lost her child, but
her mother was home, ill, very ill, and there was the doctor to pay and
medicine to be bought, and so on and so forth. I didn't believe a word of
it, of course. And since I had to find a hotel for myself, I suggested that
she come along with me and stay the night. A little economy there, I thought
to myself. But she wouldn't do that. She insisted on going home, said she
had an apartment to herself -- and besides she had to look after her mother.
On reflection I decided that it would be still cheaper sleeping at her
place, so I said yes and let's go immediately. Before going, however, I
decided it was best to let her know just how I stood, so that there
wouldn't be any squawking at the last minute. I thought she was going to
faint when I told her how much I had in my pocket. "The likes of it!" she
said. Highly insulted she was. I thought there would be a scene ...
Undaunted, however, I stood my ground. "Very well, then, I'll leave you," I
said quietly. "Perhaps I've made a mistake."

"I should say you have!" she exclaimed, but clutching me by the sleeve at
the same time. <i>"Ecoute, cheri... sois raisonnable!"</i> When I heard that
all my confidence was restored. I knew that it would be merely a question of
promising her a little extra and everything would be O. K. "All right," I
said wearily, "I'll be nice to you, you'll see."

"You were lying to me, then?" she said.

"Yes," I smiled, "I was just lying ..."

Before I had even put my hat on she had hailed a cab. I heard her give the
Boulevard de Clichy for an address. That was more than the price of a room,
I thought to myself. Oh well, there was time yet ... we'd see. I don't know
how it started any more but soon she was raving to me about Henry Bordeaux.
(I have yet to meet a whore who doesn't know of Henry Bordeaux!) But this one
was genuinely inspired; her language was beautiful now, so tender, so
discerning, that I was debating how much to give her. It seemed to me that I
had heard her say -- <i>"quand il n'y aura plus de temps."</i> It sounded like
that, anyway. In the state I was in, a phrase like that was worth a hundred
francs. I wondered if it was her own or if she had pulled it from Henry
Bordeaux. Little matter. It was just the right phrase with which to roll up
to the foot of Montmartre. "Good evening, mother," I was saying to myself,
"daughter and I will look after you -- <i>quand il n 'y aura plus de
temps!"</i> She was going to show me her diploma, too, I remembered that.

She was all aflutter, once the door had closed behind us. Distracted.
Wringing her hands and striking Sarah Bernhardt poses, half undressed too,
and pausing between times to urge me to hurry, to get undressed, to do this
and do that. Finally, when she had stripped down and was poking about with a
chemise in her hand, searching for her kimono, I caught hold of her and gave
her a good squeeze. She had a look of anguish on her face when I released
her. "My God! My God! I must go downstairs and have a look at mother!" she
exclaimed. "You can take a bath if you like, <i>cheri.</i> There! I'll be
back in a few minutes." At the door I embraced her again. I was in my
underclothes and I had a tremendous erection. Somehow all this anguish and
excitement, all the grief and histrionics, only whetted my appetite. Perhaps
she was just going downstairs to quiet her <i>maquereau.</i> I had a feeling
that something unusual was happening, some sort of drama which I would read
about in the morning paper. I gave the place a quick inspection. There were
two rooms and a bath, not badly furnished. Rather coquettish. There was her
diploma on the wall -- "first class," as they all read. And there was the
photograph of a child, a little girl with beautiful locks, on the dresser. I
put the water on for a bath, and then I changed my mind. If something were
to happen and I were found in the tub ... I didn't like the idea. I paced
back and forth, getting more and more uneasy as the minutes rolled by.

When she returned she was even more upset than before. "She's going to die
... she's going to die!" she kept wailing. For a moment I was almost on the
point of leaving. How the hell can you climb over a woman when her mother's
dying downstairs, perhaps right beneath you? I put my arms around her, half
in sympathy and half determined to get what I had come for. As we stood thus
she murmured, as if in real distress, her need for the money I had promised
her. It was for <i>"maman."</i> Shit, I didn't have the heart to haggle about
a few francs at that moment. I walked over to the chair where my clothes were
lying and I wiggled a hundred franc note out of my fob pocket, carefully
keeping my back turned to her just the same. And, as a further precaution, I
placed my pants on the side of the bed where I knew I was going to flop. The
hundred francs wasn't altogether satisfactory to her, but I could see from
the feeble way that she protested that it was quite enough. Then, with an
energy that astonished me, she flung off her kimono and jumped into bed. As
soon as I had put my arms around her and pulled her to me she reached for the
switch and out went the lights. She embraced me passionately, and she groaned
as all French cunts do when they get you in bed. She was getting me
frightfully roused with her carrying-on; that business of turning out the
lights was a new one to me ... it seemed like the real thing. But I was
suspicious too, and as soon as I could manage conveniently I put my hand out
to feel if my trousers were still there on the chair.

I thought we were settled for the night. The bed felt very comfortable,
softer than the average hotel bed -- and the sheets were clean, I had noticed
that. If only she wouldn't squirm so! You would think she hadn't slept with
a man for a month. I wanted to stretch it out. I wanted full value for my
hundred francs. But she was mumbling all sorts of things in that crazy bed
language which goes to your blood even more rapidly when it's in the dark. I
was putting up a stiff fight, but it was impossible with her groaning and
gasping going on, and her muttering: <i>"Vite cheri! Vite cheri! Oh, c'est
bon! Oh, oh! Vite, vite, cheri!"</i> I tried to count but it was like a fire
alarm going off. <i>"Vile, cheri!"</i> and this time she gave such a gasping
shudder that bango! I heard the stars chiming and there was my hundred francs
gone and the fifty that I had forgotten all about and the lights were on
again and with the same alacrity that she had bounced into bed she was
bouncing out again and grunting and squealing like an old sow. I lay back and
puffed a cigarette, gazing ruefully at my pants the while; they were terribly
wrinkled. In a moment she was back again, wrapping the kimono around her, and
telling me in that agitated way which was getting on my nerves that I should
make myself at home. "I'm going downstairs to see mother," she said. <i>"Mais
faites comme chez vous, cheri. Je reviens tout de suite."</i>

After a quarter of an hour had passed I began to feel thoroughly restless. I
went inside and I read through a letter that was lying on the table. It was
nothing on any account -- a love letter. In the bathroom I examined all the
bottles on the shelf; she had everything a woman requires to make herself
smell beautiful. I was still hoping that she would come back and give me
another fifty francs' worth. But time dragged on and there was no sign of
her. I began to grow alarmed. Perhaps there <i>was</i> someone dying
downstairs. Absent-mindedly, out of a sense of self-preservation, I suppose,
I began to put my things on. As I was buckling my belt it came to me like a
flash how she had stuffed the hundred franc note into her purse. In the
excitement of the moment she had thrust the purse in the wardrobe, on the
upper shelf. I remembered the gesture she made -- standing on her tip-toes
and reaching for the shelf. It didn't take me a minute to open the wardrobe
and feel around for the purse. It was still there. I opened it hurriedly and
saw my hundred franc note lying snugly between the silk coverlets. I put the
purse back just as it was, slipped into my coat and shoes, and then I went
to the landing and listened intently. I couldn't hear a sound. Where she had
gone to, Christ only knows. In a jiffy I was back at the wardrobe and
fumbling with her purse. I pocketed the hundred francs and all the loose
change besides. Then, closing the door silently. I tip-toed down the stairs
and when once I had hit the street I walked just as fast as my legs would
carry me. At the Cafe Boudon I stopped for a bite. The whores there having a
gay time pelting a fat man who had fallen asleep over his meal. He was sound
asleep; snoring, in fact, and yet his jaws were working away mechanically.
The place was in an uproar.

There were shouts of "All aboard!" and then a concerted banging of knives
and forks. He opened his eyes for a moment, blinked stupidly, and then his
head rolled forward again on his chest. I put the hundred franc bill
carefully away in my fob pocket and counted the change. The din around me
was increasing and I had difficulty to recall exactly whether I had seen
"first-class" on her diploma or not. It bothered me. About her mother I
didn't give a damn. I hoped she had croaked by now. It would be strange if
what she had said were true. Too good to believe. <i>Vite cheri ... vite.
vite!</i> And that other half-wit with her "my good sir" and "you have such
a kind face"! I wondered if she had really taken a room in that hotel we
stopped by.

        x x x

It was along toward the close of Summer when Fillmore invited me to come and
live with him. He had a studio apartment overlooking the cavalry barracks
just off the Place Dupleix. We had seen a lot of each other ever since the
little trip to Le Havre. If it hadn't been for Fillmore I don't know where I
should be to-day -- dead, most likely.

"I would have asked you long before," he said, "if it hadn't been for that
little bitch Jackie. I didn't know how to get her off my hands."

I had to smile. It was always like that with Fillmore. He had a genius for
attracting homeless bitches. Anyway, Jackie had finally cleared out of her
own accord. The rainy season was coming on the long, dreary stretch of
grease and fog and squirts of rain that make you damp and miserable. An
execrable place in the winter, Paris! A climate that eats into your soul,
that leaves you bare as the Labrador coast. I noticed with some anxiety
that the only means of heating the place was the little stove in the studio.
However, it was still comfortable. And the view from the studio window was
superb.

In the morning Fillmore would shake me roughly and leave a ten franc note on
the pillow. As soon as he had gone I would settle back for a final snooze.
Sometimes I would lie abed till noon. There was nothing pressing, except to
finish the book, and that didn't worry me much because I was already
convinced that nobody would accept it anyway. Nevertheless, Fillmore was much
impressed by it. When he arrived in the evening with a bottle under his arm
the first thing he did was to go to the table and see how many pages I had
knocked off. At first I enjoyed the show of enthusiasm but later, when I was
running dry, it made me devilishly uneasy to see him poking around, searching
for the pages that were supposed to trickle out of me like water from a tap.
When there was nothing to show I felt exactly like some bitch whom he had
harbored. He used to say about Jackie, I remembered -- "it would have been
all right if only she had slipped me a piece of ass once in a while." If I
had been a woman I would have been only too glad to slip him a piece of ass:
it would have been much easier than to feed him the pages which he expected.

