Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

  But the mysterious beautiful thing of going to sea occurred that night: just a few hours after all that junk of bars, fighting, streets, subways, boom, there I am standing by whipping shrouds and snapping lines in the Atlantic Ocean in the night off New Jersey, we’re sailing south to Norfolk to load on for Italy, everything is washed away by the clean sea, I can remember the judge’s remarks about the sailor in the storm is safer than a sailor on land. The stars are big, they rock side to side like Galileo drunk and Kepler stoned and Copernicus thinking, like Vasco da Gama in his bunk in thought, the wind, the cleanness, the dark, the quiet blue light in the bridge where hand holds wheel and course is set. The sleeping seamen below.

  III

  Strangely, when we arrive in Norfolk I’m put on the wheel for the first time in my life. As we approach the mine nets of the harbor I have to turn a few times to stay on course, as indicated on the Kelvin compass, but this isnt like turning softly right with the wheel of a Ford or a Pontiac; the whole huge serpentine length of iron ship behind you doesnt turn to the wheel till about ten seconds later, and when it does you realize you’ve got to ease it because it’s going to keep on turning and go into a slow spin, so you angle the wheel left (port) again, it’s one vast hell of a way to drive. Not only that but a bumboat rushes up, they throw down the Jacob’s (rope) ladder, up comes the harbor pilot, strides into the bridgehouse, doesnt even look at me and says ‘Keep her to course one ninety-nine, steady as you go.’ He says ‘We’re going through those mine nets there, that opening, which is directly on course two hundred one. Keep her steady. Just listen to me.’ He, the captain, myself and the first mate are all standing there looking straight ahead but why they let me handle the wheel I’ll never know. I guess because it’s easy anyway. It’s broad sunny noon. We slide right through the nets and there’s plenty of room. Now for the business of coming into dock they bring up the regular A.B. on my watch. I guess they were trying to drain me. Dont ask me what was going on here, there or anywhere, I really dont know, all I wanted to do was go back to sleep or go cry on Cecily’s slippy belly.

  When we docked me and the (other) ordinaries put out rat guards to the cheers of several girls in cotton dresses on the pier, my God them Norfolk gals used to go right out to meet the seamen even before the rat guards were out.

  ‘Where you goin?’

  ‘Dont know.’

  ‘Take us along.’

  The captain: ‘Get those girls off the pier!’

  But now again the bosun starts to call me ‘Handsome’ and even ‘Pretty Boy’ as we’re winching up the lines and I turn to him and say: ‘What the heck’s the matter?’

  ‘You know what, Pretty Boy, Baby Face, you aint no ablebodied seaman. By the time I’m done with you . . .’ I sensed he wanted a fight. The other guys didnt care. I began to see that there was something homosexual about his prod and dare. I wasnt about to sail all the way to Naples with a 230-pound homo bosun.

  IV

  I really pondered the problem in my bunk that sundown. The boys went ashore to dig Norfolk, nothing there but thousands of sailors and cars and movie shows and whores who charged too much. The bosun had on his side the carpenter who also gave me the evil eye. Nothing I’d done in the ship except showing a lack of knowledge of some of the deck work. But that may have been enough. There would be a fight. Even after the next day, a whole day I spent on the smokestack with another deckhand fixing the filter with wires, and down below fixing other stuff, he wasnt satisfied and kept calling me ‘Sweetie Face’ and making the other guys laugh, some of them, but some of them looking away.

  Shall I tell you where I met that guy years later? Fifteen years later as I was reading poetry in a MacDougal Street coffee-house for free, he was there tape-recording the whole thing and I recognized him immediately but in the gaiety of poetry just put my fist under his chin and said ‘You, I remember you, bosun, what are you doing taking all this down?’ As I saw his crewcut and tweed jacket I realized now, fifteen years later, 1959, that he was some kind of investigator for the government. He must have remembered my name over the fifteen years and figured I was a Communist, maybe the Navy told him about my interview with Naval Intelligence at Newport RI. I’ve always had the feeling the FBI is watching me, or the like, because of my bum record in the Navy tho I’m still proud of having had the highest IQ in the history of Newport Naval Base.

