A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (20 page)

The morning of course brought morning papers, with a great deal of amplification and correction as usual, and here and there a resourceful or spiteful note; for even reporters suffer from a kind of moral hangover. Then the various picture-publications appeared: snapshots of the flight to earth of the young pleasureless body from every angle, wonderfully snapped, out of focus, with a swishing dim tail like that of a comet. Finally the news-weeklies summarized it all in their way, concise and supercilious, too wily to give opinions, but with plenty of snap-judgments slipped into the ostensibly pure narration to speed it up. And by this time almost everyone will have forgotten almost all about it.

The young man had only one sister in fact. The others whom I had seen leaning out of the window were an older married couple, close friends. Evidently he was madder than he looked; this was not his first suicidal attempt, and he spent last year in a madhouse. But surely it was a gentle derangement, melancholic, innocuous, for the friendly couple, to help him get hold of himself, had not hesitated to engage him as their children’s tutor. Therefore I dare say that there is no great distortion of truth in my thought of him as interestingly representative of a type of ordinary and nervous man, the man who is proud as Lucifer yet ashamed of and put to shame by himself.

I must have been right in supposing that he regretted his rash act before he could complete it. A reporter heard him tell his sister that he would be “ashamed” and “embarrassed” to give up and not jump—having assembled in honor of his mixed motives this superb mournful, scornful multitude, well-wishers and skeptics and sensation seekers and what not.

When I said to myself that it would be a good idea to try tempting him with a five-hundred dollar bill, bribing him to live a while longer, I wondered where the money would come from. But it has been estimated that his sensational death as it happened cost the city of New York one hundred thousand dollars.

In case this meditation of mine should be printed, let me address a deferential word to such a man’s relatives and friends. I do not pretend that all this is true, much less the whole truth. I followed the newspapers, and doubtless forget a part of what I read, and perhaps then remembered more than was written. For my modest purpose it sufficed to be approximative. I did not even verify my anecdotes about the King of France and the Bronte brother. How can I be sure of my judgment even of my own psyche? And why should I be sure? It is all supposition, a kind of fiction, and an example of the preventive misdemeanor that I recommend, for the psyche’s sake—to prevent my ever doing what he did.

I think of another instance of dangerous American clowning which is not aristocratic at all, but only a sort of allegory. When the young man stood out on the seventeenth-story ledge of the Gotham threatening to throw himself down, his friend said, “Come on, John, come back in and we’ll go to a baseball game.” John had always been a fan, and the Giants were playing that afternoon.

“Who are they playing?” he inquired, and his friend felt hopeful.

“The Dodgers.” It is a notoriously bad team.

“I’d rather die than see the Dodgers,” the wretched creature exclaimed; and once more his attention turned to the frightful game he was playing himself. Indeed it would be silly to say that he died to prove how much he despised the Dodgers. But almost certainly he died to prove something; and it may have been only a figure of speech in the first place.

In 1935 I found myself aboard a middle-sized, very comfortable, new Italian liner named the
Conte di Savoia,
voyaging toward the Strait of Gibraltar along the south coast of Spain; and there, surprisingly, a great odor of rosemary descended from the Iberian mountain slopes to meet us, out of sight of land. It seemed the very soul and ghost of divine Earth; and it fixed itself in my mind as a metaphor for the good fortune of my existence overall and of the existence of the entire human species, relatively speaking. More fortunate, more blissful, than any other animal’s existence!

I was traveling with my brother and his wife, recently married and going abroad together for the first time. In the morning and most of the afternoon I kept out of their way, and with time on my hands, consequently, I made friends with two or three fellow passengers, among them a very odd youngster, whose name has slipped my mind. I have, however, kept in my remembrance word for word (it seems) an autobiographical story that he told me, and a few stray amusing or pleasing remarks.

