Sitting at the window lately I have noticed the same people passing at frequent intervals. They come from one direction, and a little later they appear again from the same direction, circling, it seems, or they go to the end of the block and turn around. It is perfectly normal, I tell myself, for people to notice a house like mine, one that stands out from the others and must look to them like an abandoned building, though they have been glancing this way more frequently lately, it occurs to me now, sitting in my armchair and looking out the window at three women who have stopped on the sidewalk across the street and are pointing in my direction, obviously talking about my house. It occurs to me that in this completely upscale neighborhood my house alone still stands erect. I find myself thinking of it as “flying the banner of decay.” Paint peeling, soffit boards hanging loose, curling roof shingles, broken steps, a rotting three-story hulk, it looms as a monument to mortality, an edifying lesson on the erosions of time, a mute reproach to the vanity of home improvement.
I should have gotten out of here twenty years ago. I should have left the minute I came back, when it was still possible to get out, when I might still have made something of myself.
With everything improving around me I find myself willfully deteriorating. Despite my obvious struggles to make something of myself I have discovered that I never had any intention of making something of myself.
What I really wanted to make of myself was a wretched failure at everything.
It was not always like this. There was a time when I had the feeling I belonged here. I would come back from a trip, drop my suitcase by the door, and collapse in an armchair. Sitting in the chair I would look around and think: home at last.
Now I think of myself as “the only one left,” as “the last of the old gang.”
Buying this house was the greatest folly of my life. With the money that had unexpectedly come to me, that had fallen to me as a consequence of my parents’ death in a freak accident, I bought the house and had it repaired and decorated the way I wanted. I put a considerable portion of my small fortune into it. The house, I thought, would be a launching platform for a new life.
I bought this historic house, though I never bothered to learn its actual history.
It was the end of me. I thought I was buying freedom but I was buying imprisonment. I was buying imprisonment accompanied by an illusion of freedom. I imagined that with the house “as a base,” as I thought of it then, I could go and come as I pleased, free as a lark, as I phrased it, actually saying this trite phrase to myself: “Now I am free as a lark.” I imagined I would be free to travel, to take off at the drop of a hat, but in fact the house restricted my travels, made them so difficult they became practically impossible. I stayed only because the house was here, I came back because it was here. Without the house I might still be wandering, walking along a seashore under the stars, sleeping among sheep on a hillside somewhere. Instead of travels, with the effect of broadening my horizons, my trips became periods of recuperation, periods of rest and recovery from the burden of the house.
In college I studied agronomy, geology, comparative literature, Chinese history, et cetera. I thought of pursuing each one professionally, but after a short while each was pushed aside by something else. So I did not actually give them up in the sense of giving up on them; I was still actively engaged with them when they were pushed aside and replaced by something else that suddenly struck me as more interesting. This flightiness, which I thought of as openness to innovation, looked to others like frivolity, but it was in fact a crippling disability. Following the road of life, as they say, I kept wandering off into the bushes. Buying this house, I see now, was a way of trapping myself, since whatever might happen in the future, here was something I was stuck with.
Sometimes I think of it as an attempt to bury myself alive.
I thought I would completely refashion the interior of the house, I thought I would put my stamp on it, but after eighteen months of repairs and painting I completely lost interest in that as well, and got no further in putting my stamp on it than changing the wallpaper and replacing the plain Greek Revival chimneypiece in the parlor with a marble Italian Baroque chimneypiece.
Hanging paintings on every square inch of the walls, I thought, would make my house look like the Paris house of Gertrude Stein, who had paintings covering every inch of her walls and even a portion of the ceiling. In those years Gertrude Stein’s house was superior to any museum or gallery in the world if you wanted to view the best of contemporary painting. At the time I put up my paintings I saw myself as a person of exceptional taste, someone aware of genuine art trends and not easily tricked by phony intellectual art chatterers. The house did not look like an art gallery, it was too crowded to be an art gallery, it was obviously a collector’s house, I thought. It was like a storage house for paintings. Many of these paintings I had purchased with funds from my small fortune, some had been given me by artists grateful for my support, others had been abandoned in the house by artists passing through. I thought they were advanced, groundbreaking, completely exceptional paintings, though I can see now that they are antiquated, old-fashioned, derivative imitations of an advanced painting style that is itself already old-fashioned and completely dated. Paintings that I don’t even look at anymore, that I am incapable of seeing with fresh eyes, that have sunk into the background, blended with it, become psychologically indistinguishable from the wallpaper.
The pistol is in a box under the bed, a chrome-plated Smith & Wesson .38 Special, bought when the neighborhood was still considered a dangerous place. I bought the house, and before moving in I bought the gun.
Slowing, the newspaper lady spins a paper from her car window, into the yard across the street. Later, when the man comes back from work, he will pick it up, slipping it from the blue plastic bag as he climbs the walk to his front door. He will go inside, open the blinds, sit in an armchair by a window, and read about the catastrophic state of the planet, the repulsive so-called advance of the earth-killing human species, but it won’t actually penetrate his thoughts, it will not make it impossible for him to go on living.
