“We’ll tell you later.… Go on, Ted!”
It was a long story, as usual. Apparently, O’Mara hadn’t been able to fall asleep after our talk about the orphan asylum. He had got to thinking about the past, and then about everything under the sun. Despite the lack of sleep he arose early, filled with a desire to do something. Packing my scripts—the whole caboodle—in his brief case, he set out with the intention of tackling the first man he should bump into. To change his luck he had decided to go to Jersey City. The first place he stumbled into was a lumber yard. The boss had just arrived and was in a good mood. “I fell on him like a ton of bricks, just swept him off his feet,” said O’Mara. “I don’t know what I was saying, to tell you the truth. I knew only that I had to sell him.” The lumberman turned out to be a good egg. He didn’t know what it was all about either, but he was disposed to help. Somehow O’Mara had managed to transpose the whole thing to a very personal level. He was selling the man his good friend Henry Miller, whom he believed in. The man wasn’t much for books and that sort of thing but the prospect of aiding a budding genius, oddly enough, appealed to him. “He was writing out a check for the subscription,” said O’Mara, “when the idea came to me to make him do something more. I pocketed the checks first, of course, and then I dug out your manuscripts. I put the whole pile on his desk, right in front of him. He wanted to know immediately how long it had taken you to write such a slew of words. I told him six months. He nearly fell off his chair. Naturally, I kept talking fast so that he wouldn’t starting reading the bloody things. After a while he leaned back in his swivel chair and pressed a button. His secretary appeared. ‘Get out the files on that publicity campaign we had last year,’ he ordered.”
“I know what’s coming,” I couldn’t help remarking.
“Wait a minute, Henry, let me finish. Now comes the good news.”
I let him ramble on. As I anticipated, it was a job. Only I wouldn’t be obliged to go to the office every day; I could do the work at home.
“Of course you’ll have to spend a little time with him occasionally,” said O’Mara. “He’s dying to meet you. And what’s more, he’s going to pay you handsomely. You can have seventy-five a week on account, to begin with. How’s that? You stand to make between five and ten thousand before you’re through with the job. It’s a cinch. I could do it myself, if I knew how to write. I brought some of the crap he wants you to look over. You can write that stuff with your left hand.”
“It sounds fine,” I said, “but I just had another offer today. Better than that.”
O’Mara wasn’t too pleased to hear this.
“Seems to me,” said MacGregor, “that you guys are doing pretty well without my help.”
“It’s all foolishness,” Mona put in.
“Listen,” said O’Mara, “why don’t you let him earn some money honestly? It’s only for a few months. After that you can do as you please.”
The word honestly rang in MacGregor’s ears. “What’s he doing now?” he asked. He turned to me. “I thought you were writing. What is it, Hen, what are you up to now?”
I gave him a brief résumé of the situation, making it as delicate as I could for Mona’s sake.
“For once I think O’Mara’s right,” he said. “You’ll never get anywhere this way.”
“I wish you people would mind your own business,” blurted Mona.
“Come, come,” said MacGregor, “don’t stand on your high horse with us. We’re old friends of Henry’s. We wouldn’t be giving him bad advice, would we now?”
“He doesn’t need advice,” she replied. “He knows what he’s doing.”
“O.K. sister, have it your way then!” With this he turned abruptly to me again. “What was that other proposition you started to tell about? You know—China, India, Africa.…”
“Oh that,” I said, and I began to smile.
“What are you shying off for? Listen, maybe you’ll need me for a secretary. I’d give up the law in a minute if there was anything to grab hold of. I mean it, Henry.”
Mona excused herself to make a telephone call. That meant she was too disgusted to hear a word about the “proposition.”
“What’s griping her?” said O’Mara. “What was she weeping for when I came home?”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Family troubles. Money, I guess.”
“She’s a queer girl,” said MacGregor. “Don’t mind my saying that, do you? I know she’s devoted to you and all that, but her ideas are all wet. She’ll be getting you into a jam if you don’t watch out.”
O’Mara’s eyes were glistening. “You don’t know the half of it,” he chirped. “That’s why I was so keen to do something this morning.”
“Listen, you guys, stop worrying about me. I know what I’m doing.”
“The hell you do!” said MacGregor. “You’ve been telling me that as long as I know you—and where are you? Every time we meet you’re in a new predicament. One of these days you’ll be asking me to bail you out of jail.”
“All right, all right, but let’s talk about it some other time. Here she comes—let’s change the subject. I don’t want to rile her more than necessary—she’s had a hard day of it.”
“And so you’ve really got many fathers,” I continued without a pause, looking straight at O’Mara. Mona was lowering herself into her seat. “It’s like I was saying a moment ago…”
“What is this—double talk?” said MacGregor.
“Not for him,” I said, never moving a muscle. “I should have explained the talk we had the night before, but it’s too long. Anyway, as I was saying, when I came out of the dream I knew exactly what I had to tell you.” (Looking steadfastly at O’Mara all the while.) “It had nothing to do with the dream.”
“What dream?” said MacGregor, slightly exasperated now.
“The one I just explained to you,” I said. “Listen, let me finish talking to him, will you?”
