The Adding Machine (25 page)

Neal Cassady did visit me at the South Texas farm, but never used the orgone box. Since Kerouac presumably got the story of my first accumulator from Cassady, whose tendency to exaggerate rivalled Jack’s, it’s a wonder they didn’t have me throwing orgies in the accumulator for the amusement of the wetbacks. But the orgone box does have a definite sexual effect; I also made a little one from any army-style gas-can covered with burlap and cotton wool and wrapped around with gunny sack, and it was a potent sexual tool. The orgones would stream out of the nozzle of the gas can. One day I got into the big accumulator and held the little one over my joint and came right off. That used to be one of Cocteau’s party tricks — take off all his clothes, lie down, and come off, no hands.

Wilhelm Reich was, so far as I know, the first investigator to apply the scientific method to sexual phenomena and actually measure the electrical charge of an orgasm and correlate these measurements with the subjective experience of pleasure or displeasure. There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929. For these experiments he was expelled from Norway, the traditional Scandinavian tolerance seemingly unable to assimilate such experiments. Perhaps any basic experiments into the human condition are dangerous to the tissue of false pride and misconception with which the human animal compulsively covers his nakedness.

Reich advocated the use of orgone therapy both as a preventive and as the best treatment for active cancer. He considered that cancer occurs when the electrical charge at the surface of the cells falls to a suffocation point. To offset this condition and tone up the cells, he developed orgone therapy. This therapy was rejected out of hand without trial by the medical establishment. Reich’s books were burned, his machines destroyed, and he died in prison.

Reich’s therapy is harmless and need not conflict with any other form of therapy. It could in fact be administered during the time it takes to get biopsies and arrange for an operation. It could also be used in hopeless cases and most importantly in precancerous conditions. By removing even the possibility of this form of treatment, the Federal authorities have taken a heavy responsibility on themselves, especially in view of the fact that independent researchers like Mr CD. Cone are now corroborating some of Reich’s findings.

Who is the FDA to deprive cancer patients of any treatment that could be efficacious? I am sure that most cancer patients would be glad to try any form of treatment that did not interfere with orthodox methods. The decision should rest, certainly, with the individual cancer patient and not with the FDA or the DAR. It has occurred to this investigator that orgone energy might be concentrated and directed in an effort to disperse the miasma of idiotic prurience and anxiety that blocks any scientific investigation of sexual phenomena.

When I took, some years ago, a loft in lower SoHo my friend David Prentice was building some furniture for me. We decided to make an orgone accumulator and assemble it in the loft He built a plywood box big enough to put a chair inside, with a layer of cork and a galvanized steel lining. On the outside he draped half a dozen ratty old rabbit-fur coats, to beef up the orgone charge. The rabbit coats give the box a surrealist look, very organic, like a fur-lined bathtub. I spent fifteen to twenty minutes a day in the box meditating, with the comfortable feeling that I was at least cutting down the odds of contracting cancer. It had occurred to me that the effect could be greatly enhanced by using
magnetized
iron and building the accumulator in a pyramid shape. If pyramids can prevent meat from decaying, they might do as much for you.

(A Book Review of the million-seller,
How to Stop Smoking.
Herbert Brean, Pocket Books 1975; 1st publ. 1959). In the form of a television ad.

It is interesting that tobacco, the most available and widely used of all drugs, should turn out to have the most conclusive mortality statistics. Such statistics on cannabis would undoubtedly be used to justify and continue existing laws, but no one so far has proposed to outlaw the manufacture, sale, and possession of tobacco.

The statistics on tobacco use and lung cancer, though widely publicized, seem to have little effect on smokers, even those of middle age or older who are quite aware of the immediate risk of lung cancer. They know they ought to stop, but they don’t know
how
to stop. This book — (holds book up to camera) — tells you how. The writer offers a money-back guarantee: ‘If you don’t give up smoking after reading this book and trying its proven methods, you get your money back.’

I bought this book. I followed the instructions. I stopped smoking — after fifteen years, two packs a day. Previous to reading Brean’s book I had never got beyond a few muddled attempts to ration myself down to one pack a day and never doing it, and was deeply convinced that it was hopeless to try. What magic words in this book enabled me, and many others who have read this book, to stop smoking?