That they can go on doing this, that he and his cohorts, as I think of them, can blindly continue to live in this way, is a sign of basic good sense, of their robust health, I remind myself.
The adventures of a stick: I lean heavily on it until it practically groans, unless I am feeling better, in which case I thrust it in front of me with a wild stabbing gesture, bringing it down so forcefully the pavement rings, while on the days in between, neither good nor bad, I sometimes drag it on the sidewalk behind me, the drooping tail of a beaten animal.
People will say, “He dragged his stiffened right foot like a stick. Sometimes he dragged a stick as well.”
They have pulled tables from all over the park and placed them end to end for a picnic under the oak trees, where some are still seated, talking, elbows in the litter, while the rest, young men and women, play touch football in an open grassy space nearby. Wide-eyed, smiling faces, easy gaits, healthy bodies, they call out to each other, jostling, hands in the air, shouting, “to me, to me.” When they look in my direction, to where I am stopped on the paved walk watching, their gaze sweeps over me. Quietly beyond their shouts and cries, through the trees, the river flashes in the April sun. I step from the path, walk in the direction of the river, down through the middle of the game, and they stop playing, they leave off and stand idly by, good-natured, chatting, while I cross the clearing along the line of scrimmage, jabbing at the ground with my stick.
As a child I was fat, plain, nearsighted, and dirty.
Do you know what it is like to be at the mercy of sadists? To be small and at the mercy of giants, who can bring a blade down and sever your head at a whim or put a filthy boot on your nape and press your face into the mire, if it amuses them? Probably not. Then you can’t imagine how it was in the wood-paneled halls and fluorescent chambers of the expensive private school to which I was sentenced as
a child.
Not every teacher reveled in acts of explicit cruelty and humiliation. Not all of them actually enjoyed parading their trembling victim in front of a tittering mob. The others, the milder, indifferent ones, would send you, who were at their mercy, who were fat and nearsighted and dependent on them for protection, out into the jeering yard to be stoned, to stand bewildered in the schoolyard while they stoned you. Were teachers to behave in that way today they would be thrown instantly into prison.
To this day my throat constricts, my heart pounds, I sweat and struggle to get my breath, if I so much as walk past a school building, as if I expected a large stone to come flying over the fence. Year after year I was daily at the mercy of teachers whose idiocy and incompetence were matched only by their cruelty. It is symptomatic, nothing could be more telling and symptomatic and actually damning than the fact that today I am not able to recall the face of a single one of my tormentors. I can remember the most trivial details of the various classrooms in which I was confined year after year—the color and texture of the walls, the shape and physical feel of the desks and the names and initials carved into them, the exact arrangement of the windows, the direction of the light falling through them, the precise locations of the calendar and clock—but in front of the blackboard stands a black-clothed figure (none of my teachers, I believe, actually wore black), holding in its hand the long wooden ruler with which they used to strike us repeatedly, the black-clothed shape of a person minus the face. Instead of a face it bears on its shoulders a ghoulish white oval.
They pass beneath my window every weekday morning, in little strings and clumps, the children walking to school, shouting, jostling, sometimes turning and walking backwards. My attention goes to the outlier, the straggler, the one trudging behind the others, not too close to any of them, not with any of them, a child alone, head down, feet dragging, bowed under the weight of his book bag, shoulders hunched almost to his ears. A pasty, homely, unattractive child.
Of course it is possible, even likely in most cases, that happy people are only pretending, I have often thought. It is probable, viewed scientifically, that their so-called happiness is at bottom an elaborate superstructure of evasion and denial, a Darwinian survival mechanism of some sort, a genetic falsehood designed to stave off the suicide of the species. This is undeniably the case in those who seem most happy, those who have by virtue of their social or business or artistic success a vested interest in appearing to be the happiest of all, when in fact they secretly are the most miserable people. In fact the professional happiness of these people deprives them even of the meager solace they might otherwise derive from a public exposition of their misery. Surely there are many cases where happiness is only possible on the basis of some sort of mental illness.
Of course one is not talking now about the mass of ordinary, well-adjusted, supposedly happy individuals. One is talking about the crème de la crème of that mass, which would include people like Peter Meininger.
The news lady used to throw me a paper too, occasionally into the bushes next to the steps, from where I would have to poke it with a stick or leave it to come slowly apart in the rain. They raised the price last year, nearly doubled it, and I let the subscription lapse. I was not reading the paper anyway. Roy would shit on spread-out sheets after I stopped taking him out regularly, before he discovered the basement. A year has passed and bits of paper still cling here and there to the bushes by the steps.
I have always had a gift for sniffing out misery, antennae that can pick up the faintest reverberations of suffering, the flicker of a shadow across a face, the scarcely perceptible catch in a voice, the infinitesimal tug at the corner of a mouth. This ability, though it is hardly sympathy for the sufferers (I don’t give a damn about them personally), creates a sort of bond. The fact is, they interest me. The woman across the street, for example, who seems ill, and who for all I care can drop dead tomorrow, fascinates me. Standing safely on the shore—I have no intention of diving in—I amuse myself by watching her drown.
