Black Spring

  In the past every member of our family did something with his hands. I’m the first idle son of a bitch with a glib tongue and a bad heart.

  Swimming in the crowd, a digit with the rest. Tailored and re-tailored. The lights are twinkling-on and off, on and off. Sometimes it’s a rubber tire, sometimes it’s a piece of chewing gum. The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we’re passing one another without a look of recognition. The lights jigging like electric needles. The atoms going crazy with light and heat. A conflagration going on behind the glass and nothing burns away. Men breaking their backs, men bursting their brains, to invent a machine which a child will manipulate. If I could only find the hypothetical child who’s to run this machine I’d put a hammer in its hands and say: Smash it! Smash it!

  Smash it! Smash it! That’s all I can say. The old man’s riding around in an open barouche. I envy the bastard his peace of mind. A bosom pal by his side and a quart of rye under his belt. My toes are blistering with malice. Twenty years ahead of me and this thing growing worse by the hour. It’s throttling me. In twenty years there won’t be any soft, lovable men waiting to greet me. Every bosom pal that goes now is a buffalo lost and gone forever. Steel and concrete hedging me in. The pavement getting harder and harder. The new world eating into me, expropriating me. Soon I won’t even need a name.

  Once I thought there were marvelous things in store for me. Thought I could build a world in the air, a castle of pure white spit that would raise me above the tallest building, between the tangible and the intangible, put me in a space like music where everything collapses and perishes but where I would be immune, great, godlike, holiest of the holies. It was I imagined this, I the tailor’s son! I who was born from a little acorn on an immense and stalwart tree. In the hollow of the acorn even the faintest tremor of the earth reached me: I was part of the great tree, part of the past, with crest and lineage, with pride, pride. And when I fell to earth and was buried there I remembered who I was, where I came from. Now I am lost, lost, do you hear? You don’t hear? I’m yowling and screaming-don’t you hear me? Switch the lights off! Smash the bulbs! Can you hear me now? Louder! you say. Louder! Christ, are you making sport of me? Are you deaf, dumb, and blind? Must I yank my clothes off? Must I dance on my head?

  All right, then! I’m going to dance for you! A merry whirl, brothers, and let her whirl and whirl and whirl! Throw in an extra pair of flannel trousers while you’re at it. And don’t forget, boys, I dress on the right side. You hear me? Let ‘er go! Always merry and bright!

  Jabberwhorl Cronstadt

  This man, this skull, this music …

  He lives in the back of a sunken garden, a sort of bosky glade shaded by whiffletrees and spinozas, by deodars and baobabs, a sort of queasy Buxtehude diapered with elytras and feluccas. You pass through a sentry box where the concierge twirls his mustache con furioso like in the last act of Ouida. They live on the third floor behind a mullioned belvedere filigreed with snaffled spaniels and sebaceous wens, with debentures and megrims hanging out to dry. Over the bell-push it says: “JABBERWHORL CRONSTADT, poet, musician, herbologist, weather man, linguist, oceanographer, old clothes, colloids.” Under this it reads: “Wipe your feet and blow your nose!” And under this is a rosette from a second-hand suit.

  “There’s something strange about all this,” I said to my companion whose name is Dschilly Zilah Bey. “He must be having his period again.”

  After we had pushed the button we heard a baby crying, a squeaky, brassy wail like the end of a horseknacker’s dream.

  Finally Katya comes to the door-Katya from HesseKassel-and behind her, thin as a wafer and holding a bisque doll, stands little Pinochinni. And Pinochinni says: “You should go in the drawing room, they aren’t dressed yet.” And when I asked would they be very long because we’re famished she said, “Oh no! They’ve been dressing for hours. You are to look at the new poem father wrote today-it’s on the mantelpiece.”

  And while Dschilly unwinds her serpentine scarf Pinochinni giggles and giggles, saying oh, dear, what is the matter with the world anyway, everything is so behindtime and did you ever read about the lazy little girl who hid her toothpicks under the mattress? It’s very strange, father read it to me out of a large iron book.

