The two politicians I’ve known best were President Kennedy and his brother Robert. They, too, were quite unalike, and not as close as generally believed; at any rate, the younger brother was very much afraid of the elder—
Q: Do we really have to hear any more about any Kennedy? Moreover, you’re sidestepping the question, which wasn’t about politicians but your own interest in politics.
A: I have none. I’ve never voted. Though, if invited, I suppose I might join almost anyone’s protest parade: Antiwar, Free Angela, Gay Liberation, Ladies’ Lib, etc.
Q: If you could be anything, what would you most like to be?
A: Invisible. To be visible or invisible at will. I mean, think of the possibilities: the power, the riches, the constant erotic amusement.
Q: What are your chief vices? And virtues?
A: I have no vices. The concept doesn’t exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude. So far as I know, I’ve never betrayed anyone who was kind to me. But as art is life’s compensation for the flawed delights of living, I reserve my greatest gratitude for those poets, painters, composers who have compensated me most. A work of art is the one mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology. I think I understand a considerable lot about writing; nevertheless, when I read something good, in fact, a work of art, my senses sail away into a universe of wonder: How did he do it? How is it possible?
Q: Looking back, it would seem as though some of your answers are rather inconsistent. Deliberate cruelty, you say, is the one unforgivable sin. Then you confess to occasional verbal cruelty, and later on admit that you have contemplated prepared murder.
A: Anyone consistently consistent has a head made of biscuit. My head, the interior, may be made of something odd, but it isn’t biscuit.
Q: Suppose you were drowning. What images, in the classic tradition, do you envision rolling across your mind?
A: A hot Alabama day in, oh, 1932, so I must be eight, and I am in a vegetable garden humming with bees and heat waves, and I am picking and putting into a basket turnips and slushy scarlet tomatoes. Then I am running through a pine and honeysuckle woods toward a deep cool creek, where I bathe and wash the turnips, the tomatoes. Birds, bird-music, leaf-light, the stringent taste of raw turnip on my tongue: pleasures everlasting, hallelujah. Not far away a snake, a cottonmouth moccasin, writhes, ripples across the water; I’m not afraid of it.
Ten years later. New York. A wartime jazz joint on West 52nd Street: The Famous Door. Featuring my most beloved American singer—then, now, forever: Miss Billie Holiday. Lady Day. Billie, an orchid in her hair, her drug-dimmed eyes shifting in the cheap lavender light, her mouth twisting out the words: Good mornin,’ Heartache—You’re here again to stay—
June, 1947. Paris. Having a fine l’eau at a sidewalk café with Albert Camus, who tells me I must learn to be less sensitive to criticism. (Ah! If he could have lived to see me now.)
Standing at the window of a pension on a Mediterranean island watching the afternoon passenger boat arrive from the mainland. Suddenly, there on the wharf carrying a suitcase is someone I know. Very well. Someone who had said good-bye to me, in what I took to be final tones, not many days prior. Someone who had apparently had a change of mind. So: is it the real turtle soup?—or only the mock? Or is it at long last love? (It was.)
A young man with black cowlicked hair. He is wearing a leather harness that keeps his arms strapped to his sides. He is trembling; but he is speaking to me, smiling. All I can hear is the roar of blood in my ears. Twenty minutes later he is dead, hanging from the end of a rope.
Two years later. Driving down from the April snows of the Alps into the valleys of an Italian spring.
Visiting, at Père-Lachaise in Paris, the grave of Oscar Wilde—overshadowed by Epstein’s rather awkward rendition of an angel; I don’t think Oscar would have cared for it much.
Paris. January, 1966. The Ritz. An unusual friend comes to call, bringing as gifts masses of white lilac and a baby owl in a cage. The owl, it seems, must be fed live mice. A waiter at the Ritz very kindly sent it to live with his farm-family in Provence.
Oh, but now the mental slides are moving very fast. The waves are closing over. Picking apples on an autumn afternoon. Nursing to life a bulldog puppy ill-to-death with distemper. And she lives. A garden in the California desert. The surf-sound of wind in the palm trees. A face, close by. Is it the Taj Mahal I see? Or merely Asbury Park? Or is it at long last love? (It wasn’t—God no, was it ever not.)
Suddenly, everything is again spinning backward; my friend Miss Faulk is making a scrap-quilt, the design is of roses and grapes, and now she is drawing the quilt up to my chin. There is a kerosene lamp by the bed; she wishes me happy birthday, and blows out the light.
And at midnight when the church-bell chimes I’m eight.
Once more, the creek. The taste of raw turnip on my tongue, the flow of summer water embracing my nakedness. And there, just there, swiveling, tangoing on the sun-dappled surface, the exquisitely limber and lethal cottonmouth moccasin. But I’m not afraid; am I?
1972
The End
