As I board the train to go home I realize that I have made just three lines of notes. I haven’t the slightest idea what I shall say when I sit down to the machine. My mind is a blank. A frozen blank. I sit staring out the window and not even the tremor of a thought assails me. The landscape itself is a frozen blank. The whole world is locked in snow and ice, mute, helpless. I’ve never known such a bleak, dismal, gruesome, lack-lustre day.
That night I went to bed rather chastened and humbled. Doubly so, because before retiring I had picked up a volume of Thomas Mann (in which there was the Tonio Kruger story) and had been overwhelmed by the flawless quality of the narrative. To my astonishment, however, I awoke the next day full of piss and vinegar. Instead of going for my usual morning stroll—to get my blood up—I sat down at the machine immediately after breakfast. By noon I had finished my article on Coney Island. It had come without effort. Why? Because instead of forcing it out I had gone to sleep—after due surrender of the ego, certes. It was a lesson in the futility of struggle. Do your utmost and let Providence do the rest! A petty victory, perhaps, but most illuminating.
The article, of course, was never accepted. (Nothing was ever accepted.) It went the rounds from one editor to another. Nor did it make the rounds alone. Week after week I was turning them out, sending them forth like carrier pigeons, and week after week they came back, always with the stereotyped rejection slip. Nevertheless, nothing daunted, as they say, always merry and bright, I adhered rigidly to my program. There it was, the program, on a huge sheet of wrapping paper, tacked up on the wall. Beside it was another big sheet of paper on which were listed the exotic words I was endeavoring to annex to my vocabulary. The problem was how to hitch these words to my texts without having them stick out like sore thumbs. Often I tried them out beforehand, in letters to my friends, in letters to all and sundry. The letter writing was for me what shadow boxing is to a pugilist. But imagine a pugilist spending so much time fighting his shadow that when he hooks up with a sparring partner he has no fight left! I could spend two or three hours writing a story, or article, and another six or seven explaining them to my friends by letter. The real effort was going into the letter writing, and perhaps it was best so, now that I look back on it, because it preserved the speed and naturalness of my true voice. I was far too self-conscious, in the early days, to use my own voice. I was the literary man through and through. I made use of every device I discovered, employed every register, assumed a thousand different stances, always confusing the mastery of technique with creation. Experience and technique, those were the two goads that drove me on. To triumph in the world of experience, as I formulated it, I would have to live at least a hundred lives. To acquire the right, or shall I say the complete, technique, I would have to live to be a hundred, not a day less.
Some of my more honest friends, brutally candid as they often were, would occasionally remind me that in talking to them I was always myself but that in writing I was not. Why don’t you write like you talk? they would say. At first blush the idea struck me as absurd. In the first place I never considered myself a remarkable talker, though they insisted I was. In the second place, the written word seemed so much more eloquent to me than the spoken one. When you talk you can’t stop to polish a phrase, to search for precisely the right word, nor can you go back and expunge a word, a phrase, a whole paragraph. It seemed like an insult to have them tell me, who was struggling for mastery of the word, that I succeeded better without thought than with thought. Poisonous as the idea was, though, it bore fruit. Now and then, after an exhilarating evening with my friends, after I had spouted my head off, had made them drunk with my speeches, I would sneak home and silently review the performance. The words had tumbled out of my mouth in perfect order and with telling effect; there was not only continuity, form, climax and denouement, but rhythm, volume, sonority, aura and magic in the performance. If I stumbled or faltered I went ahead nevertheless, later to double back on my tracks, erase the wrong word, expunge the inept phrase, magnify the sense of a swelling cadence through repetition, innuendo and implication, through detour and parenthesis. It was like juggling: the words were alive like balls, could be recalled, could be made to obey, could be changed for other balls, and so on. Or, it was like writing on an invisible slate. One heard the words instead of seeing them. They did not disappear because they had never truly appeared. Hearing them, one had an even keener sense of appreciation, of participation rather, as if viewing a sleight of hand performance. The memory of the ear was just as reliable as the memory of the eye. One might not be able to reproduce a lengthy harangue, even three minutes afterwards, but one could detect a false note, a wrong emphasis.
Often I have wondered, after reading about evenings with Mallarme, or with Joyce, or with Max Jacob, let us say, how these sessions of ours compared. To be sure, none of my companions of those days ever dreamed of becoming a figure in the world of art. They loved to discuss art, all the arts, but they themselves had no thought of becoming artists. Most of them were engineers, architects, physicians, chemists, teachers, lawyers. But they had intellect and they had enthusiasm, and they were all so sincere, so avid, that sometimes I wonder if the music we made might not have rivalled the chamber music which issued from the sacred quarters of the masters. Certainly there was never anything pompous or ordained about these sessions. One spoke as he pleased, was criticized freely, and never bothered his head to wonder if what he had said would please the master.
There was no master among us: we were equals, and we could be sublime or idiotic, as we pleased. What brought us together was a mutual hunger for the things we felt deprived of. We had no burning desire to reform the world. We were seeking to enrich ourselves, that was all. In Europe such gatherings often have a political, cultural, or aesthetic background. The members of the group perform their exercises, so to speak, in order later to spread the leaven among the masses. We never thought of the masses—we were too much a part of them. We talked of music, painting, literature because, if one is at all intelligent and sensitive, one naturally ends up in the world of art. We did not come together expressly to talk about such matters, it simply happened thus.
I was probably the only one in the group who took himself seriously. That is why I became such a cantankerous idiot of a pest at times. Secretly I did hope to reform the world. Secretly I was an agitator. It was just this little difference between myself and the rest which made our evenings so lively. In every sentence I uttered there was always an extra ounce of sincerity, an extra grain of truth. It wasn’t playing cricket. I would stir them up—expressly, it seemed—to draw heaps of coal on my head. No one ever fully agreed with me. No matter how I worded my thought, what I said always struck them as far-fetched. They would confess, at moments, that they just loved to hear me talk. Yes, I would say, but you never listen. This would provoke a titter. Then some one would say: You mean we don’t always agree with you. More titters. Shit! I would answer, I don’t expect you to agree with me always … I want you to think … to think for yourselves.
