The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze Read online

  What about the N.R.A.? Well, I leave that to you Maybe the N.R.A. is a member of aspirin. Anyhow, together they make a pretty slick team. They are deadening a lot of pain, but they aren’t preventing any pain. Everything is the same everywhere.

  All I know is this: that if you keep on taking aspirin long enough it will cease to deaden pain.

  And that is when the fun begins. That is when you begin to notice that snow isn’t beautiful at all. That is when your hair begins to freeze and you begin to get up in the middle of the night, laughing quietly, waiting for the worst, remembering all the pain and not wanting to evade it any longer, not wanting any longer to be half-dead, wanting full death or full life. That is when you begin to be mad about the way things are going in this country, the way things are with life, with man. That is when, weak as you are, something old and savage and defiant in you comes up bitterly out of your illness and starts to smash things, making a path for you to the sun, destroying cities, wrecking subways, pushing you into the sun, getting you away from evasions, dragging you by your neck to life.

  It made me laugh, the way I used to laugh in New York, when I heard that radio announcer say that aspirin was a member of the N.R.A., and it made me remember. It made me want to say what I knew about aspirin.

  Seventeen

  Sam Wolinsky was seventeen, and a month had passed since he had begun to shave; now he was in love. And he wanted to do something. A feeling of violence was in him, and he was thinking of himself as something enormous in the world. He felt drunk with strength that had accumulated from the first moment of his life to the moment he was now living, and he felt almost insane because of the strength. Death was nothing. It could not matter if he died; feeling as he did, it could not matter. All that mattered was this moment, Wolinsky in love, alive, walking down Ventura Avenue, in America, Wolinsky of the universe, the crazy Polak with the broken nose.

  Everything was small, beneath his enormity, and he was seeking something to do, some cruelty; it was godly to be cruel, to hurt, even to destroy. It was proper to mock soft feelings in man, to stand by, laughing at the pettiness of man. There was no sacred thing in the world. He knew; he was certain; everything was made in a profane way, and there was no sense in trying to change ugly things into lovely things, no use being dishonest.

  He was in love and there was no girl. He was in love with female whiteness, the swelling of female parts, the curve of back, the soft cohesion of limbs uniting in wholeness, hair, smile or strong frown as of passion, female motion, woman, but mostly the idea of woman. He felt no tenderness, and he had no wish to imitate the moving-picture males, touching the females. That was fake. It was fraudulence. They were trying to keep people unaware of the truth, making it a soft event, a thing of no strength. They were trying to hide the animal drive in man, the lust to function violently, but they couldn’t fool him, Wolinsky. And the love songs: all rot. And the male weeping: disgusting. A man had to be alone, something by himself. Always a man had to be above occurrences; he had to stand up and laugh at the way things happened, the inevitable way.

  He was a slight boy with sad Polish eyes, small for his age, fidgety, a lover of books, loud in conversation. At thirteen he began to read books that were said to be evil, books with thoughts in them that were said to be vile, about women, Schopenhauer, and reading these books he began to expand, growing large inwardly. He became disdainful, aloof, mocking, and he made impolite remarks to his school teachers, shocking them, seeking trouble everywhere, a chance to quarrel, to be angry, a chance not to be passive and indifferent and half-asleep about life. It was all excessive nervousness, and it came partly from the books he read and partly from himself, the way he was, inevitably, insane with life.

  Nevertheless, there was a strange tenderness in him that he could never efface, and every now and then he would stare at himself in a mirror and see the tenderness in his eyes. It would make him frantic. He didn’t want to be that way. He didn’t want to be weak like other people. He was proud because he hadn’t once cried in ten years. And he knew there had been many occasions for him to cry. The time he struck his father and felt inwardly unclean. It was never for himself that he had wanted to cry; for others, for hurting something in them, but he had always made himself laugh.

  All his life he had wanted to be fully alive, physically, violently, and now he was beginning to feel what it was like. The feeling of vastness in him, the sense of unlimited strength, the mockery in his heart for sacred things, the ribaldry that he felt in regard to love. Love? He knew all about that nonsense. He had read an article in The Haldeman-Julius Monthly about love, and he knew. Love was purely physical; all the rest was imaginary, stupid, fake. Strength accumulated in man and had to be released. It was not personal; it was abstract, universal. One woman was the same as another; it was the function, the act that was inevitable.

