ASSIGNMENT: By Thursday 2/18 write a 750-1000 word critical essay on Tropic of Cancer. You are encouraged to offer your own insights, but you might consider some of these thematic questions: Is this a novel in the conventional sense, or is it a hybrid of fiction, memoir and opinion? Is the book’s frank depiction of sexuality shocking by today’s standards, and does the fact that the sexuality is conveyed in language rather than moving images enhance its impact? What is Miller saying when he calls himself “the happiest man alive”? Discuss how Miller uses bursts of freewheeling lyrical language to convey his sensual responses to the world around him? How do Miller’s poverty and self-exile filter his worldview? How does Miller view the role of the artist, and the writer in particular? Miller expresses great admiration for Walt Whitman; what similarities in style and outlook do these two writers share? Is Miller’s attitude toward women patriarchal and sexist, romantic and idealized, or a mixture of both? What do Miller’s feminist critics, such as Kate Millett (author of Sexual Politics) and Jeanette Winterson have to say about Miller’s worldview? Can Miller’s view of sex and women be explained in part as a manifestation of the author’s times and the culture that formed him? Does Miller’s relationship with Anais Nin, and her advocacy for his writing, mitigate the notion of him as sexist? What do Miller’s champions, such as Karl Shapiro, in the book’s forward, and George Orwell, in the critical essay “In the Belly of the Whale,” Parts 1 and 3 , see as his unique, distinguishing qualities? How does this text relate to current issues of interest to you and your generation?

For additional background, watch the motion picture Henry and June, based on the published diaries of Miller’s principal patron, Anais Nin. 

Tropic of Cancer

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or
autobiographies—captivating books, if only a man knew how
to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is
really his experience, and how to record truth truly.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
Introduction by Karl Shapiro Preface by Anaïs Nin

Copyright © 1961 by Grove Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or
the facilitation thereof, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief
passages in a review. Any members of educational
institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for
classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain
permission to include the work in an anthology, should send
their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New
York, NY 10003.
Material quoted in the Introduction from other works by
Henry Miller is reprinted by the kind permission of New
Directions: Wisdom of the Heart, copyright © 1941 by New
Directions; The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, copyright ©
1948 by Henry Miller; The Time of the Assassins, copyright
© 1946, 1949, 1956 by New Directions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Henry, 1891-1980
Tropic of Cancer. New York, Grove Press [1961]
318 p.
I. Title.
PS3525.I5454T7 1961 818.52 61-15597
ISBN-10: 0-8021-3178-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3178-2
Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
09 10 40 39 38

http://www.groveatlantic.com/

The Greatest Living Author*
I call Henry Miller the greatest living author because I think
he is. I do not call him a poet because he has never written
a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think. But everything he
has written is a poem in the best as well as in the broadest
sense of the word. Secondly, I do not call him a writer, but
an author. The writer is the fly in the ointment of modern
letters; Miller has waged ceaseless war against writers. If
one had to type him one might call him a Wisdom writer,
Wisdom literature being a type of literature which lies
between literature and scripture; it is poetry only because it
rises above literature and because it sometimes ends up in
bibles. I wrote to the British poet and novelist Lawrence
Durrell last year and said: Let’s put together a bible of
Miller’s work. (I thought I was being original in calling it a
bible.) Let’s assemble a bible from his work, I said, and put
one in every hotel room in America, after removing the
Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes.
Durrell, however, had been working on this “bible” for years;
I was a Johnny-come-lately. In fact, a group of writers all
over the world have been working on it, and one version has
now come out.
There was a commonplace reason why this volume was
very much needed. The author’s books have been almost
impossible to obtain; the ones that were not banned were
stolen from libraries everywhere. Even a copy of one of the
nonbanned books was recently stolen from the mails en
route to me. Whoever got it had better be a book lover,
because it was a bibliography.

I will introduce Miller with a quotation from the Tropic of
Cancer: “I sometimes ask myself how it happens that I
attract nothing but crackbrained individuals, neurasthenics,
neurotics, psychopaths—and Jews especially. There must be
something in a healthy Gentile that excites the Jewish mind,
like when he sees sour black bread.” The “healthy Gentile”
is a good sobriquet for Miller, who usually refers to himself
as the Happy Rock, Caliban, “just a Brooklyn boy,”
“Someone who has gone off the gold standard of Literature”
or—the name I like best—the Patagonian. What is a
Patagonian? I don’t know, but it is certainly something rare
and sui generis. We can call Miller the greatest living
Patagonian.
How is one to talk about Miller? There are authors one
cannot write a book or even a good essay about. Arthur
Rimbaud is one (and Miller’s book on Rimbaud is one of the
best books on Rimbaud ever written, although it is mostly
about Henry Miller). D. H. Lawrence is another author one
cannot encompass in a book “about” (Miller abandoned his
book on Lawrence). And Miller himself is one of those
Patagonian authors who just won’t fit into a book. Every
word he has ever written is autobiographical, but only in the
way Leaves of Grass is autobiographical. There is not a word
of “confession” in Miller. His amorous exploits are
sometimes read as a kind of Brooklyn Casanova or male
Fanny Hill, but there is probably not a word of exaggeration
or boasting to speak of—or only as much as the occasion
would call for. The reader can and cannot reconstruct the
Life of Henry Miller from his books, for Miller never sticks to
the subject any more than Lawrence does. The fact is that
there isn’t any subject and Miller is its poet. But a little
information about him might help present him to those who
need an introduction. For myself, I do not read him
consecutively; I choose one of his books blindly and open it
at random. I have just done this; for an example, I find:

“Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts
of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing
syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is
why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the
nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is—the
afflictions of Job.” Not the greatest prose probably, but Miller
is not a writer; Henry James is a writer. Miller is a talker, a
street corner gabbler, a prophet, and a Patagonian.
What are the facts about Miller? I’m not sure how
important they are. He was born in Brooklyn about 1890, of
German ancestry, and in certain ways he is quite German. I
have often thought that the Germans make the best
Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans.
Miller understands the German in himself and in America.
He compares Whitman and Goethe: “In Whitman the whole
American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her
birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America
Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be
said. The future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He
was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first
and the last poet. He is almost undecipherable today, a
monument covered with rude hieroglyphs, for which there is
no key. … There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe
for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated
with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums
are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has
never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a
MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a
stuffed shirt, by comparison. Goethe was a respectable
citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal spirit, but stamped
with the German trademark, with the double eagle. The
serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing
more than the drowsy stupor of a German bourgeois deity.
Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning.”

If anybody can decipher the Whitman key it is Miller.
Miller is the twentieth-century reincarnation of Whitman. But
to return to the “facts.” The Brooklyn Boy went to a
Brooklyn high school in a day when most high schools kept
higher standards than most American universities today. He
started at CCNY but quit almost immediately and went to
work for a cement company (“Everlasting Cement”), then
for a telegraph company, where he became the personnel
manager in the biggest city in the world. The telegraph
company is called the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in
Miller’s books, or in moments of gaiety the Cosmococcic
Telegraph Company. One day while the vice-president was
bawling him out he mentioned to Miller that he would like to
see someone write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the
messengers.
I thought to myself [said Miller]—you poor old futzer, you,
just wait until I get it off my chest. … I’ll give you an Horatio
Alger book. … My head was in a whirl to leave his office. I
saw the army of men, women and children that had passed
through my hands, saw them weeping, begging,
beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming,
threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways, lying
on the floor of freight trains, the parents in rags, the coal
box empty, the sink running over, the walls sweating and
between the cold beads of sweat the cockroaches running
like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes or
falling backwards in the epileptic frenzy. … I saw the walls
giving way and the pest pouring out like a winged fluid, and
the men higher up with their ironclad logic, waiting for it to
blow over, waiting for everything to be patched up, waiting,
waiting contentedly… saying that things were temporarily
out of order. I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a
sick America, mounting higher and higher, first messenger,
then operator, then manager, then chief, then
superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then

trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the
Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay,
nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven thousand decimals
fore and aft. … I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the
day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared
away.
And he did. Miller’s first book, Tropic of Cancer, was
published in Paris in 1934 and was immediately famous and
immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. It is
the Horatio Alger story with a vengeance. Miller had walked
out of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company one day
without a word; ever after he lived on his wits. He had
managed to get to Paris on ten dollars, where he lived more
than a decade, not during the gay prosperous twenties but
during the Great Depression. He starved, made friends by
the score, mastered the French language and his own. It was
not until the Second World War broke out that he returned to
America to live at Big Sur, California. Among his best books
several were banned: the two Tropics (Tropic of Cancer,
1934, and Tropic of Capricorn, 1939); Black Spring, 1936;
and part of the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (including Sexus,
Plexus, and Nexus).
Unfortunately for Miller he has been a man without honor
in his own country and in his own language. When Tropic of
Cancer was published he was even denied entrance into
England, held over in custody by the port authorities and
returned to France by the next boat. He made friends with
his jailer and wrote a charming essay about him. But Miller
has no sense of despair. At the beginning of Tropic of Cancer
he writes: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am
the happiest man alive.”
George Orwell was one of the few English critics who saw
his worth, though (mirabile dictu) T. S. Eliot and even Ezra
Pound complimented him. Pound in his usual ungracious

manner gave the Tropic of Cancer to a friend who later
became Miller’s publisher, and said: Here is a dirty book
worth reading. Pound even went so far as to try to enlist
Miller in his economic system to save the world. Miller
retaliated by writing a satire called Money and How It Gets
That Way, dedicated to Ezra Pound. The acquaintanceship
halted there, Miller’s view of money being something like
this (from Tropic of Capricorn): “To walk in money through
the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money,
dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath
money, no least single object anywhere that is not money,
money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then
no money, or a little money or less money or more money,
but money, always money, and if you have money or you
don’t have money it is the money that counts and money
makes money, but what makes money make money?”
Pound didn’t care for that brand of economics.
But all the writers jostled each other to welcome Miller
among the elect, for the moment at least: Eliot, Herbert
Read, Aldous Huxley, John Dos Passos and among them
some who really knew how good Miller was: William Carlos
Williams, who called him the Dean, Lawrence Durrell, Paul
Rosenfeld, Wallace Fowlie, Osbert Sitwell, Kenneth Patchen,
many painters (Miller is a fanatical water colorist). But
mostly he is beset by his neurasthenics and psychopaths, as
any cosmodemonic poet must be. People of all sexes
frequently turn up at Big Sur and announce that they want
to join the Sex Cult. Miller gives them bus fare and a good
dinner and sends them on their way.
Orwell has written one of the best essays on Miller,
although he takes a sociological approach and tries to place
Miller as a Depression writer or something of the sort. What
astonished Orwell about Miller was the difference between
his view and the existential bitterness of a novelist like
Céline. Céline’s Voyage au bout de la Nuit describes the

meaninglessness of modern life and is thus a prototype of
twentieth-century fiction. Orwell calls Céline’s book a cry of
unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool. And Orwell
adds that the Tropic of Cancer is almost exactly the
opposite! Such a thing as Miller’s book “has become so
unusual as to seem almost anomalous, [for] it is the book of
a man who is happy.” Miller also reached the bottom of the
pit, as many writers do; but how, Orwell asks, could he have
emerged unembittered, whole, laughing with joy? “Exactly
the aspects of life that fill Céline with horror are the ones
that appeal to him. So far from protesting, he is accepting.
And the very word ‘acceptance’ calls up his real affinity,
another American, Walt Whitman.”
This is, indeed, the crux of the matter and it is
unfortunate that Orwell cannot see past the socio-economic
situation with Whitman and Miller. Nevertheless, this English
critic recognizes Miller’s mastery of his material and places
him among the great writers of our age; more than that, he
predicts that Miller will set the pace and attitude for the
novelist of the future. This has not happened yet, but I
agree that it must. Miller’s influence today is primarily
among poets; those poets who follow Whitman must
necessarily follow Miller, even to the extent of giving up
poetry in its formal sense and writing that personal
apocalyptic prose which Miller does. It is the prose of the
Bible of Hell that Blake talked about and Arthur Rimbaud
wrote a chapter of.
What is this “acceptance” Orwell mentions in regard to
Whitman and Henry Miller? On one level it is the poetry of
cosmic consciousness, and on the most obvious level it is
the poetry of the Romantic nineteenth century. Miller is
unknown in this country because he represents the
Continental rather than the English influence. He breaks
with the English literary tradition just as many of the
twentieth-century Americans do, because his ancestry is not

British, and not American colonial. He does not read the
favored British writers, Milton, Marlowe, Pope, Donne. He
reads what his grandparents knew was in the air when
Victorianism was the genius of British poetry. He grew up
with books by Dostoevski, Knut Hamsun, Strindberg,
Nietzsche (especially Nietzsche), Élie Faure, Spengler. Like a
true poet he found his way to Rimbaud, Ramakrishna,
Blavatsky, Huysmans, Count Keyserling, Prince Kropotkin,
Lao-tse, Nostradamus, Petronius, Rabelais, Suzuki, Zen
philosophy, Van Gogh. And in English he let himself be
influenced not by the solid classics but by Alice in
Wonderland, Chesterton’s St. Francis, Conrad, Cooper,
Emerson, Rider Haggard, G. A. Henty (the boy’s historian—I
remember being told when I was a boy that Henty had the
facts all wrong), Joyce, Arthur Machen, Mencken, John
Cowper Powys, Herbert Spencer’s Autobiography, Thoreau
on Civil Disobedience, Emma Goldman—the great anarchist
(whom he met)—Whitman, of course, and perhaps above all
that companion piece to Leaves of Grass called Huckleberry
Finn. Hardly a Great Books list from the shores of Lake
Michigan—almost a period list. Miller will introduce his
readers to strange masterpieces like Doughty’s Arabia
Deserta or to the journal of Anaïs Nin which has never been
published but which he (and other writers) swears is one of
the masterpieces of the twentieth century. I imagine that
Miller has read as much as any man living but he does not
have that religious solemnity about books which we are
brought up in. Books, after all, are only mnemonic devices;
and poets are always celebrating the burning of libraries.
And as with libraries, so with monuments, and as with
monuments, so with civilizations. But in Miller’s case (chez
Miller) there is no vindictiveness, no bitterness. Orwell was
bothered when he met Miller because Miller didn’t want to
go to the Spanish Civil War and do battle on one side or the
other. Miller is an anarchist of sorts, and he doesn’t
especially care which dog eats which dog. As it happens, the

righteous Loyalists were eaten by the Communists and the
righteous Falangists were eaten by the Nazis over the most
decadent hole in Europe; so Miller was right.
Lawrence Durrell has said that the Tropic books were
healthy while Céline and D. H. Lawrence were sick.
Lawrence never escaped his puritanism and it is his heroic
try that makes us honor him. Céline is the typical European
man of despair—why should he not despair, this Frenchman
of the trenches of World War I? We are raising up a
generation of young American Célines, I’m afraid, but
Miller’s generation still had Whitman before its eyes and
was not running back to the potholes and ash heaps of
Europe. Miller is as good an antiquarian as anybody; in the
medieval towns of France he goes wild with happiness; and
he has written one of the best “travel books” on Greece
ever done (the critics are unanimous about the Colossus of
Maroussi); but to worship the “tradition” is to him the
sheerest absurdity. Like most Americans, he shares the view
of the first Henry Ford that history is bunk. He cannot
forgive his “Nordic” ancestors for the doctrines of
righteousness and cleanliness. His people, he says, were
painfully clean: “Never once had they opened the door
which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking
a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were
promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was
read it was neatly folded and laid on a shelf; after the
clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then
tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow,
but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge
and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world
groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the
bridge.” As everyone knows, Cleanliness is the chief
American industry. Miller is the most formidable
anticleanliness poet since Walt Whitman, and his hatred of
righteousness is also American, with the Americanism of

Thoreau, Whitman, and Emma Goldman. Miller writes a
good deal about cooking and wine drinking. Americans are
the worst cooks in the world, outside of the British; and
Americans are also great drunkards who know nothing
about wine. The Germanic-American Miller reintroduces
good food and decent wine into our literature. One of his
funniest essays is about the American loaf of bread, the
poisonous loaf of cleanliness wrapped in cellophane, the
manufacture of which is a heavy industry like steel.
Orwell and other critics tend to regard Miller as a kind of
hedonist and professional do-nothing. And morally, they
tend to regard him as one of that illustrious line of
Americans who undermine the foundations of traditional
morals. Miller quotes Thoreau’s statement, which might
almost be the motto of the cosmic writer: “Most of what my
neighbors call good, I am profoundly convinced is evil, and if
I repent anything, it is my good conduct that I repent.” One
could hardly call Thoreau a criminal, yet he had his run-ins
with the law, just as Miller has, and for the same reasons.
The strain of anarchism and amorality is growing stronger in
American literature, or that branch of it that I am talking
about, and Miller is one of its chief carriers. It is not only
Emma Goldman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Whitman, and
perhaps Salinger and Mailer, but that whole literature of
Detachment from political hysteria and over-organization. I
am influenced enough by these people and by Miller to tell
my students, the poets at least, to cultivate an ignorance of
contemporary political and military events because they do
not matter. I tell them not to vote, to join nothing. I try to
steer them toward their true leaders and visionaries, men
almost unknown in the polite literary world, Reich for
instance. Wilhelm Reich furthered a movement in Germany
called “Work Democracy”; not machine politics, no politics
at all, but democracy within one’s immediate orbit;
democracy at home. America is still the only country where

social idealism and experimentation have elbow room; there
are still communities that practice primitive Christianity,
such as the Catholic anarchists; and just plain little
homemade gardens of Eden such as Miller’s cliff at Big Sur.
The life he describes in Big Sur and the Oranges of
Hieronymus Bosch is a far cry from the little fascist dreams
of the New Classicists. And it is a far cry from the bitter
isolationism of Robinson Jeffers or even of Lawrence. Morally
I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do—
Gandhi with a penis.
Miller says in a little essay on Immorality and Morality:
“What is moral and what is immoral? Nobody can ever
answer this question satisfactorily. Not because morals
ceaselessly evolve, but because the principle on which they
depend is factitious. Morality is for slaves, for beings without
spirit. And when I say spirit I mean the Holy Spirit.” And he
ends this little piece with a quotation from ancient Hindu
scripture: Evil does not exist.
Whitman, Lawrence, Miller, and even Blake all have the
reputation of being sex-obsessed, Miller especially. Whereas
Whitman writes “copulation is no more rank to me than
death is,” Miller writes hundreds of pages describing in the
minutest and clearest detail his exploits in bed. Every
serious reader of erotica has remarked about Miller that he
is probably the only author in history who writes about such
things with complete ease and naturalness. Lawrence never
quite rid himself of his puritanical salaciousness, nor Joyce;
both had too much religion in their veins. It is funny to
recollect that Lawrence thought Ulysses a smutty book and
Joyce thought Lady Chatterley a smutty book. Both were
right. But at least they tried to free themselves from literary
morality. Miller’s achievement is miraculous: he is
screamingly funny without making fun of sex, the way
Rabelais does. (Rabelais is, of course, magnificent; so is
Boccaccio; but both write against the background of

religion, like Joyce and Lawrence.) Miller is accurate and
poetic in the highest degree; there is not a smirk anywhere
in his writings. Miller undoubtedly profited from the mistakes
of his predecessors; his aim was not to write about the
erotic but to write the whole truth about the life he knew.
This goal demanded the full vocabulary and inconography of
sex, and it is possible that he is the first writer outside the
Orient who has succeeded in writing as naturally about sex
on a large scale as novelists ordinarily write about the
dinner table or the battlefield. I think only an American
could have performed this feat.
We are dealing with the serious question of banned
books, burned books, and fear of books in general. America
has the most liberal censorship laws in the West today, but
we have done no more than make a start. I have always
been amused by the famous decision of Judge Woolsey who
lifted the ban on Ulysses, although it was certainly a fine
thing to do and it is a landmark we can be proud of. Woolsey
said various comical things, such as that he could not detect
the “leer of the sensualist” in Joyce’s book, and that
therefore (the logic of it escapes me) it is not pornographic.
In excusing the use of old Saxon words he noted that Joyce’s
“locale was Celtic and his season Spring.” And, in order to
push his decision through, Judge Woolsey stated that
Ulysses “did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful
thoughts,” and he closed his argument with the elegant
statement that although the book is “somewhat emetic,
nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” Emetic means
tending to produce vomiting and I doubt that Joyce savored
that description of his masterpiece. The implication, of
course, is that vomiting is good for you, and lustful thoughts
not. Now everyone who has read Ulysses knows that the
book is based largely on the lustful thoughts and acts of its
characters and that Joyce spared no pains to represent
these thoughts and deeds richly and smackingly. Ulysses is,

since the Judge used the word, a pretty good aphrodisiac,
partly because of Joyce’s own religious tensions. Miller, on
the other hand, is no aphrodisiac at all, because religious or
so-called moral tension does not exist for him. When one of
Miller’s characters lusts, he lusts out loud and then proceeds
to the business at hand. Joyce actually prevents himself
from experiencing the beauty of sex or lust, while Miller is
freed at the outset to deal with the overpowering mysteries
and glories of love and copulation. Like other Millerites I
claim that Miller is one of the few healthy Americans alive
today; further, that the circulation of his books would do
more to wipe out the obscenities of Broadway, Hollywood,
and Madison Avenue than a full-scale social revolution.
Miller has furthered literature for all writers by ignoring
the art forms, the novel, the poem, the drama, and by
sticking to the autobiographical novel. He says in The Books
in My Life (one of the available works), “The
autobiographical novel, which Emerson predicted would
grow in importance with time, has replaced the great
confessions. It is not a mixture of truth and fiction, this
genre of literature, but an expansion and deepening of
truth. It is more authentic, more veridical, than the diary. It
is not the flimsy truth of facts which the authors of these
autobiographical novels offer but the truth of emotion,
reflection and understanding, truth digested and
assimilated. The being revealing himself does so on all
levels simultaneously.” Everything Miller has written is part
of this great amorphous autobiographical novel and it must
be read not entirely but in large chunks to make sense.
Many of the individual works are whole in themselves, one
dealing with his life in Paris, one with his life as a New
Yorker, and there is, in fact, a definite span of years
encompassed in the works. But the volumes of essays are
also part of the story and there is no way to make a whole
out of the parts. Miller is easy to quote if one quotes

carefully; the danger is that one can find massive
contradictions, unless there is some awareness of the
underlying world and the cosmic attitudes of the author.
These views are by no means unique, as they are the same
as those of all those poets and mystics I referred to in a
previous essay. What makes Miller unique is his time and
place; he is the only American of our time who has given us
a full-scale interpretation of modern America, other than the
kind we find in the cultural journals. Incidentally, we do not
find Miller in these journals, which, presuming an interest in
letters and art, are really organs of social and political
opinion.
Readers of Whitman recall that Whitman was blistering
about the materialism of this country a century ago, and its
departure from the ideals of the founding fathers. Miller is
worse. Now it is a commonplace of modern poetry that the
poet dissociates himself from life as it is lived by the
average American today. Whitman and Miller heap abuse on
the failure of the country to live up to its promise. Miller
writes as a poet about the demonic hideousness of New York
City, Chicago, the South, or he rhapsodizes when there is
anything to be rapturous about. But it is not Art that he
cares about; it is man, man’s treatment of man in America
and man’s treatment of nature. What we get in Miller is not
a sense of superiority but fury, even the fury of the prophet
of doom.
Miller knows America from the bottom up and from coast
to coast. In the same way he knows Paris as few Frenchmen
do. But when Miller describes slums it is usually with the
joyous eye of the artist, not with the self-righteous sneer of
the social reformer. Here, too, one might describe his
psychology as “Oriental” rather than modern. The cultural
situation is a matter of complete indifference to him. Miller
frequently immerses himself in such modern Indian mystics
as Krishnamurti and Ramakrishna, but without any of the

flapdoodle of the cultist. He is himself one of the foremost of
the contemporary men of Detachment. His influence (like
that of Lawrence) comes as much from his life as from his
writings. Here it is better to quote. This is Myrtle Avenue in
Brooklyn.
But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from
Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no
saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this
street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any species
of human genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor
did the sun strike it squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it.
For the genuine Inferno which I had to postpone for twenty
years I give you Myrtle Avenue, one of the innumerable
bridlepaths ridden by iron monsters which lead to the heart
of America’s emptiness. If you have only seen Essen or
Manchester or Chicago or Leval-lois-Perret or Glasgow or
Hoboken or Canarsie or Bayonne you have seen nothing of
the magnificent emptiness of progress and enlightenment.
Dear reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if
only to realize how far into the future Dante saw. You must
believe me that on this street, neither in the houses which
line it, nor the cobblestones which pave it, nor the elevated
structure which cuts it atwain, neither in any creature that
bears a name and lives thereon, neither in any animal, bird
or insect passing through it to slaughter or already
slaughtered, is there hope of “lubet,” “sublimate” or
“abominate.” It is a street not of sorrow, for sorrow would be
human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness: it is
emptier than the most extinct volcano, emptier than a
vacuum, emptier than the word God in the mouth of an
unbeliever.
This is a man describing his own neighborhood, but the
street is a type that runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
with variations:

The whole country is lawless, violent, explosive,
demoniacal. It’s in the air, in the climate, in the ultra-
grandiose landscape, in the stone forests that are lying
horizontal, in the torrential rivers that bite through the rocky
canyons, in the supranormal distances, the supernal arid
wastes, the over-lush crops, the monstrous fruits, the
mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects, beliefs,
the opposition of laws and languages, the contradictoriness
of temperaments, needs, requirements. The continent is full
of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters
and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in
doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul
is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain
everything comes in bucketsful—or not at all. The whole
continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily
concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream,
partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it’s the
same story. Nature dominates, Nature wins out. Everywhere
the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder.
Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people—
healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with
worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.
The passages on Times Square repeat and catalogue, like
Whitman; they are a little too painful to read out of context.
Here is a bit of Chicago; Miller is wandering in the Negro
slums with a fellow visitor:
We got into the car, rode a few blocks and got out to visit
another shell crater. The street was deserted except for
some chickens grubbing for food between the slats of a
crumbling piazza. More vacant lots, more gutted houses; fire
escapes clinging to the walls with their iron teeth, like
drunken acrobats. A Sunday atmosphere here. Everything
serene and peaceful. Like Louvain or Rheims between
bombardments. Like Phoebus, Virginia, dreaming of bringing

her steeds to water, or like modern Eleusis smothered by a
wet sock. Then suddenly I saw it chalked up on the side of a
house in letters ten feet high:
GOOD NEWS! GOD IS LOVE!
When I saw these words I got down on my knees in the open
sewer which had been conveniently placed there for the
purpose and I offered up a short prayer, a silent one, which
must have registered as far as Mound City, Illinois, where
the colored muskrats have built their igloos. It was time for
a good stiff drink of cod-liver oil but as the varnish factories
were all closed we had to repair to the abattoir and quaff a
bucket of blood. Never has blood tasted so wonderful! It was
like taking Vitamins A, B, C, D, E in quick succession and
then chewing a stick of cold dynamite. Good news! Aye,
wonderful news—for Chicago. I ordered the chauffeur to
take us immediately to Mundelein so that I could bless the
cardinal and all the real estate operations, but we only got
as far as the Bahai Temple. …
Or, again—in explanation:
Oh, Henry, what beautiful golden teeth you have!
exclaimed my four-year-old daughter the other morning on
climbing into bed with me. That’s how I approach the works
of my confreres. I see how beautiful are their golden teeth,
not how ugly or artificial they are.
Combating the “system” is nonsense. There is only one
aim in life and that is to live it. In America it has become
impossible, except for a few lucky or wise people, to live
one’s own life; consequently the poets and artists tend to
move to the fringes of society. Wherever there are
individuals, says Miller (like Thoreau) there are new
frontiers. The American way of life has become illusory; we
lead the lives of prisoners while we boast about free speech,
free press, and free religion, none of which we actually do

enjoy in full. The price for security has become too great;
abundance has become a travesty. The only thing for
nonenslaved man to do is to move out to the edge, lose
contact with the machines of organization which are as
ubiquitous in this country as in Russia. “Instead of bucking
your head against a stone wall, sit quietly with hands folded
and wait for the walls to crumble. … Don’t sit and pray that
it will happen! Just sit and watch it happen!” These sayings
the culture littérateur condemns as irresponsible. Miller
follows through with the complete program of
nonparticipation in our machine society, which is organized
from the cradle to the grave. “Just as Gandhi successfully
exploited the doctrine of nonresistance, so these ‘saints of
the just’ practiced non-recognition—nonrecognition of sin,
guilt, fear and disease… even death.” Whitman also
believed in nonrecognition of death. His view of death as
part of life is one of the many reasons for his unpopularity in
America, where death is considered a crime against society.
“Why try to solve a problem? Dissolve it! [says Miller]. Fear
not to be a coward, a traitor, a renegade. In this universe of
ours there is room for all, perhaps even need for all. The sun
does not inquire about rank and status before shedding its
warmth; the cyclone levels the godly and the ungodly; the
government takes your tax money even though it be
tainted. Nor is the atom bomb a respecter of persons.
Perhaps that is why the righteous are squirming so!”
All of this is about modern America and the high cost of
security. Do we really have a high standard of living? Miller
says not, as most poets do. If living means appreciation of
life we have the lowest standard of living in the world, in
spite of the fact that it costs more to live in America than in
any country in the world. Miller says “the cost is not only in
dollars and cents but in sweat and blood, in frustration,
ennui, broken homes, smashed ideals, illness and insanity.
We have the most wonderful hospitals, the most fabulous

prisons, the best equipped and highest paid army and navy,
the speediest bombers, the largest stockpile of atom bombs,
yet never enough of any of these items to satisfy the
demand. Our manual workers are the highest paid in the
world; our poets the worst. …”
And Miller gives this answer, letting Krishnamurti say it:
The world problem is the individual problem; if the
individual is at peace, has happiness, has great tolerance,
and an intense desire to help, then the world problem as
such ceases to exist. You consider the world problem before
you have considered your own problem. Before you have
established peace and understanding in your own hearts
and in your own minds you desire to establish peace and
tranquility in the minds of others, in your nations and in
your states; whereas peace and understanding will only
come when there is understanding, certainty and strength in
yourselves.
To place the individual before the state, whether the
Russian state or the American state, is the first need of
modern man. To interpret Miller, man is like the common
soldier on the battlefield; he can know nothing of the battle
at large or of its causes; he can know only the fifty feet or so
in his immediate vicinity; within that radius he is a man
responsible for himself and his fellows; beyond that he is
powerless. Modern life, having made everyone state
conscious, has destroyed the individual. America has as few
individuals today as Russia, and as many taboos to keep the
individual from coming to life as the USSR. First, we have
contaminated the idea of society; second, we have
contaminated the idea of community. Miller writing about his
little community at Big Sur frowns on the idea of community
itself. “To create community—and what is a nation, or a
people, without a sense of community—there must be a
common purpose. Even here in Big Sur, where the oranges

are ready to blossom forth, there is no common purpose, no
common effort. There is a remarkable neighborliness, but no
community spirit. We have a Grange, as do other rural
communities, but what is a ‘Grange’ in the life of man? The
real workers are outside the Grange. Just as the ‘real men of
God’ are outside the Church. And the real leaders outside
the world of politics.”
“We create our fate,” says Miller. And better still: “Forget,
forgive, renounce, abdicate.” And “scrap the past instantly.”
Live the good life instantly; it’s now or never, and always
has been.
Miller is “irresponsible” as far as officials and popular
politics go, or as far as common church morality goes, and
as far as literary manners go. But he is not a poseur, he has
no program, yet he has a deep and pure sense of morality. I
would call him a total revolutionary, the man who will settle
for nothing less than “Christmas on earth.” In his
remarkable study of Rimbaud, a prose-poem of one hundred
and fifty pages called The Time of the Assassins, Miller
discourses on the spiritual suicide of modern youth.
I like to think of him as the one who extended the
boundaries of that only partially explored domain. Youth
ends where manhood begins, it is said. A phrase without
meaning, since from the beginning of history man has never
enjoyed the full measure of youth nor known the limitless
possibilities of adulthood. How can one know the splendor
and fullness of youth if one’s energies are consumed in
combating the errors and falsities of parents and ancestors?
Is youth to waste its strength unlocking the grip of death? Is
youth’s only mission on earth to rebel, to destroy, to
assassinate? Is youth only to be offered up to sacrifice?
What of the dreams of youth? Are they always to be
regarded as follies? Are they to be populated only with
chimeras?… Stifle or deform youth’s dreams and you

destroy the creator. Where there has been no real youth
there can be no real manhood. If society has come to
resemble a collection of deformities, is it not the work of our
educators and preceptors? Today, as yesterday, the youth
who would live his own life has no place to turn, no place to
live his youth unless, retiring into his chrysalis, he closes all
apertures and buries himself alive. The conception of our
mother the earth being “an egg which doth contain all good
things in it” has undergone a profound change. The cosmic
egg contains an addled yolk. This is the present view of
mother earth. The psychoanalysts have traced the poison
back to the womb, but to what avail? In the light of this
profound discovery we are given permission… to step from
one rotten egg into another. … Why breed new monsters of
negation and futility? Let society scotch its own rotten
corpse! Let us have a new heaven and a new earth!—that
was the sense of Rimbaud’s obstinate revolt.
Miller calls for an end to revolt once and for all. His
message is precisely that of Whitman, of Rimbaud, of Rilke:
“Everything we are taught is false”; and “Change your life.”
As a writer Miller may be second- or third-rate or of no
rating at all; as a spiritual example he stands among the
great men of our age. Will this ever be recognized? Not in
our time probably.
The Rimbaud book ends with a Coda, a little recital of the
literature of despair which has surrounded us for a hundred
years. Listen to it.
Rimbaud was born in the middle of the nineteenth
century, October 20th, 1854, at 6:00 A.M., it is said. A
century of unrest, of materialism, and of “progress,” as we
say. Purgatorial in every sense of the word, and the writers
who flourished in that period reflect this ominously. Wars
and revolutions were abundant. Russia alone, we are told,
waged thirty-three wars (mostly of conquest) during the

eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Shortly after
Rimbaud is born his father is off to the Crimean War. So is
Tolstoy. The revolution of 1848, of brief duration but full of
consequences, is followed by the bloody Commune of 1871,
which Rimbaud as a boy is thought to have participated in.
In 1848 we in America are fighting the Mexicans with whom
we are now great friends, though the Mexicans are not too
sure of it. During this war Thoreau makes his famous speech
on Civil Disobedience, a document which will one day be
added to the Emancipation Proclamation. … Twelve years
later the Civil War breaks out, perhaps the bloodiest of all
civil wars. … From 1874 until his death in 1881 Amiel is
writing his Journal Intime… which… gives a thoroughgoing
analysis of the moral dilemma in which the creative spirits
of the time found themselves. The very titles of the books
written by influential writers of the nineteenth century are
revelatory. I give just a few… The Sickness unto Death
(Kierkegaard), Dreams and Life (Gérard de Nerval), Les
Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire), Les Chants de Maldoror
(Lautréamont), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), La Bête
Humaine (Zola), Hunger (Knut Hamsun), Les Lauriers Sont
Coupés (Dujardin), The Conquest of Bread (Kropotkin),
Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy), Alice in Wonderland,
The Serpent in Paradise (Sacher-Masoch), Les Paradis
Artificiels (Baudelaire), Dead Souls (Gogol), The House of
the Dead (Dostoevski), The Wild Duck (Ibsen), The Inferno
(Strindberg), The Nether World (Gissing), A Rebours
(Huysmans). …
Goethe’s Faust was not so very old when Rimbaud asked
a friend for a copy of it. Remember the date of his birth is
October 20th, 1854 (6:00 A.M. Western Standard Diabolical
Time). The very next year, 1855, Leaves of Grass makes its
appearance, followed by condemnation and suppression.
Meanwhile Moby Dick had come out (1851) and Thoreau’s
Walden (1854). In 1855 Gérard de Nerval commits suicide,

having lasted till the remarkable age of 47. In 1854
Kierkegaard is already penning his last words to history in
which he gives the parable of “The Sacrificed Ones.” Just
four or five years before Rimbaud completes A Season in
Hell (1873), Lautréamont publishes his celebrated piece of
blasphemy, another “work of youth,” as we say, in order not
to take these heartbreaking testaments seriously. … By
1888 Nietzsche is explaining to Brandes that he can now
boast three readers: Brandes, Taine, and Strindberg. The
next year he goes mad and remains that way until his death
in 1900. Lucky man! From 1893 to 1897 Strindberg is
experiencing a crise… which he describes with magisterial
effects in The Inferno. Reminiscent of Rimbaud is the title of
another of his works: The Keys to Paradise. In 1888 comes
Dujardin’s curious little book, forgotten until recently. … By
this time Mark Twain is at his height, Huckleberry Finn
having appeared in 1884, the same year as Against the
Grain of Huysmans. … By the fall of 1891 Gissing’s New
Grub Street is launched. It is an interesting year in
nineteenth-century literature, the year of Rimbaud’s death.
…
What a century of names!… Shelley, Blake, Stendhal,
Hegel, Fechner, Emerson, Poe, Schopenhauer, Max Stirner,
Mallarmé, Chekov, Andreyev, Verlaine, Couperus,
Maeterlinck, Madame Blavatsky, Samuel Butler, Claudel,
Unamuno, Conrad, Bakunin, Shaw, Rilke, Stefan George,
Verhaeren, Gautier, Léon Bloy, Balzac, Yeats. …
What revolt, what disillusionment, what longing! Nothing
but crises, breakdowns, hallucinations and visions. The
foundations of politics, morals, economics, and art tremble.
The air is full of warnings and prophecies of the debacle to
come—and in the twentieth century it comes! Already two
World Wars and a promise of more before the century is out.
Have we touched bottom? Not yet. The moral crisis of the
nineteenth century has merely given way to the spiritual

bankruptcy of the twentieth. It is “the time of the assassins”
and no mistaking it. …
Rimbaud is indeed the symbol of the death of modern
poetry. This seer, this visionary deserts poetry at the age of
eighteen to make money, by gunrunning, even by slave-
trading, ending with a death-bed conversion. His is a life of
slander, beginning with the motto “Death to God” chalked
on the church and ending with extreme unction and the
money belt under the bed. I think the message of Rimbaud
to Miller is the death of poetry, the death of history. The
whole romantic agony of the nineteenth century is summed
up in this adolescent genius, a curse laid on us. Miller
obliterates the curse; he pronounces the benediction over
Rimbaud, over the death of poetry, over the death of
civilization itself but with a side-splitting laugh without an
iota of animosity in it. Miller leads us away from the charnel
house of nineteenth-century poetry; he does not even
recognize the existence of twentieth-century poetry. For
poetry has lost its significance, its relevance, and even its
meaning in our time. To begin again it must repair to the
wilderness, outside society, outside the city gates, a million
miles from books and their keepers. Almost alone of the
writers of our time Henry Miller has done this; I would guess
that his following is enormous and that it is just beginning to
grow. Like Nietzsche, like Lawrence, his word somehow
spreads abroad and somehow cleanses the atmosphere of
the mind of its age-old detritus of tradition, its habits of
despair, its hates.
One word more: at the close of his beautiful clown story,
“The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder,” Miller talks about the
clown, the hero of so much of the best contemporary
literature.
Joy is like a river [says Miller], it flows ceaselessly. It
seems to me that this is the message which the clown is

trying to convey to us, that we should participate through
ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to
reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow on and through,
endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the
clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real.
At no time in the history of man has the world been so full
of pain and anguish. Here and there, however, we meet with
individuals who are untouched, unsullied, by the common
grief. They are not heartless individuals, far from it! They
are emancipated beings. For them the world is not what it
seems to us. They see with other eyes. We say of them that
they have died to the world. They live in the moment, fully,
and the radiance which emanates from them is a perpetual
song of joy.
And Miller is certainly one of these who have died to the
world, like the clown. The ponderous absurdities of modern
literature and the world it perpetuates dissolve in the
hilarities of this almost unknown American author; this poet
who dissociates himself from the so-called modern age and
whose one aim is to give literature back to life. There are
not many of these emancipated beings left in our world,
these clowns and clairvoyants, celebrants of the soul and of
the flesh and of the still-remaining promise of America. And
of these few great souls the greatest is—the Patagonian.
—Karl Shapiro

Preface
Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might
restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. The
predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and
bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild
extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times
almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes,
with bare stretches that taste like brass and leave the full
flavor of emptiness. It is beyond optimism or pessimism.
The author has given us the last frisson. Pain has no more
secret recesses.
In a world grown paralyzed with introspection and
constipated by delicate mental meals this brutal exposure of
the substantial body comes as a vitalizing current of blood.
The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as
manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever
accompanies the act of creation.
The restorative value of experience, prime source of
wisdom and creation, is reasserted. There remain waste
areas of unfinished thought and action, a bundle of shreds
and fibers with which the over critical may strangle
themselves. Referring to his Wilhelm Meister Goethe once
said: “People seek a central point: that is hard, and not even
right. I should think a rich, manifold life, brought close to our
eyes, would be enough without any express tendency;
which, after all, is only for the intellect”
The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and
rotation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also
there is no question of heroism or of struggle since there is
no question of will, but only an obedience to flow.

The gross caricatures are perhaps more vital, “more true
to life,” than the full portraits of the conventional novel for
the reason that the individual today has no centrality and
produces not the slightest illusion of wholeness. The
characters are integrated to the false, cultural void in which
we are drowning; thus is produced the illusion of chaos, to
face which requires the ultimate courage.
The humiliations and defeats, given with a primitive
honesty, end not in frustration, despair, or futility, but in
hunger, an ecstatic, devouring hunger—for more life. The
poetic is discovered by stripping away the vestiture of art;
by descending to what might be styled “a preartistic level,”
the durable skeleton of form which is hidden in the
phenomena of disintegration reappears to be transfigured
again in the ever-changing flesh of emotion. The scars are
burned away—the scars left by the obstetricians of culture.
Here is an artist who re-establishes the potency of illusion
by gaping at the open wounds, by courting the stern,
psychological reality which man seeks to avoid through
recourse to the oblique symbolism of art. Here the symbols
are laid bare, presented almost as naively and unblushingly
by this over-civilized individual as by the well-rooted savage.
It is no false primitivism which gives rise to this savage
lyricism. It is not a retrogressive tendency, but a swing
forward into unbeaten areas. To regard a naked book such
as this with the same critical eye that is turned upon even
such diverse types as Lawrence, Breton, Joyce and Céline is
a mistake. Rather let us try to look at it with the eyes of a
Patagonian for whom all that is sacred and taboo in our
world is meaningless. For the adventure which has brought
the author to the spiritual ends of the earth is the history of
every artist who, in order to express himself, must traverse
the intangible gridirons of his imaginary world. The air
pockets, the alkali wastes, the crumbling monuments, the
putrescent cadavers, the crazy jig and maggot dance, all

this forms a grand fresco of our epoch, done with shattering
phrases and loud, strident, hammer strokes.
If there is here revealed a capacity to shock, to startle the
lifeless ones from their profound slumber, let us
congratulate ourselves; for the tragedy of our world is
precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it
from its lethargy. No more violent dreams, no refreshment,
no awakening. In the anaesthesia produced by self-
knowledge, life is passing, art is passing, slipping from us:
we are drifting with time and our fight is with shadows. We
need a blood transfusion.
And it is blood and flesh which are here given us. Drink,
food, laughter, desire, passion, curiosity, the simple realities
which nourish the roots of our highest and vaguest
creations. The superstructure is lopped away. This book
brings with it a wind that blows down the dead and hollow
trees whose roots are withered and lost in the barren soil of
our times. This book goes to the roots and digs under, digs
for subterranean springs.
—ANAÏS NIN 1934

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt
anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and
we are dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to
shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop.
How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no
matter. We might never have known each other so
intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a
weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says.
There will be more calamities, more death, more despair.
Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The
cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed
themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not
Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step,
toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather
will not change.
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent
here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the
happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought
that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.
Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are
no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander,
defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary
sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of
spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man,
Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will. I am going to
sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing
while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse. …

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a
pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not
necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential
thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could
sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would
never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the
others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too
beautifully, or not beautifully enough.
It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep
track of the date. Would you say—my dream of the 14th
November last? There are intervals, but they are between
dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The
world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots
of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away. … I am
thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and
everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb
of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored
and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You,
Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the
world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am still alive,
kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.
Dozing off. The physiology of love. The whale with his six-
foot penis, in repose. The bat—penis libre. Animals with a
bone in the penis. Hence, a bone on. … “Happily,” says
Gourmont, “the bony structure is lost in man.” Happily? Yes,
happily. Think of the human race walking around with a
bone on. The kangaroo has a double penis—one for
weekdays and one for holidays. Dozing. A letter from a
female asking if I have found a title for my book. Title? To be
sure: “Lovely Lesbians.”
Your anecdotal life! A phrase of M. Borowski’s. It is on
Wednesdays that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who
is a dried-up cow, officiates. She is studying English now—

her favorite word is “filthy.” You can see immediately what a
pain in the ass the Borowskis are. But wait. …
Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion.
An invincible combination, especially when you consider
that he is not a bad artist. He puts on that he is a Pole, but
he is not, of course. He is a Jew, Borowski, and his father
was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is Jewish,
or half-Jewish, which is worse. There’s Carl and Paula, and
Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf
and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned
out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden
and Chérie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess.
Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am
writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this
is important to understand.
Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I
too would become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a
Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews
more than the Jew?
Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening
and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès.
The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller
coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a
crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central
America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black,
webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic in
design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the
camera registers in degrees of black.
Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this
beautiful Villa Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence
of food. It is positively appalling at times. I have asked Boris
time and again to order bread for breakfast, but he always
forgets. He goes out for breakfast, it seems. And when he
comes back he is picking his teeth and there is a little egg

hanging from his goatee. He eats in the restaurant out of
consideration for me. He says it hurts to eat a big meal and
have me watch him.
I like Van Norden but I do not share his opinion of himself.
I do not agree, for instance, that he is a philosopher, or a
thinker. He is cunt-struck, that’s all. And he will never be a
writer. Nor will Sylvester ever be a writer, though his name
blaze in 50,000-candle-power red lights. The only writers
about me for whom I have any respect, at present, are Carl
and Boris. They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a
white flame. They are mad and tone deaf. They are
sufferers.
Moldorf, on the other hand, who suffers too in his peculiar
way, is not mad. Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or
blood vessels, no heart or kidneys. He is a portable trunk
filled with innumerable drawers and in the drawers are
labels written out in white ink, brown ink, red ink, blue ink,
vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot, turquoise, onyx,
Anjou, herring, Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola. …
I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I
can see myself in the mirror as I write.
Tania is like Irène. She expects fat letters. But there is
another Tania, a Tania like a big seed, who scatters pollen
everywhere—or, let us say, a little bit of Tolstoy, a stable
scene in which the fetus is dug up. Tania is a fever, too—les
voies urinaires, Café de la Liberté, Place des Vosges, bright
neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark bathrooms,
Porto Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata
Pathétique, aural amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt
sienna breasts, heavy garters, what time is it, golden
pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffeta fingers, vaporish
twilights turning to ilex, acromegaly, cancer and delirium,
warm veils, poker chips, carpets of blood and soft thighs.
Tania says so that every one may hear: “I love him!” And

while Boris scalds himself with whisky she says: “Sit down
here! O Boris… Russia… what’ll I do? I’m bursting with it!”
At night when I look at Boris’ goatee lying on the pillow I
get hysterical. O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of
yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs?
There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out
every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send
you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and
your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows
how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot
hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent.
Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something,
does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set
the shores a little wider, I have ironed out the wrinkles. After
me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St.
Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum.
You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across
your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay
fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will
fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt
and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris
and spit out two franc pieces. …
Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees in-
finitely extended, their black boughs gesticulating like a
sleepwalker. Somber, spectral trees, their trunks pale as
cigar ash. A silence supreme and altogether European.
Shutters drawn, shops barred. A red glow here and there to
mark a tryst. Brusque the façades, almost forbidding;
immaculate except for the splotches of shadow cast by the
trees. Passing by the Orangerie I am reminded of another
Paris, the Paris of Maugham, of Gauguin, Paris of George
Moore. I think of that terrible Spaniard who was then
startling the world with his acrobatic leaps from style to
style. I think of Spengler and of his terrible
pronunciamentos, and I wonder if style, style in the grand

manner, is done for. I say that my mind is occupied with
these thoughts, but it is not true; it is only later, after I have
crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me the carnival of
lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For the
moment I can think of nothing—except that I am a sentient
being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a
forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily
over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them
with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver
as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to
whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings. …
The trouble with Irène is that she has a valise instead of a
cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise. Immense,
avec des choses inouïes. Llona now, she had a cunt. I know
because she sent us some hairs from down below. Llona—a
wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On every high hill
she played the harlot—and sometimes in telephone booths
and toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol and a shaving
mug with his initials on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road
with her dress pulled up and fingered herself. She used
candles, Roman candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the
land big enough for her… not one. Men went inside her and
curled up. She wanted extension pricks, self-exploding
rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote. She would
cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave
her permission. One cunt out of a million, Llona! A
laboratory cunt and no litmus paper that could take her
color. She was a liar, too, this Llona. She never bought a bed
for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whisky bottle
and her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Poor Carol,
he could only curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath
and he fell out—like a dead clam.
Enormous, fat letters, avec des choses inouïes. A valise
without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German
mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When

the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You
entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the
Porte de la Villette. You dropped your sweetbreads into the
tumbrils—red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the
confluence of the Ourcq and Marne, where the water sluices
through the dikes and lies like glass under the bridges. Llona
is lying there now and the canal is full of glass and splinters;
the mimosas weep, and there is a wet, foggy fart on the
windowpanes. One cunt out of a million Llona! All cunt and a
glass ass in which you can read the history of the Middle
Ages.
It is the caricature of a man which Moldorf first presents.
Thyroid eyes. Michelin lips. Voice like pea soup. Under his
vest he carries a little pear. However you look at him it is
always the same panorama: netsuke snuffbox, ivory handle,
chess piece, fan, temple motif. He has fermented so long
now that he is amorphous. Yeast despoiled of its vitamins.
Vase without a rubber plant.
The females were sired twice in the ninth century, and
again during the Renaissance. He was carried through the
great dispersions under yellow bellies and white. Long
before the Exodus a Tatar spat in his blood.
His dilemma is that of the dwarf. With his pineal eye he
sees his silhouette projected on a screen of
incommensurable size. His voice, synchronized to the
shadow of a pinhead, intoxicates him. He hears a roar where
others hear only a squeak.
There is his mind. It is an amphitheater in which the actor
gives a protean performance. Moldorf, multiform and
unerring, goes through his roles—clown, juggler,
contortionist, priest, lecher, mountebank. The amphitheater
is too small. He puts dynamite to it. The audience is
drugged. He scotches it.

I am trying ineffectually to approach Moldorf. It is like
trying to approach God, for Moldorf is God—he has never
been anything else. I am merely putting down words. …
I have had opinions about him which I have discarded; I
have had other opinions which I am revising. I have pinned
him down only to find that it was not a dung-beetle I had in
my hands, but a dragonfly. He has offended me by his
coarseness and then overwhelmed me with his delicacy. He
has been voluble to the point of suffocation, then quiet as
the Jordan.
When I see him trotting forward to greet me, his little
paws outstretched, his eyes perspiring, I feel that I am
meeting. … No, this is not the way to go about it!
“Comme un œuf dansant sur un jet d’eau.”
He has only one cane—a mediocre one. In his pocket
scraps of paper containing prescriptions for Weltschmerz.
He is cured now, and the little German girl who washed his
feet is breaking her heart. It is like Mr. Nonentity toting his
Gujarati dictionary everywhere. “Inevitable for everyone”—
meaning, no doubt, indispenensable. Borowski would find all
this incomprehensible. Borowski has a different cane for
each day in the week, and one for Easter.
We have so many points in common that it is like looking
at myself in a cracked mirror.
I have been looking over my manuscripts, pages scrawled
with revisions. Pages of literature. This frightens me a little.
It is so much like Moldorf. Only I am a Gentile, and Gentiles
have a different way of suffering. They suffer without
neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a man who has never been
afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of
suffering.
I recall distinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like
taking a cub to bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you

—and then you really were frightened. Ordinarily you had no
fear—you could always turn him loose, or chop his head off.
There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into
a cage with wild beasts and be mangled. They go in even
without revolver or whip. Fear makes them fearless. … For
the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. The door
is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His
courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in
the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not hear.
The drama, he thinks, is going on inside the cage. The cage,
he thinks, is the world. Standing there alone and helpless,
the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand
his language. Not one lion has ever heard of Spinoza.
Spinoza? Why they can’t even get their teeth into him. “Give
us meat!” they roar, while he stands there petrified, his
ideas frozen, his Weltanschauung a trapeze out of reach. A
single blow of the lion’s paw and his cosmogony is smashed.
The lions, too, are disappointed. They expected blood,
bones, gristle, sinews. They chew and chew, but the words
are chicle and chicle is indigestible. Chicle is a base over
which you sprinkle sugar, pepsin, thyme, licorice. Chicle,
when it is gathered by chicleros, is O.K. The chicleros came
over on the ridge of a sunken continent. They brought with
them an algebraic language. In the Arizona desert they met
the Mongols of the North, glazed like eggplants. Time
shortly after the earth had taken its gyroscopic lean—when
the Gulf Stream was parting ways with the Japanese current.
In the heart of the soil they found tufa rock. They
embroidered the very bowels of the earth with their
language. They ate one another’s entrails and the forest
closed in on them, on their bones and skulls, on their lace
tufa. Their language was lost. Here and there one still finds
the remnants of a menagerie, a brain plate covered with
figures.

What has all this to do with you, Moldorf? The word in
your mouth is anarchy. Say it, Moldorf, I am waiting for it.
Nobody knows, when we shake hands, the rivers that pour
through our sweat. Whilst you are framing your words, your
lips half parted, the saliva gurgling in your cheeks, I have
jumped halfway across Asia. Were I to take your cane,
mediocre as it is, and poke a little hole in your side, I could
collect enough material to fill the British Museum. We stand
on five minutes and devour centuries. You are the sieve
through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words.
Behind the word is chaos. Each word a stripe, a bar, but
there are not and never will be enough bars to make the
mesh.
In my absence the window curtains have been hung. They
have the appearance of Tyrolean tablecloths dipped in lysol.
The room sparkles. I sit on the bed in a daze, thinking about
man before his birth. Suddenly bells begin to toll, a weird,
unearthly music, as if I had been translated to the steppes
of Central Asia. Some ring out with a long, lingering roll,
some erupt drunkenly, maudlinly. And now it is quiet again,
except for a last note that barely grazes the silence of the
night—just a faint, high gong snuffed out like a flame.
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a
line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my
thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev
I put the perfection of Dostoevski. (Is there anything more
perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in one and
the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in
Van Gogh’s letters there is a perfection beyond either of
these. It is the triumph of the individual over art.
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now,
and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in
books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those
elements in the air which give direction and motivation to

our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life
some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it.
The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive
explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else
succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall
back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that
can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million
lives in the space of a generation. In the study of
entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we
derive more…
The telephone interrupts this thought which I should
never have been able to complete. Someone is coming to
rent the apartment. …
It looks as though it were finished, my life at the Villa
Borghese. Well, I’ll take up these pages and move on.
Things will happen elsewhere. Things are always happening.
It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice—
they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You
scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get
permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making
a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It’s
in the blood now—misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The
atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility.
Scratch and scratch—until there’s no skin left. However, the
effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged,
or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more
disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want
the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to
scratch himself to death.
So fast and furiously am I compelled to live now that
there is scarcely time to record even these fragmentary
notes. After the telephone call, a gentleman and his wife
arrived. I went upstairs to lie down during the transaction.
Lay there wondering what my next move would be. Surely

not to go back to the fairy’s bed and toss about all night
flicking bread crumbs with my toes. That puking little
bastard! If there’s anything worse than being a fairy it’s
being a miser. A timid, quaking little bugger who lived in
constant fear of going broke some day—the 18th of March
perhaps, or the 25th of May precisely. Coffee without milk or
sugar. Bread without butter. Meat without gravy, or no meat
at all. Without this and without that! That dirty little miser!
Open the bureau drawer one day and find money hidden
away in a sock. Over two thousand francs—and checks that
he hadn’t even cashed. Even that I wouldn’t have minded so
much if there weren’t always coffee grounds in my beret
and garbage on the floor, to say nothing of the cold cream
jars and the greasy towels and the sink always stopped up. I
tell you, the little bastard he smelled bad—except when he
doused himself with cologne. His ears were dirty, his eyes
were dirty, his ass was dirty. He was double-jointed,
asthmatic, lousy, picayune, morbid. I could have forgiven
him everything if only he had handed me a decent
breakfast! But a man who has two thousand francs hidden
away in a dirty sock and refuses to wear a clean shirt or
smear a little butter over his bread, such a man is not just a
fairy, nor even just a miser—he’s an imbecile!
But that’s neither here nor there, about the fairy. I’m
keeping an ear open as to what’s going on downstairs. It’s a
Mr. Wren and his wife who have called to look at the
apartment. They’re talking about taking it. Only talking
about it, thank God. Mrs. Wren has a loose laugh—
complications ahead. Now Mister Wren is talking. His voice
is raucous, scraping, booming, a heavy blunt weapon that
wedges its way through flesh and bone and cartilage.
Boris calls me down to be introduced. He is rubbing his
hands, like a pawnbroker. They are talking about a story Mr.
Wren wrote, a story about a spavined horse.
“But I thought Mr. Wren was a painter?”

“To be sure,” says Boris, with a twinkle in his eye, “but in
the wintertime he writes. And he writes well… remarkably
well.”
I try to induce Mr. Wren to talk, to say something,
anything, to talk about the spavined horse, if necessary. But
Mr. Wren is almost inarticulate. When he essays to speak of
those dreary months with the pen he becomes unintelligible.
Months and months he spends before setting a word to
paper. (And there are only three months of winter!) What
does he cogitate all those months and months of winter? So
help me God, I can’t see this guy as a writer. Yet Mrs. Wren
says that when he sits down to it the stuff just pours out.
The talk drifts. It is difficult to follow Mr. Wren’s mind
because he says nothing. He thinks as he goes along—so
Mrs. Wren puts it. Mrs. Wren puts everything about Mr. Wren
in the loveliest light. “He thinks as he goes along”—very
charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but
really very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing
but a spavined horse.
Boris hands me money to buy liquor. Going for the liquor I
am already intoxicated. I know just how I’ll begin when I get
back to the house. Walking down the street it commences,
the grand speech inside me that’s gurgling like Mrs. Wren’s
loose laugh. Seems to me she had a slight edge on already.
Listens beautifully when she’s tight. Coming out of the wine
shop I hear the urinal gurgling. Everything is loose and
splashy. I want Mrs. Wren to listen. …
Boris is rubbing his hands again. Mr. Wren is still
stuttering and spluttering. I have a bottle between my legs
and I’m shoving the corkscrew in. Mrs. Wren has her mouth
parted expectantly. The wine is splashing between my legs,
the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my
veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy
things that commence to gush out of me now pell-mell. I’m
telling them everything that comes to mind, everything that

was bottled up inside me and which Mrs. Wren’s loose laugh
has somehow released. With that bottle between my legs
and the sun splashing through the window I experience once
again the splendor of those miserable days when I first
arrived in Paris, a bewildered, poverty-stricken individual
who haunted the streets like a ghost at a banquet.
Everything comes back to me in a rush—the toilets that
wouldn’t work, the prince who shined my shoes, the Cinema
Splendide where I slept on the patron’s overcoat, the bars in
the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat cockroaches,
the drinking and carousing that went on between times,
Rose Cannaque and Naples dying in the sunlight. Dancing
the streets on an empty belly and now and then calling on
strange people—Madame Delorme, for instance. How I ever
got to Madame Delorme’s, I can’t imagine any more. But I
got there, got inside somehow, past the butler, past the
maid with her little white apron, got right inside the palace
with my corduroy trousers and my hunting jacket—and not a
button on my fly. Even now I can taste again the golden
ambiance of that room where Madame Delorme sat upon a
throne in her mannish rig, the goldfish in the bowls, the
maps of the ancient world, the beautifully bound books; I
can feel again her heavy hand resting upon my shoulder,
frightening me a little with her heavy Lesbian air. More
comfortable down below in that thick stew pouring into the
Gare St. Lazare, the whores in the doorways, seltzer bottles
on every table; a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters.
Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed
around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to
move along with the tide and everything whirling in your
brain. A weird sort of contentment in those days. No
appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no
dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.
Each morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and
each morning the inevitable answer from the clerk. Dashing
here and there like a bedbug, gathering butts now and then,

sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly; sitting down on a
bench and squeezing my guts to stop the gnawing, or
walking through the Jardin des Tuileries and getting an
erection looking at the dumb statues. Or wandering along
the Seine at night, wandering and wandering, and going
mad with the beauty of it, the trees leaning to, the broken
images in the water, the rush of the current under the
bloody lights of the bridges, the women sleeping in
doorways, sleeping on newspapers, sleeping in the rain;
everywhere the musty porches of the cathedrals and
beggars and lice and old hags full of St. Vitus’ dance;
pushcarts stacked up like wine barrels in the side streets,
the smell of berries in the market place and the old church
surrounded with vegetables and blue arc lights, the gutters
slippery with garbage and women in satin pumps staggering
through the filth and vermin at the end of an all-night souse.
The Place St. Sulpice, so quiet and deserted, where toward
midnight there came every night the woman with the
busted umbrella and the crazy veil; every night she slept
there on a bench under her torn umbrella, the ribs hanging
down, her dress turning green, her bony fingers and the
odor of decay oozing from her body; and in the morning I’d
be sitting there myself, taking a quiet snooze in the
sunshine, cursing the goddamned pigeons gathering up the
crumbs everywhere. St. Sulpice! The fat belfries, the garish
posters over the door, the candles flaming inside. The
Square so beloved of Anatole France, with that drone and
buzz from the altar, the splash of the fountain, the pigeons
cooing, the crumbs disappearing like magic and only a dull
rumbling in the hollow of the guts. Here I would sit day after
day thinking of Germaine and that dirty little street near the
Bastille where she lived, and that buzz-buzz going on behind
the altar, the buses whizzing by, the sun beating down into
the asphalt and the asphalt working into me and Germaine,
into the asphalt and all Paris in the big fat belfries.

And it was down the Rue Bonaparte that only a year
before Mona and I used to walk every night, after we had
taken leave of Borowski. St. Sulpice not meaning much to
me then, nor anything in Paris. Washed out with talk. Sick of
faces. Fed up with cathedrals and squares and menageries
and what not. Picking up a book in the red bedroom and the
cane chair uncomfortable; tired of sitting on my ass all day
long, tired of red wallpaper, tired of seeing so many people
jabbering away about nothing. The red bedroom and the
trunk always open; her gowns lying about in a delirium of
disorder. The red bedroom with my galoshes and canes, the
notebooks I never touched, the manuscripts lying cold and
dead. Paris! Meaning the Café Select, the Dôme, the Flea
Market, the American Express. Paris! Meaning Borowski’s
canes, Borowski’s hats, Borowski’s gouaches, Borowski’s
prehistoric fish—and prehistoric jokes. In that Paris of ‘28
only one night stands out in my memory—the night before
sailing for America. A rare night, with Borowski slightly
pickled and a little disgusted with me because I’m dancing
with every slut in the place. But we’re leaving in the
morning! That’s what I tell every cunt I grab hold of —
leaving in the morning! That’s what I’m telling the blonde
with agate-colored eyes. And while I’m telling her she takes
my hand and squeezes it between her legs. In the lavatory I
stand before the bowl with a tremendous erection; it seems
light and heavy at the same time, like a piece of lead with
wings on it. And while I’m standing there like that two cunts
sail in—Americans. I greet them cordially, prick in hand.
They give me a wink and pass on. In the vestibule, as I’m
buttoning my fly, I notice one of them waiting for her friend
to come out of the can. The music is still playing and maybe
Mona’ll be coming to fetch me, or Borowski with his gold-
knobbed cane, but I’m in her arms now and she has hold of
me and I don’t care who comes or what happens. We
wriggle into the cabinet and there I stand her up, slap up
against the wall, and I try to get it into her but it won’t work

and so we sit down on the seat and try it that way but it
won’t work either. No matter how we try it it won’t work.
And all the while she’s got hold of my prick, she’s clutching
it like a lifesaver, but it’s no use, we’re too hot, too eager.
The music is still playing and so we waltz out of the cabinet
into the vestibule again and as we’re dancing there in the
shithouse I come all over her beautiful gown and she’s sore
as hell about it. I stumble back to the table and there’s
Borowski with his ruddy face and Mona with her
disapproving eye. And Borowski says “Let’s all go to
Brussels tomorrow,” and we agree, and when we get back
to the hotel I vomit all over the place, in the bed, in the
washbowl, over the suits and gowns and the galoshes and
canes and the notebooks I never touched and the
manuscripts cold and dead.
A few months later. The same hotel, the same room. We
look out on the courtyard where the bicycles are parked,
and there is the little room up above, under the attic, where
some smart young Alec played the phonograph all day long
and repeated clever little things at the top of his voice. I say
“we” but I’m getting ahead of myself, because Mona has
been away a long time and it’s just today that I’m meeting
her at the Gare St. Lazare. Toward evening I’m standing
there with my face squeezed between the bars, but there’s
no Mona, and I read the cable over again but it doesn’t help
any. I go back to the Quarter and just the same I put away a
hearty meal. Strolling past the Dôme a little later suddenly I
see a pale, heavy face and burning eyes—and the little
velvet suit that I always adore because under the soft velvet
there were always her warm breasts, the marble legs, cool,
firm, muscular. She rises up out of a sea of faces and
embraces me, embraces me passionately—a thousand eyes,
noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all
glaring at us and we in each other’s arm oblivious. I sit down
beside her and she talks—a flood of talk. Wild consumptive

notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word
because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy
and willing to die.
We walk down the Rue du Château, looking for Eugene.
Walk over the railroad bridge where I used to watch the
trains pulling out and feel all sick inside wondering where
the hell she could be. Everything soft and enchanting as we
walk over the bridge. Smoke coming up between our legs,
the tracks creaking, semaphores in our blood. I feel her
body close to mine—all mine now—and I stop to rub my
hands over the warm velvet. Everything around us is
crumbling, crumbling and the warm body under the warm
velvet is aching for me. …
Back in the very same room and fifty francs to the good,
thanks to Eugene. I look out on the court but the
phonograph is silent. The trunk is open and her things are
lying around everywhere just as before. She lies down on
the bed with her clothes on. Once, twice, three times, four
times… I’m afraid she’ll go mad… in bed, under the
blankets, how good to feel her body again! But for how
long? Will it last this time? Already I have a presentiment
that it won’t.
She talks to me so feverishly—as if there will be no
tomorrow. “Be quiet, Mona! Just look at me… don’t talk!”
Finally she drops off and I pull my arm from under her. My
eyes close. Her body is there beside me… it will be there till
morning surely. … It was in February I pulled out of the
harbor in a blinding snowstorm. The last glimpse I had of
her was in the window waving good bye to me. A man
standing on the other side of the street, at the corner, his
hat pulled down over his eyes, his jowls resting on his
lapels. A fetus watching me. A fetus with a cigar in its
mouth. Mona at the window waving good-bye. White heavy
face, hair streaming wild. And now it is a heavy bedroom,
breathing regularly through the gills, sap still oozing from

between her legs, a warm feline odor and her hair in my
mouth. My eyes are closed. We breathe warmly into each
other’s mouth. Close together, America three thousand
miles away. I never want to see it again. To have her here in
bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I
count that something of a miracle. Nothing can happen now
till morning. …
I wake from a deep slumber to look at her. A pale light is
trickling in. I look at her beautiful wild hair. I feel something
crawling down my neck. I look at her again, closely. Her hair
is alive. I pull back the sheet—more of them. They are
swarming over the pillow.
It is a little after daybreak. We pack hurriedly and sneak
out of the hotel. The cafés are still closed. We walk, and as
we walk we scratch ourselves. The day opens in milky
whiteness, streaks of salmon-pink sky, snails leaving their
shells. Paris. Paris. Everything happens here. Old, crumbling
walls and the pleasant sound of water running in the urinals.
Men licking their mustaches at the bar. Shutters going up
with a bang and little streams purling in the gutters. Amer
Picon in huge scarlet letters. Zigzag. Which way will we go
and why or where or what?
Mona is hungry, her dress is thin. Nothing but evening
wraps, bottles of perfume, barbaric earrings, bracelets,
depilatories. We sit down in a billiard parlor on the Avenue
du Maine and order hot coffee. The toilet is out of order. We
shall have to sit some time before we can go to another
hotel. Meanwhile we pick bedbugs out of each other’s hair.
Nervous. Mona is losing her temper. Must have a bath. Must
have this. Must have that. Must, must, must…
“How much money have you left?”
Money! Forgot all about that.
Hôtel des Etats-Unis. An ascenseur. We go to bed in broad
daylight. When we get up it is dark and the first thing to do
is to raise enough dough to send a cable to America. A cable

to the fetus with the long juicy cigar in his mouth.
Meanwhile there is the Spanish woman on the Boulevard
Raspail—she’s always good for a warm meal. By morning
something will happen. At least we’re going to bed together.
No more bedbugs now. The rainy season has commenced.
The sheets are immaculate. …