“Waiter!” called MacGregor, “Ask these gentlemen what they would like to drink, will you?” To us—“I’m going to take a leak.”
“It’s like this,” I said, addressing O’Mara, “you’re lucky you lost your father when you were a kid. Now you can find your real father—and your real mother. It’s more important to find your real father than your real mother. You’ve found several fathers already, but you don’t know it. You’re rich, man. Why resurrect the dead? Look to the living! Why shit, there are fathers everywhere, all around you, better fathers by far than the one who gave you his name or the one who sent you to the asylum. To find your real father you first have to be a good son.”
O’Mara’s eyes were twinkling. “Go on,” he urged, “it sounds good even though I don’t know what the hell it all means.”
“But it’s simple,” I said. “Now look—take me, for instance. Did you ever think how lucky you were to find me? I’m not your father, but I’m a damned good brother to you. Do I ever ask you any embarrassing questions when you hand me money? Do I urge you to look for a job? Do I say anything if you lie in bed all day?”
“What’s the meaning of all this?” demanded Mona, amused in spite of herself.
“You know very well what I’m talking about,” I replied. “He needs affection.”
“We all do,” said Mona.
“We don’t need a thing,” said I. “Not really. We’re lucky, all three of us. We eat every day, we sleep well, we read the books we want to read, we go to a show now and then… and we have one another. A father? What do we need a father for? Listen, that dream I had settled everything—for me. I don’t even need a bike. If I can have a dream ride now and then, O.K.! It’s better than the real thing. In dreams you never puncture a tire; if you do, it doesn’t matter a straw. You can ride all day and all night without getting exhausted. Ted was right. One has to learn to dream it off.… If I hadn’t had that dream I wouldn’t have met that guy McFarland today. Oh, I haven’t told you about that, have I? Well, never mind, some other time. The point is I
was offered a chance to write—for a new magazine. A chance to travel, too.…”
“You never told me a thing about it,” said Mona, all ears now. “I want to hear.…”
“Oh, it sounded good,” said I, “but the chances are it would turn out to be another flop.”
“I don’t understand,” she persisted. “What were you to write for him?”
“The story of my life, no less.”
“Well…?”
“I don’t think I can do it. Not like he wanted me to, at any rate.”
“You’re crazy,” said O’Mara.
“You’re going to turn it down?” said Mona, completely mystified by my attitude.
“I’ll think it over first.”
“I don’t undersand you at all,” said O’Mara. “Here you’ve got the chance of a lifetime and you… why, a man like McFarland could make you famous overnight.”
“I know,” I said, “but that’s just what I’m afraid of. I’m not ready for success yet. Or rather I don’t want that kind of success. Between you and me—I’m going to be damned honest with you—I don’t know how to write. Not yet! I realized that immediately he made me the offer to write the damned serial. It’s going to take a long time before I know how to say what I want to say. Maybe I’ll never learn. And let me tell you another thing while I’m at it.… I don’t want any jobs between times…neither publicity jobs nor newspaper jobs nor any kind of job. All I ask is to dawdle along in my own way. I keep telling you people I know what I’m doing. I mean it. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but it’s my way. I can’t navigate any other way, do you understand?”
O’Mara said nothing, but I sensed he was sympathetic. Mona, of course, was overjoyed. She thought I had underrated myself but she was terribly pleased that I wasn’t going to take a job. Once again she repeated what she had always been telling me: “I want you to do as you please, Val. I don’t want you to think about anything but your work. I don’t care if it takes ten years or twenty years. I don’t care if you never succeed. Just write!”
“If what takes ten years?” asked MacGregor, returning just in time to catch the tail end.
“To become a writer,” I said, giving him a good-natured grin.
“You’re still talking about that? Forget it! You’re a writer no v, Henry, only nobody knows it but you. Have you finished eating? I’ve got to go somewhere. Let’s get out of here. I’ll drop you off at the house.”
We cleared out in a hurry. He was always in a hurry, MacGregor, even to attend a poker game, as it turned out. “A bad habit,” he said, half to himself. “I never win either. If I really had something to do I suppose I’d get over such nonsense. It’s just a way of killing time.”
“Why do you have to kill time?” I asked. “Couldn’t you hang on with us? You could kill time just as well by chewing the fat. If you must kill time, I mean.”
“That’s true,” he answered soberly, “I never thought of that. I don’t know, I’ve got to be on the go all the time. It’s a weakness.”
“Do you ever read a book any more?”
He laughed. “I guess not, Henry. I’m waiting for you to write some. Maybe then I’ll read again.” He lit a cigarette. “Oh, now and then I do pick up a book,” he confessed rather sheepishly, “but it’s never a good one. I’ve lost all sense of taste. I read a few lines to send myself to sleep, that’s the truth of it, Henry, I can no more read Dostoevski now, or Thomas Mann, or Hardy, than I can cook a meal. I haven’t the patience…nor the interest. You get stale grinding away in an office. Remember, Hen, how I used to study when we were kids? Jesus, I had ambition then. I was going to burn up the world, wasn’t I? Now… aw well… it doesn’t matter a damn. In our racket nobody gives a shit whether you’ve read Dostoevski or not. The important thing is—can you win the case? You don’t require much intelligence to win a case, let me tell you that. If you’re really clever, you manage to stay out of court. You let somebody else do the dirty work. Yeah, it’s the old story, Henry. I get sick of harping on it. Nobody should take up law who wants to keep his hands clean. If he does he’ll starve.… You know, I’m always twitting you about being a lazy son of a bitch. I guess I envy you. You always seem to be having a good time. You have a good time even when you’re starving to death. I never have a good time. Not any more. Why I ever got married I don’t know. To make some one else miserable, I suppose. It’s amazing the way I gripe. No matter what she does for me it’s wrong. I do nothing but bawl the shit out of her.”