The elation and immense relief that a released prisoner must feel when he steps from the prison door, while different in degree, are in kind like my feelings upon being released from boredom.
What is the point of minor artists? What justification, what possible excuse? The litter, the mountains of waste product churned out by so-called artists, self-called artists, who aren’t artists at all but defilers of the idea of art. Instead of artists they should call themselves besmirchers.
By minor I don’t mean unknown. The most famous painters today, for example, are also the most minor, just as the most famous writers are also the most insignificant writers. They are actually minuscule artists. It has always been like this, the insignificant and in fact inflated and empty rising naturally and even inevitably to the top and the weighty and significant sinking inevitably to the bottom, at least at the beginning, and there is nothing to be done about that.
I don’t include so-called commercial artists, who are in the entertainment business and not artists at all.
When I talk of minor artists, I include myself of course.
Two slim books, two juvenile pamphlets written thirty years ago, that I can’t open now without blushing: an essay on Balthus, a tedious, pretentious, art-critical “assessment” of Balthus—as if I could measure Balthus—and a collection of ostentatiously off-the-cuff “art reflections” absolutely stuffed with juvenile poetic prose.
I belittle them now in order to show myself superior to them, but at one time I was full of grandiose illusions.
Instead of a body of work I have an index-card habit.
I was able to live as a minor artist because of my independent fortune, my small independent fortune that let me be a minor artist for most of my life. A minor literary artist in my case.
I never admitted it of course, never admitted to being an artist at all. Not after the first years, when I was in fact a minor juvenile artist. Unlike other so-called artists, I never boasted of being an artist, and especially not of being a literary artist. I was a secret artist. For most of my adult life I was a collector of paintings and a concealed minor artist. I would not admit it because I could not accept the status of minor artist, what I considered the disgrace of the minor artist. I could have been a successful minor artist, but instead I was a failure as a major artist. I was a concealed failure as a major artist. By concealing the artist I was able to conceal the failure.
The chaos of my childhood—the mind- and soul-killing stupidity of the culture of my childhood in the fifties, the half-educated, middle-class, sanctimonious, self-satisfied culture that was at its core hollow and actually destructive of genuine talent, that hated everything that was different or intellectual or foreign, a culture that my parents and everyone I knew breathed in from the world around them, that was everywhere around them like a poison gas that they sucked into themselves with every breath—left me so damaged I must have seemed almost crazy.
I was crushed by art objects. In the presence of genuine art objects I felt small, I was made to feel small, I felt belittled by them. I pretended to be lifted up, even exalted, and I was exalted, but I was also humiliated. I could not become a successful minor artist because I was crushed by major art, I could not pursue possible art because I was crippled by impossible art.
I have always known that I was wounded by the culture of my childhood, that I was practically destroyed by it. I blamed it for my misfortunes, when in fact, I see now, I brought them all on myself.
Attempting to assert myself, I contemplated doing away with myself. In my puerile romantic way I thought of my death as emblematic. I was fascinated by great-artist suicides. By Hart Crane, for example, who called out, “Goodbye, everybody,” before leaping from the stern of a steamship. He was 270 miles north of Havana, returning from a year in Mexico, where he had written nothing. And Vachel Lindsay, who drank Lysol. His last words were, “They tried to get me—I got them first.”
In reality nothing is
more laughable than for a minor artist, some art cripple or useless art-product waste producer, to kill himself over his so-called art failure. In his studio perhaps, surrounded by his mess, by his dreck, by all the detritus in which he has invested so much of himself and that nobody will ever give a damn about.
I have known for a long time that my art tastes were outdated and ridiculously romantic. I see now that my paintings, which I collected through a decade of patient acquisition, which I thought were one hundred percent advanced, were in fact already “discards of history.” I see now that they have no value, are essentially worthless daubings. If I had the physical strength I would throw them all out. I would hire a dumpster, park it out front, and toss them in. I imagine that if I really managed to do that I would feel immensely better, that I would be practically cured.
I am—I will be the first to admit it—the number one besmircher of them all.
It was not entirely my fault. In the beginning, and in fact for years after the beginning, decades after that, I was constantly interrupted. The interrupters camped in my house, eating my food, sleeping in every room, sleeping on sofas, rugs; on summer nights the porch was littered with them. There was always somebody around, underfoot. I would get up in the morning, thinking I was alone, planning to set to work that very day; I would enter the kitchen and find three or four of them sitting at the table. I fed them, housed them, gave them money in exchange for paintings. I thought of myself as an art patron, a mécène, while in fact I was a vulgar grubstaker. I thought of myself as the center of the art whirl, while in fact they were circling me like hyenas.
They came because of Meininger, they came from all over the world because of him. Not just from Europe—from Turkey, Israel, Brazil, Japan. Hundreds of them came during the three years he stayed at my house. Those people who were always around me, whom I actually took steps to keep around me, whom I constantly pandered to even when I was behaving toward them with maximum hostility, prevented me from creating anything but scraps.