A new life opening up for me at the Villa Borghese. Only ten
o’clock and we have already had breakfast and been out for
a walk. We have an Elsa here with us now. “Step softly for a
few days,” cautions Boris.
The day begins gloriously: a bright sky, a fresh wind, the
houses newly washed. On our way to the Post Office Boris
and I discussed the book. The Last Book—which is going to
be written anonymously.
A new day is beginning. I felt it this morning as we stood
before one of Dufresne’s glistening canvases, a sort of
déjeuner intime in the thirteenth century, sans vin. A fine,
fleshy nude, solid, vibrant, pink as a fingernail, with
glistening billows of flesh; all the secondary characteristics,
and a few of the primary. A body that sings, that has the
moisture of dawn. A still life, only nothing is still, nothing
dead here. The table creaks with food; it is so heavy it is
sliding out of the frame. A thirteenth century repast—with
all the jungle notes that he has memorized so well. A family
of gazelles and zebras nipping the fronds of the palms.
And now we have Elsa. She was playing for us this
morning while we were in bed. Step softly for a few days
Good! Elsa is the maid and I am the guest. And Boris is the
big cheese. A new drama is beginning. I’m laughing to
myself as I write this. He knows what is going to happen,
that lynx, Boris. He has a nose for things too. Step softly. …
Boris is on pins and needles. At any moment now his wife
may appear on the scene. She weighs well over 180 pounds,
that wife of his. And Boris is only a handful. There you have
the situation. He tries to explain it to me on our way home
at night. It is so tragic and so ridiculous at the same time
that I am obliged to stop now and then and laugh in his
face. “Why do you laugh so?” he says gently, and then he

commences himself, with that whimpering, hysterical note
in his voice, like a helpless wretch who realizes suddenly
that no matter how many frock coats he puts on he will
never make a man. He wants to run away, to take a new
name. “She can have everything, that cow, if only she
leaves me alone,” he whines. But first the apartment has to
be rented, and the deeds signed, and a thousand other
details for which his frock coat will come in handy. But the
size of her!—that’s what really worries him. If we were to
find her suddenly standing on the doorstep when we arrive
he would faint—that’s how much he respects her!
And so we’ve got to go easy with Elsa for a while. Elsa is
only there to make breakfast—and to show the apartment.
But Elsa is already undermining me. That German blood.
Those melancholy songs. Coming down the stairs this
morning, with the fresh coffee in my nostrils, I was humming
softly. … “Es wär’ so schön gewesen.” For breakfast, that.
And in a little while the English boy upstairs with his Bach.
As Elsa says—“he needs a woman.” And Elsa needs
something too. I can feel it. I didn’t say anything to Boris
about it, but while he was cleaning his teeth this morning
Elsa was giving me an earful about Berlin, about the women
who look so attractive from behind, and when they turn
round—wow, syphilis!
It seems to me that Elsa looks at me rather wistfully.
Something left over from the breakfast table. This afternoon
we were writing, back to back, in the studio. She had begun
a letter to her lover who is in Italy. The machine got
jammed. Boris had gone to look at a cheap room he will take
as soon as the apartment is rented. There was nothing for it
but to make love to Elsa. She wanted it. And yet I felt a little
sorry for her. She had only written the first line to her lover
—I read it out of the corner of my eye as I bent over her. But
it couldn’t be helped. That damned German music, so

melancholy, so sentimental. It undermined me. And then
her beady little eyes, so hot and sorrowful at the same time.
After it was over I asked her to play something for me.
She’s a musician, Elsa, even though it sounded like broken
pots and skulls clanking. She was weeping, too, as she
played. I don’t blame her. Everywhere the same thing, she
says. Everywhere a man, and then she has to leave, and
then there’s an abortion and then a new job and then
another man and nobody gives a fuck about her except to
use her. All this after she’s played Schumann for me—
Schumann, that slobbery, sentimental German bastard!
Somehow I feel sorry as hell for her and yet I don’t give a
damn. A cunt who can play as she does ought to have
better sense than be tripped up by every guy with a big
putz who happens to come along. But that Schumann gets
into my blood. She’s still sniffling, Elsa; but my mind is far
away. I’m thinking of Tania and how she claws away at her
adagio. I’m thinking of lots of things that are gone and
buried. Thinking of a summer afternoon in Greenpoint when
the Germans were romping over Belgium and we had not
yet lost enough money to be concerned over the rape of a
neutral country. A time when we were still innocent enough
to listen to poets and to sit around a table in the twilight
rapping for departed spirits. All that afternoon and evening
the atmosphere is saturated with German music; the whole
neigh borhood is German, more German even than
Germany. We were brought up on Schumann and Hugo Wolf
and sauerkraut and kümmel and potato dumplings. Toward
evening we’re sitting around a big table with the curtains
drawn and some fool two-headed wench is rapping for Jesus
Christ. We’re holding hands under the table and the dame
next to me has two fingers in my fly. And finally we lie on
the floor, behind the piano, while someone sings a dreary
song. The air is stifling and her breath is boozy. The pedal is
moving up and down, stiffly, automatically, a crazy, futile

movement, like a tower of dung that takes twenty-seven
years to build but keeps perfect time. I pull her over me with
the sounding board in my ears; the room is dark and the
carpet is sticky with the kümmel that has been spilled
about. Suddenly it seems as if the dawn were coming: it is
like water purling over ice and the ice is blue with a rising
mist, glaciers sunk in emerald green, chamois and antelope,
golden groupers, sea cows mooching along and the amber
jack leaping over the Arctic rim. …
Elsa is sitting in my lap. Her eyes are like little belly-
buttons. I look at her large mouth, so wet and glistening,
and I cover it. She is humming now “Es wär’ so schön
gewesen. …” Ah, Elsa, you don’t know yet what that means
to me, your Trompeter von Säckingen. German Singing
Societies, Schwaben Hall, the Turnverein… links um, rechts
um… and then a whack over the ass with the end of a rope.
Ah, the Germans! They take you all over like an omnibus.
They give you indigestion. In the same night one cannot
visit the morgue, the infirmary, the zoo, the signs of the
zodiac, the limbos of philosophy, the caves of epistemology,
the arcana of Freud and Stekel. … On the merry-go-round
one doesn’t get anywhere, whereas with the Germans one
can go from Vega to Lope de Vega, all in one night, and
come away as foolish as Parsifal.
As I say, the day began gloriously. It was only this
morning that I became conscious again of this physical Paris
of which I have been unaware for weeks. Perhaps it is
because the book has begun to grow inside me. I am
carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the
streets big with child and the cops escort me across the
street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody
pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle
awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of
the world.

It was this morning, on our way to the Post Office, that we
gave the book its final imprimatur. We have evolved a new
cosmogony of literature, Boris and I. It is to be a new Bible—
The Last Book. All those who have anything to say will say it
here—anonymously. We will exhaust the age. After us not
another book—not for a generation, at least. Heretofore we
had been digging in the dark, with nothing but instinct to
guide us. Now we shall have a vessel in which to pour the
vital fluid, a bomb which, when we throw it, will set off the
world. We shall put into it enough to give the writers of
tomorrow their plots, their dramas, their poems, their
myths, their sciences. The world will be able to feed on it for
a thousand years to come. It is colossal in its
pretentiousness. The thought of it almost shatters us.
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has
been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or
so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of
creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying
piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce, it needs to be
blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we
have in us all the continents and the seas between the
continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it
down—the evolution of this world which has died but which
has not been buried. We are swimming on the face of time
and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown. It will
be enormous, the Book. There will be oceans of space in
which to move about, to perambulate, to sing, to dance, to
climb, to bathe, to leap somersaults, to whine, to rape, to
murder. A cathedral, a veritable cathedral, in the building of
which everybody will assist who has lost his identity. There
will be masses for the dead, prayers, confessions, hymns, a
moaning and a chattering, a sort of murderous insouciance;
there will be rose windows and gargoyles and acolytes and
pallbearers. You can bring your horses in and gallop through
the aisles. You can butt your head against the walls—they

won’t give. You can pray in any language you choose, or you
can curl up outside and go to sleep. It will last a thousand
years, at least, this cathedral, and there will be no replica,
for the builders will be dead and the formula too. We will
have postcards made and organize tours. We will build a
town around it and set up a free commune. We have no
need for genius—genius is dead. We have need for strong
hands, for spirits who are willing to give up the ghost and
put on flesh. …
The day is moving along at a fine tempo. I am up on the
balcony at Tania’s place. The drama is going on down below
in the drawing room. The dramatist is sick and from above
his scalp looks more scabrous than ever. His hair is made of
straw. His ideas are straw. His wife too is straw, though still
a little damp. The whole house is made of straw. Here I am
up on the balcony, waiting for Boris to arrive. My last
problem—breakfast—is gone. I have simplified everything. If
there are any new problems I can carry them in my
rucksack, along with my dirty wash. I am throwing away all
my sous. What need have I for money? I am a writing
machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows.
Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I
am the machine. …
They have not told me yet what the new drama is about,
but I can sense it. They are trying to get rid of me. Yet here I
am for my dinner, even a little earlier than they expected. I
have informed them where to sit, what to do. I ask them
politely if I shall be disturbing them, but what I really mean,
and they know it well, is—will you be disturbing me? No, you
blissful cockroaches, you are not disturbing me. You are
nourishing me. I see you sitting there close together and I
know there is a chasm between you. Your nearness is the
nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I
withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.

Tania is in a hostile mood—I can feel it. She resents my
being filled with anything but herself. She knows by the very
caliber of my excitement that her value is reduced to zero.
She knows that I did not come this evening to fertilize her.
She knows there is something germinating inside me which
will destroy her. She is slow to realize, but she is realizing
it…
Sylvester looks more content. He will embrace her this
evening at the dinner table. Even now he is reading my
manuscript, preparing to inflame my ego, to set my ego
against hers.
It will be a strange gathering this evening. The stage is
being set. I hear the tinkle of the glasses. The wine is being
brought out. There will be bumpers downed and Sylvester
who is ill will come out of his illness.
It was only last night, at Cronstadt’s, that we projected
this setting. It was ordained that the women must suffer,
that off-stage there should be more terror and violence,
more disasters, more suffering, more woe and misery.
It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris
is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits
the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself
Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is
simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living
embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is
the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each
one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New
York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna
than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle
gives up its babes and new ones take their places. You can
read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and
Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was
anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other.
Nobody dies here. …

They are talking downstairs. Their language is symbolic.
The world “struggle” enters into it. Sylvester, the sick
dramatist, is saying: “I am just reading the Manifesto.” And
Tania says—“Whose?” Yes, Tania, I heard you. I am up here
writing about you and you divine it well. Speak more, that I
may record you. For when we go to table I shall not be able
to make any notes. … Suddenly Tania remarks: “There is no
prominent hall in this place.” Now what does that mean, if
anything?
They are putting up pictures now. That, too, is to impress
me. See, they wish to say, we are at home here, living the
conjugal life. Making the home attractive. We will even
argue a little about the pictures, for your benefit. And Tania
remarks again: “How the eye deceives one!” Ah, Tania, what
things you say! Go on, carry out this farce a little longer. I
am here to get the dinner you promised me; I enjoy this
comedy tremendously. And now Sylvester takes the lead. He
is trying to explain one of Borowski’s gouaches. “Come here,
do you see? One of them is playing the guitar; the other is
holding a girl in his lap.” True, Sylvester. Very true. Borowski
and his guitars! The girls in his lap! Only one never quite
knows what it is he holds in his lap, or whether it is really a
man playing the guitar. …
Soon Moldorf will be trotting in on all fours and Boris with
that helpless little laugh of his. There will be a golden
pheasant for dinner and Anjou and short fat cigars. And
Cronstadt, when he gets the latest news, will live a little
harder, a little brighter, for five minutes; and then he will
subside again into the humus of his ideology and perhaps a
poem will be born, a big golden bell of a poem without a
tongue.
Had to knock off for an hour or so. Another customer to
look at the apartment. Upstairs the bloody Englishman is
practicing his Bach. It is imperative now, when someone

comes to look at the apartment, to run upstairs and ask the
pianist to lay off for a while.
Elsa is telephoning the greengrocer. The plumber is
putting a new seat on the toilet bowl. Whenever the doorbell
rings Boris loses his equilibrium. In the excitement he has
dropped his glasses; he is on his hands and knees, his frock
coat is dragging the floor. It is a little like the Grand Guignol
—the starving poet come to give the butcher’s daughter
lessons. Every time the phone rings the poet’s mouth
waters. Mallarmé sounds like a sirloin steak, Victor Hugo like
foie de veau. Elsa is ordering a delicate little lunch for Boris
—“a nice juicy little pork chop,” she says. I see a whole flock
of pink hams lying cold on the marble, wonderful hams
cushioned in white fat. I have a terrific hunger though we’ve
only had breakfast a few minutes ago—it’s the lunch that I’ll
have to skip. It’s only Wednesdays that I eat lunch, thanks
to Borowski. Elsa is still telephoning—she forgot to order a
piece of bacon. “Yes, a nice little piece of bacon, not too
fatty,” she says… Zut alors! Throw in some sweetbreads,
throw in some mountain oysters and some psst clams!
Throw in some fried liverwurst while you’re at it; I could
gobble up the fifteen hundred plays of Lope de Vega in one
sitting.
It is a beautiful woman who has come to look at the
apartment. An American, of course. I stand at the window
with my back to her watching a sparrow pecking at a fresh
turd. Amazing how easily the sparrow is provided for. It is
raining a bit and the drops are very big. I used to think a
bird couldn’t fly if its wings got wet. Amazing how these rich
dames come to Paris and find all the swell studios. A little
talent and a big purse. If it rains they have a chance to
display their brand new slickers. Food is nothing: sometimes
they’re so busy gadding about that they haven’t time for
lunch. Just a little sandwich, a wafer, at the Café de la Paix
or the Ritz Bar. “For the daughters of gentlefolk only”—

that’s what it says at the old studio of Puvis de Chavannes.
Happened to pass there the other day. Rich American cunts
with paint boxes slung over their shoulders. A little talent
and a fat purse.
The sparrow is hopping frantically from one cobblestone
to another. Truly herculean efforts, if you stop to examine
closely. Everywhere there is food lying about—in the gutter,
I mean. The beautiful American woman is inquiring about
the toilet. The toilet! Let me show you, you velvet-snooted
gazelle! The toilet, you say? Par ici, Madame. N’oubliez pas
que les places numérotées sont réservées aux mutilés de la
guerre.
Boris is rubbing his hands—he is putting the finishing
touches to the deal. The dogs are barking in the courtyard;
they bark like wolves. Upstairs Mrs. Melverness is moving
the furniture around. She had nothing to do all day, she’s
bored; if she finds a crumb of dirt anywhere she cleans the
whole house. There’s a bunch of green grapes on the table
and a bottle of wine—vin de choix, ten degrees. “Yes,” says
Boris. “I could make a washstand for you, just come here,
please. Yes, this is the toilet. There is one upstairs too, of
course. Yes, a thousand francs a month. You don’t care
much for Utrillo, you say? No, this is it. It needs a new
washer, that’s all. …”
She’s going in a minute now. Boris hasn’t even introduced
me this time. The son of a bitch! Whenever it’s a rich cunt
he forgets to introduce me. In a few minutes I’ll be able to
sit down again and type. Somehow I don’t feel like it any
more today. My spirit is dribbling away. She may come back
in an hour or so and take the chair from under my ass. How
the hell can a man write when he doesn’t know where he’s
going to sit the next half-hour? If this rich bastard takes the
place I won’t even have a place to sleep. It’s hard to know,
when you’re in such a jam, which is worse—not having a
place to sleep or not having a place to work. One can sleep

almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even
if it’s not a masterpiece you’re doing. Even a bad novel
requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy. These rich
cunts never think of a thing like that. Whenever they want
to lower their soft behinds there’s always a chair standing
ready for them. …
Last night we left Sylvester and his God sitting together
before the hearth. Sylvester in his pajamas, Moldorf with a
cigar between his lips. Sylvester is peeling an orange. He
puts the peel on the couch cover. Moldorf draws closer to
him. He asks permission to read again that brilliant parody,
The Gates of Heaven. We are getting ready to go, Boris and
I. We are too gay for this sickroom atmosphere. Tania is
going with us. She is gay because she is going to escape.
Boris is gay because the God in Moldorf is dead. I am gay
because it is another act we are going to put on.
Moldorf’s voice is reverent. “Can I stay with you,
Sylvester, until you go to bed?” He has been staying with
him for the last six days, buying medicine, running errands
for Tania, comforting, consoling, guarding the portals
against malevolent intruders like Boris and his scalawags.
He is like a savage who has discovered that his idol was
mutilated during the night. There he sits, at the idol’s feet,
with breadfruit and grease and jabberwocky prayers. His
voice goes out unctuously. His limbs are already paralyzed.
To Tania he speaks as if she were a priestess who had
broken her vows. “You must make yourself worthy. Sylvester
is your God.” And while Sylvester is upstairs suffering (he
has a little wheeze in the chest) the priest and the priestess
devour the food. “You are polluting yourself,” he says, the
gravy dripping from his lips. He has the capacity for eating
and suffering at the same time. While he fends off the
dangerous ones he puts out his fat little paw and strokes

Tania’s hair. “I’m beginning to fall in love with you. You are
like my Fanny.”
In other respects it has been a fine day for Moldorf. A
letter arrived from America. Moe is getting A’s in everything.
Murray is learning to ride the bicycle. The victrola was
repaired. You can see from the expression on his face that
there were other things in the letter besides report cards
and velocipedes. You can be sure of it because this
afternoon he bought 325 francs worth of jewelry for his
Fanny. In addition he wrote her a twenty-page letter. The
garçon brought him page after page, filled his fountain pen,
served his coffee and cigars, fanned him a little when he
perspired, brushed the crumbs from the table, lit his cigar
when it went out, bought stamps for him, danced on him,
pirouetted, salaamed… broke his spine damned near. The
tip was fat. Bigger and fatter than a Corona Corona. Moldorf
probably mentioned it in his diary. It was for Fanny’s sake.
The bracelet and the earrings, they were worth every sou he
spent. Better to spend it on Fanny than waste it on little
strumpets like Germaine and Odette. Yes, he told Tania so.
He showed her his trunk. It is crammed with gifts—for
Fanny, and for Moe and Murray.
“My Fanny is the most intelligent woman in the world. I
have been searching and searching to find a flaw in her—
but there’s not one.
“She’s perfect. I’ll tell you what Fanny can do. She plays
bridge like a shark; she’s interested in Zionism; you give her
an old hat, for instance, and see what she can do with it. A
little twist here, a ribbon there, and voilà quelque chose de
beau! Do you know what is perfect bliss? To sit beside
Fanny, when Moe and Murray have gone to bed, and listen
to the radio. She sits there so peacefully. I am rewarded for
all my struggles and heartaches in just watching her. She
listens intelligently. When I think of your stinking
Montparnasse and then of my evenings in Bay Ridge with

Fanny after a big meal, I tell you there is no comparison. A
simple thing like food, the children, the soft lamps, and
Fanny sitting there, a little tired, but cheerful, contented,
heavy with bread… we just sit there for hours without
saying a word. That’s bliss!
“Today she writes me a letter—not one of those dull
stock-report letters. She writes me from the heart, in
language that even my little Murray could understand. She’s
delicate about everything, Fanny. She says that the children
must continue their education but the expense worries her.
It will cost a thousand bucks to send little Murray to school.
Moe, of course, will get a scholarship. But little Murray, that
little genius, Murray, what are we going to do about him? I
wrote Fanny not to worry. Send Murray to school, I said.
What’s another thousand dollars? I’ll make more money this
year than ever before. I’ll do it for little Murray—because
he’s a genius, that kid.”
I should like to be there when Fanny opens the trunk.
“See, Fanny, this is what I bought in Budapest from an old
Jew. … This is what they wear in Bulgaria—it’s pure wool. …
This belonged to the Duke of something or other—no, you
don’t wind it, you put it in the sun. … This I want you to
wear, Fanny, when we go to the Opera… wear it with that
comb I showed you. … And this, Fanny, is something Tania
picked up for me… she’s a little bit on your type. …”
And Fanny is sitting there on the settee, just as she was in
the oleograph, with Moe on one side of her and little Murray,
Murray the genius, on the other. Her fat legs are a little too
short to reach the floor. Her eyes have a dull permanganate
glow. Breasts like ripe red cabbage; they bobble a little
when she leans forward. But the sad thing about her is that
the juice has been cut off. She sits there like a dead storage
battery; her face is out of plumb—it needs a little animation,
a sudden spurt of juice to bring it back into focus. Moldorf is
jumping around in front of her like a fat toad. His flesh

quivers. He slips and it is difficult for him to roll over again
on his belly. She prods him with her thick toes. His eyes
protrude a little further. “Kick me again, Fanny, that was
good.” She gives him a good prod this time—it leaves a
permanent dent in his paunch. His face is close to the
carpet; the wattles are joggling in the nap of the rug. He
livens up a bit, flips around, springs from furniture to
furniture. “Fanny, you are marvelous!” He is sitting now on
her shoulder. He bites a little piece from her ear, just a little
tip from the lobe where it doesn’t hurt. But she’s still dead—
all storage battery and no juice. He falls on her lap and lies
there quivering like a toothache. He is all warm now and
helpless. His belly glistens like a patent-leather shoe. In the
sockets of his eyes a pair of fancy vest buttons. “Unbutton
my eyes, Fanny, I want to see you better!” Fanny carries
him to bed and drops a little hot wax over his eyes. She puts
rings around his navel and a thermometer up his ass. She
places him and he quivers again. Suddenly he’s dwindled,
shrunk completely out of sight. She searches all over for
him, in her intestines, everywhere. Something is tickling her
—she doesn’t know where exactly. The bed is full of toads
and fancy vest buttons. “Fanny, where are you?” Something
is tickling her—she can’t say where. The buttons are
dropping off the bed. The toads are climbing the walls. A
tickling and a tickling. “Fanny, take the wax out of my eyes!
I want to look at you!” But Fanny is laughing, squirming with
laughter. There is something inside her, tickling and tickling.
She’ll die laughing if she doesn’t find it. “Fanny, the trunk is
full of beautiful things. Fanny, do you hear me?” Fanny is
laughing, laughing like a fat worm. Her belly is swollen with
laughter. Her legs are getting blue. “O God, Morris, there is
something tickling me. … I can’t help it!”

Sunday! Left the Villa Borghese a little before noon, just as
Boris was getting ready to sit down to lunch. I left out of a
sense of delicacy, because it really pains Boris to see me
sitting there in the studio with an empty belly. Why he
doesn’t invite me to lunch with him I don’t know. He says he
can’t afford it, but that’s no excuse. Anyway, I’m delicate
about it. If it pains him to eat alone in my presence it would
probably pain him more to share his meal with me. It’s not
my place to pry into his secret affairs.
Dropped in at the Cronstadts’ and they were eating too. A
young chicken with wild rice. Pretended that I had eaten
already, but I could have torn the chicken from the baby’s
hands. This is not just false modesty—it’s a kind of
perversion, I’m thinking. Twice they asked me if I wouldn’t
join them. No! No! Wouldn’t even accept a cup of coffee
after the meal. I’m delicat, I am! On the way out I cast a
lingering glance at the bones lying on the baby’s plate—
there was still meat on them.
Prowling around aimlessly. A beautiful day—so far. The
Rue de Buci is alive, crawling. The bars wide open and the
curbs lined with bicycles. All the meat and vegetable
markets are in full swing. Arms loaded with truck bandaged
in newspapers. A fine Catholic Sunday—in the morning, at
least.
High noon and here I am standing on an empty belly at
the confluence of all these crooked lanes that reek with the
odor of food. Opposite me is the Hôtel de Louisiane. A grim
old hostelry known to the bad boys of the Rue de Buci in the
good old days. Hotels and food, and I’m walking about like a
leper with crabs gnawing at my entrails. On Sunday
mornings there’s a fever in the streets. Nothing like it
anywhere, except perhaps on the East Side, or down around

Chatham Square. The Rue de l’Echaudé is seething. The
streets twist and turn, at every angle a fresh hive of activity.
Long queues of people with vegetables under their arms,
turning in here and there with crisp, sparkling appetites.
Nothing but food, food, food. Makes one delirious.
Pass the Square de Furstenberg. Looks different now. at
high noon. The other night when I passed by it was
deserted, bleak, spectral. In the middle of the square four
black trees that have not yet begun to blossom. Intellectual
trees, nourished by the paving stones. Like T. S. Eliot’s
verse. Here, by God, if Marie Laurencin ever brought her
Lesbians out into the open, would be the place for them to
commune. Très lesbienne ici. Sterile, hybrid, dry as Boris’
heart.
In the little garden adjoining the Eglise St. Germain are a
few dismounted gargoyles. Monsters that jut forward with a
terrifying plunge. On the benches other monsters—old
people, idiots, cripples, epileptics. Snoozing there quietly,
waiting for the dinner bell to ring. At the Galerie Zak across
the way some imbecile has made a picture of the cosmos—
on the flat. A painter’s cosmos! Full of odds and ends, bric-a-
bric. In the lower left-hand corner, however, there’s an
anchor—and a dinner bell. Salute! Salute! O Cosmos!
Still prowling around. Mid afternoon. Guts rattling.
Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomblike from the
water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace façade. They
hang there like an idée fixe in the mind of a monomaniac.
An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some
Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his
head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns
the golden sands to mud. Bookstore with some of Raoul
Dufy’s drawings in the window. Drawings of charwomen with
rosebushes between their legs. A treatise on the philosophy
of Joan Miró. The philosophy, mind you!

In the same window: A Man Cut In Slices! Chapter one:
the man in the eyes of his family. Chapter two: the same in
the eyes of his mistress. Chapter three:—No chapter three.
Have to come back tomorrow for chapters three and four.
Every day the window trimmer turns a fresh page. A man
cut in slices. … You can’t imagine how furious I am not to
have thought of a title like that! Where is this bloke who
writes “the same in the eyes of his mistress… the same in
the eyes of… the same…?” Where is this guy? Who is he? I
want to hug him. I wish to Christ I had had brains enough to
think of a title like that—instead of Crazy Cock and the other
fool things I invented. Well, fuck a duck! I congratulate him
just the same.
I wish him luck with his fine title. Here’s another slice for
you—for your next book! Ring me up some day. I’m living at
the Villa Borghese. We’re all dead, or dying, or about to die.
We need good titles. We need meat—slices and slices of
meat—juicy tenderloins, porterhouse steaks, kidneys,
mountain oysters, sweetbreads. Some day, when I’m
standing at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, I’m
going to remember this title and I’m going to put down
everything that goes on in my noodle—caviar, rain drops,
axle grease, vermicelli, liverwurst—slices and slices of it.
And I’ll tell no one why, after I had put everything down, I
suddenly went home and chopped the baby to pieces. Un
acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupé en
tranches!
How a man can wander about all day on an empty belly,
and even get an erection once in a while, is one of those
mysteries which are too easily explained by the “anatomists
of the soul.” On a Sunday afternoon, when the shutters are
down and the proletariat possesses the street in a kind of
dumb torpor, there are certain thoroughfares which remind
one of nothing less than a big chancrous cock laid open
longitudinally. And it is just these highways, the Rue St.

Denis, for instance, or the Faubourg du Temple—which
attract one irresistibly, much as in the old days, around
Union Square or the upper reaches of the Bowery, one was
drawn to the dime museums where in the show windows
there were displayed wax reproductions of various organs of
the body eaten away by syphilis and other venereal
diseases. The city sprouts out like a huge organism diseased
in every part, the beautiful thoroughfares only a little less
repulsive because they have been drained of their pus.
At the Cité Nortier, somewhere near the Place du Combat,
I pause a few minutes to drink in the full squalor of the
scene. It is a rectangular court like many another which one
glimpses through the low passageways that flank the old
arteries of Paris. In the middle of the court is a clump of
decrepit buildings which have so rotted away that they have
collapsed on one another and formed a sort of intestinal
embrace. The ground is uneven, the flagging slippery with
slime. A sort of human dump heap which has been filled in
with cinders and dry garbage. The sun is setting fast. The
colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre
to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. Here and
there a lopsided monster stands in the window blinking like
an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces
and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the
forceps. A fetid odor seeps from the walls, the odor of a
mildewed mattress. Europe—medieval, grotesque,
monstrous: a symphony in B-mol. Directly across the street
the Ciné Combat offers its distinguished clientele Metropolis.
Coming away my mind reverts to a book that I was
reading only the other day. “The town was a shambles;
corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers,
lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to
eat them; the black death and other plagues crept in to
keep them company, and the English came marching on;
the while the danse macabre whirled about the tombs in all

the cemeteries. …” Paris during the days of Charles the
Silly! A lovely book! Refreshing, appetizing. I’m still
enchanted by it. About the patrons and prodromes of the
Renaissance I know little, but Madam Pimpernel, la belle
boulangère, and Maître Jehan Crapotte, l’ orfèvre, these
occupy my spare thoughts still. Not forgetting Rodin, the evil
genius of The Wandering Jew, who practiced his nefarious
ways “until the day when he was en-flamed and outwitted
by the octoroon Cecily.” Sitting in the Square du Temple,
musing over the doings of the horse knackers led by Jean
Caboche, I have thought long and ruefully over the sad fate
of Charles the Silly. A halfwit, who prowled about the halls of
his Hôtel St. Paul, garbed in the filthiest rags, eaten away by
ulcers and vermin, gnawing a bone, when they flung him
one, like a mangy dog. At the Rue des Lions I looked for the
stones of the old menagerie where he once fed his pets. His
only diversion, poor dolt, aside from those card games with
his “low-born companion,” Odette de Champdivers.
It was a Sunday afternoon, much like this, when I first met
Germaine. I was strolling along the Boulevard
Beaumarchais, rich by a hundred francs or so which my wife
had frantically cabled from America. There was a touch of
spring in the air, a poisonous, malefic spring that seemed to
burst from the manholes. Night after night I had been
coming back to this quarter, attracted by certain leprous
streets which only revealed their sinister splendor when the
light of day had oozed away and the whores commenced to
take up their posts. The Rue du Pasteur-Wagner is one I
recall in particular, corner of the Rue Amelot which hides
behind the boulevard like a slumbering lizard. Here, at the
neck of the bottle, so to speak, there was always a cluster of
vultures who croaked and flapped their dirty wings, who
reached out with sharp talons and plucked you into a
doorway. Jolly, rapacious devils who didn’t even give you
time to button your pants when it was over. Led you into a

little room off the street, a room without a window usually,
and, sitting on the edge of the bed with skirts tucked up
gave you a quick inspection, spat on your cock, and placed
it for you. While you washed yourself another one stood at
the door and, holding her victim by the hand, watched
nonchalantly as you gave the finishing touches to your
toilet.
Germaine was different. There was nothing to tell me so
from her appearance. Nothing to distinguish her from the
other trollops who met each afternoon and evening at the
Café de l’Eléphant. As I say, it was a spring day and the few
francs my wife had scraped up to cable me were jingling in
my pocket. I had a sort of vague premonition that I would
not reach the Bastille without being taken in tow by one of
these buzzards. Sauntering along the boulevard I had
noticed her verging toward me with that curious trot-about
air of a whore and the run-down heels and cheap jewelry
and the pasty look of their kind which the rouge only
accentuates. It was not difficult to come to terms with her.
We sat in the back of the little tabac called L’Eléphant and
talked it over quickly. In a few minutes we were in a five
franc room on the Rue Amelot, the curtains drawn and the
covers thrown back. She didn’t rush things, Germaine. She
sat on the bidet soaping herself and talked to me pleasantly
about this and that; she liked the knickerbockers I was
wearing. Très chic! she thought. They were once, but I had
worn the seat out of them; fortunately the jacket covered
my ass. As she stood up to dry herself, still talking to me
pleasantly, suddenly she dropped the towel and, advancing
toward me leisurely, she commenced rubbing her pussy
affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it,
patting it, patting it. There was something about her
eloquence at that moment and the way she thrust that
rosebush under my nose which remains unforgettable; she
spoke of it as if it were some extraneous object which she

had acquired at great cost, an object whose value had
increased with time and which now she prized above
everything in the world. Her words imbued it with a peculiar
fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ, but a
treasure, a magic, potent treasure, a God-given thing—and
none the less so because she traded it day in and day out
for a few pieces of silver. As she flung herself on the bed,
with legs spread wide apart, she cupped it with her hands
and stroked it some more, murmuring all the while in that
hoarse, cracked voice of hers that it was good, beautiful, a
treasure, a little treasure. And it was good, that little pussy
of hers! That Sunday afternoon, with its poisonous breath of
spring in the air, everything clicked again. As we stepped
out of the hotel I looked her over again in the harsh light of
day and I saw clearly what a whore she was—the gold teeth,
the geranium in her hat, the rundown heels, etc., etc. Even
the fact that she had wormed a dinner out of me and
cigarettes and taxi hadn’t the least disturbing effect upon
me. I encouraged it, in fact. I liked her so well that after
dinner we went back to the hotel again and took another
shot at it. “For love,” this time. And again that big, bushy
thing of hers worked its bloom and magic. It began to have
an independent existence—for me too. There was Germaine
and there was that rosebush of hers. I liked them separately
and I liked them together.
As I say, she was different, Germaine. Later, when she
discovered my true circumstances, she treated me nobly—
blew me to drinks, gave me credit, pawned my things,
introduced me to her friends, and so on. She even
apologized for not lending me money, which I understood
quite well after her maquereau had been pointed out to me.
Night after night I walked down the Boulevard Beaumarchais
to the little tabac where they all congregated and I waited
for her to stroll in and give me a few minutes of her precious
time.

