The Nightmare Had Triplets (2 page)

    This book attempts to extend the naturalism of Lewis Carroll. That seems an explanation demanded by honesty; and, in its turn, demanding a paragraph or so to explain it.

    In 1929, then, during the revising of
The Cream of the Jest
into its definitive version, the thought occurred to the writer of
The Cream of the Jest
that, with one striking exception, nobody had as yet published a dream-story combining any considerable length with even the most shadowy pretence to veracity. Here and there one found a short story which, in its stinted way, stayed veracious enough. Even in
The Cream of the Jest
one found, among forty chapters, four chapters which seemed veracious. But Lewis Carroll alone of mankind appeared to have written books which dealt, and which dealt only, with the true stuff of dreams; which covered entirely the course of a normal dream; and which progressed at all times, as a dream does normally progress, under the local regulations of dream land.

    In
The Cream of the Jest
one considered—a bit ruefully—a novel builded about the dreams of a novelist. But one considered, also, the real issue dodged, and dodged doubly, by the facts: (
a
) that the dreams of Felix Kennaston were indicated by extracts or summaries; and (
b
) that these dreams were induced by extraneous means, more or less magical. Turning thence to
Jurgen,
to
The High Place,
to
Figures of Earth,
and to yet other volumes emanating at diverse periods from the same typewriter, one discovered, in very ample quantity, the dream which this or the other magic induced, and which (in consequence of a reason well known to all students of goetia) conformed to the logic, and to the touchstones, and to the experience, of a person who is awake. None of these volumes recorded any dream from the authentic, the wholly familiar standpoint of a normal dreamer. And it seemed odd that, after so much yearlong traffic with dreams, the author of the Biography of the Life of Manuel had never once dealt realistically with any more realistic species of dream.

    Odder still seemed the fact that, when you came to think of it, there did not appear to exist in American literature, whether in its maturity or during its prolonged infancy in England, any full-length dream-story which obeyed the actual and well-known laws of a normal dream—with the ever-memorable exception of the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll. These books alone did preserve the peculiar, the unremittent movement of a normal dream, and the peculiar logic of a normal dream, and the peculiar legerdemain through which the people one meets, or the places visited, in a normal dream, are enabled unostentatiously to take visible form or to vanish, quite naturally, without provoking in the beholder’s mind any element of surprise; just as these books preserved, too, the ever-present knowledge, common to many dreamers, that, after all, they are dreaming.... But I forbear to particularize the true somnial touch with which matters are handled. My point is that, in 1929, these two books remained inexplicably unfellowed in our literature, as the sole known aesthetic instances—I believed—of an elaborate and unflinching naturalism applied to the lands beyond common-sense.

    Even here the precise might file an objection. Alice smells pepper in Wonderland, she smells the “scented rushes” in Looking-Glass Land; and, upon several occasions, Alice partakes of food, and of physic also—tasting, as you may recall, an unusual medicine which had “a sort of mixed flavor of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast.” It is my strong personal belief that in no dream not induced by black magic or by gray magic did anybody ever smell or taste anything. So that small objection to the scientific exactness of Lewis Carroll is recorded in this place, for whatever it may be worth,—with the glad supplement that in every other important respect one finds his books to be triumphs in naturalism, with which the works of Flaubert, or of Zola, or of Tolstoi, let us say, cannot easily be compared.

    Returning to
The Cream of the Jest,
it seemed increasingly needful to the author of
The Cream of the Jest,
during the months which he gave over to revising
The Cream of the Jest,
that some novelist other than Lewis Carroll should treat a full-length dream, at full length, realistically. The trend of the time, one reflected, stayed definitely averse from any form of too timid restraint such as continued to enslave our creative writers. I mean (of course) that professed realists had given us, very multitudinously, the stark, the grim, and preferably the sex-flavored, truth about man’s life during his wideawake hours—the truth about just two-thirds of human existence,—without ever daring, it would seem, to venture beyond that rather vulgar fraction. All their novels displayed a quaint devotion to insomnia.

    The eight hours, more or less, which every human being devotes to sleep appeared to repel the professed realist; to bother him, in some obscure fashion; and to be a theme which no realist cared, or perhaps had the courage, to handle. Dreams had been analyzed and interpreted,
ad,
as the learned say,
infinitum,
and even, the impatient append,
ad nauseam;
but never since 1871 had any English or American writer dealt with any complete and convincing dream completely and convincingly.

    All this, too, in face of the plain fact that every normal person spends some third part of his existence in sleep, during which (according at least to such eminent authorities as Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes, and yet other reputable philosophers) every sleeper dreams continuously, and so, for eight hours
per noctem,
lives among supernatural surroundings and wields supernatural powers. Yet Lewis Carroll alone of our better-known realists had considered this huge field, this entire third of human life, with any seriousness or any veracity. And even this great pioneer had confined his explorings to the south temperate zone, as it were, in the callow, the sexless dreams of a child.

    It followed that nowhere in English prose literature was an adult dream represented from the actual point of view of a dreamer; and that some thirty-three per cent, of human experience remained untouched by any living creative writer at all truthfully. Since Bunyan’s time there had been an abundance of books which purported to record dreams; but, thus far, only two of them had tried honestly to obey the conditions of dream land, wherein all human beings pass a third of their lives.

    It really did seem a default which ought to be remedied.

