The Haunted Life Page 12

  It was one of the most pleasant jobs I ever had. I should say, the most pleasant.

  Schoenfeldt sailed into the antechamber to hang up his coat and curtly inquired, with a thick German accent, where the other guinea pigs were. Hosker lit up a cigarette and tapped his foot. “These girls are always late!” he said. “Come on, Paimpol,” he said to me, “get on your white horse and go and get the girls.”

  The only thing I could reply was, “Gladly, if you get me the white horse.” One good remark deserves another.

  Hosker went into the room where the throat machine was and started to fuss around. Dr. Schoenfeldt went into the office and called up his wife. John and I sat waiting, and I was mad for a cigarette. I poked John and put two fingers up to my lips, which is a signal meaning you want to smoke. He shrugged and we went out again on the fire escape.

  There I lit a cigarette and took three long puffs, sharing them with my companion. I inhaled so deeply that the smoke was still coming out of me when we went back to the hall bench.

  “Goddamnit,” I said, stretching out my legs, “let’s get going.”

  It was hilarious the way we all complained at this little job, as though we were stokers demanding better working conditions in the fire room.

  John was still ruminating over his dreams, and now he giggled. “God, but if these dreams go on, I’ll go mad, really Joe. Those hats! those damned hats! I wonder if there’s anything homosexual in there somewhere . . .”

  “Certain kinds of hats can be called phallic symbols.”

  “And then you know, my mother and I, in this other dream, were in a cafeteria. I ordered, of all things, sausage and spaghetti. But before I should eat the spaghetti, I want the sauce cleaned off it in a sort of spaghetti-cleaning machine. Sausages! Phallic symbols! don’t you think?” He giggled uncontrollably. “And that spaghetti business, oh God!” When John said “Oh God” you could hear it all over, echoing back and forth. “Some sort of fallopian symbol there. Fresh from the womb, the spaghetti must be cleaned of its tomato sauce.”

  “Charming dish,” I said, pleased with myself. John was really upset about these dreams, but I couldn’t be of any use to him in the way of sympathetic understanding or whatever you will. Conversely, I was certain he would not respond to my preoccupations with hypocrisy. And already I could feel my hostile interest fading. In another hour, I would be ranting about something else. We are all mad.

  “I don’t know,” said John brightly, “what mother would say to all this, I really don’t. Gad!”

  Hosker came out and sat with us. He had a newspaper in his hand and started to read it nervously.

  Outline of Subsequent Synopsis: The Town and the City (1948)

  After BOOK ONE: “THE TOWN AND SOME OF ITS APPURTENANCES” and the introduction to the members of the family and their world, in BOOK TWO: “AN AMERICAN SPRINGTIME” we find more about the life of the Martin family in the Town, set in a truly American Springtime landscape, however with the beginning of events leading to the several interconnected themes of the novel, these being: the American family and how it can disintegrate, what this can lead to and what it significantly means in American culture: our life in pre-war, war and post-war times: the deep meanings of town-feeling and city-feeling in this country, their antipodal moods: the transplantation of European “culture” within our own, by outcasts and malcontents, as a kind of revenge for failure within the fold and as a means of individual salvation, and the danger of this special kind of decadence to our indigenous vigor and organic health: and all the misty hints, meanings, evocations, longings and unknowables of an unexpressed culture—the whole catalogue of American things and tones that have only begun to be expressed by spiritually American writers like Fitzgerald and O’Hara and Wolfe, and denied by Americans like T. S. Eliot and Henry Miller and the psychoanalytical writers who apparently believe that “culture” is an exclusively foreign phenomena.