When some time later I came to write about Claude, it
was not Claude that I was thinking of but Germaine. … “All
the men she’s been with and now you, just you, and barges
going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life
flowing through you, through her, through all the guys
behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the
sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you,
annihilating you.” That was for Germaine! Claude was not
the same, though I admired her tremendously—I even
thought for a while that I loved her. Claude had a soul and a
conscience; she had refinement, too, which is bad—in a
whore. Claude always imparted a feeling of sadness; she left
the impression, unwittingly, of course, that you were just
one more added to the stream which fate had ordained to
destroy her. Unwittingly, I say, because Claude was the last
person in the world who would consciously create such an
image in one’s mind. She was too delicate, too sensitive for
that. At bottom, Claude was just a good French girl of
average breed and intelligence whom life had tricked
somehow; something in her there was which was not tough
enough to withstand the shock of daily experience. For her
were meant those terrible words of Louis-Philippe, “and a
night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have
closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to
stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it
had been masticated by every mouth.” Germaine, on the
other hand, was a whore from the cradle; she was
thoroughly satisfied with her role, enjoyed it in fact, except
when her stomach pinched or her shoes gave out, little
surface things of no account, nothing that ate into her soul,
nothing that created torment. Ennui! That was the worst she
ever felt. Days there were, no doubt, when she had a
bellyful, as we say—but no more than that! Most of the time
she enjoyed it—or gave the illusion of enjoying it. It made a
difference of course, whom she went with—or came with.
But the principal thing was a man. A man! That was what

she craved. A man with something between his legs that
could tickle her, that could make her writhe in ecstasy,
make her grab that bushy twat of hers with both hands and
rub it joyfully, boastfully, proudly, with a sense of
connection, a sense of life. That was the only place where
she experienced any life—down there where she clutched
herself with both hands.
Germaine was a whore all the way through, even down to
her good heart, her whore’s heart which is not really a good
heart but a lazy one, an indifferent, flaccid heart that can be
touched for a moment, a heart without reference to any
fixed point within, a big, flaccid whore’s heart that can
detach itself for a moment from its true center. However vile
and circumscribed was that world which she had created for
herself, nevertheless she functioned in it superbly. And that
in itself is a tonic thing. When, after we had become well
acquainted, her companions would twit me, saying that I
was in love with Germaine (a situation almost inconceivable
to them), I would say: “Sure! Sure, I’m in love with her! And
what’s more, I’m going to be faithful to her!” A lie, of
course, because I could no more think of loving Germaine
than I could think of loving a spider; and if I was faithful, it
was not to Germaine but to that bushy thing she carried
between her legs. Whenever I looked at another woman I
thought immediately of Germaine, of that flaming bush
which she had left in my mind and which seemed
imperishable. It gave me pleasure to sit on the terrasse of
the little tabac and observe her as she plied her trade,
observe her as she resorted to the same grimaces, the
same tricks, with others as she had with me. “She’s doing
her job!”—that’s how I felt about it, and it was with
approbation that I regarded her transactions. Later, when I
had taken up with Claude, and I saw her night after night
sitting in her accustomed place, her round little buttocks
chubbily ensconced in the plush settee, I felt a sort of

inexpressible rebellion toward her; a whore, it seemed to
me, had no right to be sitting there like a lady, waiting
timidly for someone to approach and all the while
abstemiously sipping her chocolat. Germaine was a hustler.
She didn’t wait for you to come to her—she went out and
grabbed you. I remember so well the holes in her stockings,
and the torn ragged shoes; I remember too how she stood
at the bar and with blind, courageous defiance threw a
strong drink down her stomach and marched out again.
A hustler! Perhaps it wasn’t so pleasant to smell that boozy
breath of hers, that breath compounded of weak coffee,
cognac, apéritifs, Pernods and all the other stuff she guzzled
between times, what to warm herself and what to summon
up strength and courage, but the fire of it penetrated her, it
glowed down there between her legs where women ought to
glow, and there was established that circuit which makes
one feel the earth under his legs again. When she lay there
with her legs apart and moaning, even if she did moan that
way for any and everybody, it was good, it was a proper
show of feeling. She didn’t stare up at the ceiling with a
vacant look or count the bedbugs on the wallpaper; she kept
her mind on her business, she talked about the things a
man wants to hear when he’s climbing over a woman.
Whereas Claude—well, with Claude there was always a
certain delicacy, even when she got under the sheets with
you. And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate
whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away
when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when
he’s burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants
to see everything, even how they make water. And while it’s
all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature
coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to
be served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was
ignorant and lusty, she put her heart and soul into her work.

She was a whore all the way through—and that was her
virtue!

Easter came in like a frozen hare—but it was fairly warm in
bed. Today it is lovely again and along the Champs-Elysées
at twilight it is like an outdoor seraglio choked with dark-
eyed houris. The trees are in full foliage and of a verdure so
pure, so rich, that it seems as though they were still wet and
glistening with dew. From the Palais du Louvre to the Etoile
it is like a piece of music for the pianoforte. For five days I
have not touched the typewriter nor looked at a book; nor
have I had a single idea in my head except to go to the
American Express. At nine this morning I was there, just as
the doors were being opened, and again at one o’clock. No
news. At four-thirty I dash out of the hotel, resolved to make
a last-minute stab at it. Just as I turn the corner I brush
against Walter Pach. Since he doesn’t recognize me, and
since I have nothing to say to him, I make no attempt to
arrest him. Later, when I am stretching my legs in the
Tuileries his figure reverts to mind. He was a little stooped,
pensive, with a sort of serene yet reserved smile on his face.
I wonder, as I look up at this softly enameled sky, so faintly
tinted, which does not bulge today with heavy rain clouds
but smiles like a piece of old china, I wonder what goes on in
the mind of this man who translated the four thick volumes
of the History of Art when he takes in this blissful cosmos
with his drooping eye.
Along the Champs-Elysées, ideas pouring from me like
sweat. I ought to be rich enough to have a secretary to
whom I could dictate as I walk, because my best thoughts
always come when I am away from the machine.
Walking along the Champs-Elysées I keep thinking of my
really superb health. When I say “health” I mean optimism,
to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the
nineteenth century. I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans.

Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. “I have only to talk
about a meal,” he say, “and you’re radiant!” It’s a fact. The
mere thought of a meal—another meal—rejuvenates me. A
meal! That means something to go on—a few solid hours of
work, an erection possibly. I don’t deny it. I have health,
good solid, animal health. The only thing that stands
between me and a future is a meal, another meal.
As for Carl, he’s not himself these days. He’s upset, his
nerves are jangled. He says he’s ill, and I believe him, but I
don’t feel badly about it.
I can’t. In fact, it makes me laugh. And that offends him,
of course. Everything wounds him—my laughter, my
hunger, my persistence, my insouciance, everything. One
day he wants to blow his brains out because he can’t stand
this lousy hole of a Europe any more; the next day he talks
of going to Arizona “where they look you square in the eye.”
“Do it!” I say. “Do one thing or the other, you bastard, but
don’t try to cloud my healthy eye with your melancholy
breath!”
But that’s just it! In Europe one gets used to doing
nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get
contaminated. You rot.
Fundamentally Carl is a snob, an aristocratic little prick
who lives in a dementia praecox kingdom all his own. “I hate
Paris!” he whines. “All these stupid people playing cards all
day… look at them! And the writing! What’s the use of
putting words together? I can be a writer without writing,
can’t I? What does it prove if I write a book? What do we
want with books anyway? There are too many books
already. …”
My eye, but I’ve been all over that ground—years and
years ago. I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a
fuck any more what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me.
I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No

past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day.
Today! Le bel aujourd’hui!
He has one day a week off, Carl, and on that day he’s
more miserable, if you can imagine it, than on any other day
of the week. Though he professes to despise food, the only
way he seems to enjoy himself on his day off is to order a
big spread. Perhaps he does it for my benefit—I don’t know,
and I don’t ask. If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of
vices, let him—it’s O.K. with me. Anyway, last Tuesday, after
squandering what he had on a big spread, he steers me to
the Dôme, the last place in the world I would seek on my
day off. But one not only gets acquiescent here—one gets
supine.
Standing at the Dôme bar is Marlowe, soused to the ears.
He’s been on a bender, as he calls it, for the last five days.
That means a continuous drunk, a peregrination from one
bar to another, day and night without interruption, and
finally a layoff at the American Hospital. Marlowe’s bony
emaciated face is nothing but a skull perforated by two
deep sockets in which there are buried a pair of dead clams.
His back is covered with sawdust—he has just had a little
snooze in the water closet. In his coat pocket are the proofs
for the next issue of his review, he was on his way to the
printer with the proofs, it seems, when some one inveigled
him to have a drink. He talks about it as though it happened
months ago. He takes out the proofs and spreads them over
the bar; they are full of coffee stains and dried spittle. He
tries to read a poem which he had written in Greek, but the
proofs are undecipherable. Then he decides to deliver a
speech, in French, but the gérant puts a stop to it. Marlowe
is piqued: his one ambition is to talk a French which even
the garçon will understand. Of Old French he is a master; of
the surrealists he has made excellent translations; but to
say a simple thing like “get the hell out of here, you old
prick!”—that is beyond him. Nobody understands Marlowe’s

French, not even the whores. For that matter, it’s difficult
enough to understand his English when he’s under the
weather. He blabbers and spits like a confirmed stutterer…
no sequence to his phrases. “You pay!” that’s one thing he
manages to get out clearly.
Even if he is fried to the hat some fine preservative
instinct always warns Marlowe when it is time to act. If there
is any doubt in his mind as to how the drinks are going to be
paid he will be sure to put on a stunt. The usual one is to
pretend that he is going blind. Carl knows all his tricks by
now, and so when Marlowe suddenly claps his hands to his
temples and begins to act it out Carl gives him a boot in the
ass and says: “Come out of it, you sap! You don’t have to do
that with me!”
Whether it is a cunning piece of revenge or not, I don’t
know, but at any rate Marlowe is paying Carl back in good
coin. Leaning over us confidentially he relates in a hoarse,
croaking voice a piece of gossip which he picked up in the
course of his peregrinations from bar to bar. Carl looks up in
amazement. He’s pale under the gills. Marlowe repeats the
story with variations. Each time Carl wilts a little more. “But
that’s impossible!” he finally blurts out. “No it ain’t!” croaks
Marlowe. “You’re gonna lose your job… I got it straight.” Carl
looks at me in despair. “Is he shitting me, that bastard?” he
murmurs in my ear. And then aloud—“What am I going to do
now? I’ll never find another job. It took me a year to land
this one.”
This, apparently, is all that Marlowe has been waiting to
hear. At last he has found someone worse off than himself.
“They be hard times!” he croaks, and his bony skull glows
with a cold, electric fire.
Leaving the Dôme Marlowe explains between hiccups that
he’s got to return to San Francisco. He seems genuinely
touched now by Carl’s helplessness. He proposes that Carl
and I take over the review during his absence. “I can trust

you, Carl,” he says. And then suddenly he gets an attack, a
real one this time. He almost collapses in the gutter. We
haul him to a bistro at the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and sit
him down. This time he’s really got It—a blinding headache
that makes him squeal and grunt and rock himself to and fro
like a dumb brute that’s been struck by a sledge hammer.
We spill a couple of Fernet-Brancas down his throat, lay him
out on the bench and cover his eyes with his muffler. He lies
there groaning. In a little while we hear him snoring.
“What about his proposition?” says Carl. “Should we take
it up? He says he’ll give me a thousand francs when he
comes back. I know he won’t, but what about it?” He looks
at Marlowe sprawled out on the bench, lifts the muffler from
his eyes, and puts it back again. Suddenly a mischievous
grin lights up his face. “Listen, Joe,” he says, beckoning me
to move closer, “we’ll take him up on it. We’ll take his lousy
review over and we’ll fuck him good and proper.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Why we’ll throw out all the other contributors and we’ll
fill it with our own shit—that’s what!”
“Yeah, but what kind of shit?”
“Any kind… he won’t be able to do anything about it. We’ll
fuck him good and proper. One good number and after that
the magazine’ll be finished. Are you game, Joe?”
Grinning and chuckling we lift Marlowe to his feet and
haul him to Carl’s room. When we turn on the lights there’s
a woman in the bed waiting for Carl. “I forgot all about her,”
says Carl. We turn the cunt loose and shove Marlowe into
bed. In a minute or so there’s a knock at the door. It’s Van
Norden. He’s all aflutter. Lost a plate of false teeth—at the
Bal Nègre, he thinks. Anyway, we get to bed, the four of us.
Marlowe stinks like a smoked fish.
In the morning Marlowe and Van Norden leave to search
for the false teeth. Marlowe is blubbering. He imagines they

are his teeth.

It is my last dinner at the dramatist’s home. They have just
rented a new piano, a concert grand. I meet Sylvester
coming out of the florist’s with a rubber plant in his arms.
He asks me if I would carry it for him while he goes for the
cigars. One by one I’ve fucked myself out of all these free
meals which I had planned so carefully. One by one the
husbands turn against me, or the wives. As I walk along with
the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few
months back when the idea first occurred to me. I was
sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding
ring which I had tried to pawn off on a garçon at the Dôme.
He had offered me six francs for it and I was in a rage about
it. But the belly was getting the upper hand. Ever since I left
Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie. It was so much a
part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it. It was
one of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold. Worth a
dollar and a half once, maybe more. For three years we
went along without a wedding ring and then one day when I
was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a
jewelry window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was
stuffed with wedding rings. When I got to the pier Mona was
not to be seen. I waited for the last passenger to descend
the gangplank, but no Mona. Finally I asked to be shown the
passenger list. Her name was not on it. I slipped the
wedding ring on my pinkie and there it stayed. Once I left it
in a public bath, but then I got it back again. One of the
orange blossoms had fallen off. Anyway, I was sitting there
on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when
suddenly someone clapped me on the back. To make it brief,
I got a meal and a few francs besides. And then it occurred
to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if
only he had the courage to demand it. I went immediately
to a café and wrote a dozen letters. “Would you let me have

dinner with you once a week? Tell me what day is most
convenient for you.” It worked like a charm. I was not only
fed… I was feasted. Every night I went home drunk. They
couldn’t do enough for me, these generous once-a-week
souls. What happened to me between times was none of
their affair. Now and then the thoughtful ones presented me
with cigarettes, or a little pin money. They were all obviously
relieved when they realized that they would see me only
once a week. And they were still more relieved when I said
—“it won’t be necessary any more.” They never asked why.
They congratulated me, and that was all. Often the reason
was I had found a better host; I could afford to scratch off
the ones who were a pain in the ass. But that thought never
occurred to them. Finally I had a steady, solid program—a
fixed schedule. On Tuesdays I knew it would be this kind of a
meal and on Fridays that kind. Cronstadt, I knew, would
have champagne for me and homemade apple pie. And Carl
would invite me out, take me to a different restaurant each
time, order rare wines, invite me to the theater afterward or
take me to the Cirque Médrano. They were curious about
one another, my hosts. Would ask me which place I liked
best, who was the best cook, etc. I think I liked Cronstadt’s
joint best of all, perhaps because he chalked the meal up on
the wall each time. Not that it eased my conscience to see
what I owed him, because I had no intention of paying him
back nor had he any illusions about being requited. No, it
was the odd numbers which intrigued me. He used to figure
it out to the last centime. If I was to pay in full I would have
had to break a sou. His wife was a marvelous cook and she
didn’t give a fuck about those centimes Cronstadt added up.
She took it out of me in carbon copies. A fact! If I hadn’t any
fresh carbons for her when I showed up, she was crestfallen.
And for that I would have to take the little girl to the
Luxembourg next day, play with her for two or three hours,
a task which drove me wild because she spoke nothing but

Hungarian and French. They were a queer lot on the whole,
my hosts. …
At Tania’s I look down on the spread from the balcony.
Moldorf is there, sitting beside his idol. He is warming his
feet at the hearth, a monstrous look of gratitude in his
watery eyes. Tania is running over the adagio. The adagio
says very distinctly: no more words of love! I am at the
fountain again, watching the turtles pissing green milk.
Sylvester has just come back from Broadway with a heart
full of love. All night I was lying on a bench outside the mall
while the globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss and the
horses stiffened with priapic fury galloped like mad without
ever touching the ground. All night long I smell the lilacs in
the little dark room where she is taking down her hair, the
lilacs that I bought for her as she went to meet Sylvester. He
came back with a heart full of love, she said, and the lilacs
are in her hair, her mouth, they are choking her armpits.
The room is swimming with love and turtle piss and warm
lilacs and the horses are galloping like mad. In the morning
dirty teeth and scum on the windowpanes; the little gate
that leads to the mall is locked. People are going to work
and the shutters are rattling like coats of mail. In the
bookstore opposite the fountain is the story of Lake Chad,
the silent lizards, the gorgeous gamboge tints. All the letters
I wrote her, drunken ones with a blunt stub, crazy ones with
bits of charcoal, little pieces from bench to bench,
firecrackers, doilies, tutti-frutti; they will be going over them
now, together, and he will compliment me one day. He will
say, as he flicks his cigar ash: “Really, you write quite well.
Let’s see, you’re a surrealist, aren’t you?” Dry, brittle voice,
teeth full of dandruff, solo for solar plexus, g for gaga.
Upon the balcony with the rubber plant and the adagio
going on down below. The keys are black and white, then
black, then white, then white and black. And you want to
know if you can play something for me. Yes, play something

with those big thumbs of yours. Play the adagio since that’s
the only goddamned thing you know. Play it, and then cut
off your big thumbs.
That adagio! I don’t know why she insists on playing it all
the time. The old piano wasn’t good enough for her; she had
to rent a concert grand—for the adagio! When I see her big
thumbs pressing the keyboard and that silly rubber plant
beside me I feel like that madman of the North who threw
his clothes away and, sitting naked in the wintry boughs,
threw nuts down into the herring-frozen sea. There is
something exasperating about this movement, something
abortively melancholy about it, as if it had been written in
lava, as if it had the color of lead and milk mixed. And
Sylvester, with his head cocked to one side like an
auctioneer, Sylvester says: “Play that other one you were
practicing today.” It’s beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a
good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So
lenitive. Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a
breath of fresh air. Yes, her fingers are very supple,
extraordinary supple. She does batik work too. Would you
like to try a Bulgarian cigarette? I say, pigeon breast, what’s
that other movement I like so well? The scherzo! Ah, yes,
the scherzo! Excellent, the scherzo! Count Waldemar von
Schwisseneinzug speaking. Cool, dandruff eyes. Halitosis.
Gaudy socks. And croutons in the pea soup, if you please.
We always have pea soup Friday nights. Won’t you try a
little red wine? The red wine goes with the meat, you know.
A dry, crisp voice. Have a cigar, won’t you? Yes, I like my
work, but I don’t attach any importance to it. My next play
will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe.
Revolving drums with calcium lights. O’Neill is dead. I think,
dear, you should lift your foot from the pedal more
frequently. Yes, that part is very nice… very nice, don’t you
think? Yes, the characters go around with microphones in
their trousers. The locale is in Asia, because the

atmospheric conditions are more conducive. Would you like
to try a little Anjou? We bought it especially for you….
All through the meal this patter continues. It feels exactly
as if he had taken out that circumcised dick of his and was
peeing on us. Tania is bursting with the strain. Ever since he
came back with a heart full of love this monologue has been
going on. He talks while he’s undressing, she tells me—a
steady stream of warm piss, as though his bladder had been
punctured. When I think of Tania crawling into bed with this
busted bladder I get enraged. To think that a poor, withered
bastard with those cheap Broadway plays up his sleeve
should be pissing on the woman I love. Calling for red wine
and revolving drums and croutons in his pea soup. The
cheek of him! To think that he can lie beside that furnace I
stoked for him and do nothing but make water! My God,
man, you ought to get down on your knees and thank me.
Don’t you see that you have a woman in your house now?
Can’t you see she’s bursting? You telling me with those
strangulated adenoids of yours—“well now, I’ll tell you…
there’s two ways of looking at that. …” Fuck your two ways
of looking at things! Fuck your pluralistic universe, and your
Asiatic acoustics! Don’t hand me your red wine or your
Anjou… hand her over… she belongs to me! You go sit by
the fountain, and let me smell the lilacs! Pick the dandruff
out of your eyes… and take that damned adagio and wrap it
in a pair of flannel pants! And the other little movement
too… all the little movements that you make with your weak
bladder. You smile at me so confidently, so calculatingly. I’m
flattering the ass off you, can’t you tell? While I listen to
your crap she’s got her hand on me—but you don’t see that.
You think I like to suffer—that’s my role, you say. O.K. Ask
her about it! She’ll tell you how I suffer. “You’re cancer and
delirium,” she said over the phone the other day. She’s got
it now, the cancer and delirium, and soon you’ll have to pick
the scabs. Her veins are bursting, I tell you, and your talk is

all sawdust. No matter how much you piss away you’ll never
plug up the holes. What did Mr. Wren say? Words are
loneliness. I left a couple of words for you on the tablecloth
last night—you covered them with your elbows.
He’s put a fence around her as if she were a dirty,
stinking bone of a saint. If he only had the courage to say
“Take her!” perhaps a miracle would occur. Just that. Take
her! and I swear everything would come out all right.
Besides, maybe I wouldn’t take her—did that ever occur to
him, I wonder? Or I might take her for a while and hand her
back, improved. But putting up a fence around her, that
won’t work. You can’t put a fence around a human being. It
ain’t done any more. … You think, you poor, withered
bastard, that I’m no good for her, that I might pollute her,
desecrate her. You don’t know how palatable is a polluted
woman, how a change of semen can make a woman bloom!
You think a heart full of love is enough, and perhaps it is, for
the right woman, but you haven’t got a heart any more…
you are nothing but a big, empty bladder. You are
sharpening your teeth and cultivating your growl. You run at
her heels like a watchdog and you piddle everywhere. She
didn’t take you for a watchdog… she took you for a poet.
You were a poet once, she said. And now what are you?
Courage, Sylvester, courage! Take the microphone out of
your pants. Put your hind leg down and stop making water
everywhere. Courage, I say, because she’s ditched you
already. She’s contaminated, I tell you, and you might as
well take down the fence. No use asking me politely if the
coffee doesn’t taste like carbolic acid: that won’t scare me
away. Put rat poison in the coffee, and a little ground glass.
Make some boiling hot urine and drop a few nutmegs in it.
…
It is a communal life I have been living for the last few
weeks. I have had to share myself with others, principally
with some crazy Russians, a drunken Dutchman, and a big

Bulgarian woman named Olga. Of the Russians there are
chiefly Eugene and Anatole.
It was just a few days ago that Olga got out of the
hospital where she had her tubes burned out and lost a little
excess weight. However she doesn’t look as if she had gone
through much suffering. She weighs almost as much as a
camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has
halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like
excelsior. She has two big warts on her chin from which
there sprouts a clump of little hairs; she is growing a
mustache.
The day after Olga was released from the hospital she
commenced making shoes again. At six in the morning she
is at her bench; she knocks out two pairs of shoes a day.
Eugene complains that Olga is a burden, but the truth is
that Olga is supporting Eugene and his wife with her two
pairs of shoes a day. If Olga doesn’t work there is no food.
So everyone endeavors to pull Olga to bed on time, to give
her enough food to keep going, etc.
Every meal starts off with soup. Whether it be onion soup,
tomato soup, vegetable soup, or what not, the soup always
tastes the same. Mostly it tastes as if a dish rag had been
stewed in it—slightly sour, mildewed, scummy. I see Eugene
hiding it away in the commode after the meal. It stays there,
rotting away, until the next meal. The butter, too, is hidden
away in the commode; after three days it tastes like the big
toe of a cadaver.
The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly
appetizing, especially when the cooking is done in a room in
which there is not the slightest form of ventilation. No
sooner than I open the door I feel ill. But Eugene, as soon as
he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and pulls
back the bedsheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep
out the sunlight. Poor Eugene! He looks about the room at
the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bed-sheets and the

wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: “I am
a slave!” Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times.
And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings.
But about the smell of rancid butter. … There are good
associations too. When I think of this rancid butter I see
myself standing in a little, old-world courtyard, a very
smelly, very dreary courtyard. Through the cracks in the
shutters strange figures peer out at me… old women with
shawls, dwarfs, rat-faced pimps, bent Jews, midinettes,
bearded idots. They totter out into the courtyard to draw
water or to rinse the slop pails. One day Eugene asked me if
I would empty the pail for him. I took it to the corner of the
yard. There was a hole in the ground and some dirty paper
lying around the hole. The little well was slimy with
excrement, which in English is shit. I tipped the pail and
there was a foul, gurgling splash followed by another and
unexpected splash. When I returned the soup was dished
out. All through the meal I thought of my toothbrush—it is
getting old and the bristles get caught in my teeth.
When I sit down to eat I always sit near the window. I am
afraid to sit on the other side of the table—it is too close to
the bed and the bed is crawling. I can see bloodstains on
the gray sheets if I look that way, but I try not to look that
way. I look out on the courtyard where they are rinsing the
slop pails.
The meal is never complete without music. As soon as the
cheese is passed around Eugene jumps up and reaches for
the guitar which hangs over the bed. It is always the same
song. He says he has fifteen or sixteen songs in his
repertoire, but I have never heard more than three. His
favorite is Charmant poème d’amour. It is full of angoisse
and tristesse.
In the afternoon we go to the cinema which is cool and
dark. Eugene sits at the piano in the big pit and I sit on a
bench up front. The house is empty, but Eugene sings as if

he had for audience all the crowned heads of Europe. The
garden door is open and the odor of wet leaves sops in and
the rain blends with Eugene’s angoisse and tristesse. At
midnight, after the spectators have saturated the hall with
perspiration and foul breaths, I return to sleep on a bench.
The exit light, swimming in a halo of tobacco smoke, sheds
a faint light on the lower corner of the asbestos curtain; I
close my eyes every night on an artificial eye. …
Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the
world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in
the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to
the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung.
The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but
there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which
says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I
can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed;
in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my
artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A
woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk;
she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined
with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes;
there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before
the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and
Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the
corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse
is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse
from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window.
She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from
the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve
and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the
woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean
out the window and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it
is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The
sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs
everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.

I have been ejected from the world like a cartridge. A
deep fog has settled down, the earth is smeared with frozen
grease. I can feel the city palpitating, as if it were a heart
just removed from a warm body. The windows of my hotel
are festering and there is a thick, acrid stench as of
chemicals burning. Looking into the Seine I see mud and
desolation, street lamps drowning, men and women choking
to death, the bridges covered with houses, slaughterhouses
of love. A man is standing against a wall with an accordion
strapped to his belly; his hands are cut off at the wrists, but
the accordion writhes between his stumps like a sack of
snakes. The universe has dwindled; it is only a block long
and there are no stars, no trees, no rivers. The people who
live here are dead; they make chairs which other people sit
on in their dreams. In the middle of the street is a wheel and
in the hub of the wheel a gallows is fixed. People already
dead are trying frantically to mount the gallows, but the
wheel is turning too fast. …
Something was needed to put me right with myself. Last
night I discovered it: Papini. It doesn’t matter to me whether
he’s a chauvinist, a little Christer, or a near sighted pedant.
As a failure he’s marvelous. …
The books he read—at eighteen! Not only Homer, Dante,
Goethe, not only Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, not only
Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, not only Walt Whitman, Edgar
Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Villon, Carducci, Manzoni, Lope de
Vega, not only Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel,
Darwin, Spencer, Huxley—not only these but all the small
fry in between. This on page 18. Alors, on page 232 he
breaks down and confesses. I know nothing, he admits. I
know the titles, I have compiled bibliographies, I have
written critical essays, I have maligned and defamed. … I
can talk for five minutes or for five days, but then I give out,
I am squeezed dry.

Follows this: “Everybody wants to see me. Everybody
insists on talking to me. People pester me and they pester
others with inquiries about what I am doing. How am I? Am I
quite well again? Do I still go for my walks in the country?
Am I working? Have I finished my book? Will I begin another
soon?
“A skinny monkey of a German wants me to translate his
works. A wild-eyed Russian girl wants me to write an
account of my life for her. An American lady wants the very
latest news about me. An American gentleman will send his
carriage to take me to dinner—just an intimate, confidential
talk, you know. An old schoolmate and chum of mine, of ten
years ago, wants me to read him all that I write as fast as I
write it. A painter friend I know expects me to pose for him
by the hour. A newspaperman wants my present address.
An acquaintance, a mystic, inquires about the state of my
soul; another, more practical, about the state of my
pocketbook. The president of my club wonders if I will make
a speech for the boys! A lady, spiritually inclined, hopes I
will come to her house for tea as often as possible. She
wants to have my opinion of Jesus Christ, and—what do I
think of that new medium?…
“Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you
people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul,
suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion,
confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me
for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to
play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a
slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of
you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I
know? Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon to lift
her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first
man in a tailored suit who comes along?
“I am a man who would live an heroic life and make the
world more endurable in his own sight. If, in some moment

of weakness, of relaxation, of need, I blow off steam—a bit
of red-hot rage cooled off in words—a passionate dream,
wrapped and tied in imagery—well, take it or leave it… but
don’t bother me!
“I am a free man—and I need my freedom. I need to be
alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in
seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the
streets without companions, without conversation, face to
face with myself, with only the music of my heart for
company. What do you want of me? When I have something
to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give
it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your
compliments humiliate me! Your tea poisons me! I owe
nothing to any one. I would be responsible to God alone—if
He existed!”
It seems to me that Papini misses something by a hair’s
breadth when he talks of the need to be alone. It is not
difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is
always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is
loneliness.
The artist, I call myself. So be it. A beautiful nap this
afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae. Generated
enough ideas to last me three days. Chock-full of energy
and nothing to do about it. Decide to go for a walk. In the
street I change my mind. Decide to go to the movies. Can’t
go to the movies—short a few sous. A walk then. At every
movie house I stop and look at the billboards, then at the
price list. Cheap enough, these opium joints, but I’m short
just a few sous. If it weren’t so late I might go back and cash
an empty bottle.
By the time I get to the Rue Amélie I’ve forgotten all
about the movies. The Rue Amélie is one of my favorite
streets. It is one of those streets which by good fortune the
municipality has forgotten to pave. Huge cobblestones
spreading convexly from one side of the street to the other.

Only one block long and narrow. The Hôtel Pretty is on this
street. There is a little church, too, on the Rue Amélie. It
looks as though it were made especially for the President of
the Republic and his private family. It’s good occasionally to
see a modest little church. Paris is full of pompous
cathedrals.
Pont Alexandre III. A great windswept space approaching
the bridge. Gaunt, bare trees mathematically fixed in their
iron grates; the gloom of the Invalides welling out of the
dome and overflowing the dark streets adjacent to the
Square. The morgue of poetry. They have him where they
want him now, the great warrior, the last big man of Europe.
He sleeps soundly in his granite bed. No fear of him turning
over in his grave. The doors are well bolted, the lid is on
tight. Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it
was only your corpse!
The river is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights. I
don’t know what it is rushes up in me at the sight of this
dark, swift-moving current, but a great exultation lifts me
up, affirms the deep wish that is in me never to leave this
land. I remember passing this way the other morning on my
way to the American Express, knowing in advance that
there would be no mail for me, no check, no cable, nothing,
nothing. A wagon from the Galeries Lafayette was rumbling
over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking
through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of
roofs with a cold fire. I recall now how the driver leaned out
and looked up the river toward Passy way. Such a healthy,
simple, approving glance, as if he were saying to himself:
“Ah, spring is coming!” And God knows, when spring comes
to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells
in paradise. But it was not only this—it was the intimacy
with which his eye rested upon the scene. It was his Paris. A
man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this
way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people—the

proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the
earth, it seems to me. And yet they give the illusion of being
at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all
other metropolitan souls.
When I think of New York I have a very different feeling.
New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance.
New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate.
There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the
more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A
constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a
test tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs
the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous
reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.
When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this
Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks
my guts. New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks
swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints
that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the
lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of
faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters,
jobs, crimes, loves. … A whole city erected over a hollow pit
of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. And
Forty-second Street! The top of the world, they call it.
Where’s the bottom then? You can walk along with your
hands out and they’ll put cinders in your cap. Rich or poor,
they walk along with head thrown back and they almost
break their necks looking up at their beautiful white prisons.
They walk along like blind geese and the searchlights spray
their empty faces with flecks of ecstasy.

