Of friends and supporters I must have had around fifty. Of the lot there were three or four who had some slight understanding of what I was trying to do. One of them, a composer named Larry Hunt, lived in a little town in Minnesota. We had once rented him a room and he had proceeded to fall in love with my wife—because I treated her so shamefully. But he liked me even better than my wife, and so, upon his return to the sticks, there began a correspondence which soon became voluminous. He was hinting now of coming back to New York for a little visit. I was hoping that he would come on and take the wife off my hands. Years ago, when we had just begun our unhappy affair, I had tried to palm her off on her old sweetheart, an up-State boy called Ronald. Ronald had come to New York to ask her hand in marriage. I use that high-flown phrase because he was the sort of fellow who could say a thing like that without looking foolish. Well, the three of us met and we had dinner together in a French restaurant. I saw from the way he looked at Maude that he cared more for her, and had more in common with her, than I would ever have. I liked him immensely; he was clean-cut, honest to the bone, kind, considerate, the type who would make what is called a good husband. Besides, he had waited for her a long time, something which she had forgotten, or she would never have taken up with a worthless son of a bitch like myself who could do her no good. . . . A strange thing happened that evening, something she would never forgive me for were she ever to learn of it. Instead of taking her home I went back to the hotel with her old sweetheart. I sat up all night with him trying to persuade him that he was the better man, telling him all sorts of rotten things about myself, things I had done to her and to others, pleading with him, begging him to claim her. I even went so far as to say that I knew she loved him, that she had admitted it to me. “She only took me because I happened to be around,” I said. “She’s really waiting for you to do something. Give yourself a break.” But no, he wouldn’t hear of it. It was like Gaston and Alphonse of the comic strip. Ridiculous, pathetic, altogether unreal. It was the sort of thing they still do in the movies and people pay to see it. . . . Anyway, thinking of Larry Hunt’s coming visit I knew I wouldn’t repeat that line. My one fear was that he might have found another woman in the meantime. It would be hard to forgive him that.
There was one place (the only place in New York) that I enjoyed going to, particularly if I were in an exalted mood, and that was my friend Ulric’s studio uptown. Ulric was a lecherous bird; his profession brought him in contact with stripteasers, cock-teasers, and all sorts of sexually bedeviled females. More than any of the glamorous lanky swans who walked into his place to undress I liked the colored maids, whom he seemed to change frequently. To get them to pose for us was not an easy job. It was even more difficult, once we had persuaded them to try it, to get them to drape a leg over an armchair and expose a little salmon-colored meat. Ulric was full of lecherous designs, always thinking up ways to get his end in, as he put it. It was a way of emptying his mind of the slops he was commissioned to paint. (He was paid handsomely to make beautiful cans of soup, or corn on the cob, for the back covers of the magazines.) What he really wanted to do was to make cunts, rich, juicy cunts that you could plaster over the bathroom wall and so bring about a pleasant, agreeable bowel movement. He would have made them for nothing if someone had kept him in food and pin money. As I was saying a moment ago, he had an extraordinary flair for dark meat. When he had arranged the model in some outlandish position—bending over to pick up a hairpin, or climbing a ladder to wash a spot off the wall—I would be given a pad and pencil and told off to some advantageous spot where, pretending to draw a human figure (something beyond my powers), I would feast my eyes on the choice anatomical portions offered me whilst covering the paper with bird cages, checkerboards, pineapples and chicken tracks. After a brief rest we would elaborately aid the model to regain her original position. This necessitated some delicate maneuvering, such as lowering or raising the buttocks, lifting one foot a little higher, spreading the legs a little more, and so on. “I think that’s about it, Lucy,” I can hear him say, as he deftly manipulated her into an obscene position. “Can you hold that now, Lucy?” And Lucy would let out a niggerish whine signifying that she was all set. “We won’t keep you long, Lucy,” he would say, giving me a sly wink. “Observe the longitudinal vagination,” he would say to me, employing a highfalutin jargon which Lucy found impossible to follow with her rabbit ears. Words like “vagination” had a pleasing, magical tintinnabulation for Lucy’s ears. Meeting him in the street I heard her say to him one day—“Any vagination exercises today, Mister Ulric?”
