,
my books, everything that was superfluous.
If I had had the power I would have given the company away to the poor
buggers who pestered me. If I was asked
for a dime I gave a half dollar, if I was asked for a dollar I gave five. I didn't give a fuck how much I gave away,
because it was easier to borrow and give than to refuse the poor devils. I never saw such an aggregation of misery in
my life, and I hope I'll never see it again.
Men are poor everywhere - they always have been and they always will be. And beneath the terrible poverty there is a
flame, usually so low that it is almost invisible. But it is there and if one has the courage to
blow on it it can become a conflagration. I was constantly urged not to be too lenient,
not to be too sentimental, not to be too
charitable. Be firm! Be hard! they
cautioned me. Fuck that! I said to myself,
I'll be generous, pliant, forgiving, tolerant, tender. In the beginning I heard every man to the
end; if I couldn't give him a job I gave him money, and if I had no money I
gave him cigarettes or I gave him courage.
But I gave! The effect was dizzying. Nobody can estimate the results of a good
deed, of a kind word. I was swamped with
gratitude, with good wishes, with invitations, with pathetic, tender little
gifts. If I had had real power instead
of being the fifth wheel on a wagon, God knows what I might not have
accomplished. I could have used the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of
I even
accomplished the miracle of stopping the crazy turnover, something that nobody
had dared to hope for. Instead of
supporting my efforts they undermined me.
According to the logic of the higher-ups the turnover had ceased because
the wages were too high. So they cut the
wages. It was like kicking the bottom
out of a bucket. The whole edifice
tumbled, collapsed on my hands. And,
just as though nothing had happened they insisted that the gaps be plugged up
immediately. To soften the blow a bit
they intimated that I might even increase the percentage of Jews, I might take
on a cripple now and then, if he were capable, I might do this and that, all of
which they had informed me previously was against the code. I was so furious that I took on anything and
everything; I would have taken on broncos and gorillas if I could have imbued
them with the modicum of intelligence which was necessary to deliver messages. A few days previously there had been only
five or six vacancies at closing time.
Now there were three hundred, four hundred, five
hundred - they were running out like sand.
It was marvellous. I sat there
and without asking a question I took them on in carload lots - niggers, Jews,
paralytics, cripples, ex-convicts, whores, maniacs, perverts, idiots, any
fucking bastard who could stand on two legs and hold a telegram in his
hand. The managers of the hundred and
one offices were frightened to death. I
laughed. I laughed all day long thinking
what a fine stinking mess I was making of it.
Complaints were pouring in from all parts of the city. The service was crippled, constipated,
strangulated. A mule could have gotten
there faster than some of the idiots I put into harness.
The best thing
about the new day was the introduction of female messengers. It changes the whole atmosphere of the
joint. For Hymie
especially it was a godsend. He moved
his switchboard around so that he could watch me while juggling the waybills
back and forth. Despite the added work
he had a permanent erection. He came to
work with a smile and he smiled all day long.
He was in heaven. At the end of
the day I always had a list of five or six who were worth trying out. The game was to keep them on the string, to
promise them a job but to get a free fuck first. Usually it was only necessary to throw a feed
into them in order to bring them back to the office at night and lay them out
on the zinc-covered table in the dressing room.
If they had a cosy apartment, as they sometimes did, we took them home
and finished it in bed. If they liked to
drink Hymie would bring a bottle along. If they were any good and really needed some
dough Hymie would flash his roll and peel off a five
spot or a ten spot, as the case might be.
It makes my mouth water when I think of that roll he carried about with
him. Where he got it from I never knew,
because he was the lowest-paid man in the joint. But it was always there, and no matter what I
asked for I got. And once it happened
that we did get a bonus and I paid Hymie back to the
last penny - which so amazed him that he took me out that night to Delmonico's and spent a fortune on me. Not only that, but the next day he insisted
on buying me a hat and shirts and gloves.
He even insinuated that I might come home and fuck his wife, if I liked,
though he warned me that she was having a little trouble at present with her
ovaries.
In addition to Hymie and McGovern I had as assistants a pair of beautiful
blondes who often accompanied us to dinner in the evening. And there was O'Mara, an old friend of mine
who had just returned from the
That was how it
stood at Sunset Place after a couple of years had rolled by. I was saturated with humanity, with
experiences of one kind and another. In
my sober moments I made notes which I intended to make use of later if ever I
should have a chance to record my experiences.
I was waiting for a breathing spell.