Nevertheless, he tried to make me feel at ease. There was always plenty of
food and wine, and now and then he would insist that I accompany him to a
<i>dancing.</i> He was fond of going to a nigger joint on the Rue d'Odessa
where there was a good-looking mulatto who used to come home with us
occasionally. The one thing that bothered him was that he couldn't find a
French girl who liked to drink. They were all too sober to satisfy him -- He
liked to bring a woman back to the studio and guzzle it with her before
getting down to business. He also liked to have her think that he was an
artist. As the man from whom he had rented the place was a painter, it was
not difficult to create an impression; the canvases which we had found in
the <i>armoire</i> were soon stuck about the place and one of the unfinished
ones conspicuously mounted on the easel. Unfortunately they were all of a
Surrealistic quality and the impression they created was usually
unfavorable. Between a whore, a concierge and a cabinet minister there is
not much difference in taste where pictures are concerned. It was a matter
of great relief to Fillmore when Mark Swift began to visit us regularly with
the intention of doing my portrait. Fillmore had a great admiration for
Swift. He was a genius, he said. And though there was something ferocious
about everything he tackled nevertheless when he painted a man or an object
you could recognize it for what it was.

At Swift's request I had begun to grow a beard. The shape of my skull, he
said, required a beard. I had to sit by the window with the Eiffel Tower in
back of me because he wanted the Eiffel Tower in the picture too. He also
wanted the typewriter in the picture. Kruger got the habit of dropping in
too about this time; he maintained that Swift knew nothing about painting. It
exasperated him to see things out of proportion. He believed in Nature's
laws, implicitly. Swift didn't give a fuck about Nature; he wanted to paint
what was inside his head. Anyway, there was Swift's portrait of me stuck on
the easel now, and though everything was out of proportion, even a cabinet
minister could see that it was a human head, a man with a beard. The
concierge, indeed, began to take a great interest in the picture; she thought
the likeness was striking. And she liked the idea of showing the Eiffel Tower
in the background.

Things rolled along this way peacefully for about a month or more. The
neighborhood appealed to me, particularly at night when the full squalor
and lugubriousness of it made itself felt. The little Place, so charming and
tranquil at twilight, could assume the most dismal, sinister character when
darkness came on. There was that long, high wall covering one side of the
barracks against which there was always a couple embracing each other
furtively -- often in the rain. A depressing sight to see two lovers squeezed
against a prison wall under a gloomy street light: as if they had been
driven right to the last bounds. What went on inside the enclosure was also
depressing. On a rainy day I used to stand by the window and look down on
the activity below, quite as if it were something going on on another
planet. It seemed incomprehensible to me. Everything done according to
schedule, but a schedule that must have been devised by a lunatic. There
they were, floundering around in the mud, the bugles blowing, the horses
charging -- all within four walls. A sham battle. A lot of tin soldiers who
hadn't the least interest in learning how to kill or how to polish their
boots or curry-comb the horses. Utterly ridiculous the whole thing, but part
of the scheme of things. When they had nothing to do they looked even more
ridiculous; they scratched themselves, they walked about with their hands in
their pockets, they looked up at the sky. And when an officer came along
they clicked their heels and saluted. A madhouse, it seemed to me. Even the
horses looked silly. And then sometimes the artillery was dragged out and
they went clattering down the street on parade and people stood and gaped and
admired the fine uniforms. To me they always looked like an army corps in
retreat; something shabby, bedraggled, crestfallen about them, their uniforms
too big for their bodies, all the alertness, which as individuals they
possess to such a remarkable degree, gone now.

When the sun came out, however, things looked different. There was a ray of
hope in their eyes, they walked more elastically, they showed a little
enthusiasm. Then the color of things peeped out graciously and there was that
fuss and bustle so characteristic of the French; at the <i>bistrot</i> on the
corner they chattered gaily over their drinks and the officers seemed more
human, more French, I might say. When the sun comes out, any spot in Paris
can look beautiful; and if there is a <i>bistrot</i> with an awning rolled
down, a few tables on the sidewalk and colored drinks in the glasses, then
people look altogether human. And they <i>are</i> human -- the finest people
in the world when the sun shines! So intelligent, so indolent, so carefree!
It's a crime to herd such a people into barracks, to put them through
exercises, to grade them into privates and sergeants and colonels and what
not.

As I say, things were rolling along smoothly. Now and then Carl came along
with a job for me, travel articles which he hated to do himself. They only
paid fifty francs a piece, but they were easy to do because I had only to
consult the back issues and revamp the old articles. People only read these
things when they were sitting on a toilet or killing time in a waiting
room. The principal thing was to keep the adjectives well furbished -- the
rest was a matter of dates and statistics. If it was an important article
the head of the department signed it himself; he was a half-wit who couldn't
speak any language well, but who knew how to find fault. If he found a
paragraph that seemed to him well written he would say -- "Now that's the way
I want you to write! That's beautiful. You have my permission to use it in
your book." These beautiful paragraphs we sometimes lifted from the
encyclopaedia or an old guide book. Some of them Carl did put into his
book -- they had a Surrealistic character.

Then one evening, after I had been out for a walk, I open the door and a
woman springs out of the bed-room. "So you're the writer!" she exclaims at
once, and she looks at my beard as if to corroborate her impression. "What a
horrid beard!" she says. "I think you people must be crazy around here."
Fillmore is trailing after her with a blanket in his hand. "She's a
princess," he says, smacking his lips as if he had just tasted some rare
caviar. The two of them were dressed for the street; I couldn't understand
what they were doing with the bed-clothes. And then it occurred to me
immediately that Fillmore must have dragged her into the bed-room to show her
his laundry bag. He always did that with a new woman, especially if she was a
<i>Francaise.</i> "No tickee, no shirtee!" that's what was stitched on the
laundry bag, and somehow Fillmore had an obsession for explaining this motto
to every female who arrived. But this dame was not a <i>Francaise -- </i>he
made that clear to me at once. She was Russian -- and a princess, no less.

He was bubbling over with excitement, like a child that has just found a new
toy. "She speaks five languages!" he said, obviously overwhelmed by such an
accomplishment.

"<i>Non, four</i>!" she corrected promptly.

"Well, four then ... Anyway, she's a damned intelligent girl. You ought to
hear her speak."

The princess was nervous -- she kept scratching her thigh and rubbing her
nose. "Why does he want to make his bed now?" she asked me abruptly. "Does he
think he will get me that way? He's a big child. He behaves disgracefully. I
took him to a Russian restaurant and he danced like a nigger." She wiggled
her bottom to illustrate. "And he talks too much. Too loud. He talks
nonsense." She swished about the room, examining the paintings and the books,
keeping her chin well up all the time but scratching herself intermittently.
Now and then she wheeled around like a battleship and delivered a broadside.
Fillmore kept following her about with a bottle in one hand and a glass in
the other. "Stop following me like that!" she exclaimed. "And haven't you
anything to drink but this? Can't you get a bottle of champagne? I must have
some champagne. My nerves! My nerves!"

Fillmore tries to whisper a few words in my ear. "An actress ... a movie
star ... some guy jilted her and she can't get over it ... I'm going to get
her cockeyed ..."

"I'll clear out then," I was saying, when the princess interrupted us with a
shout.

"Why do you whisper like that?" she cried, stamping her foot. "Don't you know
that's not polite? And <i>you,</i> I thought you were going to take me out? I
must get drunk to-night, I have told you that already."

"Yes, yes," said Fillmore, "we're going in a minute. I just want another
drink."

"You're a pig!" she yelled. "But you're a nice boy too. Only you're loud.
You have no manners." She turned to me. "Can I trust him to behave himself?
I must get drunk to-night but I don't want him to disgrace me. Maybe I will
come back here afterwards. I would like to talk to you. You seem more
intelligent."

As they were leaving the princess shook my hand cordially and promised to
come for dinner some evening -- "when I will be sober," she said.

"Fine!" I said. "Bring another princess along -- or a countess, at least. We
change the sheets every Saturday."

About three in the morning Fillmore staggers in ... alone. Lit up like an
ocean liner, and making a noise like a blind man with his cracked cane. Tap,
tap, tap, down the weary lane ... "Going straight to bed," he says, as he
marches past me. 'Tell you all about it tomorrow." He goes inside to his
room and throws back the covers. I hear him groaning -- "what a woman! what a
woman!" In a second he's out again, with his hat on and the cracked cane in
his hand. "I knew something like that was going to happen. She's crazy!"

He rummages around in the kitchen a while and then comes back to the studio
with a bottle of Anjou. I have to sit up and down a glass with him.

As far as I can piece the story together the whole thing started at the
Rond-Point des Champs Elysees where he had dropped off for a drink on his
way home. As usual at that hour the <i>terrasse</i> was crowded with
buzzards. This one was sitting right on the aisle with a pile of saucers in
front of her; she was getting drunk quietly all by herself when Fillmore
happened along and caught her eye. "I'm drunk," she giggled, "won't you sit
down?" And then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to
do, she began right off the bat with the yam about her movie
director, how he had given her the go-by and how she had thrown herself in
the Seine and so forth and so on. She couldn't remember any more which
bridge it was, only that there was a crowd around when they fished her out
of the water. Besides, she didn't see what difference it made which bridge
she threw herself from -- why did he ask such questions? She was laughing
hysterically about it, and then suddenly she had a desire to be off -- she
wanted to dance. Seeing him hesitate she opens her bag impulsively and pulls
out a hundred francs note. The next moment, however, she decided that a
hundred francs wouldn't go very far. "Haven't you any money at all?" she
said. No, he hadn't very much in his pocket, but he had a checkbook at home.
So they made a dash for the checkbook and then, of course, I had to happen
in just as he was explaining to her the "No tickee, no shirtee" business.