  But anyway, to compound all the horror, I had to get away from that horrible bosun. So I put all my clothes on, put my chinos and black jacket over that, folded the empty duffel bag into my belt under, and walked off the ship that night the fattest able-bodied seaman you ever saw. The guard on watch was from the dock and didnt know me personally, how I was built, and just watched me walk off showing my papers to the pier people below. I looked like Mister Five-by-Five. A fat happy seaman going ashore to look at girls’ legs. But it was only I.

  I walked across the endless piers, got to the highway, where Naval lieutenants I could see inside of swank restaurants dining with blondes, and got into the toilet of a Texaco filling station. There I undid all my clothes, packed it back in the duffel bag, and emerged light as a feather in the cool southern autumnal evening. With the duffel bag I hailed a bus confidently, but who do you think was sitting in the front seat of the bus leering at me: the bosun and the carpenter! ‘Where you going with your duffel bag? How’d you get off that ship?’

  ‘It’s not mine, I picked it up at a gas station for my friend from Mass., he’s downtown waiting for it.’

  ‘Yeh?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Don’t forget, we sail tomorrow night at five P.M. Have a good time, kid,’ as I moved to the back of the bus among the standing sailors.

  So, at midnight, after having stashed my bag in the bus station lockers, and even seeing a movie, and by God even digging Norfolk just because I was there, and in fact even running into an old boyhood Navy chum from Lowell (Charley Bloodworth who was also in love with Maggie Cassidy during the 1939 track season), I was on the bus and riding back up across the southern dark toward New York. A ship jumper, to add to the rest.

  V

  And in New York, I went straight to the Columbia campus, occupied a room on the sixth floor of Dalton Hall, called Cecily, held her in my arms (still a tease, she), yelled at her, then when she left settled out my new notebooks and embarked on a career as literary artist.

  I lighted a candle, cut a little into my finger, dripped blood, and wrote ‘The Blood of the Poet’ on a little calling card, with ink, then the big word ‘BLOOD’ over it, and hung that up on the wall as reminder of my new calling. ‘Blood’ writ in blood.

  From Irwin I got all the books I wanted, Rimbaud, Yeats, Huxley, Nietzsche, Maldoror, and I wrote all kinds of inanities that are really silly when you think of me, like, ‘Creative pregnancy justifies anything I do short of criminality. Why should I live a moral life and inconvenience pre-disinterested emotions towards it?’ And the answer came in red ink: ‘If you dont, your creation will not be sound. Sound creation is moral in temper. Goethe proved that.’ I reopened the wound and tourniqueted more blood out of it to make a cross of blood and a ‘J.D.’ and a dash over the inked words of Nietzsche and Rimbaud:

  ‘NIETZSCHE: Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.’

  ‘RIMBAUD: Quand irons-nous, par delà les grèves et les monts, saluer la naissance du travail nouveau, la sagesse nouvelle, la fuite des tyrans, et des démons, la fin de la superstition, adorer . . . les premiers! . . . Noël sur la terre?’ Translated it goes: ‘When shall we go, over there by the shores and mountains to salute the birth of new work, the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants, and of demons, the end of superstition, to adore . . . the first ones! . . . Christmas on Earth?’

  And this I pinned up on my wall.

  I was completely alone, my wife and my family thought I was at sea, nobody knew I was
there except Irwin, I was going to embark on an even deeper solitary room writing than I had done in Hartford Conn. with the little short stories. Now it was all Symbolism, all kinds of silly junk, the repertory of modern ideas, ‘neo-dogmatism à la Claudel’, ‘the neo-Aeschylus, the realization of the need for correlation of introspective visionaryism and romanticist eclecticism’.

  Now I only mention these few quotes to show the reader what I was reading and How (and How!) I was absorbing it and how serious I was. In fact I had endless things lined up some of which might just about cover the tone of the period I was undergoing:

  They went:

  ‘(1) The Huxleyan (?) idea of ceasless growth (also Goethean). Élan vital. The course in conversation (polemicism), reading, writing, and experiencing must never cease. Becoming.

  ‘(2) Sexual neo-Platonism and the sexual understanding of a grande dame of the eighteenth century as a modern trend.

  ‘(3) Political liberalism in the critical throes of adolescence (post-Marxian, pre-Socialistic). Bloody modern Europe. Materialism has picked up a bludgeon.

