“I follow you all right,” said Curley, “but I don’t give a damn about all those subtleties and complexities. That’s literature! I’m telling you honestly that I still hate his guts, that I’d kill him without compunction, if I could get away with it.”
“I see one big difference already…” Mona began.
“What do you mean?” he snapped.
“Between you and the hero of a book.”
“I don’t want to be a hero!”
“I know,” said Mona gently, “but you do want to remain a human being, don’t you? If you go on thinking this way, who knows, some day you may get your wish. Then what?”
“Then I’d be happy. No, not happy exactly, but relieved.”
“Because he was out of the way, you mean?”
“No! Because I had done away with him. There’s a difference there.”
Here I felt impelled to break in. “Look, Curley, Mona got off the track. I think I know what she meant to say. It’s this—the difference between a criminal who commits a crime and the hero of a book who commits the same crime is that the latter doesn’t care whether he will get away with it or not. He’s not concerned about what happens to him afterwards. He must accomplish his purpose, that’s all.…”
“Which only proves,” said Curley, “that I’ll never make a hero.”
“Nobody’s asking you to become a hero. But if you see the distinction between the two then you’ll realize that you’re hardly much better than the man you hate and despise so much.”
“Even if that’s true I don’t give a damn!”
“Let’s forget it then. The probabilities are that he’ll die a peaceful death and that you’ll end up on a ranch in sunny California.”
“Maybe it’ll be the griffs and the grinds—how do you know?”
“Maybe. And maybe not.”
Before he left that night Curley imparted a piece of information which gave us quite a shock. Tony Maurer, he told us, had committed suicide. He had hanged himself in the bathroom during the course of a party he was giving his friends. They had found him with a sardonic smile on his lips and a pipe hanging from his mouth. No one, apparently, knew why he had done it. He was never in lack of money and he was deeply in love with the woman he lived with, a beautiful Javanese girl. Some said he had done it out of sheer boredom. If so, it was in keeping with his character.
The news affected me strangely. I kept thinking what a pity it was that I had not gotten to know Tony Maurer more intimately. He was the sort of man I would have been proud to call a friend. But I was too bashful to make advances, and he was too surfeited to recognize my need. I always felt a little uncomfortable in his presence. Like a schoolboy, to be precise. Everything I wanted to do he had done already.… Perhaps there was something else which had drawn me to him all unconsciously: his German blood. For once in my life I had had the pleasure of knowing a German who did not remind me of all the other Germans I knew. The truth is, he wasn’t really a German—he was a cosmopolite. The perfect example of that “late-city man” whom Spengler has so well described. His roots were not in German soil, German blood, German tradition, but in those end periods which distinguished the late-city man of Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India. He was rootless and “at home” everywhere—that is, where there was culture and civilization. He might just as well have fought on the Italian, French, Hungarian or Roumanian side as ours. He had a sense of loyalty without being patriotic. No wonder he had spent six months (by accident) in a French prison camp—and enjoyed it. He liked the French even more than the Germans—or the Americans. He liked good conversation, that was it.
All these aspects of the man, plus the fact that he was debonair, adroit, thoroughly sophisticated, utterly tolerant and forgiving, had endeared him to me. Not one of my friends possessed these qualities. They had better and worse traits, traits all too familiar to me. They were too much like myself au fond, my friends. All my life I had wanted, and still crave, as a matter of fact, friends whom I could look upon as being utterly different from myself. Whenever I succeeded in finding one I also discovered that the attraction necessary to maintain a vital relationship was lacking. None of these individuals ever became more than “potential” friends.
Anyway, that night I dreamed. An interminable dream, as I said before, and full of hair-raising escapades. In the dream Butch and Tony Maurer had exchanged personalities. In some mysterious way I was in league with them, or him, for sometimes this mysterious, baffling confederate of mine would split into two distinct personalities, never however being clearly Tony Maurer or clearly Butch, but always a composite of the two, even when split. This sort of double play was sufficient in itself to cause me extreme anguish, to say nothing of the fact that I was never certain whether he or they were with me or against me.
The theme of this disturbing dream centered about a job we were pulling off in some strange city which I had never visited, a remote place like Sioux Falls, Tonopah or Ludlow. I played the role of stooge, a most uncomfortable role, since I was always exposed, always left in the lurch. Over and over again it was impressed on me that one false move, one little mistake, and I would be so much horse meat. The instructions were always garbled, always given in a code which it took me hours to decipher. Of course the job was never pulled off. Instead we were on the run continuously, driven from pillar to post, badgered like wild game. When we were obliged to hide away—in caves, cellars, swamps, mineshafts—we played cards or rolled dice. The stakes were always for grand sums. We paid one another off in I.O.U’s, or else in Confederate money which we had seized in rifling a bank. This Butch-Maurer wore a monocle, wore it even in public, despite all my entreaties. His language was a mixture of thieves’ argot and Oxford slang. Even when explaining the devious complexities of a perilous undertaking he had a bad habit of wandering off the track, of telling stories which were long-winded and pointless. It was excruciating to follow him. Eventually the three of us were cornered, or pocketed rather, in a narrow defile (in the Far West, it seemed) by a band of vigilantes. We were all killed outright, shot down like wild boars. I only realized that I was still alive when I came awake. Even then I could scarcely believe it. I was already sprouting wings.
