The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (11 page)

A half hour later, a mere half hour, he was going down the stairs, remembering all the rotten details, the face, the hands, the body, the way it happened. And the ghastly silence as of death, the absence of strength, the impossibility of laughter, the true ugliness of it.

He fled from Chinatown, delirious with anger and shock and horror. He saw the earth flat and drab, cheap and pointless, and what was worse he saw himself as he was, small, the size of a small man, and cheap and pointless and drab and ungodly, and everything despicable. He wanted to laugh at himself but could not. He wanted to laugh at the whole world, the fraudulence of all things that had life and motion, but could not. He began to walk in the city, not knowing which way to go, not understanding why he was there at all, walking, dreading the thought of ever again going home, and all that he could think of was the ghastly filthiness of truth even, the everlasting pettiness of man, the whole falsity of humanity.

He walked a long while, and at last he went home, entering his father’s house. And when he was asked to eat, he said that he was not hungry, and he went to
his room and took a book and tried to read. The words were on the pages as evasions, like everything else. He closed the book and tried just sitting and not thinking, but it was impossible.

He could not get over the feeling of the cheapness of the whole thing, the absence of strength, the absence of dignity, the impossibility of laughter.

His mother, worrying, standing at the door of his room, heard him crying. At first she could not believe it, but afterwards she knew that it was real crying, like her own crying sometimes, and she went to the boy’s father. “He is in there alone, crying,” she said to her husband. “Sammy, our boy, is crying, papa. Sammy. Please go to him, papa. I am afraid. Please see why he is crying.” And the poor woman began herself to cry. It made her very happy to cry over her son crying. It made her feel that at last he was like all of them, small and pathetic, a real baby, her boy, and she kept on repeating, “Papa, Sammy is crying; he is crying, papa.”

Dear M—,

I want you to know that it is very cold in San Francisco today, and that I am freezing. It is so cold in my room that every time I start to write a short story the cold stops me and I have to get up and do bending exercises. It means, I think, that something’s got to be done about keeping short story writers warm. Sometimes when it is very cold I am able to do very good writing, but at other times I am not. It is the same when the weather is excessively pleasant. I very much dislike letting a day go by without writing a short story and that is why I am writing this letter: to let you know that I am very angry about the weather. Do not think that I am sitting in a nice warm room
in sunny California, as they call it, and making up all this stuff about the cold. I am sitting in a very cold room and there is no sun anywhere, and the only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today. I am freezing and my teeth are chattering. I would like to know what the Democratic party ever did for freezing short story writers. Everybody else gets heat. We’ve got to depend on the sun and in the winter the sun is undependable. That’s the fix I am in: wanting to write and not being able to, because of the cold.

One winter day last year the sun came out and its light came into my room and fell across my table, warming my table and my room and warming me. So I did some brisk bending exercises and then sat down and began to write a short story. But it was a winter day and before I had written the first paragraph of the story the sun had fallen back behind clouds and there I was in my room, sitting in the cold, writing a story. It was such a good story that even though I knew it would never be printed I had to go on writing it, and as a result I was frozen stiff by the time I finished writing it. My face was blue and I could barely move my limbs, they were so cold and stiff. And my room was full of the smoke of a package of Chesterfield cigarettes, but even the smoke was frozen. There were clouds of it in my room, but my room was very cold just the same. Once, while I was writing, I thought of getting a tub and making a fire in it. What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story. I found an old tub and I brought it to my room, but when I
looked around for books to burn I couldn’t find any. All of my books are old and cheap. I have about five hundred of them and I paid a nickel each for most of them, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn’t find any. There was a large heavy book in German on anatomy that would have made a swell fire, but when I opened it and read a line of that beautiful language,
sie bestehen aus zwei Hüftgelenkbeu-gemuskeln des Oberschenkels, von denen der eine breitere
, and so on, I couldn’t do it. It was asking too much. I couldn’t understand the language, I couldn’t understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire. The book had cost me five cents two or three years ago, and it weighed about six pounds, so you see that even as fire wood it had been a bargain and I should have been able to tear out its pages and make a fire.

But I couldn’t do it. There were over a thousand pages in the book and I planned to burn one page at a time and see the fire of each page, but when I thought of all that print being effaced by fire and all that accurate language being removed from my library, I couldn’t do it, and I still have the book. When I get tired of reading great writers, I go to this book and read language that I cannot understand,
während der Kindheit ist sie von birnförmiger Gestalt und liegt vorzugsweise in der Bauchhöhle
. It is simply blasphemous to think of burning a thousand pages of such language. And of course I haven’t so much as mentioned the marvelous illustrations.

