Algren at Sea (13 page)

“The American fears that dereliction into which man falls when he splits off from what is given,” Mme. de Beauvoir had observed. Her observation has since been confirmed by the man paying fifty dollars for a tin key with a bunny on it, upon an assumption that he is purchasing a unique personality. (That twenty thousand keys may be sold the same month to men suffering the same sense of inadequacy doesn't, apparently, modify this assumption.)

Stripped of philosophy, the question asked a decade ago by Existentialism was, simply, “Why not?” Meaning that, to multitudes who despair at risks involved in living, it offers the answer that not to try is to die. It answers that there is no alternative but to assume the responsibility of giving oneself: That the only way to be alive was to belong to the world of men.

A decade later it appeared that the American key-holder had decided death preferable to risk.

“The only spot on Achilles' body which was vulnerable was where his mother had held him,” another French scold
²
writes. And it began to appear that the American's mother had literally encompassed him until he was old enough to own his own key. He was then set free and immediately ran away from home by buying himself into the sanctuary of a key club where he could look at nude women without getting involved with them. For the understanding within the club, however tacit, was, “If you'll let me stay a little boy I'll let you stay a little girl.”

And was not this pervasion of the emotional life of Americans by the values that had once only been employed in business—never sell till the price is right and then try to get a piece of the commodity back along with the profit—precisely the result of what the French philosopher had observed in saying, “The cult of money which one encounters here expresses the fact that the individual is unable to commit his freedom in any concrete realm”?

The shift in emotional values from first person to third appeared to have followed a similar shift in the philosophy of business: the investor no longer put his life savings into an enterprise and went for wealth or went for broke: now he invested the money of others. And so, in love, he invested only the emotions of the other party, and contained his own.

Thus the anonymous nude performed for him the thrill without the risk. And, as nothing is happening in the private life of the third-person man, he feels an increased appetite for the private life of others. Which the omnipresent camera now supplies us through
Life
and
Look
and dozens of other mindless rags.

What the key-holder—and multitudes who cannot afford fifty dollars for a key but remain key-thinkers all the same—has settled for is to remain uncommitted, by taking no risk of exposing oneself to another. It
means never being
for
another. In short, a flat refusal to be fully human. His answer to the question “Why not?” is “No. Never.”

Existentialism directly opposed this view by going to its source, to the ancient biblical warning that to gain the world is to lose oneself, and to give oneself to the world is to gain one's self.

This was the beginning my French friends were making in 1949.

 

The people partying through the rooms were Americans who wished to be helpful but didn't know how. This was the spring of 1960: They were the first wave of a summer inundation that had broken early in April on Saint-Germain-de-Près.

It had been in April, too, that a thirty-year-old Algerian woman, an attorney named Gisèle Halimi, had come to Mme. de Beauvoir with the story of Djamila Boupacha.

On the night of February 10, 1960, Djamila Boupacha, twenty-two, a member of the F.L.N., was arrested and sent by the French to the camp of El Biar. Arrested with her was her father, Abdellaziz Boupacha, seventy; his pregnant daughter, Néfissa Boupacha, eighteen; and his son-in-law, Ahmed, thirty. The pregnant girl was put in solitary confinement but suffered no violence. Her husband and father and Dajmila Boupacha were tortured.

Mlle. Boupacha was told, “If we raped you, you might take pleasure”—and was thereupon impaled on a bottle in the hands of a French soldier. Mlle. Boupacha was a virgin.

Mme. Halimi's plea, for Mlle. Boupacha to Mme. de Beauvoir, was to have her client transferred for trial to Paris, both to prevent further torture and to obtain a fair trial. Mme. de Beauvoir's account of the story in
L' Express
was subsequently seized in Algiers, but it broke in the American press and the story was out. Although Mme. Halimi has not succeeded in getting her client to Paris for trial, there are no indications that the girl has been tortured further.

 

The people partying through the rooms had come from places like Fort Dodge and East Jesus, Kansas, because they had found Fort Dodge and East Jesus unbearable. So they had immediately set up small Fort Dodges and East Jesuses on the Left Bank in order to Keep Paris Away. The last people they wanted to see were the French, who had troubles nobody was concerned with in Fort Dodge and East Jesus. They had come to see other
people from other Fort Dodges and other East Jesuses in order to talk about how things used to be in Fort Dodge and East Jesus.

One could hardly blame them for believing in an acquisitive economy which enabled them to live without feeling acquisitive. But now they didn't know what else to do with themselves. By and large, they seemed to be people whose feelings had been hurt because they had only one of everything while others owned two. All the same I was happy to meet them, because I suspect American affluence has come to depend upon a fundamental corruption to which I felt capable of contributing. I hadn't been driven to Paris by disenchantment over the Black Sox scandal so much as I'd been drawn by rumors of lonely Americans looking for dinner guests who were bilingual. I speak both English and Chicagoese.

Already I had introduced myself to several film writers who were frankly disapproving of a nakedly competitive economy unless it gave them a head start. One of these, wearing a sweat shirt on which his initials had been sewn, was particularly scornful of any economy in the hands of French waiters.

“What
they
call
breakfast
in this country! What they call
coffee!”
he warned the assembled expatriates—”it took me forty-five minutes to get ham and eggs this morning!”

Of course, when you write for the movies every minute counts, but why did this thinker want to get up before Darryl Zanuck? I had once seen his picture in
Time,
routing the foe with a samurai sword bought in Manila after the war, but I hadn't read the book. All the same, the picture had left me with a strong impression that at last America had a novelist who could slice off your head at a single stroke without going on safari. I haven't gotten around to slicing off somebody's head but am willing to give it up if the other side will. This fellow didn't strike me so much as being a downright expatriate as he did a fellow who was afraid he'd go broke before he was ninety-two if he stayed in the States.

