The Adding Machine (29 page)

Looking through some of the reviews of
EXTERMINATOR!
...

Ho hum. This reviewer is very tired of so-called critics who would substitute for criticism invective and insults strung together like so many gibbering maniacs in an asylum.

And here is Anatole Broyard. . .

Genet was not
made
to say that. He did say it in front of Terry Southern, Dick Seaver and your reporter at a time when he was supporting the rebellion of youth with his presence.

Who is Broyard to speak for Genet and say he would
have to
be
‘camping’. I was there. Broyard wasn’t. I doubt if he has the pleasure of Genet’s acquaintance. That Genet was not camping is clearly indicated by the piece he wrote for
Esquire
on the Convention, by his support of the Black Panthers, not only with his words but with his presence, and by his later arrest at a student demonstration in Paris. In failing to recognize Genet as the real article Broyard betrays his own confusion.

If critics are to exercise the power they so desperately crave they will have to arrive at some acceptable standards for criticism and some conception as to what writing is about. Many people who call themselves writers and have their names on books are not writers and they do not write; a bullfighter who fights a bull is different from a bullshitter who makes passes with no bull there. The writer has been there or he can’t write about it. Fitzgerald wrote the Jazz Age, all the sad young men, firefly evenings, winter dreams. He wrote it and brought it back for a generation to read. But he never found his own way back. A whole migrant generation rose from
On the Road.
In order to write it the writer must go there and submit to conditions he may not have bargained for. He must take risks. Only those critics who are willing and able to follow him on this journey are competent to judge his work.

There are of course many critics who do maintain high standards and I have certainly received my share of constructive criticism. Writing an honest book review is hard work. I know because I have written book reviews. A review of a thousand words takes me at least ten hours and many revisions to complete. I could turn out an unfair negative review in ten minutes. Anybody could. A computer could do it just as effectively and even quicker since it is only necessary to string together derogatory comments with no regard to applicability. Broyard’s review of
EXTERMINATOR!
simply reprograms Philip Toynbee’s review of
Naked Lunch
Toynbee begins by saying he has searched himself carefully for pro-establishment bias, puritanism, prejudice against so-called avant-garde writing and finding himself as clean as the applicants for immortality in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead,
pronounces ‘this book boring rubbish’. Switch titles, dust in a few quotes, feed in the Toynbee program and out comes Broyard in ten seconds. Perhaps he has found his true metier as a computer programmer and I hope this consoles him for being redundant.

Audrey always reads in space. Most of the crew didn’t, ‘preferring to wallow in their own dreams like contented alligators,’ Audrey thought, with a touch of cool condescension. He preferred to feed his fantasies with carefully selected input and he made an oddly assorted selection. For this trip to Ba’Dan his books were:
An Outcast of the Islands
by Joseph Conrad;
Fury
by Henry Kuttner;
Brave and Cruel
by Denton Welch; some of his own pungent fever notes (he thought of them as potent spices to be used sparingly);
Brak the Barbarian
by John Jakes;
Anabase
by Saint-John Perse; Herodotus — what a liar he is;
The Shootist
by Glendon Swarthout, and oh yes one line
from Blood Hype
by Alan Foster which belongs up with the lush musky exquisite after taste of slime department, and a drug called Fringe culled from
The High Destiny
by Dan Morgan.

You see there is a method in his selection:
An Outcast of the Islands:
white shadows playing out charades of corruption like so many black and white cartoons against the sombre back drop of torpid rivers, swamps, jungle and sky with its prop thunder and clouds and rain that sloshes down on cue. What a film this book could make. Willems is the able ambitious clerk who falls into a trap old as Eve and deadly as Circe. Driven to restless inactivity by the hostility of Almayer, who fears his influence with Captain Lingard, Willems meets a WOMAN for the first time in his life. 30 years old, content with an unattractive wife, he never thought much about sex, too busy getting on and making money.