  There is no poem on the mantelpiece, but there are other things-The Anatomy of Melancholy, an empty bottle of Pernod Fils, The Opal Sea, a slice of cut plug tobacco, hairpins, a street directory, an ocarina … and a machine to roll cigarettes. Under the machine are notes written on menus, calling cards, toilet paper, match boxes … “meet the Cuntess Cathcart at four” … “the opalescent mucus of Michelet” … “deflux-ions … cotyledons … phthisical” … “if Easter falls in Lady Day’s lap, beware old England of the clap” .. . “from the ichor of which springs his successor” … “the reindeer, the otter, the marmink, the minkfrog.”

  The piano stands in a corner near the belvedere, a frail black box with silver candlesticks; the black keys have been bitten off by the spaniels. There are albums marked Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, filled with bills, manicure sets, chess pieces, marbles, and dice. When he is in good humor Cronstadt will open an album marked “Goya” and play something for you in the key of C. He can play operas, minuets, schottisches, rondos, sarabands, preludes, fugues, waltzes, military marches; he can play Czerny, Prokofief or Granados, he can even improvise and whistle a Provencal air at the same time. But it must be in the key of C.

  So it doesn’t matter how many black keys are missing or whether the spaniels breed or don’t breed. If the bell gets out of order, if the toilet doesn’t flush, if the poem isn’t written, if the chandelier falls, if the rent isn’t paid, if the water is shut off, if the maids are drunk, if the sink is stopped and the garbage rotting, if dandruff falls and the bed creaks, if the flowers are mildewed, if the milk turns, if the sink is greasy and the wallpaper fades, if the news is stale and calamities fail, if the breath is bad or the hands sticky, if the ice doesn’t melt, if the pedals won’t work, it’s all one and come Christmas because everything can be played in the key of C if you get used to looking at the world that way.

  Suddenly the door opens to admit an enormous epileptoid beast with fungoid whiskers. It is Jocatha the famished cat, a big, buggerish brute with a taupe fur and two black walnuts hidden under its kinkless tail. It runs about like a leopard, it lifts its hind leg like a dog, it micturates like an owl.

  “I’m coming in a minute,” says Jabberwhorl through the sash of the door. “I’m just putting on my pants.”

  Now Elsa comes in-Elsa from Bad Nauheim-and she places a tray with blood-red glasses on the mantelpiece. The beast is bounding and yowling and thrashing and caterwauling: he has a few grains of cayenne pepper on the soft lilypad of his nose, the butt of his nose soft as a dum-dum bullet. He thrashes about in large Siamese wrath and the bones in his tail are finer than the finest sardines. He claws the carpet and chews the wallpaper, he rolls into a spiral and unrolls like a corolla, he whisks the knots out of his tail, shakes the fungus out of his whiskers. He bites clean through the floor to the bone of the poem. He’s in the key of C and mad clean through. He has magenta eyes, like oldfashioned vest buttons; he’s mowsy and glaubrous, brown like arnica and then green as the Nile; he’s quaky and qualmy and queasy and teasey; he chews chasubles and ripples rasubly.

  Now Anna comes in-Anna from Hannover-Minden -and she brings cognac, red pepper, absinthe and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. And with Anna come the little Temple cats-Lahore, Mysore, and Cawnpore. They are all males, including the mother. They roll on the floor, with their shrunken skulls, and bugger each other mercilessly. And now the poet himself appears saying what time is it though time is a word he has stricken from his list, time, sib to death. Death’s the surd and time’s the sib and now there is a little time between the acts, an oleo in which the straight man mixes a drink to get his stomach muscles twitching. Time, time, he says, shakin
g a little cayenne pepper into his cognac. A time for everything, though I scarcely use the word any more, and so saying he examines the tail of Lahore which has a kink in it and scratching his own last coccyx he adds that the toilet has just been done in silver where you’ll find a copy of Humanite.

  “You’re very beautiful,” he says to Dschilly Zilah Bey and with that the door opens again and Jill comes forward in a chlamys of Nile green.

  “Don’t you think she’s beautiful?” says Jab.

  Everything has suddenly grown beautiful, even that big buggerish brute Jocatha with her walnuts brown as cinnamon and soft as lichee.

  Blow the conch and tickle the clavicle! Jab’s got a pain in the belly where his wife ought to have it. Once a month, regular as the moon, it comes over him and it lays him low, nor will inunctions do him any good. Nothing but cognac and cayenne pepper-to start the stomach muscles twitching. “I’ll give you three words,” he says, “while the goose turns over in the pan: whimsical, dropsical, phthisical.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” says Jill. “He’s got his period.”

