Tropic of Capricorn (33 page)

Another shot of rye as the sea food’s coming along and he starts in again. “I meant that about taking you on a trip with me. I’m thinking about it seriously. I suppose you’ll tell me you’ve got a wife and a kid to look after. Listen when are you going to break off with that battle-axe of yours? Don’t you know that you’ve got to ditch her?” He begins to laugh softly. “Ho! Ho! To think that I was the one who picked her out for you! Did I ever think you’d be chump enough to get hitched up to her? I thought I was recommending you a nice piece of tail and you, you poor slob, you marry her. Ho ho! Listen to me, Henry, while you’ve got a little sense left: don’t let that sour-balled puss muck up your life for you, do you get me? I don’t care what you do or where you go. I’d hate to see you leave town … I’d miss you, I’m telling you that frankly, but Jesus, if you have to go to Africa, beat it, get out of her clutches, she’s no good for you. Sometimes when I get hold of a good cunt I think to myself now there’s something nice for Henry – and I have in mind to introduce her to you, and then of course I forget. But Jesus, man, there’s thousands of cunts in the world you get along with. To think that you had to pick on a mean bitch like that …
Do you want more bacon?
You’d better eat what you want now, you know there won’t be any dough later.
Have another drink, eh?
Listen, if you try to run away from me to-day I swear I’ll never lend you a cent … What was I saying? Oh yeah, about that screwy bitch you married. Listen, are you going to do it or not? Every time I see you you tell me you’re going to run away, but you never do it. You don’t think you’re supporting her, I hope? She don’t
need
you, you sap, don’t you see that? She just wants to torture you. As for the kid … well, shit, if I were in your
boots I’d drown it. That sounds kind of mean, doesn’t it, but you know what I mean. You’re not a father. I don’t know what the hell you are … I just know you’re too god-damned good a fellow to be wasting your life on them. Listen, why don’t you try to make something of yourself? You’re young yet and you make a good appearance. Go off somewhere, way the hell off, and start all over again. If you need a little money I’ll raise it for you. It’s like throwing it down a sewer, I know, but I’ll do it for you just the same. The truth is, Henry, I like you a hell of a lot. I’ve taken more from you than I would from anybody in the world. I guess we have a lot in common, coming from the old neighbourhood. Funny I didn’t know you in those days. Shit, I’m getting sentimental …”

The day wore on like that, with lots to eat and drink, the sun out strong, a car to tote us around, cigars in between, dozing a little on the beach studying the cunts passing by, talking, laughing, singing a bit too – one of many, many days I spent like that with MacGregor. Days like that really seemed to make the wheel stop. On the surface it was jolly and happy go lucky; time passing like a sticky dream. But underneath it was fatalistic, premonitory, leaving me the next day morbid and restless. I knew very well I’d have to make a break some day; I knew very well I was pissing my time away. But I knew also that there was nothing I could do about it –
yet.
Something had to happen, something big, something that would sweep me off my feet. All I needed was a push, but it had to be some force outside my world that could give me the right push, that I was certain of. I couldn’t eat my heart out, because it wasn’t in my nature. All my life things had worked out all right –
in the end.
It wasn’t in the cards for me to exert myself. Something had to be left to Providence – in my case a whole lot. Despite all the outward manifestations of misfortune or mismanagement I knew that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And with a double crown too. The external situation was bad, admitted – but what bothered me more was the internal situation. I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite, my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my geniality, my powers of adaptation. No
situation in itself could frighten me: I somehow always saw myself sitting pretty, sitting inside a buttercup, as it were and sipping the honey. Even if I were flung in jail I had a hunch I’d enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to resist, I suppose. Other people wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn’t bother me nearly so much as what they were doing to others or to themselves. I was really so damned well off inside that I had to take on the problems of the world. And that’s why I was in a mess all the time. I wasn’t synchronized with my own destiny, so to speak. I was trying to live out the world destiny. If I got home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house, not even for the kid, I would turn right around and go looking for the food. But what I noticed about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no sooner outside and hustling for the grub than I was back at the Weltanschauung again. I didn’t think of food for
us
exclusively, I thought of food in general, food in all its stages, everywhere in the world at that hour, and how it was gotten and how it was prepared and what people did if they didn’t have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that everybody would have it when they wanted it and no more rime wasted on such an idiotically simple problem. I felt sorry for the wife and kid, sure, but also felt sorry for the Hottentots and the Australian Bushmen, not to mention the starving Belgians and the Turks and the Armenians. I felt sorry for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack of imagination. Missing a meal wasn’t so terrible – it was the ghastly emptiness of the street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like another, and all so empty and cheerless-looking. Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and beautifully-hideously-elegant brown-stone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be looking for a crust of bread. That’s what got me. The incongruousness of it. If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell “Listen, listen, people, I’m a guy what’s hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the garbage brought out? Who wants
the drainpipes cleaned out?” If you could only go out in the street and put it to them clear like that. But no, you don’t dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you’re hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That’s something I never understood. I don’t understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple – you just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can’t say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don’t know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That’s what I think about, more than about whose trap it’s going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate. And that’s just what the bastards don’t want you to do –
to live!
They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That’s reasonable. That’s intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn’t be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn’t have to shit in your pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn’t be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million-billion varieties, maybe there wouldn’t even be glass in the windows, maybe you’d have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn’t be French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn’t be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn’t be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because there wouldn’t be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months and years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn’t need a visa or a passport or a carte d’identité because you wouldn’t be registered anywhere and you wouldn’t bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn’t make any difference since you wouldn’t own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free? During this period when I was drifting from door to door,
job to job, friend to friend, meal to meal, I did try nevertheless to rope off a little space for myself which might be an anchorage; it was more like a lifebuoy in the midst of a swift channel. To get within a mile of me was to hear a huge dolorous bell tolling. Nobody could see the anchorage – it was buried deep in the bottom of the channel. One saw me bobbing up and down on the surface, rocking gently sometimes or else swinging backwards and forwards agitatedly. What held me down safely was the big pigeon-holed desk which I put in the parlour. This was the desk which had been in the old man’s tailoring establishment for the last fifty years, which had given birth to many bills and many groans, which had housed strange souvenirs in its compartments, and which finally I had filched from him when he was ill and away from the establishment; and now it stood in the middle of the floor in our lugubrious parlour on the third floor of a respectable brown-stone house in the dead centre of the most respectable neighbourhood in Brooklyn. I had to fight a tough battle to install it there, but I insisted that it be there in the midmost midst of the shebang. It was like putting a mastodon in the centre of a dentist’s office. But since the wife had no friends to visit her and since my friends didn’t give a fuck if it were suspended from the chandelier, I kept it in the parlour and I put all the extra chairs we had around it in a big circle and then I sat down comfortably and I put my feet up on the desk and dreamed of what I would write if I could write. I had a spittoon alongside of the desk, a big brass one from the same establishment, and I would spit in it now and then to remind myself that it was there. All the pigeon-holes were empty and all the drawers were empty; there wasn’t a thing on the desk or in it except a sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much as a pothook.

