Algren at Sea (52 page)

Dostoevsky's underground man, born from an idea instead of a father, lost and confused when left alone without books—a creature who did not know what living was—has strangely risen bearing a critic's credentials.

And the word to the Pfc instructor, wherever faculty brass and their wives compete for captaincies, is
publish, publish, publish.
Riding an endless belt of useless information, he becomes confident that the footnote is the road to fame and fortune. The present imbalance of books
about
writing,
to those written from direct experience, is sufficient evidence of this. And sends throngs of young people to believing that literature derives from other books rather than from life.

They are duped by a presumption: that the truths which can sustain them can be handed down by educators, critics, analysts, anthologists and professional distributors of safe precepts: all those who, like Greener losing his sense of life under the hood of a secondhand Ford, lose theirs in a world where terminology embalms alike the living with the dead. The man whose passion attained its peak in a course in cost accounting now emerges as a shaper of American letters.

How else to explain that a compilation of literary allusions such as
Herzog,
possessing no value beyond cuteness, can be mistaken for a living book? The explanation is that dedication to accuracy no more suffices to make criticism true than does correctness in a novelist: lacking a sense of poetry, all creative work becomes false.

“What I have termed ‘evasion' in his work,” another big-spender-around-campus explains Hemingway, “will be borne out if we search for its roots in his life, from which an artist's work always springs. To be able to cope with emotion only by indirection [is] like escaping from life by big-game hunting or watching violence in the bullring. These are fascinating pursuits for our hours of leisure when given proper perspective. When they become a substitute for other forms of life they become an evasion of life.”
²⁰

This is spite-burning; not criticism. When my father scolded me—“Why can't you be a good boy?”—he was being quite as critical while being more just. And his English was better. But then he wasn't a terminologist whose morality depended upon personal security.

That “always and everywhere the proper study of mankind is man” doesn't mean to annotate Man but to live like one. The critic's resentment here is that which the small shopkeeper has always felt for the restless wanderer. What business does anyone have, he is asking, following bullfighters from arena to arena when he could be having a rich, full life teaching young women iambic pentameter? Why go bumping in a jeep across a battlefield when one can go wheeling contentedly to class in a Porsche?

There,
there,
between the “definitive edition” and the bursar's office, between the hard cover and the soft, between an LL.D. and his next
critique,
is where annotated man faces up to a life of no evasions.

Hemingway's life could be told solely in terms of his hostility toward the
petit bourgeois
demand that neither love nor death be real. That he overstates his proofs does, not now lessen the usefulness of his voyage. He began with
Nada,
he ended with
Nada:
but he knew those ports-of-call where life conflicts with death. He made the voyage.

For the risks he took were not unmeasured. Both physical and literary, they were the calculated chances of a pro. His risks were of the kind that, failing, the taker fails alone; but succeeding, succeed for everyone. To be qualified to pass judgment upon his style, therefore, a critic would himself have to be a man willing to take similar risks. Since no such man appeared during Hemingway's career, his work remains to be judged.

Villon, writing in the fifteenth century, brings Hemingway to us more justly than any modern critic:

More than any other contemporary, Hemingway put the ancestral warning, that he who gains his life shall lose it, into terms usable by modern man. Of many American writers who represented their own times, Hemingway alone made his times represent him.

For the painter no longer in touch with people who don't look at pictures begins to die as a painter. The actor whose life has moved from the marketplace to the studio acts falsely. The novelist, grown remote from people who don't read, becomes untrue to those who do read. The thinker who loses contact with those who never think at all, no longer thinks justly.

As the critic whose only wellspring is the work of other men at last gets to know all there is to know about Literature.

 

Except how to enjoy it.

Between the ceaseless rocking of the sea and the ceaseless wordiness of the critics, I divided the hours until afternoon. Then I decided to visit the officer's lounge for a cup of coffee and witty conversation.

A ward for catatonics would have been as lively and the coffee might have been better. First Mate, Third Mate, First Engineer and Second, each sat by himself looking straight ahead with his assigned cup before him. Each had his rating, so no more words were needed. What was there to do the rest of one's days but avoid gonorrhea?

William Gibbs McAdoo Manning, Chief Purser, was the philosopher of this likable group. When I came in he had just finished not replying to something the First Mate hadn't said. The Second Engineer appeared to be in agreement.

I noticed that the sugar-shaker was empty but, rather than ask for sugar, I drank the coffee black: why stick
my
neck out?

The thinking seemed to be to take death's mouth softly to one's own, in order to escape the risk of living. This, in the flesh, was the American affliction of living incommunicado even to oneself.

One deck down the seaborne sadsacks, foulups and misfits from every state in the union were lounging around reading comic books. Chips was listening on a transistor to the Dodgers playing the Giants.

Smith motioned to me.

“You remind me of a fellow I knew once”—Smith adjusted his neck and shifted a hip (to favor his Monstrous Boil) in order to get me into his sightline—“because his face was purely honest, but all he was good at was stealing.”

“Thanks,” I acknowledged Smith's flattering way.

“His name was Zekl,” Smith went blithely on, “and the way he was most different from you was that
he
was
fat.
Zekl was
all
fat. He carried an outfielder's
mitt on his hip from the time he'd played semi-pro ball but now he could barely waddle. We called him ‘Hippo'—now ain't
that
a diller?”

I didn't see any diller.