The first step is to be sure you want to stop. Yes, think of everything you
like
about smoking. If you still want to stop, read on and you will. If you don’t want to stop, turn on another program.

Start thinking about it. Think of it coolly and calmly, without fear or hopelessness. Many others have done it — you can too. Consider the whole idea objectively. Don’t try to make even a tentative resolution. Think about it — that’s all. You can’t change it? It’s like the weather? Take a long cool look at that tobacco weather, and see whether you like it. Look at yourself looking forward to the next cigarette — you get your little treat after you come back from the supermarket, hustled from one cigarette to another from morning till night, don’t own your own hands, always crawling into your pocket and sneaking out another, you don’t even remember smoking another and another until you see the pile of butts in the ashtray, first pack almost gone at three in the afternoon ... mouth raw, he goes into momentary panic when he finds only three Senior Service left ... thank God — he finds an untouched pack in a drawer. Cancer sighs with relief from young oat cells need the tar and cyanide and nicotine to live and breathe.

Now just seeing all this without any reaction, from a point of zero cigarettes (you are
thinking
about stopping), you have already stopped; by reaching the point where you can look at it, a point in future time when you will stop smoking. You want to stop, and you are convinced that you can’t — without even making the attempt, without even
considering
the attempt? You doubt you could even sit in ‘Non-Smoking’ on a three-hour air trip, and you beat John Wayne to the draw when the no-smoking sign clicks off.

And think about those cancer statistics. Don’t scare yourself, just think about them. Already doctors are talking about an epidemic. Idea for a science fiction novel here: The steady increase in cancer becomes a tidal wave. Accelerated cancer reduces the smoker to a tumor in a few weeks. Tobacco turns out to be a long-range weapon of the Venusians to exterminate the natives. The breed could land by killing or weakening cancer antibodies — they are going to hatch out of the tumors. Don’t scare yourself, just look: You are looking right at cancer. Plop of diseased lung into a bloody trough . ..

A
(cigarette brand) is
great
after major surgery,’ said Doctor Caspar Higgin, after removing a lung from his twin brother.

So you’ve thought about it. Now make a list of everything you don’t like about smoking and carry it around with you. By thinking about it you already have a list. Now pick your time and
stop.
No cutting down, no rationing:
Stop. Do not permit
yourself one single exception.

The first day you don’t take it seriously — you might start again tomorrow — but somehow you don’t. By the third day you know you have actually stopped, and that you prefer the way you are now to the way you were when you smoked. Now you can see the dreary sordid slavery of tobacco. Why, one respected matron who tried to stop rushed out of her house at midnight in her pajamas, quite mad for cigarettes, cribbing in gutters and ash cans ... And Oscar Wilde often encountered a young friend on the floor as they both searched the trash for usable butts.

Observing what happens when you stop smoking will tell you a lot about what the actual function of smoking is. For one thing, people light up to cover pain, worry, embarrassment. Remember the advertisements for Murad cigarettes?

‘Embarrassing moments. . .’ (Her husband returns unexpectedly, etc.)

‘Be nonchalant: light a Murad.’

And when the doctor tells you you got oat cell cancer in both lungs, be nonchalant, light a Murad — you might as well.

I see the old smoking Burroughs dim jerky far away in a 1920’s comedy where it’s always two in the morning and languid aristocrats yawn out smoke rings. It was put down in the ads as glamorous, a badge of manhood and sophistication. I see it now as a dirty, ruinous, slobbish habit. Smokers of the world, look in the mirror. These are unsightly tricks’ — Doctor Strangelove slaps his creeping hand away from his pocket.

No-smoking Rallies could be organized . . .

‘Oh I just know I had to stop . ..’

‘It came to me real sudden, “I don’t have to do that” . . .’

‘I know, I know, I know . . .’