I had more in common with Ulric than with any of my other friends. For me he represented Europe, its softening, civilizing influence. We would talk by the hour of this other world where art had some relation to life, where you could sit quietly in public watching the passing show and think your own thoughts. Would I ever get there? Would it be too late? How would I live? What language would I speak? When I thought about it realistically it seemed hopeless. Only hardy, adventurous spirits could realize such dreams. Ulric had done it—for a year—by dint of hard sacrifice. For ten years he had done the things he hated to do, in order to make his dream come true. Now the dream was over and he was back where he had started. Farther back than ever, really, because he would never again be able to adapt himself to the treadmill. For Ulric it had been a Sabbatical leave: a dream which turns to gall and wormwood as the years roll by. I could never do as Ulric had done. I could never make a sacrifice of that sort, nor could I be content with a mere vacation however long or short it might be. My policy has always been to burn my bridges behind me. My face is always set toward the future. If I make a mistake it is fatal. When I am flung back I fall all the way back—to the very bottom. My one safeguard is my resiliency. So far I have always bounced back. Sometimes the rebound has resembled a slow-motion performance, but in the eyes of God speed has no particular significance.
It was in Ulric’s studio not so many months ago that I had finished my first book—the book about the twelve messengers. I used to work in his brother’s room, where some short time previously a magazine editor, after reading a few pages of an unfinished story, informed me cold-bloodedly that I hadn’t an ounce of talent, that I didn’t know the first thing about writing—in short that I was a complete flop and the best thing to do, my lad, is to forget it, try to make an honest living. Another nincompoop who had written a highly successful book about Jesus-the-carpenter had told me the same thing. And if rejection slips mean anything there was simple corroboration to support the criticism of these discerning minds. “Who are these shits?” I used to say to Ulric. “Where do they get off to tell me these things? What have they done, except to prove that they know how to make money?”
Well, I was talking about Joey and Tony, my little friends. I was lying in the dark, a little twig floating in the Japanese current. I was getting back to simple abracadabra, the straw that makes bricks, the crude sketch, the temple which must take on flesh and blood and make itself manifest to all the world. I got up and put on a soft light. I felt calm and lucid, like a lotus opening up. No violent pacing back and forth, no tearing the hair out by the roots. I sank slowly into a chair by the table and with a pencil I began to write. I described in simple words how it felt to take my mother’s hand and walk across the sunlit fields, how it felt to see Joey and Tony rushing towards me with arms open, their faces beaming with joy. I put one brick upon another like an honest bricklayer. Something of a vertical nature was happening—not blades of grass shooting up but something structural, something planned. I didn’t strain myself to finish it; I stopped when I had said all I could. I read it over quietly, what I had written. I was so moved that the tears came to my eyes. It wasn’t something to show an editor: it was something to put away in a drawer, to keep as a reminder of natural processes, as a promise of fulfillment.
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of
a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
What happened to me in writing about Joey and Tony was tantamount to revelation. It was revealed to me that I could say what I wanted to say—if I thought of nothing else, if I concentrated upon that exclusively—and if I were willing to bear the consequences which a pure act always involves.
2
Two or three days later I met Mara for the first time in broad daylight. I was waiting for her in the Long Island depot over in Brooklyn. It was about six in the afternoon, daylight-saving time, which is a strange sunlit rush hour that enlivens even such a gloomy crypt as the waiting room of the Long Island Railroad. I was standing near the door when I spotted her crossing the car tracks under the elevated line; the sunlight filtered through the hideous structure in shafts of powdered gold. She had on a dotted Swiss dress which made her full figure seem even more opulent; the breeze blew lightly through her glossy black hair, teasing the heavy chalk-white face like spray dashing against a cliff. In that quick lithe stride, so sure, so alert, I sensed the animal breaking through the flesh with flowery grace and fragile beauty. This was her daytime self, a fresh, healthy creature who dressed with utter simplicity, and talked almost like a child.
We had decided to spend the evening at the beach. I was afraid it would be too cool for her in that light dress but she said she never felt the cold. We were so frightfully happy that the words just babbled out of our mouths. We had crowded together in the motorman’s compartment, our faces almost touching and glowing with the fiery rays of the setting sun. How different this ride over the rooftops from the lonely anxious one that Sunday morning when I set out for her home! Was it possible that in such a short span of time the world could take on such a different hue?
