Black Spring (8 page)

This isn’t the end of the gondola. Two days before I left for America-1927 or ‘8-we held a big session at the house. It was at the height of my water-color career.

It began in a peculiar way, this water-color mania. Through hunger, I might say. That and the extreme cold. For weeks I had been hanging out with my friend Joe in poolrooms and comfort stations, wherever there was animal heat and no expense. On our way back to the morgue one evening we noticed a reproduction of Turner’s in the window of a department store. That’s exactly the way in which it all began. One of the most active, one of the most enjoyable periods of my barren life. When I say that we littered the floor with paintings I am not exaggerating. As fast as they dried we hung them up-and the next day we took them down and hung up another collection. We painted on the backs of old ones, we washed them off, we scraped them with the knife, and in the course of these experiments we discovered, by accident, some astonishing things. We discovered how to get interesting results with coffee grounds and bread crumbs, with coal and arnica; we laid the paintings in the bathtub and let them soak for hours, and then with a loaded brush we approached these dripping omelettes and we let fly at them. Turner started all this-and the severe winter of 1927-‘28.

Two nights before my departure, as I was saying, a number of painters come to the house to inspect our work. They are all good eggs and not above taking an interest in the work of amateurs. The water colors are lying about on the floor, as usual, drying. As a last experiment we walk over them, spilling a little wine as we go. Astonishing what effects a dirty heel will produce, or a drop of wine falling from a height of three feet with the best of intentions. The enthusiasm mounts. Two of my friends are working on the walls with chunks of coal. Another is boiling coffee in order to get some nice fresh grounds. The rest of us are drinking.

In the midst of the festivities-about three A.M.-My wife walks in. She seems a little depressed. Taking me aside she shows me a steamship ticket. I look at it. “What’s that for?” I said. “You’ve got to go away,” she answers. “But I don’t want to go away,” I said. “I’m quite happy here.” “So I see,” she says, rather sardonically.

Anyway I go. And when we’re pulling up the Thames the only thought in my mind is to see the Turner collection at the Tate Gallery. Finally I get there and I see the famous Turners. And as luck would have it one of the halfwits there takes a fancy to me. I find that he’s a magnificent water-colorist himself. Works entirely by lamplight. I really hated to leave London, he made it so agreeable for me. Anyway, pulling out of Southampton I thought to myself-“the circle is complete now: from the department store window to here.”

However, to get on… . This gondola is going to be the piece de resistance! But first I must clean up the walls. Taking the bread knife and dipping it into the laque carmine I apply a liberal dose to the windows of the houses. Holy Jesus! Immediately the houses are in flames! If I were really mad, and not simulating the madness of a madman, I’d be putting firemen into the picture and I’d make ladders out of the bold diagonal planks of the bridge flooring. But my insanity takes the form of building a conflagration. I set all the houses on fire-first with carmine, then with vermilion, and finally with a bloody concoction of all three. This part of the picture is clear and decisive: it’s a holocaust.

The result of my incendiarism is that I’ve singed the horse’s back. Now he’s neither a horse nor a zebra. He’s become a fire-eating dragon. And where the missing tail belonged there is now a bunch of firecrackers, and with a bunch of firecrackers up his ass not even an Ionian horse can preserve his dignity. I could, of course, go on to make a real dragon; but this conversion and patching-up is getting on my nerves. If you start with a horse you ought to keep it a horse-or eliminate it entirely. Once you begin to tamper with an animal’s anatomy you can go through the whole phylogenetic process.

With a solid opaque green and indigo I blot the horse out. In my mind, to be sure, he’s still there. People may look at this opaque object and think-how strange! how curious! But I know that at bottom it’s a horse. At the bottom of everything there’s some animal: that’s our deepest obsession. When I see human beings squirming up toward the light like wilted sunflowers, I say to myself: “Squirm, you bastards, and pretend all you like, but at bottom you’re a turtle or a guinea-pig.” Greece was mad about horses and if they had had the wisdom to remain half horse instead of playing the Titan-well, we might have been spared a great many mythological pains.

When you’re an instinctive water-colorist everything happens according to God’s will. Thus, if you are bidden to paint the cemetery gates a clear gamboge, you do it and you don’t grumble about it. Never mind if they are too vivid for such somber portals. Perhaps there is an unknown justification. And truly, when I paint in this bright liquid yellow, this yellow which is to me the finest of all yellows (even yellower than the mouth of the Yangtsze Kiang), I am radiant, radiant. Something dreary, cloying, oppressive has been washed away forever. I would not be surprised if it were the Cypress Hills Cemetery which I passed in disgust and mortification for so many years, which I looked down on from the bend in the elevated line, which I spat into from the platform of the train. Or St. John’s Cemetery, with its crazy leaden angels, where I worked as a gravedigger. Or the Montparnasse Cemetery which in winter looks as if it had been shellshocked. Cemeteries, cemeteries…. By God, I refuse to be buried in a cemetery! I won’t have any imbeciles standing over me with a sprinkler and looking mournful. I won’t have it!

