Snow White (2 page)

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SNOW WHITE:

IN THE AREA OF FEARS, SHE FEARS

MIRRORS

APPLES

POISONED COMBS

IN addition to washing the buildings, we make baby food, Chinese baby food:

BABY BOW YEE
(
chopped pork and Chinese vegetables
)

BABY DOW SHEW
(
bean curd stuffed with ground pike
)

BABY JAR HAR
(
shrimp in batter
)

BABY GOOK SHAR SHEW BOW
(
sweet roast pork
)

BABY PIE GUAT
(
pork and oysters in soy sauce
)

BABY GAI GOON
(
chicken, bean sprouts and cabbage
)

BABY DIM SUM
(
ground pork and Chinese vegetables
)

BABY JING SHAR SHEW BOW
(
sweet roast pork and apples
)

That is how we spend our time, tending the vats. Although sometimes we spend our time
washing the buildings. The vats and the buildings have made us rich. It is amazing
how many mothers will spring for an attractively packaged jar of Baby Dim Sum, a tasty-looking
potlet of Baby Jing Shar Shew Bow. Heigh-ho. The recipes came from our father. “Try
to be a man about whom nothing is known,” our father said, when we were young. Our
father said several other interesting things, but we have forgotten what they were.
“Keep quiet,” he said. That we remember. He wanted more quiet. One tends to want that,
in a National Park. Our father was a man
about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He gave us the recipes.
He was not very interesting. A tree is more interesting. A suitcase is more interesting.
A canned good is more interesting. When we sing the father hymn, we notice that he
was not very interesting. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explicitly commented
upon, in the text.

“I UNDERSTAND all this about Bill,” Henry said. He had unlocked the locks on the bar
and we were all drinking. “Nevertheless I think somebody ought to build a fire under
him. He needs a good kick in the back according to my way of thinking. Couldn’t we
give him a book to read that would get him started. It bothers me to come in at night
and see him sitting there playing Hearts or something, all that potential being pissed
away. We are little children compared to him, in terms of possibility, and yet all
he seems to want to do is sit around the game room, and shuffle the Bezique cards,
and throw darts and that sort of thing, when he could be out realizing his potential.
We are like little balls of dust under his feet, potentially, and he merely sits there
making ships inside bottles, and doing scrimshaw, and all that, when he could be out
maximizing his possibilities. Boy I would like to build a fire under that boy. I’ll
be damned if I know what to do about this situation which is vexing me in a hundred
ways. It’s just such a damned shame and crime I can’t stand it, the more I think about
it. I just want to go out and hurl boxes in the river, the more I think about it,
and rage against fate, that one so obviously chosen to be the darling of the life-principle
should be so indolent, impious and wrong. I am just about at the end of my tether,
boys, and I’ll say that to his face, too!”

AT dinner we discussed the psychiatrist. “And the psychiatrist?” we said. “He was
unforgivable,” she said. “Unforgivable?” “He said I was uninteresting.” “Uninteresting?”
“He said I was a screaming bore.” “He should not have said that.” “He said he wasn’t
in this for the money.” “For what then?” “He was in this for grins, he said.” “The
expression is unfamiliar.” “There were not a million grins in my history, he said.”
“That was shabby of him.” “He said let’s go to a movie for God’s sake.” “And?” “We
went to a movie.” “Which?” “A Charlton Heston.” “How was it?” “Excellent.” “Who paid?”
“He.” “Was there popcorn?” “Mars Bars.” “Did you hold hands?” “
Naturellement
.” “And after?” “Drinks.” “And after that?” “Don’t pry.” “But,” we said putting down
the duck, “
three days
at the psychiatrist’s . . .” We regarded Snow White, her smooth lips and face, her
womanly figure swaying there, at the window. Something was certainly wrong, we felt.
“Most life is unextraordinary,” Clem said to Snow White, in the kitchen. “Yes,” Snow
White said, “I know. Most life is unextraordinary looked at with a woman’s desperate
eye too it might interest you to know.” Dan keeps telling Snow White that “Christmas
is coming!” How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains?