  In this section are scenes exploring more of our own culture and at the same time the active plot gets underway towards its revealing conclusions. The Martin father and little Mickey spend a big day together at the races and restaurants and theaters in Boston, and this sets forth the awe and wonder of the little boy in juxtaposition to the dignity and love of the old man; there are scenes showing Elizabeth Martin forlorn and lovesick in the April rain, the strange boy she loves (Buster Fredericks) who wants nothing more than his “horn” so he can play the blues and someday become a great jazz musician, and scenes of their romance in the lonely and savage places that they go to on his ecstatic motorcycle, the music in their hearts; there are scenes with Peter Martin and his friends, ballroom dancing on the lake, baseball games, swimming, and one wild drunken trip to Vermont, all-night talkfests—all of it setting the stage for the pathos of the fact that almost half of these boys get killed in the future war; and Joe Martin settles down in Galloway starting a gas station, dividing his time between work and sports and romancing in the typical way that American youngsters have; young Charley works in Joe’s gas station; there are scenes showing little Mickey’s neighborhood activities, his “gang” and their doings, and also the elaborately imaginative private life he leads in his room with all kinds of games he invents; there are Saturday nights in May when Mrs. Martin is home alone with her cousin, whence they tell each other’s fortunes in tealeaves and smoke Fatimas, and the Spring moon shines down through the trees around the house and all the night is soft and rich; the father bowls with his friends, plays the horses, plays cards, neglects his business and loses money; there are scenes about Ruth Martin and her dates around the town and the young set she moves in; and meanwhile there’s Francis Martin’s job in Boston, and the futile hesitating love he has for a beautiful college girl that ends with his hating himself even more, his lonely wanderings around Boston, the bitterness and hatred for his lot always seething. Through all this, running like threads, is the fact that Mr. Martin is seriously neglecting his business like a man who is undergoing a second restlessness, and moreover he does not heed his wife’s admonitions; and secondly, the reckless Elizabeth passionately presses the issue with her beloved and persuades him to elope with her in the near future, although she has yet to finish high school.

  In BOOK THREE: “A CRISIS IN THE FAMILY” the Martin father loses his business and declares bankruptcy, and Elizabeth elopes with the young musician Fredericks. But these are only the externals of a deep inner crisis in the family. Concerning the father’s folly and neglect, no sides are taken in the household on the issue, the whole family retaining a cohesive natural loyalty in the face of any adversity. Here I wish to show that the average American family is not ugly and torn by neurotic strife as can be so easily supposed from reading a lot of the current sensational literature: the naiveté of the American is the source of his great strength. Now the family has to move out of the old Martin house, which is a great American tragedy in itself, and move to a flat in Merrimacville situated among tenements. This affects the kids in so many ways. It makes it easier for Elizabeth to make her rash elopement: she and her young husband migrate to Hartford, Conn., which at the time is a booming war-plant town, and there they get jobs in the defense plants and young Fredericks plays his saxophone at night in the cabarets: the whole world of jitterbugs is introduced, in a mood of “blues in the night” that existed at the time all over the country. (This is carried through to its present 1946 development: I find that jazz is a great subject to explore.) Meanwhile Peter Martin is struck hard by the family crisis: he broods the whole night long on the eve of his departure for the sophomore year at college, where he is expected to become one of the great half backs in recent years: homesick and melancholy, however, he suddenly leaves college after only two weeks, roams the South in a dreamy daze, and finally returns to Galloway, helpless yet angry. He wants to work and help the family, and gets a job in Hartford also, where he spends two months of strange joy and loneliness—the product of feeling for the first time in his life the inherent purge of fa
ilure. Alexander Panos remains a devoted and doting comrade. Peter then comes back to Galloway and gets a job as a sports writer on the Galloway newspaper, where bitterness, anger, longing and ambition rage in his soul: he is revising his whole idea of life: there is always something appealing about a young American working on a newspaper and finding the harsher lineaments of his world-around in the pursuance of his job, always something dark and brooding, angry and passionate. Meanwhile, Pearl Harbor has come and everything is even more confusing. Young Joe wants to enlist right away but he has to choose between going off to war and helping the family, and temporarily chooses the latter.

