Blue Voyage: A Novel (22 page)

“Yes,
why
not? The answer is, that though I’m an unsuccessful artist—pleasing practically nobody but myself—and though, as a good psychologist, I scorn or at any rate
see through
the whole bloody business, nevertheless I have that particular sort of neurosis, verbal in its outward expression, which will probably keep me an artist till I die or go mad.… Suppose I’m a sort of forerunner, a new type. And what then?”

“A new type? Tell it to the marines! You don’t look it. You’re no more a new type than
I
am.”

“Yes, sir! A type in which there is an artist’s neurosis, but also a penetrating intelligence which will not permit, or permit only with contempt, the neurosis to work itself out! If you want a parallel which will make the predicament clear, conceive a Christ, for example, who
understood
the nature of his psychological affliction, foresaw its fatal consequences for himself, foresaw also that to yield to his neurosis would perhaps retard the development of mankind for four thousand years, and nevertheless
had to yield to it
. As a matter of fact, that illustration occurs to me because it is the theme of a play that I’ve had in mind for some time.
The Man Who Was Greater Than God
.”

“It’s a damned good title, I’ll say that much for it! But if you ever got it on the stage, you’d be mobbed.”

“Oh, it would be impossible at present. At any rate, it probably would be, if my hero was too palpably modeled on Christ. I could, however, and probably would, represent him as a modern man, an intelligent man, who nevertheless had religious delusions of grandeur. Perhaps an illegitimate child, who compensated for that flaw in his descent by believing himself to be the son of God … Or, I’ve also considered dropping the Messiah idea altogether, and having for my hero an artist, or a writer, or perhaps a social reformer. In that case, I betray
myself
—it’s really myself I should be portraying in either character. The Strindberg and Nietzsche and von Kleist type, but with the addition of intellectual poise, or
insight
! However, what good would it do? What’s the use of doing it? The predicament of the hero would be too exceptional to be widely interesting—no audience could possibly sympathize with him. The Messiah, on the other hand, would be a figure universally appealing … Yes, it would have to be the Messiah, much as I prefer the artist … But—why not
act
that play, in my own life, instead of thus taking flight from the problem in one more surrender to my neurosis?”

“Act it? I don’t get you. How do you mean act it?”

“Well, in the play the hero would finally decide (perhaps he is pushed, somewhat, to this conclusion by his friend, a psychoanalyst) to abjure his art, entirely and forever. To anyone who is an artist, that scene would be positively
plangent
with invitations to narcissistic anguish—every artist, beholding, would weep for himself. Imagine it. A Shakespeare, for instance, deciding for the good of humanity, not to write plays! Seeing them all there—his Hamlet, his Othello, his Lear, his Cleopatra, his magnificent Coriolanus—and dismissing them unborn! Very touching. And to make it worse, he perhaps pays for this in a complete mental breakdown, or death … That’s the
play:
in which, as you see, I have all the luxury of this suicidal decision, but also the luxury of having again, and thus intimately,
adored
myself. Now the question is—why not
do
it, instead of writing it? Why not give up, in advance, that play and all my other ambitions? I think very seriously of it; at the same time suspecting that my whole life would be deranged by it … It’s a nice little problem. To write, or to commit suicide.”

“Don’t do either! but have a cocktail!”

“That’s not a bad idea, either! a dry Martini would go nicely.”

“Steward! Can we have two
dry
Martinis, please?”

“Two
dry
Martinis, yes, sir.”

“Yes, it’s very sad and complicated. If you look at the problem from a purely humanitarian point of view, and try to solve it solely in the interests of mankind—even then, it’s not too simple. In the first place, there is always the possibility that the whole Freudian idea, as thus applied to art, is wrong. It may be that art will be a permanent necessity for man, a penalty that he pays for having become a social and civilized animal. How can we be sure? If I go on writing plays and novels, may I not at any rate give aid and comfort to a few verbalistic lunatics like myself, and help them to keep their spiritual balance in this melancholy world? And isn’t that a good deed?… But no, I’m not sure. The intellectual side of me declines to believe in that—or balks at it. I have what my friend Tompkins, the psychoanalyst, calls a Samson complex.”

“This gets deeper and darker. Have a drink. Here’s to the Samson complex!”