What was odd about him? Oddity in reverse. He had not (I thought) a single trait or peculiarity that would help me to remember him, if for any reason I should want to. He was simply everyman at an early age; John Doe Jr. I did not find him handsome, recognizing nevertheless that he had certain fine features: a clear complexion and blushing cheeks and good teeth; and soft, almost dim hazel eyes that gleamed a little, once in a while. Though slim he was obviously strong, but he moved in an unenergetic way and he was rather awkward. His hair was yellow and unbecomingly cut, and I thought his suits and ties vulgar. His manners, on the other hand, were gentle and unassuming. His expression brightened pleasantly when I talked to him, but very evidently he had an indolent mind and a minimum of education.

Even familiar friends, if they had seen him and me together, might have assumed that I was attracted to him physically. I was not. What other compatibility could there have been between us? Ego, to start with, another measure of the interest of all things, and of one’s fellowmen. My first thought about him was that he must have been approximately the age that I was in 1921, voyaging with such mixed emotions, minding the lack of modern improvements, dismayed by the seasick November weather, some fifteen latitudinal degrees farther north. A kind of sentimental interest: what did this voyage mean to him?

Another of my vulnerabilities in those years, quite distinct from ego and libido, was curiosity; greatly abated now. It appertained to my young vanity and optimism as a writer; also abated or at least changed. I used to pray for subject matter, to watch for it and track it down and lure it out of people and make it mine. Now my prayer is: no more of that, no more; not another hint or another glimpse, beyond what I can handle; nothing unsuited to my talent. Any new thing to write about, suitable or not, gives me a bad conscience, as it will crowd out something that I already have in mind, in hand. Enough is as good as a feast, better than a feast.

The young man who perhaps suggested subject matter to me, despite his ordinary aspect, sat at our table. Beginning on the second or third day, we took our exercise together, round and round the deck. Sometimes in the evening he would sit in the bar with me and my brother, and with my sister-in-law also, once or twice, when the sea was calm and the vessel steady. He was not particularly drawn to me. His hazy-looking hazel eyes would shift from person to person, as we walked or as we sat, in vain; and then come back to me. There were no youngsters his age, and only a few unattached women and girls, and no good-looking unmarried older men. He was left at loose ends, and we were at ease together.

On the third morning he felt emboldened to ask some questions. “Have you been to Europe before? Where are you going in Italy?”

I answered in some detail, and he in turn told me where he was going. “My friend is at Lido, near Venice. I’m going to meet him there.”

That afternoon, or perhaps the next morning, he inquired a little further, as to my place of residence in our native land, my domestic circumstances, and my source of income. “Do you just travel around, living on investments? Are you on vacation? Have you a job or a business?”

I am always less shy about answering questions than about asking them. This time I covered a good deal of ground. Up to that point he hadn’t seemed very warmly interested in my account of myself. But when I said, “I’m a writer,” he came to life.

“Oh, oh, so you’re a writer? A real writer who writes books? Any best sellers?”

No real writer who writes books, especially novels and stories, will be surprised at my saying that this question and answer changed matters between my shipboard acquaintance and me. Around practitioners of literature, meritorious or successful or both or neither, there is a magnetic field, from which some people flee, toward which others gravitate.

The gravitaters as a rule are those who have had extraordinary experiences either in the whole course of life or in some historic juncture or convulsion of chance, or by virtue of a peculiar gift for living or great vulnerability in some way. For example, an octogenarian woman in the Middle West whom I knew as a teenaged boy. In her early teens, she had sat all night with a rifle across her lap, waiting for one last southward thrust of the redskins, out of their desperate reservation in the north woods; which, as it turned out, was a false alarm. For example, a Greek underground hero between wars, or to be exact, between battles, in New York for remedial surgery; a matter of resetting broken bones in his right wrist and right hand, to enable him to press a trigger quicker. For example, a homosexual Italian young man, or perhaps I should say, grown boy, whose father in righteous indignation shot his lover to death, and was acquitted for so doing. I could give example after example; they all wanted, perhaps still want, will always want, to be immortalized. Their aggressiveness in this desire, their indiscretion, and their trustfulness, often amaze us.

