B007RT1UH4 EBOK (38 page)

To Edith Gaddis

American Express

11, Rue Scribe

Paris France

9 July 49.

dear Mother,

I have just dropped two suitcase keys out of my 7th-storey hotel window; and that trifle may go to illustrate pretty much how things have been going for the last weeks.

Many enough competences have attacked the sempiternal picture of ingrate children, sons and lovers. And here the son, moored high among a floating campanella, faëry bells that pass unattached, tangled among treetops, bleeding their sounds in drops over the green, through the light, indifferent calling signalling only the mariner who reasons to fear the shoals, we others reach out, call back answerless, until there and sudden is the white water and we know what they knew—Seated, as I say, on a level of treetops in an anonymous section of Paris, adding the days I have written you nothing (where the dark of the days and the hours reigned in glowing incautious confusion) (new ribbon)

(“and that one”, said an old engineer, “has bananas in his head . . .”) History being a temporal substitute for creation, I suppose we may best recline to chronology, to rely like the weak on arrangement, on the varicose strands of time. Conveniently with each day numbered, respectfully submitting to a larger number that Pope Gregory, forced to temporal attentions, restricted as a year, thinking perhaps that any christian concept of eternity merited science’s corresponding resolution to infinity, that was numbers. Or Evangeline, retching in the forest primeval —life is very long.

But no. Better, —It was roses, roses all the way, and never a sprig of yew . . . And better to go backwards; starting at last night.

The Paris Opera. We went, I took Margaret, to the ballet at the Paris Opera, largely because it is Paris, because she is Margaret, and we are both, wolens-nolens, in Paris. And so we sat, at aristocratic attention, inclining toward the stage or toward one another to comment, seated in armchairs, suspended darkly over the ostentation of the multitude; and there they danced to undistinguished music and polite applause—who? an American? shouted bis! bis! not because it was grand or even particularly good, but because we need spectacles, because the only ones who afford the grand gesture today usually end up in the prison or the asylum, so well-conducted is our sterility, so well-rewarded our antisepsis,

(Well, and it was graceful of them, they’d break talk off and afford,

(She to touch her mask’s black velvet, he to finger at his sword,

(While you sat and played tocattas, stately at the clavichord . . .)

Words drop, disappear, or shamefully retreat from our vocabularies. And that word cried in a desert on desert air, that was Disaster. Because now, a meticulous unfolding seems to be going on. The day before, we (of whom the sustaining concomitant is Margaret) went as his guests to Mr Bean’s country school, where we lunched in a cafe garden, and were so pleasant together that one has a sudden moment of stricken silence to say, these are the moments we have waited for, and paid for before and after, passionless and un-looked-for. Or we have suppered at a student restaurant, or among intellectuals talking of foolishness, or fools parading their mis-information, or walked near the Seine and beside it, or walked among people like a walk in the forest over dead leaves where they crush under quick steps refuse of nature, used, old junk, dust returning, back to the button-moulder, helpless before life.

All of which is to say, that, although confusion has never reigned so brilliantly, there would seem to be immanent crossroads: though that is a pitifully incompetent metaphor: not crossroads, but something like that clover-leaf highway arrangement on the Henry Hudson parkway; where, if you remember, we spent the better part of an afternoon thundering in misdirections, and were finally resolved on the way we were going, for better or worse, toward home or away from it, I cannot remember.

Let me say, it is not as Mr Eliot said it was, as it was, “distracted from distraction by distraction,” . . . but now there is the sense of concert.

Jacob has gone off to the Loire valley for his summer. Bernie has gone off to a week-end for his week-end. Margaret has inclined to the let-us-hope brief charm of Sont-American Gold (dear one, she really deserves a full meal). The rest have all gone into the dark. And I, as I say, ponder here in a tiny room, an ayerie (I can’t spell it, it means an eagle’s nest) in respectable periphery of Paris. I believe that in another week I may go to join Jake. But cannot say. First I want to talk here to some personification of responsbility, some handmaiden to power, about the notion of returning to Spain in the fall with employment there. I have thought this summer to work at My work, to prove it one way or another, and by the fall know whether it deserves the continuance of vagabondage, or points instead to the bondage of respectable employment. If that latter I can hope to go back to that naked country which I have not finished with; it has not finished with me yet either.

There is, as you may have foreseen, may have hoped, the sudden gigantic gigantic consideration, of another person. That is Margaret. Margaret just now is about as busy and certain as a kettle-drummer, quite unhysterical, not desperate, because she knows the composer. And can you know, what a quiet good happy and pleasant time we have had here in Paris? Time, energy, and money, well and wonderfully spent. But spent, especially the last. I am, at the moment, cheerfully broke and reasonably in debt, but shall not load you with those endless considerations; because all of the expenditure, unreasonable as it may have seemed, has pointed, is pointing in better direction, in a direction of fullness, of realisation. Still the 15th looks miles away.