On the way home they had stopped off at the Poisson d'Or for a little snack
which she had washed down with a few vodkas. She was in her element there
with everyone kissing her hand and murmuring <i>Princesse, Princesse.</i>
Drunk as she was, she managed to collect her dignity. "Don't wiggle your
behind like that!" she kept saying, as they danced.

It was Fillmore's idea, when he brought her back to the studio, to stay
there. But, since she was such an intelligent girl and so erratic, he had
decided to put up with her whims and postpone the grand event. He had even
visualized the prospect of running across another princess and bringing the
two of them back. When they started out for the evening, therefore, he was
in a good humor and prepared, if necessary, to spend a few hundred francs
on her. After all, one doesn't run across a princess every day.

This time she dragged him to another place, a place where she was still
better known and where there would be no trouble in cashing a check, as she
said. Everybody was in evening clothes and there was more spine-breaking,
hand-kissing nonsense as the waiter escorted them to a table.

In the middle of a dance she suddenly walks off the floor, with tears in her
eyes. "What's the matter?" he said, "what did I do this time?" and
instinctively he put his
hand to his backside, as though perhaps it might still be wiggling. "It's
nothing," she said. "You didn't do anything. Come, you're a nice boy," and
with that she drags him on to the floor again and begins to dance with
abandon. "But what's the matter with you?" he murmured. "It's nothing," she
repeated. "I saw somebody, that's all." And then, with a sudden spurt of
anger -- "why do you get me drunk? Don't you know it makes me crazy?"

"Have you got a check?" she says. "We must get out of here." She called the
waiter over and whispered to him in Russian. "Is it a good check?" she
asked, when the waiter had disappeared. And then, impulsively: "Wait for me
downstairs in the cloak-room. I must telephone somebody."

After the waiter had brought the change Fillmore sauntered leisurely
downstairs to the cloak-room to wait for her. He strode up and down, humming
and whistling softly, and smacking his lips in anticipation of the caviar to
come. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Still whistling softly. When twenty
minutes had gone by and still no princess he at last grew suspicious. The
cloak-room attendant said that she had left long ago. He dashed outside.
There was a nigger in livery standing there with a big grin on his face. Did
the nigger know where she had breezed to? Nigger grins. Nigger says: "Ah
heerd Coupole, dassall sir!"

At the Coupole, downstairs, he finds her sitting in front of a cocktail with
a dreamy, trance-like expression on her face. She smiles when she sees him.

"Was that a decent thing to do," he says, "to run away like that? You might
have told me that you didn't like me ..."

She flared up at this, got theatrical about it. And after a lot of gushing
she commenced to whine and slobber. "I'm crazy," she blubbered. "And you're
crazy too. You want me to sleep with you, and I don't want to sleep with
you." And then she began to rave about her lover, the movie director whom
she had seen on the dance floor. That's why she had to run away from the
place. That's why she took drugs and got drunk every night. That's why she
threw herself in the Seine. She babbled on this way about how crazy she was
and then suddenly she had an idea. "Let's go to
Bricktop's!" There was a man there whom she knew ... he had promised her a
job once. She was certain he would help her.

"What's it going to cost?" asked Fillmore cautiously.

It would cost a lot, she let him know that immediately. "But listen, if you
take me to Bricktop's, I promise to go home with you." She was honest enough
to add that it might cost him five or six hundred francs. "But I'm worth it!
You don't know what a woman I am. There isn't another woman like me in all
Paris ..."

"That's what <i>you</i> think!" His Yankee blood was coming to the fore.
"But I don't see it. I don't see that you're worth anything. You're just a
poor crazy son-of-a-bitch. Frankly, I'd rather give fifty francs to some
poor French girl; at least they give you something in return."

She hit me ceiling when he mentioned the French girls. "Don't talk to me
about those women! I hate them! They're stupid ... they're ugly ... they're
mercenary. Stop it, I tell you!"

In a moment she had subsided again. She was on a new tack. "Darling," she
murmured, "you don't know what I look like when I'm undressed. I'm
<i>beautiful</i>!." And she held her breasts with her two hands.

But Fillmore remained unimpressed. "You're a bitch!" he said coldly. "I
wouldn't mind spending a few hundred francs on you, but you're crazy. You
haven't even washed your face. Your breath stinks. I don't give a damn
whether you're a princess or not ... I don't want any of your high-assed
Russian variety. You ought to get out in the street and hustle for it.
You're no better than any little French girl. You're not as good. I wouldn't
piss away another sou on you. You ought to go to America -- that's the place
for a blood-sucking leech like you ..."

She didn't seem to be at all put out by this speech. "I think you're just a
little afraid of me," she said.

"Afraid of you? Of <i>you</i>?"

"You're just a lime boy," she said. "You have no manners. When you know me
better you will talk differently ... Why don't you try to be nice? If you
don't want to go with me to-night, very well. I will be at the Rond-Point
tomorrow between five and seven. I like you."

"I don't intend to be at the Rond-Point tomorrow, or any other night. I don't
want to see you again ... ever. I'm through with you. I'm going out and find
myself a nice little French girl. You can go to hell!"

She looked at him and smiled wearily. "That's what you say now. But wait!
Wait until you've slept with me. You don't know yet what a beautiful body I
have. You think the French girls know how to make love ... wait! I will make
you crazy about me. I like you. Only you're uncivilized. You're just a boy.
You talk too much ..."

"You're <i>crazy,"</i> said Fillmore. "I wouldn't fall for you if you were
the last woman on earth. Go home and wash your face." He walked off without
paying for the drinks.

In a few days, however, the princess was installed. She's a genuine
princess, of that we're pretty certain. But she has the clap. Anyway, life
is far from dull here. Fillmore had bronchitis, the princess, as I was
saying, has the clap, and I have the piles. Just exchanged six empty bottles
at the Russian <i>epicene</i> across the way. Not a drop went down my
gullet. No meat, no wine, no rich game, no women. Only fruit and paraffin
oil, arnica drops and adenalin ointment. And not a chair in the joint that's
comfortable enough. Right now, looking at the princess, I'm propped up like
a pasha. Pasha! That reminds me of her name: Macha. Doesn't sound so damned
aristocratic to me. Reminds me of <i>The Living Corpse.</i>

At first I thought it was going to be embarrassing, a <i>menage a trois,</i>
but not at all. I thought when I saw her move in that it was all up with me
again, that I should have to find another place, but Fillmore soon gave me
to understand that he was only putting her up until she got on her feet.
With a woman like her I don't know what an expression like that means; as
far as I can see she's been standing on her head all her life. She says the
revolution drove her out of Russia, but I'm sure if it hadn't been the
revolution it would have been something else. She's under the impression
that she's a great actress; we never contradict her in anything she says
because it's time wasted. Fillmore finds her amusing. When he leaves for the
office in the morning he drops ten francs on her pillow and ten francs on
mine; at night the three of us go to the Russian restaurant down below. The
neighborhood is full of Russians and Macha has already found a place

where she can run up a little credit. Naturally ten francs a day isn't
anything for a princess; she wants caviar now and then and champagne, and
she needs a complete new wardrobe in order to get a job in the movies again.
She has nothing to do now except to kill time. She's putting on fat.

This morning I had quite a fright. After I had washed my face I grabbed her
towel by mistake. We can't seem to train her to put her towel on the right
hook. And when I bawled her out for it she answered smoothly: "My dear, if
one can become blind from that I would have been blind years ago."

And then there's the toilet, which we all have to use. I try speaking to her
in a fatherly way about the toilet seat. "Oh zut!" she says. "If you are so
afraid I'll go to a cafe." But it's not necessary to do that, I explain.
Just use ordinary precautions. "Tut tut!" she says, "I won't sit down then
... I'll stand up."

Everything is cockeyed with her around. First she wouldn't come across
because she had the monthlies. For eight days that lasted. We were beginning
to think she was faking it. But no, she wasn't faking. One day, when I was
trying to put the place in order, I found some cotton batting under the bed
and it was stained with blood. With her everything goes under the bed:
orange peel, wadding, corks, empty bottles, scissors, used condoms, books,
pillows ... She makes the bed only when it's time to retire. Most of the
time she lies abed reading her Russian papers. "My dear," she says to me,
"if it weren't for my papers I wouldn't get out of bed at all." That's it
precisely! Nothing but Russian newspapers. Not a scratch of toilet paper
around -- nothing but Russian newspapers with which to wipe your ass.

Anyway, speaking of her idiosyncrasies, after the menstrual flow was over,
after she had rested properly and put a nice layer of fat around her belt,
still she wouldn't come across. Pretended that she only liked women. To take
on a man she had to first be properly stimulated. Wanted us to take her to a
bawdy house where they put on the dog and man act. Or better still, she
said, would be Leda and the<i> </i>swan: the flapping of the wings excited
her terribly.