  ‘(4) The conflict between modern bourgeois culture and artistic culture in Thomas Mann, in Rolland, in Wolfe, in Yeats, Joyce.

  ‘(5) The new aspect, or the new vision – in Rimbaud, in Lautréamont (Maldoror), or as in Claudel.

  ‘(6) Nietzscheanism – “Nothing is true, everything is allowed.” Superman. Neo-mysticism as exemplified in Zarathustra. An ethical revolution.

  ‘(7) The decline of the Western church – Hardy’s crass causality in the same instant made subject to the fortitude of Jude.

  ‘(8) Freud’s mechanistics in practically the same instant made subject to emotions (as in Koestler) or to a new morality (as in Heard’s vague sense).

  ‘(9) From the humanism of H. G. Wells, from the naturalism of Shaw and Hauptmann and Lewisohn, immediately to the neo-Aeschylus Stephen Dedalus (Bous Stephanoumenos) and to universal Earwicker himself.

  ‘(10) Spengler and Pareto – a resultant return, as in Louÿs or Rimbaud, to the East. (Malraux.) Why do the French return to the South? (Those Marseilles decadents in the mahogany tropics of Alfredo Segró.) Anglo-Catholicism and classicism of Eliot. “Fine sentiment,” comments the Kensington Garden intellectual in Royal Albert Hall.

  ‘(11) Music . . . toward conflict and discordance. The prophecy in end of third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Schoenberg. Freud’s ego-concept has risen to the surface and is now heard conflicting. Seen in painting as in the Impressionists, in Picasso, in Dali, et al.

  ‘(12) Santayana’s grandee mysticism . . . De Boeldieu and his white gloves in Les Grandes Illusions. High-consciousness.

  ‘(13) Francis Thompson’s lesson of the impalpability of human life. Melville: “I seek that inscrutable thing!” Also Wolfe, Thompson, like the latter is haunted by the truth of loneliness until he is forced to accept it (!).

  ‘(14) Gideanism . . . acte gratuite as abandonment of reason and return to impulse. But now our impulses exist in a society civilized by Christianity. Gideanism is richness in contradiction’s Proteanism, immorality . . . is, in essence, the Dionysian overflow of the artistic morality.’ Etc.

  VI

  Artistic morality, that was the point, because then I devised the idea of burning most of what I wrote so that my art would not appear (to myself as well as to others) to be done for ulterior, or practical motives, but just as a function, a daily duty, a daily, scatalogical ‘heap’ for the sake of purgation. So I’d burn what I wrote, with the candle flame, and watch the paper curl up and squirm, and smile madly. The way writers are born, I guess. A holy idea, I called it ‘self ultimacy’, or, SU.

  Also, to show you, the intellectualism that Claude and Irwin had now influenced over me. But the word ‘intellectualism’ just made Hubbard snuff down his nose when he showed up early that December after much candle-writing and bleeding on my part, ‘My God, Jack, stop this nonsense and let’s go out and have a drink.’

  I’ve been eating potato soup out of the same bowl with Irwin in the West End.’

  ‘What about your shipping out and stuff?’

  ‘I jumped the ship at Norfolk thinking I was coming back here for a big love affair with Cecily but she doesn’t care.’

  ‘Oh you’re a card. Let’s go have dinner, then go see Jean Cocteau’s movie The Blood of the Poet if that’s in your line these days, then we’ll repair to my apartment on Riverside Drive, me boy, and have a bang of morphine. That oughta give you some new visions.’

  This may make him sound sinister but he wasnt sinister at all, morphine came my way from other directions and I turned it down anyhow. Why, old Will in that time, he just awaited the next monstrous production from the pen of his young friend, me, and when I brought them in he pursed his lips in an attitude of amused inquiry and read. Having read what I offered up, he nodded his head and returned the production to the hands of the maker. Me, I sat there, perched on a stool somewhat near this man’s feet, either in my room or in his apartment on Riverside Drive, in a conscious attitude of adoring expectation, and, finding my work returned to me with no more comment than a nod of the head, said, almost blushingly ‘You’ve read it, what you think?’

