Assorted Prose Read online

  “I?” I protested. “I said little, but that little, well.”

  “Stuff!” she snapped. “Your tongue didn’t stop for four hours. You drove poor Maggie Wentworth absolutely to sleep. And as for Horace, you brought on a bilious attack that had him hiccuping like a cricket.” [Several pages of such dialogue are here expunged.—ED.] Even now, I find it difficult to believe that her impression of the evening is the correct one. One piece of evidence, however—admittedly circumstantial—emerged to support her case. The Wentworths never had us back, though they owe us.

  After this seizure I was more watchful of myself. I deliberately curtailed my conversational offerings, even in relation to subjects upon which I was plainly the best informed and possessed the most lively and intricate opinions. I made myself, as it were, a mere supplier of footnotes, and artificially withheld from my fellow-humans the riches of information and nuance I knew to be within me. I was on the verge of shucking this (as I thought) foolish and inhibiting cocoon when late one night, as I was briefly qualifying something someone else had said—scarcely, indeed, qualifying; merely restating his gist in more lucid and understandable terms—I noticed, to my horror, that a delicate but distinct glaze had overspread the faces of my auditors. It is impossible to convey the macabre effect. It was not so much that their eyes had gone out of focus (for some eyes were staring fixedly at me) or that their mouths had sagged open (for some mouths were rigidly clamped shut): It was the curious uniformity of complexion, as if with one swipe their faces had been painted with the same lacquer, an impalpable coating whose emotional color, translated into visual terms, was the yellow of distant wheat fields seen through a grimy train window. And, though I paused, gagging on my terror at this disgusting omen, I went right on talking. It was then that I realized that I was a hopelessly ill man.

  My subsequent decay was not without its pretty phosphorescences. One of the most vivid, and in a way mystical, sensations is that of repetition. As words issue from one’s mouth, one is conscious of having said them before, but with no idea of whether it was an hour ago, a week ago, or in another world altogether. The feeling is not unlike the universally experienced intuition of having been in a strange place at a previous time, which offers to some a comforting proof of the doctrine of reincarnation. The bore’s repetition wears a kindred nimbus of romantic reassurance; though I know I have pronounced these words before, perhaps to this identical company, yet I have no inclination to stop. Indeed, the words seem enhanced by repetition, as in some aesthetic credos furniture and utensils are improved in beauty by the marks of wear left upon them by humble thumbs.

  Becoming a bore is far from a simple, simultaneous decline of the mental and sensory faculties. On the contrary: some are unhealthily heightened. As one’s stock of anecdotes and topics dwindles to a precious few, one’s ability to relate these obsessive subjects to a running conversation increases. It is truly astounding with what ease the mind of the bore creates an illusory relevance! If, as has been said, the mark of the rational mind is the ability to perceive connections between unlike things, then the bore is truly in the forefront of rational beings. For instance: I am oppressed by a peculiar vague emotion, or circular set of propositions, about my home town that, boiled down to its essence, might go as follows: “It seems extraordinary to me that the town where I was born, and spent all my formative years, had nothing extraordinary about it. Yet is not this, in a sense, extraordinary?” Not that I ever state it so baldly. My effort to unburden myself of this strange message usually takes the form of a sentence beginning, “In the town where I grew up,” and going on to describe some innocuous condition like the way the mailman walked up one side of the street and then down the other. Non-bores can have no conception of how many opportunities I perceive in the course of an hour to intrude this kind of information. A conversation on, say, cybernetics seems to my deranged but active brain an immense sieve full of holes crying to be plugged with a sentence beginning, “In the town where I grew up.” The glaze on the faces around me is no longer a deterrent, since that particular varnish is applied now the moment I enter a room. I am indifferent to it; I am indifferent to sniggers, to yawns, to the creeping net of ostracism that is tightening around me and my family. There is one delight left in my life, one music toward whose enchanted strains my whole being is bent. My throat itches, my larynx inflates with air, my tongue contorts; and I am drowned in bubbling syllables of bliss.