One night, to test her out, we accompanied her to a
place that she suggested. But before we had a chance to broach the subject
to the madame, a drunken Englishman, who was sitting at the next table, fell
into a conversation with us. He had already been upstairs twice but he
wanted another try at it. He had only about twenty francs in his pocket, and
not knowing any French, he asked us if we would help him to bargain with the
girl he had his eye on. Happened she was a negress, a powerful wench from
Martinique, and beautiful as a panther. Had a lovely disposition too. In
order to persuade her to accept the Englishman's remaining sous, Fillmore
had to promise to go with her himself soon as she got through with the
Englishman. The princess looked on, heard everything that was said, and
then got on her high horse. She was insulted. "Well," said Fillmore, "you
wanted some excitement -- you can watch me do it!" She didn't want to watch
him -- she wanted to watch a drake. "Well, by Jesus," he said, "I'm as good
as a drake any day ... maybe a little better." Like that, one word led to
another, and finally the only way we could appease her was to call one of
the girls over and let them tickle each other... When Fillmore came back
with the negress her eyes were smouldering. I could see from the way
Fillmore looked at her that she must have given an unusual performance and I
began to feel lecherous myself. Fillmore must have sensed how I felt, and
what an ordeal it was to sit and look on all night, for suddenly he pulled a
hundred franc note out of his pocket and slapping it in front of me, he
said: "Look here, you probably need a lay more than any of us. Take that and
pick someone out for yourself." Somehow that gesture endeared him more to me
than anything he had ever done for me, and he had done considerable. I
accepted the money in the spirit it was given and promptly signalled to the
negress to get ready for another lay. That enraged the Princess more than
anything, it appeared. She wanted to know if there wasn't anyone in the
place good enough for us except this negress. I told her bluntly NO. And it
was so -- the negress was the queen of the harem. You had only to look at her
to get an erection. Her eyes seemed to be swimming in sperm. She was drunk
with all the demands made upon her. She couldn't walk straight any more -- at
least, it seemed that way to me. Going up the narrow winding stairs behind
her I couldn't resist the temptation to slide my hand up her crotch; we
continued up the stairs that way, she looking back at me with a cheerful
smile and wiggling her ass a bit when it tickled her too much.

It was a good session all around. Everyone was happy. Macha seemed to be in
a good mood too. And so the next evening, after she had had her ration of
champagne and caviar, after she had given us another chapter out of the
history of her life, Fillmore went to work on her. It seemed as though he
was going to get his reward at last. She had ceased to put up a fight any
more. She lay back with her legs apart and she let him fool around and fool
around and then, just as he was climbing over her, just as he was going to
slip it in, she informs him nonchalantly that she has a dose of clap. He
rolled off her like a log. I heard him fumbling around in the kitchen for
the black soap he used on special occasions, and in a few moments he was
standing by my bed with a towel in his hands and saying -- "can you beat that?
that son-of-a-bitch of a princess has the clap!" He seemed pretty well
scared about it. The princess meanwhile was munching an apple and calling
for her Russian newspapers. It was quite a joke to her. "There are worse
things than that," she said, lying there in her bed and talking to us
through the open door. Finally Fillmore began to see it as a joke too and
opening another bottle of Anjou he poured out a drink for himself and
quaffed it down. It was only about one in the morning and so he sat there
talking to me for a while. He wasn't going to be put off by a thing like
that, he told me. Of course, he had to be careful... there was the old dose
which had come on in Le Havre. He couldn't remember any more how that
happened. Sometimes when he got drunk he forgot to wash himself. It wasn't
anything very terrible, but you never knew what might develop later. He
didn't want any one massaging his prostate gland. No, that he didn't relish.
The first dose he ever got was at college. Didn't know whether the girl had
given it to him or he to the girl; there was so much funny work going on
about the campus you didn't know whom to believe. Nearly all the co-eds had
been knocked up some time or other. Too damned ignorant... even the profs
were ignorant. One of the profs had himself castrated, so the rumor went...

Anyway, the next night he decided to risk it -- with a condom. Not much risk
in that, unless it breaks. He had bought himself some of the long fish-skin
variety -- they were the most reliable, he assured me. But then, that didn't
work either. She was too tight. "Jesus, there's nothing abnormal about me,"
he said. "How do you make that out? Somebody got inside her all right to
give her that dose. He must have been abnormally small."

So, one thing after another failing, he just gave it up altogether. They
lie there now like brother and sister, with incestuous dreams. Says Macha,
in her philosophic way: "In Russia it often happens that a man sleeps with a
woman without touching her. They can go on that way for weeks and weeks and
never think anything about it. Until paff! once he touches her ... paff!
paff! After that it's paff, paff, paff!"

All efforts are concentrated now on getting Macha into shape. Fillmore
thinks if he cures her of the clap she may loosen up. A strange idea. So
he's bought her a douche bag, a stock of permanganate, a whirling syringe
and other little things which were recommended to him by a Hungarian doctor,
a little quack of an abortionist over near the Place d'Aligre. It seems his
boss had knocked up a sixteen year old girl once and she had introduced him
to the Hungarian; and then after that the boss had a beautiful chancre and
it was the Hungarian again. That's how one gets acquainted in
Paris -- genito-urinary friendships. Anyway, under our strict supervision,
Macha is taking care of herself. The other night, though, we were in a
quandary for a while. She stuck the suppository inside her and then she
couldn't find the string attached to it. "My God!" she was yelling, "where
is that string? My God! I can't find the string!"

"Did you look under the bed?" said Fillmore. Finally she quieted down. But
only for a few minutes. The next thing was: "My God! I'm bleeding again. I
just had my period and now there are <i>gouttes</i> again. It must be that
cheap champagne you buy. My God, do you want me to bleed to death?" She comes
out with a kimono on and a towel stuck between her legs, trying to look
dignified as usual. "My whole life is just like that," she says. "I'm a
neurasthenic. The whole day running around and at night I'm drunk again. When
I came to Paris I was still an innocent girl. I read only Villon and
Beaudelaire. But as I had then 300,000 Swiss francs in the bank I was crazy
to enjoy myself, because in Russia they were always strict with me. And as I
was even more beautiful then than I am now I had all the men falling at my
feet." Here she hitched up the slack which had accumulated around her belt.
"You mustn't think I had a stomach like that when I came here ... that's from
all the poison I was given to drink ... those horrible <i>aperitifs</i> which
the French are so crazy to drink ... So then I met my movie director and he
wanted that I should play a part for him. He said I was the most gorgeous
creature in the world and he was begging me to sleep with him every night. I
was a foolish young virgin and so I permitted him to rape me one night. I
wanted to be a great actress and I didn't know that he was full of poison. So
he gave me the clap ... and now I want that he should have it back again.
It's all his fault that I committed suicide in the Seine ... Why are you
laughing? Don't you believe that I committed suicide? I can show you the
newspapers ... there is my picture in all the papers. I will show you the
Russian papers some day ... they wrote about me wonderfully ... But darling,
you know that first I must have a new dress. I can't vamp this man with these
dirty rags I am in. Besides, I still owe my dressmaker 12,000 francs ..."

From here on it's a long story about the inheritance which she is trying to
collect. She has a young lawyer, a Frenchman, who is rather timid, it seems,
and he is trying to win back her fortune. From time to time he used to give
her a hundred francs or so on account. "He's stingy, like all the French
people," she says. "And I was so beautiful, too, that he couldn't keep his
eyes off me. He kept begging me always to fuck him. I got so sick and tired
of listening to him that one night I said yes, just to keep him quiet, and
so as I wouldn't lose my hundred francs now and then." She paused a moment
to laugh hysterically. "My dear," she continued, "it was too funny for words
what happened to him. He calls me up on the phone one day and he says: "I
must see you right away ... it's very important." And when I see him he shows
me a paper from the doctor -- and it's gonorrhea! My dear, I laughed in his
face. How should I know that I still had the clap? "You wanted to fuck me and
so I fucked you!" That made him quiet. That's how it goes in life: you don't
suspect anything, and then all of a sudden paff, paff, paff! He was such a
fool that he fell in love with me all over again. Only he begged me to behave
myself and not run around Montparnasse all night drinking and fucking. He
said I was driving him crazy. He wanted to marry me and then his family heard
about me and they persuaded him to go to Indo-China ..."

From this Macha calmly switches to an affair she had with a Lesbian. "It was
very funny, my dear, how she picked me up one night. I was at the 'Fetiche'
and I was drunk as usual. She took me from one place to the other and she
made love to me under the table all night until I couldn't stand it any
more. Then she took me to her apartment and for two hundred francs I let her
suck me off. She wanted me to live with her but I didn't want to have her
suck me off every night ... it makes you too weak. Besides, I can tell you
that I don't care so much for Lesbians as I used to. I would rather sleep
with a man even though it hurts me. When I get terribly excited I can't hold
myself back any more ... three, four, five times ... just like that! Paff,
paff, paff! And then I bleed and that is very unhealthy for me because I am
inclined to be anaemic. So you see why once in a while I must let myself be
sucked by a Lesbian ..."

                               <b>* * *</b>

When the cold weather set in the princess disappeared. It was getting
uncomfortable with just a little coal stove in the studio; the bed-room was
like an ice-box and the kitchen was hardly any better. There was just a
little space around the stove where it was actually warm. So Macha had found
herself a sculptor who was castrated. She told us about him before she left.
After a few days she tried coming back to us, but Fillmore wouldn't hear of
it. She complained that the sculptor kept her awake all night kissing her.
And then there was no hot water for her douches. But finally she decided
that it was just as well she didn't come back. "I won't have that
candle-stick next to me any more," she said. "Always that candlestick ...
it made me nervous. If you had only been a fairy I would have stayed with
you ..."

With Macha gone our evenings took on a different character. Often we sat by
the fire drinking hot toddies and discussing the life back there in the
States. We talked about it as if we never expected to go back there again.
Fillmore had a map of New York City which he had tacked on the wall; we used
to spend whole evenings discussing the relative virtues of Paris and New
York. And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of
Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of
her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past
and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in
America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The
future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of the Body
and the Soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet. He is almost
undecipherable today, a monument covered with rude hieroglyphs for which
there is no key. It seems strange almost to mention his
name over here. There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the
spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is
full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures,
but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call
a MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by
comparison. Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal
spirit, but stamped with the German trade-mark, with the double eagle. The
serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the
drowsy stupor of a German bourgeois deity. Goethe is an end of something.
Whitman is a beginning.