Life,” said Emerson, “consists in what a man is thinking all
day.” If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine.
I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at
night.
But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in double
harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a
poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only
remains to be a man. Last week I thought the problem of
living was about to be solved, thought I was on the way to
becoming self-supporting. It happened that I ran across
another Russian—Serge is his name. He lives in Suresnes
where there is a little colony of émigrés and run-down
artists. Before the revolution Serge was a captain in the
Imperial Guard; he stands six foot three in his stockinged
feet and drinks vodka like a fish. His father was an admiral,
or something like that, on the battleship “Potemkin.”
I met Serge under rather peculiar circumstances. Sniffing
about for food I found myself toward noon the other day in
the neighborhood of the Folies-Bergère—the back entrance,
that is to say, in the narrow little lane with an iron gate at
one end. I was dawdling about the stage entrance, hoping
vaguely for a casual brush with one of the butterflies, when
an open truck pulls up to the sidewalk. Seeing me standing
there with my hands in my pockets the driver, who was
Serge, asks me if I would give him a hand unloading the iron
barrels. When he learns that I am an American and that I’m
broke he almost weeps with joy. He has been looking high
and low for an English teacher, it seems. I help him roll the
barrels of insecticide inside and I look my fill at the
butterflies fluttering about the wings. The incident takes on
strange proportions to me—the empty house, the sawdust
dolls bouncing in the wings, the barrels of germicide, the

battleship “Potemkin”—above all, Serge’s gentleness. He is
big and tender, a man every inch of him, but with a
woman’s heart.
In the café nearby—Café des Artistes—he proposes
immediately to put me up; says he will put a mattress on
the floor in the hallway. For the lessons he says he will give
me a meal every day, a big Russian meal, or if for any
reason the meal is lacking then five francs. It sounds
wonderful to me—wonderful. The only question is, how will I
get from Suresnes to the American Express every day?
Serge insists that we begin at once—he gives me the
carfare to get out to Suresnes in the evening. I arrive a little
before dinner, with my knapsack, in order to give Serge a
lesson. There are some guests on hand already—seems as
though they always eat in a crowd, everybody chipping in.
There are eight of us at the table—and three dogs. The
dogs eat first. They eat oatmeal. Then we commence. We
eat oatmeal too—as an hors d’oeuvre. “Chez nous,” says
Serge, with a twinkle in his eye, “c’est pour les chiens, les
Quaker Oats. Ici pour le gentleman. Ça va.” After the
oatmeal, mushroom soup and vegetables; after that bacon
omelet, fruit, red wine, vodka, coffee, cigarettes. Not bad,
the Russian meal. Everyone talks with his mouth full. Toward
the end of the meal Serge’s wife, who is a lazy slut of an
Armenian, flops on the couch and begins to nibble bonbons.
She fishes around in the box with her fat fingers, nibbles a
tiny piece to see if there is any juice inside, and then throws
it on the floor for the dogs.
The meal over, the guests rush away. They rush away
precipitously, as if they feared a plague. Serge and I are left
with the dogs—his wife has fallen asleep on the couch.
Serge moves about unconcernedly, scraping the garbage for
the dogs. “Dogs like very much,” he says. “Very good for
dogs. Little dog he has worms… he is too young yet.” He
bends down to examine some white worms lying on the

carpet between the dog’s paws. Tries to explain about the
worms in English, but his vocabulary is lacking. Finally he
consults the dictionary. “Ah,” he says, looking at me
exultantly, “tapeworms!” My response is evidently not very
intelligent. Serge is confused. He gets down on his hands
and knees to examine them better. He picks one up and lays
it on the table beside the fruit. “Huh, him not very beeg,” he
grunts. “Next lesson you learn me worms, no? You are gude
teacher. I make progress with you. …”
Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odor of the
germicide stifles me. A pungent, acrid odor that seems to
invade every pore of my body. The food begins to repeat on
me—the Quaker Oats, the mushrooms, the bacon, the fried
apples. I see the little tapeworm lying beside the fruit and
all the varieties of worms that Serge drew on the tablecloth
to explain what was the matter with the dog. I see the
empty pit of the Folies-Bergère and in every crevice there
are cockroaches and lice and bedbugs; I see people
scratching themselves frantically, scratching and scratching
until the blood comes. I see the worms crawling over the
scenery like an army of red ants, devouring everything in
sight. I see the chorus girls throwing away their gauze tunics
and running through the aisles naked; I see the spectators
in the pit throwing off their clothes also and scratching each
other like monkeys.
I try to quiet myself. After all, this is a home I’ve found,
and there’s a meal waiting for me every day. And Serge is a
brick, there’s no doubt about that. But I can’t sleep. It’s like
going to sleep in a morgue. The mattress is saturated with
embalming fluid. It’s a morgue for lice, bedbugs,
cockroaches, tapeworms. I can’t stand it. I won’t stand it!
After all I’m a man, not a louse.
In the morning I wait for Serge to load the truck. I ask him
to take me in to Paris. I haven’t the heart to tell him I’m
leaving. I leave the knapsack behind, with the few things

that were left me. When we get to the Place Péreire I jump
out. No particular reason for getting off here. No particular
reason for anything. l’m free—that’s the main thing. …
Light as a bird I flit about from one quarter to another. It’s
as though I had been released from prison. I look at the
world with new eyes. Everything interests me profoundly.
Even trifles. On the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière I stop
before the window of a physical culture establishment.
There are photographs showing specimens of manhood
“before and after.” All frogs. Some of them are nude, except
for a pince-nez or a beard. Can’t understand how these
birds fall for parallel bars and dumbbells. A frog should have
just a wee bit of a paunch, like the Baron de Charlus. He
should wear a beard and a pince-nez, but he should never
be photographed in the nude. He should wear twinkling
patent-leather boots and in the breast pocket of his sack
coat there should be a white handkerchief protruding about
three-quarters of an inch above the vent. If possible, he
should have a red ribbon in his lapel, through the
buttonhole. He should wear pajamas on going to bed.
Approaching the Place Clichy toward evening I pass the
little whore with the wooden stump who stands opposite the
Gaumont Palace day in and day out. She doesn’t look a day
over eighteen. Has her regular customers, I suppose. After
midnight she stands there in her black rig rooted to the
spot. Back of her is the little alleyway that blazes like an
inferno. Passing her now with a light heart she reminds me
somehow of a goose tied to a stake, a goose with a diseased
liver, so that the world may have its pâté de foie gras. Must
be strange taking that wooden stump to bed with you. One
imagines all sorts of things—splinters, etc. However, every
man to his taste!
Going down the Rue des Dames I bump into Peck-over,
another poor devil who works on the paper. He complains of
getting only three or four hours’ sleep a night—has to get up

at eight in the morning to work at a dentist’s office. It isn’t
for the money he’s doing it, so he explains—it’s for to buy
himself a set of false teeth. “It’s hard to read proof when
you’re dropping with sleep,” he says. “The wife, she thinks
I’ve got a cinch of it. What would we do if you lost your job?
she says.” But Peckover doesn’t give a damn about the job;
it doesn’t even allow him spending money. He has to save
his cigarette butts and use them for pipe tobacco. His coat
is held together with pins. He has halitosis and his hands
sweat. And only three hours’ sleep a night. “It’s no way to
treat a man,” he says. “And that boss of mine, he bawls the
piss out of me if I miss a semicolon.” Speaking of his wife he
adds: “That woman of mine, she’s got no fucking gratitude, I
tell you!”
In parting I manage to worm a franc fifty out of him. I try
to squeeze another fifty centimes out of him but it’s
impossible. Anyway I’ve got enough for a coffee and
croissants. Near the Gare St. Lazare there’s a bar with
reduced prices.
As luck would have it I find a ticket in the lavabo for a
concert. Light as a feather now I go there to the Salle
Gaveau. The usher looks ravaged because I overlook giving
him his little tip. Every time he passes me he looks at me
inquiringly, as if perhaps I will suddenly remember.
It’s so long since I’ve sat in the company of well-dressed
people that I feel a bit panic-stricken. I can still smell the
formaldehyde. Perhaps Serge makes deliveries here too. But
nobody is scratching himself, thank God. A faint odor of
perfume… very faint. Even before the music begins there is
that bored look on people’s faces. A polite form of self-
imposed torture, the concert. For a moment, when the
conductor raps with his little wand, there is a tense spasm
of concentration followed almost immediately by a general
slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the
steady, uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra. My mind is

curiously alert; it’s as though my skull had a thousand
mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are
like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water. I’ve never
been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing
escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It’s as though I
had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window
and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards.
I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and
my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with
reverberations. How long this lasts I have no idea; I have
lost all sense of time and place. After what seems like an
eternity there follows an interval of semiconsciousness
balanced by such a calm that I feel a great lake inside me, a
lake of iridescent sheen, cool as jelly; and over this lake,
rising in great swooping spirals, there emerge flocks of birds
of passage with long slim legs and brilliant plumage. Flock
after flock surge up from the cool, still surface of the lake
and, passing under my clavicles, lose themselves in the
white sea of space. And then slowly, very slowly, as if an old
woman in a white cap were going the rounds of my body,
slowly the windows are closed and my organs drop back into
place. Suddenly the lights flare up and the man in the white
box whom I had taken for a Turkish officer turns out to be a
woman with a flowerpot on her head.
There is a buzz now and all those who want to cough,
cough to their heart’s content. There is the noise of feet
shuffling and seats slamming, the steady, frittering noise of
people moving about aimlessly, of people fluttering their
programs and pretending to read and then dropping their
programs and scuffling under their seats, thankful for even
the slightest accident which will prevent them from asking
themselves what they were thinking about because if they
knew they were thinking about nothing they would go mad.
In the harsh glare of the lights they look at each other
vacuously and there is a strange tenseness with which they

stare at one another. And the moment the conductor raps
again they fall back into a cataleptic state—they scratch
themselves unconsciously or they remember suddenly a
show window in which there was displayed a scarf or a hat;
they remember every detail of that window with amazing
clarity, but where it was exactly, that they can’t recall; and
that bothers them, keeps them wide awake, restless, and
they listen now with redoubled attention because they are
wide awake and no matter how wonderful the music is they
will not lose consciousness of that show window and that
scarf that was hanging there, or the hat.
And this fierce attentiveness communicates itself; even
the orchestra seems galvanized into an extraordinary
alertness. The second number goes off like a top—so fast
indeed that when suddenly the music ceases and the lights
go up some are stuck in their seats like carrots, their jaws
working convulsively, and if you suddenly shouted in their
ear Brahms, Beethoven, Mendeleev, Herzegovina, they
would answer without thinking—4, 967, 289.
By the time we get to the Debussy number the
atmosphere is completely poisoned. I find myself wondering
what it feels like, during intercourse, to be a woman—
whether the pleasure is keener, etc. Try to imagine
something penetrating my groin, but have only a vague
sensation of pain. I try to focus, but the music is too
slippery. I can think of nothing but a vase slowly turning and
the figures dropping off into space. Finally there is only light
turning, and how does light turn, I ask myself. The man next
to me is sleeping soundly. He looks like a broker, with his big
paunch and his waxed mustache. I like him thus. I like
especially that big paunch and all that went into the making
of it. Why shouldn’t he sleep soundly? If he wants to listen
he can always rustle up the price of a ticket. I notice that
the better dressed they are the more soundly they sleep.
They have an easy conscience, the rich. If a poor man dozes

off, even for a few seconds, he feels mortified; he imagines
that he has committed a crime against the composer.
In the Spanish number the house was electrified.
Everybody sat on the edge of his seat—the drums woke
them up. I thought when the drums started it would keep up
forever. I expected to see people fall out of the boxes or
throw their hats away. There was something heroic about it
and he could have driven us stark mad, Ravel, if he had
wanted to. But that’s not Ravel. Suddenly it all died down. It
was as if he remembered, in the midst of his antics, that he
had on a cutaway suit. He arrested himself. A great mistake,
in my humble opinion. Art consists in going the full length. If
you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or
TNT. Ravel sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable
that people must digest before going to bed.
My thoughts are spreading. The music is slipping away
from me, now that the drums have ceased. People
everywhere are composed to order. Under the exit light is a
Werther sunk in despair; he is leaning on his two elbows, his
eyes are glazed. Near the door, huddled in a big cape,
stands a Spaniard with a sombrero in his hand. He looks as
if he were posing for the “Balzac” of Rodin. From the neck
up he suggests Buffalo Bill. In the gallery opposite me, in
the front row, sits a woman with her legs spread wide apart;
she looks as though she had lockjaw, with her neck thrown
back and dislocated. The woman with the red hat who is
dozing over the rail—marvelous if she were to have a
hemorrhage! if suddenly she spilled a bucketful on those
stiff shirts below. Imagine these bloody no-accounts going
home from the concert with blood on their dickies!
Sleep is the keynote. No one is listening any more.
Impossible to think and listen. Impossible to dream even
when the music itself is nothing but a dream. A woman with
white gloves holds a swan in her lap. The legend is that

when Leda was fecundated she gave birth to twins.
Everybody is giving birth to something—everybody but the
Lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat
wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of
sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is
piercing her ears. Little phrases from California, whales with
big fins, Zanzibar, the Alcazar. When along the Guadalquivir
there were a thousand mosques ashimmer. Deep in the
icebergs and the days all lilac. The Money Street with two
white hitching posts. The gargoyles… the man with the
Jaworski nonsense… the river lights… the…

In America I had a number of Hindu friends, some good,
some bad, some indifferent. Circumstances had placed me
in a position where fortunately I could be of aid to them; I
secured jobs for them, I harbored them, and I fed them
when necessary. They were very grateful, I must say; so
much so, in fact that they made my life miserable with their
attentions. Two of them were saints, if I know what a saint
is; particularly Gupte who was found one morning with his
throat cut from ear to ear. In a little boarding house in
Greenwich Village he was found one morning stretched out
stark naked on the bed, his flute beside him, and his throat
gashed, as I say, from ear to ear. It was never discovered
whether he had been murdered or whether he had
committed suicide. But that’s neither here nor there. …
I’m thinking back to the chain of circumstances which has
brought me finally to Nanantatee’s place. Thinking how
strange it is that I should have forgotten all about
Nanantatee until the other day when lying in a shabby hotel
room on the Rue Cels. I’m lying there on the iron bed
thinking what a zero I have become, what a cipher, what a
nullity, when bango! out pops the word: NONENTITY! That’s
what we called him in New York—Nonentity. Mister
Nonentity.
I’m lying on the floor now in that gorgeous suite of rooms
he boasted of when he was in New York. Nanantatee is
playing the good Samaritan; he has given me a pair of itchy
blankets, horse blankets they are, in which I curl up on the
dusty floor. There are little jobs to do every hour of the day
—that is, if I am foolish enough to remain indoors. In the
morning he wakes me rudely in order to have me prepare
the vegetables for his lunch: onions, garlic, beans, etc. His
friend, Kepi, warns me not to eat the food—he says it’s bad.

Bad or good what difference? Food! That’s all that matters.
For a little food I am quite willing to sweep his carpets with a
broken broom, to wash his clothes and to scrape the crumbs
off the floor as soon as he has finished eating. He’s become
absolutely immaculate since my arrival: everything has to
be dusted now, the chairs must be arranged a certain way,
the clock must ring, the toilet must flush properly. … A crazy
Hindu if ever there was one! And parsimonious as a string
bean. I’ll have a great laugh over it when I get out of his
clutches, but just now I’m a prisoner, a man without caste,
an untouchable. …
If I fail to come back at night and roll up in the horse
blankets he says to me on arriving: “Oh, so you didn’t die
then? I thought you had died.” And though he knows I’m
absolutely penniless he tells me every day about some
cheap room he has just discovered in the neighborhood.
“But I can’t take a room yet, you know that,” I say. And then,
blinking his eyes like a Chink, he answers smoothly: “Oh,
yes, I forgot that you had no money. I am always forgetting,
Endree. … But when the cable comes… when Miss Mona
sends you the money, then you will come with me to look
for a room, eh?” And in the next breath he urges me to stay
as long as I wish—“six months… seven months, Endree…
you are very good for me here.”
Nanantatee is one of the Hindus I never did anything for
in America. He represented himself to me as a wealthy
merchant, a pearl merchant, with a luxurious suite of rooms
on the Rue Lafayette, Paris, a villa in Bombay, a bungalow in
Darjeeling. I could see from first glance that he was a half-
wit, but then half-wits sometimes have the genius to amass
a fortune. I didn’t know that he paid his hotel bill in New
York by leaving a couple of fat pearls in the proprietor’s
hands. It seems amusing to me now that this little duck
once swaggered about the lobby of that hotel in New York
with an ebony cane, bossing the bellhops around, ordering

luncheons for his guests, calling up the porter for theater
tickets, renting a taxi by the day, etc., etc., all without a sou
in his pocket. Just a string of fat pearls around his neck
which he cashed one by one as time wore on. And the
fatuous way he used to pat me on the back, thank me for
being so good to the Hindu boys—“they are all very
intelligent boys, Endree… very intelligent!” Telling me that
the good lord so-and-so would repay me for my kindness.
That explains now why they used to giggle so, these
intelligent Hindu boys, when I suggested that they touch
Nanantatee for a five-spot.
Curious now how the good lord so-and-so is requiting me
for my benevolence. I’m nothing but a slave to this fat little
duck. I’m at his beck and call continually. He needs me here
—he tells me so to my face. When he goes to the crap-can
he shouts: “Endree, bring me a pitcher of water, please. I
must wipe myself.” He wouldn’t think of using toilet paper,
Nanantatee. Must be against his religion. No, he calls for a
pitcher of water and a rag. He’s delicate, the fat little duck.
Sometimes when I’m drinking a cup of pale tea in which he
has dropped a rose leaf he comes alongside of me and lets
a loud fart, right in my face. He never says “Excuse me!”
The word must be missing from his Gujarati dictionary.
The day I arrived at Nanantatee’s apartment he was in
the act of performing his ablutions, that is to say, he was
standing over a dirty bowl trying to work his crooked arm
around toward the back of his neck. Beside the bowl was a
brass goblet which he used to change the water. He
requested me to be silent during the ceremony. I sat there
silently, as I was bidden, and watched him as he sang and
prayed and spat now and then into the washbowl. So this is
the wonderful suite of rooms he talked about in New York!
The Rue Lafayette! It sounded like an important street to me
back there in New York. I thought only millionaires and pearl
merchants inhabited the street. It sounds wonderful, the

Rue Lafayette, when you’re on the other side of the water.
So does Fifth Avenue, when you’re over here. One can’t
imagine what dumps there are on these swell streets.
Anyway, here I am at last, sitting in the gorgeous suite of
rooms on the Rue Lafayette. And this crazy duck with his
crooked arm is going through the ritual of washing himself.
The chair on which I’m sitting is broken, the bedstead is
falling apart, the wallpaper is in tatters, there is an open
valise under the bed crammed with dirty wash. From where I
sit I can glance at the miserable courtyard down below
where the aristocracy of the Rue Lafayette sit and smoke
their clay pipes. I wonder now, as he chants the doxology,
what that bungalow in Darjeeling looks like. It’s
interminable, his chanting and praying.
He explains to me that he is obliged to wash in a certain
prescribed way—his religion demands it. But on Sundays he
takes a bath in the tin tub—the Great I AM will wink at that,
he says. When he’s dressed he goes to the cupboard, kneels
before a little idol on the third shelf, and repeats the mumbo
jumbo. If you pray like that every day, he says, nothing will
happen to you. The good lord what’s his name never forgets
an obedient servant. And then he shows me the crooked
arm which he got in a taxi accident on a day doubtless when
he had neglected to rehearse the complete song and dance.
His arm looks like a broken compass; it’s not an arm any
more, but a knucklebone with a shank attached. Since the
arm has been repaired he has developed a pair of swollen
glands in the armpit—fat little glands, exactly like a dog’s
testicles. While bemoaning his plight he remembers
suddenly that the doctor had recommended a more liberal
diet. He begs me at once to sit down and make up a menu
with plenty of fish and meat. “And what about oysters,
Endree—for le petit frère?” But all this is only to make an
impression on me. He hasn’t the slightest intention of
buying himself oysters, or meat, or fish. Not as long as I am

there, at least. For the time being we are going to nourish
ourselves on lentils and rice and all the dry foods he has
stored away in the attic. And the butter he bought last
week, that won’t go to waste either. When he commences to
cure the butter the smell is unbearable. I used to run out at
first, when he started frying the butter, but now I stick it out.
He’d be only too delighted if he could make me vomit up my
meal—that would be something else to put away in the
cupboard along with the dry bread and the moldy cheese
and the little grease cakes that he makes himself out of the
stale milk and the rancid butter.
For the last five years, so it seems, he hasn’t done a
stroke of work, hasn’t turned over a penny. Business has
gone to smash. He talks to me about pearls in the Indian
ocean—big fat ones on which you can live for a lifetime. The
Arabs are ruining the business, he says. But meanwhile he
prays to the lord so-and-so every day, and that sustains
him. He’s on a marvelous footing with the deity: knows just
how to cajole him, how to wheedle a few sous out: of him.
It’s a pure commercial relationship. In exchange for the
flummery before the cabinet every day he gets his ration of
beans and garlic, to say nothing of the swollen testicles
under his arm. He is confident that everything will turn out
well in the end. The pearls will sell again some day, maybe
five years hence, maybe twenty—when the Lord
Boomaroom wishes it. “And when the business goes,
Endree, you will get ten per cent—for writing the letters. But
first Endree, you must write the letter to find out if we can
get credit from India. It will take about six months for an
answer, maybe seven months… the boats are not fast in
India.” He has no conception of time at all, the little duck.
When I ask him if he has slept well he will say: “Ah, yes,
Endree, I sleep very well… I sleep sometimes ninety-two
hours in three days.”

Mornings he is usually too weak to do any work. His arm!
That poor broken crutch of an arm! I wonder sometimes
when I see him twisting it around the back of his neck how
he will ever get it into place again. If it weren’t for that little
paunch he carries he’d remind me of one of those
contortionists at the Cirque Médrano. All he needs is to
break a leg. When he sees me sweeping the carpet, when
he sees what a cloud of dust I raise, he begins to cluck like a
pygmy. “Good! Very good, Endree. And now I will pick up the
knots.” That means that there are a few crumbs of dust
which I have overlooked; it is a polite way he has of being
sarcastic.
Afternoons there are always a few cronies from the pearl
market dropping in to pay him a visit. They’re all very
suave, butter-tongued bastards with soft, doelike eyes; they
sit around the table drinking the perfumed tea with a loud
hissing noise while Nanantatee jumps up and down like a
jack-in-the-box or points to a crumb on the floor and says in
his smooth slippery voice—“Will you please to pick that up,
Endree.” When the guests arrive he goes unctuously to the
cupboard and gets out the dry crusts of bread which he
toasted maybe a week ago and which taste strongly now of
the moldy wood. Not a crumb is thrown away. If the bread
gets too sour he takes it downstairs to the concierge who, so
he says, has been very kind to him. According to him, the
concierge is delighted to get the stale bread—she makes
bread pudding with it.
One day my friend Anatole came to see me. Nanantatee
was delighted. Insisted that Anatole stay for tea. Insisted
that he try little grease cakes and the stale bread. “You
must come every day,” he says, “and teach me Russian.
Fine language, Russian… I want to speak it. How do you say
that again, Endree—borsht? You will write that down for me,
please, Endree. …” And I must write it on the typewriter, no
less, so that he can observe my technique. He bought the

typewriter, after he had collected on the bad arm, because
the doctor recommended it as a good exercise. But he got
tired of the typewriter shortly—it was an English typewriter.
When he learned that Anatole played the mandolin he
said: “Very good! You must come every day and teach me
the music. I will buy a mandolin as soon as business is
better. It is good for my arm.” The next day he borrows a
phonograph from the concierge. “You will please teach me
to dance, Endree. My stomach is too big.” I am hoping that
he will buy a porterhouse steak some day so that I can say
to him: “You will please bite it for me, Mister Nonentity. My
teeth are not strong!”
As I said a moment ago, ever since my arrival he has
become extraordinarily meticulous. “Yesterday,” he says,
“you made three mistakes, Endree. First, you forgot to close
the toilet door and so all night it makes boom-boom;
second, you left the kitchen window open and so the
window is cracked this morning. And you forgot to put out
the milk bottle! Always you will put out the milk bottle
please, before you go to bed, and in the morning you will
please bring in the bread.”
Every day his friend Kepi drops in to see if any visitors
have arrived from India. He waits for Nanantatee to go out
and then he scurries to the cupboard and devours the sticks
of bread that are hidden away in a glass jar. The food is no
good, he insists, but he puts it away like a rat. Kepi is a
scrounger, a sort of human tick who fastens himself to the
hide of even the poorest compatriot. From Kepi’s standpoint
they are all nabobs. For a Manila cheroot and the price of a
drink he will suck any Hindu’s ass. A Hindu’s, mind you, but
not an Englishman’s. He has the address of every
whorehouse in Paris, and the rates. Even from the ten franc
joints he gets his little commission. And he knows the
shortest way to any place you want to go. He will ask you
first if you want to go by taxi; if you say no, he will suggest

the bus, and if that is too high then the streetcar or the
metro. Or he will offer to walk you there and save a franc or
two, knowing very well that it will be necessary to pass a
tabac on the way and that you will please be so good as to
buy me a little cheroot.
Kepi is interesting, in a way, because he has absolutely no
ambition except to get a fuck every night. Every penny he
makes, and they are damned few, he squanders in the
dance halls. He has a wife and eight children in Bombay, but
that does not prevent him from proposing marriage to any
little femme de chambre who is stupid and credulous
enough to be taken in by him. He has a little room on the
Rue Condorcet for which he pays sixty francs a month. He
papered it all himself. Very proud of it, too. He uses violet-
colored ink in his fountain pen because it lasts longer. He
shines his own shoes, presses his own pants, does his own
laundry. For a little cigar, a cheroot, if you please, he will
escort you all over Paris. If you stop to look at a shirt or a
collar button his eyes flash. “Don’t buy it here,” he will say.
“They ask too much. I will show you a cheaper place.” And
before you have time to think about it he will whisk you
away and deposit you before another show window where
there are the same ties and shirts and collar buttons—
maybe it’s the very same store! but you don’t know the
difference. When Kepi hears that you want to buy something
his soul becomes animated. He will ask you so many
questions and drag you to so many places that you are
bound to get thirsty and ask him to have a drink, whereupon
you will discover to your amazement that you are again
standing in a tabac—maybe the same tabac!—and Kepi is
saying again in that small unctuous voice: “Will you please
be so good as to buy me a little cheroot?” No matter what
you propose doing, even if it’s only to walk around the
corner, Kepi will economize for you. Kepi will show you the
shortest way, the cheapest place, the biggest dish, because

whatever you have to do you must pass a tabac, and
whether there is a revolution or a lockout or a quarantine
Kepi must be at the Moulin Rouge or the Olympia or the
Ange Rouge when the music strikes up.
The other day he brought a book for me to read. It was
about a famous suit between a holy man and the editor of
an Indian paper. The editor, it seems had openly accused
the holy man of leading a scandalous life; he went further,
and accused the holy man of being diseased. Kepi says it
must have been the great French pox, but Nanantatee avers
that it was the Japanese clap. For Nanantatee everything
has to be a little exaggerated. At any rate, says Nanantatee
cheerily: “You will please tell me what it says, Endree. I can’t
read the book—it hurts my arm.” Then, by way of
encouraging me—“it is a fine book about the fucking,
Endree. Kepi has brought it for you. He thinks about nothing
but the girls. So many girls he fucks—just like Krishna. We
don’t believe in that business, Endree. …”
A little later he takes me upstairs to the attic which is
loaded down with tin cans and crap from India wrapped in
burlap and firecracker paper. “Here is where I bring the
girls,” he says. And then rather wistfully: “I am not a very
good fucker, Endree. I don’t screw the girls any more. I hold
them in my arms and I say the words. I like only to say the
words now.” It isn’t necesary to listen any further: I know
that he is going to tell me about his arm. I can see him lying
there with that broken hinge dangling from the side of the
bed. But to my surprise he adds: “I am no good for the
fucking, Endree. I never was a very good fucker. My brother,
he is good! Three times a day, every day! And Kepi, he is
good—just like Krishna.”
His mind is fixed now on the “fucking business.”
Downstairs, in the little room where he kneels before the
open cabinet, he explains to me how it was when he was
rich and his wife and the children were here. On holidays he

would take his wife to the House of All Nations and hire a
room for the night. Every room was appointed in a different
style. His wife liked it there very much. “A wonderful place
for the fucking, Endree. I know all the rooms. …”
The walls of the little room in which we are sitting are
crammed with photographs. Every branch of the family is
represented, it is like a cross section of the Indian empire.
For the most part the members of this genealogical tree
look like withered leaves: the women are frail and they have
a startled, frightened look in their eyes: the men have a
keen, intelligent look, like educated chimpanzees. They are
all there, about ninety of them, with their white bullocks,
their dung cakes, their skinny legs, their old-fashioned
spectacles; in the background, now and then, one catches a
glimpse of the parched soil, of a crumbling pediment, of an
idol with crooked arms, a sort of human centipede. There is
something so fantastic, so incongruous about this gallery
that one is reminded inevitably of the great spawn of
temples which stretch from the Himalayas to the tip of
Ceylon, a vast jumble of architecture, staggering in beauty
and at the same time monstrous, hideously monstrous
because the fecundity which seethes and ferments in the
myriad ramifications of design seems to have exhausted the
very soil of India itself. Looking at the seething hive of
figures which swarm the façades of the temples one is
overwhelmed by the potency of these dark, handsome
peoples who mingled their mysterious streams in a sexual
embrace that has lasted thirty centuries or more. These frail
men and women with piercing eyes who stare out of the
photographs seem like the emaciated shadows of those
virile, massive figures who incarnated themselves in stone
and fresco from one end of India to the other in order that
the heroic myths of the races who here intermingled should
remain forever entwined in the hearts of their countrymen.
When I look at only a fragment of these spacious dreams of

stone, these toppling, sluggish edifices studded with gems,
coagulated with human sperm, I am overwhelmed by the
dazzling splendor of those imaginative flights which enabled
half a billion people of diverse origins to thus incarnate the
most fugitive expressions of their longing.
It is a strange, inexplicable medley of feelings which
assails me now as Nanantatee prattles on about the sister
who died in childbirth. There she is on the wall, a frail, timid
thing of twelve or thirteen clinging to the arm of a dotard. At
ten years of age she was given in wedlock to this old roué
who had already buried five wives. She had seven children,
only one of whom survived her. She was given to the aged
gorilla in order to keep the pearls in the family. As she was
passing away, so Nanantatee puts it, she whispered to the
doctor: “I am tired of this fucking. … I don’t want to fuck any
more, doctor.” As he relates this to me he scratches his
head solemnly with his withered arm. “The fucking business
is bad, Endree,” he says. “But I will give you a word that will
always make you lucky; you must say it every day, over and
over, a million times you must say it. It is the best word
there is, Endree… say it now… OOMAHARUMOOMA!”
“OOMARABOO. …”
“No, Endree… like this… OOMAHARUMOOMA!”
“OOMAMABOOMBA. …”
“No, Endree… like this. …”
… But what with the murky light, the botchy print, the
tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the
fox-trotting fleas, the lie-a-bed lice, the scum on his tongue,
the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his
pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief
from his breath, the fog of his brainfag, the tic of his
conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his
fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the
rats in his garret, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears,

since it took him a month to steal a march, he was hard-set
to memorize more than a word a week.
I suppose I would never have gotten out of Nanantatee’s
clutches if fate hadn’t intervened. One night, as luck would
have it, Kepi asked me if I wouldn’t take one of his clients to
a whorehouse nearby. The young man had just come from
India and he had not very much money to spend. He was
one of Gandhi’s men, one of that little band who made the
historic march to the sea during the salt trouble. A very gay
disciple of Gandhi’s I must say, despite the vows of
abstinence he had taken. Evidently he hadn’t looked at a
woman for ages. It was all I could do to get him as far as the
Rue Laferrière; he was like a dog with his tongue hanging
out. And a pompous, vain little devil to boot! He had decked
himself out in a corduroy suit, a beret, a cane, a Windsor tie;
he had bought himself two fountain pens, a kodak, and
some fancy underwear. The money he was spending was a
gift from the merchants of Bombay; they were sending him
to England to spread the gospel of Gandhi.
Once inside Miss Hamilton’s joint he began to lose his
sang-froid. When suddenly he found himself surrounded by
a bevy of naked women he looked at me in consternation.
“Pick one out,” I said. “You can have your choice.” He had
become so rattled that he could scarcely look at them. “You
do it for me,” he murmured, blushing violently. I looked
them over coolly and picked out a plump young wench who
seemed full of feathers. We sat down in the reception room
and waited for the drinks. The madam wanted to know why I
didn’t take a girl also. “Yes, you take one too,” said the
young Hindu. “I don’t want to be alone with her.” So the
girls were brought in again and I chose one for myself, a
rather tall, thin one with melancholy eyes. We were left
alone, the four of us, in the reception room. After a few
moments my young Gandhi leans over and whispers
something in my ear. “Sure, if you like her better, take her,”

I said, and so, rather awkwardly and considerably
embarrassed, I explained to the girls that we would like to
switch. I saw at once that we had made a faux pas, but by
now my young friend had became gay and lecherous and
nothing would do but to get upstairs quickly and have it
over with.
We took adjoining rooms with a connecting door between.
I think my companion had in mind to make another switch
once he had satisfied his sharp, gnawing hunger. At any
rate, no sooner had the girls left the room to prepare
themselves than I hear him knocking on the door. “Where is
the toilet, please?” he asks. Not thinking that it was
anything serious I urge him to do in the bidet. The girls
return with towels in their hands. I hear him giggling in the
next room.
As I’m putting on my pants suddenly I hear a commotion
in the next room. The girl is bawling him out, calling him a
pig, a dirty little pig. I can’t imagine what he has done to
warrant such an outburst. I’m standing there with one foot
in my trousers listening attentively. He’s trying to explain to
her in English, raising his voice louder and louder until it
becomes a shriek.
I hear a door slam and in another moment the madam
bursts into my room, her face as red as a beet, her arms
gesticulating wildly. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,”
she screams, “bringing a man like that to my place! He’s a
barbarian… he’s a pig… he’s a…!” My companion is
standing behind her, in the doorway, a look of utmost
discomfiture on his face “What did you do?” I ask.
“What did he do?” yells the madam. “I’ll show you. …
Come here!” And grabbing me by the arm she drags me into
the next room. “There! There!” she screams, pointing to the
bidet.
“Come on, let’s get out,” says the Hindu boy.
“Wait a minute, you can’t get out as easily as all that.”