    Here, in
The Cream of the Jest,
glimmered a fair starting point for that remedying. Caution whispered that to present the dreamer as one who lived as a litterateur during his waking hours would make it difficult for dullards to see in the proposed book anything save a re-writing of
The Cream of the Jest.
He could as easily be a painter, said caution, or, perhaps better still, a professional book reviewer; though indeed, for that matter, without any large difficulty, he could be made a stock broker, or a minister of the gospel (a notion with some fine possibilities), or a merchant, or a lawyer, or, yet more simply, a person of independent means. Such persons were still about in 1929. In brief, the sole needs of my protagonist as the tale shiftingly took form in 1929, seemed a fair allowance of literacy and of definite theories about art.

    Ah, but then—as experience forthwith assured me—but if I did make my protagonist a professional writer, no dullard anywhere would be able quite to avoid the belief I was writing about myself; and as a further, most salutary consequence, no dullard would fail to be rather cordially irritated. (It is for this reason, I remark in passing, that I always incline to make my protagonist a writer, or at the very least a potential writer, just as I labor toward much the same end when I hyphenate Richmond-in-Virginia.) Thus did experience woo me, outwhispering caution, and sturdily prompting me not to remit the pleasures promised by a continuance in mock egotism. And to the sage voice of experience I hearkened most reverently, because at my age one knows experience to be the best teacher.

    So, then, did experience lead me to decide that my protagonist, like Felix Kennaston (but, above all, like me, before my late conversion to naturalism) must perforce be a writer of romantic novels: and gradually my protagonist came closer toward me, solidifying, a little by a little, as it were, during his slow emergence from that shadowy realm in which the as yet uncreated characters of fiction abide restively; and he revealed to me, first of all, his inevitable name, his 
mot juste.
After that, he revealed his dream, just as clearly as (but not a jot clearlier than) it had been revealed to him.

    He revealed also, as I came to convert this dream into words and sentences and punctuation marks, an unpliant obstinacy. “But that,” he would repeat, parrot-like, whensoever I attempted to touch up a bit improvingly his revealings, “that is not the way it was.” And there was no doing anything with the man until I had returned meekly to his far less attractive version of the affair in hand. From the beginning to the end of his story (which was not the real end, to be sure, because a great deal else happened afterward) he has thus caused me endless trouble.

    For my gradually evoked acquaintance insisted that dream he had lacked not merely the ability to smell or to taste anything. His power of vision also was circumscribed, indescribably. Oh, yes, he saw everything clearly enough, in so far as went any practical need. It was only that a sort of mistiness pervaded matters, driftingly, unpredictably. And besides, at times, one or another visual detail would seize on the attention, obsessing it, somewhat as though, from a shrouding fog, this particular detail—an eyebrow, it might be, or a red note-book, or perhaps a horn snuffbox—had been picked out by a flashlight. In consequence, you did not ever obtain a leisured and complete view of any person or of any place.

    It sounds trivial enough. Yet this was a limitation, I soon found, which debarred the higher reaches of picturesque writing, because upon no occasion had my protagonist seen quite enough of anything to afford me the material for an elaborate describing of it. There was, for the rest, no noticeable abatement, he reported, in hearing or in touch: but three of his senses were as though drugged, two of them completely, and the other in part.

    Moreover, there was in his dream no perception of time. For the convenience of the reader I have suggested here and there a short interval of time, just as it have mercifully divided the book into chapters, to afford breathing spells. Yet here again has my friend remarked dubiously, “But that is not the way it was.” For in point of fact, he declared, there were no intervals. Everything happened, as it were, simultaneously, or at least almost simultaneously, now that events, and many persons too, merged swiftly and unaccountably, but quite naturally, into yet other events, or yet other persons; so that the action of this dream could not be thought of as consuming any definite period.... There seemed, in so far as my reporting dreamer could phrase the affair, to be no important difference between the length of a minute and the length of a century and the length of a yardstick, because time had become a matter incomprehensible and remote. He did not any more travel through time, but instead, time was now travelling about him, at a varying and, in so far as he was concerned, an irrelevant gait.... And space did very much the same thing. He did not often go to any place in this dream, for the sufficing reason that the place—swiftly and unaccountably, but quite naturally—came to him. He had severed, in brief, all his day-lit relations with time and space.

    But I forbear to cite further the conditions of any normal dream, inasmuch as these conditions are familiar to all mankind. My point is merely that I have endeavored to conform to every one of these conditions, and have found them to be both hampering and stimulating, throughout this book.

    I remark likewise that to write truthfully about human dreams is an enterprise, howsoever difficult, which I would recommend to my fellow realists, because their continued avoidance of an entire third of every human life seems to me a bit cowardly. Finally, I rejoice to have rectified, at least, and at howsoever long a last, my own delinquency in this matter.

    
Richmond-in-Virginia

    
October 1933

    “
In describing Peter the Hermit, Gibbon says that ‘his stature was small, his appearance contemptible; but his eye was keen and lively; and he possessed that vehemence of speech which seldom fails to impart the persuasion of the soul.’ He had been a soldier, but is declared to have adopted a monk’s robe in order to escape from an old and ugly wife.
”

    You lived in contentment. Your desired work was done. The romantic novels which you had written pleased, at all events, you. Sedately and wholly, as cool water contents a thirsting man, so did these books satisfy you, not because of their super-eminence in any special grace or profundity, but because they were what you had desired to do, and that which, somehow, amid all dissuasions, all stumbling-blocks, and all treacheries of chance, you had done. The completed novels thus figured, in your more frank moments of reverie, as a tangible prize, no more valuable in itself, perhaps, than a blue ribbon or a laurel wreath, but none the less as a tangible prize, in the prolonged game played against time and accident and one’s own frailty.