Ladders to Fire (12 page)

“The funny thing,” added Jay after a pause, “is
that after this his luck turned. When he hanged his effigy he seemed to have
killed the self who had been a failure.”

The visitors left.

Then all the laughter in him subsided into a
pool of serenity. His voice became soft. Just as he loved the falsities of his
roles, he loved also to rest from these pranks and attitudes and crystallize in
the white heat of Lillian’s faith.

And when all the gestures and talk seemed
lulled, suddenly he sprang up again with a new mood, a fanatic philosopher who
walked up and down the studio punctuating the torrent of his ideas with fist
blows on the tables. A nervous lithe walk, while he churned ideas like leaves
on a pyre which never turned to ash.

Then all the words, the ideas, the memories,
were drawn together like the cords of a hundred kites and he said:

“I’d like to work now.”

Lillian watched the transformation in him. She
watched the half open mouth close musingly, the scattered talk crystallizing.
This man so easily swayed, caught, moved, now collecting his strength again. At
that moment she saw the big man in him, the man who appeared to be merely
enjoying recklessly, idling, roaming, but deep down set upon a terribly earnest
goal: to hand back to life all the wealth of material he had collected, intent
on making restitution to the world for what he had absorbed with his enormous
creator’s appetite.

There remained in the air only the echoes of
his resonant voice, the hot breath of his words, the vibration of his pounding
gestures.

She rose to lock the door of the studio upon
the world. She drew in long invisible bolts. She pulled in
rustless
shutters. Silence. She imprisoned within herself that mood and texture of Jay
which would never go into his work, or be given or exposed to the world, that
which she alone could see and know./font>

While Lillian slept Jay reassembled his
dispersed selves. At this moment the flow in him became purposeful.

In his very manner of pressing the paint tube
there was intensity; often it spurted like a geyser, was wasted, stained his
clothes and the floor. The paint, having appeared in a minor explosion,
proceeded to cause a major one on the canvas.

The explosion caused not a whole world to
appear, but a shattered world of fragments. Bodies, objects, cities, trees,
animals were all splintered, pierced, impaled.

It was actually a spectacle of carnage.

The bodies were dismembered and every part of
them misplaced. In the vast dislocation eyes were placed where they had never
visited a body, the hands and feet were substituted for the face, the faces
bore four simultaneous facets with one empty void between. Gravity was lost,
all relation between the figures were like those of acrobats. Flesh became
rubber, trees flesh, bones became plumage, and all the life of the interior,
cells, nerves, sinew lay exposed as by a merely curious surgeon not concerned
with closing the incisions. All his painter’s thrusts opening, exposing,
dismembering in the violent colors of reality.

The vitality with which he exploded, painted
dissolution and disintegration, with which his energy broke familiar objects
into unfamiliar components, was such that people who walked into a room full of
his painting were struck only with the power and force of these brilliant
fragments as by an act of birth. That they were struck only by broken pieces of
an exploded world, they did not see. The force of the explosion, the weight,
density and brilliance was compelling.

To each lost, straying piece of body or animal
was often added the growth and excrescences of illness, choking moss on
southern trees, cocoons of the unborn, barnacles and parasites.

It was Jay’s own particular jungle in which the
blind warfare of insects and animals was carried on by human beings. The
violence of the conflicts distorted the human body. Fear became muscular
twistings
like the tangled roots of trees, dualities
sundered them in two separate pieces seeking separate lives. The entire drama
took place at times in stagnant marshes, in petrified forests where every human
being was a threat to the other.

The substance that could weld them together
again was absent. Through the bodies irretrievable holes had been drilled and
in place of a heart there was a rubber pump or a watch.

The mild, smiling Jay who stepped out of these
infernos always experienced a slight tremor of uneasiness when he passed from
the world of his painting to Lillian’s room. If she was awake she would want to
see what he had been doing. And she was always inevitably shocked. To see the
image of her inner nightmares exposed affected her as the sight of a mirror
affects a cat or a child. There was always a moment of strained silence.

This underground of hostility she carried in
her being, of which her body felt only the blind impacts, the shocks, was now
clearly projected./font>

Jay was always surprised at her recoil, for he
could see how Lillian was a prolongation of this warfare on canvas, how at the
point where he left violence and became a simple, anonymous, mild-mannered man,
it was she who took up the thread and enacted the violence directly upon people.

But Lillian had never seen herself doing it.

Jay would say: “I wish you wouldn’t quarrel
with everyone, Lillian.”

“I wish you wouldn’t paint such horrors. Why
did you paint
Faustin
without a head? That’s what
he’s proudest of—his head.”

“Because that’s what he should lose, to come
alive. You hate him too. Why did you hand him his coat the other night in such
a way that he was forced to leave?”

In the daylight they repudiated each other. At
night their bodies recognized a familiar substance: gunpowder, and they made
their peace together.

In the morning it was he who went out for
bread, butter and milk for breakfast, while she made the coffee.

When she locked the studio for the night, she
locked out anxiety. But when Jay got into his slack morning working clothes and
stepped out jauntily, whistling, he had a habit of locking the door again—and
in between, anxiety slipped in again.

He locks the door, he has forgotten that I
am here
.

Thus she interpreted it, because of her feeling
that once he had taken her, he deserted her each time anew. No contact was ever
continuous with him. So he locked the door, forgot she was there, deserted her.

When she confessed this to
Djuna
,
Djuna
who had continued to write for Lillian the
Chinese dictionary of counter-interpretations, she laughed: “Lillian, have you
ever thought that he might be locking you in to keep you for himself?”

Lillian was accurate in her feeling that when
Jay left the studio he was disassociated from her, and not from her alone, but
from himself.