“Your bloody good health!”

“Not bad at all.”

“Shall we repeat?”

“We might!”

“Two more please, steward?”

“Two dry Martinis? Yes, sir.”

“Well, now, Socrates, tell me about the Samson complex. I hope you don’t mind if I just seem to listen, like a sponge.”

“I don’t mind, if
you
don’t. But I don’t want to bore you.”

“Bore me! Great Godfry. I’ve been dying for something highbrow like this. But don’t be surprised if I fall asleep.”

“Well, the name for it was partly a joke, and refers to a dream I had two weeks ago, when I was visiting Tompkins. Tompkins has always been keen to have me drop all this literary folderol and become a psychologist, or at any rate a psychological critic of literature. When I was staying with Tompkins, two weeks ago, he renewed his attack on me and once more brought this schism painfully to the surface. Lately, I had been backsliding a little. After a year and a half of potboiling, which took the form of book reviewing, I suddenly developed a tremendous
resistance
to criticism—my destructive speculations, you see, were coming too close to a destruction of
myself,
not only by taking up all my time, but also by undermining my
amour propre …
How much, please?”

“Two shillings—or fifty cents. Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

“Here’s to your ectoplasm.”

“And yours. May it never grow less. Don’t forget the dream in your excitement.”

“I was just getting to it. It reflects, you see, this conflict in me between the critic and the artist … The times, I should think, were those of Euripides: though I’m not positive the place was Greece. I was a runner, a messenger, and I had been running since daybreak, bearing some portentous message. What was this great message, this revelation? I don’t know—it was never clearly formulated in the dream. But at dusk I came to a great stone-built temple, and entered it. I was exhausted: I could hardly stand. The temple chamber, within, was immense, high-roofed, and ceilinged with blue and gold; and at the far end of it, before a grim stone altar, a hieratic procession of tall priests was forming. It seemed, however, that they were expecting me, and that whatever it was that they were about to perform must wait till they had heard what it was that I had to say. I approached them, spoke, and then, my message delivered, realized that I was going to die, that the long run had killed me. Stumbling, therefore, to a table-shaped tomb of stone, I stretched myself upon it like the effigy of a crusader, my throbbing eyes turned upward toward the ceiling … How high it was, how gorgeously azured and gilded, and how massive the masonry of its arch! If it should fall—if it were only to fall—would it not destroy—not only myself, already dying—but also these hateful priests and their mysteries? the temple? And suddenly, then, with a last spastic effort of body and soul, I cried out in terrific command to the ceiling ‘F
ALL
! F
ALL
!…’ And it fell.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

“Good gracious Peter … I see, yes, where the Samson idea comes in … I never dreamt anything like that in my life. All my dreams are in pieces—I’m walking in one place, and then I’m in another. I look into a room and see a
lovely
girl undressing, kiss her—oh boy! notice that she has put too much rouge on her mouth, and looks consumptive—and the next thing I know I’m watching a crazy play, with that girl, or another one something like her, acting the heroine in
Why Girls Leave Home
. No good at all. Do you always dream dreams like that?”

“Usually.”

“No wonder you’ve got things to write about … Tell me—when you write a novel, for instance, how do you go about it? Do you make up a plot out of whole cloth—so to speak—or do you see something in life, simply, and put it down?”

“I don’t think it’s either method, but a sort of combination. Personally, I find it hard to draw from life. I couldn’t, for example, transfer you to a novel, or Hay-Lawrence, and make you real: you would only become real, for my purpose, if I had
invented
you” …

“Gosh! Now, suppose we were all of us just——”

“Characters in a novel? Yes! Every now and then one experiences that sense of a complete dissociation of personality, when one seems to evaporate under the glare of one’s own eye. Exactly the way that when you’ve been lying in bed in one position too long you lose all sense of your body … You know, it’s something like this, some analagous feeling of unreality and absurdity, a destructive sense of the profound
relativity
of my existence, that makes me a failure. It seems to me—I don’t know whether this is idiotic, but thanks to the cocktails I don’t hesitate to say it—it seems to me that I can
foresee
everything, exactly the feeling that one has in a hashish or mescal trance. Have you ever tried hashish?”

“No. Something like opium, isn’t it?”