My shipboard companion was not aggressive. But, having heard that I was a writer, he felt no further curiosity about me or my life. In certain expressions passing across his face I could see all his thought veering around to himself: his fate, his guilt or innocence, his weakness or strength, in whatever balance, enacted in whatever had happened to him, or might still happen. At last, at last, I sensed that the point of his questioning me was to be questioned back. “Where were you born?” I asked. “Where do you live? Where did you go to school? Did you go in for sports? Do you read a lot? What do your parents do? What are they like?”

Then suddenly he responded with his entire story in a succession of short sentences; in an incongruous tone of voice, soft, ordinary, cold. “Can you believe it? I was born and always lived in a kind of little town named Prison City, California. My parents came from Europe, my father from Sweden, my mother from Italy; but they weren’t like foreigners at all. They are both dead. My mother died a little while after my father died. My father killed himself. They were poor people. I was poor too, of course, until just lately. I have a friend who is well -off.

“There used to be a real prison in Prison City. Now it’s a reform school for girls; criminal girls, only they’re the ones that aren’t hard to handle. It’s a kind of progressive institution that looks like a campus, with landscape gardening. My father was the gardener and got to be the outdoor superintendent. He had an affair with one of the girls. She was only fifteen years old, but mature for her age; she’d had a baby. For my dad, it was on the up and up; he fell in love with her. My mother knew about it; she hated him anyway. If he hadn’t been in love he might have got away with it. He told my mother that there had been a couple of other scandals at the place that had been hushed up. He went to Florida on his vacation with my mother and wrote some love letters from there to the girl. The woman on the staff of the place who had charge of the girls’ mail opened the letters he’d written. They weren’t just sentimental letters; they were about their making love and all the rest of it. As soon as he got back from Florida they fired him, and they were going to bring him to trial, because the girl was so young. When he heard that, he didn’t come home for lunch or dinner; he just killed himself.

“When he didn’t come home at all that night, my mother thought he’d gone somewhere and got drunk. The house we lived in had a horse barn behind it. We didn’t ever have horses; it was our garage. You could go upstairs over it, which used to be for hay, and we kept things there. I haven’t any idea why I went there in the morning. Maybe my mother asked me to bring down a suitcase, or maybe I was looking for an old broken bicycle that I thought I could fix. Afterward I couldn’t remember any of that. I opened the door at the foot of the stairs and looked up. There was a beam over the stairs, and my dad’s body was hanging there.”

He paused, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked at me so intently that a good many seconds, perhaps several minutes, seemed to pass. Then he went on. “After it happened, especially after my mother died, I went wild, little by little. It wasn’t the body hanging up in the barn. I think you get a kick, when you’re a kid, finding something like that. I wasn’t close to my dad, and he couldn’t have helped me; he was a weak man. I kept thinking that what happened to him wasn’t fair; he must have felt that he just had to kill himself. It could happen to anyone; that scared hell out of me.

“I knew this friend in Sacramento and he felt sorry for me, the way I was taking it. We’ve been together for two years. This year we’re going to travel.” His golden eyes were as vague and his young voice was as flat when he came to his good fortune as they had been during the narration of his father’s romance and self-destruction.

Incorrigible man of letters even then, I said to myself: he hasn’t told it well. Oh, this is the great letdown and miscarriage of literature in our time. Most of us tell one another everything, or almost everything; we don’t write everything. Society consists of people who, tolerant or intolerant, can be trusted not to repeat what they have heard except to other people who can be trusted. Things written will be read, or at least talked about, by people who can’t be trusted; by your children and your aged parents and your poor relations, by your employer and your employees, by your lawmakers and your law-enforcers. What we write is a synthesis and a collage and a composite. Or we write about the lower classes who can’t strike back. Very few of us have the courage to write for posthumous publication; it means too great a deprivation of possible income, for one thing. Also, it seems harder work than when a publisher is waiting; and the tape recorder isn’t going to help. Spoken narration is too flat, too cold, and not sensuous enough.