The madam is standing by the bidet, fuming and spitting.
The girls are standing there too, with towels in their hands.
The five of us are standing there looking at the bidet. There
are two enormous turds floating in the water. The madam
bends down and puts a towel over it. “Frightful! Frightful!”
she wails. “Never have I seen anything like this! A pig! A
dirty little pig!”
The Hindu boy looks at me reproachfully. “You should
have told me!” he says. “I didn’t know it wouldn’t go down. I
asked you where to go and you told me to use that.” He is
almost in tears.
Finally the madam takes me to one side. She has become
a little more reasonable now. After all, it was a mistake.
Perhaps the gentlemen would like to come downstairs and
order another drink—for the girls. It was a great shock to the
girls. They are not used to such things. And if the good
gentlemen will be so kind as to remember the femme de
chambre. … It is not so pretty for the femme de chambre—
that mess, that ugly mess. She shrugs her shoulders and
winks her eye. A lamentable incident. But an accident. If the
gentlemen will wait here a few moments the maid will bring
the drinks. Would the gentlemen like to have some
champagne? Yes?
“I’d like to get out of here,” says the Hindu boy weakly.
“Don’t feel so badly about it,” says the madam. “It is all
over now. Mistakes will happen sometimes. Next time you
will ask for the toilet.” She goes on about the toilet—one on
every floor, it seems. And a bathroom too. “I have lots of
English clients,” she says. “They are all gentlemen. The
gentleman is a Hindu? Charming people, the Hindus. So
intelligent. So handsome.”
When we get into the street the charming young
gentleman is almost weeping. He is sorry now that he
bought a corduroy suit and the cane and the fountain pens.
He talks about the eight vows that he took, the control of

the palate, etc. On the march to Dandi even a plate of ice
cream it was forbidden to take. He tells me about the
spinning wheel—how the little band of Satyagrahists
imitated the devotion of their master. He relates with pride
how he walked beside the master and conversed with him. I
have the illusion of being in the presence of one of the
twelve disciples.
During the next few days we see a good deal of each
other; there are interviews to be arranged with the
newspaper men and lectures to be given to the Hindus of
Paris. It is amazing to see how these spineless devils order
one another about; amazing also to see how ineffectual they
are in all that concerns practical affairs. And the jealousy
and the intrigues, the petty, sordid rivalries. Wherever there
are ten Hindus together there is India with her sects and
schisms, her racial, lingual, religious, political antagonisms.
In the person of Gandhi they are experiencing for a brief
moment the miracle of unity, but when he goes there will be
a crash, an utter relapse into that strife and chaos so
characteristic of the Indian people.
The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to
America and he has been contaminated by the cheap
idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous
bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle,
the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free
libraries, etc., etc. His ideal would be to Americanize India.
He is not at all pleased with Gandhi’s retrogressive mania.
Forward, he says, just like a YMCA man. As I listen to his
tales of America I see how absurd it is to expect of Gandhi
that miracle which will deroute the trend of destiny. India’s
enemy is not England, but America. India’s enemy is the
time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing
will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole
world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will
drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.

He thinks the Americans are a very gullible people. He
tells me about the credulous souls who succored him there
—the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Theosophists, the New
Thoughters, the Seventh-day Adventists, etc. He knew
where to sail his boat, this bright young man. He knew how
to make the tears come to his eyes at the right moment; he
knew how to take up a collection, how to appeal to the
minister’s wife, how to make love to the mother and
daughter at the same time. To look at him you would think
him a saint. And he is a saint, in the modern fashion; a
contaminated saint who talks in one breath of love,
brotherhood, bathtubs, sanitation, efficiency, etc.
The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to “the
fucking business.” He has had a full program all day—
conferences, cablegrams, interviews, photographs for the
newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice to the faithful,
etc., etc. At dinner time he decides to lay aside his troubles.
He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at
the garçon and behaves in general like the boorish little
peasant that he is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the
good places he suggests now that I show him something
more primitive. He would like to go to a very cheap place,
order two or three girls at once. I steer him along the
Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be
careful of his pocketbook. Around Aubervilliers we duck into
a cheap dive and immediately we’ve got a flock of them on
our hands. In a few minutes he’s dancing with a naked
wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls. I can see
her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the
room—and those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her
tenaciously. The table is full of beer glasses, the mechanical
piano is wheezing and gasping. The girls who are
unoccupied are sitting placidly on the leather benches,
scratching themselves peacefully just like a family of
chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in

the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited
explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail,
something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated,
completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which
permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite
aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but
insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline
form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And
like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly
free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless
determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which
commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be
giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was
responding to the dictates of an ambiance which it had
never before experienced; that which I could call myself
seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the
stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter
knew only the modulations of the nerve ends.
And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me
became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the
close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed. In
the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the
same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated.
The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the
introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic
particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the
fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter clarity
which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that
moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the
world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian
which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt
that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the
wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I
felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow
in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding

itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that
dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of
time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion
creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment
anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that
great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus
seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that
men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for
some reason or other, they should want roses. For some
reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to
accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch
himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for
only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the
hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace,
humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that
overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render
life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and
there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All
the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking
the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides
away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of
the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is
pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no
miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief.
Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be
fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like
the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.
And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle
which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing
more than these two enormous turds which the faithful
disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment,
when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there
should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a
silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is
nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps

of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than
anything which man has looked forward to. It would be
miraculous because it would be undreamed of. It would be
more miraculous than even the wildest dream because
anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has,
and probably nobody ever again will.
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for
had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for
years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to
something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter
my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute
hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a
great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I
parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him
for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward
Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to
make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what
form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me
thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had
been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The
world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a
plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a
single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for
faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already
manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at
this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on
to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I
would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a
plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to
go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to
the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I
would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the
quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime
and distress? Had one single element of man’s nature been
altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant

march of history? By what he calls the better part of his
nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme
limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as
a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been
picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life
again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh;
the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will
pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I
will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have
been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the
few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I
have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the
wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am
dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce
back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only
spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The
world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is
breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean
spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean
and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

At one-thirty I called on Van Norden, as per agreement. He
had warned me that if he didn’t answer it would mean that
he was sleeping with someone, probably his Georgia cunt.
Anyway, there he was, tucked away comfortably, but with
an air of weariness as usual. He wakes up cursing himself,
or cursing the job, or cursing life. He wakes up utterly bored
and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die
overnight.
I sit down by the window and give him what
encouragement I can. It is tedious work. One has to actually
coax him out of bed. Mornings—he means by mornings
anywhere between one and five p.m.—mornings, as I say,
he gives himself up to reveries. Mostly it is about the past
he dreams. About his “cunts.” He endeavors to recall how
they felt, what they said to him at certain critical moments,
where he laid them, and so on. And as he lies there,
grinning and cursing, he manipulates his fingers in that
curious, bored way of his, as though to convey the
impression that his disgust is too great for words. Over the
bedstead hangs a douche bag which he keeps for
emergencies—for the virgins whom he tracks down like a
sleuth. Even after he has slept with one of these mythical
creatures he will still refer to her as a virgin, and almost
never by name. “My virgin,” he will say, just as he says “my
Georgia cunt.” When he goes to the toilet he says: “If my
Georgia cunt calls tell her to wait. Say I said so. And listen,
you can have her if you like. I’m tired of her.”
He takes a squint at the weather and heaves a deep sigh.
If it’s rainy he says: “God damn this fucking climate, it
makes one morbid.” And if the sun is shining brightly he
says: “God damn that fucking sun, it makes you blind!” As
he starts to shave he suddenly remembers that there is no

clean towel. “God damn this fucking hotel, they’re too stingy
to give you a clean towel every day!” No matter what he
does or where he goes things are out of joint. Either it’s the
fucking country or the fucking job, or else it’s some fucking
cunt who’s put him on the blink.
“My teeth are all rotten,” he says, gargling his throat. “It’s
the fucking bread they give you to eat here.” He opens his
mouth wide and pulls his lower lip down. “See that? Pulled
out six teeth yesterday. Soon I’ll have to get another plate.
That’s what you get working for a living. When I was on the
bum I had all my teeth, my eyes were bright and clear. Look
at me now! It’s a wonder I can make a cunt any more. Jesus,
what I’d like is to find some rich cunt—like that cute little
prick, Carl. Did he ever show you the letters she sends him?
Who is she, do you know? He wouldn’t tell me her name, the
bastard… he’s afraid I might take her away from him.” He
gargles his throat again and then takes a long look at the
cavities. “You’re lucky,” he says ruefully. “You’ve got friends,
at least. I haven’t anybody, except that cute little prick who
drives me bats about his rich cunt.”
“Listen,” he says, “do you happen to know a cunt by the
name of Norma? She hangs around the Dôme all day. I think
she’s queer. I had her up here yesterday, tickling her ass.
She wouldn’t let me do a thing. I had her on the bed. … I
even had her drawers off… and then I got disgusted. Jesus, I
can’t bother struggling that way any more. It isn’t worth it.
Either they do or they don’t—it’s foolish to waste time
wrestling with them. While you’re struggling with a little
bitch like that there may be a dozen cunts on the terrasse
just dying to be laid. It’s a fact. They all come over here to
get laid. They think it’s sinful here… the poor boobs! Some
of these schoolteachers from out West, they’re honestly
virgins… I mean it! They sit around on their can all day
thinking about it. You don’t have to work over them very
much. They’re dying for it. I had a married woman the other

day who told me she hadn’t had a lay for six months. Can
you imagine that? Jesus, she was hot! I thought she’d tear
the cock off me. And groaning all the time. “Do you? Do
you?” She kept saying that all the time, like she was nuts.
And do you know what that bitch wanted to do? She wanted
to move in here. Imagine that! Asking me if I loved her. I
didn’t even know her name. I never know their names… I
don’t want to. The married ones! Christ, if you saw all the
married cunts I bring up here you’d never have any more
illusions. They’re worse than the virgins, the married ones.
They don’t wait for you to start things—they fish it out for
you themselves. And then they talk about love afterwards.
It’s disgusting. I tell you, I’m actually beginning to hate
cunt!”
He looks out the window again. It’s drizzling. It’s been
drizzling this way for the last five days.
“Are we going to the Dôme, Joe?” I call him Joe because
he calls me Joe. When Carl is with us he is Joe too.
Everybody is Joe because it’s easier that way. It’s also a
pleasant reminder not to take yourself too seriously.
Anyway, Joe doesn’t want to go to the Dôme—he owes too
much money there. He wants to go to the Coupole. Wants to
take a little walk first around the block.
“But it’s raining, Joe.”
“I know, but what the hell! I’ve got to have my
constitutional. I’ve got to wash the dirt out of my belly.”
When he says this I have the impression that the whole
world is wrapped up there inside his belly, and that it’s
rotting there.
As he’s putting on his things he falls back again into a
semi-comatose state. He stands there with one arm in his
coat sleeve and his hat on assways and he begins to dream
aloud—about the Riviera, about the sun, about lazing one’s
life away. “All I ask of life,” he says, “is a bunch of books, a
bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.” As he mumbles this

meditatively he looks at me with the softest, the most
insidious smile. “Do you like that smile?” he says. And then
disgustedly—“Jesus, if I could only find some rich cunt to
smile at that way!”
“Only a rich cunt can save me now,” he says with an air
of utmost weariness. “One gets tired of chasing after new
cunts all the time. It gets mechanical. The trouble is, you
see, I can’t fall in love. I’m too much of an egoist. Women
only help me to dream, that’s all. It’s a vice, like drink or
opium. I’ve got to have a new one every day; if I don’t I get
morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I’m amazed at myself,
how quick I pull it off—and how little it really means. I do it
automatically like. Sometimes I’m not thinking about a
woman at all, but suddenly I notice a woman looking at me
and then, bango! it starts all over again. Before I know what
I’m doing I’ve got her up to the room. I don’t even
remember what I say to them. I bring them up to the room,
give them a pat on the ass, and before I know what it’s all
about it’s over. It’s like a dream. … Do you know what I
mean?”
He hasn’t much use for the French girls. Can’t stand
them. “Either they want money or they want you to marry
them. At bottom they’re all whores. I’d rather wrestle with a
virgin,” he says. “They give you a little illusion. They put up
a fight at least.” Just the same, as we glance over the
terrasse there is hardly a whore in sight whom he hasn’t
fucked at some time or other. Standing at the bar he points
them out to me, one by one, goes over them anatomically,
describes their good points and their bad. “They’re all
frigid,” he says. And then begins to mold his hands, thinking
of the nice, juicy virgins who are just dying for it.
In the midst of his reveries he suddenly arrests himself,
and grabbing my arm excitedly, he points to a whale of a
woman who is just lowering herself into a seat. “There’s my
Danish cunt,” he grunts. “See that ass? Danish. How that

woman loves it! She just begs me for it. Come over here…
look at her now, from the side! Look at that ass, will you?
It’s enormous. I tell you, when she climbs over me I can
hardly get my arms around it. It blots out the whole world.
She makes me feel like a little bug crawling inside her. I
don’t know why I fall for her—I suppose it’s that ass. It’s so
incongruous like. And the creases in it! You can’t forget an
ass like that. It’s a fact… a solid fact. The others, they may
bore you, or they may give you a moment’s illusion, but this
one—with her ass!—zowie, you can’t obliterate her… it’s like
going to bed with a monument on top of you.”
The Danish cunt seems to have electrified him. He’s lost
all his sluggishness now. His eyes are popping out of his
head. And of course one thing reminds him of another. He
wants to get out of the fucking hotel because the noise
bothers him. He wants to write a book too so as to have
something to occupy his mind. But then the goddamned job
stands in the way. “It takes it out of you, that fucking job! I
don’t want to write about Montparnasse. … I want to write
my life, my thoughts. I want to get the dirt out of my belly.
… Listen, get that one over there! I had her a long time ago.
She used to be down near Les Halles. A funny bitch. She lay
on the edge of the bed and pulled her dress up. Ever try it
that way? Not bad. She didn’t hurry me either. She just lay
back and played with her hat while I slugged away at her.
And when I come she says sort of bored like—‘Are you
through?’ Like it didn’t make any difference at all. Of course,
it doesn’t make any difference, I know that goddamn well…
but the cold-blooded way she had… I sort of liked it… it was
fascinating, you know? When she goes to wipe herself she
begins to sing. Going out of the hotel she was still singing.
Didn’t even say Au revoir! Walks off swinging her hat and
humming to herself like. That’s a whore for you! A good lay
though. I think I liked her better than my virgin. There’s
something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn’t

give a fuck about it. It heats your blood. …” And then, after
a moment’s meditation—“Can you imagine what she’d be
like if she had any feelings?”
“Listen,” he says, “I want you to come to the Club with
me tomorrow afternoon… there’s a dance on.”
“I can’t tomorrow, Joe. I promised to help Carl out. …”
“Listen, forget that prick! I want you to do me a favor. It’s
like this”—he commences to mold his hands again. “I’ve got
a cunt lined up… she promised to stay with me on my night
off. But I’m not positive about her yet. She’s got a mother,
you see… some shit of a painter, she chews my ear off
every time I see her. I think the truth is, the mother’s
jealous. I don’t think she’d mind so much if I gave her a lay
first. You know how it is. … Anyway, I thought maybe you
wouldn’t mind taking the mother… she’s not so bad… if I
hadn’t seen the daughter I might have considered her
myself. The daughter’s nice and young, fresh like, you know
what I mean? There’s a clean smell to her. …”
“Listen, Joe, you’d better find somebody else. …”
“Aw, don’t take it like that! I know how you feel about it.
It’s only a little favor I’m asking you to do for me. I don’t
know to get rid of the old hen. I thought first I’d get drunk
and ditch her—but I don’t think the young one’d like that.
They’re sentimental like. They come from Minnesota or
somewhere. Anyway, come around tomorrow and wake me
up, will you? Otherwise I’ll oversleep. And besides, I want
you to help me find a room. You know I’m helpless. Find me
a room in a quiet street, somewhere near here. I’ve got to
stay around here… I’ve got credit here. Listen, promise me
you’ll do that for me. I’ll buy you a meal now and then.
Come around anyway, because I go nuts talking to these
foolish cunts. I want to talk to you about Havelock Ellis.
Jesus, I’ve had the book out for three weeks now and I
haven’t looked at it. You sort of rot here. Would you believe
it, I’ve never been to the Louvre—nor the Comédie-

Française. Is it worth going to those joints? Still, it sort of
takes your mind off things, I suppose. What do you do with
yourself all day? Don’t you get bored? What do you do for a
lay? Listen… come here! Don’t run away yet… I’m lonely. Do
you know something—if this keeps up another year I’ll go
nuts. I’ve got to get out of this fucking country. There’s
nothing for me here. I know it’s lousy now, in America, but
just the same. … You go queer over here… all these cheap
shits sitting on their ass all day bragging about their work
and none of them is worth a stinking damn. They’re all
failures—that’s why they come over here. Listen, Joe, don’t
you ever get homesick? You’re a funny guy… you seem to
like it over here. What do you see in it?… I wish you’d tell
me. I wish to Christ I could stop thinking about myself. I’m
all twisted up inside… it’s like a knot in there. … Listen, I
know I’m boring the shit out of you, but I’ve got to talk to
someone. I can’t talk to those guys upstairs… you know
what those bastards are like… they all take a byline. And
Carl, the little prick, he’s so goddamned selfish. I’m an
egotist, but I’m not selfish. There’s a difference. I’m a
neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself. It isn’t
that I think myself so important. … I simply can’t think
about anything else, that’s all. If I could fall in love with a
woman that might help some. But I can’t find a woman who
interests me. I’m in a mess, you can see that can’t you?
What do you advise me to do? What would you do in my
place? Listen, I don’t want to hold you back any longer, but
wake me up tomorrow—at one-thirty—will you? I’ll give you
something extra if you’ll shine my shoes. And listen, if
you’ve got an extra shirt, a clean one, bring it along, will
you? Shit, I’m grinding my balls off on that job, and it
doesn’t even give me a clean shirt. They’ve got us over here
like a bunch of niggers. Ah, well, shit! I’m going to take a
walk… wash the dirt out of my belly. Don’t forget,
tomorrow!”

For six months or more it’s been going on, this
correspondence with the rich cunt, Irene. Recently I’ve been
reporting to Carl every day in order to bring the affair to a
head, because as far as Irene is concerned this thing could
go on indefinitely. In the last few days there’s been a perfect
avalanche of letters exchanged; the last letter we
dispatched was almost forty pages long, and written in
three languages. It was a potpourri, the last letter—tag ends
of old novels, slices from the Sunday supplement,
reconstructed versions of old letters to Llona and Tania,
garbled transliterations of Rabelais and Petronius—in short,
we exhausted ourselves. Finally Irene decides to come out
of her shell. Finally a letter arrives giving a rendezvous at
her hotel. Carl is pissing in his pants. It’s one thing to write
letters to a woman you don’t know; it’s another thing
entirely to call on her and make love to her. At the last
moment he’s quaking so that I almost fear I’ll have to
substitute for him. When we get out of the taxi in front of
her hotel he’s trembling so much that I have to walk him
around the block first. He’s already had two Pernods, but
they haven’t made the slightest impression on him. The
sight of the hotel itself is enough to crush him: it’s a
pretentious place with one of those huge empty lobbies in
which Englishwomen sit for hours with a blank look. In order
to make sure that he wouldn’t run away I stood by while the
porter telephoned to announce him. Irene was there, and
she was waiting for him. As he got into the lift he threw me
a last despairing glance, one of those mute appeals which a
dog makes when you put a noose around its neck. Going
through the revolving door I thought of Van Norden. …
I go back to the hotel and wait for a telephone call. He’s
only got an hour’s time and he’s promised to let me know
the results before going to work. I look over the carbons of
the letters we sent her. I try to imagine the situation as it
actually is, but it’s beyond me. Her letters are much better

than ours—they’re sincere, that’s plain. By now they’ve
sized each other up. I wonder if he’s still pissing in his pants.
The telephone rings. His voice sounds queer, squeaky, as
though he were frightened and jubilant at the same time.
He asks me to substitute for him at the office. “Tell the
bastard anything! Tell him I’m dying. …”
“Listen, Carl… can you tell me…?”
“Hello! Are you Henry Miller?” It’s a woman’s voice. It’s
Irene. She’s saying hello to me. Her voice sounds beautiful
over the phone… beautiful. For a moment I’m in a perfect
panic. I don’t know what to say to her. I’d like to say: “Listen,
Irene, I think you are beautiful… I think you’re wonderful.”
I’d like to say one true thing to her, no matter how silly it
would sound, because now that I hear her voice everything
is changed. But before I can gather my wits Carl is on the
phone again and he’s saying in that queer squeaky voice:
“She likes you, Joe. I told her all about you. …”
At the office I have to hold copy for Van Norden. When it
comes time for the break he pulls me aside. He looks glum
and ravaged.
“So he’s dying, is he, the little prick? Listen, what’s the
lowdown on this?”
“I think he went to see his rich cunt,” I answer calmly.
“What! You mean he called on her?” He seems beside
himself. “Listen, where does she live? What’s her name?” I
pretend ignorance. “Listen,” he says, “you’re a decent guy.
Why the hell don’t you let me in on this racket?”
In order to appease him I promise finally that I’ll tell him
everything as soon as I get the details from Carl. I can
hardly wait myself until I see Carl.
Around noon next day I knock at his door. He’s up already
and lathering his beard. Can’t tell a thing from the
expression on his face. Can’t even tell whether he’s going to

tell me the truth. The sun is streaming in through the open
window, the birds are chirping, and yet somehow, why it is I
don’t know, the room seems more barren and poverty-
stricken than ever. The floor is slathered with lather, and on
the rack there are the two dirty towels which are never
changed. And somehow Carl isn’t changed either, and that
puzzles me more than anything. This morning the whole
world ought to be changed, for bad or good, but changed,
radically changed. And yet Carl is standing there lathering
his face and not a single detail is altered.
“Sit down… sit down there on the bed,” he says. “You’re
going to hear everything… but wait first… wait a little.” He
commences to lather his face again, and then to hone his
razor. He even remarks about the water… no hot water
again.
“Listen, Carl, I’m on tenterhooks. You can torture me
afterward, if you like, but tell me now, tell me one thing…
was it good or bad?”
He turns away from the mirror with brush in hand and
gives me a strange smile. “Wait! I’m going to tell you
everything. …”
“That means it was a failure.”
“No,” he says, drawing out his words. “It wasn’t a failure,
and it wasn’t a success either. … By the way, did you fix it
up for me at the office? What did you tell them?”
I see it’s no use trying to pull it out of him. When he gets
good and ready he’ll tell me. Not before. I lie back on the
bed, silent as a clam. He goes on shaving.
Suddenly, apropos of nothing at all, he begins to talk—
disconnectedly at first, and then more and more clearly,
emphatically, resolutely. It’s a struggle to get it out, but he
seems determined to relate everything; he acts as if he
were getting something off his conscience. He even reminds
me of the look he gave me as he was going up the elevator

shaft. He dwells on that lingeringly, as though to imply that
everything were contained in that last moment, as though,
if he had the power to alter things, he would never have put
foot outside the elevator.
She was in her dressing sack when he called. There was a
bucket of champagne on the dresser. The room was rather
dark and her voice was lovely. He gives me all the details
about the room, the champagne, how the garçon opened it,
the noise it made, the way her dressing sack rustled when
she came forward to greet him—he tells me everything but
what I want to hear.
It was about eight when he called on her. At eight-thirty
he was nervous, thinking about the job. “It was about nine
when I called you, wasn’t it?” he says.
“Yes, about that.”
“I was nervous, see. …”
“I know that. Go on. …”
I don’t know whether to believe him or not, especially
after those letters we concocted. I don’t even know whether
I’ve heard him accurately, because what he’s telling me
sounds utterly fantastic. And yet it sounds true too, knowing
the sort of guy he is. And then I remember his voice over
the telephone, that strange mixture of fright and jubilation.
But why isn’t he more jubilant now? He keeps smiling all the
time, smiling like a rosy little bedbug that has had its fill. “It
was nine o’clock,” he says once again, “when I called you
up, wasn’t it?” I nod my head wearily. Yes, it was nine
o’clock. He is certain now that it was nine o’clock because
he remembers having taken out his watch. Anyway, when
he looked at his watch again it was ten o’clock. At ten
o’clock she was lying on the divan with her boobies in her
hands. That’s the way he gives it to me—in driblets. At
eleven o’clock it was all settled; they were going to run
away, to Borneo. Fuck the husband! She never loved him
anyway. She would never have written the first letter if the

husband wasn’t old and passionless. “And then she says to
me: ‘But listen, dear, how do you know you won’t get tired
of me?’”
At this I burst out laughing. This sounds preposterous to
me, I can’t help it.
“And you said?”
“What did you expect me to say? I said: ‘How could
anyone ever grow tired of you?”’
And then he describes to me what happened after that,
how he bent down and kissed her breasts, and how, after he
had kissed them fervidly, he stuffed them back into her
corsage, or whatever it is they call these things. And after
that another coupe of champagne.
Around midnight the garçon arrives with beer and
sandwiches—caviar sandwiches. And all the while, so he
says, he has been dying to take a leak. He had one hard on,
but it faded out. All the while his bladder is fit to burst, but
he imagines, the cute little prick that he is, that the
situation calls for delicacy.
At one-thirty she’s for hiring a carriage and driving
through the Bois. He has only one thought in his head—how
to take a leak? “I love you… I adore you,” he says. “I’ll go
anywhere you say—Istanbul, Singapore, Honolulu. Only I
must go now. … It’s getting late.”
He tells me all this in his dirty little room, with the sun
pouring in and the birds chirping away like mad. I don’t yet
know whether she was beautiful or not. He doesn’t know
himself, the imbecile. He rather thinks she wasn’t. The room
was dark and then there was the champagne and his nerves
all frazzled.
“But you ought to know something about her—if this isn’t
all a goddamned lie!”
“Wait a minute,” he says. “Wait… let me think! No, she
wasn’t beautiful. I’m sure of that now. She had a streak of

gray hair over her forehead… I remember that. But: that
wouldn’t be so bad—I had almost forgotten it you see. No, it
was her arms—they were thin… they were thin and brittle.”
He begins to pace back and forth.—Suddenly he stops dead.
“If she were only ten years younger!” he exclaims. “If she
were ten years younger I might overlook the streak of gray
hair… and even the brittle arms. But she’s too old. You see,
with a cunt like that every year counts now. She won’t be
just one year older next year—she’ll be ten years older.
Another year hence and she’ll be twenty years older. And I’ll
be getting younger looking all the time—at least for another
five years. …”
“But how did it end?” I interrupt.
“That’s just it… it didn’t end. I promised to see her
Tuesday around five o’clock. That’s bad, you know! There
were lines in her face which will look much worse in
daylight. I suppose she wants me to fuck her Tuesday.
Fucking in the daytime—you don’t do it with a cunt like that.
Especially in a hotel like that. I’d rather do it on my night
off… but Tuesday’s not my night off. And that’s not all. I
promised her a letter in the meantime. How am I going to
write her a letter now? I haven’t anything to say. … Shit! If
only she were ten years younger. Do you think I should go
with her… to Borneo or wherever it is she wants to take me?
What would I do with a rich cunt like that on my hands? I
don’t know how to shoot. I am afraid of guns and all that
sort of thing. Besides, she’ll be wanting me to fuck her night
and day… nothing but hunting and fucking all the time… I
can’t do it!”
“Maybe it won’t be so bad as you think. She’ll buy you
ties and all sorts of things. …”
“Maybe you’ll come along with us, eh? I told her all about
you. …”
“Did you tell her I was poor? Did you tell her I needed
things?”

“I told her everything. Shit, everything would be fine, if
she were just a few years younger. She said she was turning
forty. That means fifty or sixty. It’s like fucking your own
mother… you can’t do it… it’s impossible.”
“But she must have had some attractiveness… you were
kissing her breasts, you said.”
“Kissing her breasts—what’s that? Besides it was dark,
I’m telling you.”
Putting on his pants a button falls off. “Look at that, will
you. It’s falling apart, the goddamned suit. I’ve worn it for
seven years now. … I never paid for it either. It was a good
suit once, but it stinks now. And that cunt would buy me
suits too, all I wanted most likely. But that’s what I don’t like,
having a woman shell out for me. I never did that in my life.
That’s your idea. I’d rather live alone. Shit, this is a good
room isn’t it? What’s wrong with it? It’s a damned sight
better than her room, isn’t it? I don’t like her fine hotel. I’m
against hotels like that. I told her so. She said she didn’t
care where she lived… said she’d come and live with me if I
wanted her to. Can you picture her moving in here with her
big trunks and her hatboxes and all that crap she drags
around with her? She has too many things—too many
dresses and bottles and all that. It’s like a clinic, her room. If
she gets a little scratch on her finger it’s serious. And then
she has to be massaged and her hair has to be waved and
she mustn’t eat this and she mustn’t eat that. Listen, Joe,
she’d be all right if she were just a little younger. You can
forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn’t have to
have any brains. They’re better without brains. But an old
cunt, even if she’s brilliant, even if she’s the most charming
woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young
cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they
can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn’t put meat
on their arms or juice between the legs. She isn’t bad, Irene.
In fact, I think you’d like her. With you it’s different. You

don’t have to fuck her. You can afford to like her. Maybe you
wouldn’t like all those dresses and the bottles and what not,
but you could be tolerant. She wouldn’t bore you, that I can
tell you. She’s even interesting, I might say. But she’s
withered. Her breasts are all right yet—but her arms! I told
her I’d bring you around some day. I talked a lot about you.
… I didn’t know what to say to her. Maybe you’d like her,
especially when she’s dressed. I don’t know. …”
“Listen, she’s rich, you say? I’ll like her! I don’t care how
old she is, so long as she’s not a hag. …”
“She’s not a hag! What are you talking about? She’s
charming, I tell you. She talks well. She looks well too… only
her arms. …”
“All right, if that’s how it is, I’ll fuck her—if you don’t want
to. Tell her that. Be subtle about it, though. With a woman
like that you’ve got to do things slowly. You bring me around
and let things work out for themselves. Praise the shit out of
me. Act jealous like. … Shit, maybe we’ll fuck her together…
and we’ll go places and we’ll eat together… and we’ll drive
and hunt and wear nice things. If she wants to go to Borneo
let her take us along. I don’t know how to shoot either, but
that doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care about that either. She
just wants to be fucked that’s all. You’re talking about her
arms all the time. You don’t have to look at her arms all the
time, do you? Look at this bedspread! Look at the mirror! Do
you call this living? Do you want to go on being delicate and
live like a louse all your life? You can’t even pay your hotel
bill… and you’ve got a job too. This is no way to live. I don’t
care if she’s seventy years old—it’s better than this. …”
“Listen, Joe, you fuck her for me… then everything’ll be
fine. Maybe I’ll fuck her once in a while too… on my night
off. It’s four days now since I’ve had a good shit. There’s
something sticking to me, like grapes. …”
“You’ve got the piles, that’s what.”

“My hair’s falling out too… and I ought to see the dentist.
I feel as though I were falling apart. I told her what a good
guy you are. … You’ll do things for me, eh? You’re not too
delicate, eh? If we go to Borneo I won’t have hemorrhoids
any more. Maybe I’ll develop something else… something
worse… fever perhaps… or cholera. Shit, it’s better to die of
a good disease like that than to piss your life away on a
newspaper with grapes up your ass and buttons falling off
your pants. I’d like to be rich, even if it were only for a week,
and then go to a hospital with a good disease, a fatal one,
and have flowers in the room and nurses dancing around
and telegrams coming. They take good care of you if you’re
rich. They wash you with cotton batting and they comb your
hair for you. Shit, I know all that. Maybe I’d be lucky and not
die at all. Maybe I’d be a cripple all my life… maybe I’d be
paralyzed and have to sit in a wheelchair. But then I’d be
taken care of just the same… even if I had no more money.
If you’re an invalid—a real one—they don’t let you starve.
And you get a clean bed to lie in… and they change the
towels every day. This way nobody gives a fuck about you,
especially if you have a job. They think a man should be
happy if he’s got a job. What would you rather do—be a
cripple all your life, or have a job… or marry a rich cunt?
You’d rather marry a rich cunt, I can see that. You only think
about food. But supposing you married her and then you
couldn’t get a hard on any more—that happens sometimes
—what would you do then? You’d be at her mercy. You’d
have to eat out of her hand, like a little poodle dog. You’d
like that, would you? Or maybe you don’t think of those
things? I think of everything. I think of the suits I’d pick out
and the places I’d like to go to, but I also think of the other
thing. That’s the important thing. What good are the fancy
ties and the fine suits if you can’t get a hard on any more?
You couldn’t even betray her—because she’d be on your
heels all the time. No, the best thing would be to marry her
and then get a disease right away. Only not syphilis.