Then I began to look around for cheap fiction.

And you know the world is chock full of such stuff.
Nine books out of ten are cheap worthless fiction, inorganic stuff. I thought, well, there are at least a half dozen of those books in my library and I can burn them and be warm and write my story. So I picked out six books and together they weighed about as much as the German anatomy book. The first was
Tom Brown At Oxford: A Sequel to School Days At Rugby
, Two Volumes in One. The first book had 378 pages, and the second 430, and all these pages would have made a small fire that would have lasted a pretty long time, but I had never read the book and it seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn’t even read. It looked as if it ought to be a book of cheap prose, one worthy of being burned, but I couldn’t do it. I read,
The belfry-tower rocked and reeled, as that peal rang out, now merry, now scornful, now plaintive, from those narrow belfry windows, into the bosom of the soft southwest wind, which was playing round the old gray tower of Englebourn church
. Now that isn’t exactly tremendous prose, but it isn’t such very bad prose either. So I put the book back on the shelf.

The next book was
Inez: A Tale of the Alamo
, and it was dedicated to The Texan Patriots. It was by the author of another book called
Beulah
, and yet another called
St. Elmo
. The only thing I knew about this writer or her books was that one day a girl at school had been severely reprimanded for bringing to class a book called
St. Elmo
. It was said to be the sort of book that would corrupt the morals of a young girl. Well, I opened the book and read,
I am dying; and, feeling as I do, that few hours are allotted me, I
shall not hesitate to speak freely and candidly. Some might think me deviating from, the delicacy of my sex; but, under the circumstances, I feel that I am not. I have loved you long, and to know that my love is returned, is a source of deep and unutterable joy to me
. And so on.

This was such bad writing that it was good, and I decided to read the whole book at my first opportunity. There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.

The next book was
Ten Nights In A Bar Room, and What I Saw There
by T. S. Arthur. Well, even this book was too good to burn. The other three books were by Hall Caine, Brander Matthews, and Upton Sinclair. I had read only Mr. Sinclair’s book, and while I didn’t like it a lot as a piece of writing, I couldn’t burn it because the print was so fine and the binding so good. Typographically it was one of my best books.

Anyway, I didn’t burn a single page of a single book, and I went on freezing and writing. Every now and then I burned a match just to remind myself what a flame looked like, just to keep in touch with the idea of heat and warmth. It would be when I wanted to light another cigarette and instead of blowing out the flame I would let it burn all the way down to my fingers.

It is simply this: that if you have any respect for the mere idea of books, what they stand for in life, if you believe in paper and print, you cannot burn any
page of any book. Even if you are freezing. Even if you are trying to do a bit of writing yourself. You can’t do it. It is asking too much.

Today it is as cold in my room as the day I wanted to make a fire of books. I am sitting in the cold, smoking cigarettes, and trying to get this coldness onto paper so that when it becomes warm again in San Francisco I won’t forget how it was on the cold days.

I have a small phonograph in my room and I play it when I want to exercise in order to keep warm. Well, when it gets to be very cold in my room this phonograph won’t work. Something goes wrong inside, the grease freezes and the wheels won’t turn, and I can’t have music while I am bending and swinging my arms. I’ve got to do it without music. It is much more pleasant to exercise with jazz, but when it is very cold the phonograph won’t work and I am in a hell of a fix. I have been in here since eight o’clock this morning and it is now a quarter to five, and I am in a hell of a mess. I hate to let a day go by without doing something about it, without saying something, and all day I have been in here with my books that I never read, trying to get started and I haven’t gotten anywhere. Most of the time I have been walking up and down the room (two steps in any direction brings you to a wall) and bending and kicking and swinging my arms. That’s practically all I have been doing. I tried the phonograph a half dozen times to see if the temperature hadn’t gone up a little, but it hadn’t, and the phonograph wouldn’t play music.