And then by chance one day, when I had been put on the carpet for some
wanton piece of negligence, the vice-president let drop a phrase which stuck in
my crop. He had said that he would like
to see some one write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers; he
hinted that perhaps I might be the one to do such a job. I was furious to think what a ninny he was
and delighted at the same time because secretly I was itching to get the thing
off my chest. I thought to myself - you
poor old futzer, you, just wait until I get it off my chest.... I'll give
you an Horatio Alger book ... just you wait! My head was in a whirl leaving his
office. I saw the army of men, women and
children that had passed through my hands, saw them weeping, begging,
beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming, threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways,
the freight trains lying on the floor, the parents in rags, the coal box empty,
the sink running over, the walls sweating and between the cold beads of sweat
the cockroaches running like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes
or falling backwards in the epileptic frenzy, the mouth twitching, the slaver
pouring from the lips, the limbs writhing; I saw the walls giving way and the
pest pouring out like a winged fluid, and the men higher up with their ironclad
logic, waiting for it to blow over, waiting for everything to be patched up,
waiting contentedly, smugly, with big cigars in their mouths and their feet on
the desk, saying things were temporarily out of order. I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a
sick America, mounting higher and higher, first messenger, then operator, then
manager, then chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president,
then trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money
god, the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven
thousand decimals fore and aft. You
shits, I said to myself, I will give you the picture of twelve little men,
zeros without decimals, ciphers, digits, the twelve uncrushable
worms who are hollowing out the base of your rotten edifice. I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the
day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has
cleared away.
From all over the
earth they had come to me to be succoured.
Except for the primitives there was scarcely a race which wasn't
represented on the force. Except for the
Ainus, the Maoris, the Papuans, the Veddas, the Lapps, the Zulus, the Patagonians, the Igorots, the Hottentots, the Tuaregs,
except for the lost Tasmanians, the lost Grimaldi
men, the lost Atlanteans, I had a representative of
almost every species under the sun. I
had two brothers who were still sun-worshippers, two Nestorians from the old
Assyrian world; I had two Maltese twins from Malta and a descendant of the
Mayas from Yucatan; I had a few of our little brown brothers from the
Philippines and some Ethiopians from Abyssinia; I had men from the pampas of Argentina
and stranded cowboys from Montana; I had Greeks, Letts,
Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Ruthenians, Czechs,
Spaniards, Welshmen, Finns, Swedes, Russians, Danes, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans,
Cubans, Uruguayans, Brazilians, Australians, Persians, Japs,
Chinese, Javanese, Egyptians, Africans from the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast,
Hindus, Armenians, Turks, Arabs, Germans, Irish, English, Canadians - and
plenty of Italians and plenty of Jews. I
had only one Frenchman that I can recall and he lasted about three hours. I had a few American Indians, Cherokees
mostly, but no Tibetans, and no Eskimos: I saw names I could never have
imagined and handwriting which ranged from cuneiform to the sophisticated and
astoundingly beautiful calligraphy of the Chinese. I heard men beg for work who had been
Egyptologists, botanists, surgeons, gold miners, professors of Oriental
languages, musicians, engineers, physicians, astronomers, anthropologists,
chemists, mathematicians, mayors of cities and governors of states, prison wardens,
cowpunchers, lumberjacks, sailors, oyster pirates, stevedores, riveters,
dentists, painters, sculptors, plumbers, architects, dope peddlers,
abortionists, white slavers, sea divers, steeplejacks, farmers, cloak and suit
salesmen, trappers, lighthouse keepers, pimps, aldermen, senators, every bloody
thing under the sun, and all of them down and out, begging for work, for
cigarettes, for carfare, for a chance, Christ Almighty, just another chance! I saw and got to know men who were saints, if
there are saints in this world; I saw and spoke to savants, crapulous and uncrapulous ones; I listened to men who had the divine fire
in their bowels, who could have convinced God Almighty that they were worthy of
another chance, but not the vice-president of the Cosmococcic
Telegraphy Company. I sat riveted to my
desk and I travelled around the world at lightning speed, and I learned that
everywhere it is the same - hunger, humiliation, ignorance, vice, greed,
extortion, chicanery, torture, despotism: the inhumanity of man to man: the
fetters, the harness, the halter, the bridle, the whip, the spurs. The finer the calibre the
worse off the man. Men were
walking the streets of New York in that bloody, degrading outfit, the despised,
the lowest of the low, walking around like auks, like penguins, like oxen, like
trained seals, like patient donkeys, like bug jackasses, like crazy gorillas,
like docile maniacs nibbling at the dangling bait, like waltzing mice, like
guinea pigs, like squirrels, like rabbits, and many and many a one was fit to
govern the world, to write the greatest book every written. When I think of some of the Persians, the
Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the character they revealed, their
grace, their tenderness, their intelligence, their holiness, I spit on
the white conquerors of the world, the degenerate British, the pigheaded
Germans, the smug, self-satisfied French.