THE pretty airline stewardess regarded Clem’s chest through his transparent wash-and-wear
nylon shirt. “He has that sort of fallen-in chest many boys from the West have, as
if a cow had fallen on him, in his early life. Only one shirt. The shirt on his back.
How appealing that is! Surely I must do something for this poor Westerner!” In the
rear baggage compartment Clem sweated over the ironing board Carol had made out of
a pile of old suitcases. “Snow White waits for me,” Clem reflected while ironing his
shirt. “Although she also waits for Bill, Hubert, Henry, Edward, Kevin and Dan, I
cannot help feeling that, when everything is said and done, she is essentially mine.
Even though I am aware that each of the others feels the same way.” Clem replaced
the iron in the bucket. His shirt looked fine now, just fine. The aircraft landed
softly, just as it should. The stairway fell correctly onto the landing strip. The
passengers followed protocol in getting off, the most famous emerging first, the most
ignoble emerging last. Clem was in the lower middle. He regarded the Volkswagens crowding
the Chicago streets, the children freaking out in their Army surplus, the black grime
falling from the sky. “So this is the Free World! I would so like to make ‘love’ in
a bed, just once. Making it in the shower is fine, on ordinary days, but on one’s
vacation there should be
something a little different, it seems to me. A bed would be a sensational novelty.
I suppose I must seek out a bordel. I assume they can be found in the Yellow Pages.
It is not Snow White that I would be being unfaithful to, but the shower. Only a collection
of white porcelain and shiny metal, at bottom.”

THE SECOND GENERATION OF ENGLISH ROMANTICS INHERITED THE PROBLEMS OF THE FIRST, BUT
COMPLICATED BY THE EVILS OF INDUSTRIALISM AND POLITICAL REPRESSION. ULTIMATELY THEY
FOUND AN ANSWER NOT IN SOCIETY BUT IN VARIOUS FORMS OF INDEPENDENCE FROM SOCIETY:

HEROISM

ART

SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE

BEAVER COLLEGE is where she got her education. She studied
Modern Woman, Her Privileges and Responsibilities:
the nature and nurture of women and what they stand for, in evolution and in history,
including householding, upbringing, peace-keeping, healing and devotion, and how these
contribute to the rehumanizing of today’s world. Then she studied
Classical Guitar I
, utilizing the methods and techniques of Sor, Tarrega, Segovia, etc. Then she studied
English Romantic Poets II:
Shelley, Byron, Keats. Then she studied
Theoretical Foundations of Psychology:
mind, consciousness, unconscious mind, personality, the self, interpersonal relations,
psychosexual norms, social games, groups, adjustment, conflict, authority, individuation,
integration and mental health. Then she studied
Oil Painting I
bringing to the first class as instructed Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Medium,
Cadmium Red Light, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue, Viridian, Ivory
Black, Raw Umber, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, White. Then she studied
Personal Resources I and II:
self-evaluation, developing the courage to respond to the environment, opening and
using the mind, individual experience, training, the use of time, mature redefinition
of goals, action projects. Then she studied
Realism and Idealism in the Contemporary Italian Novel:
Palazzeschi, Brancati, Bilenchi, Pratolini, Moravia,
Pavese, Levi, Silone, Berto, Cassola, Ginzburg, Malaparte, Mapalarte, Calvino, Gadda,
Bassani, Landolfi. Then she studied—

“I AM princely,” Paul reflected in his eat-in kitchen. “There is that. At times, when
I am ‘down,’ I am able to pump myself up again by thinking about my blood. It is blue,
the bluest this fading world has known probably. At times I startle myself with a
gesture so royal, so full of light, that I wonder where it comes from. It comes from
my father, Paul XVII, a most kingly man and personage. Even though his sole accomplishment
during his long lack of reign was the de-deification of his own person. He fluttered
the dovecotes with that gesture, when he presented himself as mortal and just like
everybody else. A lot of people were surprised. But the one thing they could not take
away from him, there in that hall bedroom in Montreaux, was his blood. And the other
thing they could not take away from him was his airs and graces, which I have inherited,
to a sickening degree. Even at fifty-five he was still putting cologne in his shoes.
But I am more experimental than he was, and at the same time, more withdrawn. The
height of his ambition was to tumble the odd chambermaid now and then, whereas I have
loftier ambitions, only I don’t know what they are, exactly. Probably I should go
out and effect a liaison with some beauty who needs me, and save her, and ride away
with her flung over the pommel of my palfrey, I believe I have that right.
But on the other hand, this duck-with-blue-cheese sandwich that I am eating is mighty
attractive and absorbing, too. He was peculiar, my father. That much can safely be
said. He knew some things that other men do not know. He heard the swans singing just
before death, and the bees barking in the night. That is what he said, but I didn’t
believe him, then. Now, I don’t know.”

