I think and know all this, lying in the dark memory of a Summer’s day, without having mastered, or even half-heartedly attempted to master, the art of the crude hieroglyph. Before ever I begin I am disgusted with the efforts of the acknowledged masters. Without the ability of the knowledge to make so much as a portal in the facade of the grand edifice, I criticize and lament the architecture itself. If I were only a tiny brick in the vast cathedral of this antiquated facade I would be infinitely happier; I would have life, the life of the whole structure, even as an infinitesimal part of it. But I am outside, a barbarian who cannot make even a crude sketch, let alone a plan, of the edifice he dreams of inhabiting. I dream a new blazingly magnificent world which collapses as soon as the light is turned on. A world that vanishes but does not die, for I have only to become still again and stare wide-eyed into the darkness and it reappears… There is then a world in me which is utterly unlike any world I know of. I do not think it is my exclusive property —it is only the angle of my vision which is exclusive in that it is unique. If I talk the language of my unique vision nobody understands; the most colossal edifice may be reared and yet remain invisible. The thought of that haunts me. What good will it do to make an invisible temple?

Drifting with the flux—because of that little phrase. This is the sort of thinking that went on whenever the word writing came up. In ten years of sporadic efforts I had managed to write a million words or so. You might as well say—a million blades of grass. To call attention to this ragged lawn was humiliating. All my friends knew that I had the itch to write—that’s what made me good company now and then: the itch. Ed Gavarni, for example, who was studying to become a priest: he would have a little gathering at his home expressly for my benefit, so that I could scratch myself in public and thus make the evening somewhat of an event. To prove his interest in the noble art he would drop around to see me at more or less regular intervals, bringing cold sandwiches, apples and beer. Sometimes he would have a pocketful of cigars. I was to fill my belly and spout. If he had had an ounce of talent he would never have dreamed of becoming a priest… There was Zabrowskie, the crack telegraph operator of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America: he always examined my shoes, my hat, my overcoat, to see if they were in good condition. He had no time for reading, nor did he care what I wrote, nor did he believe I would ever get anywhere, but he liked to hear about it. He was interested in horses, mud-larks particularly. Listening to me was a harmless diversion and worth the price of a good lunch or a new hat, if needs be. It excited me to tell him stories because it was like talking to the man in the moon. He could interrupt the most subtle divagations by asking whether I preferred strawberry pie or cold pot cheese for dessert… There was Costigan, the knuckle-duster from Yorkville—another good stand-by and sensitive as an old sow. He once knew a writer for the Police Gazette; that made him eligible to seek the company of the elect. He had stories to tell me, stories that would sell, if I would come down off my perch and lend an ear. Costigan appealed to me in a strange way. He looked positively inert, a pimple-faced old sow with wiry bristles all over; he was so gentle, so tender, that if he had disguised himself as a woman you would never know that he was capable of shoving a guy against a wall and pummeling his brains out. He was the sort of tough egg who can sing falsetto and get up a fat collection to buy a funeral wreath. In the telegraph business he was considered to be a quiet, dependable clerk who had the company’s interest at heart. In his off hours he was a holy terror, the scourge of the neighborhood. He had a wife whose maiden name was Tillie Jupiter; she was built like a cactus plant and gave plenty of rich milk. An evening with the two of them would set my mind to work like a poisoned arrow.

Of friends and supporters I must have had around fifty. Of the lot there were three of four who had some slight understanding of what I was trying to do. One of them, a composer named Larry Hunt, lived in a little town in Minnesota. We had once rented him a room and he had proceeded to fall in love with my wife—because I treated her so shamefully. But he liked me even better than my wife, and so, upon his return to the sticks, there began a correspondence which soon became voluminous. He was hinting now of coming back to New York for a little visit. I was hoping that he would come on and take the wife off my hands. Years ago, when we had just begun our unhappy affair, I had tried to palm her off on her old sweetheart, an up-State boy called Ronald. Ronald had come to New York to ask her hand in marriage. I use that high-flown phrase because he was the sort of fellow who could say a thing like that without looking foolish. Well, the three of us met and we had dinner together in a French restaurant. I saw from the way he looked at Maude that he cared more for her, and had more in common with her, than I would ever have. I liked him immensely; he was clean-cut, honest to the bone, kind, considerate, the type who would make what is called a good husband. Besides, he had waited for her a long time, something which she had forgotten, or she would never have taken up with a worthless son-of-a-bitch like myself who could do her no good… A strange thing happened that evening, something she would never forgive me for were she ever to learn of it. Instead of taking her home I went back to the hotel with her old sweetheart. I sat up all night with him trying to persuade him that he was the better man, telling him all sorts of rotten things about myself, things I had done to her and to others, pleading with him, begging him to claim her. I even went so far as to say that I knew she loved him, that she had admitted it to me. «She only took me because I happened to be around», I said. «She’s really waiting for you to do something. Give yourself a break». But no, he wouldn’t hear of it. It was like Gaston and Alphonse of the comic strip. Ridiculous, pathetic, altogether unreal. It was the sort of thing they still do in the movies and people pay to see it… Anyway, thinking of Larry Hunt’s coming visit I knew I wouldn’t repeat that line. My one fear was that he might have found another woman in the meantime. It would be hard to forgive him that.

There was one place (the only place in New York) that I enjoyed going to, particularly if I were in an exalted mood, and that was my friend Ulric’s studio uptown. Ulric was a lecherous bird; his profession brought him in contact with stripteasers, cock-teasers, and all sorts of sexually bedeviled females. More than any of the glamorous lanky swans who walked into his place to undress I liked the colored maids whom he seemed to change frequently. To get them to pose for us was not an easy job. It was even more difficult, once we had persuaded them to try it, to get them to drape a leg over an arm-chair and expose a little salmon-colored meat. Ulric was full of lecherous designs, always thinking up ways to get his end in, as he put it. It was a way of emptying his mind of the slops he was commissioned to paint. (He was paid handsomely to make beautiful cans of soup, or corn on the cob, for the back covers of the magazines.) What he really wanted to do was to make cunts, rich, juicy cunts that you could plaster over the bath-room wall and so bring about a pleasant, agreeable bowel movement. He would have made them for nothing if some one had kept him in food and pin money. As I was saying a moment ago, he had an extraordinary flair for dark meat. When he had arranged the model in some outlandish position—bending over to pick up a hairpin, or climbing a ladder to wash a spot off the wall —I would be given a pad and pencil and told off to some advantageous spot where, pretending to draw a human figure (something beyond my powers), I would feast my eyes on the choice anatomical portions offered me whilst covering the paper with birdcages, checker-boards, pineapples and chicken tracks. After a brief rest we would elaborately aid the model to regain her original position. This necessitated some delicate maneuvering, such as lowering or raising the buttocks, lifting one foot a little higher, spreading the legs a little more,