Atop an Underwood (24 page)

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You walk alone through the streets, feeling the cold of the stones & cement, and begin to wonder ...

Presently, I approached another lunch-cart, another typical New England milltown hamburger house. Again the smell of frying beef, of butter .... a large pan with pats of ground red meat drowned in a puddle of boiling grease.

I sat down to eat, searching for the eye of the War, eating and smoking and searching. A whore came in from the cold, her very French features blue from the icy air. Hawk-faced, with long-lashed and coquettish brown eyes, heavy-breasted, she went up to the counter & spoke confidentially with the short order cook.

“Did you ever‘ear such a 'ting, Hah?”

“You mean Pearl Harbor—... ?”

“Oua, oua!” she affirmed, sternly.

“Ah oua!” said the counterman with a sad Gallic wistfulness. “Ah oua!”

They both ruminated slowly with genuine sadness & compassion.

She shrugged her fine shoulders.

“Ah ben, quesqu'on peut faire!”

“Oua ...” he echoed. “Oua ...”

“Deux hamburgers, héh Joe?” she finally asked, addressing him familiarly.

He prepared them sadly, still thinking about Pearl Harbor. It was very casual, as persons would be with a lively and vital topic which had no personal color in it. And I suddenly began to see something, but before I could formulate anything, a shabby person stamped in from the cold and gave the woman a meaningful look. Obviously, she knew him slightly .... invited him to sit with her—and in a flash, the thing was accomplished, the thing was arranged & ready, here within the flimsy wooden walls of a little New England milltown eatery on a cold dark slum street. (I tried to contrast this with the way it might have been done in New York City perhaps in one of those orange-juice, white-tiled, brightly lit sandwich counters where sallow, sagging-jowled New Yorkers gobble up hamburgers in resentful, scowling silence, and exit without a word—in such a place, the acquisition of a street-walker would have been a long and foolish thing, first the secret, stolen stares of black glut, then the casual and ratlike character of the approach, which would be unsuccessful in the lunch-cart because of New York's lack of human warmth; and thirdly the savage, prowling and lustful pursuit into the streets, terminating successfully in some illicit doorway away from the empty red & blue glow of street lights, and even in the success of the acquisition there would be nothing but filthy sneakiness, false casualness, and a shaming feeling of naked fear, dark-eyed, winking terror and lust.) Ah not so in my home-town not so! There, an acquisition is a quick, warm, human thing. There is no lustful string, no prowling pursuit, no shame-faced hinting. That is one large difference between New York City & my home-town ..... and thus, I might have begun to draw contrasts on the preceding illustrations, at that moment, had I not suddenly realized that the eye of the War was not there, that I had gone out into the streets at 2 A.M. in the morning to search for something that did not exist.

For the eye of the War had changed nothing, not even the people, and this brought me to the thrilling realization that the American people are really strong, that though we lack grace, we do possess certain unfinished grace; that though we are trying to cover up with false virility, false coarseness, underneath us there is a great current of courage, even daring, and a blessed love of casualness & calmness that shows itself only in times of great emergency.

Nothing was changed. There was the cold crater glow of moon, the crude upthrust of wooden tenement, the brutish French-Canadian gabble in greasy lunch-cart, the dream-giving American music, the graceful interplay of sex with social ease, the genuine American heart of Love which lay hidden beneath a false armor ..... all these remained, the war rumbled remote, and the eye of the War was not there. The American people had taken it in their stride, .. and it was, I tell you and always will, a huge, earth-devouring stride that could conquer the Universe.

And so it is.

My search by night for the eye of the War had been unsuccessful .... and yet, of course, it was so very successful.

[...] In December of 1941, I returned to Lowell and was hired by the Lowell Sun as a reporter. The Sports Editor said: “Now, Jack, you'll have to start up from the bottom, writing small articles here and there, and keeping your eyes and ears open. The newspaper game is a tough game!” Three days later, I was writing 90% of the sports page while the Sports Editor and his two other “sports reporters” were down around the corner conducting a hot-stove league over a glass of beer.

The situation amused me one day, and angered me the other. I began to write a novel right in the City Room about Lowell and the three attendant ills of most middle-sized cities: provincialism, bigotry, and materialism. After hours were spent in the Library studying, where I learned more in three months than I could have learned in three years at college. I delved into everything: history, sociology, psychology, the classics, philosophy, evolution, and even psychoanalysis. Nights at home, I ate up Joyce's “Ulysses” and Thoreau and Wolfe and Dostoevsky and a dozen other favorites. I still have the novel I spoke of, and intend to touch it up in a few years.

