OPUS 21 (16 page)

All my life I have listened to a wearisome cell repeat an old saw: the coward dies a thousand times, the brave man once.

A person is afraid to be cowardly.

For many years, owing to this rather superficial sentence, I had to accept the inner humiliation of cowardice. A boy with my kind of imagination, my style of projecting, could not but help finding in his head the taste of the thousand deaths. And I am often cowardly still. In those few morning minutes, I chased my coward a long distance.

But I do think the aphorism should be discarded. Certainly the coward dies a thousand times. So, too, however, does the man of imagination. It is the manner of the thousand deaths that is important. And bravery--our poor, human bravery--is not necessarily consonant with faulty imagination or none at all, as this dumbbell's apothegm implies.

I finally caught my animal--a real beast and not a dream.

I ordered coffee and stepped into the sitting room.

It was after nine.

The morning papers had been put at my door. There was mail.

A letter from Ricky.

I ripped it open and read it hungrily.

Dear:

Would you please, if you get a chance, go to the Lingerie Department at Saks and ask for Miss Drewson? Tell her I'd like to have three more slips like the blue satin ones I got last July when we were in town. I could order them by mail, but I want to be sure to get the same kind and she will know. Size twelve, which I guess I needn't tell you. We miss you--everything is just the same, which is dandy--and have fun. I love you very much.

Ricky

I had a second little beast to chase, then.

There was a bank statement.

There were four publicity releases from business concerns which keep sending me their bilge even though I took the pains, almost a year ago, to write them that I'd quit doing a newspaper column and had no way of airing their propaganda even if I felt the urge. There were three letters from people who liked my books. There was a letter from the assistant to the dean of a small college in Illinois: Dear Wylie:

Just how does one go about getting so swellheaded and self-righteous that he thinks he can tell off everybody on earth? I would like to know, because it must be a wonderful sensation to balloon around so gassily. Look out for pins, though!

Please reply.

Sincerely,

John F. Casselberry.

I put the letter between my big toe and the next one, held it out at body length, and reflected.

There is nothing unusual about this letter; I get a version of it every few days, sometimes running into thousands of derogatory words. And, of course, it is true.

Of course, of course, of course.

Authorship is the supreme act of ego.

Whether it is good or evil, as an act, depends, I suppose not so much on what's written, as how the writing is.

Most authors conceal the egoistic aspect of the business under the nom de plumes of their characters.

But exactly as every man
is
all that he thinks and does--and dreams, too--so is an author all he writes.

A mystery writer is a murderer in his head and he sets down his gory lore for an audience of murderers.

What does that make you, Wylie? You first-person author!

Did I use it to take the blame and the guilt--to take the responsibility--and to tear down the artifice of the third person? And was it true (as I felt) that, since my purpose was to turn the thoughts of better authors into a vernacular more popular than their own, my I was the mere agent--and not the excreted vanity which it so constantly deplored? Or was the whole affair a secret exercise in look-ma-I'm-dancing?

God knows, some part of it had to be.

I fancied myself as a teacher.

I was mostly a ham.

What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort and understanding in--all this--and the long years I'd spent endeavoring to give it a dignified texture--forever emerged as the overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet.

The truths were somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a cheap world.

Some people heard my mentors. Yes.

A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the attention-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those whom I ballyhooed.

But others--oh, how rightly--saw me!

Yakkety-yak.

Wylie's next.

Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set bristles standing on old Comstock's neck.

Christ Jesus!

I had thought a havoc in prose might be a substitute for havoc itself--sparing a man here and a woman there from the reality of acquainting them with the instinct.

O tin messiah.

Tawdry complex.

Bawling calfcake.

Jackass of your own worst describing.

Balloon.

It must be 'a wonderful sensation.

Not truth, so much as show-off.

Not love of you--infatuation with me.

Not--for what I did--but, like most of us, for what I might have done--and used instead to inflate the First Person Singular with the airs of my hot compartments.

The extravert posing as the introvert.

The hoofer philosopher.

Shame, shame, shame!

Shame ran off me.

And I shall die, in it and with it.

I went to my window to look at the city the messy cubes in the haze and somebody's radio performed an act of God.

Ja-da

Ja-da

Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jingo

Shimmy, I thought.

Shimmy.

Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.

You wear 'em in the winter and you wear 'em in the fall You wear 'em in the summer if you wear 'em at all.

Shimmy.

Shimmy!

Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.

This is a message to and of the American people.

The Dream.

The Cross.

Everybody

Loves my body

But my body

Don't love nobody

But me.

Dear Dean Casselberry:

I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing, patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast-you will be there, and you should also carry a pail of tears.

Phil Wylie

Some give money

some give work

but if you give the person

brother, you're a jerk.

It didn't do me any good . . . for . . .

If you try to tell the truth there's only you telling it.

2

It was a hell of a morning.