  Yet, between the luminous day of normality and the ecstatic night of boringness there exists a twilight, brief for some, agonizingly long for others, in which the sufferer flitters ambiguously among phantasmal shapes of embarrassment and shame. While his tongue happily lopes along, a remote corner of his mind involuntarily observes the dismal effects he is producing; in intervals of extreme lucidity he is even bored himself. It is in such a twilit moment that I have sat down to pen, before the black curtain falls finally, these hasty words, this quick cry. In the town where I grew up.… [The remaining hundred and eighty thousand words of the confession, while of indubitable interest to the specialist, are well in excess of the needs of the general reader.]

  THE UNREAD BOOK ROUTE

  IMAGINE TWO RECTANGLES, representing the first and second stories of my home. Each contains an angular flux, clockwise and counterclockwise respectively, of arrows, lettered, at various elbows, A through G. This is the unread book route. Over the last eighteen months I have charted it by means of patient observation, phosphorescent tracing dyes, electronically tripped cameras, factory-tuned logarithmic tables, and some inspired—as they say in the scientific quarterlies—guesswork. While I dare not claim for my investigations an importance equal to the more publicized researches of the I.G.Y. (researches that have conclusively demonstrated, according to my reading of Life, that the ionosphere is shaped like a macaroni’s cravat, that the continents are merely large irregular cherries in a wobble of silicon Jell-O, and that the Pacific Ocean bulges toward Tahiti whenever you leave the hot water running), nevertheless The Unread Book Route is one more piece fitted into the puzzle of the mysterious and irresistible currents that do so much to make our terrestrial existence discomfiting.

  The books enter at A, which is the letter slot. I cut the slot myself, working with a bent keyhole saw, so that the inner lip of metal juts above the ragged wood and effectively blocks whatever letters the mailman attempts to insert. After rattling the brass flap angrily for up to five minutes, he rams his shoulder against the door, losing his powder-blue cap and twenty-five pounds of National Geographics, and throws everything into the foyer, including four dividend checks for the lady next door. After delivering the checks, and running after the mailman with his cap, I return to my house and find that the children have already torn open the Jiffy book envelopes, an operation that has left the floor evenly coated with iron-colored fluff.

  At Point B, next to our four-sided three-legged table, the books are presented to me. I gratefully inhale the fragrance of the bindings, slice all uncut pages, and even read a few paragraphs. I am especially apt to begin reading if the book is one for which I have sent. For instance, A History of Japan to 1334, by George Sansom (Stanford University Press): the physical presence of this book, so substantial, so fresh, the edges so trim, the type so tasty, reawakens in me, like a Proustian talisman, the emotions I experienced when, in my youth, I ordered it. “About time I knew something about Japan up to 1334,” I say again to myself, and again seem to stand overlooking a vast landscape bathed in lifting mist. Soon that distant line of trees, that vague row of Fujiwara regents, will embower my marching strides; that remote cottage, that Hōryūii monastery, will house me tonight. Then the dinner bell, or the doorbell, or the alarm bell, rings, and the unread book takes up its first station, at C, on top of the television set.

  Here it resides for an indeterminate period. As new arrivals pile in, the stack grows irregular, and by osmotic pressure they reshuffle themselves so that the largest are on the bottom, for stability. They wi
thstand a constant sidewise pressure from a vase of pussy willows, and spasmodic tremors when the children manipulate the volume dial. Sometimes, even, a few of the upper, lighter books fall behind the set into the morass of wiring; but by and large they are secure here, in the shade of the pussy willows, on a high ledge where ashtrays and coffee cups and broken crayons seldom climb. So it always startles me when, suddenly one night, they pull up stakes, spattering the wallpaper with phosphorescent dye, and take a new stance, at D, the top of a bookcase.