  Any man who got soft inside about the lust that was in him was a fool. Any man who felt shame was a fool. Man was thus, the chemical situation was thus, there was nothing else to it. And the married women in church, singing, it was laughable: Freud said they were merely doing in a very subtle way what they dared not even think of doing: fornicating. Pathetic and amusing, pious ladies committing spiritual adultery in church, on Sunday. It was a fine thing to know, to laugh about. There was at least some godliness in being truthful, even if a man had to be a little vulgar.

  There was no girl. All his life something had kept him apart. He had felt love for certain girls in school, but something had kept him apart from them. First it was a feeling that he was unworthy. This feeling was mingled with a consciousness of prejudice against his race. To the others he was a Polak, nothing, nobody. Then it was timidity, then pride, and ever since it had remained pride. He could walk alone. He did not need to humiliate himself by asking a girl to be interested in him, wanting her body and all the rest of it. The soul. The part that really didn’t exist, according to science and The Haldeman-Julius Monthly, but somehow seemed always to be there in girls. The way they looked at things, the way they came out of their eyes, dancing or being naked or running violently, or weeping. He had seen the girls emerging from their eyes, and it had been very subtle, but he had understood the innate structure of each girl, the specific manner of motion. And always he had preferred the ones who had left themselves violently.

  He was a bit mad; he was certain of it, but it never worried him and he was never ashamed. It was out of the accumulated strength in him that his madness emerged in his conduct. One day, walking, he struck a telephone post with his fist, and the knuckles bled and his fist became swollen with pain, but he was not ashamed. He had been walking along, feeling expansive and large, and suddenly he had done it, not thinking about it one way or another. That was all: something to do, some cruelty. The post might have been a man, or life, or God, the idea of these things. It might have been all men, man. He had simply struck. A hurt fist was nothing. Inside he had felt exhilarated. He had laughed, shaking his hand with the pain, laughing about it.

  And his fights with other boys; they had always refreshed him. The least little thing would make him fight, and he didn’t care how large a boy might be. All he wanted was to function with strength, violently, to let himself out. They had broken his nose twice, but he hadn’t felt sorry. He was only a Polak. Physically, he was small. His features were hardly masculine. He knew all about these things. But inside; nobody could say that he wasn’t a man. He had taken pains to prove it. All his life he had taken pains to be stronger, braver than his fellows. He had been one of the first boys to begin smoking cigarettes at Longfellow School. He had been thirteen at the time. All the same, there was this old tenderness in him, and it was inexplicable.

  It was Sunday afternoon, September, and he was walking down Ventura Avenue, on his way to town. It was thick in him, the old lust, only in a new way: something besides fighting, striking things, a maddening sexual feeling, a desire for the universe, a desire to attack and violate it, to make his reality spec
ific, to establish his presence on earth. He felt no need to apologize for the bawdy feeling that was in him. It was not his fault. He hadn’t established the basis of the universe, the manner of life, the method of remaining sane.

  He met many friends in Court House Park where the afternoon band concert was being held, boys who feared and respected him, but secretly disliked him. He knew they did not like him. He had no friends. He was alone. He disliked the town; it was small and petty, full of the weaknesses of man. He felt himself to be a stranger in the place. And these boys who greeted him were merely the boys with whom he had grown up. They were in the park because of the girls, the girls with whom they had grown up. What they were doing was pathetic. Woman to him was more than the girls of his time. She was something primarily evil, something vast, eternal and ungiggling. All these girls were full of giggles. They giggled every time a boy looked at them. He walked about in the park, listening to the music in the summer air, watching the boys trying to make the girls, feeling the lust growing in him; then he left the park and began to walk toward Chinatown.