I wait with ill-concealed hunger, thinking that perhaps Mr Hall will appear, the consideration of a ‘very good dinner’, I believe I can even borrow a white shirt for the engagement. Oh, understand; I do not wait haggard and hungry, but in a new element of something near peace, something near happiness, something near content with a hard-boiled egg for today’s meal.

Let me say, bitterness disappears or is channeled; that the wiseness in what was called foolish expenditure becomes evident as the corners of the pattern begin to suggest themselves; that reason reached through unreason; and honesty through pretension. to ask you to indulge the fore-going miasma of metaphor, the dearth of clean lines, the plethora of pretension; to find underneath what I try vainly to dig down to; to be assured of my health in body, immanent sanity of mind, and eternal gratitude.

Now an old typewriter-ribbon has caught smouldering fire in my wastebacket. I shall return to the immediate problems of This World.

with all love,

W.

Pope Gregory: Gregory XIII established the Gregorian calendar in 1582 to correct the older Julian calendar.

Evangeline: the heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s book-lenth poem (1847), who wanders through forests primeval before settling in Philadelphia.

It was roses [...] sprig of yew: from Graham Greene’s 1938 novel
Brighton Rock
: “Mr Prewitt quoted promptly, inaccurately, ‘Roses, roses all the way, and never a sprig of yew’” (Penguin, 1977), 167. The first half is the opening line of Robert Browning’s poem “The Patriot” (1845), and quoted in
R
(741); “and never a sprig of yew” is from Matthew Arnold’s “Requiescat” (1853): “Strew on her roses, roses, / And never a spray of yew!”

wolens-nolens: i.e.,
nolens volens
, Latin: willing or unwilling (willy-nilly).

bis! bis!: encore! encore!

Well [...] at the clavichord: from Browning’s poem “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” (1855), prominently quoted in
R
(191).

the button-moulder: a character in Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
(1867), an important text for
R.

“distracted from distraction by distraction”: from section 3 of “Burnt Norton” (1935), the first of Eliot’s
Four Quartets.

Sont-American Gold: perhaps a typo for South-American Gold.

gone into the dark: “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,” from section 3 of Eliot’s “East Coker.”

To Edith Gaddis

American Express, Paris

25 July 49.

Well,

Remembering many months ago, saying something about the dust settling: it doesn’t. There are frying pans and fires. The desert of St Anthony or evenings with Sardanapolis, all punctured by the laundry question. A man gets tired sometimes.

Just this morning, I put on a hat, since I was going after a job as a contact man. Now I don’t know what a contact man is, but it sounded to me like somebody with a hat. It turned out he needed more. Or less. Less, perhaps, since it pays a 2$ commission for every many days foolish work. I decided not to be a contact man. There are all the thousands of Americans here looking for work; and re-engaging onesself in the competitive society is a caution. And with all its pleasance, Paris more often becomes a hot city, with the city’s beauties: wrong-telephone numbers, buses missed, &c.

I know this sounds more daily like a crazy game I am playing; and the more confirmative of opinions such as those of Mr GSB et allia. And honestly, how I wish I could sit down and write you a long letter of the sort I have written; but this is not the climate, not a Spanish monastery. Just, so far, a habitat of loose ends, among them at present mr Emmart, mr Winebaum, myself, Margaret, &c. Jacob the only sensible one, having gone to the less expensive and cooler country.

What are questions I must answer? First many thanks for the promised extra this month. It will save a life or two. Then thanks for the Heggen news-clip, Snow’s marriage, and news of Chas Hall (who, if he was in cantankerous spirit, just as well I guess we all didn’t encounter, I do hope for your sake, he is over it when he gets back). [...]

I don’t know; there is so much in my mind now that I can’t set it down on letter paper; but thanks always for being so good about these recent and far-between wild-eyed notes. Margaret continues to be the loveliest lady on the continent. Happy happy happy pair; none but the brave, none but the brave, not but the brave deserve the fair.

with all love,

W

St Anthony: Egyptian monk (c. 251–356) who spent most of his life in self-imposed isolation.

Sardanapolis: i.e., Sardanapalus (7th cent.
BCE
?), the semilegendary last king of Assyria, evocative of riotous living.

Mr GSB: mentioned in 19 January 1948 letter.

Heggen news-clip: on the suicide of Thomas Heggen (1918–49), author of the popular novel
Mister Roberts
(1946). He and WG fought over Helen Parker in 1946; see John Leggett’s
Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies
(Simon & Schuster, 1974), 330–34, an incident that reveals WG’s belligerent side.

Happy happy [...] deserve the fair: from Dryden’s poem “Alexander’s Feast” (1697).