  Cawnpore is lying on an album of Twenty-Four Preludes. “I’ll play you a fast one,” says Jab, and flinging back the cover of the little black box he goes plink, plank, plunk! “I’ll do a tremolo,” he says, and employing every finger of his right hand in quick succession he hits the white key C in the middle of the board and the chess pieces and the manicure sets and the unpaid bills rattle like drunken tiddledywinks. “That’s technique! ” he says, and his eyes are glaucous and rimed with hoarfrost. “There’s only one thing travels as fast as light and that’s angels. Only angels can travel as fast as light. It takes a thousand light years to get to the planet Uranus but nobody has ever been there and nobody is ever going to get there. Here’s a Sunday newspaper from America. Did you ever notice how one reads the Sunday papers? First the rotogravure, then the funny sheet, then the sports column, then the magazine, then the theater news, then the book reviews, then the headlines. Recapitulation. Ontogeny-phylogeny. Define your terms and you’ll never use words like time, death, world, soul. In every statement there’s a little error and the error grows bigger and bigger until the snake is scotched. The poem is the only flawless thing, provided you know what time it is. A poem is a web which the poet spins out of his own body according to a logarithmic calculus of his own divination. It’s always right, because the poet starts from the center and works outward….”

  The phone is ringing.

  “Pythagoras was right…. Newton was right…. Einstein is right….”

  “Answer the phone, will you!” says Jill.

  “Hello! Oui, c’est le Monsieur Cronstadt. Et votre nom, s’il vous plait? Bimberg? Listen, you speak English, don’t you? So do I…. What? Yes, I’ve got three apartments-to rent or to sell. What? Yes, there’s a bath and a kitchen and a toilet too… . No, a regular toilet. No, not in the hall-in the apartment. One you sit down on. Would you like it in silver or in gold leaf? What? No, the toilet! I’ve got a man here from Munich, he’s a refugee. Refugee! Hitler! Hitler! Compris? Yeah, that’s it. He’s got a swastika on his chest, in blue… . What? No, I’m serious. Are you serious? What? Listen, if you mean business it means cash…. Cash! You’ve got to lay out cash. What? Well, that’s the way things are done over here. The French don’t believe in checks. I had a man last week tried to do me out of 750 francs. Yeah, an American check. What? If you don’t like that one I’ve got another one for you with a dumbwaiter. It’s out of order now but it could be fixed. What? Oh, about a thousand francs. There’s a billiard room on the top floor…. What? No… no … no. Don’t have such things over here. Listen, Mr. Bimberg, you’ve got to realize that you’re in France now. Yeah, that’s it…. When in Rome…. Listen, call me tomorrow morning, will you? I’m at dinner now. Dinner. I’m eating. What? Yeah, cash … ‘bye!”

  “You see,” he says, hanging up, “that’s how we do things in this house. Fast work, what? Real estate. You people are living in a fairyland. You think literature is everything. You eat literature. Now in this house we eat goose, for instance. Yeah, it’s almost done now. Anna! Wie geht es? Nicht fertig? Merde alors! Three girls … refugees. I don’t know where they come from. Somebody gave them our address. Fine girls. Hale, hearty, buxom, sound as a berry. No room for them in Germany. Einstein is busy writing poems about light. These girls want a job, a place to live. Do you know anybody who wants a maid? Fine girls. They’re well educated. But it takes the three of them to make a meal. Katya, she’s the best of the lot: she knows how to iron. That one, Anna-she borrowed my typewriter yesterday … said she wanted to write a poem. I’m not keeping you here to write poems, I said. In this house I write the poems-if there are any to write. You learn how to cook and darn the socks. She looked peeved. Listen, Anna, I said, you’re living in an imaginary world. The world doesn’t need any more poems. The world needs bread and butter. Can you produce more bread and butter? That’s what the world wants. Learn French and you can help me with the real estate. Yeah, people have to have places to live in. Funny. But, that’s how the world is now. It was always like that, only people never believed it before. The world is made for the future … for the planet Uranus. Nobody will ever visit the planet Uranus, but that doesn’t make any difference. People must live places and eat bread and butter. For the sake of the future. That’s the way it was in the past. That’s the way it will be in the future. The present? There’s no such thing as the present. There’s a word called Time, but nobody is able to define it. There’s a past and there’s a future, and Time runs through it like an electric current. The present is an imaginary condition, a dream state … an oxymoron. There’s a word for you-I’ll make you a present of it. Write a poem about it. I’m too busy … real estate presses. Must have goose and cranberry sauce… . Listen, Jill, what was that word I was looking up yesterday?”