The earth is one great sentient being, a planet saturated through and
through with man, a live planet expressing itself falteringly and stutteringly; it is not the home of the white race or the
black race or the yellow race or the lost blue race, but the home of man
and all men are equal before God and will have their chance, if not now then a
million years hence. The little brown
brothers of the
When it came time
for my vacation - I hadn't taken one for three years, I was so eager to make
the company a success! - I took three weeks instead of two and I wrote the book
about the twelve little men. I wrote it
straight off, five, seven, sometimes eight thousand words a day. I thought that a man, to be a writer, must do
at least five thousand words a day. I
thought he must say everything all at once - in one book - and collapse
afterwards. I didn't know a thing about
writing. I was scared shitless. But I was determined to wipe Horatio Alger
out of the North American consciousness.
I suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written. It was a colossal tome and faulty from start
to finish. But it was my first book and
I was in love with it. If I had had the
money, as Gide had, I would have published it at my
own expense. If I had had the courage
that Whitman had, I would have peddled it from door to door. Everybody I showed it to said
it was terrible. I was urged to give up
the idea of writing. I had to learn, as
Balzac did, that one must write volumes before signing one's own name. I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must
give up everything and not do anything else but write,
that one must write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises
you against it, even if nobody believes in you.
Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real
secret lies in making people believe.
That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad, terrible, as they
said, was only natural. I was attempting
at the start what a man of genius would have undertaken only at the end. I wanted to say the last word at the
beginning. It was absurd and
pathetic. It was a crushing defeat, but
it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt something
big. Today, when I think of the
circumstances under which I wrote that book, when I think of the overwhelming
material which I tried to put into form, when I think of what I hoped to
encompass, I pat myself on the back, I give myself a double A. I am proud of the fact that I made such a
miserable failure of it; had it succeeded I would have become a monster. Sometimes, when I look over my notebooks,
when I look at the names alone of those whom I thought to write about, I am
seized with vertigo. Each man came to me
with a world of his own; he came to me and unloaded it on my desk; he expected
me to pick it up and put it on my shoulders.
I had no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed like Atlas,
my feet on the elephant's back and the elephant on the tortoise's back. To inquire on what the tortoise stood would
be to go mad.
I didn't dare to
think of anything then except the "facts". To get beneath the facts I would have had to
be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your
conflicting points of view annihilated.
You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again as
an individual. You have to be carbonized
and mineralized in order to work upwards from the least common denominator of
the self. You have to get beyond pity in
order to feel from the very roots of your being. One can't make a new heaven and earth with
"facts". There are no
"facts" - there is only the fact that man, every man
everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take
the short route. Every man is working
out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind,
generous and patient. In my enthusiasm
certain things were then inexplicable to me which are
now clear. I think, for example, of
Carnahan, one of the twelve little men I had chosen to write about. He was what is called a model messenger. He was a graduate of a prominent university,
had a sound intelligence and was of exemplary character. He worked eighteen and twenty hours a day and
earned more than any messenger on the force.
The clients whom he served wrote letters about him, praising him to the
skies; he was offered good positions which he refused for one reason or
another. He lived frugally, sending the
best part of his wages to his wife and children who lived in another city. He had two vices - drink and the desire to
succeed. He could go for a year without
drinking, but if he took one drop he was off.
He had cleaned up twice in Wall Street and yet, before coming to me for
a job, he had gotten no further than to be a sexton of a church in some little
town. He had been fired from that job
because he had broken into the sacramental wine and rung the bells all night
long. He was truthful, sincere, earnest. I had
implicit confidence in him and my confidence was proven by the record of his
service which was without a blemish.
Nevertheless he shot his wife and children in cold blood and then he
shot himself. Fortunately none of them
died; they all lay in the hospital together and they all recovered. I went to see his wife, after they had
transferred him to jail, to get her help.