They wallow in congratulatory heaps until attacked by the displaced tobacco workers. But they can run so much faster ... they scatter laughing gaily. Tobacco posters rot and peel and flap in the wind. Radiant pop stars strip off tobacco plants. The tobacco industry is rained. Oh, there were a few people who smoked five cigarettes a day — they can grow their own for all the money to be made off them and some cranky old pipe-smokers. It catches on like mad: a whole film is made in which nobody smokes. Soon it is as bad form to flash a cigarette package as a mink stole.

‘In their insensate fury they could turn on other products,’ a former president of Tobacco Amalgamated warned bluntly. Yes indeed — on a lot of old products. When you stop smoking, all habits are called into question. You begin to take a long cool look at everything you think and do. How much of your thinking and doing is predicated on a conviction that you can’t change? You have just proven to yourself that you can. So why stop with cigarettes? You can give up anything or anybody.

‘Sorry . .. you’re an old bad habit.’

Those of you who have listened to this program want to stop smoking, otherwise you wouldn’t have listened. Buy Brean’s book
How To Stop Smoking.
Follow the Instructions in that book. And you will stop smoking.

Notes on Ted Morgan’s book,
Maugham,
which is a great deal more interesting than Maugham himself. Robin Maugham thought that his uncle Willy had made a Devil’s bargain. The Devil’s Bargain is always a fool’s bargain and especially for the artist Because the Devil does not, in fact
cannot,
dispense quality merchandise. He can make you the most famous, the most widely read, the richest writer in the world, but he cannot make you the best writer. Or even a good writer.

And Maugham was acutely conscious of his failures as an artist. Maugham expected to be placed in the very first rank of the second-raters. Sorry, Mr Maugham, there is no such category. Even the position of the second-rater is earned by some first-rate work. A second-rater is an uneven or specialized performer. I can think of writers I read years ago and have forgotten the writers name and the title. But I can remember a chapter, a paragraph, maybe just a phrase, that really shines. Without such flashes a voluminous output of well written volumes counts for little. I have postulated that the function of art is to show us the way to space. Applying this touchstone to words, Maugham fails as an artist. He is competent but never magical. It is many years since I read Maugham and he does not reread well. I cannot bring myself to care about his characters because he obviously does not care himself. Contrast the loving care which Conrad dedicates to Lord Jim. And the way in which Genet transfigures his pimps and thieves. Genet said that the writer must assume a terrible responsibility for the characters he creates. It is obvious that Maugham felt no such responsibility. Conrad and Genet are writers for the space age. Maugham is not.

Robin Maugham says that Willie was haunted by something evil. He relates this incident which took place in Maugham’s last years. He (Willie) was staring towards the door. His face was contorted with fear and he was trembling violently. ‘Who’s that coming into the room?’ he asked. Willie’s face was ashen as he began to shriek ‘Go away! I’m not ready! I’m not dead yet I tell you!’

‘I looked around but the room was empty, said Robin.

Perhaps if Maugham could have written about that. . . But it wasn’t in the bargain. Shortly before his death, he asked Robin, ‘You don’t believe one can lose one’s soul so completely in this life that there is nothing left do you?’ Robin dutifully assured him that this was not possible, like reassuring a cancer victim that he will recover.

Conrad remarks in one of his illuminating introductory notes that the Devil’s Bargain is always a fool’s bargain. And especially a fool’s bargain for a writer since a writer deals in
qualitative data.
A man whose goals are solid and realizable — wealth, power, fame, position — may feel that he has gotten his soul’s worth at least until the fine print is spelled out on him. But an artist stands to gain nothing from such a bargain.

Maugham, one feels, sold out at birth. There is nothing that he might have done if he hadn’t made the Bargain. What I remember about Maugham, and I read them all as they came out, sometimes in the Taushnitz edition in my
pension,
are a few sentences . ..

‘If someone calls and leaves a message that it’s important you can be sure it is important to them and not to you.’

’
The way to eat well in England is to eat breakfast three times a day.’

Is this
all?
Well, almost all. To my mind what a novelist does is create characters. Look at Maugham’s characters . . . The hero of
The Razor’s Edge,
I can’t remember his name to start with ... a nothing, appropriately played by the nothing Tyrone Power in the film.