While these thoughts have been passing through my head I have been inadvertently smearing the trees and the terraces with a dry brush. The trees gleam now like a coat of mail, the boughs are studded with silver and turquoise links. If I had a crucifixion on hand I could cover the bodies of the martyrs with jeweled pockmarks. On the wall opposite me is a scene from the wilds of Ethiopia. The body of Christ crucified lies on the floor covered with smallpox; the bloodthirsty Jews -black, Ethiopian Jews-are pounding him with iron quoits. They have a most ferociously gleeful expression. I bought the picture because of the pockmarks, why I didn’t know at the time. It’s only now that I’ve discovered the reason. Only now that I recall a certain picture over a cellar on the Bowery, entitled “Death on Bugs.” Happened I was just coming away from a lunatic, a professional visit which had not been altogether unpleasant. It’s broad afternoon and the dirty throat of the Bowery is choked with clots of phlegm. Just below Cooper Square three bums are stretched out flat beside a lamppost, a la Breughel. A penny arcade is going full blast. A weird, unearthly chant rises up from the streets, like a man with a cleaver fighting his way through delirium tremens. And there, over the slanting cellar door, is this painting called “Death on Bugs.” A naked woman with long flaxen hair lies on the bed scratching herself. The bed is floating in the middle air and about it dances a man with a squirt gun. He has that same imbecilic air about him as these Jews with the iron quoits. The picture is stippled with pockmarks -to represent that cosmopolitan bloodsucking wingless depressed bug of reddish-brown color and vile odor which infests houses and beds and goes by the formidable name of Cimex lectularius.

And here I am now with a dry brush applying the stigmata to the three trees. The clouds are covered with bedbugs, the volcano is belching bedbugs; the bedbugs are scrambling down the steep chalk cliffs and drowning themselves in the river. I am like that young immigrant on the second floor of a poem by some Ivanovich or other who tosses about on the bedsprings haunted by the misery of his starved, wasted life, despairing of all the beauty beyond his grasp. My whole life seems to be wrapped up in that dirty handkerchief, the Bowery, which I walked through day after day, year in and year out-a dose of smallpox whose scars never disappear. If I had a name then it was Cimex Lectularius. If I had a home it was a slide trombone. If I had a passion it was to wash myself clean.

In a fury now I take the brush and dipping it in all the colors successively I commence to smudge the cemetery gates. I smudge and smudge until the lower half of the picture is as thick as chocolate, until the picture actually smells of pigment. And when it is completely ruined I sit there with a vacant enjoyment and twiddle my thumbs.

And then suddenly I get a real inspiration. I take it to the sink and after soaking it well I scrub it with the nail brush. I scrub and scrub and then I hold the picture upside down, letting the colors coagulate. Then gin gerly, very gingerly, I flatten it out on my desk. It’s a masterpiece, I tell you! I’ve been studying it for the last three hours….

You may say it’s just an accident, this masterpiece, and so it is! But then, so is the Twenty-third Psalm. Every birth is miraculous-and inspired. What appears now before my eyes is the result of innumerable mistakes, withdrawals, erasures, hesitations; it is also the result of certitude. You would like to give the nail brush credit, and the water credit. Do so-by all means. Give everybody and everything credit. Credit Dante, credit Spinoza, credit Hieronymus Bosch. Credit Cash and debit Societe Anonyme. Put in the Day Book: Tante Melia. So. Draw a balance. Out by a penny, eh? If you could take a penny from your pocket and balance the books you would do so. But you are no longer dealing with actual pennies. There is no machine clever enough to devise, to counterfeit, this penny which does not exist. The world of real and counterfeit is behind us. Out of the tangible we have invented the intangible.

When you can draw up a clean balance you will no longer have a picture. Now you have an intangible, an accident, and you sit up all night with the open ledger cracking your skull over it. You have a minus sign on your hands. All live, interesting data is labeled minus. When you find the plus equivalent you have-nothing. You have that imaginary, momentary something called “a balance.” A balance never is. It’s a fraud, like stopping the clock, or like calling a truce. You strike a balance in order to add a hypothetical weight, in order to create a reason for your existence.

