Tropic of Capricorn (5 page)

Often it happened, as in Russia, that a man came in with a chip on his shoulder. He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon. Nine times out of ten he was a good fellow, a fellow whom everybody liked. But when the rage came on nothing could stop him. He was like a horse with the blind staggers and the best thing you could do for him was to shoot him on the spot. It always happens that way with peaceable people. One day they run amok. In America they’re constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for their energy, for their blood lust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America is pacifistic and cannibalistic. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it’s a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbour and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; actually it’s a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody knows what it is to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the films where everything is faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place.

Nobody could have slept more soundly than I in the midst of this nightmare. The war, when it came along, made only a sort of faint rumble in my ears. Like my compatriots, I was pacifistic and cannibalistic. The millions who were put away in the carnage passed away in a cloud, much like the Aztecs passed away, and the Incas and the red Indians and the buffaloes. People pretended to be profoundly moved, but they weren’t. They were simply tossing fitfully in their sleep. No
one lost his appetite, no one got up and rang the fire alarm. The day I first realized that there had been a war was about six months or so after the armistice. It was in a street car on the 14th Street crosstown line. One of our heroes, a Texas lad with a string of medals across his chest, happened to see an officer passing on the sidewalk. The sight of the officer enraged him. He was a sergeant himself and he probably had good reason to be sore. Anyway, the sight of the officer enraged him so that he got up from his seat and began to bawl the shit out of the government, the army, the civilians, the passengers in the car, everybody and everything. He said if there was ever another war they couldn’t drag him to it with a twenty mule team. He said he’d see every son of a bitch killed before he’d go again himself; he said he didn’t give a fuck about the medals they had decorated him with and to show that he meant it he ripped them off and threw them out the window; he said if he was ever in a trench with an officer again he’d shoot him in the back like a dirty dog, and that held good for General Pershing or any other general. He said a lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he’d picked up over there, and nobody opened his trap to gainsay him. And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty towards his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all. And the second time I experienced the reality of war was when ex-sergeant Griswold, one of our night messengers, flew off the handle one day and smashed the office to bits at one of the railway stations. They sent him to me to give him the gate, but I didn’t have the heart to fire him. He had performed such a beautiful piece of destruction that I felt more like hugging and squeezing him; I was only hoping to Christ he would go up the 25th floor, or wherever it was that the president and the
vice-presidents had their offices, and mop up the whole bloody gang. But in the name of discipline, and to uphold the bloody farce it was, I had to do something to punish him or be punished for it myself, and so not knowing what less I could do I took him off the commission basis and put him back on a salary basis. He took it pretty badly, not realizing exactly where I stood, either for him or against him and so I got a letter from him pronto, saying that he was going to pay me a visit in a day or two and that I’d better watch out because he was going to take it out of my hide. He said he’d come up after office hours and that if I was afraid I’d better have some strong-arm men around to look after me. I knew he meant every word he said and I felt pretty damned quaky when I put the letter down. I waited in for him alone, however, feeling that it would be even more cowardly to ask for protection. It was a strange experience. He must have realized the moment he laid eyes on me that if I was a son of a bitch and a lying, stinking hypocrite, as he had called me in his letter, I was only that because he was, which wasn’t a hell of a lot better. He must have realized immediately that we were both in the same boat and that the bloody boat was leaking pretty badly. I could see something like that going on in him as he strode forward, outwardly still furious, still foaming at the mouth, but inwardly all spent, all soft and feathery. As for myself, what fear I had vanished the moment I saw him enter. Just being there quiet and alone, and being less strong, less capable of defending myself, gave me the drop on him. Not that I wanted to have the drop on him either. But it had turned out that way and I took advantage of it, naturally. The moment he sat down he went soft as putty. He wasn’t a man any more, but just a big child. There must have been millions of them like him, big children with machine guns who could wipe out whole regiments without batting an eyelash; but back in the work trenches, without a weapon, without a clear, visible enemy, they were helpless as ants. Everything revolved about the question of food. The food and the rent – that was all there was to fight about – but there was no way, no clear, visible way, to fight for it. It was like seeing an army strong and well equipped, capable of licking anything
in sight, and yet ordered to retreat every day, to retreat and retreat and retreat because that was the strategic thing to do, even though it meant losing ground, losing guns, losing ammunition, losing food, losing sleep, losing courage, losing life itself finally. Wherever there were men fighting for food and rent there was this retreat going on, in the fog, in the night, for no earthly reason except that it was the strategic thing to do. It was eating the heart out of him. To fight was easy, but to fight for food and rent was like fighting an army of ghosts. All you could do was to retreat, and while you retreated you watched your own brothers getting popped off, one after the other, silently, mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing to do about it. He was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and beaten, that he put his head in his arms and wept on my desk. And while he’s sobbing like that suddenly the telephone rings and it’s the vice-president’s office – never the vice-president himself, but always
his office –
and they want this man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes Sir! and I hang up. I don’t say anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him and I have dinner with him and his wife and kids. And when I leave him I say to myself that if I have to fire that guy somebody’s going to pay for it – and anyway I want to know first where the order comes from and why. And hot and sullen I go right up to the vice-president’s office in the morning and I ask to see the vice-president himself and did you give the order I ask –
and why?
And before he has a chance to deny it, or to explain his reason for it, I give him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and where he don’t like it and can’t take it – and if you don’t like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass – and like that I walk out on him. I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go about my work as usual. I expect, of course, that I’ll get the sack before the day’s over. But nothing of the kind. No, to my amazement I get a telephone call from the general manager saying to take it easy, to just calm down a bit, yes, just go easy, don’t do anything hasty, we’ll look into it, etc. I guess they’re still looking into it because Griswold went on working just as
always – in fact, they even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a dirty deal, too, because as a clerk he earned less money than as a messenger, but it saved his pride and it also took a little more of the spunk out of him too, no doubt. But that’s what happens to a guy when he’s just a hero in his sleep. Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president. It’s all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish. I know it as I was in it, because I woke up. And when I woke up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same door that I had walked in – without as much as a by your leave, sir!

Things take place instantaneously, but there’s a long process to be gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens according to law – and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night, hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn’t seem to make much difference whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set. Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several years. We hadn’t seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an important day in my life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I had often dreamed about but never hoped to see. I remember vividly that we were standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street towards dusk. I remember it because it seemed
utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about Mt. Aetna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th St., Manhattan. I remember the way he looked about as he talked, like a man who hadn’t quite realized what he was in for but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in returning. His eyes seemed to be saying all the time – this has no value, no value whatever. He didn’t say that, however, but just this over and over: “I’m sure you’d like it! I’m sure it’s just the place for you.” When he left me I was in a daze. I couldn’t get hold of him again quickly enough. I wanted to hear it all over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend’s own lips. It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends – and because he knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had travelled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself, drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future. O’Mara, yes, he had travelled a bit, almost all over the world – but as a bum, or else in the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met whom I could truly say had travelled. And he knew how to talk about his experiences.

As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby. What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real. Sometimes after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacré Coeur, through the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight.
Just a Brooklyn boy!
That was an expression he used sometimes when
he felt ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my being here to-day. Most of the places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them in our rambles through the park.

Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of Lawrence’s work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence’s ideas. Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence’s words. Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it did. Most of us live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open my eyes wide and full and clear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was only because I had renounced America, renounced my past.

My friend Kronski used to twit me about my “euphorias”. It was a sly way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety, of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the person called Henry Miller raised to the
n
th degree. In the latter mood, for instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolleycar. Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in one of my states of “euphoria”.