She refused categorically. She
said he was the meanest, cruellest son of a bitch that ever walked on two legs
- she wanted to see him hanged. I
pleaded with her for two days, but she was adamant. I went to the jail and talked to him through
the mesh. I found that he had already
made himself popular with the authorities, had already been granted special
privileges. He wasn't at all
dejected. On the contrary, he was looking
forward to making the best of his time in prison by "studying up" on
salesmanship. He was going to be the
best salesman in
There was another
chap, a Hindu named Guptal. He was not only a model of good behaviour -
he was a saint. He had a passion for the
flute which he played all by himself in his miserable little room. One day he was found naked, his throat slit
from ear to ear, and beside him on the bed was his flute. At the funeral there were a dozen women who
wept passionate tears, including the wife of the janitor who had murdered
him. I could write a book about this
young man who was the gentlest and the holiest man I ever met, who had never
offended anybody and never taken anything from anybody, but who had made the
cardinal mistake of coming to
There was David Olinski, another faithful, industrious messenger who
thought of nothing but work. He had one
fatal weakness - he talked too much.
When he came to me he had already been around the globe several times
and what he hadn't done to make a living isn't worth telling about. He knew about twelve languages and he was
rather proud of his linguistic ability.
He was one of those men whose very willingness and enthusiasm is their
undoing. He wanted to help everybody
along, show everybody how to succeed. He
wanted more work than we could give him - he was a glutton for work. Perhaps I should have warned him, when I sent
him to his office on the East Side, that he was going to work in a tough
neighbourhood, but he pretended to know so much and he was so insistent in
working in that locality (because of his linguistic ability) that I said
nothing. I thought to myself - you'll
find out quickly enough for yourself.
And sure enough, he was only there a short time when he got into
trouble. A tough Jewboy
from the neighbourhood walked in one day and asked for a blank. Dave, the messenger, was behind the
desk. He didn't like the way the man
asked for the blank. He told him he
ought to be more polite. For that he got
a box in the ears. That made him wag his
tongue some more, whereupon he got such a wallop that his teeth flew down his
throat and his jawbone was broken in three places. Still he didn't know enough to hold his
trap. Like the damned fool he was he
goes to the police station and registers a complaint. A week later, while he's sitting on a bench
snoozing, a gang of roughnecks break into the place and beat him to a
pulp. His head was so battered that his
brains looked like an omelette. For good
measure they emptied the safe and turned it upside down. Dave died on the way to the hospital. They found five hundred dollars hidden away
in the toe of his sock.... Then there was Clausen and his wife
Often it happens,
as in
Nobody can have
slept more soundly than I in the midst of this nightmare. The war, when it came along, made only a sort
of faint rumble in my ears. Like my
compatriots, I was pacifistic and cannibalistic. The millions who were put away in the carnage
passed away in a cloud, much like the Aztecs passed away, and the Incas and the
Red Indians and the buffaloes. People
pretended to be profoundly moved, but they weren't. They were simply tossing fitfully in their
sleep. No-one lost his appetite, no-one got up and rang the fire alarm. The day I first realized that there had been
a war was about six months or so after the armistice. It was on a street car on the
Things take place
instantaneously, but there's a long process to be gone through first. What you get when something happens is only
the explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens according to law - and
with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb
had to be properly prepared, properly primed.
After putting things in order for the bastards up above I had to be
taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a football, had to
be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent as a
jellyfish. All my life I have never
wanted for friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up
around me like mushrooms. I never had a
moment to myself. If I went home of a night,
hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes a gang of them would be there and
it didn't seem to make much difference whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other
set.
As a result of
that chance encounter on the street we met frequently thereafter, for a period
of several months. He used to call for
me in the evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was
nearby. What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world
fascinated me. Even now, years and years
since, even now, when I know
Interwoven with
this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of
My friend Kronski used to twit me about my "euphorias". It was a sly way he had of reminding me, when
I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow would find me depressed. It was true.
I had nothing but ups and downs. Long stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant
bursts of gaiety, of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I
was myself. It sounds strange to
say so, yet I was never myself. I was
either anonymous or the person called Henry Miller raised
to the nth degree. In the latter
mood, for instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie
while riding a trolley car. Hymie, who never
suspected me of being anything but a good employment manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one
night when I was in one of my states of "euphoria". We had bordered the trolley at the
What strikes me
now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is
the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real
interest for me. Only the object haunted
me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body or a
staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had
found in the gutter. Whatever it was it
enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who made
up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside their world as a
cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the
thing-in-itself - not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately
passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which
everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.