I have never been able to draw a balance. I am always minus something. I have a reason therefore to go on. I am putting my whole life into the balance in order that it may produce nothing. To get to nothing you have to lay out an infinitude of figures. That’s just it: in the living equation the sign for myself is infinity. To get nowhere you must traverse every known universe: you must be everywhere in order to be nowhere. To have disorder you must destroy every form of order. To go mad you must have a terrific accumulation of sanities. All the madmen whose works have inspired me were touched by a cold sanity. They have taught me nothing-because the balance sheets which they bequeathed to us have been falsified. Their calculations are meaningless to me-because the figures have been altered. The marvelous gilt-edged ledgers which they handed down have the hideous beauty of plants which are forced in the night.

My masterpiece! It’s like a splinter under the nail. I ask you, now that you are looking at it, do you see in it the lakes beyond the Urals? do you see the mad Kotchei balancing himself with a paper parasol? do you see the arch of Trajan breaking through the smoke of Asia? do you see the penguins thawing in the Himalayas? do you see the Creeks and the Seminoles gliding through the cemetery gates? do you see the fresco from the Upper Nile, with its flying geese, its bats and aviaries? do you see the marvelous pommels of the Crusaders and the saliva that washed them down? do you see the wigwams belching fire? do you see the alkali sinks and the mule bones and the gleaming borax? do you see the tomb of Belshazzar, or the ghoul who is rifling it? do you see the new mouths which the Colorado will open up? do you see the starfish lying on their backs and the molecules supporting them? do you see the bursting eyes of Alexander, or the grief that inspired it? do you see the ink on which the squibs are feeding?

No, I’m afraid you don’t! You see only the bleak blue angel frozen by the glaciers. You do not even see the umbrella ribs, because you are not trained to look for umbrella ribs. But you see an angel, and you see a horse’s ass. And you may keep them: they are for you! There are no pockmarks on the angel now-only a cold blue spotlight which throws into relief his fallen stomach and his broken arches. The angel is there to lead you to Heaven, where it is all plus and no minus. The angel is there like a watermark, a guarantee of your faultless vision. The angel has no goiter; it is the artist who has the goiter. The angel is there to drop sprigs of parsley in your omelette, to put a shamrock in your buttonhole. I could scrub the mythology out of the horse’s mane; I could scrub the yellow out of the Yangtsze Kiang; I could scrub the date out of the man in the gondola; I could scrub out the clouds and the tissue paper in which were wrapped the bouquets with forked lightning…. But the angel 1 can’t scrub out. The angel is my watermark.

The Tailor Shop

I’ve got a motter: always merry and bright!

The day used to start like this: “Ask so-and-so for a little something on account, but don’t insult him!” They were ticklish bastards, all these old farts we catered to. It was enough to drive any man to drink. There we were, just opposite the Olcott, Fifth Avenue tailors even though we weren’t on the Avenue. A joint corporation of father and son, with mother holding the boodle.

Mornings, eight A.M. or thereabouts, a brisk intellectual walk from Delancey Street and the Bowery to just below the Waldorf. No matter how fast I walked old man Bendix was sure to be there ahead of me, raising hell with the cutter because neither of the bosses was on the job. How was it we could never get there ahead of that old buzzard Bendix? He had nothing to do, Bendix, but run from the tailor to the shirtmaker and from the shirtmaker to the jeweler’s; his rings were either too loose or too tight, his watch was either twentyfive seconds slow or thirty-three seconds fast. He raised hell with everybody, including the family doctor, because the latter couldn’t keep his kidneys clear of gravel. If we made him a sack coat in August by October it was too large for him, or too small. When he could find nothing to complain about he would dress on the right side so as to have the pleasure of bawling the pants maker out because he was strangling his, H. W. Bendix’s, balls. A difficult guy. Touchy, whimsical, mean, crotchety, miserly, capricious, malevolent. When I look back on it all now, see the old man sitting down to table with his boozy breath and saying shit why don’t some one smile, why do you all look so glum, I feel sorry for him and for all merchant tailors who have to kiss rich people’s asses. If it hadn’t been for the Olcott bar across the way and the sots he picked up there God knows what would have become of the old man. He certainly got no sympathy at home. My mother hadn’t the least idea what it meant to be kissing rich people’s backsides. All she knew how to do was to groan and lament all day, and with her groaning and lamenting she brought on the boozy breath and the potato dumplings grown cold. She got us so damned jumpy with her anxiety that we would choke on our own spittle, my brother and I. My brother was a halfwit and he got on the old man’s nerves even more than H. W. Bendix with his “Pastor So-and-so’s going to Europe…. Pastor So-and-so’s going to open a bowling alley,”
etc.
“Pastor So-and-so’s an ass,” the old man would say, “and why aren’t the dumplings hot?”