  Here you would think they would find peace. This is a bookcase, after all, and they are books. But it is a bookcase in which several years ago I scrupulously arranged, in chronological order, shelves of American literature, English literature, Russian, Spanish, and Irish (a pretty triplet, I thought) literature so neatly and tightly that our purchases in all of these categories have had to stop. True, there is more flexibility in the top shelf, containing French books and “little, cute” volumes like Peter Pauper editions of Malayan aphorisms, and in the bottom shelf, reserved for big, strikingly uncute books—Belloc’s biography of Danton, the bound reports of the Rhode Island Audubon Society, and college anthologies scribbled with insane notes like “Marvellous!,” “Micro-macro,” and “Cf. Romantic Angst”—but time with its relentless neap tide has wedged even these catch-alls solid. So the unread books recline uneasily on top, still on their sides, suffering the company of porcelain figurines, water glasses full of dripping daffodils, and children’s drawings, which move around the house in a sort of counter-swirl to the unread books. I have often noticed how at this stage their jackets, though untouched, begin to tatter with despair.

  One night, when we are all asleep and except for the twitching of the thermostat the house is still, the unread books leap into the air, sail through the kitchen door, bank jauntily over the stove, and coast at a smart cant into the library (E), where they settle, fluffing and cooing, on chair arms, sofa backs, hi-fi speakers, and the space where my wife is supposed to write letters. At first, I believe, they batter their wings against the bookcase, but it is as futile as pigeons trying to roost on the side of the U.N. building, for they meet a sheer wall of Bernard Shaw, Penguin classics, paperbound theology, and other books too odd for the bookcase at D. Once, years ago, a few unread books found a purchase here, and it may be a racial memory of this that drives them into the room; but they find the meadows sere, the once-open range strung with barbed wire, and the rivers polluted with radioactive silt. It is not long before the more enterprising of the unread books are stomping up the stairs, and creeping into our bedroom.

  F is a tiny table that stands beside our bed. I bought it at an auction, having failed to see that it was not a table at all but a stand in which to hold a large flowerpot. Accordingly there is a circular hole in the top, which we have patched with a slim volume of paintings by Paul Klee. The painting on the cover shows a bright pink face with three or four eyes, and it makes an unsteady, wrinkling surface. Now, A History of Japan to 1334 is a tall, solid book; it needs firm support. The sides of the flowerpot stand are too low; A History of Japan keeps being shoved over the edge by Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West, in one volume, a book so hefty I sprained my latissimus dorsi lifting it in and out of bed. Furthermore, the other unread books, hearing us scuffling around overhead, come pouring up the stairs and jump on the little table—that was never meant to hold anything except a flowerpot in the first place—and keep falling off and jumping again, like shipwreck survivors around the one lifeboat that got free of the rigging. Sometimes a whole dozen squeeze on at once, and then the Klee collapses, and they fall through the circular hole. Their bodies, after a mysterious subaqueous passage, come to surface at G.

  G is a tiny room, once titled “the study,” which I tricked out with shelves to hold papers, stamps, athletic trophies, rubber bands, and similar proofs of my masculinity. Unfortunately, the influx of broken toys, cracked mirrors, defunct light bulbs, cranky children, sewing machines, and other things that puzzled my wife became so great that I was flooded away, and was forced to abandon the shelves, which have become the terraces of the Afterworld of unread books. Here they stand, upright at last, in rigidly packed rows. There is no exit; the unremitting arrival of new immigrants puts them under terrific pressure, and, like the countless microörganisms that dedicated their corpses to our petroleum deposits, like the millions of once-green leaves compressed into the coal fields underlying Wilkes-Barre, they form a rich resource for future ages.

  ALPHONSE PEINTRE

  (An Interview Not Utterly Unlike Those in “The Artist in His Studio,” Text and Photographs by Alexander Liberman)

  THE SQUALID HUT, near Rouen, whence issue the cryptically dabbled bits of canvas that have soothed five generations of art dealers is approached by an unspeakable dirt road winding among depressingly dusty lime trees and appallingly tawdry livestock. How true it is, I reflected, that artists are slovenly about their environments! So deeply rutted was the road that as I bounced to a stop in front of the master’s residence a stack of Vogues, which I had brought as my recommendation to the reputedly inaccessible sage, leaped from the back seat of my convertible and flew into the air like assaulted chickens. Or perhaps they were real chickens; I was amused to discover that several lice-infested fowl had become fatally entangled with the grille of my Mercedes.

