With Doc Zabriskie a few minutes usually meant an hour or two. Not this time, however. Everything was running smoothly and efficiently now.
I sat down in the big chair and opened wide my mouth. There was only one little cavity; he would fill it immediately. As he drilled away he plied me with questions: how were things going? was I still writing? did I have any children? why hadn’t I looked him up before? how was So-and-So? did I still ride the bike? To all of which I replied with grunts and a roll of the eyes.
Finally it was over. Don’t run away! he said. Have a little drink with me first! He opened a cabinet and got out a bottle of excellent Scotch, then pulled a stool up beside me. Now tell me all about yourself!
I had to make quite a preamble before coming to the issue. That is, where we stood at the present moment, financially and otherwise. At last I blurted it out—the tumor. Immediately he informed me that he had a good friend, an excellent surgeon, who would do the job for nothing. That stumped me. All I could say was that arrangements had already been made, that I had already advanced a hundred dollars toward the cost of the operation.
I see, he said. That’s too bad. He thought a moment, then asked: When must you have it, the balance?
Day after to-morrow.
I tell you what, he said, I’ll give you a post-dated check. Right now my bank balance is low, very low. How much is it you need exactly?
I said two hundred and fifty dollars.
That’s a shame, he said. I could have saved you all this expense.
I was suddenly struck with remorse. Listen, I said, forget about it! I don’t want to take your last penny.
He wouldn’t listen to me. People were slow in paying their bills, that’s all, he explained. He got out a big ledger, began thumbing through it. By the end of the month I should take in over three thousand dollars. You see, he grinned, I’m not exactly poor.
The check safely in my pocket, I lingered a while to save face. When at last he escorted me to the elevator—I already had one foot in—he said: Better ring me up before depositing that check … just to make sure it’s covered. Do that, will you?
I’ll do that, I said, and waved good-bye.
The same good-hearted fellow, thought I to myself, as the elevator descended. Too bad I hadn’t thought to get a little cash too. A coffee and a piece of pie was what I needed now. I felt in my pocket. Just a few pennies short. Same old story.
Approaching the library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street I found myself weighing the pros and cons of setting up as a bootblack. What ever could have put such a thought in my head, I wondered. Going on forty and thinking about shining other people’s shoes. How the mind wanders!
Abreast of the esplanade guarded by the placid stone lions, the impulse seized me to visit the library. Always pleasant and cosy up in the big reading room. Besides, I had suddenly developed a curiosity to see how it had fared, at my age, with other men of letters. (There was also a possibility of running into an acquaintance and still getting that pie and coffee.) One thing was certain, there was no need to delve into the private lives of such as Gorky, Dostoievsky, Andreyev or any of their ilk. Nor Dickens either. Jules Verne! There was a writer about whose life I knew absolutely nothing. Might be interesting. Some authors, it seemed, never had a private life; everything went into their books. Others, like Strindberg, Nietzsche, Jack London … their lives I knew almost as well as my own.
What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly, without plan, purpose or goal, and then suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death. What I wanted to lay hold of—as if one could ever come to grips with such impalpables!—was that crucial point in the evolution of a genius when the hard dry rock suddenly yields water. As the heavenly vapors are eventually collected in vast water-sheds and there converted into streams and rivers, so in the mind and soul, I felt, there must ever exist this reservoir waiting to be transformed into words, sentences, books, to be drowned again in the ocean of thought.
Only through trial and tribulation, it is said, are we opened up. Was that what I would find—nothing more?—in scanning the pages of biography? Were the creative ones tormented beings who found salvation only through wrestling with the media of art? In man’s world beauty was linked with suffering and suffering with salvation. Nothing of the sort obtained in Nature.
I took a seat in the reading room with a huge biographical dictionary before me. After reading here and there I fell into a reverie. To pursue my own thoughts proved more exciting than to pry into the lives of successful failures. Could I trace my own meanderings, beneath the roots, perhaps I might stumble on the stream which would lead me into the open. Stasia’s words came to mind—the need to meet a kindred spirit, in order to grow, to give forth fruit. To hold converse (on writing) with the lovers of literature was fruitless. There were many I had already met who could talk more brilliantly on the subject than any writer. (And they would never write a line.) Was there any one, indeed, who could speak discerningly about the secret processes?
The great question was that eternal, seemingly unanswerable one: what have I to tell the world which is so desperately important? What have I to say that has not been said before, and thousands of times, by men infinitely more gifted? Was it sheer ego, this coercive need to be heard? In what way was I unique? For if I was not unique then it would be like adding a cipher to an incalculable astronomic figure.
From one thing to another—a delicious Traumerei!—until I found myself pondering this most absorbing aspect of the writer’s problem: openings. The way in which a book opened—there in itself lay a world. How vastly different, how unique, were the opening pages of the great books! Some authors were like huge birds of prey; they hovered above their creation, casting immense, serrated shadows over their words. Some, like painters, began with delicate, unpremeditated touches, guided by some sure instinct whose purpose would become apparent later in the application of mass and color. Some took you by the hand like dreamers, content to linger at the edges of dream, and only slowly, tantalizingly permitted themselves to reveal what was obviously inexpressible. There were others who, as if perched in signal towers, derived intense enjoyment from pulling switches, blinking lights; with them everything was delineated sharply and boldly, as though their thoughts were so many trains pulling into the station yard. And then there were those who, either demented or hallucinated, began at random with hoarse cries, jeers and curses, stamping their thoughts not upon but through the page, like machines gone wild. Varied as they were, all these methods of breaking the ice were symptomatic of the personality, not expositions of thought out techniques. The way a book opened was the way an author walked or talked, the way he looked at life, the way he took courage or concealed his fears. Some began by seeing clear to the end; others began blindly, each line a silent prayer leading to the next. What an ordeal, this lifting of the veil! What a shuddering risk, this laying bare the mummy! No one, not even the greatest, could be certain what he might be called upon to present to the profane eye. Once engaged, anything could happen. It was as if, by taking pen in hand, the archons were summoned. Yes, the archons! Those mysterious entities, those cosmic enzymes, who are at work in every seed, who engineer the creation, structural and aesthetic, of every flower, every plant, every tree, every universe. The powers within. An everlasting ferment from which stemmed law and order.
And while these invisible ones went about their task the author—what a misnomer!—lived and breathed, performed the duties of a householder, a prisoner, a vagabond, whatever the role, and as the days passed, or the years, the scroll unrolled, the tragedy (his own and his characters’) spelled itself out, his moods varying like the weather from day to day, his energies rising and sinking, his thoughts seething like a maelstrom, the end ever approaching, a heaven which even if he has not earned it he must force, because what is begun must be finished, consummated, even if on the cross.
What need, eh, to read the pages of biography? What need to study the worm or the ant? Think, for just a moment, of such willing victims as Blake, Boehme, Nietzsche, of Holderlin, Sade, Nerval, of Villon, Rimbaud, Strindberg, of Cervantes or Dante, or even of Heine or Oscar Wilde! And I, was I to add my name to this host of illustrious martyrs? To what further depths of degradation had I to sink before acquiring the right to join the ranks of these scapegoats?
As on those interminable walks to and from the tailor shop, I