  There were some whores over there; he heard the music fading away, the town dwindling away from his mind with the music. He crossed the Southern Pacific tracks on Tulare Street, and began to walk among the Mexicans and Hindus and Chinese of Chinatown. The place was filthy with a filth that was man’s, but he had never been squeamish. The player-piano of the Lyceum Theatre was making a nervous racket, and a crowd of Mexicans and Negroes was standing in front of the theatre, eating peanuts and sunflower seeds, talking loudly. He saw one Mexican face that somehow angered him, the face itself, and for a moment he wanted to start a fight. It was strange: something unclean in man that had found expression in the face, and he wanted to object to the face physically. And the musical, sing-song Mexican talk; it annoyed him. It was too soft and effortless, not hard and solid like English, not precise. He wondered where the women could be, and he walked up a block to F Street. On the corner, a poolroom full of Chinese and Mexicans, much smoke, and no sight of female face or figure.

  He began to look up second-story windows, seeking some sign of professional evil. He saw red flower pots on window sills with sickly geranium plants growing out of them, and suddenly he began to feel that he was going around like a dog in heat. It made him sick to have such a feeling about himself, and yet he did not want to evade the truth. It was something like that, what he was doing. There was something of the low animal in it, and he hadn’t had such a feeling before.

  He wanted to be honest. He had come over to Chinatown to have a woman. He hadn’t had the thought in his mind in a secretive way; it hadn’t been in the background of his mind in the form of a vague possibility. It had been specific, outright. He would never be able to maintain his belief in himself if he did not go through with it. He began to look around for certain doorways, passageways leading to such places, small hotels. Nothing looked evil. Nothing seemed vast and universal and strong. The doorways of small hotels were exactly like other doorways. It was incredible. He wasn’t seeking something pathetic. He wanted genuine evil, clean and large and bawdy. And all that he saw was narrowness and uncleanliness, and it all reflected the dirt and weakness of man, his essential cheapness. He wanted to fight somebody, but recognized the wish as a subtle evasion and refused to entertain the thought.

  It was not a question of doing something with his fists; it was a question of finding out definitely about evil, whether or not it was in man to be really strong, or if it was essential for him to be something eternally small and maudlin. He felt this truth cleanly, accurately.

  Scrambling up the stairs of a small hotel, he remembered himself suddenly scrambling up the stairs of a small hotel in Chinatown and he remembered how suddenly, how secretively, he had turned into the passageway.

  He stood in the hallway of the hotel, looking about, absorbing the filthiness of the place, not the mere physical filthiness, the rotten odor, the ugliness of the walls, the low ceiling, but the symbolic filthiness of the hotel, the whole idea of it. There was a table in a corner with a small hand-bell on it, and a sign on the wall, please ring bell. He touched the bell and heard it ring, losing his breath. Waiting impatiently, dismissing a wish to run down the stairs and escape, he began to notice that there was no laughter, nothing of the universal about what was going on.

  He heard walking in the hall, soft slippers shuffling over soft carpet, and the sound was pathetic to him. Some common human being was moving toward him; that was all. He heard no sound of strong, godly evil, no laughter. And suddenly he was facing a small woman of fifty with hair on her upper lip, a white hag, and he was looking into her unclean eyes; no evil—filthiness.

  He wanted to speak but could not. “I want,” he began to say, then gulped and felt ashamed of himself. Then he wished to efface this woman from the earth, to have her politely out of his way, out of all life: her dirt, the rot of her age. Then he did what he believed to be a cowardly thing, the most cowardly thing he had ever done. He smiled. He permitted himself to smile, when as a matter of fact he did not wish to smile at all, when as a matter of fact he wished even to destroy the very idea of this person standing before him, and he knew that his smile must be weak and fake and pathetic.

  The smile told what he wanted. “Follow me, honey,” said the woman, leading him down the hall. Honey? he thought. From this hag? This sort of weakness and fraudulence, and from this sort of person?

  The old woman opened the door of a room, and he went in and sat down. “I’ll send a girl right over,” said the old woman, going away.

  Then he saw himself from away up in the firmament sitting pathetically in a small room, smoking a cigarette, feeling unclean, dirty in every moment of his life, from the first moment to this moment, but refusing to get up and go away, wanting to know, one way or another, strength or weakness, laughter or no laughter.