After a discussion of this sort I would sometimes put on my things and go
for a walk, bundled up in a sweater, a spring overcoat of Fillmore's and a
cape over that. A foul, damp cold against which there is no protection
except a strong spirit. They say America is a country of extremes, and it
is true that the thermometer registers degrees of cold which are practically
unheard of here; but the cold of a Paris winter is a cold unknown to
America, it is psychological, an inner as well as an outer cold. If it never
freezes here it never thaws either. Just as the people protect themselves
against the invasion of their privacy, by their high walls, their bolts and
shutters, their growling, evil-tongued, slatternly concierges, so they have
learned to protect themselves against the cold and heat of a bracing,
vigorous climate. They have fortified themselves: protection is the
keyword. Protection and security. In order that they may rot in comfort. On
a damp winter's night it is not necessary to look at the map to discover the
latitude of Paris. It is a northern city, an outpost erected over a swamp
filled in with skulls and bones. Along the boulevards there is a cold
electrical imitation of heat. <i>Tout Va Bien</i> in ultraviolet rays that
make the clients of the Dupont chain cafes look like gangrened cadavers.
<i>Tout Via Bien!</i> That's the motto that nourishes the forlorn beggars
who walk up and down all night under the drizzle of the violet rays.
Wherever there are lights there is a little heat. One gets warm from
watching the fat, secure bastards down their grogs, their steaming black
coffees.

Where the lights are there are people on the sidewalks, jostling one
another, giving off a little animal heat through their dirty underwear and
their foul, cursing breaths. Maybe for a stretch of eight or ten blocks
there is a semblance of gaiety, and then it tumbles back into night, dismal,
foul, black night like frozen fat in a soup tureen. Blocks and blocks of
jagged tenements, every window closed tight, every shop front barred and
bolted. Miles and miles of stone prisons without the faintest glow of
warmth; the dogs and the cats are all inside with the canary birds. The
cockroaches and the bedbugs too are safely incarcerated. <i>Tout Va
Bien.</i> If you haven't a sou why just take a few old newspapers and make
yourself a bed on the steps of a cathedral. The doors are well bolted and
there will be no draughts to disturb you. Better still is to sleep outside
the Metro doors; there you will have company. Look at them on a rainy night,
lying there stiff as mattresses -- men, women, lice, all huddled together and
protected by the newspapers against spittle and the vermin that walks
without legs. Look at them under the bridges or under the market sheds. How
vile they look in comparison with the clean, bright vegetables stacked up
like jewels. Even the dead horses and the cows and sheep hanging from the
greasy hooks look more inviting. At least we will eat these tomorrow and
even the intestines will serve a purpose. But these filthy beggars lying in
the rain, what purpose do they serve? what good can they do us? They make us
bleed for five minutes, that's all.

Oh, well, these are night thoughts produced by walking in the rain after two
thousand years of Christianity. At least now the birds are well provided
for, and the cats and dogs. Every time I pass the concierge's window and
catch the full icy impact of her glance I have an insane desire to throttle
all the birds in creation. At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a
drop or two of love -- just enough to feed the birds.

Still I can't get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between
ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two
with a bright awning. And it won't go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if
there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist
alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living: liver ideas,
kidney ideas, interstitial ideas, etc. If it were only for the sake of an
idea Copernicus would not have smashed the existent macrocosm and Columbus
would have foundered in the Sargasso Sea. The aesthetics of the idea breeds
flower-pots and flower-pots you put on the window-sill. But if there be no
rain or sun of what use putting flower-pots outside the window?

Fillmore is full of ideas about gold. The "mythos" of gold, he calls it. I
like "mythos" and I like the idea of gold, but I am not obsessed by the
subject and I don't see why we should make flower-pots, even of gold. He
tells me that the French are hoarding their gold away in watertight
compartments deep below the surface of the earth; he tells me that there is a
little locomotive which runs around in these subterranean vaults and
corridors. I like the idea enormously. A profound, uninterrupted silence in
which the gold softly snoozes at a temperature of 17 ^ degrees Centigrade. He
says an army working 46 days and 37 hours would not be sufficient to count
all the gold that is sunk beneath the Bank of France, and that there is a
reserve supply of false teeth, bracelets, wedding rings, etc. Enough food
also to last for eighty days and a lake on top of the gold pile to resist the
shock of high explosives. Gold, he says, tends to become more and more
invisible, a myth, and no more defalcations. Excellent! I am wondering what
will happen to the world when we go off the gold standard in ideas, dress,
morals, etc. <i>The gold standard of love!</i>

Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off
the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a
resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the
stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium. To paint a
pre-Socratic being, a creature part goat, part Titan. In short, to erect a
world on the basis of the <i>omphalos, </i>not on an abstract idea nailed to
a cross. Here and there you may have come across neglected statues, oases
untapped, windmills overlooked by Cervantes, rivers that run uphill, women
with five and six breasts ranged longitudinally along the torso. (Writing to
Gauguin, Strindberg said: <i>"J'ai vu des arbres que ne retrouverait aucun
botaniste, des animaux que Cuvier n'a jamais soupconnes et des hommes que
vous seul avez pu creer</i>.")

When Rembrandt hit par he went below with the gold ingots and the pemmican
and the portable beds. Gold is a night word belonging to the chthonian mind:
it has dream in it and mythos. We are reverting to alchemy, to that fake
Alexandrian wisdom which produced our inflated symbols. Real wisdom is
being stored away in the sub-cellars by the misers of learning. The day is
coming when they will be circling around in the middle air with magnetizers;
to find a piece of ore you will have to go up ten thousand feet with a pair
of instruments -- in a cold latitude preferably -- and establish telepathic
communication with the bowels of the earth and the shades of the dead. No
more Klondikes. No more bonanzas. You will have to learn to sing and caper a
bit, to read the zodiac and study your entrails. All the gold that is being
tucked away in the pockets of the earth will have to be re-mined;
all this symbolism will have to be dragged out again from the bowels of men.
But first the instruments must be perfected. First it is necessary to
invent better airplanes, to distinguish <i>where</i> the noise comes from
and not go daffy just because you hear an explosion under your ass. And
secondly it will be necessary to get adapted to the cold layers of the
stratosphere, to become a cold-blooded fish of the air. No reverence. No
piety. No longing. No regrets. No hysteria. Above all, as Philippe Datz
says -- "NO DISCOURAGEMENT!"

These are sunny thoughts inspired by a Vermouth Cassis at the Place de la
Trinite. A Saturday afternoon and a "misfire" book in my hands. Everything
swimming in a divine mucopus. The drink leaves a bitter herbish taste in my
mouth, the lees of our great Western civilization, rotting now like the
toe-nails of the saints. Women are passing by -- regiments of them -- all
swinging their asses in front of me; the chimes are ringing and the buses
are climbing the sidewalk and bussing one another. The garcon wipes the
table with a dirty rag while the <i>patronne </i>tickles the cash-register
with fiendish glee. A look of vacuity on my face, blotto, vague in acuity,
biting the asses that brush by me. In the belfry opposite a hunchback
strikes with a golden mallet and the pigeons scream alarum. I open the book
-- the book which Nietzsche called "the best German book there is" -- and it
says:

"MEN WILL BECOME MORE CLEVER AND MORE ACUTE; BUT NOT BETTER, HAPPIER, AND
STRONGER IN ACTION ---- OR, AT LEAST, ONLY AT EPOCHS. I FORESEE THE TIME WHEN
GOD WILL HAVE NO MORE JOY IN THEM, BUT WILL BREAK UP EVERYTHING FOR A
RENEWED CREATION. I AM CERTAIN THAT EVERYTHING IS PLANNED TO THIS END, AND
THAT THE TIME AND HOUR IN THE DISTANT FUTURE FOR THE OCCURRENCE OF THIS
RENOVATING EPOCH ARE ALREADY FIXED. BUT A LONG TIME WILL ELAPSE FIRST, AND
WE MAY STILL FOR THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF YEARS AMUSE OURSELVES ON THIS
DEAR OLD SURFACE."

Excellent! At least a hundred years ago there was a man who had vision
enough to see that the world was pooped out. <i>Our Western world! -- </i>When
I see the figures of men and women moving listlessly behind their prison
walls, sheltered, secluded for a few brief hours, I am appalled by the
potentialities for drama that are still contained in these feeble bodies.
Behind the gray walls there are human sparks, and yet never a conflagration.
Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of
puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but
they have nowhere to go. In one realm only are they free and there they may
roam at will -- but they have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there
have been no dreams that have taken wing. Not one man has been born light
enough, <i>gay</i> enough, to leave the earth! The eagles who flapped their
mighty pinions for a while came crashing heavily to earth. They made us
dizzy with the flap and whir of their wings. Stay on the earth, you eagles
of the future! The heavens have been explored and they are empty. And what
lies under the earth is empty too, filled with bones and shadows. Stay on
the earth and swim another few hundred thousand years!

And now it is three o'clock in the morning and we have a couple of trollops
here who are doing somersaults on the bare floor. Fillmore is walking around
naked with a goblet in his hand, and that paunch of his is drumtight, hard as
a fistula. All the Pernod and champagne and cognac and Anjou which he guzzled
from three in the afternoon on, is gurgling in his trap like a sewer. The
girls are putting their ears to his belly as if it were a music-box. Open his
mouth with a button-hook and drop a slug in the slot. When the sewer gurgles
I hear the bats flying out of the belfry and the dream slides into artifice.