3

From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial.

You wouldn't be interested. We'll go on, anyway. What the hell else can a man do?

4

Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous.

The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway. It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning--the creation of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id, meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All these, and countless other "punishments"--which change with changing social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and differ from one home to another and one culture to another--set up such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate indignities.

Add to this the regimentations of school--the musts and must nots of classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in the passing years, fold in the Law--cop, truant officer, and prison bars--sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed, or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations), and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the adolescent, the adult.

Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence. Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze--at the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped. Detach him, that is to say, from Nature--deprive him of its experiences and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never know a spring's taste.

Set him to work at earning a living without acquaintance of how the whole of any living is made. On the contrary. Let his life's blood derive from some capillary of the flow. Let him take charge--not of house-building, or food-raising, or wood-gathering or fire-keeping, not of cookery or child-birthing or the weaving of fabrics--but of the twenty-eighth step in the manufacture of one size of ball bearings. Call this earning a living.

Give him a town to defend against all other towns and cities, a county to boast of, a state to regard as superior to forty-seven other states, and a nation which anyone can see is the greatest on earth. Teach him to hold such superiority as the supreme goal--to believe that no more can be asked of him or of his fellows than that they maintain the greatest nation-however low the rest may sink. Teach him never to inquire if his superlatives are adequate for the conditions of his age. Let him live to the full--by odious comparison. Let him say--I am better than you, wherefore you--not I--need all the improvement.

Now. Set a few wars in his time, with their alarms, rigors, restrictions, and dull regimentations. Load up his era with means for bacteriological attack and with atomic bombs. Invent great secrets, with attendant rumors. Frighten him all day long--and at night. Tell him he is nevertheless a free man and that, above all else, he must cherish and protect his liberty. Next, at every corner and edge of freedom, hack, harass, chip, clip, steal, stain, bribe, sabotage, and smudge each meaning and application of liberty, so that he no longer gathers its fundamental sense and comes to imagine liberty is consonant with security--which is all that remains for him to dwell upon, since he has been deprived of every secure thing and every secure experience in God's cosmos.

It makes you nervous, n'est-ce pas?

No one should be surprised that modern man shows signs of strain.

Nothing much in the world is sane.

Only the great instinct--the spaceless, timeless urge toward consciousness--

continues its thrust of sanity. Because of it, even the maddest men are able to seize upon the illusion that they are sane by interpreting their own, spotty awareness as if it were the entirety of possible knowing. Because of instinct, however, all the mad men and all the mad societies will be brushed like bugs from the earth's crust and replaced by better, sensibler men or--if necessary--by silence. By silence while Evolution is retooled and instinct tries again with a new form--one which may not be so dazzled by its little consciousness or so greedy for the immediate fruits thereof as to attempt, with all the means and methods set down here, and ten million more, to deny instinct, repudiate Nature, and insist its petty Reason is the shape of truth entire.

So we three nervous wrecks sat down to lunch.

Marcia was a pretty girl, winsome, willowy, with eyes as blue as an upland lake and light-brown hair which, where the sun fell through undulant glass brick, turned opalescent, like duck feathers, and shone every color, as if it were composed of quintillions of submicroscopic prisms. She wore a light perfume--smelled like an April garden--and her voice was limpid.

Poor Paul.

Gloves on her hands--white little things, knit of string. She was nearly as tall as I am. A trembling came through the gloves. "So glad to meet you, Phil. Paul talks about you incessantly. It's practically a fixation."

Hot in the lobby, steamy; you could bake bread in the place. "Come in the Knight's Bar," I said, "and cool off."

She bewitched me with her lakelike eyes a moment longer--and deep in them I saw the shadow glide, the fear--the numb, dark carnivore that had to eat, that looked up at me with a guilty but imploring gaze.

You see, I knew her.

I held the door. She went first, walking confidently in the face of the strangers in the restaurant. Paul hesitated halfway through the cold doorway--hesitated, and eyed me with a sort of regret. Regret--and inquiry. I nodded my head to say she was lovely.

Jay saw her--gestured with a menu. We sat.

They ordered Manhattans and I a coke.

Music sprayed from its electrical hose-garbled a little, echoing slightly, like music from a lawn sprinkler. This wash of counterpoint in every public place is an attempt to assuage nerves that burn like beds of coals. We do everything we can dream of to relax--

except relax. If we did that--we would lose the world that we own. And we are afraid to find our souls.

"It broke the record today," Paul said. Our best prop.

"Just over a hundred." Marcia moved her long hair across her right shoulder and kept gazing at me to see--not if I remembered her, for we had already acknowledged that

--but what the effect was to be. "You ought to see Park Avenue! It's a parade--driving to the country!"

I tried to look like a man who had no memory--who regarded the earth as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those unbearable souls who likes it that way."

"Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy about it--