  “Omoplate?” says Jill promptly.

  “No, not that. Omo … omo …”

  “Omphalos?”

  “No, no. Omo … omo …”

  “I’ve got it,” cries Jill. “Omophagia!”

  “Omophagia, that’s it! Do you like that word? Take it away with you! What’s the matter? You’re not drinking. Jill, where the hell’s that cocktail shaker I found the other day in the dumbwaiter? Can you imagine it-a cocktail shaker! Anyway, you people seem to think that literature is something vitally necessary. It ain’t. It’s just literature. I could be making literature too-if I didn’t have these refugees to feed. You want to know what the present is? Look at that window over there. No, not there … the one above. There! Every day they sit there at that table playing cards-just the two of them. She’s always got on a red dress. And he’s always shuffling the cards. That’s the present. And if you add another word it becomes subjunctive….”

  “Jesus, I’m going to see what those girls are doing,” says Jill.

  “No you don’t! That’s just what they’re waiting for -for you to come and help them. They’ve got to learn that this is a real world. I want them to understand that. Afterwards I’ll find them jobs. I’ve got lots of jobs on hand. First let them cook me a meal.”

  “Elsa says everything’s ready. Come on, let’s go inside.”

  “Anna, Anna, bring these bottles inside and put them on the table!”

  Anna looks at Jabberwhorl helplessly.

  “There you are! They haven’t even learned to speak English yet. What am I going to do with them? Anna … bier! ‘Raus mit ‘em! Versteht? And pour yourself a drink, you blinking idiot.”

  The dining room is softly lighted. There is a candelabra on the table and the service glitters. Just as we are sitting down the phone rings. Anna gathers up the long cord and brings the apparatus from the piano to the sideboard just behind Cronstadt. “Hello!” he yells, and unslacking the long cord, “just like the intestines … hello! Oui! Oui, madame … je suis le Monsieur Cronstadt … et votre nom, s’il vous plait? Oui, it y a un salon, un entresol, une cuisine, deux ch
ambres a coucher, une Salle de bain, un cabinet … oui, madame…. Non, ce n’est pas cher, pas cher du tout … on peut s’arranger facilement … comme vous voulez, madame…. A queue heure? Oui … avec plaisir…. Comment? Que dites-vous? Ah non! Au contraire! ca sera un plaisir … un grand plaisir…. Au revoir, madame!” Slamming it up-“Kuss die Hand, madame! Would you like your back scratched, madame? Do you take milk with your coffee, madame? Will you …?

  “Listen,” says Jill, “who the hell was that? You were pretty smooth with her. Oui, madame … non, madame! Did she promise to buy you a drink too?” Turning to us-“Can you imagine it, he has an actress up here yesterday while I’m taking a bath … some trollop from the Casino de Paris … and she takes him out and gets him soused….”

  “You don’t tell that right, Jill. It’s this way … I’m showing her a lovely apartment-with a dumbwaiter in it-and she says to me won’t you show me your poetry —poesie … sounds better in French … and so I bring her up here and she says I’ll have them printed for you in Belgian.”

  “Why Belgian, Jab?”

  “Because that’s what she was, a Belgian-or a Belgianess. Anyway, what difference does it make what language they’re printed in? Somebody has to print them, otherwise nobody will read them.”

  “But what made her say that-so quick like?”

  “Ask me! Because they’re good, I suppose. Why else would people want to print poems?”

  “Baloney! “

  “See that! She doesn’t believe me.”

  “Of course I don’t! If I catch you bringing any prima donnas up here, or any toe dancers, or any trapeze artists, or anything that’s French and wears skirts, there’s going to be hell to pay. Especially if they offer to print your poems!”