When I think of the titanic efforts I made to canalize the hot lava which was bubbling inside me, the efforts I repeated thousands of times to bring the funnel into place and capture
a
word,
a
phrase, I think inevitably of the men of the old stone age. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years, three hundred thousand years to arrive at the idea of the paleolith.

A phantom struggle, because they weren’t dreaming of such a thing as the paleolith. It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or they don’t happen, that’s all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we’ve lost the habit of falling asleep. We don’t know how to let go. We’re like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.

I think if I had been crazy I couldn’t have hit upon a better scheme to consolidate my anchorage than to install this Neanderthal object in the middle of the parlour. With my feet on the desk, picking up the current, and my spinal column snugly socketed in a thick leather cushion, I was in an ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam which was whirling about me, and which, because they were crazy and part of the flux, my friends were trying to convince me was life. I remember vividly the first contact with reality that I got through my feet, so to speak. The million words or so which I had written, mind you, well ordered, well connected, were as nothing to me – crude ciphers from the old stone age – because the contact was through the head and the head is a useless appendage unless you’re anchored in mid-channel deep in the mud. Everything I had written before was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that’s why it doesn’t catch fire, doesn’t inflame the world. I was only a mouthpiece for the ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one thought which would come up out of me, out of the lifebuoy, was a Herculean task. I didn’t lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression – I lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the juice. The bloody machine wouldn’t stop, that was the difficulty. I was not only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it whatever.

I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the other mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials and which I had made with my own hands and
my own blood slowly began to function. I had gone to the theatre nearby to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing on line in the lobby, I already experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of normality, which is a very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow its foul breath in my mouth – it wouldn’t matter. I might bend over and kiss the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm could possibly come to me. There was not just a balance in this constant warfare between health and disease, which is all that most of as may hope for, but there was a plus integer in the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease was completely routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment, one would never again be ill or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this conclusion is to make a jump which would take one back farther than the old stone age. At that moment I wasn’t even dreaming of taking root; I was experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the miraculous. I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was willing to the then and there for the privilege of the experience.

What happened was this … As I passed the doorman holding the torn stub in my hand the lights were dimmed and the curtains sent up. I stood a moment slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I had the feeling that throughout the ages man had always been mysteriously stilled by this brief moment which preludes the spectacle. I could feel the curtain rising
in man.
And immediately I also realized that this was a symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man, would have mounted the boards. I didn’t think this thought – it was a realization, as I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that the machine stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage and beheld the marble
staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the balcony. I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the balustrade. The man could have been myself, the old self which had been sleepwalking ever since I was born. My eye didn’t take in the entire staircase, just the few steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the stairs and his hand was never removed from the marble balustrade. I felt the curtain descend, and for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving amidst the sets, like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being enacted on the stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as the bread and cheese lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their long life joined at the hips. I saw only that which was alive! the rest faded out in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe the little patch of staircase which is imperishable.