Such was the gist of the dream. I tried to condense this raw material into a tale of pursuit, with a strict plot and a definite locale. The manhunt part of it I captured quite well, I thought, but the choppy, fantastic, episodic dream substance of flight and incident refused to be converted into intelligible narrative. I fell between two stools. Still, it was a brave attempt, and it gave me the courage to tackle more imaginative stories. Perhaps I might have succeeded, in this latter vein, had we not received a telegram from O’Mara urging us to join him in North Carolina, the seat of another big real-estate boom. As usual, he intimated that he was holding down a big job: “they” had need of me on the publicity end.
I wired back immediately to send us the train fare and advise what my salary would be. The answer I received read as follows: “Don’t worry everything jake borrow the fare.”
Mona immediately suspected the worst. It was just like him, she thought, to be vague, noncommittal and utterly unreliable. It was nothing more than loneliness that had made him wire us.
Defending him instinctively, I worked myself up to such a pitch of enthusiasm that, despite the fact that I had a sinking feeling about the whole business, I could no longer back out.
“Well,” she said, “and where will we get the fare?”
I was stumped. For a minute only. Suddenly I had a bright thought. “The money? Why, from that little Lesbian you met the other day in the department store, remember? The Tansy perfume girl. That’s where.”
“Preposterous!” That was her first reaction.
“Come, come,” I said, “she’ll probably bless you for asking her.”
She continued to assert that it was out of the question, but it was obvious that she was revolving the suggestion in her mind. By the morrow I was certain she’d display
a different attitude.
“I tell you what,” said I, as if to dismiss the subject, “let’s go to a show tonight, what do you say? Let’s see something funny.”
She thought it an excellent idea. We ate out, picked a good show—at the Palace—and came home laughing our heads off. We laughed so much in fact that it took us hours to fall asleep.
The next morning, as I had anticipated, she was off to see her little Lesbian friend. No trouble at all borrowing fifty smackers. Her difficulty had been to shake the girl off.
I suggested that we hitchhike instead of taking the train. That would leave something over on arriving. “You never know about O’Mara. It may be all a smoke dream.”
“You talked differently yesterday,” said Mona.
“I know, but now it’s today. I’d rather play safe.”
She acquiesced readily enough. Agreed that we would probably see more of the country by hitchhiking. Besides, with a woman by one’s side it was always easier to get a lift.
The landlady was a bit put out by the suddenness of our decision but when I explained that I had been commissioned to do a book she took it with seeming good nature and wished us well.
“What sort of book?” she asked, clutching my hand in farewell.
“About the Cherokee Indians,” I said, quickly closing the door behind us.
We got lifts easily enough but to my amazement Mona registered nothing but disappointment. By the time we reached Harper’s Ferry she was plainly disgusted—with the landscape, the towns, the people we met, the meals and everything.
It was late afternoon when we reached Harper’s Ferry. We sat high up on a rock overlooking three states. Below us the Shenandoah and the Potomac. A hallowed spot, if for no other reason than the fact that here John Brown, the great Liberator, met his fate. Mona, however, wasn’t at all interested in the historic aspects of the place. As for the splendor of the vista, that she couldn’t repudiate. But it filled her with desolation. To tell the truth, I felt much the same, but for different reasons. It was impossible to pull myself away. Too much had happened here to permit the obtrusion of one’s private worries. I read with moist eyes what Thomas Jefferson had said of this particular spot: the words were carved on a tablet fastened to the rock. There was sublimity in Jefferson’s words. But there was even more sublimity in the action of John Brown and his faithful followers. “No man in America,” said Thoreau, “has ever stood up so persistently for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for man and equal of any and all governments.” A fanatic? Possibly. Who else but a just man could plan to overthrow the stable, conservative government of these United States, with a mere handful of men? Glory to John Brown! Glory on high! “I believe in the Golden Rule, sir, and the Declaration of Independence. I think they both mean the same thing. Better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth—men, women and children—by a violent death, than that one jot of either should fall in this country.” (The words of John Brown in the year 1857.) Let us not forget that the number of Liberators who took possession of the town of Harper’s Ferry was only twenty-two, of whom seventeen were whites. “A few men in the right, and knowing they are, can overturn a king,” said John Brown. With twenty men in the Alleghanies he was certain he could smash Slavery in two years. “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.” There you have John Brown in a nutshell. A fanatic? More than likely. The sort who said: “A man dies when his time comes, and a man who fears is born out of time.” If he was indeed a fanatic, he was a unique one. Is this the language of a fanatic?—“Do not allow anyone to say that I acted from revenge. I claim no man has a right to revenge himself. It is a feeling that does not enter into my heart. What I do, I do for the cause of human liberty, and because I regard it as necessary.”
Compromise was not in his nature. Nor palliation. He was a man of vision. And it was a great, great vision which inspired his “mad” behavior. Had John Brown taken over the helm the slaves would really be free today—not only the black slaves but the white slaves and the slaves of the slaves, which is to say, the slaves of the machine.