  Meanwhile, the Martin father, having made animosities in Galloway due to the well-known excess of his temper, finds that he has to work in out-of-town printing plants. He begins at this point a long stretch of loneliness and labor in cheap hotel rooms away from home, and it is here that he begins to fail in health and in spirit, which ultimately kills him: so many disappointments follow his having lost the Galloway business: Elizabeth’s elopement, Peter’s abandonment of a brilliant college career, the war, the plight of the family, and so on to more and more pain, defeat and regret.

  Rose and Ruth get war jobs. But understandably enough, it is little Mickey who is hit hardest by all this: there are scenes full of pathos depicting his confusion and wistfulness, how he misses his old neighborhood chums, and sometimes trudges across the town with his bat and glove to play with the old gang but they have already begun to forget him. As for young Charley, he’s just waiting to come of age so he can join the Marines, and meanwhile he works at odd jobs.

  In BOOK FOUR: “WARTIMES” we get the strange and brooding life that occurred in America during the war. Peter joins the merchant marine and travels all over strange seas, there are many returns to his land, he is drunk with the power and mystery of Arctic mountains and African coasts, there is sadness and strangeness and longing, and the great train scenes in the U.S.A. with all the soldiers and sailors and young wives, the quality of nighttime and loneliness and loss that the war produced in the generation, the songs of the time, the reunions and partings everywhere, the atmosphere of farewell and night rain glistening in far-off places. Joe joins the Air Corps, and there is the beginning of his love affair with a girl from the West: he is assigned to service in England, and there are the scenes there, particularly one heart-wrenching reunion with Peter in blacked-out London. Francis is eventually drafted, for his part, and almost immediately put under observation in a psychoneurotic ward: scenes here are of utmost importance and pathos, inasmuch as they reveal one of the great aspects of the war, the inability of some to stomach the regimens of war and the resulting pathetic confusion of youngsters who thought they were insane. For Francis it is just further proof that he is the only sane man in a mad world. His father visits him in the ward, and Peter on another occasion. The gloomy madness of Francis is given free rein. The doctors realize that although Francis is not mad, he is indeed unfit for almost any of the responsibilities of life, but Francis scorns their judgment. He is finally discharged and he goes to New York City to live alone and work, where his wan spirit at last finds its true home. There is the mother with her anxieties and fears and the letters she writes—(wartime letters offer a vista of feeling)—and her loneliness. Ruth goes off to join the WAC, where she eventually meets her future husband, a softspoken Southern boy, and there are scenes of their courtship and marriage just before he goes overseas to end up on Okinawa, and always the train rides, the partings and reunions and the feelings of farewell everywhere . . . The Martin father continues to work out of town, and his bitterness against the war and his own life grows, he wanders, an old man now, alone and living in cheap hotels and working all night long in the printing plants. Little Mickey meanwhile applies himself to his schoolwork with absorbed devotion and his inherent ambitiousness begins to show. Young Charley enlists in the Marines and goes off to Quantico for training, and there is a scene where he meets Peter in Washington just before going overseas, whence he and his brother spend a melancholy night sitting up in the park across from the White House among all the other kid-soldiers sleeping in the grass, a scene of youthful desolation and waste as the warm lights burn in the White House windows . . . (Charley never comes back from Tarawa, and Peter is the last of the Martins ever to see him.)

  The Martin mother, in a desperate attempt to reunite the family, moves to New York City, to Brooklyn, where the old man joins her and they both go to work in the city. Little Mickey finds himself suddenly in the clamoring streets of the City, confused and frightened, and in the public schools of Brooklyn. The other boys come home sometimes, Peter (who has taken to living with a girl between sea trips, with a wild bunch of young war kids), or Francis occasionally for Sunday dinners, or Joe on one furlough, Ruth the WAC comes home on a furlough, and Rose (who is now a nurse)—there are gay Christmases and joviality, but always nonetheless there is the quality of something gone and lost, of farewell, a feeling that everything is farewell, with the great wartime scenes in America and overseas, and all the things that happened, the drinking and desperation of the time among the young, the loneliness of the older people, night and farewell and desolate rain, and the letters that people wrote . . .