Living in the
midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I attached myself to the
old. In every object there was a minute
particle which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for
the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the
object. Whatever set the object apart,
or made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to
me. If this was perverse it was also
healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world which was
springing up about me. Soon I too would
become like these objects which I venerated, a thing apart, a
non-useful member of society. I was
definitely dated, that was certain. And
yet I was able to amuse, to instruct, to nourish. But never to be accepted,
in a genuine way. When I wished
to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum of society,
and make him listen to me. I could hold
him spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long
as the spirit was in me. At bottom I
sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an
antagonism which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a clown; it would have
afforded me the widest range of expression.
But I underestimated the profession.
Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville entertainer, I would have
been famous. People would have
appreciated me precisely because they would not have understood; but they would
have understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief, to say the
least.
It was always a
source of amazement to me how easily people could become riled just listening
to me talk. Perhaps my speech was
somewhat extravagant, though often it happened when I was holding myself in
with main force. The turn of a phrase,
the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the facility with which the words came
to my lips, the allusions to subjects which were taboo - everything conspired
to set me off as an outlaw, as an enemy
of society. No matter how well things
began sooner or later they smelled me out.
If I were modest and humble, for example, then
I was too modest, too humble. If I were
gay and spontaneous, bold and reckless, then I was too free, too gay. I could never get myself quite au point
with the individual I happened to be talking to. If it were not a question of life and death -
everything was life and death to me then - if it was merely a question of
passing a pleasant evening at the home of some acquaintance, it was the same
thing. There were vibrations emanating
from me, overtones and undertones, which charged the atmosphere
unpleasantly. Perhaps the whole evening
they had been amused by my stories, perhaps I had them in stitches, as it often
happened, and everything seemed to auger well.
But sure as fate something was bound to happen before the evening came
to a close, some vibration set loose which made the chandelier ring or which
reminded some sensitive soul of the pisspot under the
bed. Even while the laughter was still
dying off the venom was beginning to make itself
felt. "Hope to see you again some
time," they would say, but the wet, limp hand which was extended would
belie the words.
Persona non grata! Jesus,
how clear it seems to me now! No pick
and choice possible: I had to take what was to hand and learn to like it. I had to learn to live with the scum, to swim
like a sewer rat or be drowned. If you
elect to join the herd you are immune.
To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself,
make yourself indistinguishable from the herd.
You may dream, if you dream alike.
But if you dream something different you are not in
Am I saying this
with rancour, with envy, with malice? Perhaps. Perhaps I
regret not having been able to become an American. Perhaps. In my zeal now, which is again American,
I am about to give birth to a monstrous edifice, a skyscraper, which will last
undoubtedly long after the other skyscrapers have vanished, but which will
vanish too when that which produced it disappears. Everything American will disappear one day,
more completely than that which was Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian. This is one of the ideas which pushed
me outside the warm, comfortable bloodstream where, buffaloes all, we once
grazed in peace. An
idea that has caused me infinite sorrow, for not to belong to something
enduring is the last agony. But I
am not a buffalo and I have no desire to be one, I am not even a spiritual
buffalo. I have slipped away to rejoin
an older stream of consciousness, a race antecedent to the buffaloes, a race
that will survive the buffalo.
All things, all
objects animate or inanimate that are different,
are veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is different. This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different
from the usual skyscraper à l'américaine. In this skyscraper there are no elevators, no
seventy-third-storey windows to jump from.
If you get tired of climbing you are shit out
of luck. There is no slot directory in
the main lobby. If you are searching for
somebody you will have to search. If you
want a drink you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in
this building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths. All the other skyscrapers have what you want!
this one contains nothing but what I want, what
I like. And somewhere in this
skyscraper Valeska has her being, and we're going to
get to her when the spirit moves me. For
the time being she's all right, Valeska, seeing as
how she's six feet under and by now perhaps picked clean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked
clean too, by the human worms who have no respect for
anything which has a different tint, a different odour.
The sad thing
about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood
in her veins. It was depressing for
everybody around her. She made you aware
of it whether you wished to be or no.
The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact that
her mother was a trollop. The mother was
white, of course. Who the father was
nobody knew, not even Valeska herself.
Everything was
going along smoothly until the day an officious little Jew from the
vice-president's office happened to espy her.
He was horrified, so he informed me confidentially, to think that I had
employed a coloured person as my secretary.
He spoke as though she might contaminate the messengers. The next day I was put on the carpet. It was exactly as though I had committed
sacrilege. Of course I pretended that I
hadn't observed anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely
intelligent and extremely capable.