“Oh come,” I said, to egg him on, “you’re not as bad as all that.”
“Ain’t I, though? You should live with me for a few days. Listen, I’m so goddamned ornery I can’t even live with myself—how do you like that?”
“Why don’t you cut your throat?” I said, giving him a broad smile. “Really, when things get that bad, there’s no alternative.”
“You’re telling me?” he cried. “I have it out with myself every day. Yes sir”—and he banged the wheel emphatically—“every day of my life I ask myself whether I should go on living or not.”
“The trouble is you’re not serious,” I said. “You only have to ask yourself that question once and you know.”
“You’re wrong, Henry! It’s not as easy as all that,” he remonstrated. “I wish it were. I wish I could toss a coin and have done with it.”
“That’s no way to settle it,” I said.
“I know, Henry, I know. But you know me! Remember the old days? Christ, I couldn’t even decide whether to take a crap or not.” He laughed in spite of himself. “Have you noticed, as you get older things seem to take care of themselves. You don’t debate what to do every step of the way. You just grouse.”
We were pulling up to the door. He lingered over the farewell. “Remember, Henry,” he said, feathering the gas pedal, “if you get stuck there’s always a job for you at Randall, Randall and Randall’s. Twenty a week regular.…Why don’t you look me up once in a while? Don’t make me run after you all the time!”
4
“I feel in myself a lift so luminous,” says Louis Lambert, “that I might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral.” This statement, which Balzac voices through his double, expresses perfectly the secret anguish of which I was then a victim. At one and the same time I was leading two thoroughly divergent lives. One could be described as “the merry whirl,” the other as the contemplative life. In the role of active being everybody took me for what I was, or what I appeared to be; in the other role no one recognized me, least of all myself. No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself. It needed only a few moments, seemingly, of shutting out the world for me to be restored. But it required much longer stretches—of being alone with myself—to write. As I have frequently pointed out, the business of writing never ceased. But from this interior process to the process of translation is always, and was then very definitely, a big step. Today it is often hard for me to remember when or where I made this or that utterance, to remember whether I actually said it somewhere or whether I intended to say it sometime or other. There is an ordinary kind of forgetting and a special kind; the latter is due, more than likely, to the vice of living in two worlds at once. One of the consequences of this tendency is that you live everything out innumerable times. Worse, whatever you succeed in transmitting to paper seems but an infinitesimal fraction of what you’ve already written in your head. That delicious experience with which everyone is familiar, and which occurs with haunting impressiveness in dreams—I mean of falling into a familiar groove: meeting the same person over and over, going down the same street, confronting the identically same situation—this experience often happens to me in waking moments. How often I rack my brains to think where it was I made use of a certain thought, a certain situation, a certain character! Frantically I wonder if “it” occurred in some manuscript thoughtlessly destroyed. And then, when I
’ve forgotten all about “it,” suddenly it dawns on me that “it” is one of the perpetual themes which I carry about inside me, which I am writing in the air, which I have written hundreds of times already, but never set down on paper. I make a note to write it out at the first opportunity, so as to be done with it, so as to bury it once and for all. I make the note—and I forget it with alacrity.… It’s as though there were two melodies going on simultaneously: one for private exploitation and the other for the public ear. The whole struggle is to squeeze into that public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody.
It was this inner turmoil which my friends detected in my comportment. And it was the lack of it, in my writings, which they deplored. I almost felt sorry for them. But there was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self. This “perversity” always voiced itself thus: “Reveal your true self and they will mutilate you.” “They” meant not my friends alone but the world.
Once in a great while I came across a being whom I felt I could give myself to completely. Alas, these beings existed only in books. They were worse than dead to me—they had never existed except in imagination. Ah, what dialogues I conducted with kindred, ghostly spirits! Soul-searching colloquies, of which not a line has ever been recorded. Indeed, these “excriminations,” as I chose to style them, defied recording. They were carried on in a language that does not exist, a language so simple, so direct, so transparent, that words were useless. It was not a silent language either, as is often used in communication with “higher beings.” It was a language of clamor and tumult—the heart’s clamor, the heart’s tumult. But noiseless. If it were Dostoevski whom I summoned, it was “the complete Dostoevski,” that is to say, the man who wrote the novels, diaries and letters we know, plus the man we also know by what he left unsaid, unwritten. It was type and archetype speaking, so to say. Always full, resonant, veridical; always the unimpeachable sort of music which one credits him with, whether audible or inaudible, whether recorded or unrecorded. A language which could emanate only from Dostoevski.