The ironic thing is that the great Liberator came to a disastrous end because of his overwhelming sense of consideration for the enemy. (That was where his real madness lay!) After forty days in chains, after a mock trial during which he lay on the floor of the courtroom in his blood-soaked, saber-torn clothes, he went to the gallows, with his head erect, standing there on the trap blindfolded, waiting, waiting (though his one and only request had been to get done with it quickly), while the gallant military men of Virginia performed their interminable and asinine parade maneuvers.
To those who had written him towards the end, asking how they might aid him, John Brown had replied: “Please send fifty cents a year to my wife in North Elba, New York.” As he made his way to the gallows he shook hands in turn with each of his comrades, handing them each a quarter with his blessing. That’s how the great Liberator went to meet his Maker.…
The gateway to the South is Harper’s Ferry. You enter the South by way of the Old Dominion. John Brown had entered the Old Dominion to pass into life eternal. “I acknowledge no master in human form,” he said. Glory! Glory be!
One of his contemporaries, almost as famous in his own way, said of John Brown: “He could not have been tried by his peers, for his peers did not exist.” Amen! Alleluia! And may his soul go marching on!
14
“I’m now going to sing of “The Seven Great Joys.” This is the refrain:
Come all ye out of the wilderness
And glory be,
Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
Through all eternity.
We will sing it often as we writhe like snakes in the sultry bosom of the South.…
Asheville. Thomas Wolfe, who was born here, was probably composing Look Homeward, Angel! at the time of our entry. I had not even heard of Thomas Wolfe. A pity, because I might have looked at Asheville with different eyes. No matter what anyone says of Asheville, the setting is magnificent. In the very heart of the Great Smokies. Ancient Cherokee land. To the Cherokees it must have been Paradise. It is still a Paradise, if you can view it with a clear conscience.
O’Mara was there to usher us into Heaven. But once again we were too late. Things had taken a bad turn. The real-estate boom was over. There was no publicity job awaiting me. No job of any sort. To tell the truth, I felt relieved. Learning that O’Mara had put a little money aside, enough to tide us over a few weeks, I decided that it was as good a place as any to stay a while and write. The only drawback was Mona. The South was not to her liking. I had hopes however, that she would adjust herself. After all, she had rarely set foot outside New York.
According to O’Mara, there was a ranger’s cabin which we could make use of indefinitely, rent-free, if we liked the place. An ideal spot, he thought, for me to write in. Only a short distance out of town it was, up in the hills. He seemed eager to see us move in immediately.
It was nightfall when we got to the foot of the hill, where we were to obtain the keys for the cabin. With the aid of an overgrown idiot we rode up on muleback, in pitch darkness. Just Mona and myself, that is. As we slowly and laboriously ascended we listened to the roar of the mountain torrent rushing beside us. It was that dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of you. It took us almost an hour to get to the clearing where the cabin stood. Hardly had we dismounted when we were assailed by swarms of flies and mosquitoes. The idiot, a gangling, gawky lad who never opened his mouth, pushed the door in and hung the lantern on a cord dangling from a rafter. Obviously the place hadn’t been inhabited for years. It was not only filthy, it was infested with rats, spiders and all manner of vermin.
We stretched out on the two cots side by side; the idiot lay on the floor at our feet. I was aware of the unpleasant sound of bats swooping about over our heads. The flies and mosquitoes, disturbed by our intrusion, attacked us mercilessly.
Despite everything, however, we succeede
d in falling asleep.
It seemed to me I had hardly closed my eyes when I felt Mona clutching my arm.
“What is it?” I muttered.
She leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“Nonsense,” I said, “you were probably dreaming.”
I tried to fall back to sleep. In an instant I felt her clutching me again.
“It’s him,” she whispered, “I’m sure of it. He’s feeling my leg.”
I got up, struck a match, and took a good look at the idiot. He was lying on his side, his eyes closed, still as a stick.
“You’re imagining things,” I said, “he’s sound asleep.”
Just the same I thought it better to be on the alert. A dumb gawk like that had the strength of a brute. I struck another match and took a quick look about to see what I might use as a weapon should he really get out of hand.
At daybreak we were all wide awake and scratching like mad. The heat was already stifling. We sent the boy to fetch a pail of water, dressed hurriedly, and decided without delay to clear out. While waiting for the goon to pack we inspected the spot more closely. The cabin was literally smothered by trees and brush. No view whatever. Just the sound of running water and the insane twittering of birds. I recalled O’Mara’s parting words when we started up the goat path—“Just the place for you … an ideal retreat!”
Descending, again on muleback, we observed with a shudder what a narrow escape we had had. One little slip and we would have been done for. Before we had gone very far we dismounted and followed on foot. Even thus it was a ticklish feat to keep from slipping.
At the bottom we were presented to all the members of the family. There were over a dozen kids running about, most of them half naked. We inquired if we might have breakfast with them. We were told to wait, they’d call us when ready. We sat down on the steps of the porch and waited glumly. By now—it was not yet seven—the heat was almost intolerable.