Finally the president himself stepped in. There was a short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically proposed to
give her a better position in
That was the
beginning of things. I think it was the
very next day that I slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her. She read the note sitting opposite me and
when she was through she looked me square in the eye and said she didn't
believe it. But we went to dinner again
that night and we had more to drink and we danced and while we were dancing she
pressed herself against me lasciviously.
It was just the time, as luck would have it, that my wife was getting
ready to have another abortion. I was
telling Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said - "Why
don't you let me lend you a hundred dollars?" The next thing I brought her home to dinner
and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed how well the two of them got
along. Before the evening was over it
was agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house
the day of the abortion and take care of the kid. The day came and I gave Valeska
the afternoon off. About an hour after
she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the
afternoon off also. I started toward the
burlesque on
It's strange how
things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid
I suddenly remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a
child. You take the dominoes and you
make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull the tablecloth on which
the battleships are floating until they come to the edge of the table when
suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall onto the floor. We tried it over and over again,
the three of us, until the kid got so sleepy that she toddled off to the next
room and fell asleep. The dominoes were
lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor too. Suddenly Valeska
was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down my throat, my hand
between her legs. As I laid her back on
the table she twined her legs around me.
I could fell one of the dominoes under my feet - I thought of my
grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day that
I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as he
pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought of the attack on
San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture of Teddy charging at
the head of his volunteers in the big book which I used to read beside the
workbench; I thought of the battleship "Maine" that floated over my
bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral Dewey and of
Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy
Yard which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered that
we had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the doctor's office
I didn't have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings.... We had
hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the
slaughterhouse. I was still buttoning my
fly as I went through the hall to open the gate. She was as white as flour. She looked as though she'd never be able to
go through another one. We put her to
bed and then we gathered up the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on the
table. Just the other night in a bistro,
as I was going to the toilet, I happened to pass two old fellows playing
dominoes. I had to stop a moment and
pick up a domino. The feeling of it
immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they made when they fell
on the floor. And with
the battleships my lost tonsils and my faith in human beings gone. So that every time I walked over the
A terrible sense of desolation. It hung over me for years. If I were to believe in the stars I should
have to believe that I was completely under the reign of Saturn. Everything that happened to me happened too
late to mean much to me. It was even so
with my birth. Slated for Christmas I
was born a half hour too late. It always
seemed to me that I was meant to be the sort of individual that one is destined
to be by virtue of being born on the 25th day of December. Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was
Jesus Christ ... perhaps Krishnamurti too, for all I
know. Anyway that's the sort of guy I
was intended to be. But due to the fact
that my mother had a clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an
octopus, I came out under another configuration - with a bad setup in other
words. They say - the astrologers, I
mean - that it will get better and better for me as I go on; the future, in
fact, is supposed to be quite glorious.
But what do I care about the future?
It would have been better if my mother had tripped on the stairs the
morning of the 25th December and broken her neck: that would have given me a
fair start! When I try to think,
therefore, of where the break occurred I keep putting it back further and
further, until there is no other way of accounting for it than by the retarded
hour of birth. Even my mother, with her
caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. "Always dragging
behind, like a cow's tail" - that's how she characterized me. But is it my fault that she held me locked
inside her until the hour had passed?
Destiny had prepared me to be such and such a person; the stars were in
the right conjunction and I was right with the stars and kicking to get
out. But I had no choice about the
mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I
was lucky not to have been born an idiot, considering all the
circumstances. One thing seems clear,
however - and this is a hangover from the 25th - that I was born with a
crucifixion complex. That is, to be more
precise, I was born a fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me from
early childhood on. By
my parents especially. What is a
fanatic? One who believes passionately
and acts desperately upon what he believes.
I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more
firmly I believed. I believed -
and the rest of the world did not! If it
were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the
end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined,
hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet. It isn't even treachery, what I have in
mind. Treachery is understandable and
combatable. No, it is something worse,
something less than treachery.
It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in
the act of balancing yourself. You are
seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair
stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your
feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It
comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to
embrace people, to show them your love.
The more you reach out toward the world the more the world
retreats. Nobody wants real love, real
hatred. Nobody wants you to put your
hand in his sacred entrails - that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm,
you are to pretend that there's no such thing as blood and no such thing as a
skeleton beneath the covering of flesh. Keep
of the grass! That's the motto by
which people live.
