Dhalgren (26 page)

Walking his fists on the wood, the bartender came, like some blond gorilla.

"Can you put together a tequila sunrise?"

"Make my life easy and have a beer."

"Gin and tonic?"

The bartender nodded deeply.

"And another for my friend here."

The gorilla responded, forefinger to forehead.

"Hey, I'm sort of surprised," Kidd volunteered into the feeling of loss between them, "to see you in here, Mr Newboy."

"Are you?" Newboy sighed. "I'm out on my own, tonight. I've a whole list of places people have told me I must see while I'm in town. It's a bit strange. I gather you know who I…?"

"From the
Times."

"Yes." Newboy nodded. "I've never been on the
front
page of a newspaper before. I've had just enough of that till now to be rather protective of my anonymity. Well, Mr Calkins thought he was doing something nice; his motives were the best."

"Bellona's a very hard place to get lost in." What Kidd took for slight nervousness, he reacted to with warmth. "I'm glad I read you were here."

Newboy raised his peppered brows.

"I've read some of your poem now, see?"

"And you wouldn't have if you hadn't read about me?"

"I didn't buy the book. A lady had it."

"Which book?"

"Pilgrimage."

Now Newboy lowered them. "You haven't read it carefully, several times, all the way through?"

He shook his head, felt his lips shake, so closed his mouth.

"Good." Newboy smiled. "Then you don't know me any better than I know you. For a moment I thought you had an advantage."

"I only browsed in it." He added: "In the bathroom."

Newboy laughed out loud, and drank. "Tell me about yourself. Are you a student? Or do you write?"

"Yes. I mean I write. I'm… a poet. Too." That was an interesting thing to say, he decided. It felt quite good. He wondered what Newboy's reaction would be.

"Very good." Whatever Newboy's reaction, surprise was not part of it. "Do you find Bellona stimulating, making you produce lots of work?"

He nodded. "But I've never published anything."

"Did I ask if you had?"

Kidd looked for severity; what he saw was a gentle smile.

"Or are you interested in getting published?"

"Yeah." He turned half around on his stool. "How do you get poems published?"

"If I could really answer that, I would probably write a lot more poems than I do."

"But
you
don't have any problems now, about getting things in magazines and things?"

"Just about everything I write now—" Newboy folded his glass in both hands—"I can be sure will be published. It makes me very careful of what I actually put down. How careful are you?"

The first beer bottle was empty. "I don't know." He drank from the second. "I haven't been a poet very long," he confessed, smiling. "Only a couple of days. Why'd you come here?"

"Pardon?" There was a little surprise there; but not much.

"I bet you know lots of writers, famous ones. And people in the government too. Why did you come here?"

"Oh, Bellona has developed… an underground reputation, you call it? One never reads about it, but one hears. There are some cities one must be just dying to visit." In a theatrical whisper: "I hope this isn't one of them." While he laughed, his eyes asked forgiveness.

Kidd forgave and laughed.

"I really don't know. It was a spur of the moment thing," Newboy went on. "I don't quite know how I did it. I certainly wasn't expecting to meet anyone like Roger. That headline was a bit of a surprise. But Bellona is full of surprises."

"You're going to write about it here?"

Newboy turned his drink. "No. I don't think so." He smiled again. "You're all safe."

"You
do
know a lot of famous people though, I bet. Even when you read introductions and flyleaves and book reviews, you begin to figure out that everybody knows everybody. You get this picture of all these people sitting around together and getting mad, or friendly, probably screwing each other—"

"Literary intrigues? Oh, you're right: It's quite complicated, harrowing, insidious, vicious; and thoroughly fascinating. The only pastime I prefer to writing is gossip."

He frowned. "Somebody else was talking to me about gossip. Everybody around here sort of goes for it." Lanya was still not in the bar. He looked again at Newboy. "She knows your friend Mr Calkins."

"It is a small city. I wish Paul Fenster had felt a little less—up tight?" He gestured toward the notebook. "I'd enjoy seeing some of your poems."

"Huh?"

"I enjoy reading poems, especially by people I've met. Let me tell you right away, I won't even presume to say anything about whether I think they're good or bad. But you're pleasant, in an angular way. I'd like to see what you wrote."

"Oh. I don't have very many. I've just been writing them down for… well, like I say, not long."

"Then it won't take me very long to read them—if you wouldn't mind showing them to me, sometime when you felt like it?"

"Oh. Sure. But you
would
have to tell me if they're good."

"I doubt if I could."

"Sure you could. I mean I'd listen to what you said. That would be good for me."

"May I tell you a story?"

Kidd cocked his head, and found his own eager distrust interesting.

Newboy waved a finger at the bartender for refills. "Some years ago in London, when I was much younger than the time between then and now would indicate, my Hampstead host winked at me through his sherry glass and asked if I would like to meet an American writer staying in the city. That afternoon I had to see an editor of an Arts Council subsidized magazine to which my host, the writer in question, and myself all contributed. I enjoy writers: their personalities intrigue me. I can talk about it in this detached way because I'm afraid I do so little of it myself now, that, though I presumptuously feel myself an artist at all times, I only consider myself a writer a month or so out of the year. On good years. At any rate, I agreed. The American writer was phoned to come over that evening. While I was waiting to go out, I picked up a magazine in which he had an article—a description of his travels through Mexico—and began the afternoon's preparation for the evening's encounter. The world is small: I had been hearing of this young man for two years. I had read his name in conjunction with my own in several places. But I had actually read no single piece by him before. I poured more sherry and turned to the article. It was unpenetrable! I read on through the limpest recountings of passage through pointless scenery and unfocused meetings with vapid people. The judgments on the land were inane. The insights into the populace, had they been expressed with more energy, would have been a bit horrifying for their prejudice. Fortunately the prose was too dense for me to get through more than ten of the sixteen pages. I have always prided myself on my ability to read anything; I feel I must, as my own output is so small. But I put
that
article by! The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it! I assumed I had received that necessary betrayal and took my shopping bag full of Christmas presents into London's whiter mud. The editor in his last letter had invited me, jokingly, to Christmas dinner, and I had written an equally joking acceptance and then come, two thousand miles I believe, for a London holiday. Such schemes, delightful in the anticipation and the later retelling, have their drawbacks in present practice. I'd arrived three days in advance, and thought it best to deliver gifts in tune for Christmas morning and allow my host to rejudge the size of his goose and add a plum or so to his pudding. At the door, back of an English green hall, I rang the bell. It was answered by this very large, very golden young man, who, when he spoke, was obviously American. Let me see how nearly I can remember the conversation. It contributes to the point.