Spring returned again, and, armed with a letter of introduction to James Hogan of Republic from a Boston columnist, I started off on the road for California. I wound up in the South, working on construction jobs and lunchcarts, hopping freights from city to city, casually enjoying myself in the warm sun, a young and languorous tramp. After three months of that, I went back home and joined the Merchant Marine. We went to Arctic Greenland and Iceland, a torpedo missing our bow by ten yards on the way back to Boston. Arriving safely in October, with a wad of money in my wallet and an Eskimo harpoon under my arm, I was surprised and pleased to find a telegram from Lou Little waiting for me. He offered to make arrangements for my return to Columbia. Back I went, signing up in the Officers' Training program and finding myself in a Baker Field scrimmage no less than 48 hours after debarking the S.S. Dorchester (sunk five months later off Iceland.)

That Saturday, I played a few minutes in the Army game and decided to drop the sport for good. After my stint at sea, I felt it was too much physically. I again turned my attention to my studies.

It was then I made fast friends with Prof. Mark van Doren, who encouraged me to keep on writing and particularly liked my interpretations of Shakespeare. I got an “A” in Advanced Composition from another encouraging and friendly instructor. I renewed my typing agency and tutored more French, wrote once more for the Columbia Spectator and Jester, and was enjoying myself thoroughly until I ran out of money in December. I transferred to Naval Flying, flunked out there, and went back to the Merchant Marine.

In the Merchant Marine, I began work on a novel entitled “The Sea is My Brother,” did informal research on the subconscious mind and dreams, and traveled to Casablanca, London, Liverpool, Belfast, and Glasgow. After writing 80,000 words on the novel, I decided to remake an entirely new version of it and title it “Two Worlds for a New One.” I am working on this at the present. As well, I have two stories pending at the New Yorker, [....] So much for the past and present.

The day I was born, there was snow on the ground and the light from the descending sun made the windows in Centralville glow with strange and lovely melancholia.

I was six years old, walking home with my sled.

Suddenly, I was born: I began to wonder, genuine mature wondering. I was wondering about this: Why is everything sad now, as I go home to my supper. Why?

I was born, therefore, in 1929, about seven months before the great stock market crash in Wall St. In Centralville, I didn't hear a damned thing, and for all that, I was busy wondering anyway. I had no time to dawdle with worldly affairs; in the newspaper, I looked at the big headlines telling of the stock market crash, but I didn't care much, apparently, since today all I can remember is Popeye & the Thimble Theatre, by Segar, Co. 1929, King Features Syndicate, and so forth. Nothing about the stock market crash, only Popeye in the funny page.

The day I was born, on my way to supper with my sled, hands feeling red-hot with energy, myself steaming into the winter air from underneath the warm scarf, I stopped to look at the sad windows of the houses.

Why, why? I asked myself, aged six. Pourquoi, I might of said, because I was French. At any rate, I wanted to know, and I couldn't quite make it out, and I still cannot make it out, which is in a nutshell the story of inward war, raging inside of me, Science vs. Poetry, Bazarov vs. Wolfe, and all that sort of thing. (Tennysonian sentimentality vs. the Gallup Poll, or better, Shelley vs. Eleanor Roosevelt.) It is an astounding question, and needs to be solved.

I came very close to solving it, the first day I was born. Since then, I have been getting further and further away from the answer, until today, I am ignorant. At six, I was wise. Even Oil-Coordinator Ickes was wise at six, and Walter Winchell also. We were all wise at the age of six.

But today, we are more or less insane. There are exceptions, but I don't want to start anything. Not at the moment. I am busy writing a story called “Sadness at Six.”

I was walking along, dead, and suddenly I saw the windows of Centralville gleaming redly, quietly; I heard a dog barking, and the children who were still coasting on the hill were making plenty of swell noise; it was February, I shall presume, and the sun was getting redder and redder all over the whole neighborhood there was a strange old color as of dream and I was born, amid radiant glowings, born into this world to get in line with the boys, the good boys or the bad boys, either which way, and with a sweep of wonderment, I began to live—a man on the earth, his relation to all things, to himself, to his fellow man, to his society, and to the universe. I was born in February 1929, which makes me 13 years old as I write. Not bad for a kid, hey? Yes, I was born, and the music began to filter into my being, and the colors accentuated deeply, and the weird flutings as of Joyce could be heard emanating from my lips, and I was a man on the earth at last, age two minutes five seconds. I went home and ate my first meal. That's all I remember, and there is not much else to say. I was born suddenly, at the age of six, and I am thanking whoever did it for me—be it Bazarov's God, or Wolfe's, or Aquinas'.