We were pulling up to the door. He lingered over the farewell. Remember, Henry, he said, feathering the gas pedal, if you get stuck there’s always a job for you at Randall, Randall and Randall’s. Twenty a week regular … Why don’t you look me up once in a while? Don’t make me run after you all the time!
4
I feel in myself a life so luminous, says Louis Lambert, that I might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral. This statement, which Balzac voices through his double, expresses perfectly the secret anguish of which I was then a victim. At one and the same time I was leading two thoroughly divergent lives. One could be described as the merry whirl, the other as the contemplative life. In the role of active being everybody took me for what I was, or what I appeared to be; in the other role no one recognized me, least of all myself. No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself. It needed only a few moments, seemingly, of shutting out the world for me to be restored. But it required much longer stretches—of being alone with myself—to write. As I have frequently pointed out, the business of writing never ceased. But from this interior process to the process of translation is always, and was then very definitely, a big step. Today it is often hard for me to remember when or where I made this or that utterance, to remember whether I actually said it somewhere or whether I intended to say it some time or other. There is an ordinary kind of forgetting and a special kind; the latter is due, more than likely, to the vice of living in two worlds at once.
One of the consequences of this tendency is that you live everything out innumerable times. Worse, whatever you succeed in transmitting to paper seems but an infinitesimal fraction of what you’ve already written in your head. That delicious experience with which every one is familiar, and which occurs with haunting impressiveness in dreams—I mean of falling into a familiar groove: meeting the same person over and over, going down the same street, confronting the identically same situation—this experience often happens to me in waking moments. How often I rack my brains to think where it was I made use of a certain thought, a certain situation, a certain character! Frantically I wonder if it occurred in some manuscript thoughtlessly destroyed. And then, when I’ve forgotten all about it, suddenly it dawns on me that it is one of the perpetual themes which I carry about inside me, which I am writing in the air, which I have written hundreds of times already, but never set down on paper. I make a note to write it out at the first opportunity, so as to be done with it, so as to bury it once and for all. I make the note—and I forget it with alacrity … It’s as though there were two melodies going on simultaneously: one for private exploitation and the other for the public ear. The whole struggle is to squeeze into that public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody.
It was this inner turmoil which my friends detected in my comportment. And it was the lack of it, in my writings, which they deplored. I almost felt sorry for them. But there was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self. This perversity always voiced itself thus: Reveal your true self and they will mutilate you.
They meant not my friends alone but the world.
Once in a great while I came across a being whom I felt I could give myself to completely. Alas, these beings existed only in books. They were worse than dead to me—they had never existed except in imagination. Ah, what dialogues I conducted with kindred, ghostly spirits! Soul-searching colloquies, of which not a line has ever been recorded. Indeed, these excrimin-ations, as I chose to style them, defied recording. They were carried on in a language that does not exist, a language so simple, so direct, so transparent, that words were useless. It was not a silent language either, as is often used in communication with higher beings. It was a language of clamor and tumult—the heart’s clamor, the heart’s tumult. But noiseless. If it were Dostoievsky whom I summoned, it was the complete Dostoievsky, that is to say, the man who wrote the novels, diaries and letters we know, plus the man we also know by what he left unsaid, unwritten. It was type and archetype speaking, so to say. Always full, resonant, veridic; always the unimpeachable sort of music which one credits him with, whether audible or inaudible, whether recorded or unrecorded. A language which could emanate only from Dostoievsky.
After such indescribably tumultuous communions I often sat down to the machine thinking that the moment had at last arrived. Now I can say it! I would tell myself. And I would sit there, mute, motionless, drifting with the stellar flux. I might sit that way for hours, completely rapt, completely oblivious to everything about me. And then, startled out of the trance by some unexpected sound or intrusion, I would wake’ with a start, look at the blank paper, and slowly, painfully tap out a sentence, or perhaps only a phrase. Whereupon I would sit and stare at these words as if they had been written by some unknown hand. Usually somebody arrived to break the spell. If it were Mona, she would of course burst in enthusiastically (seeing me sitting there at the machine) and beg me to let her glance at what I had written. Sometimes, still half-drugged, I would sit there like an automaton while she stared at the sentence, or the little phrase. To her bewildered queries I would answer in a hollow, empty voice, as if I were far away, speaking through a microphone. Other times I would spring out of it like a Jack-in-the-box, hand her a wopping lie (that I had concealed the other pages, for instance), and begin raving like a lunatic. Then I could really talk a blue streak! It was as if I were reading from a book. All to convince her—and even more myself!—that I had been deep in work, deep in thought, deep in creation. Dismayed, she would apologize profusely for having interrupted me at the wrong moment. And I would accept her apology lightly, airily, as though to say—What matter?
There’s more where that came from … I have only to turn it on or off … I’m a prestidigitator, I am. And from the lie I would make truth. I’d spool it off (my unfinished opus) like a man possessed—themes, sub-themes, variations, detours, parentheses—as if the only thing I thought about the live-long day was creation. With this of course went considerable clowning. I not only invented the characters and events, I acted them out. And poor Mona exclaiming: Are you really putting all that into the story? or the book? (Neither of us, in such moments, ever specified what book.) When the word book sprang up it was always assumed that it was the book, that is to say, the one I would soon o get started on—or else it was the one I was writing secretly, which I would show her only when finished. (She always acted as if she were certain this secret travail was going on. She even pretended that she had searched everywhere for the script during my periods of absence.) In this sort of atmosphere it was not at all unusual, therefore, that reference be made occasionally to certain chapters, or certain passages, chapters and passages which never existed, to be sure, but which were taken for granted and which, no doubt, had a greater reality (for us) than if they were in black and white. Mona would sometimes indulge in this kind of talk in the presence of a third person, which, led, of course, to fantastic and often most embarrassing situations. If it were Ulric who happened to be listening in, there was nothing to worry about. He had a way of entering into the game which was not only gallant but stimulating. He knew how to rectify a bad slip in a humorous and fortifying way.
For example, he might have forgotten for a moment that we were employing the present tense and begun using the future tense. (I know you will write a book like that some day!) A moment later, realizing his error he would add: I didn’t mean will write—I meant the book you ore writing—and very obviously writing, too, because nobody on God’s earth could talk the way you do about something in which he wasn’t deeply engrossed. Perhaps I’m being too explicit—forgive me, won’t you? At such junctures we all enjoyed the relief of letting go. We would indeed laugh uproariously. Ulric’s laughter was always the heartiest—and the dirtiest, if I may put it that way. Ho! Ho! he seemed to laugh, but aren’t we all wonderful liars! I’m not doing so bad myself, by golly. If I stay with you people long enough I won’t even know I’m lying any more. Ho Ho Ho! Haw Haw! Ha Ha! Hee Hee!