Cholera, let’s say, or yellow fever. So that if a miracle did
happen and your life was spared you’d be a cripple for the
rest of your days. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about
fucking her any more, and you wouldn’t have to worry about
the rent either. She’d probably buy you a fine wheelchair
with rubber tires and all sorts of levers and what not. You
might even be able to use your hands—I mean enough to be
able to write. Or you could have a secretary, for that matter.
That’s it—that’s the best solution for a writer. What does a
guy want with his arms and legs? He doesn’t need arms and
legs to write with. He needs security… peace… protection.
All those heroes who parade in wheelchairs—it’s too bad
they’re not writers. If you could only be sure, when you go
to war, that you’d have only your legs blown off… if you
could be sure of that I’d say let’s have a war tomorrow. I
wouldn’t give a fuck about the medals—they could keep the
medals. All I’d want is a good wheelchair and three meals a
day. Then I’d give them something to read, those pricks.”
The following day, at one-thirty, I call on Van Norden. It’s
his day off, or rather his night off. He has left word with Carl
that I am to help him move today.
I find him in a state of unusual depression. He hasn’t slept
a wink all night, he tells me. There’s something on his mind,
something that’s eating him up. It isn’t long before I
discover what it is; he’s been waiting impatiently for me to
arrive in order to spill it.
“That guy,” he begins, meaning Carl, “that guy’s an artist.
He described every detail minutely. He told it to me with
such accuracy that I know it’s all a goddamned lie… but I
can’t dismiss it from my mind. You know how my mind
works!”
He interrupts himself to inquire if Carl has told me the
whole story. There isn’t the least suspicion in his mind that
Carl may have told me one thing and him another. He

seems to think that the story was invented expressly to
torture him. He doesn’t seem to mind so much that it’s a
fabrication. It’s the “images” as he says, which Carl left in
his mind, that get him. The images are real, even if the
whole story is false. And besides, the fact that there actually
is a rich cunt on the scene and that Carl actually paid her a
visit, that’s undeniable. What actually happened is
secondary; he takes it for granted that Carl put the boots to
her. But what drives him desperate is the thought that what
Carl has described to him might have been possible.
“It’s just like that guy,” he says, “to tell me he put it to
her six or seven times. I know that’s a lot of shit and I don’t
mind that so much, but when he tells me that she hired a
carriage and drove him out to the Bois and that they used
the husband’s fur coat for a blanket, that’s too much. I
suppose he told you about the chauffeur waiting
respectfully… and listen, did he tell you how the engine
purred all the time? Jesus, he built that up wonderfully. It’s
just like him to think of a detail like that… it’s one of those
little details which makes a thing psychologically real… you
can’t get it out of your head afterward. And he tells it to me
so smoothly, so naturally. … I wonder, did he think it up in
advance or did it just pop out of his head like that,
spontaneously? He’s such a cute little liar you can’t walk
away from him… it’s like he’s writing you a letter, one of
those flowerpots that he makes overnight. I don’t
understand how a guy can write such letters… I don’t get
the mentality behind it… it’s a form of masturbation… what
do you think?”
But before I have an opportunity to venture an opinion, or
even to laugh in his face, Van Norden goes on with his
monologue.
“Listen, I suppose he told you everything… did he tell you
how he stood on the balcony in the moonlight and kissed
her? That sounds banal when you repeat it, but the way that

guy describes it… I can just see the little prick standing
there with the woman in his arms and already he’s writing
another letter to her, another flowerpot about the roof tops
and all that crap he steals from his French authors. That guy
never says a thing that’s original, I found that out. You have
to get a clue like… find out whom he’s been reading lately…
and it’s hard to do that because he’s so damned secretive.
Listen, if I didn’t know that you went there with him, I
wouldn’t believe that the woman existed. A guy like that
could write letters to himself. And yet he’s lucky… he’s so
damned tiny, so frail, so romantic looking, that women fall
for him now and then… they sort of adopt him… they feel
sorry for him, I guess. And some cunts like to receive
flowerpots… it makes them feel important. … But this
woman’s an intelligent woman, so he says. You ought to
know… you’ve seen her letters. What do you suppose a
woman like that saw in him? I can understand her falling for
the letters… but how do you suppose she felt when she saw
him?
“But listen, all that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at
is the way he tells it to me. You know how he embroiders
things… well, after that scene on the balcony—he gives me
that like an hors d’œuvre, you know—after that, so he says,
they went inside and he unbuttoned her pajamas. What are
you smiling for? Was he shitting me about that?”
“No, no! You’re giving it to me exactly as he told me. Go
ahead…”
“After that”—here Van Norden has to smile himself—”after
that, mind you, he tells me how she sat in the chair with her
legs up… not a stitch on… and he’s sitting on the floor
looking up at her, telling her how beautiful she looks… did
he tell you that she looked like a Matisse?… Wait a minute…
I’d like to remember exactly what he said. He had some
cute little phrase there about an odalisque… what the hell’s
an odalisque anyway? He said it in French, that’s why it’s

hard to remember the fucking thing… but it sounded good.
It sounded just like the sort of thing he might say. And she
probably thought it was original with him… I suppose she
thinks he’s a poet or something. But listen, all this is
nothing… I make allowance for his imagination. It’s what
happened after that that drives me crazy. All night long I’ve
been tossing about, playing with these images he left in my
mind. I can’t get it out of my head. It sounds so real to me
that if it didn’t happen I could strangle the bastard. A guy
has no right to invent things like that. Or else he’s diseased.
…
“What I’m getting at is that moment when, he says, he
got down on his knees and with those two skinny fingers of
his he spread her cunt open. You remember that? He says
she was sitting there with her legs dangling over the arms of
the chair and suddenly, he says, he got an inspiration. This
was after he had given her a couple of lays already… after
he had made that little spiel about Matisse. He gets down on
his knees—get this!—and with his two fingers… just the tips
of them, mind you… he opens the little petals… squish-
squish… just like that. A sticky little sound… almost
inaudible. Squish-squish! Jesus, I’ve been hearing it all night
long! And then he says—as if that weren’t enough for me—
then he tells me he buried his head in her muff. And when
he did that, so help me Christ, if she didn’t swing her legs
around his neck and lock him there. That finished me!
Imagine it! Imagine a fine, sensitive woman like that
swinging her legs around his neck! There’s something
poisonous about it. It’s so fantastic that it sounds
convincing. If he had only told me about the champagne
and the ride in the Bois and even that scene on the balcony
I could have dismissed it. But this thing is so incredible that
it doesn’t sound like a lie any more. I can’t believe that he
ever read anything like that anywhere, and I can’t see what
could have put the idea into his head unless there was some

truth in it. With a little prick like that, you know, anything
can happen. He may not have fucked her at all, but she may
have let him diddle her… you never know with these rich
cunts what they might expect you to do. …”
When he finally pulls himself out of bed and starts to
shave the afternoon is already well advanced. I’ve finally
succeeded in switching his mind to other things, to the
moving principally. The maid comes in to see if he’s ready—
he’s supposed to have vacated the room by noon. He’s just
in the act of slipping into his trousers. I’m a little surprised
that he doesn’t excuse himself, or turn away. Seeing him
standing there nonchalantly buttoning his fly as he gives her
orders I begin to titter. “Don’t mind her,” he says, throwing
her a look of supreme contempt, “she’s just a big sow. Give
her a pinch in the ass, if you like. She won’t say anything.”
And then addressing her, in English, he says. “Come here,
you bitch, put your hand on this!” At this I can’t restrain
myself any longer. I burst out laughing, a fit of hysterical
laughter which infects the maid also, though she doesn’t
know what it’s all about. The maid commences to take down
the pictures and the photographs, mostly of himself, which
line the walls. “You” he says, jerking his thumb, “come here!
Here’s something to remember me by”—ripping a
photograph off the wall—”when I go you can wipe your ass
with it. See,” he says, turning to me, “she’s a dumb bitch.
She wouldn’t look any more intelligent if I said it in French.”
The maid stands there with her mouth open; she is
evidently convinced that he is cracked. “Hey!” he yells at
her as if she were hard of hearing. “Hey, you! Yes, you! Like
this…!” and he takes the photograph, his own photograph,
and wipes his ass with it. “Comme ça! Savvy? You’ve got to
draw pictures for her,” he says, thrusting his lower lip
forward in absolute disgust.
He watches her helplessly as she throws his things into
the big valises. “Here, put these in too,” he says, handing

her a toothbrush and the douche bag. Half of his belongings
are lying on the floor. The valises are crammed full and
there is nowhere to put the paintings and the books and the
bottles that are half empty. “Sit down a minute,” he says.
“We’ve got plenty of time. We’ve got to think this thing out.
If you hadn’t come around I’d never have gotten out of here.
You see how helpless I am. Don’t let me forget to take the
bulbs out… they belong to me. That wastebasket belongs to
me too. They expect you to live like pigs, these bastards.”
The maid has gone downstairs to get some twine. … “Wait
till you see… she’ll charge me for the twine even if it’s only
three sous. They wouldn’t sew a button on your pants here
without charging for it. The lousy, dirty scroungers!” He
takes a bottle of Calvados from the mantelpiece and nods to
me to grab the other. “No use carrying these to the new
place. Let’s finish them off now. But don’t give her a drink!
That bastard, I wouldn’t leave her a piece of toilet paper. I’d
like to ruin the joint before I go. Listen… piss on the floor, if
you like. I wish I could take a crap in the bureau drawer.” He
feels so utterly disgusted with himself and everything else
that he doesn’t know what to do by way of venting his
feelings. He walks over to the bed with the bottle in his
hand and pulling back the covers he sprinkles Calvados over
the mattress. Not content with that he digs his heel into the
mattress. Unfortunately there’s no mud on his heels. Finally
he takes the sheet and cleans his shoes with it. “That’ll give
them something to do,” he mutters vengefully. Then, taking
a good swig, he throws his head back and gargles his throat,
and after he’s gargled it good and proper he spits it out on
the mirror. “There, you cheap bastards! Wipe that off when I
go!” He walks back and forth mumbling to himself. Seeing
his torn socks lying on the floor he picks them up and tears
them to bits. The paintings enrage him too. He picks one up
—a portrait of himself done by some Lesbian he knew and
he puts his foot through it. “That bitch! You know what she
had the nerve to ask me? She asked me to turn over my

cunts to her after I was through with them. She never gave
me a sou for writing her up. She thought I honestly admired
her work. I wouldn’t have gotten that painting out of her if I
hadn’t promised to fix her up with that cunt from Minnesota.
She was nuts about her… used to follow us around like a
dog in heat… we couldn’t get rid of the bitch! She bothered
the life out of me. I got so that I was almost afraid to bring a
cunt up here for fear that she’d bust in on me. I used to
creep up here like a burglar and lock the door behind me as
soon as I got inside. … She and that Georgia cunt—they
drive me nuts. The one is always in heat and the other is
always hungry. I hate fucking a woman who’s hungry. It’s
like you push a feed inside her and then you push it out
again. … Jesus, that reminds me of something… where did I
put that blue ointment? That’s important. Did you ever have
those things? It’s worse than having a dose. And I don’t
know where I got them from either. I’ve had so many
women up here in the last week or so I’ve lost track of them.
Funny too, because they all smelled so fresh. But you know
how it is. …”
The maid has piled his things up on the sidewalk. The
patron looks on with a surly air. When everything has been
loaded into the taxi there is only room for one of us inside.
As soon as we commence to roll Van Norden gets out a
newspaper and starts bundling up his pots and pans; in the
new place all cooking is strictly forbidden. By the time we
reach our destination all his luggage has come undone; it
wouldn’t be quite so embarrassing if the madam had not
stuck her head out of the doorway just as we rolled up. “My
God!” she exclaims, “what in the devil is all this? What does
it mean?” Van Norden is so intimidated that he can think of
nothing more to say than “C’est moi… c’est moi, madame!”
And turning to me he mumbles savagely: “That cluck! Did
you notice her face? She’s going to make it hard for me.”

The hotel lies back of a dingy passage and forms a
rectangle very much on the order of a modern penitentiary.
The bureau is large and gloomy, despite the brilliant
reflections from the tile walls. There are bird cages hanging
in the windows and little enamel signs everywhere begging
the guests in an obsolete language not to do this and not to
forget that. It is almost immaculately clean but absolutely
poverty-stricken, threadbare, woebegone. The upholstered
chairs are held together with wired thongs; they remind one
unpleasantly of the electric chair. The room he is going to
occupy is on the fifth floor. As we climb the stairs Van
Norden informs me that Maupassant once lived here. And in
the same breath remarks that there is a peculiar odor in the
hall. On the fifth floor a few windowpanes are missing; we
stand a moment gazing at the tenants across the court. It is
getting toward dinner time and people are straggling back
to their rooms with that weary, dejected air which comes
from earning a living honestly. Most of the windows are wide
open: the dingy rooms have the appearance of so many
yawning mouths. The occupants of the rooms are yawning
too, or else scratching themselves. They move about
listlessly and apparently without much purpose; they might
just as well be lunatics.
As we turn down the corridor toward room 57, a door
suddenly opens in front of us and an old hag with matted
hair and the eyes of a maniac peers out. She startles us so
that we stand transfixed. For a full minute the three of us
stand there powerless to move or even to make an
intelligent gesture. Back of the old hag I can see a kitchen
table and on it lies a baby all undressed, a puny little brat
no bigger than a plucked chicken. Finally the old one picks
up a slop pail by her side and makes a move forward. We
stand aside to let her pass and as the door closes behind
her the baby lets out a piercing scream. It is room 56, and

between 56 and 57 is the toilet where the old hag is
emptying her slops.
Ever since we have mounted the stairs Van Norden has
kept silence. But his looks are eloquent. When he opens the
door of 57 I have for a fleeting moment the sensation of
going mad. A huge mirror covered with green gauze and
tipped at an angle of 45 degrees hangs directly opposite the
entrance over a baby carriage which is filled with books. Van
Norden doesn’t even crack a smile; instead he walks
nonchalantly over to the baby carriage and picking up a
book begins to skim it through, much as a man would enter
the public library and go unthinkingly to the rack nearest to
hand. And perhaps this would not seem so ludicrous to me if
I had not espied at the same time a pair of handle bars
resting in the corner. They look so absolutely peaceful and
contented, as if they had been dozing there for years, that
suddenly it seems to me as if we had been standing in this
room, in exactly this position, for an incalculably long time,
that it was a pose we had struck in a dream from which we
never emerged, a dream which the least gesture, the wink
of an eye even, will shatter. But more remarkable still is the
remembrance that suddenly floats up of an actual dream
which occurred only the other night, a dream in which I saw
Van Norden in just such a corner as is occupied now by the
handle bars, only instead of the handle bars there was a
woman crouching with her legs drawn up. I see him
standing over the woman with that alert, eager look in his
eye which comes when he wants something badly. The
street in which this is going on is blurred—only the angle
made by the two walls is clear, and the cowering figure of
the woman. I can see him going at her in that quick, animal
way of his, reckless of what’s going on about him,
determined only to have his way. And a look in his eyes as
though to say—”you can kill me afterwards, but just let me
get it in… I’ve got to get it in!” And there he is, bent over

her, their heads knocking against the wall, he has such a
tremendous erection that it’s simply impossible to get it in
her. Suddenly, with that disgusted air which he knows so
well how to summon, he picks himself up and adjusts his
clothes. He is about to walk away when suddenly he notices
that his penis is lying on the sidewalk. It is about the size of
a sawed-off broomstick. He picks it up nonchalantly and
slings it under his arm. As he walks off I notice two huge
bulbs, like tulip bulbs, dangling from the end of the
broomstick, and I can hear him muttering to himself
“flowerpots… flowerpots.”
The garçon arrives panting and sweating. Van Norden
looks at him uncomprehendingly. The madam now marches
in and, walking straight up to Van Norden, she takes the
book out of his hand, thrusts it in the baby carriage, and,
without saying a word, wheels the baby carriage into the
hallway.
“This is a bughouse,” says Van Norden, smiling
distressedly. It is such a faint, indescribable smile that for a
moment the dream feeling comes back and it seems to me
that we are standing at the end of a long corridor at the end
of which is a corrugated mirror. And down this corridor,
swinging his distress like a dingy lantern, Van Norden
staggers, staggers in and out as here and there a door
opens and a hand yanks him, or a hoof pushes him out. And
the further off he wanders the more lugubrious is his
distress; he wears it like a lantern which the cyclists hold
between their teeth on a night when the pavement is wet
and slippery. In and out of the dingy rooms he wanders, and
when he sits down the chair collapses, when he opens his
valise there is only a toothbrush inside. In every room there
is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his
rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling
and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have
gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his

beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he’s so disgusted
with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits
with his big heels.
Meanwhile the luggage is being hauled in. And things
begin to look crazier even than before—particularly when he
attaches his exerciser to the bedstead and begins his
Sandow exercises. “I like this place,” he says, smiling at the
garçon. He takes his coat and vest off. The garçon is
watching him with a puzzled air; he has a valise in one hand
and the douche bag in the other. I’m standing apart in the
antechamber holding the mirror with the green gauze. Not a
single object seems to possess a practical use. The
antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a
barn. It is exactly the same sort of sensation which I get
when I enter the Comédie-Française or the Palais-Royal
Theatre; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms
and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in
armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass
cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it’s like
finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there’s
no room in the valise.
Climbing up the stairs, as I said a moment ago, he had
mentioned the fact that Maupassant used to live here. The
coincidence seems to have made an impression upon him.
He would like to believe that it was in this very room that
Maupassant gave birth to some of those gruesome tales on
which his reputation rests. “They lived like pigs, those poor
bastards,” he says. We are sitting at the round table in a
pair of comfortable old armchairs that have been trussed up
with thongs and braces; the bed is right beside us, so close
indeed that we can put our feet on it. The armoire stands in
a corner behind us, also conveniently within reach. Van
Norden has emptied his dirty wash on the table; we sit there
with our feet buried in his dirty socks and shirts and smoke
contentedly. The sordid-ness of the place seems to have

worked a spell on him: he is content here. When I get up to
switch on the light he suggests that we play a game of
cards before going out to eat. And so we sit there by the
window, with the dirty wash strewn over the floor and the
Sandow exerciser hanging from the chandelier, and we play
a few rounds of two-handed pinochle. Van Norden has put
away his pipe and packed a wad of snuff on the underside of
his lower lip. Now and then he spits out of the window, big
healthy gobs of brown juice which resound with a smack on
the pavement below. He seems content now.
“In America,” he says, “you wouldn’t dream of living in a
joint like this. Even when I was on the bum I slept in better
rooms than this. But here it seems natural—it’s like the
books you read. If I ever go back there I’ll forget all about
this life, just like you forget a bad dream. I’ll probably take
up the old life again just where I left off… if I ever get back.
Sometimes I lie in bed dreaming about the past and it’s so
vivid to me that I have to shake myself in order to realize
where I am. Especially when I have a woman beside me; a
woman can set me off better than anything. That’s all I want
of them—to forget myself. Sometimes I get so lost in my
reveries that I can’t remember the name of the cunt or
where I picked her up. That’s funny, eh? It’s good to have a
fresh warm body beside you when you wake up in the
morning. It gives you a clean feeling. You get spiritual like…
until they start pulling that mushy crap about love et cetera.
Why do all these cunts talk about love so much, can you tell
me that? A good lay isn’t enough for them apparently… they
want your soul too. …”
Now this word soul, which pops up frequently in Van
Norden’s soliloquies, used to have a droll effect upon me at
first. Whenever I heard the word soul from his lips I would
get hysterical; somehow it seemed like a false coin, more
particularly because it was usually accompanied by a gob of
brown juice which left a trickle down the corner of his

mouth. And as I never hesitated to laugh in his face it
happened invariably that when this little word bobbed up
Van Norden would pause just long enough for me to burst
into a cackle and then, as if nothing had happened, he
would resume his monologue, repeating the word more and
more frequently and each time with a more caressing
emphasis. It was the soul of him that women were trying to
possess—that he made clear to me. He has explained it over
and over again, but he comes back to it afresh each time
like a paranoiac to his obsession. In a sense Van Norden is
mad, of that I’m convinced. His one fear is to be left alone,
and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he
is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to
her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for
himself. “I try all sorts of things,” he explains to me. “I even
count sometimes, or I begin to think of a problem in
philosophy, but it doesn’t work. It’s like I’m two people, and
one of them is watching me all the time. I get so
goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself… and in a
way, that’s what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one
second like I obliterate myself. There’s not even one me
then… there’s nothing… not even the cunt. It’s like receiving
communion. Honest, I mean that. For a few seconds
afterward I have a fine spiritual glow… and maybe it would
continue that way indefinitely—how can you tell?—if it
weren’t for the fact that there’s a woman beside you and
then the douche bag and the water running… all those little
details that make you desperately self-conscious,
desperately lonely. And for that one moment of freedom you
have to listen to all that love crap… it drives me nuts
sometimes… I want to kick them out immediately… I do now
and then. But that doesn’t keep them away. They like it, in
fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after
you. There’s something perverse about women… they’re all
masochists at heart.”

“But what is it you want of a woman, then?” I demand.
He begins to mold his hands; his lower lip droops. He
looks completely frustrated. When eventually he succeeds
in stammering out a few broken phrases it’s with the
conviction that behind his words lies an overwhelming
futility. “I want to be able to surrender myself to a woman,”
he blurts out. “I want her to take me out of myself. But to do
that, she’s got to be better than I am; she’s got to have a
mind, not just a cunt. She’s got to make me believe that I
need her, that I can’t live without her. Find me a cunt like
that, will you? If you could do that I’d give you my job. I
wouldn’t care then what happened to me: I wouldn’t need a
job or friends or books or anything. If she could only make
me believe that there was something more important on
earth than myself. Jesus, I hate myself! But I hate these
bastardly cunts even more—because they’re none of them
any good.
“You think I like myself,” he continues. “That shows how
little you know about me. I know I’m a great guy. … I
wouldn’t have these problems if there weren’t something to
me. But what eats me up is that I can’t express myself.
People think I’m a cunt-chaser. That’s how shallow they are,
these high brows who sit on the terrasse all day chewing the
psychologic cud. … That’s not so bad, eh—psychologic cud?
Write it down for me. I’ll use it in my column next week. …
By the way, did you ever read Stekel? Is he any good? It
looks like nothing but case histories to me. I wish to Christ I
could get up enough nerve to visit an analyst… a good one,
I mean. I don’t want to see these little shysters with goatees
and frock coats, like your friend Boris. How do you manage
to tolerate those guys? Don’t they bore you stiff? You talk to
anybody, I notice. You don’t give a goddamn. Maybe you’re
right. I wish I weren’t so damned critical. But these dirty
little Jews who hang around the Dôme, Jesus, they give me
the creeps. They sound just like textbooks. If I could talk to

you every day maybe I could get things off my chest. You’re
a good listener. I know you don’t give a damn about me, but
you’re patient. And you don’t have any theories to exploit. I
suppose you put it all down afterward in that notebook of
yours. Listen, I don’t mind what you say about me, but don’t
make me out to be a cunt-chaser—it’s too simple. Some day
I’ll write a book about myself, about my thoughts. I don’t
mean just a piece of introspective analysis… I mean that I’ll
lay myself down on the operating table and I’ll expose my
whole guts… every goddamned thing. Has anybody ever
done that before?—What the hell are you smiling at? Does it
sound naïf?”
I’m smiling because whenever we touch on the subject of
this book which he is going to write some day things
assume an incongruous aspect. He has only to say “my
book” and immediately the world shrinks to the private
dimensions of Van Norden and Co. The book must be
absolutely original, absolutely perfect. That is why, among
other things, it is impossible for him to get started on it. As
soon as he gets an idea he begins to question it. He
remembers that Dostoevski used it, or Hamsun, or
somebody else. “I’m not saying that I want to be better than
them, but I want to be different,” he explains. And so,
instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after
another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not
going to tread on their private property. And the more he
reads the more disdainful he becomes. None of them are
satisfying; none of them arrive at that degree of perfection
which he has imposed on himself. And forgetting completely
that he has not written as much as a chapter he talks about
them condescendingly, quite as though there existed a shelf
of books bearing his name, books which everyone is familiar
with and the titles of which it is therefore superfluous to
mention. Though he has never overtly lied about this fact,
nevertheless it is obvious that the people whom he

buttonholes in order to air his private philosophy, his
criticism, and his grievances, take it for granted that behind
his loose remarks there stands a solid body of work.
Especially the young and foolish virgins whom he lures to
his room on the pretext of reading to them his poems, or on
the still better pretext of asking their advice. Without the
least feeling of guilt or self-consciousness he will hand them
a piece of soiled paper on which he has scribbled a few lines
—the basis of a new poem, as he puts it—and with absolute
seriousness demand of them an honest expression of
opinion. As they usually have nothing to give by way of
comment, wholly bewildered as they are by the utter
senselessness of the lines, Van Norden seizes the occasion
to expound to them his view of art, a view, needless to say,
which is spontaneously created to suit the event. So expert
has he become in this role that the transition from Ezra
Pound’s cantos to the bed is made as simply and naturally
as a modulation from one key to another; in fact, if it were
not made there would be a discord, which is what happens
now and then when he makes a mistake as regards those
nitwits whom he refers to as “push-overs.” Naturally,
constituted as he is, it is with reluctance that he refers to
these fatal errors of judgment. But when he does bring
himself to confess to an error of this kind it is with absolute
frankness; in fact, he seems to derive a perverse pleasure in
dwelling upon his inaptitude. There is one woman, for
example, whom he has been trying to make for almost ten
years now—first in America, and finally here in Paris. It is the
only person of the opposite sex with whom he has a cordial,
friendly relationship. They seem not only to like each other,
but to understand each other. At first it seemed to me that if
he could really make this creature his problem might be
solved. All the elements for a successful union were there—
except the fundamental one. Bessie was almost as unusual
in her way as himself. She had as little concern about giving
herself to a man as she has about the dessert which follows

the meal. Usually she singled out the object of her choice
and made the proposition herself. She was not bad-looking,
nor could one say that she was good-looking either. She had
a fine body, that was the chief thing—and she liked it, as
they say.
They were so chummy, these two, that sometimes, in
order to gratify her curiosity (and also in the vain hope of
inspiring her by his prowess), Van Norden would arrange to
hide her in his closet during one of his seances. After is was
over Bessie would emerge from her hiding place and they
would discuss the matter casually, that is to say, with an
almost total indifference to everything except “technique.”
Technique was one of her favorite terms, at least in those
discussions which I was privileged to enjoy. “What’s wrong
with my technique?” he would say. And Bessie would
answer: “You’re too crude. If you ever expect to make me
you’ve got to become more subtle.”
There was such a perfect understanding between them,
as I say, that often when I called for Van Norden at one-
thirty, I would find Bessie sitting on the bed, the covers
thrown back and Van Norden inviting her to stroke his
penis… “just a few silken strokes,” he would say, “so as I’ll
have the courage to get up.” Or else he would urge her to
blow on it, or failing that, he would grab hold of himself and
shake it like a dinner bell, the two of them laughing fit to
die. “I’ll never make this bitch,” he would say. “She has no
respect for me. That’s what I get for taking her into my
confidence.” And then abruptly he might add: “What do you
make of that blonde I showed you yesterday?” Talking to
Bessie, of course. And Bessie would jeer at him, telling him
he had no taste. “Aw, don’t give me that line,” he would say.
And then playfully, perhaps for the thousandth time,
because by now it had become a standing joke between
them—“Listen, Bessie, what about a quick lay? Just one little
lay… no.” And when this had passed off in the usual manner

he would add, in the same tone: “Well, what about him?
Why don’t you give him a lay?”
The whole point about Bessie was that she couldn’t, or
just wouldn’t, regard herself as a lay. She talked about
passion, as if it were a brand new word. She was passionate
about things, even a little thing like a lay. She had to put her
soul into it.
“I get passionate too sometimes,” Van Norden would say.
“Oh, you,” says Bessie. “You’re just a worn-out satyr. You
don’t know the meaning of passion. When you get an
erection you think you’re passionate.”
“All right, maybe it’s not passion… but you can’t get
passionate without having an erection, that’s true isn’t it?”
All this about Bessie, and the other women whom he
drags to his room day in and out, occupies my thoughts as
we walk to the restaurant. I have adjusted myself so well to
his monologues that without interrupting my own reveries I
make whatever comment is required automatically, the
moment I hear his voice die out. It is a duet, and like most
duets moreover in that one listens attentively only for the
signal which announces the advent of one’s own voice. As it
is his night off, and as I have promised to keep him
company, I have already dulled myself to his queries. I know
that before the evening is over I shall be thoroughly
exhausted; if I am lucky, that is, if I can worm a few francs
out of him on some pretext or other, I will duck him the
moment he goes to the toilet. But he knows my propensity
for slipping away, and, instead of being insulted, he simply
provides against the possibility by guarding his sous. If I ask
him for money to buy cigarettes he insists on going with me
to purchase them. He will not be left alone, not for a second.
Even when he has succeeded in grabbing off a woman, even
then he is terrified to be left alone with her. If it were
possible he would have me sit in the room while he puts on

the performance. It would be like asking me to wait while he
took a shave.
On his night off Van Norden generally manages to have at
least fifty francs in his pocket, a circumstance which does
not prevent him from making a touch whenever he
encounters a prospect. “Hello,” he says, “give me twenty
francs… I need it.” He has a way of looking panic-stricken at
the same time. And if he meets with a rebuff he becomes
insulting. “Well, you can buy a drink at least.” And when he
gets his drink he says more graciously—“Listen give me five
francs then… give me two francs” We go from bar to bar
looking for a little excitement and always accumulating a
few more francs.
At the Coupole we stumble into a drunk from the
newspaper. One of the upstairs guys. There’s just been an
accident at the office, he informs us. One of the
proofreaders fell down the elevator shaft. Not expected to
live.
At first Van Norden is shocked, deeply shocked. But when
he learns that it was Peckover, the Englishman, he looks
relieved. “The poor bastard,” he says, “he’s better off dead
than alive. He just got his false teeth the other day too. …”
The allusion to the false teeth moves the man upstairs to
tears. He relates in a slobbery way a little incident
connected with the accident. He is upset about it, more
upset about this little incident than about the catastrophe
itself. It seems that Peckover, when he hit the bottom of the
shaft, regained consciousness before anyone could reach
him. Despite the fact that his legs were broken and his ribs
busted, he had managed to rise to all fours and grope about
for his false teeth. In the ambulance he was crying out in his
delirium for the teeth he had lost. The incident was pathetic
and ludicrous at the same time. The guy from upstairs
hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep as he related it. It
was a delicate moment because with a drunk like that, one

false move and he’d crash a bottle over your skull. He had
never been particularly friendly with Peckover—as a matter
of fact, he had scarcely ever set foot in the proofreading
department: there was an invisible wall like between the
guys upstairs and the guys down below. But now, since he
had felt the touch of death, he wanted to display his
comradeship. He wanted to weep, if possible, to show that
he was a regular guy. And Joe and I, who knew Peckover well
and who knew also that he wasn’t worth a good goddamn,
even a few tears, we felt annoyed with this drunken
sentimentality. We wanted to tell him so too, but with a guy
like that you can’t afford to be honest; you have to buy a
wreath and go to the funeral and pretend that you’re
miserable. And you have to congratulate him too for the
delicate obituary he’s written. He’ll be carrying his delicate
little obituary around with him for months, praising the shit
out of himself for the way he handled the situation. We felt
all that, Joe and I, without saying a word to each other. We
just stood there and listened with a murderous, silent
contempt. And as soon as we could break away we did so;
we left him there at the bar blubbering to himself over his
Pernod.
Once out of his sight we began to laugh hysterically. The
false teeth! No matter what we said about the poor devil,
and we said some good things about him too, we always
came back to the false teeth. There are people in this world
who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders
them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more
ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end
with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to
discover anything tragic in their going. And since we didn’t
have to put on a false front we could laugh about the
incident to our heart’s content. We laughed all night about
it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust
for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to

persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine
fellow and that his death was a catastrophe. All sorts of
funny recollections came to our minds—the semicolons that
he overlooked and for which they bawled the piss out of
him. They made his life miserable with their fucking little
semicolons and the fractions which he always got wrong.
They were even going to fire him once because he came to
work with a boozy breath. They despised him because he
always looked so miserable and because he had eczema
and dandruff. He was just a nobody, as far as they were
concerned, but, now that he was dead, they would all chip in
lustily and buy him a huge wreath and they’d put his name
in big type in the obituary column. Anything to throw a little
reflection on themselves; they’d make him out to be a big
shit if they could. But unfortunately, with Peckover, there
was little they could invent about him. He was a zero, and
even the fact that he was dead wouldn’t add a cipher to his
name.
“There’s only one good aspect to it,” says Joe. “You may
get his job. And if you have any luck, maybe you’ll fall down
the elevator shaft and break your neck too. We’ll buy you a
nice wreath, I promise you that.”
Toward dawn we’re sitting on the terrasse of the Dôme.
We’ve forgotten about poor Peckover long ago. We’ve had a
little excitement at the Bal Nègre and Joe’s mind has slipped
back to the eternal preoccupation: cunt. It’s at this hour,
when his night off is almost concluded, that his restlessness
mounts to a fever pitch. He thinks of the women he passed
up earlier in the evening and of the steady ones he might
have had for the asking, if it weren’t that he was fed up with
them. He is reminded inevitably of his Georgia cunt—she’s
been hounding him lately, begging him to take her in, at
least until she can find herself a job. “I don’t mind giving her
a feed once in a while,” he says, “but I couldn’t take her on
as a steady thing… she’d ruin it for my other cunts.” What

gripes him most about her is that she doesn’t put on any
flesh. “It’s like taking a skeleton to bed with you,” he says.
“The other night I took her on—out of pity—and what do you
think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it
clean… not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a
woman who shaved her twat? It’s repulsive, ain’t it? And it’s
funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn’t look like a twat any
more: it’s like a dead clam or something.” He describes to
me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and
searched for his flashlight. “I made her hold it open and I
trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me. … it
was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all
about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously.
You’d imagine I’d never seen one before. And the more I
looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to
show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s
shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a
statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a
statue—that was by Rodin. You ought to see it some time…
she has her legs spread wide apart. … I don’t think there
was any head on it. Just a cunt you might say. Jesus, it
looked ghastly. The thing is this—they all look alike. When
you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts
of things: you give them an individuality like, which they
haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between
the legs and you get all steamed up about it—you don’t
even look at it half the time. You know it’s there and all you
think about is getting your ramrod inside; it’s as though
your penis did the thinking for you. It’s an illusion! You get
all burned up about nothing… about a crack with hair on it,
or without hair. It’s so absolutely meaningless that it
fascinated me to look at it. I must have studied it for ten
minutes or more. When you look at it that way, sort of
detached like, you get funny notions in your head. All that
mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—
just a blank. Wouldn’t it be funny if you found a harmonica

inside… or a calendar? But there’s nothing there… nothing
at all. It’s disgusting. It almost drove me mad…. Listen, do
you know what I did afterwards? I gave her a quick lay and
then I turned my back on her. Yeah, I picked up a book and I
read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad
book… but a cunt, it’s just sheer loss of time. …”
It just so happened that as he was concluding his speech
a whore gave us the eye. Without the slightest transition he
says to me abruptly: “Would you like to give her a tumble? It
won’t cost much… she’ll take the two of us on.” And without
waiting for a reply he staggers to his feet and goes over to
her. In a few minutes he comes back. “It’s all fixed,” he
says. “Finish your beer. She’s hungry. There’s nothing doing
any more at this hour… she’ll take the both of us for fifteen
francs. We’ll go to my room… it’ll be cheaper.”
On the way to the hotel the girl is shivering so that we
have to stop and buy her a coffee. She’s a rather gentle sort
of creature and not at all bad to look at. She evidently
knows Van Norden, knows there’s nothing to expect from
him but the fifteen francs. “You haven’t got any dough,” he
says, mumbling to me under his breath. As I haven’t a
centime in my pocket I don’t quite see the point of this, until
he bursts out: “For Christ’s sake, remember that we’re
broke. Don’t get tenderhearted when we get upstairs. She’s
going to ask you for a little extra—I know this cunt! I could
get her for ten francs, if I wanted to. There’s no use spoiling
them. …”
“Il est méchant, celui-là,” she says to me, gathering the
drift of his remarks in her dull way.
“Non, il n’est pas méchant, il est très gentil.”
She shakes her head laughingly. “Je le connais bien, ce
type.” And then she commences a hard luck story, about
the hospital and the back rent and the baby in the country.
But she doesn’t overdo it. She knows that our ears are

stopped; but the misery is there inside her, like a stone, and
there’s no room for any other thoughts. She isn’t trying to
make an appeal to our sympathies—she’s just shifting this
big weight inside her from one place to another. I rather like
her. I hope to Christ she hasn’t got a disease. …
In the room she goes about her preparations
mechanically. “There isn’t a crust of bread about by any
chance?” she inquires, as she squats over the bidet. Van
Norden laughs at this. “Here, take a drink,” he says, shoving
a bottle at her. She doesn’t want anything to drink; her
stomach’s already on the bum, she complains.
“That’s just a line with her,” says Van Norden. “Don’t let
her work on your sympathies. Just the same, I wish she’d
talk about something else. How the hell can you get up any
passion when you’ve got a starving cunt on your hands?”
Precisely! We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for
her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond
necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the
fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s
like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipated
nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it
over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his
arms, to say, “I’m fed up with it… I’m through.” No, there’s
fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn
about any more and which nobody is going to get in the end
anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of
things and rather than listen to one’s own voice, rather than
walk out: on the primal cause, one surrenders to the
situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the
more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he
behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and
suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers
pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on
their chest. Then one has the rest of his life to think about
the fifteen francs. One hasn’t any eyes or arms or legs, but

he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his days
about the fifteen francs which everybody has forgotten.
It’s exactly like a state of war—I can’t get it out of my
head. The way she works over me, to blow a spark of
passion into me, makes me think what a damned poor
soldier I’d be if I was ever silly enough to be trapped like this
and dragged to the front. I know for my part that I’d
surrender everything, honor included, in order to get out of
the mess. I haven’t any stomach for it, and that’s all there is
to it. But she’s got her mind set on the fifteen francs arid if I
don’t want to fight about it she’s going to make me fight.
But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any
fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you
can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to
death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us
who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a
little behind. My mind is on the peace treaty all the time. I
can’t forget that it was the fifteen francs which started all
the trouble. Fifteen francs! What does fifteen francs mean to
me, particularly since it’s not my fifteen francs?
Van Norden seems to have a more normal attitude about
it. He doesn’t care a rap about the fifteen francs either now;
it’s the situation itself which intrigues him. It seems to call
for a show of mettle—his manhood is involved. The fifteen
francs are lost, whether we succeed or not. There’s
something more involved—not just manhood perhaps, but
will. It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know
any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes
now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same,
and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has
admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or
even just his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and
slaughtering, he’d slaughter a million men rather than stop
and ask himself why.