‘It is written that white fools are the slaves of their passions as they have enslaved us with their guns and their money and their machines and their laws,’ says Babalatchi the old one-eyed Malay, what a sententious old bore, worse than Almayer himself, whose thought processes are so basically dull, self directed and heavy that he achieves at times a oneness with the objects of his thought not unlike the detachment of the sage as if a river, the weather, his hatred of Willems and his intrigues to rid himself of this danger to his position, float solid in his mind of their own volition, while he looks on as a remote witness.

‘The left shore is very unhealthy,’ says Almayer. ‘Strange that only the breadth of the river. . .’ He dropped off into deep thoughtfulness as if he had forgotten his grievances in a bitter meditation upon the unsanitary conditions of the virgin forests on the left bank . . . Cut in shots of jungle, river, and sky in the style of 19th century impressionist painting ending with paintings of the Left Bank in Paris like
Le Buveur d’absinthe.

Although Almayer hates the river and the jungle they touch him more directly than they touch Babalatchi who is encased in his ritualized perceptions. Here Almayer takes his place as an advanced master of deep meditation: ‘His arms hanging down on each side of the chair, he sat motionless in a meditation so concentrated and so absorbing with all his power of thought deep within himself that all expression disappeared from his face in an aspect of staring vacancy. The lamp standing on the far side of the table threw a section of a lighted circle on the floor where his outstretched legs stuck out from under the table with feet rigid and turned up like the feet of a corpse. His set face with fixed eyes could also be the face of a corpse but for its vacant yet conscious aspect, the hard the stupid the stony aspect of one not dead but only buried under the dust, ashes and corruption of personal thoughts, of base fears, of selfish desires. Ali glanced down at him and said unconcernedly ‘Master finish?’

Almayer there in the lamplight from his dinner table, Ali clearing the table, could also be a 19th century painting, Delacroix perhaps, with the chair and the light by Van Gogh.

Captain Lingard, Lord of the Seas, is a Daddy Warbucks cartoon with a kind and heavy hand. He knows his Malays and that the Malays and Arabs are stylized recordings. They were there before the white man came. Like the river and forest they will be there after the white men are gone.

Yes, Babalatchi knows his white men.’ Ai it is written that all white men are fools.’

Blast off. Everyone in his bunk. The space ship looks rather like a submarine — tiers of bunks and lockers all very functional. Audrey’s books have iron filings pressed into the covers which give them an ozony smell The shelf by his bunk is magnetized to keep his books, possessions and equipment from floating around.

In the timeless silence of space every thought, feeling and perception is immediately translated into spatial terms. Pictures, tastes, smells pop out of the words. He has a feeling of participating in the scenes that rise from the pages in front of his eyes, and at the same time a realization of unreality and distance. Rather like being an actor in a play watching the stage through a telescope.

Very sharp and clear and far away: ‘The man who suggested Willems a mistrusted, disliked worn-out European, living on the reluctant toleration of that outpost up that sombre stream which our ship was the only white man’s ship to visit, ... Hollow clean-shaven cheeks, a heavy gray moustache, eyes without any expression whatever, he wandered silently among the houses in daylight almost as dumb as an animal. An air of futile mystery hung over him, something not exactly dark but obviously ugly.’ Very much like a burnt out terminal fever case, consumed by the deadly ecstasies of fever delirium, a solid empty body from which the soul has departed.

Audrey leafs through his fever notes. All the crew had had fever at one time or another, it was, like malaria in the tropics, one of the dangers of space travel. Sooner or later you came to terms with it, learned to live with it, or it destroyed you.

In
Fury
by Kuttner — a bad title Audrey thinks, no wonder it went out of print — the deadly temptation takes the form of an organism which by direct neural contact establishes a lethal symbiosis that ensures death in a few years. ‘Happy Cloak addicts lasted about two years on the average. The thing was a biological adaptation of an organism found in the Venusian seas. It got its prey by touching it. After that neuro-contact had been established the prey was quite content to be ingested. It was a beautiful garment, a living white like the white of a pearl shimmering with rippling lights, stirring with a terrible ecstatic movement as the lethal symbiosis was established.’