"I asked if my friends were in.

"He said no, they were out for the afternoon; he was babysitting with their two daughters.

"I said I just wanted to leave off some presents, and could he please tell them to expect me for dinner, Christmas day.

"Oh, he said. You must be—well, I'm going to be coming to see you this evening!

"I laughed again, surprised. Very well, I said, I look forward to it. We shook hands, and I hurried off. He seemed affable and I gained interest in the coming meeting. First rule of behavior in the literary community: never condemn a man in the living room for any indiscretion he has put on paper. The amount of
charity
you wish to extend to the living-room barbarian because of his literary excellence is a matter of your own temperament. My point, however, is that we exchanged no more than seventy-five or a hundred words. Virtually I only heard his voice. At any rate, back at Hampstead, as sherry gave way for redder wine, I happened to pick up the magazine with the writer's article. Well, I decided, I shall give it one more chance. I opened it and began to read." Newboy glared over the rim, set down the glass without looking at it and pressed his lips to a slash. "It was lucid, it was vivid, it was both arch and ironic. What I had taken for banality was the most delicate satire. The piece presented an excruciating vision of the conditions under which the country struggled, as well as the absurdity of the author's own position as American and tourist. It walked that terribly difficult line between grace and pathos. And all I had heard was his
voice!
It was retiring, the slightest bit effeminate, with a period and emphasis oddly awry with the great object of fresh water, redwoods, and Rockies who spoke with it. But what, simply, had happened was that now I could
hear
that voice informing the prose, supplying the emphasis here or there to unlock for me what previously had been as dense and graceless as a telephone directory. I have delighted in all of this writer's work since with exquisite enjoyment!" Newboy took another sip. "Ah, but there is a brief corollary. Your critics here in the States have done me the ultimate kindness of choosing only the work of mine I find interesting for their discussions, and those interminable volumes of hair-splitting which insure a university position for me when the Diplomatic Service exhausts my passion for tattle, they let by. On my last trip to your country I was greeted with a rather laudatory review of the reissue of my early poems, in one of your more prestigious literary magazines, by a lady whom modesty forbids me to call incisive if only because she had been so generous with her praise. She was the first American to write of me. But before she ever did, I had followed her critical writings with an avidity I usually have only for poets. A prolific critic of necessity must say many absurd things. The test is, once a body of articles has passed your eye, whether the intelligence and acumen is more memorable than the absurdity. I had never met her. To come off a plane, pick up three magazines at the airport, and, in the taxi to the hotel, discover her article halfway through the second was a delight, a rarity, a pleasure for which once, in fantasy, I perhaps became a writer. And
at
the hotel, she had left a letter, not at the desk, but in my door: She was passing through New York, was in a hotel two blocks away, and wanted to know if I would meet her for a drink that evening, assuming my flight had not tired me out. I was delighted, I was grateful: what better creatures we would be if such attention were not so enjoyable. It was a pleasant drink, a pleasant evening: the relation has become the most rewarding friendship in the years since. It is rare enough, when people who have been first introduced by reputation
can
move on to a personal friendship, to remark it. But I noted this some days later, when I returned to one of her articles: Part of the measured consideration that informed her writing came from her choice of vocabulary. You know the Pope couplet:
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,/The line too labours and the words move slow.
She had a penchant for following a word ending in a heavy consonant with a word that began with one equally heavy. In my mind, I had constructed a considered and leisurely tone of voice which, even when the matter lacked, informed her written utterances with dignity. Using the same vocabulary she wrote with, I realized, on the evening we met, she speaks extremely rapidly, with animation and enthusiasm. And certainly her intelligence is as acute as I had ever judged it. But though she has become one of my closest friends, I have lost practically all enjoyment in reading her. Even as I reread what before has given me the greatest intellectual pleasure, the words rush together in
her
vocal pattern, and all dignity and reserve has deserted the writing; I can only be grateful that, when we meet, we can argue and dissect the works before us till dawn, so that I still have some benefit of her astounding analytical faculty." He drank once more. "How can I possibly tell if your poems are good? We've met. I've heard you speak. And I have not even broached the convolved and emotional swamp some people are silly enough to call an objective judgment, but merely the critical distortion that comes from having heard your voice." Newboy waited, smiling.

"Is that a story you tell to everybody who asks you to read their poems?"

"Ah!" Newboy raised his finger. "I asked
you
if I might be
allowed
to read them. It is a story I have told to several people who've asked me for a judgment." Newboy swirled blunted ice. "Everyone knows everyone. Yes, you're right." He nodded. "I wonder sometimes if the purpose of the Artistic Community isn't to provide a concerned social matrix which simultaneously assures that no member, regardless of honors or approbation, has the slightest idea of the worth of his own work."

Kidd drank his beer, resentful at the long-windedness but curious about the man indulging it.

"The aesthetic equation," Newboy mused. "The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industralized society which has learned to distrust magic—"