Schnadig I don’t know, unless it is because of Dostoievski. The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don’t know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoievski was the first man to reveal his soul to me? Maybe I have been a bit queer before that, without realizing it, but from the moment that I dipped into Dostoievski I was definitely, irrevocably, contentedly queer. The ordinary waking, work-a-day world was finished for me. Any ambition of desire I had to write was also killed – for a long time to come. I was like those men who have been too long in the trenches, too long under fire. Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions – it was just so much shit to me.

I can visualize best my condition when I think of my relations with Maxie and his sister Rita. At the time Maxie and I were both interested in sport. We used to go swimming together a great deal, that I remember well. Often we passed the whole day and night at the beach. I had only met Maxie’s sister once or twice; whenever I brought up her name Maxie would rather frantically begin to talk about something else.

That annoyed me because I was really bored to death with Maxie’s company, tolerating him only because he loaned me money readily and bought me things which I needed. Every time we started for the beach I was in hopes his sister would turn up unexpectedly. But no, he always managed to keep her out of reach. Well, one day as we were undressing in the bath house and he was showing me what a fine tight scrotum he had, I said to him right out of the blue – “listen, Maxie, that’s all right about your nuts, they’re fine and dandy, and there’s nothing to worry about but where in hell is Rita all the time, why don’t you bring her along some time and let me take a good look at her quim… yes, quim, you know what I mean.” Maxie, being a Jew from Odessa, had never heard the word quim before. He was deeply shocked by my words and yet at the same time intrigued by this new word.

In a sort of daze he said to me – “Jesus, Henry, you oughtn’t to say a thing like that to me!” “Why not?” I answered. “She’s got a cunt, your sister, hasn’t she?” I was about to add something else when he broke into a terrific fit of laughter. That saved the situation, for the time being. But Maxie didn’t like the idea at all deep down. All day long it bothered him, though he never referred to our conversation again. No, he was very silent that day. The only form of revenge he could think of was to urge me to swim far beyond the safety zone in the hope of tiring me out and letting me drown. I could see so clearly what was in his mind that I was possessed with the strength of ten men. Damned if I would go drown myself just because his sister like all other women happened to have a cunt.

It was at Far Rockaway where this took place. After we had dressed and eaten a meal I suddenly decided that I wanted to be alone and so, very abruptly, at the comer of a street. I shook hands and said good-bye. And there I was! Almost instantaneously I felt alone in the world, alone as one feels only in moments of extreme anguish. I think I was picking my teeth absentmindedly when this wave of loneliness hit me full on, like a tornado. I stood there on the street comer and sort of felt myself all over to see if I had been hit by something. It was inexplicable, and at the same time it was very wonderful, very exhilarating, like a double tonic, I might say. When I say that I was at Far Rockaway I mean that I was standing at the end of the earth, at a place called Xanthos, if there be such a place, and surely there ought to be a word like this to express no place at all. If Rita had come along then I don’t think I would have recognized her. I had become an absolute stranger standing in the very midst of my own people.

They looked crazy to me, my people, with their newly sunbumed faces and their flannel trousers and their dock-work stockings. They had been bathing like myself because it was a pleasant, healthy recreation and now like myself they were full of sun and food and a little heavy with fatigue. Up until this loneliness hit me I too was a bit weary, but suddenly, standing there completely shut off from the world, I woke up with a start I became so electrified that I didn’t dare move for fear I would charge like a bull or start to climb the wall of a building or else dance and scream. Suddenly I realized that all this was because I was really a brother to Dostoievski, that perhaps I was the only man in all America who knew what he meant in writing those books. Not only that, but I felt all the books I would one day write myself germinating inside me: they were bursting inside like ripe cocoons. And since up to this time I had written nothing but fiendishly long letters about everything and nothing, it was difficult for me to realize that there must come a time when I should begin, when I should put down the first word, the first-real word. And this time was now! That was what dawned on me.

I used the word Xanthos a moment ago. I don’t know whether there is a Xanthos or not, and I really don’t care one way or another, but there must be a place in the world, perhaps in the Grecian islands, where you come to the end of the known world and you are thoroughly alone and yet you are not frightened of it but rejoice, because at this dropping off place you can feel the old ancestral world which is eternally young and new and fecundating. You stand there, wherever the place is, like a newly hatched chick beside its eggshell. This place is Xanthos, or as it happened in my case. Far Rockaway.

There I was! It grew dark, a wind came up, the streets became deserted, and finally it began to pour cats and dogs. Jesus, that finished me! When the rain came down, and I got it smack in the face staring at the sky, I suddenly began to bellow with joy. I laughed and laughed and laughed, exactly like an insane man. Nor did I know what I was laughing about. I wasn’t thinking of a thing. I was just overwhelmed with joy, just crazy with delight in finding myself absolutely alone. If then and there a nice juicy quim had been handed me on a platter, if all the quims in the world had been afforded me for to make my choice, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.

I had what no quim could give me. And just about at that point, thoroughly drenched but still exultant, I thought of the most irrelevant thing in the world – carfare! Jesus, the bastard Maxie had walked off without leaving me a sou. There I was with my fine budding antique world and not a penny in my jeans. Herr Dostoievski Junior had now to begin to walk here and there peering into friendly and un-friendly faces to see if he could pry loose a dime. He walked from one end of Far Rockaway to the other but nobody seemed to give a fuck about handing out carfare in the rain. Walking about in that heavy animal stupor which comes with begging I got to thinking of Maxie the window-trimmer and how the first time I spied him he was standing in the show-window dressing a mannikin. And from that in a few minutes to Dostoievski, then the world stopped dead, and then, like a great rose bush opening in the night, his sister Rita’s warm, velvety flesh.

Now this what is rather strange … A few minutes after I thought of Rita, her private and extraordinary quim, I was in the train bound for New York and dozing off with a marvellous languid erection. And stranger still, when I got out of the train, when I had walked but a block or two from the station, whom should I bump into rounding a comer but Rita herself. And as though she had been informed telepathically of what was going on in my brain, Rita too was hot under the whiskers. Soon we were sitting in a chop suey joint, seated side by side in a little booth, behaving exactly like a pair of rabbits in rut. On the dance floor we hardly moved. We were wedged in tight and we stayed that way, letting