  A half hour later, a mere half hour, he was going down the stairs, remembering all the rotten details, the face, the hands, the body, the way it happened. And the ghastly silence as of death, the absence of strength, the impossibility of laughter, the true ugliness of it.

  He fled from Chinatown, delirious with anger and shock and horror. He saw the earth flat and drab, cheap and pointless, and what was worse he saw himself as he was, small, the size of a small man, and cheap and pointless and drab and ungodly, and everything despicable. He wanted to laugh at himself but could not. He wanted to laugh at the whole world, the fraudulence of all things that had life and motion, but could not. He began to walk in the city, not knowing which way to go, not understanding why he was there at all, walking, dreading the thought of ever again going home, and all that he could think of was the ghastly filthiness of truth even, the everlasting pettiness of man, the whole falsity of humanity.

  He walked a long while, and at last he went home, entering his father’s house. And when he was asked to eat, he said that he was not hungry, and he went to his room and took a book and tried to read. The words were on the pages as evasions, like everything else. He closed the book and tried just sitting and not thinking, but it was impossible.

  He could not get over the feeling of the cheapness of the whole thing, the absence of strength, the absence of dignity, the impossibility of laughter.

  His mother, worrying, standing at the door of his room, heard him crying. At first she could not believe it, but afterwards she knew that it was real crying, like her own crying sometimes, and she went to the boy’s father. “He is in there alone, crying,” she said to her husband. “Sammy, our boy, is crying, papa. Sammy. Please go to him, papa. I am afraid. Please see why he is crying.” And the poor woman began herself to cry. It made her very happy to cry over her son crying. It made her feel that at last he was like all of them, small and pathetic, a real baby, her boy, and she kept on repeating, “Papa, Sammy is crying; he is crying, papa.”

  A Cold Day

  Dear M—,

  I want you to know that it is very cold in San Francisco today, an
d that I am freezing. It is so cold in my room that every time I start to write a short story the cold stops me and I have to get up and do bending exercises. It means, I think, that something’s got to be done about keeping short story writers warm. Sometimes when it is very cold I am able to do very good writing, but at other times I am not. It is the same when the weather is excessively pleasant. I very much dislike letting a day go by without writing a short story and that is why I am writing this letter: to let you know that I am very angry about the weather. Do not think that I am sitting in a nice warm room in sunny California, as they call it, and making up all this stuff about the cold. I am sitting in a very cold room and there is no sun anywhere, and the only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today. I am freezing and my teeth are chattering. I would like to know what the Democratic party ever did for freezing short story writers. Everybody else gets heat. We’ve got to depend on the sun and in the winter the sun is undependable. That’s the fix I am in: wanting to write and not being able to, because of the cold.

  One winter day last year the sun came out and its light came into my room and fell across my table, warming my table and my room and warming me. So I did some brisk bending exercises and then sat down and began to write a short story. But it was a winter day and before I had written the first paragraph of the story the sun had fallen back behind clouds and there I was in my room, sitting in the cold, writing a story. It was such a good story that even though I knew it would never be printed I had to go on writing it, and as a result I was frozen stiff by the time I finished writing it. My face was blue and I could barely move my limbs, they were so cold and stiff. And my room was full of the smoke of a package of Chesterfield cigarettes, but even the smoke was frozen. There were clouds of it in my room, but my room was very cold just the same. Once, while I was writing, I thought of getting a tub and making a fire in it. What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story. I found an old tub and I brought it to my room, but when I looked around for books to burn I couldn’t find any. All of my books are old and cheap. I have about five hundred of them and I paid a nickel each for most of them, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn’t find any. There was a large heavy book in German on anatomy that would have made a swell fire, but when I opened it and read a line of that beautiful language, sie bestehen aus zwei Hüftgelenkbeu-gemuskeln des Oberschenkels, von denen der eine breitere, and so on, I couldn’t do it. It was asking too much. I couldn’t understand the language, I couldn’t understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire. The book had cost me five cents two or three years ago, and it weighed about six pounds, so you see that even as fire wood it had been a bargain and I should have been able to tear out its pages and make a fire.