“Something … You lose the power to distinguish in time and place. For instance, you remember, as you sit there absorbed in sensory meditation, that you have forgotten to let in the dog. In the course of thinking this, you so sharply visualize the action of descending the stairs, passing the bust of Clytie in the wall niche, slipping back the cold brass bolt, feeling the injured screw under the doorknob, hearing the whimper of the hinge and the threefold scrape of the dog’s nails on the worn door panel, and then (the door opened) seeing the mad swarm of stars above the Baptist church—you experience all this so profoundly, and the return upstairs, that you become convinced that you have actually
done
it … Am I losing my thread, or are these cocktails making me drunk?”

“I suspect you’re drunk!”

“Yes, I have at all times, drunk or sober, a crippling sense of having foreseen every possible action or feeling or thought, not only of my own, but also of everyone else. All the alternatives, too. The whole blooming buzzing cosmic telephone exchange—every connection. This is so appallingly vivid that in its wake any
real
action performed by me, or any thought formulated, or any feeling observed in its progress from belly to thorax, and from thorax to—possibly—horripilation——”

“Pause there! That word again, please, if you don’t mind, professor.”

“Horripilation—when your hair walks backward on cold feet. Any such
reality
seems to me in consequence a rather stupid and meaningless repetition, not worth troubling about. Why write a book, which one can conceive so much more sublimely than anyone could possibly write? Why bother even to
conceive
a new unity in a chosen gamut of heterogeneity, when one also foresees disastrously the hour when that unity will have become merely one item in a larger heterogeneity, each new system absorbed by a larger system? Why bother to foresee that fatality of decay and change, of clicking and mechanical and inevitable death, when one remembers that even oneself, the foreseer, was foreseen
in the act of foreseeing,
and that even one’s newness is old?… This is a poisonous sophistry from which I find it hard to escape. I only escape it when the attention of my senses has been sharply drawn. And even then the willingness to act or feel is only intermittent. As in love, for instance.”

“Ah! Thank God! I was beginning to lose all hope for you. But if you can still fall in love, it’s not so bad.”

“But my God, think how terrible it is to be in love, and not to be able to believe in it or act on it!”

“Oh, come come, Mr. Demarest! Do you mean to ask me to believe that? No … No, no!”

“It’s true, s’welp me Bob!”

“Well, if you weren’t drunk, I’d think you were crazy.”

“My dear Silberstein, I’m no crazier than you are.”

“No, sir, you can’t tar me with
that
brush. Believe me, when I’m in love—using that as a
very broad term
—there’s plenty of action. I’m no Hamlet, by God! I either get ’em, or I don’t. And if I don’t, I don’t cry about it. I look for another: the woods are full of them. It’s as easy as tripping a cripple.”

“Well, of course, I’m exaggerating slightly——”

“Ah! That’s better. You were exaggerating slightly——”

“—but there’s something in it. I don’t mean so much as applied to—well, the more fleeting sort of sexual adventure. Though it’s apt to be true even of those. But when one’s really in love—it’s a miserable business. All out of focus. No reasonable center to one’s behavior. Or
my
behavior, anyway. I’m always a damned fool when I’m in love.”

“If you’re talking about Romeo and Juliet stuff, all I can say is that at your age you ought to know better. The female doesn’t exist that can get me in love with her.”

“But I wonder if there’s any escaping one’s temperament in that regard? Here I am, aged thirty-five, and more horribly in love than I ever was before—in love, mind you, in the most sublimated and sentimental sense imaginable. I actually don’t feel the slightest
conscious
sensual attraction to the girl. Not the slightest. Oh, I don’t mean that I don’t think she’s beautiful—I do. But her beauty affects me in a very peculiar way—it seems to me merely a clue to something else, some mental or spiritual quality (though I distrust the word spiritual) which is infinitely more exciting and more worth discovery. Of course, I admit frankly that I’ve had other affairs in which there was little or nothing of this. Usually, even when I’m mildly
‘in love,’
the desire for physical contact is at once uppermost—all my tentacles and palpacles begin to quiver. Why this difference? How can we be sure that one way is any better than the other? You simply take your choice. Both of them have something of value to offer. Perhaps it’s the difference between poetry and prose. I always liked Donne’s remark on that subject——”