  The man Hubbard nodded his head, like a Buddha, having come to ghastly life from out of Nirvana what else was he s’posed to do? He joined his fingertips resignedly. Peering over the arch of his hands he answered ‘Good, good.’

  ‘But what do you specifically think of it?’

  ‘Why . . .’ pursing his lips and looking away toward a sympathetic and equally amused wall, ‘why, I dont specifically think of it. I just rather like it, is all.’ (Only a few years before he’d been with Isherwood and Auden in Berlin, had known Freud in Vienna, and visited the Pierre Louÿs locales in North Africa.)

  I returned the work to my inner pocket, again blushed, said ‘Well at any rate, it was fun writing it.’

  ‘I daresay,’ he’d murmur. ‘And now tell me, how is your family?’

  But, you see, late that night he’d, alone, with fingers counterpoised under the glare of the lamp, with legs crossed and eyes heavy lidded in patience and waiting, remember again that tomorrow the young man would return with the records of his imagination . . . and ill-advised and importunate tho he might consider them . . . he, yes, waited for more. Elsewhere there was only established fact and ruinous retreat.

  VII

  So just about the whole next year I spent hungering to go see him, to be handed books by him, Spengler, even Shakespeare, Pope, a whole year of drug-taking and talking with him and meeting characters of the underworld he’d started to study as an acte gratuite of some kind.

  Because around Christmas of 1944 Johnnie came back to me from Detroit, we lived and loved briefly in Dalton Hall, then moved in with her old girlfriend June up on 117th Street now and then persuaded Hubbard to move in too, in the empty room, and he later married June (Johnnie and I knew they would like each other).

  But it was a year of low, evil decadence. Not only the drugs, the morphine, the marijuana, the horrible Benzedrine we used to take in those days by breaking open Benzedrine inhalers and removing the soaked paper and rolling it into poisonous little balls that made you sweat and suffer (lost thirty pounds in three days the first time I tried it on an overdose), but the characters we got to know, Times Square actual thieves who’d come in and stash stolen gumball machines from the subway, finally stashing guns, borrowing Will’s own gun, or his blackjack, and worst of all, on June’s huge doublebed with the Oriental drapecover on it we had ample room for sometimes six of us to sprawl with coffee cups and ashtrays and discuss the decadence of the ‘bourgeoisie’ for days on end.

  I’d come home to Ozone Park from these endless debauches looking like a pale skin-and-bones of my former self and my father would say ‘O that Hubbard and that Irwin Garden are going to d
estroy you someday.’ To add to everything my father had begun to develop Banti’s disease, his belly would swell up every two or three weeks and have to be drained. He soon couldnt work anymore and was about to come home and die. Cancer.

  I ran with horror from home to ‘them’ and then from ‘them’ to home but both equally dark and inhospitable places of guilt, sin, sorrow, lamentation, despair. It wasnt so much the darkness of the night that bothered me but the horrible lights men had invented to illuminate their darkness with . . . I mean the very streetlamp down at the end of the street . . .

  It was a year when I completely gave up trying to keep my body in condition and a photo of myself on the beach at the time shows soft and flabby body. My hair had begun to recede from the sides. I wandered in Benzedrine depression hallucinations. A 6-foot redhead applied pancake makeup to my face and we went in the subway like that: she was the one who gave me the overdose: she was a gun moll. We met furtive awful characters at certain subway stops, some of them were subway ‘lush workers’ (rolling subway drunks), we hung out in the evil bar on 8th Avenue around the corner from 42nd Street. I myself took no part in any crime but I knew personally of many indeed. For Hubbard it was a jaded study of how awful people can be, but in his vacuity, how ‘alert’ they could also be in a ‘dead’ society, for me it was a romantic self-torture like the blood business in my Self Ultimacy writing garret the fall before. For Irwin, now a shipyard worker, and occasional merchant seaman coastwise to Texas, et al., a new kind of material for his new Hart Crane poetry kick.

  One of our ‘friends’ who came in to stash a gun one day turned out, after he hanged himself in the Tombs some months later, to have been the ‘Mad Killer of Times Square’, tho I didnt know about that: he’d walk right into a liquor store and shoot the proprietor dead: it was afterward confessed to me by another thief who couldnt hold the secret he said because he hurted from holding it.