He gave me a long, down-slanting look. For a few long moments he looked at me that way, silently, scrutinizingly. “I’ll tell you,” he said finally, “there’s just one thing I’ve ever written which I think good—and I’ve never put it down on paper. But I’ve got it up here,” and he tapped his forehead with his forefinger. “If you’d like to hear it I’ll recite it for you. It’s a long poem I wrote one time when I was in Manila. You’ve heard of Morro Castle, haven’t you?
All right, it was just outside the walls of Mono Castle that I got the inspiration. I think it’s a great poem. I know it is! I wouldn’t want to see it printed. I wouldn’t want to take money for it. Here it is. . . .”
Without pausing to clear his throat or take a drink he launched into this poem about the sun going down in Manila. He recited it at a rapid pace in a clear musical voice. It was like shooting down the rapids in a light canoe.
All around us the conversation had died down; some stood up and moved in close the better to hear him. It seemed to have neither beginning nor end. As I say, it had started off at the velocity of a flood, and it went on and on, image upon image, crescendo upon crescendo, rising and falling in musical cadences.
I don’t remember a single line of it, more’s the pity. All I remember is the sensation I had of being borne along on the swollen bosom of a great river through the heart of a tropical zone in which there was a constant fluttering of dazzling plumage, the sheen of wet green leaves, the bending and swaying of lakes of grass, the throbbing midnight blue of sky, the gleam of stars like coruscating jewels, the song of birds intoxicated by God knows what.
There was a fever running through the lines, the fever not of a sick man but of an exalted, frenzied creature who had suddenly found his true voice and was trying it out in the dark. It was a voice which issued straight from the heart, a taut, vibrant column of blood which fell upon the car in rhapsodic, thunderous waves. The end was an abatement rather than a cessation, a diminuendo which brought the pounding rhythm to a whisper that prolonged itself far beyond the actual silence in which it finally merged. The voice had ceased to register, but the poem continued to pulsate in the echoing cells of the brain.
He broke the silence which ensued by alluding modestly to his unusual facility for memorizing whatever caught his eye. “I remember everything I read in school,” he said, “from Longfellow and Wordsworth to Ronsard and François Villon. Villon, there’s a fellow after my own heart,” and he launched into a familiar verse in an accent that betrayed he had more than a textbook knowledge of French. “The greatest poets were the Chinese,” he said. ‘They made the little things reveal the greatness of the universe. They were philosophers first and then poets. They lived their poetry.
We have nothing to make poetry about, except death and desolation. You can’t make a poem about an automobile or a telephone booth. To begin with, the heart has to be intact. One must be able to believe in something. The values we were taught to respect when we were children are all smashed.
We’re not men any more—we’re automatons. We don’t even get any satisfaction in killing. The last war killed off our impulses. We don’t respond; we react. We’re the lost legion of the defeated archangels. We’re dangling in chaos and our leaders, blinder than bats, bray like jackasses. You wouldn’t call Mister Roosevelt a great leader, would you?
Not if you know your history. A leader has to be inspired by a great vision; he has to lift his people out of the mire with mighty pinions; he has to rouse them from the stupor in which they vegetate like stoats and slugs.
You don’t advance the cause of freedom and humanity by leading poor, feeble dreamers to the slaughterhouse. What’s he belly-aching about anyway? Did the Creator appoint him the Saviour of Civilization? When I went over there to fight for Democracy I was just a kid. I didn’t have any great ambitions, neither did I have any desire to kill anybody. I was brought up to believe that the shedding of blood was a crime against God and man.
Well, I did what they asked me to, like a good soldier. I murdered every son of a bitch that was trying to murder me. What else could I do? It wasn’t all murder, of course. I had some good times now and then—a different sort of pleasure than I ever figured I would like. In fact, nothing was like what I thought it would be before I went over.
You know what those bastards make you into. Why, your own mother wouldn’t recognize you if she saw you taking your pleasure—or crawling in the mud and sticking a bayonet in a man who never did you any harm. I’m telling you, it got so filthy and poisonous I didn’t know who I was any more. I was just a number that lit up like a switchboard when the order came to do this, do that, do the other thing. You couldn’t call me a man—I didn’t have a god-damned bit of feeling left.
And I wasn’t an animal because if I had been an animal I’d have had better sense than to get myself into such a mess. Animals kill one another only when they’re hungry. We kill because we’re afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we’d have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong.
Today I haven’t got any principles—I’m an outlaw. I have only one ambition left—to get enough booze under my belt every day so as to forget what the world looks like. I never sanctioned this setup. You can’t convince me that I murdered all those Germans in order to bring this unholy mess about. No sir, I refuse to take any part in it. I wash my hands of it. I walk out on it.
Now if that makes me a bad citizen why then I’m a bad citizen. So what? Do you suppose if I ran around like a mad dog, begging for a club and a rifle to start murdering all over again, do you suppose that would make me into a good citizen, good enough, what I mean, to vote the straight Democratic ticket?
I suppose if I did that I could eat right out of their hand, what? Well, I don’t want to eat out of anybody’s hand. I want to be left alone; I want to dream my dreams, to believe as I once believed, that life is good and beautiful and that men can live with one another in peace and plenty.
No son of a bitch on earth can tell me that to make life better you have to first kill a million or ten million men in cold blood. No sir, those bastards haven’t got any heart. I know the Germans are no worse than we are, and by Christ, I know from experience that some of them at least are a damned sight better than the French or the English.
“That schoolteacher we made a President of, he thought he had everything fixed just right, didn’t he? Can you picture him crawling around on the floor at Versailles like an old billygoat, putting up imaginary fences with a blue pencil?
What’s the sense of making new boundaries, will you tell me? Why tariffs and taxes and sentry boxes and pillboxes anyway? Why doesn’t England part with some of her unlawful possessions? If the poor people in England can’t make a living when the government possesses the biggest empire that ever was how are they going to make a living when the empire falls to pieces? Why don’t they emigrate to Canada or Africa or Australia?
“There’s another thing I don’t understand. We always assume that we’re in the right, that we have the best government under the sun. How do we know—have we tried the others out? Is everything running so beautifully here that we couldn’t bear the thought of a change? Supposing I honestly believed in Fascism or Communism or polygamy or Mohammedanism or pacifism or any of the things that are now tabu in this country?
What would happen to me if I started to open my trap, eh? Why you don’t even dare to protest against being vaccinated, though there’s plenty of evidence to prove that vaccination does more harm than good. Where is this liberty and freedom we boast about? You’re only free if you’re in good odor with your neighbors, and even then it’s not a hell of a lot of rope they give you.
If you happen to be broke and out of a job your freedom isn’t worth a button. And if you’re old besides then it’s just plain misery. They’re much kinder to animals and flowers and crazy people. Civilization is a blessing to the unfit and the degenerate—the others it breaks or demoralizes.
As far as the comforts of life go I’m better off when I’m in jail than when I’m out. In the one case they take your freedom away and in