HENRY was noting his weaknesses on a pad. Process comparable to searching a dog’s
underbelly for fleas. The weaknesses pinched out of the soul’s ecstasy one by one.
Of course “ecstasy” is being used here in a very special sense, as misery, something
that would be in German one of three aspects of something called the
Lumpwelt
in some such sentence as, “The
Inmitten
-ness of the
Lumpwelt
is a turning toward misery.” So that what is meant here by ecstasy is something on
the order of “fit,” but a kind of slow one, perhaps a semi-arrested one, and one that
is divisible by three. “Should I go to Acadia and remove my parents from there? From
that parking place where they have been parked since 1936? It is true that they are
well connected to the ground now, with gas and water lines and geraniums. The uprooting
would be considerable. The fear of the father’s frown. That deters me. He is happy
there, as far as I know; still I have this feeling that he ought to be rescued. From
that natural beauty.” Then Dan came in. “Dan, what is an interrupted screw?” Henry
asked. “An interrupted screw,” Dan said, “is a screw with a discontinuous helix, as
in a cannon breech, formed by cutting away part or parts of the thread, and sometimes
part of the shaft. Used with a lock nut having corresponding male sections.” “This
filthy,”
Henry said, “this language thinking and stinking everlastingly of sex, screw, breech,
‘part,’ shaft, nut, male, it is no wonder we are all going round the bend with this
language dinning forever into our eyes and ears . . .” “I am not going round the bed,”
Dan said, “not me.” “Round the
bend
,” Henry said, “the bend not the bed, how is it that I said ‘bend’ and you heard ‘bed,’
you see what I mean, it’s inescapable.” “You live in a world of your own Henry.” “I
can certainly improve on what was given,” Henry said.

“THOSE men      hulking   hulk in closets and outside      gestures eventuating against
a white screen difficulties      intelligence      I only wanted one plain hero of
incredible size and soft, flexible manners      parts      thought      dissembling
     limb      add up the thumbprints on my shoulders      Seven is too      moves
too much and is absent partly      different levels of emotional release calculated
paroxysms      scug      dissolve thinking parts of faces      lower area of Clem
from the nose’s bottom to the line, an inch from the chin cliff      not enough ever
     Extra difficulty! His use of color!      Firmness      mirror      custody of
the blow      scale model      I concede that it is to a degree      instruments      adequate
distances parched      to touch each one with invisible kindly general delivery hands,
washing motions      mirror      To take turns and then say “Thank you”      congress
of eyes turning with a firm, soft glance up      Edward never      extra density of
the blanched product rolling      tongue      child      straight ahead      broken
exterior facing      natural gas      To experience a definition placed neatly where
you can’t reach it and higher up      Daytime experiences      choler      film bliss”

JANE replaced the Hermes Rocket on the shelf. Another letter completed. That made
twenty-five letters completed. Only eighteen more letters to complete. She had tried
to make them irritating in the extreme. She reread the last letter. She was trembling.
It was irritating in the extreme. Jane stopped trembling. There was Hogo to think
about, now, and Jane preferred to think about Hogo without trembling. “He knows when
I tremble. That is what he likes best.” Hogo drove Jane down Meat Street in his cobra-green
Pontiac convertible. Nobody likes Hogo, because he is loathsome. He always has a white
dog sitting upright in the front seat of the car, when Jane is not sitting there.
Jane likes to swing from the lianas that dangle from the Meat Street trees, so sometimes
she is not sitting there and the dog is sitting there instead. “For God’s sake can’t
you stay put?” “Sorry.” Jane fingered her amulet. “That
canaille
Hogo. If he wants an exotic girl like me then he has to put up with a few irregularities
from time to time.” Hogo is not very simpatico—not much! He changed his name to Hogo
from Roy and he wears an Iron Cross t-shirt and we suspect him of some sort of shady
underground connection with Paul—we haven’t figured out exactly what yet. “Hogo can
I have an ice cream—a chocolate swirl?” Hogo took the chocolate swirl and
jammed it into Jane’s mouth, in a loathsome way. His mother loved him when he was
Roy, but now that he is Hogo she won’t even speak to him, if she can help it.