Blood Hype
concerns a drug so habit forming that withdrawal involves an excruciatingly painful death. ‘Moderate doses produce a “fire fit”, an intense burning sensation that adds to the overall pleasure.’

Of course one could come to terms and take it all quite lightly, why he might write an inspirational article for
The Reader’s
Digest, How I Turned My Fever into a Profitable Part Time
Business,
raising miniature Happy Cloaks in a basement aquarium. Choicer than Piranha fish my dear her glow in the dark.

He turns to a story called
The Barn
in Denton Welch’s
Brave and Cruel.
How charming and innocent. The boy loosens his pants and chins himself on a beam: ‘I rested my chin on the beetle eaten oak. Slowly and gently I felt my trousers slipping. They slid caressingly over my hips and fell with a soft plop to my ankles. I still hung there supported by my chin and my tingling arms. Soft draughts of air blew deliciously against my complete nakedness. Now I am a criminal whose feet have been tied together and whose body has been stripped by the hangman living passionately my idea of a criminal on the gibbet while the rain beat on the barn doors and drops fell from the roof.’

Audrey can see the naked red-haired boy lost back there with little scraps of delight and burning scrolls in your birthday suit. ‘Let’s go Audrey’ stripped naked down to his quivering toes intense burning sensation along the backs of his thighs musty unused barn in the August heat his nuts crinkle to autumn leaves long ago ass going where?

From
Brak
the Barbarian:’
A smell of offal and garbage, sweet sputtering torch wood, strange drugs and incense, narrow thoroughfares that still stink in the crisp frosty air. A beggar blocks the narrow street.

‘Just one dishna Outlander.’

‘Stand out of my path.’

The mendicant glanced right and left as if seeking assistance. The narrow alley of shuttered shops was empty. Just ahead, where the street became a slop strewn stair half the level of a house, revellers could be seen on the upper levels. They raced back and forth across a square under the frosted blue light from torches set in the walls. It’s all very Thief of Baghdad Adventure stories, evoking Audrey’s fantasies of danger in faraway places. A bit tinsel and worn at the seams, the sky is thin as paper here. It’s escape from the fever, from his corrupted flesh into a world of magic and adventure.

And here’s
The Shootist
after a shootout: ‘The bite of smoke was in his nose and the taste of death on his tongue the danger past and now the sweat and suddenly the nothingness, the sweet clean feel of being bom.’ Audrey could feel the custom made .44 in his hands, the short unsighted nickel-plated barrel, the pearl handle shimmering like a happy cloak, the smooth light double action, the deadly precision of bullets grouping within a two inch circle at 20 yards, the sweet clean feeling of being born without memory of the past.

In this quarter of vacant lots and rubbish a child sad as the death of monkeys offered us his pictures of a squirrel hunt (a shared interest in slightly dangerous sports ... pistol licenses will be issued . .. I don’t believe in miracles). I will be off with the wild geese in the sick smell of morning.

‘The beggar raced towards the stairs shouting “Darters ho! A stranger down here in Sweetmeat Alley!” In the blowing murk a company of small lithe figures who had been racing past wheeled into sight. A dozen or more filthy boys screeched and squealed down the stairs. The boys formed a circle just up the street, dirty-skinned underfed waifs with pointed wolf’s teeth they gave off a rank sharp animal smell Where eye pits should have been, each carried two silver disks embedded between eyebrow and cheek bone. Their finger tips too were made of this silver crystal stuff and pointed like needles. A boy somewhat taller than the rest stepped forward. The blind crystal silver disks winked with reflections of the smoky blue torches round about. He capered in his animal skin breech clout and executed a contemptuous bow.’