The girls have undressed and we are examining the floor to make sure that
they won't get any splinters in their ass. They are still wearing their
high-heeled shoes. But the ass! The ass is worn down, scraped, sandpapered,
smooth, hard, bright as a billiard ball or the skull of a leper. On the wall
is Mona's picture: she is facing northeast on a line with Cracow written in
green ink. To the left of her is the Dordogne, encircled with a red pencil.
Suddenly I see a dark, hairy crack in front of me set in a bright, polished
billiard ball; the legs are holding me like a pair of scissors. A glance at
that dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the
images and memories that had been laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted,
labelled, documented, filed, sealed and stamped break forth pellmell like
ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world ceases to revolve,
time stops, the very nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts
spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face
to face with the Absolute. I see again the great sprawling mothers of
Picasso, their breasts covered with spiders, their legend hidden deep in the
labyrinth. And Molly Bloom lying on a dirty mattress for eternity. On the
toilet door red chalk cocks and the madonna uttering the diapason of woe. I
hear a wild, hysterical laugh, a room full of lockjaw, and the body that was
black glows like phosphorus. Wild, wild, utterly uncontrollable laughter,
and that crack laughing at me too, laughing through the mossy whiskers, a
laugh that creases the bright, polished surface of the billiard ball. Great
whore and mother of man with gin in her veins. Mother of all harlots, spider
rolling us in your logarithmic grave, insatiable one, fiend whose laughter
rives me! I look down into that sunken crater, world lost and without
traces, and I hear the bells chiming, two nuns at the Palace Stanislas and
the smell of rancid butter under their dresses, manifesto never printed
because it was raining, war fought to further the cause of plastic surgery,
the Prince of Wales flying around the world decorating the graves of unknown
heroes. Every bat flying out of the belfry a lost cause, every whoop-la a
groan over the radio from the private trenches of the damned. Out of that
dark, unstitched wound, that sink of abominations, that cradle of
black-thronged cities where the music of ideas is drowned in cold fat, out of
strangled Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between beauty and
ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and
sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upward sees a buttered angel, a
snail with wings.

When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign, the world at
balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace of remainder. Not the zero on
which Van Norden turned his flashlight, not the empty crack of the
prematurely disillusioned man, but an Arabian zero rather, the sign from
which spring endless mathematical worlds, the fulcrum which balances the
stars and the light dreams and the machines lighter than air and the
light-weight limbs and the explosives that produced them. Into that crack I
would like to penetrate up to the eyes, make them waggle ferociously, dear,
crazy, metallurgical eyes. When the eyes waggle then will I hear again
Dostoievski's words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest
observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery
now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the
heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the
radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars. The story
of art whose roots lie in massacre.

When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world
beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished
like a leper's skull. If there were a man who dared to say all that he
thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to
stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his
back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much
festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the
foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does
appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn
the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love
that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If
now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear,
that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with
his back up, a man whose only defense left are his words and his words are
always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than
all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle
of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his
heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I
think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to
smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the
pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the
world.

In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared, the last
man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady
decline of man in art, in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there
isn't a dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the
slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles,
ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos? If anyone knew what it meant to read the
riddle of that thing which to-day is called a "crack" or a "hole," if any
one had the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are labelled
"obscene," this world would crack asunder. It is the obscene horror, the
dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look
like a crater. It is this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the
creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs. When a
hungry, desperate spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is
because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that
beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash,
the wound that never heals. And he puts the live wire right between the
legs; he hits below the belt, scorches the very gizzards. It is no use
putting on rubber gloves; all that can be coolly and intellectually handled
belongs to the carapace and a man who is intent on creation always dives
beneath, to the open wound, to the festering obscene horror. He hitches his
dynamo to the tenderest parts; if only blood and pus
gush forth, it is something. The dry, fucked-out crater is obscene. More
obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath
is paralysis. If there is only a gaping wound left then it must gush forth
though it produce nothing but toads and bats and homunculi.

Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not
consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a
great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean
billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed
she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her,
from the generous breasts to her glearning thighs, blazes with furious
ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoop-la
that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of
the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is
like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting
with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and
hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust -- what are these amidst the fornications
of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents
the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep
if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster?

She used to say to me, Mona, in her fits of exaltation, "you're a great human
being," and though she left me here to perish, though she put beneath my feet
a great howling pit of emptiness, the words that lie at the bottom of my soul
leap forth and they light the shadows below me. I am one who was lost in the
crowd, whom the fizzing lights made dizzy, a zero who saw everything about
him reduced to mockery. Passed me men and women ignited with sulphur, porters
in calcium livery opening the jaws of hell, fame walking on crutches,
dwindled by the skyscrapers, chewed to a frazzle by the spiked mouth of the
machines. I walked between the tall buildings towards the cool of the river
and I saw the lights shoot up between the ribs of the skeletons like rockets.
If I was truly a great human being, as she said, then what was the meaning of
this slavering idiocy about me? I was a man with body and soul, I had a heart
that was not protected by a steel vault. I had moments of ecstasy and I sang
with burning sparks. I sang of the Equator, her red-feathered legs and the
islands dropping out of sight. But nobody heard. A gun fired across the
Pacific falls into space because the earth is round and pigeons fly upside
down. I saw her looking at me across the table with eyes turned to grief;
sorrow spreading inward flattened its nose against her spine; the marrow
churned to pity had turned liquid. She was light as a corpse that floats in
the Dead Sea. Her fingers bled with anguish and the blood turned to drool.
With the wet dawn came the tolling of bells and along the fibres of my nerves
the bells played ceaselessly and their tongues pounded in my heart and
clanged with iron malice. Strange that the bells should toll so, but stranger
still the body bursting, this woman turned to night and her maggot words
gnawing through the mattress. I moved along under the Equator, heard the
hideous laughter of the green-jawed hyaena, saw the jackal with silken tail
and the dick-dick and the spotted leopard, all left behind in the Garden of
Eden. And then her sorrow widened, like the bow of a dreadnought and the
weight of her sinking flooded my ears. Slime-wash and sapphires slipping,
sluicing through the gay neurones, and the spectrum spliced and the gunwales
dipping. Soft as lion-pad I heard the gun-carriages turn, saw them vomit and
drool: the firmament sagged and all the stars turned black. Black ocean
bleeding and the brooding stars breeding chunks of fresh-swollen flesh while
overhead the birds wheeled and out of the hallucinated sky fell the balance
with mortar and pestle and the bandaged eyes of justice. All that is here
related moves with imaginary feet along the parallels of dead orbs; all that
is seen with the empty sockets bursts like flowering grass. Out of
nothingness arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spirals
slowly sinks the gaping hole. The land and the water make numbers joined, a
poem written with flesh and stronger than steel or granite. Through endless
night the earth whirls towards a creation unknown ...

To-day I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with
gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany -- <i>"Fay ce que
vouldras! ... fay ce que vouldras!"</i> Do anything, but let it produce joy.
Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say
this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and
the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the
door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust,
crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones,
the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good
they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor,
the strife they created. But above all, <i>the ecstasy</i>!

Things, certain things about my old idols bring the tears to my eyes: the
interruptions, the disorder, the violence, above all, the hatred they
aroused. When I think of their deformities, of the monstrous styles they
chose, of the flatulence and tediousness of their works, of all the chaos
and confusion they wallowed in, of the obstacles they heaped up about them,
I feel an exaltation. They were all mired in their own dung. All men who
over-elaborated. So true is it that I am almost tempted to say:

"Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!" What is
called their "over-elaboration" is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is
struggle itself with all the fibres clinging to it, the very aura and
ambiance of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses
himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I
am unattracted ... I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that the task
which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to
make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and
ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored
to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones,
their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my
ears. I see in the beautifully bloated pages that follow the interruptions
the erasure of petty intrusions, of the dirty foot-prints, as it were, of
cowards, liars, thieves, vandals, calumniators. I see in the swollen muscles
of their lyric throats the staggering effort that must be made to turn the
wheel over, to pick up the pace where one has left off. I see that behind the
daily annoyances and intrusions, behind the cheap, glittering malice of the
feeble and inert, there stands the symbol of life's frustrating power, and
that he who would create order, he who would sow strife and discord, because
he is imbued with will, such a man must go again and again to the stake and
the gibbet. I see that behind the nobility of his gestures there lurks the
spectre of the ridiculousness of it all -- that he is not only sublime, but
absurd.

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I
see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am
<i>inhuman,</i> that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing
to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking
machinery of humanity -- I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow
and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all
those cracked forbears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging
me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with
their skulking skulls. <i>I am inhuman!</i> I say it with a mad, hallucinated
grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rains crocodiles. Behind my
words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and
grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lock-jaw, some grinning
with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always
going on. Clearer man all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton
dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated
pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my
madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean
vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on
endlessly through the minds of those ho come in the inexhaustible vessel that
contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs
another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by
unknown impulses, take the listless mass of humanity and by the fever and
ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the
bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert
slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of
individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their
feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always
clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying
everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their
vitals. I see that when they tear hair with the effort to comprehend, to
seize this, forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed
beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other
path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high
place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and
just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening
spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less
intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The
rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.

When I think of Stavrogin for example, I think of some divine monster
standing on a high place and flinging to us his torn bowels. In <i>The
Possessed</i> the earth quakes: it is not the catastrophe that befalls the
imaginative individual, but a cataclysm in which a large portion of humanity
is buried, wiped out for ever. Stavrogin was Dostoievski and Dostoievski was
the sum of all those contradictions which either paralyze a man or lead him
to the heights. There was no world too low for him to enter, no place too
high for him to fear to ascend. He went the whole gamut, from the abyss to
the stars. It is a pity that we shall never again have the opportunity to
see a man placed at the very core of mystery and, by his flashes,
illuminating for us the depth and immensity of the darkness.