  I had been prepared by my Paris friends for the fact that Peintre’s living quarters were not commensurate with the elegance of his productions; but I had not been warned that the shack was mounted on ten-foot stilts. The only access to the hovel was by means of a movable ladder which, to judge from the sounds of altercation within, someone was reluctant to put down. At last, however, after I had nearly exhausted my battery in beeping the horn, a cheery red female face appeared at one of the windows, and a diaphanous old derelict clad in baggy blue coveralls, grumbling in a language I could not understand, lowered the rickety steps into place. This grim wraith was Alphonse Peintre.

  I had an excellent opportunity to study his face when, as I carried my cameras up the ladder, a rung snapped and to preserve my balance I seized his Orientally long, silken beard. His face was eroded by wrinkles as if by some never-ceasing geological process. His lips were thin and hard with peasant cunning. His ochre cheekbones suggested a possible Mongol strain in his blood. He wore a drab puce beanie on his abundant but unkempt locks, clotted with snaffles and burrs. But it was his eyes that held my attention. They were round with astonishment, their blue bleached as if by a sudden infusion of pain, and an indignant glint flashed deep in their lucid, oddly youthful depths.

  His wife rushed forward to lift us both into the cottage. As I felt her broad crimson hands, roughened by homely labor, tighten around my abdomen, I realized who of the couple provided the physical strength. This faithful helpmate was de la terre. I perceived a paradox in so airy an art loyally sheltered by such powerful, earthy muscles. Mme. Peintre cradled her husband like a child and set him in the room’s one furnishing, a worm-riddled rocking chair. “You have brought us luck,” she confided to me. “You will pay for the chickens?”

  It was a dispiriting room. A little wan light dribbled in across the thatched windowsills. Pots, peanut-butter jars, dried tubes, twisted coat hangers littered the floor. An icon hung cockeyed in one corner. The walls were entirely of canvas, punctured here and there where the good wife had snipped out pieces to sell to the American museums. Through these rents I saw a landscape from which all color had been drained by the vivid fancies of the artist’s remorseless imagination. Some sections of the shabby wall writhed with superimposed scribbles, like the magic caves near Lascaux.

  The venerable eremite slowly allowed a few words to escape his canny reserve. Though he had been a contemporary of Balzac, his words were not those of a senile man. How remarkably old these visual sorcerers live to be! It must be the relaxed work hours. “Giotto … blotto,” he said, in response to a question of mine. “Michel Agnolo … a little dude.” He called
him “Agnolo,” as you would a childhood friend. “Monet … nada. Poor Cézanne … a grind. He seemed always to be preparing for an examination that was never scheduled. Art is not like that. Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. Do not take down my words,” he protested with a sudden sly wave of his beautifully withered hand, encrusted with Byzantine rings, the ancient ascetic’s one luxury. “They are foolish. Art is foolish. Since Watteau, nada. And myself. I try. The moon is coming closer. I am not afraid. It is no bigger than a pie plate. Do you have enough?”

  We ate peanut-butter sandwiches—a typical meal of this pays de Caux. Mme. Peintre, a girlish grace imprisoned in her heavy body, adroitly usurped the rocking chair and fell asleep. Peintre scowled and squatted on the floor and began to twist coat hangers into unique and exquisite shapes. Absentmindedly he spat on my tripod, near my shoes. I assured him it was an accident. In the mysterious way of genius, he seemed to have retreated into himself. My conversational gambits fell unanswered, as if into an inscrutable primeval pool. Regretfully, I took my leave; in going out the door, I forgot—so charming and intense was the atmosphere of this consecrated interior—about the ladder, and fell ten feet with all my equipment. Looking up from my position on the foul ground, I saw Peintre’s remarkable countenance framed in the crude portal, and was rewarded in a most unexpected way. The Olympian hauteur of his visage cracked, and the immortal smiled.