What had made him think he wouldn't have to pay for his meals if he moved to Paris I don't know. He was pretty hot about it.

“They don't even know what a toasted cheeseburger is!
Try
to get a chocolate malted!” This Pearl Harbor Paul Revere circled the room spreading the alarm—“the hell with serv
ees
compr
ee!”
He looked over at me but saw I wasn't wearing a napkin over my arm so he didn't charge. I wondered
why anyone would come such a distance just to be made a fool of by French waiters.

Yet I once knew a fellow from East Jesus who fell in love, and the girl failed to mention that she'd once had a roll in the hay with the pinball champion of West Jesus. The new beau caught the scent, challenged the earlier conqueror to a pinball tournament, and then punched him silly over a pinball technicality.

And to this very day the pinball champion of West Jesus thinks he was whipped just because he was outweighed. It wasn't him who put two pounds of sugar in the new beau's gas tank the next day, I happen to know. It was just the girl's way of showing she still thought of her first hay-roll fondly.

Was this fellow who had hacked his way through the jungle single-handed for
Time
this type of athlete or had he made sergeant on sheer ability? Is the pen
really
mightier than the sword? Should the spitball be made legal? Can Missouri remain half slave and half free? If Jerry Lewis, Jr., and Norman Mailer actually
are
two different persons, how come nobody has ever seen them together? These and other problems now perplexing Western civilization crossed my mind while I worked my way toward another shot at the Scotch.

On the other side of the room an unescorted woman, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, was growing hysterical over the difficulty of finding a mate. If she took off the glasses and pulled her skirt down over her knees she might do some good in the few years remaining to her was my figuring. But, as it turned out, it wasn't a mate for herself that was giving her concern, but one for her ladylike boxer.

“I won't have my Mimi made a fool of!” she warned everybody, as though the room were full of people who planned to have their Great Danes seduce little Mimi, “My Mimi is going to be
properly
mated!”

Although they owned apartments and children and cars, these people seemed strangely to feel they'd been left out when the
real
goodies had been passed around. Each seemed like an only child that was trying too late to learn how to play.

There was something about the way they ate that would give you a weak streak right through your middle, particularly if you were hungry too. They ate as though they were in need of something more than food, and I'm sure they were.

The athlete in the sweat shirt was eating everything that wasn't moving, so I kept shifting from one foot to another so he wouldn't splash mustard over me. I wasn't hungry myself and so limited myself to things that weren't big enough to bite back.

Somebody mentioned a friend who had missed a plane by five minutes and was still arguing with a reservation clerk about it when the plane came down in flames on the other side of the field.

“I
never
have that kind of luck,” the pinball fellow complained at this news, “Oh, no, not
me—I'd
have been on it,” and walked off grieving over his premature demise, his work half finished, his songs half sung. Still and all, he appeared to have been well brought up and I suppose that's where the trouble began. He came over to me holding a loaf of bread half the size of himself, stuffed with something that was wriggling to get out, yet he kept a firm hold.

“I don't buy this serv
ees
compr
ee
deal,” he let me know.

“You don't
have
to tip, Zane,” a girl lying on her side, reading a letter, glanced up to inform him and she wasn't lying on her side for fun. “As a matter of fact, you don't have to tip at all. It's just a little something extra.”

“PAR-DON-AY-MWA,
Madame,”
the witty chap excused himself, “but since when did anyone ever give
me
‘a little something extra?'”

Buddy, it occurred to me, if this is your old lady you have certainly been given a great deal extra and the benefit of the doubt as well, but I didn't express this notion as I was on a tight schedule myself. Till the bar went dry.

The girl held out her Martini glass to him and he peered down into it, thinking she was offering him a drink; only, the glass was dry. He couldn't figure that one out. Then he saw the olive and it came to him that she wanted him to eat it. He popped it in his mouth. At least they weren't hiding the olives on him.

“She wants another Martini,” I explained, not wishing an expectant mother to tire herself by holding out her arm indefinitely from a prone position.

“You had one, honey,” he remembered when they had first met.

“That was for Baby,” she explained, “now get one for Mother.” He finally got the idea and wheeled off as if gin were going out of style. I'd been wondering which of the paralyzed embryos stalking her premises this girl had gotten careless with, but now I didn't have to wonder any longer.
I liked her approach to motherhood so much that I sat beside her to see what else I could do for her.

“I'd like to read your mail,” I told her.

“It's just from an ex-fighter in a fix,” she told me, folding the letter.

“I know all the ex-fighters in a fix,” I assured her, taking the letter from her, “and some people who can't blame it on boxing. I even know one ex-fighter who has never been in a fix. Do you know Roger Donoghue?”

This is a standard gimmick I employ, in tight situations, about a fellow who used to fight around New York, in order to avoid being crushed by such issues as whether the service is better on a Dutch or a French line or What Would
You
Have Done If
You
Had Been Mary McCarthy When Françoise Sagan Came Along? As long as I can stay clear of serious subjects, I may add, I can be a dangerous conversationalist.

“I saw Roger Donahue the first time he fought Flores,” the girl told me, “he won.”

“He won the second time, too,” I informed her, “he always did have color.”

“He wasn't
all
color,” she corrected me, “Roger really
could
fight.”

“The night I saw him he wasn't forcing himself,” I remembered, but I was just egging her on. Pregnancy had put a silver bell in her voice and I liked hearing it tinkle.

She was no beauty but she was a beauty all the same. She was the only person around who didn't seem to feel that she was being made a fool of if she couldn't get a filet topped by a mushroom the size of a baby bison in four minutes flat. Anybody who didn't like her on sight had a mind that had recently snapped.