  Peter receives word that Alexander Panos is killed in Italy, and in his great sadness, he journeys to Asheville, the home of Thomas Wolfe, where he and Alexander were going to go together after the war . . . And there is Peter in the Smoky Mountain night waiting for the ghosts of Alexander, of Thomas Wolfe, of a lost American vision, of all the lost Americans in the war . . . And the train along the river near Asheville howls as it did for Wolfe so long ago.

  In BOOK FIVE: “THE CITY” we come at last to the grand meanings of high civilization and city-feeling and the specific impact of this upon the Martin family. How the family struggles through the maze of enigmas, conflicts and fatal complexities of city life, through all that tension and skepticism which has come into New York and several other great American city-centers and which is alien to the deep pulse of life in the town-America, how the family emerges strong—this is the expression of a true optimism for American mankind, based on the facts of American life and grounded on the nature and substance of the life here. There is no purpose in pessimism save death, no goal in carping criticism save destruction and no end in hatred of this country and this way of life save the abyss. I believe the American is a plain man and his goal is simplicity. The American culture is still so young that it hasn’t smoothed out the rough edges of its shape yet, we still have “minorities” and we still have decadent outcast groups and individuals from the “majority” or the “mob,” we still have the actual infiltration of alien political ideologies, and much confusion and conflict—but the thing will take shape, and the time has come particularly for American writers to stop apologizing to European culture for being Americans and to proceed within the full Springtime of a new culture and society. This is “Americanism,” but “Americanism” down past the political surface of the term, down to the deep roots of an actual national feeling that can’t be denied, down to the domain of America’s “unuttered tongue.”

  Now, in this book five, there comes over Peter Martin the spiritual apathy and desolation of city-feeling, in this particular case in the realms of “intellectualism” and “emancipation” that find so much approval in city-centers of thought. Peter with a loving heart seeks “enlightenment”—and like everyone else pursuing that course in an unfinished culture only ends up with the decadent Existentialism of European culture. How Peter, running the gamut of all this to spiritual anarchy and sophisticated spoofery and even drug-taking, and to that last stop of the European soul: psychoanalytical cognition: how he finds himself finally wishing to die under the crushing weight of excessive pessimism. One of his decadent friends commits a murder, in which Peter is involved, and in that sequence the full flower du mal of a Baudelairean city is dramatically shown, with all the gloomy ends of the night, the evil and the p
erversion, the brutality and the Roman squalor shown for all it is worth. (This material is contained in the Phillip Tourian murder novel.) And there are hoodlums, dope addicts, petty gangsters, marijuana pads and scenes in fantastic Lower East Side hovels and hideouts along the waterfront that give to Peter at last the realization that the city is a cruel illusion . . . No longer does the Brooklyn Bridge soar to freedom for him, for now he’s lived under its dirty belly and seen it reach greedily across the sky for Brooklyn—and he has known Brooklyn too, known it well. The despair that comes over Peter is almost final: he begins to feel the need to retrace his soul back to earlier meanings, he thrashes about the city like a wounded animal . . . And meanwhile Francis is involved in that gloomy decadence of his own, he indulges in literary diatribes against American culture in the little chi-chi publications of the city, frequents sophisticated cliques around the city and announces that he is “waiting for the atom bomb to drop” and all that stuff. He is preparing himself for a blind-alley life of bitterness and incalculable disbelief—for a spiritual suicide. And Elizabeth Martin, after spending a few years of her marriage with Fredericks in war plants all over the U.S.A., and after their inevitable and violent separation, now turns to a wild reckless life of Dionysian excess, operating along the edges of the jazz world (she has become a topflight vocalist) and drugs and higher prostitution along Broadway . . . yet always filled with loss and longing for the life she had known in Galloway. This is actually what the City has done to three of the Martins . . .