That fiery sun going down in the West—what a symbol of joy and warmth! It fired our hearts, illumined our thoughts, magnetized our souls. Its warmth would last far into the night, would flow back from below the curved horizon in defiance of the night. In this fiery blaze I handed her the manuscript to read. I couldn’t have chosen a more favorable moment or a more favorable critic. It had been conceived in darkness and it was being baptized in light. As I watched her expression I had such a strong feeling of exaltation that I felt as if I had handed her a message from the Creator himself. I didn’t need to know her opinion, I could read it on her face. For years I cherished this souvenir, reviving it in those dark moments when I had broken with everyone, walking back and forth in a lonely attic in a foreign city, reading the freshly written pages and struggling to visualize on the faces of all my coming readers this expression of unreserved love and admiration. When people ask me if I have a definite audience in mind when I sit down to write I tell them no, I have no one in mind, but the truth is that I have before me the image of a great crowd, an anonymous crowd, in which perhaps I recognize here and there a friendly face: in that crowd I see accumulating the slow, burning warmth which was once a single image: I see it spread, take fire, rise into a great conflagration. (The only time a writer receives his due reward is when someone comes to him burning with this flame which he fanned in a moment of solitude. Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.)
When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat—at least that is my experience. Then they either fail you utterly or they surpass themselves. Sorrow is the great link—sorrow and misfortune. But when you are testing your powers, when you are trying to do something new, the best friend is apt to prove a traitor. The very way he wishes you luck, when you broach your chimerical ideas, is enough to dishearten you. He believes in you only in so far as he knows you; the possibility that you are greater than you seem is disturbing, for friendship is founded on mutuality. It is almost a law that when a man embarks on a great adventure he must cut all ties. He must take himself off to the wilderness, and when he has wrestled it out with himself, he must return and choose a disciple. It doesn’t matter how poor in quality the disciple may be: it matters only that he believe implicitly. For a germ to sprout, some other person, some one individual out of the crowd, has to show faith. Artists, like great religious leaders, show amazing perspicacity in this respect. They never pick the likely one for their purpose, but always some obscure, frequently ridiculous person.
What aborted me in my beginnings, what almost proved to be a tragedy, was that I could find no who believed in me implicitly, either as a person or as a writer. There was Mara, it is true, but Mara was not a friend, hardly even another person, so closely did we unite. I needed someone outside the vicious circle of false admirers and envious denigrators. I needed a man from the blue.
Ulric did his best to understand what had come over me, but he hadn’t it in him then to perceive what I was destined to become. How can I forget the way he received the news about Mara? It was the day after we had gone to the beach. I had gone to the office as usual in the morning, but by noon I was so feverishly inspired that I took a trolley and rode out into the country. Ideas were pouring into my head. As fast as I jotted them down others came crowding in. At last I reached that point where you abandon all hope of remembering your brilliant ideas and you simply surrender to the luxury of writing a book in your head. You know that you’ll never be able to recapture these ideas, not a single line of all the tumultuous and marvelously dovetailed sentences which sift through your mind like sawdust spilling through a hole. On such days you have for company the best companion you will ever have—the modest, defeated, plodding workaday self which has a name and which can be identified in public registers in case of accident or death. But the real self, the one who has taken over the reins, is almost a stranger. He is the one who is filled with ideas; he is the one who is writing in the air; he is the one who, if you become too fascinated with his exploits, will finally expropriate the old, worn-out self, taking over your name, your address, your wife, your past, your future. Naturally, when you walk in on an old friend in this euphoric state he doesn’t wish to concede immediately that you have another life, a life apart in which he has no share. He says quite naively—“Feeling rather high today, eh?” And you nod your head almost shamefacedly.
“Look, Ulric,” I said, bursting in on him in the midst of a Campbell’s Soup design, “I’ve got to tell you something, I’m bursting with it.”
“Sure, fire away,” he said, dipping his water-color brush in the big pot on the stool beside him. “You don’t mind if I go on with this bloody thing, do you? I’ve got to finish it by tonight.”
I pretended I didn’t mind but I was disconcerted. I pitched my voice lower in order not to disturb him too much. “You remember the girl I was telling you about—the girl I met at the dance hall? Well I met her again. We went to the beach together last night . . .”
“How was it . . . good going?”
I could see from the way he slid his tongue over his lips that he was priming himself for a juicy yarn.
“Listen, Ulric, do you know what it is to be in love?”
He didn’t even deign to look up in answer to this. As he deftly mixed his colors in the tin tray he mumbled something about being possessed with normal instincts.
I went on unabashed. “Do you think you might meet a woman some day who would change your whole life?”
“I’ve met one or two who’ve tried—not with entire success, as you can see,” he responded.
“Shit! Drop that stuff a moment, will you? I want to tell you something. . . . I want to tell you that I’m in love, madly in love. I kno
w it sounds silly, but this is different—I’ve never been like this before. You wonder if she’s a good piece of tail. Yes, magnificent. But I don’t give a shit about that . . .”