To-day I am aware of my lineage. I have no need to consult my horoscope or
my genealogical chart. What is written in the stars, or in my blood, I know
nothing of. I know that I spring from the mythological founders of the race.
The man who raises the holy bottle to his lips, the criminal who kneels in
the market-place, the innocent one who discovers that <i>all</i> corpses
stink, the madman who dances with lightning in his hands, the friar who
lifts his skirts to pee over the world, the fanatic who ransacks libraries
in order to find the Word -- all these are fused in me, all these make my
confusion, my ecstasy. If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped
over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry,
miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and
codes, defined by platitudes and isms. I am pouring the juice of the grape
down my gullet and I find wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the
grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine....

I want to make a detour of those lofty arid mountain ranges where one dies
of thirst and cold, that "extra-temporal" history, that absolute of time and
space where there exists neither man, beast, nor vegetation, where one goes
crazy with loneliness, with language that is mere words, where everything is
unhooked, ungeared, out of joint with the times. I want a world of men and
women, of trees that do not talk (because there is too much talk in the
world as it is!) of rivers that carry you to places, not rivers that are
legends, but rivers that put you in touch with other men and women, with
architecture, religion, plants, animals -- rivers that have boats on them and
in which men drown, drown not in myth and legend and books and dust of the
past, but in time and space and history. I want rivers that make oceans
such as Shakespeare and Dante, rivers which do not dry up in the void of the
past. Oceans, yes! Let us have more oceans, new oceans that blot out the
past, oceans that create new geological formations, new topographical vistas
and strange, terrifying continents, oceans that destroy and preserve at the
same time, oceans that we can sail on, take off to new discoveries, new
horizons. Let us have more oceans, more upheavals, more wars, more
holocausts. Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their
legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a
world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts. I believe that to-day more
than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only <i>one</i> great
page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toe-nails, anything
that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and
soul.

It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, <i>any of us,</i>
but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a
screech of defiance, a war-whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies
and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums!
Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the
crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!

"I love everything that flows," said the great blind Milton of our times. I
was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of
joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night
which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that
flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love
the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its
painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out
scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and
the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of
the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where
crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat
and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows,
even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts
that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I
love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming,
that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence
of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic,
the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle
that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey
that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and
dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its
sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution.
The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great
image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is
constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.


                              <b>* * *</b>


     It was close to dawn on Christmas Day when we came home from the Rue
d'Odessa with a couple of negresses from the telephone company. The fire was
out and we were all so tired that we climbed into bed with our clothes on.
The one I had, who had been like a bounding leopard all evening, fell sound
asleep as I was climbing over her. For a while I worked over her as one
works over a person who has been drowned or asphyxiated. Then I gave it up
and fell sound asleep myself.

    All during the holidays we had champagne morning, noon and night -- the
cheapest and the best champagne. With the turn of the year I was to leave
for Dijon where I had been offered a trivial post as exchange professor of
English, one of those Franco-American amity arrangements which is supposed
to promote understanding and good will between sister republics. Fillmore
was more elated than I by the prospect -- he had good reason to be. For me it
was just a transfer from one purgatory to another. There was no future
ahead of me; there wasn't even a salary attached to the job. One was
supposed to consider himself fortunate to enjoy the privilege of spreading
the gospel of Franco-American amity. It was a job for a rich man's son.

The night before I left we had a good time. About dawn it began to snow: we
walked about from one quarter to another taking a last look at Paris.
Passing through the Rue St. Dominique we suddenly fell upon a little square
and there was the Eglise Ste. Clotilde. People were going to mass. Fillmore,
whose head was still a little cloudy, was bent on going to mass too. "For
the fun of it!" as he put it. I felt somewhat uneasy about it; in the first
place I had never attended a mass, and in the second
place I looked seedy and felt seedy. Fillmore, too, looked rather battered,
even more disreputable than myself; his big slouch hat was on assways and
his overcoat was still full of sawdust from the last joint we had been in.
However, we marched in. The worst they could do would be to throw us out.

I was so astounded by the sight that greeted my eyes that I lost all
uneasiness. It took me a little while to get adjusted to the dim light. I
stumbled around behind Fillmore, holding his sleeve. A weird, unearthly
noise assailed my ears, a sort of hollow drone that rose up out of the cold
flagging. A huge, dismal tomb it was with mourners shuffling in and out. A
sort of ante-chamber to the world below. Temperature about 55 or 60
Fahrenheit. No music except this undefinable dirge manufactured in the
sub-cellar -- like a million heads of cauliflower wailing in the dark. People
in shrouds were chewing away with that hopeless, dejected look of beggars
who hold out their hands in a trance and mumble an unintelligible appeal.

That this sort of thing existed I knew, but then one also knows that there
are slaughterhouses and morgues and dissecting rooms. One instinctively
avoids such places. In the street I had often passed a priest with a little
prayer book in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines. <i>Idiot, </i>I
would say to myself, and let it go at that. In the street one meets with all
forms of dementia and the priest is by no means the most striking. Two
thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it. However, when you
are suddenly transported to the very midst of his realm, when you see the
little world in which the priest functions like an alarm clock, you are apt
to have entirely different sensations.

For a moment all this slaver and twitching of the lips almost began to have
a meaning. Something was going on, some kind of dumb show which, not
rendering me wholly stupefied, held me spellbound. All over the world,
wherever there are these dim-lit tombs, you have this incredible
spectacle -- the same mean temperature, the same crepuscular glow, the same
buzz and drone. All over Christendom, at certain stipulated hours, people in
black are grovelling before the altar where the priest stands up
with a little book in one hand and a dinner bell or atomizer in the other
and mumbles to them in a language which, even if it were comprehensible, no
longer contains a shred of meaning. Blessing them, most likely. Blessing the
country, blessing the ruler, blessing the firearms and the battleships and
the ammunition and the hand grenades. Surrounding him on the altar are
little boys dressed like angels of the Lord who sing alto and soprano.
Innocent lambs. All in skirts, sexless, like the priest himself who is
usually flat-footed and nearsighted to boot. A fine epicene caterwauling.
Sex in a jock-strap, to the tune of J.-mol.

I was taking it in as best I could in the dim light. Fascinating and
stupefying at the same time. All over the civilized world, I thought to
myself. All over the world. Marvelous. Rain or shine, hail, sleet, snow,
thunder, lightning, war, famine, pestilence -- makes not the slightest
difference. Always the same mean temperature, the same mumbo-jumbo, the same
high-laced shoes and the little angels of the Lord singing soprano and alto.
Near the exit a little slot-box -- to carry on the heavenly work. So that
God's blessing may rain down upon king and country and battleships and high
explosives and tanks and aeroplanes, so that the worker may have more
strength in his arms, strength to slaughter horses and cows and sheep,
strength to punch holes in iron girders, strength to sew buttons on other
people's pants, strength to sell carrots and sewing machines and automobiles,
strength to exterminate insects and clean stables and unload garbage cans and
scrub lavatories, strength to write headlines and chop tickets in the subway.
Strength ... strength. All that lip-chewing and horn-swoggling just to
furnish a little strength!

We were moving about from one spot to another, surveying the scene with
that clearheadedness which comes after an all-night session. We must have
made ourselves pretty conspicuous shuffling about that way with our coat
collars turned up and never once crossing ourselves and never once moving
our lips except to whisper some callous remark. Perhaps everything would
have passed off without notice if Fillmore hadn't insisted on walking past
the altar in the midst of the ceremony. He was looking for the exit, and he
thought while he was at it, I suppose, that he would take a good squint at
the holy of holies, get a close-up on it, as it were. We had gotten safely by
and were marching toward a crack of light which must have been the way out
when a priest suddenly stepped out of the gloom and blocked our path. Wanted
to know where we were going and what we were doing. We told him politely
enough that we were looking for the exit. We said "exit" because at the
moment we were so flabbergasted that we couldn't think of the French for
exit. Without a word of response he took us firmly by the arm and, opening
the door, a side door it was, he gave us a push and out we tumbled into the
blinding light of day. It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that when we
hit the sidewalk we were in a daze. We walked a few paces, blinking our eyes,
and then instinctively we both turned round; the priest was still standing on
the steps, pale as a ghost and scowling like the devil himself. He must have
been sore as hell. Later, thinking back on it, I couldn't blame him for it.
But at that moment, seeing him with his long skirts and the little skull cap
on his cranium, he looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. I looked
at Fillmore and he began to laugh too. For a full minute we stood there
laughing right in the poor bugger's face. He was so bewildered, I guess, that
for a moment he didn't know what to do; suddenly, however, he started down
the steps on the run, shaking his fist at us as if he were in earnest. When
he swung out of the enclosure he was on the gallop. By this time some
preservative instinct warned me to get a move on. I grabbed Fillmore by the
coat sleeve and started to run. He was saying, like an idiot: "No, no! I
won't run!" -- "Come on!" I yelled, "we'd better get out of here. That guy's
mad clean through." And off we ran, beating it as fast as our legs would
carry us.

On the way to Dijon, still laughing about the affair, my thoughts reverted
to a ludicrous incident, of a somewhat similar nature, which occurred during
my brief sojourn in Florida. It was during the celebrated boom when, like
thousands of others, I was caught with my pants down. Trying to extricate
myself I got caught, along with a friend of mine, in the very neck of the
bottle. Jacksonville, where we were marooned for about six weeks, was
practically in a state of siege. Every bum on earth, and a lot of guys who
had never been bums before, seemed to have drifted into Jacksonville. The
Y.M.C.A., the Salvation Army, the fire houses and police stations, the
hotels, the lodging houses, everything was full up. <i>Complet</i>
absolutely, and signs everywhere to that effect. The residents of
Jacksonville had become so hardened that it seemed to me as if they were
walking around in coats of mail. It was the old business of food again. Food
and a place to flop. Food was coming up from below in trainloads -- oranges and
grapefruit and all sorts of juicy edibles. We used to pass by the freight
sheds looking for rotten fruit -- but even that was scarce.