He walked out in the street and became one with
the street. His mood became the mood of the street. He dissolved and became
eye, ear, smile.

There are days when the city exposes only its
cripples, days when the bus must stop close to the curb to permit a one-legged
man to board it, days when a man without legs rests his torso on a rolling
stand and propels himself with his hands; days when a head is held up by a pink
metal truss, days when blind men ask to be guided, and Jay knew as he looked,
absorbing every detail, that he would paint them, even though had he been
consulted all the cripples of the world would be destroyed excepting the
smiling old men who sat on benches beatifically drunk, because they were his
father. He had so many fathers, for he was one to see the many.
I believe we
have a hundred fathers and mothers and
loversll
interchangeable, and that’s the flaw in Lillian, for her there is only one
mother, one father, one husband, one lover, one son, one daughter,
irreplaceable, unique—her world is too small. The young girl who just passed me
with lightning in her eyes is my daughter. I could take her home as my daughter
in place of the one I lost. The world is full of fathers, whenever I need one I
only need to stop and talk to one…this one sitting there with a white beard and
a captain’s cap…

“Do you want a cigarette, Captain?”

“I’m no captain, Monsieur, I was a Legionnaire,
as you can see by my beard. Are
yousure
you haven’t a
butt or two? I’d rather have a butt. I like my independence,
youknow
, I collect butts. A cigarette is charity. I’m a
hobo,
youknow
, not a beggar.”

His legs were wrapped in newspapers. “Because
of the varicose veins. They sort of bother me in the winter. I could stay with
the nuns, they would take care of me. But imagine having to get up every
morning at six at the sound of a bell, of having to eat exactly at noon, and
then at seven and having to sleep at nine. I’m better here. I like my
independence.” He was filling his pipe with butts.

Jaysat
beside him.

“The nuns are not bad to me. I collect crusts
of old bread from the garbage cans and I sell them to the hospital for the soup
they serve to pregnant women.”

“Why did
youleave
the
Legion?”

“During my campaigns I received letters from an
unknown godmother. You can’t imagine what those letters were, Monsieur, I
haven’t got them because I wore them out reading them there, in the deserts.
They were so warm I could have heated my hands over them if I had been fighting
in a cold country. Those letters made me so happy that on my first furlough I
looked her up. That was quite a task, believe me, she had no address! She sold
bananas from a little cart, and she slept under the bridges. I spent my
furlough sitting with her like this with a bottle of red wine. It was a good life;
I deserted the Legion.”

He again refused a cigarette and Jaywalked on.

The name of a street upon an iron plate, Rue
Dolent
, Rue
Dolent
decomposed for him into dolorous,
doliente
,
douleur
. The plate
is
nailed to the prison wall, the
wall of China, of our chaos and our mysteries, the wall of Jericho, of our
religions and our
guilts
, the wall of lamentation,
the wall of the prison of Paris. Wall of soot, encrusted dust. No prison
breaker ever crumbled this wall, the darkest and longest of all leaning heavily
upon the little Rue
Dolent
Doliente
Douleur
which,although
on
the free side of the wall, is the saddest street of all Paris. On one side are
men whose crimes were accomplished in a moment of rage, rebellion, violence. On
the other, grey figures too afraid to hate, to rebel, to kill openly. On the
free side of the wall
theyalk
with iron bars in their
hearts and stones on their feet carrying the balls and chains of their
obsessions. Prisoners of their weakness, of their self-inflicted illnesses and
slaveries. No need of guards and keys! They will never escape from themselves,
and they only kill others with the invisible death rays of their impotence.

He did not know any longer where he was
walking. The personages of the street and the personages of his paintings
extended into each other, issued from one to fall into the other, fell into the
work, or out of it, stood now with, now without, frames. The man on the sliding
board, had he not seen him before in Coney Island when he was a very young man
and walking with a woman he loved? This half-man had followed them persistently
along the boardwalk, on a summer night made for caresses, until the woman had
recoiled from his pursuit and left both the half-man and Jay. Again the man on
wheels had appeared in his dream, but this time it was his mother in a black
dress with black jet beads on it as he had seen her once about to attend a
funeral. Why he should deprive his mother of the lower half of her body, he
didn’t know. No fear of incest had ever barred his way to women, and he had
always been able to want them all, and the more they looked like his mother the
better.

He saw the seven hard benches of the pawnshop
where he had spent so many hours of his life in Paris waiting to borrow a
little cash on his paintings, and felt the bitterness he had tasted when they
underestimated his work! The man behind the counter had eyes dilated from
appraising objects. Jay laughed out loud at the memory of the man who had
pawned his books and continued to read them avidly until the last minute like
one condemned to future starvation. He had painted them all pawning their arms
and legs, after seeing them pawn the stove that would keep them warm, the coat
that would save them from pneumonia, the dress that would attract customers. A
grotesque world, hissed the Dean of Critics. A distorted world.
Well and
good. Let them sit for three hours on one of the seven benches of the Paris
pawnshop. Let them walk through the Rue
Dolent
.
Perhaps I should not be allowed to go free, perhaps I should be jailed with the
criminals. I feel in sympathy with them. My murders are committed with paint.
Every act of murder might awaken people to the state of things that produced
it, but soon they fall asleep again, and when the artist awakens them they are quick
to take revenge. Very good that they refuse me money and honors, for thus they
keep me in these streets and exposing what they do not wish me to expose. My
jungle
is
not the innocent one of Rousseau. In my jungle everyone meets
his enemy. In the underworld of nature debts must be paid in the same specie:
no false money accepted. Hunger with hunger, pain with pain, destruction with
destruction.