“Hippo Zekl was a good center-fielder on Sundays and a good Saturday-Night-Mover. A Saturday-Night-Mover is a fellow who helps cops move stuff out of back-doors Saturday nights. This was in the days before night baseball so his athletic career didn't interfere with his criminal life.”

Smith hitched his neck: it was going to be a long story.

“One Saturday night he helped move 10,500 dollars' worth of office furniture out of an office-furniture place, and the next day I was playing center and Hippo was in right. It was the last of the ninth, we were one run behind, there was two out 'n nobody on. Zekl came to bat.

“He sliced the first pitch toward first 'n should of been out by five feet, except the first-baseman waited for the pitcher to field it and the pitcher waited for the first-baseman, then both made the move together just as Zekl slood—”

“He
what?
”

“Slood. Slood into first. He was trying to beat the baseman to the bag with the ball. So he slood.”

Smith looked perfectly guileless.

“Go on,” I encouraged him.

“He brought up such a cloud of dust that nobody could tell what had happened till the dust cleared. Then we seen Zekl standing on the bag and the first baseman looking for the ball.

“He made sure the baseman wasn't trying the hidden ball play on him. Then he took off for second. This time he slood spikes-first.”

Smith glanced at me to see whether I had any objection. I had none.

“When Zekl made second, he seen that the pitcher was helping the first-baseman find the ball, so he said to the second-baseman, ‘I guess you fellows just don't want me'—and took off for third. This time he slood right
under
the baseman. When he got up and begin dusting hisself off, the right-fielder came in to help find the ball before Zekl took off again, because now there was nobody left but the catcher to stop him. But Zekl just stood on the bag as if we didn't have four dollars apiece going on him.

“‘Home!' we hollered at him. ‘Home, Hippo! Home!'”

Zekl began
strolling
toward home like he had all day.

‘
Slide,
Zekl!
Slide!
' everybody began hollering.”

“And he
slood?
”

“No
sir,
” Smith told me reproachfully, “he
didn't
slide. He took the ball out of his own pocket and tossed it to the catcher when he was still ten feet from the plate. The catcher got so excited he put Zekl out by shoving the ball in his face. Zekl
sat
down in the middle of the base-path saying the same thing over and over.”

“What was he saying over and over?”

“‘I had it coming,' Zekl kept saying, ‘I had it coming.'”

Smith looked at me smugly confident I would be unsatisfied with the story.

“What was the final score?” I wanted to know.

“Five-four. We lost.”

I turned away, but felt his hand on my shoulder lightly. I turned back.

“That wasn't what you were supposed to ask, sir.”

“What was I supposed to ask?”

“You were supposed to ask why this fellow got hisself throwed out and then just sat there saying he had it coming.”

“Why did he get hisself throwed out and just sat there saying the same thing over and over?”

“Well, he said, ‘I had it coming, I had it coming,' because his conscience bothered him about trying to steal a baseball.

“
That's
what he
claimed
later.”

“And what about the ten thousand dollars' worth of office equipment he'd moved the night before?” I asked.

“‘
Everybody
moves office equipment on Saturday nights,' was the way Zekl felt about
that—
‘but no
good
guy,' he told me, ‘no really
good
guy
ever
slides into first. Nobody
ever
slides into first,' he went around saying. That's what he'd meant when he kept saying ‘I got it coming, I got it coming. ' It wasn't office equipment on his conscience. He'd got hisself throwed out at home because he didn't think a fellow who slood into first
deserved
to score a run.”

“Frankie Frisch did,” I reminded Smith.

Smith jerked his neck a notch inward.

“You're putting me on.”

“I'm not putting you on,” I told him irritably, “he
slood
fingers-first, on his chest, into first, at the Polo Grounds. It started a riot.”

Smith studied me.

“If it started a riot,” he decided thoughtfully, “then he must have.”

He put out his hand and I took it.

“Thanks for telling me that. I feel better now.”

“Because
you
were the guy who slood into first?”

He grinned.

“You G-Twoed it, sir,” he told me with fresh respect—“you hit it right on the head. Never was
nobody
called Hippo Zekl. I made up the name because I was ashamed of what I done. You've took a weight off my conscience. Thank you. I appreciate it. Any time I can do anything for you, sir, you have only to let me know.”

“You could fill me in on why the last stitch goes through the nose any time you feel in the mood,” I suggested.

Smith nodded as though he'd anticipated my question.

“Let me make a
suggestion,
sir,” he told me without seeming offended, “ask Chips. It's
his
job, not mine.”

We were three days from the port of Bombay.

This street, when the land was British, was named
Saféd-Galli:
Avenue of the White Whores. Today it is the Street of the Hundred Cages. Not everybody went home.

Those who stayed do a lot of spitting. The walks in front of their cages are streaked by ropes of spittle of blackish red. A platinum blond with purple lips puts out her tongue; and her tongue is a deadlier purple yet. She smiles and the smile fills with blood: these ominous splatters marking the public ways are betel. The girls of the public cages chew it to dull hunger.

Some go into the cages for shelter. Some are waifs who were snatched off the streets to earn their keep as servants until they grew big enough to be used. Some are working off fines for husbands and brothers. Betel is easier to spit out than debt.

India's bureaucracies are accused of using too much paper; around the cages of Suklaji Street it uses none at all. Any tourist can become an official jail visitor just by pausing long enough to say, “Hello, Baby.” By dispensing with paper-work entailed in making out visitors' passes, an enormous saving is being effected for the nation. What India will do with the money is India's problem.