One night, in desperation, I dragged my friend Joe to a synagogue, during
the service. It was a reformed congregation and the rabbi impressed me
rather favorably. The music got me too -- that piercing lamentation of the
Jews. As soon as the service was over I marched to the rabbi's study and
requested an interview with him. He received me decently enough -- until I
made clear my mission. Then he grew absolutely frightened. I had only asked
him for a hand-out on behalf of my friend Joe and myself. You would have
thought, from the way he looked at me, that I had asked to rent the
synagogue as a bowling alley. To cap it all, he suddenly asked me
point-blank if I was a Jew or not. When I answered no, he seemed perfectly
outraged. Why, pray, had I come to a Jewish pastor for aid? I told him
naively that I had always had more faith in the Jews than in the Gentiles. I
said it modestly, as if it were one of my peculiar defects. It was the truth
too. But he wasn't a bit flattered. No, siree. He was horrified. To get rid
of me he wrote out a note to the Salvation Army people. "That's the place
for you to address yourself," he said, and brusquely turned away to tend his
flock.

The Salvation Army, of course, had nothing to offer us. If we had had a
quarter apiece we might have rented a mattress on the floor. But we hadn't a
nickel between us. We went to the park and stretched ourselves out on a
bench. It was raining and so we covered ourselves with newspapers. Weren't
there more than a half hour, I imagine, when a cop came along and, without
a word of warning, gave us such a sound fanning that we were up and on
our feet in a jiffy, and dancing a bit too, though we weren't in any mood
for dancing. I felt so goddamned sore and miserable, so dejected, so lousy,
after being whacked over the ass by that half-witted bastard, that I could
have blown up the City Hall.

The next morning, in order to get even with these hospitable sons of
bitches, we presented ourselves bright and early at the door of a Catholic
priest. This time I let Joe do the talking. He was Irish and he had a bit of
brogue. He had very soft, blue eyes, too, and he could make them water a bit
when he wanted to. A sister in black opened the door for us; she didn't ask
us inside, however. We were to wait in the vestibule until she went and
called for the good father. In a few minutes he came, the good father,
puffing like a locomotive. And what was it we wanted disturbing his likes at
that hour of the morning? Something to eat and a place to flop, we answered
innocently. And where did we hail from, the good father wanted to know at
once. From New York. From New York, eh? Then ye'd better be gettin' back
there as fast as ye kin, me lads, and without another word the big, bloated
turnip-faced bastard shoved the door in our face.

About an hour later, drifting around helplessly like a couple of drunken
schooners, we happened to pass by the rectory again. So help me God if the
big, lecherous-looking turnip wasn't backing out of the alley in a
limousine! As he swung past us he blew a cloud of smoke into our eyes. As
though to say -- <i>"That</i> for you!" A beautiful limousine it was, with a
couple of spare tires in the back, and the good father sitting at the wheel
with a big cigar in his mouth. Must have been a Corona-Corona, so fat and
luscious it was. Sitting pretty he was, and no two ways about it. I couldn't
see whether he had skirts on or not. I could only see the gravy trickling
from his lips -- and the big cigar with that fifty cent aroma.

All the way to Dijon I got to reminiscing about the past. I thought of all
the things I might have said and done, which I hadn't said or done, in the
bitter, humiliating moments when just to ask for a crust of bread is to
make yourself less than a worm. Stone sober as I was, I was still smarting
from those old insults and injuries. I could still feel that whack over the
ass which the cop gave me in the park -- though that was a mere bagatelle, a
little dancing lesson, you might say. All over the States I wandered, and
into Canada and Mexico. The same story everywhere. If you want bread you've
got to get in harness, get in lock-step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a
carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed
wire, more dog-biscuits, more lawn-mowers, more ball-bearings, more high
explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more tooth-paste, more
newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums.
<i>Forward!</i> Time presses. The embryo is pushing through the neck of the
womb, and there's not even a gob of spit to ease the passage, A dry,
strangulating birth. Not a wail, not a chirp. <i>Salut au monde!</i> Salute
of twenty-one guns bombinating from the rectum. "I wear my hat as I please,
indoors or out," said Walt. That was a time when you could still get a hat to
fit your head. But time passes. To get a hat that fits now you have to walk
to the electric chair. They give you a skull cap. A tight fit, what? But no
matter! It fits.

You have to be in a strange country like France, walking the meridian that
separates the hemispheres of life and death, to know what incalculable
vistas yawn ahead. <i>The body electric! The democratic soul! Flood-tide!</i>
Holy Mother of God, what does this crap mean? The earth is parched and
cracked. Men and women come together like broods of vultures over a stinking
carcass, to mate and fly apart again. Vultures who drop from the clouds like
heavy stones. Talons and beak, that's what we are! A huge intestinal
apparatus with a nose for dead meat. <i>Forward!</i> Forward without pity,
without compassion, without love, without forgiveness. Ask no quarter and
give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More
gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines! More and more of
it -- until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with
it!

Stepping off the train I knew immediately that I had made a fatal mistake.
The Lycee was a little distance from the station; I walked down the main
street in the early dusk of winter, feeling my way towards my destination.
A light snow was falling, the trees sparkled with frost. Passed a couple of
huge, empty cafes that looked like dismal waiting rooms. Silent, empty
gloom -- that's how it impressed me. A hopeless, jerk-water town where mustard
is turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and
cute-looking little jars.

The first glance at the Lycee sent a shudder through me. I felt so undecided
that at the entrance I stopped to debate whether I would go in or not. But
as I hadn't the price of a return ticket there wasn't much use debating the
question. I thought for a moment of sending a wire to Fillmore, but then I
was stomped to know what excuse to make. The only thing to do was to walk in
with my eyes shut.

It happened that M. le Proviseur was out -- his day off, so they said. A
little hunchback came forward and offered to escort me to the office of M.
le Censeur, second in charge. I walked a little behind him, fascinated by
the grotesque way in which he hobbled along. He was a little monster, such
as can be seen on the porch of any half-assed cathedral in Europe.

The office of M. le Censeur was large and bare. I sat down in a stiff chair
to wait while the hunchback darted off to search for him. I almost felt at
home. The atmosphere of the place reminded me vividly of certain charity
bureaus back in the States where I used to sit by the hour waiting for some
mealy-mouthed bastard to come and cross-examine me.

Suddenly the door opened and, with a mincing step, M. le Censeur came
prancing in. It was all I could do to suppress a titter. He had on just such
a frock coat as Boris used to wear, and over his forehead there hung a bang,
a sort of spitcurl such as Smerdiakov might have worn. Grave and brittle,
with a lynx-like eye, he wasted no words of cheer on me. At once he brought
forth the sheets on which were written the names of the students, the hours,
the classes, etc., all in a meticulous hand. He told me how much coal and
wood I was allowed and after that he promptly informed me that I was at
liberty to do as I pleased in my spare time. This last was the first good
thing I had heard him say. It sounded so reassuring that I quickly said a
prayer for France -- for the army and navy, the educational system, the
<i>bistrots,</i> the whole <i>goddamned works.</i>

This fol-de-rol completed, he rang a little bell, whereupon the hunchback
promptly appeared to escort me to the office of M. l'Econome. Here
<i>the</i> atmosphere was somewhat different. More like a freight-station,
with bills of lading and rubber stamps everywhere, and pasty-faced clerks
scribbling away with broken pens in huge, cumbersome ledgers. My dole of
coal and wood portioned out, off we marched, the hunchback and I, with a
wheelbarrow, towards the dormitory. I was to have a room on the top floor,
in the same wing as the <i>pions.</i> The situation was taking on a humorous
aspect. I didn't know what the hell to expect next. Perhaps a spittoon. The
whole thing smacked very much of preparation for a campaign; the only things
missing were a knapsack and rifle -- and a brass slug.

The room assigned to me was rather large, with a small stove to which was
attached a crooked pipe that made an elbow just over the iron cot. A big
chest for the coal and wood stood near the door. The windows gave out on a
row of forlorn little houses all made of stone in which lived the grocer, the
baker, the shoemaker, the butcher, etc. -- all imbecilic-looking clodhoppers.
I glanced over the rooftops towards the bare hills where a train was
clattering. The whistle of the locomotive screamed mournfully and
hysterically.

After the hunchback had made the fire for me I inquired about the grub. It
was not quite time for dinner. I flopped on the bed, with my overcoat on,
and pulled the covers over me. Beside me was the eternal rickety night table
in which the piss pot is hidden away. I stood the alarm on the table and
watched the minutes ticking off. Into the well of the room a bluish light
filtered in from the street. I listened to the trucks rattling by as I gazed
vacantly at the stove pipe, at the elbow where it was held together with
bits of wire. The coal chest intrigued me. Never in my life had I occupied a
room with a coal chest. And never in my life had I built a fire or taught
children. Nor, for that matter, never in my life had I worked without pay.
I felt free and chained at the same time -- like one feels just before
election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to
vote for the right man. I felt like a hired man, like a jack-of-all-trades,
like a hunter, like a rover, like a galley-slave, like a pedagogue, like a
worm and a louse. I was free, but my limbs were shackled. A democratic soul
with a free meal ticket, but no power of locomotion, no voice. I felt like a
jelly-fish nailed to a plank. Above all, I felt hungry. The hands were
moving slowly. Still ten more minutes to kill before the fire alarm would go
off. The shadows in the room deepened. It grew frightfully silent, a tense
stillness that tautened my nerves. Little dabs of snow clung to the
window-panes. Far away a locomotive gave out a shrill scream. Then a dead
silence again. The stove had commenced to glow, but there was no heat
coming from it. I began to fear that I might doze off and miss the dinner.
That would mean lying awake on an empty belly all night. I got
panic-stricken.

Just a moment before the gong went off I jumped out of bed and, locking the
door behind me, I bolted downstairs to the courtyard. There I got lost. One
quadrangle