If you continue
this balancing at the edge of the abyss long enough you become very very adept: no matter which way you are pushed you always
right yourself. Being in constant trim
you develop a ferocious gaiety, an unnatural gaiety, I might say. There are only two peoples in the world today
who understand the meaning of such a statement - the Jews and the Chinese. If it happens that you are neither of these
you find yourself in a strange predicament.
You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are considered cruel
and heartless when in reality you are only tough and durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and
weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as
they live. That means to be right and to
get the worst of it at the same time. It
means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this company the world always wears a
normal aspect, even under the most abnormal conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes
it so. You no longer believe in reality
but in thinking. And when you are pushed
off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.
In a way, in a
profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and
swaying, as if by a great recoil, the negative backwash rolled up and stayed
his death. The whole negative impulse of
humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human
integer, the figure one, one and indivisible.
There was a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact
that men have always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls on, the stars roll on, but
men, the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image of
the one and only one.
If one isn't
crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go on living above and
beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then another curious thing
happens. It's as though one had actually
died and actually been resurrected again; one lives a supernormal life, life
the Chinese. That is to say, one is
unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy, unnaturally
indifferent. The tragic sense is gone:
one lives on like a flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature
at the same time. If your best friend
dies you don't even bother to go to the funeral; if a man is run down by a
streetcar right before your eyes you keep on walking just as though nothing had
happened; if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you
yourself take no interest in the slaughter.
And so on and so on. Life becomes
a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing
show. Loneliness is abolished, because
all values, your own included, are destroyed.
Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human sympathy, a limited
sympathy - it is something monstrous and evil.
You care so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody
or anything. At the same time your
interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace. This too is suspect, since it is capable of
attaching you to a collar button just as well as to a cause. There is no fundamental, unalterable
difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling;
within however you grow hard as a diamond.
And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts
others to you willy-nilly. One thing is
certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and
whatever is of the earth is your inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being
without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena
about you.
Nothing of this
which I am now recording was known to me at the time that I was going through
the great change. Everything I endured
was in the nature of a preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one
evening, I walked out of the office, out of my hitherto private life, and
sought the woman who was to liberate me from a living death. In the light of this I look back now upon my
nocturnal rambles through the streets of
Whoever, through
too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of his misery,
is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy. And this joy of living, because it is
unnaturally acquired, is a poison which eventually vitiates the whole
world. Whatever is created beyond the
normal limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about
destruction. At night the streets of
In this null and
void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a sandwich, or a collar
button. I could study a cornice or a
coping with the greatest curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of
human woe. I can remember the dates on
certain buildings and the names of the architects who designed them. I can remember the temperature and the
velocity of the wind, standing at a certain corner; the tale that accompanied
it is gone. I can remember that I was
even then remembering something else, and I can tell you what it was that I was
then remembering, but of what use? There
was one man in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances;
there was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be me,
myself, but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast of the
field. Just as the city itself had
become a huge tomb in which men struggled to earn a decent death, so my own
life came to resemble a tomb which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a stone forest the
centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead centre, in the very heart of
chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended someone,
or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopeless and
bewildering. Until the time when I would
encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no
life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have
meaning. Perhaps in reading this, one
has still the impression of chaos but this is written from a live centre and
what is chaotic is merely peripheral, the tangential shreds, as it were, of a
world which no longer concerns me. Only
a few months ago I was standing in the streets of New York looking about me as
years ago I had looked about me; again I found myself studying the architecture,
studying the minute details which only the dislocated eye takes in. But this time it was like coming down from
Mars. What race of men is this, I asked
myself. What does it mean? And there was no remembrance of suffering or
of the life that was snuffed out in the gutter, only that I was looking upon a
strange and incomprehensible world, a world so removed from me that I had the
sensation of belonging to another planet.
From the top of the
Chaos! A howling chaos! No need to choose a particular day. And day of my life - back there - would
suit. Every day of my life, my tiny,
microcosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back.... At seven-thirty the
alarm went off. I didn't bounce out of
bed. I lay there till eight-thirty,
trying the gain a little more sleep.
Sleep - how could I sleep? In the
back of my mind was an image of the office where I was already due. I could see Hymie
arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already buzzing with demands for help,
the applicants climbing up the wide wooden stairway, the strong smell of
camphor from the dressing room. Why get
up and repeat yesterday's song and dance?
As fast as I hired them they dropped out. Working my balls off and
not even a clean shirt to wear.