I thought I ought to tell you about this. It’s nothing important. It’s sort of silly, making so much of a
little cold weather, but at the same time the cold is a fact today and it is the big thing right now and I am speaking of it. The thing that amazes and pleases me is that my typewriter hasn’t once clogged today. Around Christmas when we had a very cold spell out here it was always clogging, and the more I oiled it the more it clogged. I couldn’t do a thing with it. The reason was that I had been using the wrong kind of oil. But all this time that I have been writing about the cold my typewriter has been doing its work excellently, and this amazes and pleases me. To think that in spite of the cold this machine can go right on making the language I use is very fine. It encourages me to stick with it, whatever happens. If the machine will work, I tell myself, then you’ve got to work with it. That’s what it amounts to. If you can’t write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody. Tell them how cold you are. By the time the letter is received the sun will be out again and you will be warm again, but the letter will be there mentioning the cold. If it is so cold that you can’t make up a little ordinary Tuesday prose, why, what the hell, say anything that comes along, just so it’s the truth. Talk about your toes freezing, about the time you actually wanted to burn books to keep warm but couldn’t do it, about the phonograph. Speak of the little unimportant things on a cold day, when your mind is numb and your feet and hands frozen. Mention the things you wanted to write but couldn’t. This is what I have been telling myself.

After coffee this morning, I came here to write an
important story. I was warm with the coffee and I didn’t realize how really cold it was. I brought out paper and started to line up what I was going to say in this important story that will never be written because once I lose a thing I lose it forever, this story that is forever lost because of the cold that got into me and silenced me and made me jump up from my chair and do bending exercises. Well, I can tell you about it. I can give you an idea what it was to have been like. I remember that much about it, but I didn’t write it and it is lost. It will give you something of an idea as to how I write.

I will tell you the things I was telling myself this morning while I was getting this story lined up in my mind:

Think of America, I told myself this morning. The whole thing. The cities, all the houses, all the people, the coming and going, the coming of children, the going of them, the coming and going of men and death, and life, the movement, the talk, the sound of machinery, the oratory, think of the pain in America and the fear and the deep inward longing of all things alive in America. Remember the great machines, wheels turning, smoke and fire, the mines and the men working them, the noise, the confusion. Remember the newspapers and the moving picture theatres and everything that is a part of this life. Let this be your purpose: to suggest this great country.

Then turn to the specific. Go out to some single person and dwell with him, within him, lovingly, seeking to understand the miracle of his being, and utter the truth of his existence and reveal the splendor
of the mere fact of his being alive, and say it in great prose, simply, show that he is of the time, of the machines and the fire and smoke, the newspapers and the noise. Go with him to his secret and speak of it gently, showing that it is the secret of man. Do not deceive. Do not make up lies for the sake of pleasing anyone. No one need be killed in your story. Simply relate what is the great event of all history, of all time, the humble, artless truth of mere being. There is no greater theme: no one need be violent to help you with your art. There
is
violence. Mention it of course when it is time to mention it. Mention the war. Mention all ugliness, all waste. Do even this lovingly. But emphasize the glorious truth of mere being. It is the major theme. You do not have to create a triumphant climax. The man you write of need not perform some heroic or monstrous deed in order to make your prose great. Let him do what he has always done, day in and day out, continuing to live. Let him walk and talk and think and sleep and dream and awaken and walk again and talk again and move and be alive. It is enough. There is nothing else to write about. You have never seen a short story in life. The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form. Your own consciousness is the only form you need. Your own awareness is the only action you need. Speak of this man, recognize his existence. Speak of man.

Well, this is a poor idea of what the story was to have been like. I was warm with coffee when I was telling myself what and how to write, but now I am
freezing, and this is the closest I can come to what I had in mind. It was to have been something fine, but now all that I have is this vague remembrance of the story. The least I can do is put into words this remembrance. Tomorrow I will write another story, a different story. I will look at the picture from a different viewpoint. I don’t know for sure, but I may feel cocky and I may mock this country and the life that is lived here. It is possible. I can do it. I have done it before, and sometimes when I get mad about political parties and political graft I sit down and mock this great country of ours. I get mean and I make man out to be a rotten, worthless, unclean thing. It isn’t man, but I make out as if it is. It’s something else, something less tangible, but for mockery it is more convenient to make out that it is man. It’s my business to get at the truth, but when you start to mock, you say to hell with the truth. Nobody’s telling the truth, why should I? Everybody’s telling nice lies, writing nice stories and novels, why should I worry about the truth. There is no truth. Only grammar, punctuation, and all that rot. But I know better. I can get mad at things and start to mock, but I know better. At its best, the whole business is pretty sad, pretty pathetic.