Mondays I got my allowance from the wife - carfare and lunch money. I was always in debt to her and she was in
debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so on. I couldn't be bothered shaving - there wasn't
time enough. I put on the torn shirt,
gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway. If she were in a bad mood I would swindle the
money from the newsdealer at the subway. I get to the office out of breath, an hour
behind time and a dozen calls to make before I even talk to an applicant. While I make one call there are three other
calls waiting to be answered. I use two
telephones at once. The switchboard is
buzzing. Hymie
is sharpening his pencils between calls.
McGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of advice
about one of the applicants, probably a crook, who is trying to sneak back
under a false name. Behind
me the cards and ledgers containing the name of every applicant who had ever
passed through the machine. The
bad ones are starred in red ink; some of them have six aliases after their
names. Meanwhile the room is crawling
like a hive. The room stinks with sweat,
dirty feet, old uniforms, camphor, Lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away -
not that we don't need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just
won't do. The man in front of my desk,
standing at the rail with palsied hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of
The whole thing
was cockeyed and we were all laughing hysterically and then we began to drink -
the only thing they had in the house was kümmel and
it didn't take much to put us under. And
then it got more cockeyed because the two of them began to paw me and neither
one would let the other do anything. The
result was I undressed them both and put them to bed and they fell asleep in
each other's arms. And when I walked
out, toward 5 A.M., I discovered I didn't have a cent in my pocket and I tried
to bum a nickel from a taxi driver but nothing doing so finally I took off my furlined overcoat and I gave it to him - for a nickel. When I got home my wife was awake and sore as
hell because I had stayed out so long.
We had a hot discussion and finally I lost my temper and I clouted her
and she fell on the floor and began to weep and sob and then the kid woke up
and hearing the wife bawling she got frightened and began to scream at the top
of her lungs. The girl upstairs came
running down to see what was the matter.
She was in her kimono and her hair was hanging down her back. In the excitement she got close to me and
things happened without either of us intending anything to happen. We put the wife to bed with a wet towel
around her forehead and while the girl upstairs was bending over I stood behind
her and lifting her kimono I got it into her and she stood there a long time
talking a lot of foolish, soothing nonsense.
Finally I climbed into bed with the wife and to my utter amazement she
began to cuddle up to me and without saying a word we locked horns and we
stayed that way until dawn. I should
have been worn out, but instead I was wide-awake, and I lay there beside her
planning to take the day off and look up the whore with the beautiful fur whom
I was talking to earlier in the day.
After that I began to think about another woman, the wife of one of my
friends who always twitted me about my indifference. And then I began to think about one after the
other - all those whom I had passed up for one reason or another - until
finally I fell sound asleep and in the midst of it I had a wet dream. At seven-thirty the alarm went off as usual
and as usual I looked at my torn shirt hanging over the chair and I said to
myself what's the use and I turned over.
At eight o'clock the telephone rang and it was Hymie. Better get over quickly, he
said, because there's a strike on. And
that's how it went, day after day, and there was no reason for it, except that
the whole country was cockeyed and what I relate was going on everywhere,
either on a smaller scale or a larger scale, but the same thing everywhere,
because it was all chaos and all meaningless.
It went on and on
that way, day in and day out for almost five solid years. The continent itself perpetually wracked by
cyclones, tornadoes, tidal waves, droughts, blizzards, heat waves, pests,
strikes, hold-ups, assassinations, suicides ... a continuous fever and torment,
an eruption, a whirlpool. I was like a
man sitting in a lighthouse: below me the wild waves, the rocks, the reefs, the
debris of shipwrecked fleets. I could
give the danger signal but I was powerless to avert catastrophe. I breathed danger and
catastrophe. At times the sensation of
it was so strong that it belched like fire from my nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was
irresistibly attracted. I was violent
and phlegmatic at the same time. I was
like the lighthouse itself - secure in the midst of the most turbulent
sea. Beneath me was solid rock, the same
shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth and
the armature of my body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I was an eye, a huge searchlight
which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly, pitilessly. This eye so wide-awake seemed to have made
all my other faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to
see, to take in the drama of the world.
If I longed for
destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some
cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish,
to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the
earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep
in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit
in a cave and read by candlelight. I
wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body,
my own desires. I wanted to be alone for
a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in
order to forget. I wanted something
of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from
the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and
absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to
feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of
annihilation. I wanted to shake the
stone and the light out of my system. I
wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or
else the lapping of the black waters of death.
I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night
diapered with stars and trailing comets.
To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly
incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to
listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to
encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a planet
or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed,
divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom,
heartless as the earth itself.