As I watch Van Norden tackle her, it seems to me that I’m
looking at a machine whose cogs have slipped. Left to
themselves, they could go on this way forever, grinding and
slipping, without ever anything happening. Until a hand
shuts the motor off. The sight of them coupled like a pair of
goats without the least spark of passion, grinding and
grinding away for no reason except the fifteen francs,
washes away every bit of feeling I have except the inhuman
one of satisfying my curiosity. The girl is lying on the edge of
the bed and Van Norden is bent over her like a satyr with his
two feet solidly planted on the floor. I am sitting on a chair
behind him, watching their movements with a cool,
scientific detachment; it doesn’t matter to me if it should
last forever. It’s like watching one of those crazy machines
which throw the newspaper out, millions and billions and
trillions of them with their meaningless headlines. The
machine seems more sensible, crazy as it is, and more
fascinating to watch, than the human beings and the events
which produced it. My interest in Van Norden and the girl is
nil; if I could sit like this and watch every single performance
going on at this minute all over the world my interest would
be even less than nil. I wouldn’t be able to differentiate
between this phenomenon and the rain falling or a volcano
erupting. As long as that spark of passion is missing there is
no human significance in the performance. The machine is
better to watch. And these two are like a machine which has
slipped its cogs. It needs the touch of a human hand to set it
right. It needs a mechanic.
I get down on my knees behind Van Norden and I examine
the machine more attentively. The girl throws her head on
one side and gives me a despairing look. “It’s no use,” she
says. “It’s impossible.” Upon which Van Norden sets to work
with renewed energy, just like an old billy goat. He’s such an
obstinate cuss that he’ll break his horns rather than give up.

And he’s getting sore now because I’m tickling him in the
rump.
“For God’s sake, Joe, give it up! You’ll kill the poor girl.”
“Leave me alone,” he grunts. “I almost got it in that
time.”
The posture and the determined way in which he blurts
this out suddenly bring to my mind, for the second time, the
remembrance of my dream. Only now it seems as though
that broomstick, which he had so nonchalantly slung under
his arm, as he walked away, is lost forever. It is like the
sequel to the dream—the same Van Norden, but minus the
primal cause. He’s like a hero come back from the war, a
poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.
Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door
he enters the room is empty; whatever he puts in his mouth
leaves a bad taste. Everything is just the same as it was
before; the elements are unchanged, the dream is no
different than the reality. Only, between the time he went to
sleep and the time he woke up, his body was stolen. He’s
like a machine throwing out newspapers, millions and
billions of them every day, and the front page is loaded with
catastrophes, with riots, murders, explosions, collisions, but
he doesn’t feel anything. If somebody doesn’t turn the
switch off he’ll never know what it means to die; you can’t
die if your own proper body has been stolen. You can get
over a cunt and work away like a billy goat until eternity;
you can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will
create that spark of passion if there isn’t the intervention of
a human hand. Somebody has to put his hand into the
machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh
again. Somebody has to do this without hope of reward,
without concern over the fifteen francs; somebody whose
chest is so thin that a medal would make him hunchbacked.
And somebody has to throw a feed into a starving cunt

without fear of pushing it out again. Otherwise this show’ll
go on forever. There’s no way out of the mess. …
After sucking the boss’s ass for a whole week—it’s the
thing to do here—I managed to land Peckover’s job. He died
all right, the poor devil, a few hours after he hit the bottom
of the shaft. And just as I predicted, they gave him a fine
funeral, with solemn mass, huge wreaths, and everything.
Tout compris. And after the ceremonies they regaled
themselves, the upstairs guys, at a bistro. It was too bad
Peckover couldn’t have had just a little snack—he would
have appreciated it so much to sit with the men upstairs
and hear his own name mentioned so frequently.
I must say, right at the start, that I haven’t a thing to
complain about. It’s like being in a lunatic asylum, with
permission to masturbate for the rest of your life. The world
is brought right under my nose and all that is requested of
me is to punctuate the calamities. There is nothing in which
these slick guys upstairs do not put their fingers: no joy, no
misery passes unnoticed. They live among the hard facts of
life, reality, as it is called. It is the reality of a swamp and
they are the frogs who have nothing better to do than to
croak. The more they croak the more real life becomes.
Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman—these are
the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world.
A constant atmosphere of calamity. It’s marvelous. It’s as if
the barometer never changed, as if the flag were always at
half-mast. One can see now how the idea of heaven takes
hold of men’s consciousness, how it gains ground even
when all the props have been knocked from under it. There
must be another world beside this swamp in which
everything is dumped pell-mell. It’s hard to imagine what it
can be like, this heaven that men dream about. A frog’s
heaven, no doubt. Miasma, scum, pond lilies, stagnant
water. Sit on a lily pad unmolested and croak all day.
Something like that, I imagine.

They have a wonderful therapeutic effect upon me, these
catastrophes which I proofread. Imagine a state of perfect
immunity, a charmed existence, a life of absolute security in
the midst of poison bacilli. Nothing touches me, neither
earthquakes nor explosions nor riots nor famine nor
collisions nor wars nor revolutions. I am inoculated against
every disease, every calamity, every sorrow and misery. It’s
the culmination of a life of fortitude. Seated at my little
niche all the poisons which the world gives off each day
pass through my hands. Not even a fingernail gets stained. I
am absolutely immune. I am even better off than a
laboratory attendant, because there are no bad odors here,
just the smell of lead burning. The world can blow up—I’ll be
here just the same to put in a comma or a semicolon. I may
even touch a little overtime, for with an event like that
there’s bound to be a final extra. When the world blows up
and the final edition has gone to press the proofreaders will
quietly gather up all commas, semicolons, hyphens,
asterisks, brackets, parentheses, periods, exclamation
marks, etc. and put them in a little box over the editorial
chair. Comme ça tout est réglé. …
None of my companions seem to understand why I
appear so contented. They grumble all the time, they have
ambitions, they want to show their pride and spleen. A good
proofreader has no ambitions, no pride, no spleen. A good
proofreader is a little like God Almighty, he’s in the world
but not of it. He’s for Sundays only. Sunday is his night off.
On Sundays he steps down from his pedestal and shows his
ass to the faithful. Once a week he listens in on all the
private grief and misery of the world; it’s enough to last him
for the rest of the week. The rest of the week he remains in
the frozen winter marshes, an absolute, an impeccable
absolute, with only a vaccination mark to distinguish him
from the immense void.

The greatest calamity for a proofreader is the threat of
losing his job. When we get together in the break the
question that sends a shiver down our spines is: what’ll you
do if you lose your job? For the man in the paddock, whose
duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the
possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is
disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a
piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his
livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.
This life which, if I were still a man with pride, honor,
ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of
degradation, I welcome now, as an invalid welcomes death.
It’s a negative reality, just like death—a sort of heaven
without the pain and terror of dying. In this chthonian world
the only thing of importance is orthography and
punctuation. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the
calamity is, only whether it is spelled right. Everything is on
one level, whether it be the latest fashion for evening
gowns, a new battleship, a plague, a high explosive, an
astronomic discovery, a bank run, a railroad wreck, a bull
market, a hundred-to-one shot, an execution, a stick-up, an
assassination, or what. Nothing escapes the proofreader’s
eye, but nothing penetrates his bulletproof vest. To the
Hindoo Agha Mir, Madam Scheer (formerly Miss Esteve)
writes saying she is quite satisfied with his work.” I was
married June 6th and I thank you. We are very happy and I
hope that thanks to your power it will be so forever. I am
sending you by telegraph money order the sum of… to
reward you. …” The Hindoo Agha Mir foretells your future
and reads all your thoughts in a precise and inexplicable
way. He will advise you, will help you rid yourself of all your
worries and troubles of all kinds, etc. Call or write 20 Avenue
Mac-Mahon, Paris.
He reads all your thoughts in a marvelous way! I take it
that means without exception, from the most trivial

thoughts to the most shameless. He must have a lot of time
on his hands, this Agha Mir. Or does he only concentrate on
the thoughts of those who send money by telegraph money
order? In the same edition I notice a headline announcing
that “the universe is expanding so fast it may burst” and
underneath it is the photograph of a splitting headache. And
then there is a spiel about the pearl, signed Tecla. The
oyster produces both, he informs all and sundry. Both the
“wild” or Oriental pearl, and the “cultured” pearl. On the
same day, at the Cathedral of Trier, the Germans are
exhibiting the Coat of Christ; it’s the first time it’s been
taken out of the moth balls in forty-two years. Nothing said
about the pants and vest. In Salzburg, also the same day,
two mice were born in a man’s stomach, believe it or not. A
famous movie actress is shown with her legs crossed: she is
taking a rest in Hyde Park, and underneath a well-known
painter remarks “I’ll admit that Mrs. Coolidge has such
charm and personality that she would have been one of the
12 famous Americans, even had her husband not been
President.” From an interview with Mr. Humhal, of Vienna, I
glean the following…“Before I stop,” said Mr. Humhal, “I’d
like to say that faultless cut and fit does not suffice; the
proof of good tailoring is seen in the wearing. A suit must
bend to the body, yet keep its line when the wearer is
walking or sitting.” And whenever there is an explosion in a
coal mine—a British coal mine—notice please that the King
and Queen always send their condolences promptly, by
telegraph. And they always attend the important races,
though the other day, according to the copy, it was at the
Derby, I believe, “heavy rains began to fall, much to the
surprise of the King and Queen.” More heart-rending,
however, is an item like this: “It is claimed in Italy that the
persecutions are not against the Church, but nevertheless
they are conducted against the most exquisite parts of the
Church. It is claimed that they are not against the Pope, but
they are against the very heart and eyes of the Pope.”

I had to travel precisely all around the world to find just
such a comfortable, agreeable niche as this. It seems
incredible almost. How could I have foreseen, in America,
with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you
pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my
temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes? Over
there you think of nothing but becoming President of the
United States some day. Potentially every man is
Presidential timber. Here it’s different. Here every man is
potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it
is an accident, a miracle. The chances are a thousand to one
that you will never leave your native village. The chances
are a thousand to one that you’ll have your legs shot off or
your eyes blown out. Unless the miracle happens and you
find yourself a general or a rear admiral.
But it’s just because the chances are all against you, just
because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.
Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. The
barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast.
You wear a piece of black crepe on your arm, you have a
little ribbon in your buttonhole, and, if you are lucky enough
to afford it, you buy yourself a pair of artificial lightweight
limbs, aluminum preferably. Which does not prevent you
from enjoying an apéritif or looking at the animals in the zoo
or flirting with the vultures who sail up and down the
boulevards always on the alert for fresh carrion. Time
passes. If you’re a stranger and your papers are in order you
can expose yourself to infection without fear of being
contaminated. It is better, if possible, to have a
proofreader’s job. Comme ça, tout s’arrange. That means,
that if you happen to be strolling home at three in the
morning and you are intercepted by the bicycle cops, you
can snap your fingers at them. In the morning, when the
market is in swing, you can buy Belgian eggs, at fifty
centimes apiece. A proofreader doesn’t get up usually until

noon, or a little after. It’s well to choose a hotel near a
cinema, because if you have a tendency to oversleep the
bells will wake you up in time for the matinee. Or if you
can’t find a hotel near a cinema, choose one near a
cemetery, it comes to the same thing. Above all, never
despair. Il ne faut jamais désespérer.
Which is what I try to din into Carl and Van Norden every
night. A world without hope, but no despair. It’s as though I
had been converted to a new religion, as though I were
making an annual novena every night to Our Lady of Solace.
I can’t imagine what there would be to gain if I were made
editor of the paper, or even President of the United States.
I’m up a blind alley, and it’s cosy and comfortable. With a
piece of copy in my hand I listen to the music around me,
the hum and drone of voices, the tinkle of the linotype
machines, as if there were a thousand silver bracelets
passing through a wringer; now and then a rat scurries past
our feet or a cockroach descends the wall in front of us,
moving nimbly and gingerly on his delicate legs. The events
of the day are slid under your nose, quietly,
unostentatiously, with, now and then, a by-line to mark the
presence of a human hand, an ego, a touch of vanity. The
procession passes serenely, like a cortege entering the
cemetery gates. The paper under the copy desk is so thick
that it almost feels like a carpet with a soft nap. Under Van
Norden’s desk it is stained with brown juice. Around eleven
o’clock the peanut vendor arrives, a half-wit of an Armenian
who is also content with his lot in life.
Now and then I get a cablegram from Mona saying that
she’s arriving on the next boat. “Letter following,” it always
says. It’s been going on like this for nine months, but I never
see her name in the list of boat arrivals, nor does the garçon
ever bring me a letter on a silver platter. I haven’t any more
expectations in that direction either. If she ever does arrive
she can look for me downstairs, just behind the lavatory.

She’ll probably tell me right away that it’s unsanitary. That’s
the first thing that strikes an American woman about Europe
—that it’s unsanitary. Impossible for them to conceive of a
paradise without modern plumbing. If they find a bedbug
they want to write a letter immediately to the chamber of
commerce. How am I ever going to explain to her that I’m
contented here? She’ll say I’ve become a degenerate. I
know her line from beginning to end. She’ll want to look for
a studio with a garden attached—and a bathtub to be sure.
She wants to be poor in a romantic way. I know her. But I’m
prepared for her this time.
There are days, nevertheless, when the sun is out and I
get off the beaten path and think about her hungrily. Now
and then, despite my grim satisfaction, I get to thinking
about another way of life, get to wondering if it would make
a difference having a young, restless creature by my side.
The trouble is I can hardly remember what she looks like,
nor even how it feels to have my arms around her.
Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen
into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost
their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time-
bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire. If I try to recall my life
in New York I get a few splintered fragments, nightmarish
and covered with verdigris. It seems as if my own proper
existence had come to an end somewhere, just where
exactly I can’t make out. I’m not an American any more, nor
a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian. I
haven’t any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds,
any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I’m neither for nor
against. I’m a neutral.
When we walk home of a night, the three of us, it often
happens after the first spasms of disgust that we get to
talking about the condition of things with that enthusiasm
which only those who bear no active part in life can muster.
What seems strange to me sometimes, when I crawl into

bed, is that all this enthusiasm is engendered just to kill
time, just to annihilate the three-quarters of an hour which it
requires to walk from the office to Montparnasse. We might
have the most brilliant, the most feasible ideas for the
amelioration of this or that, but there is no vehicle to hitch
them to. And what is more strange is that the absence of
any relationship between ideas and living causes us no
anguish, no discomfort. We have become so adjusted that, if
tomorrow we were ordered to walk on our hands, we would
do so without the slightest protest. Provided, of course, that
the paper came out as usual. And that we touched our pay
regularly. Otherwise nothing matters. Nothing. We have
become Orientalized. We have become coolies, white-collar
coolies, silenced by a handful of rice each day. A special
feature in American skulls, I was reading the other day, is
the presence of the epactal bone, or os Incae, in the occiput.
The presence of this bone, so the savant went on to say, is
due to a persistence of the transverse occipital suture which
is usually closed in fetal life. Hence it is a sign of arrested
development and indicative of an inferior race. “The
average cubical capacity of the American skull,” so he went
on to say, “falls below that of the white, and rises above
that of the black race. Taking both sexes, the Parisians of
today have a cranial capacity of 1,448 cubic centimeters;
the Negroes 1,344 centimeters; the American Indians
1,376.” From all of which I deduce nothing because I am an
American and not an Indian. But it’s cute to explain things
that way, by a bone, an os Incae, for example. It doesn’t
disturb his theory at all to admit that single examples of
Indian skulls have yielded the extraordinary capacity of
1,920 cubic centimeters, a cranial capacity not exceeded in
any other race. What I note with satisfaction is that the
Parisians, of both sexes, seem to have a normal cranial
capacity. The transverse occipital suture is evidently not so
persistent with them. They know how to enjoy an apéritif
and they don’t worry if the houses are unpainted. There’s

nothing extraordinary about their skulls, so far as cranial
indices go. There must be some other explanation for the
art of living which they have brought to such a degree of
perfection.
At Monsieur Paul’s, the bistro across the way, there is a
back room reserved for the newspapermen where we can
eat on credit. It is a pleasant little room with sawdust on the
floor and flies in season and out. When I say that it is
reserved for the newspapermen I don’t mean to imply that
we eat in privacy; on the contrary, it means that we have
the privilege of associating with the whores and pimps who
form the more substantial element of Monsier Paul’s clientle.
The arrangement suits the guys upstairs to a T, because
they’re always on the lookout for tail, and even those who
have a steady little French girl are not averse to making a
switch now and then. The principal thing is not to get a
dose; at times it would seem as if an epidemic had swept
the office, or perhaps it might be explained by the fact that
they all sleep with the same woman. Anyhow, it’s gratifying
to observe how miserable they can look when they are
obliged to sit beside a pimp who, despite the little hardships
of his profession, lives a life of luxury by comparison.
I’m thinking particularly now of one tall, blonde fellow
who delivers the Havas messages by bicycle. He is always a
little late for his meal, always perspiring profusely and his
face covered with grime. He has a fine, awkward way of
strolling in, saluting everybody with two fingers and making
a beeline for the sink which is just between the toilet and
the kitchen. As he wipes his face he gives the edibles a
quick inspection; if he sees a nice steak lying on the slab he
picks it up and sniffs it, or he will dip the ladle into the big
pot and try a mouthful of soup. He’s like a fine bloodhound,
his nose to the ground all the time. The preliminaries over,
having made peepee and blown his nose vigorously, he
walks nonchalantly over to his wench and gives her a big,

smacking kiss together with an affectionate pat on the
rump. Her, the wench, I’ve never seen look anything but
immaculate—even at three a.m., after an evening’s work.
She looks exactly as if she had just stepped out of a Turkish
bath. It’s a pleasure to look at such healthy brutes, to see
such repose, such affection, such appetite as they display.
It’s the evening meal I’m speaking of now, the little snack
that she takes before entering upon her duties. In a little
while she will be obliged to take leave of her big blonde
brute, to flop somewhere on the boulevard and sip her
digestif. If the job is irksome or wearing or exhaustive, she
certainly doesn’t show it. When the big fellow arrives,
hungry as a wolf, she puts her arms around him and kisses
him hungrily—his eyes, nose, cheeks, hair, the back of his
neck… she’d kiss his ass if it could be done publicly. She’s
grateful to him, that’s evident. She’s no wage slave. All
through the meal she laughs convulsively. You wouldn’t
think she had a care in the world. And now and then, by way
of affection, she gives him a resounding slap in the face,
such a whack as would knock a proofreader spinning.
They don’t seem to be aware of anything but themselves
and the food that they pack away in shovelsful. Such perfect
contentment, such harmony, such mutual understanding, it
drives Van Norden crazy to watch them. Especially when she
slips her hand in the big fellow’s fly and caresses it, to which
he generally responds by grabbing her teat and squeezing it
playfully.
There is another couple who arrive usually about the
same time and they behave just like two married people.
They have their spats, they wash their linen in public and
after they’ve made things disagreeable for themselves and
everybody else, after threats and curses and reproaches
and recriminations, they make up for it by billing and
cooing, just like a pair of turtle doves. Lucienne, as he calls
her, is a heavy platinum blonde with a cruel, saturnine air.

She has a full underlip which she chews venomously when
her temper runs away with her. And a cold, beady eye, a
sort of faded china blue, which makes him sweat when she
fixes him with it. But she’s a good sort, Lucienne, despite
the condor-like profile which she presents to us when the
squabbling begins. Her bag is always full of dough, and if
she deals it out cautiously, it is only because she doesn’t
want to encourage him in his bad habits. He has a weak
character; that is, if one takes Lucienne’s tirades seriously.
He will spend fifty francs of an evening while waiting for her
to get through. When the waitress comes to take his order
he has no appetite. “Ah, you’re not hungry again!” growls
Lucienne. “Humpf! You were waiting for me, I suppose, on
the Faubourg Montmartre. You had a good time, I hope,
while I slaved for you. Speak, imbecile, where were you?”
When she flares up like that, when she gets enraged, he
looks up at her timidly and then, as if he had decided that
silence was the best course, he lets his head drop and he
fiddles with his napkin. But this little gesture, which she
knows so well and which of course is secretly pleasing to her
because she is convinced now that he is guilty, only
increases Lucienne’s anger. “Speak, imbecile!” she shrieks.
And with a squeaky, timid little voice he explains to her
woefully that while waiting for her he got so hungry that he
was obliged to stop off for a sandwich and a glass of beer. It
was just enough to ruin his appetite—he says it dolefully,
though it’s apparent that food just now is the least of his
worries. “But”—and he tries to make his voice sound more
convincing—“I was waiting for you all the time,” he blurts
out.
“Liar!” she screams. “Liar! Ah, fortunately, I too am a
liar… a good liar. You make me ill with your petty little lies.
Why don’t you tell me a big lie?”
He hangs his head again and absent-mindedly he gathers
a few crumbs and puts them to his mouth. Whereupon she

slaps his hand. “Don’t do that! You make me tired. You’re
such an imbecile. Liar! Just you wait! I have more to say. I
am a liar too, but I am not an imbecile.”
In a little while, however, they are sitting close together,
their hands locked, and she is murmuring softly: “Ah, my
little rabbit, it is hard to leave you now. Come here, kiss me!
What are you going to do this evening? Tell me the truth, my
little one. … I am sorry that I have such an ugly temper.” He
kisses her timidly, just like a little bunny with long pink ears;
gives her a little peck on the lips as if he were nibbling a
cabbage leaf. And at the same time his bright round eyes
fall caressingly on her purse which is lying open beside her
on the bench. He is only waiting for the moment when he
can graciously give her the slip; he is itching to get away, to
sit down in some quiet café on the Rue du Faubourg
Montmartre.
I know him, the innocent little devil, with his round,
frightened eyes of a rabbit. And I know what a devil’s street
is the Faubourg Montmartre with its brass plates and rubber
goods, the lights twinkling all night and sex running through
the street like a sewer. To walk from the Rue Lafayette to the
boulevard is like running the gauntlet; they attach
themselves to you like barnacles, they eat into you like ants,
they coax, wheedle, cajole, implore, beseech, they try it out
in German, English, Spanish, they show you their torn hearts
and their busted shoes, and long after you’ve chopped the
tentacles away, long after the fizz and sizzle has died out,
the fragrance of the lavabo clings to your nostrils—it is the
odor of the Parfum de Danse whose effectiveness is
guaranteed only for a distance of twenty centimeters. One
could piss away a whole lifetime in that little stretch
between the boulevard and the Rue Lafayette. Every bar is
alive, throbbing, the dice loaded; the cashiers are perched
like vultures on their high stools and the money they handle
has a human stink to it. There is no equivalent in the

Banque de France for the blood money that passes currency
here, the money that glistens with human sweat, that
passes like a forest fire from hand to hand and leaves
behind it a smoke and stench. A man who can walk through
the Faubourg Montmartre at night without panting or
sweating, without a prayer or a curse on his lips, a man like
that has no balls, and if he has, then he ought to be
castrated.
Supposing the timid little rabbit does spend fifty francs of
an evening while waiting for his Lucienne? Supposing he
does get hungry and buy a sandwich and a glass of beer, or
stop and chat with somebody else’s trollop? You think he
ought to be weary of that round night after night? You think
it ought to weigh on him, oppress him, bore him to death?
You don’t think that a pimp is inhuman, I hope? A pimp has
his private grief and misery too, don’t you forget. Perhaps
he would like nothing better than to stand on the corner
every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them
piddle. Perhaps he would like it if, when he opened the door,
he would see her there reading the Paris-Soir, her eyes
already a little heavy with sleep. Perhaps it isn’t so
wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste
another man’s breath. Better maybe to have only three
francs in your pocket and a pair of white dogs that piddle on
the corner than to taste those bruised lips. Bet you, when
she squeezes him tight, when she begs for that little
package of love which only he knows how to deliver, bet you
he fights like a thousand devils to pump it up, to wipe out
that regiment that has marched between her legs. Maybe
when he takes her body and practices a new tune, maybe it
isn’t all passion and curiosity with him, but a fight in the
dark, a fight single-handed against the army that rushed the
gates, the army that walked over her, trampled her, that left
her with such a devouring hunger that not even a Rudolph
Valentino could appease. When I listen to the reproaches

that are leveled against a girl like Lucienne, when I hear her
being denigrated or despised because she is cold and
mercenary, because she is too mechanical, or because she’s
in too great a hurry, or because this or because that, I say to
myself, hold on there bozo, not so fast! Remember that
you’re far back in the procession; remember that a whole
army corps has laid siege to her, that she’s been laid waste,
plundered and pillaged. I say to myself, listen, bozo, don’t
begrudge the fifty francs you hand her because you know
her pimp is pissing it away in the Faubourg Montmartre. It’s
her money and her pimp. It’s blood money. It’s money that’ll
never be taken out of circulation because there’s nothing in
the Banque de France to redeem it with.
That’s how I think about it often when I’m seated in my
little niche juggling the Havas reports or untangling the
cables from Chicago, London and Montreal. In between the
rubber and silk markets and the Winnipeg grains there
oozes a little of the fizz and sizzle of the Faubourg
Montmartre. When the bonds go weak and spongy and the
pivotals balk and the volatiles effervesce, when the grain
market slips and slides and the bulls commence to roar,
when every fucking calamity, every ad, every sport item
and fashion article, every boat arrival, every travelogue,
every tag of gossip has been punctuated, checked, revised,
pegged and wrung through the silver bracelets, when I hear
the front page being hammered into whack and see the
frogs dancing around like drunken squibs, I think of Lucienne
sailing down the boulevard with her wings outstretched, a
huge silver condor suspended over the sluggish tide of
traffic, a strange bird from the tips of the Andes with a rose-
white belly and a tenacious little knob. Sometimes I walk
home alone and I follow her through the dark streets, follow
her through the court of the Louvre, over the Pont des Arts,
through the arcade, through the fents and slits, the
somnolence, the drugged whiteness, the grill of the

Luxembourg, the tangled boughs, the snores and groans,
the green slats, the strum and tinkle, the points of the stars,
the spangles, the jetties, the blue and white striped awnings
that she brushed with the tips of her wings.
In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan
and crumpled; along the beach at Montparnasse the water
lilies bend and break. When the tide is on the ebb and only
a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the muck, the
Dôme looks like a shooting gallery that’s been struck by a
cyclone. Everything is slowly dribbling back to the sewer. For
about an hour there is a deathlike calm during which the
vomit is mopped up. Suddenly the trees begin to screech.
From one end of the boulevard to the other a demented
song rises up. It is like the signal that announces the close
of the exchange. What hopes there were are swept up. The
moment has come to void the last bagful of urine. The day
is sneaking in like a leper. …
One of the things to guard against when you work nights
is not to break your schedule; if you don’t get to bed before
the birds begin to screech it’s useless to go to bed at all.
This morning, having nothing better to do, I visited the
Jardin des Plantes. Marvelous pelicans here from
Chapultepec and peacocks with studded fans that look at
you with silly eyes. Suddenly it began to rain.
Returning to Montparnasse in the bus I noticed a little
French woman opposite me who sat stiff and erect as if she
were getting ready to preen herself. She sat on the edge of
the seat as if she feared to crush her gorgeous tail.
Marvelous, I thought, if suddenly she shook herself and from
her derrière there sprung open a huge studded fan with long
silken plumes.
At the Café de l’Avenue, where I stop for a bite, a woman
with a swollen stomach tries to interest me in her condition.
She would like me to go to a room with her and while away

an hour or two. It is the first time I have ever been
propositioned by a pregnant woman: I am almost tempted
to try it. As soon as the baby is born and handed over to the
authorities she will go back to her trade, she says. She
makes hats. Observing that my interest is waning she takes
my hand and puts it on her abdomen. I feel something
stirring inside. It takes my appetite away.
I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual
provender. As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye
or a leg she goes on the loose. In America she’d starve to
death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation.
Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or
a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural
homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an
added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.
I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to
the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop
of juice has been squeezed out by the machine—the
martyrs of modern progress. It is this mass of bones and
collar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh
on.
It is only later, in the afternoon, when I find myself in an
art gallery on the Rue de Sèze, surrounded by the men and
women of Matisse, that I am drawn back again to the proper
precincts of the human world. On the threshold of that big
hall whose walls are now ablaze, I pause a moment to
recover from the shock which one experiences when the
habitual gray of the world is rent asunder and the color of
life splashes forth in song and poem. I find myself in a world
so natural, so complete, that I am lost. I have the sensation
of being immersed in the very plexus of life, focal from
whatever place, position or attitude I take my stance. Lost
as when once I sank into the quick of a budding grove and
seated in the dining room of that enormous world of Balbec,
I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those

interior stills which manifest their presence through the
exorcism of sight and touch. Standing on the threshold of
that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the
power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so
deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself,
are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable
of transforming the negative reality of life into the
substantial and significant outlines of art. Only those who
can admit the light into their gizzards can translate what is
there in the heart. Vividly now I recall how the glint and
sparkle of light caroming from the massive chandeliers
splintered and ran blood, flecking the tips of the waves that
beat monotonously on the dull gold outside the windows. On
the beach, masts and chimneys interlaced, and like a
fuliginous shadow the figure of Albertine gliding through the
surf, fusing into the mysterious quick and prism of a
protoplasmic realm, uniting her shadow to the dream and
harbinger of death. With the close of day, pain rising like a
mist from the earth, sorrow closing in, shuttering the
endless vista of sea and sky. Two waxen hands lying
listlessly on the bedspread and along the pale veins the
fluted murmur of a shell repeating the legend of its birth.
In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle
of human flesh which refused the consummation of death.
The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the
miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a
greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into
hungry seeing mouths. By whatever vision one passes there
is the odor and the sound of voyage. It is impossible to gaze
at even a corner of his dreams without feeling the lift of the
wave and the cool of flying spray. He stands at the helm
peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio of time. Into
what distant corners has he not thrown his long, slanting
gaze? Looking down the vast promontory of his nose he has
beheld everything—the Cordilleras falling away into the

Pacific, the history of the Diaspora done in vellum, shutters
fluting the froufrou of the beach, the piano curving like a
conch, corollas giving out diapasons of light, chameleons
squirming under the book press, seraglios expiring in oceans
of dust, music issuing like fire from the hidden
chromosphere of pain, spore and madrepore fructifying the
earth, navels vomiting their bright spawn of anguish. … He
is a bright sage, a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the
brush, removes the ugly scaffold to which the body of man
is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life. He it is, if any
man today possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve
the human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an
harmonious line in order to detect the rhythm and murmur
of the blood, who takes the light that has been refracted
inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of color. Behind the
minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the
invisible pattern; he announces his discoveries in the
metaphysical pigment of space. No searching for formulae,
no crucifixion of ideas, no compulsion other than to create.
Even as the world goes to smash there is one man who
remains at the core, who becomes more solidly fixed and
anchored, more centrifugal as the process of dissolution
quickens.
More and more the world resembles an entomologist’s
dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has
shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-
blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse
sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn
belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch
by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are
smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day,
when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore.
As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows
blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there
articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose,

at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds
like a broken rectum.
At the very hub of this wheel which is falling apart, is
Matisse. And he will keep on rolling until everything that has
gone to make up the wheel has disintegrated. He has
already rolled over a goodly portion of the globe, over Persia
and India and China, and like a magnet he has attached to
himself microscopic particles from Kurd, Baluchistan,
Timbuktu, Somaliland, Angkor, Tierra del Fuego. The
odalisques he has studded with malachite and jasper, their
flesh veiled with a thousand eyes, perfumed eyes dipped in
the sperm of whales. Wherever a breeze stirs there are
breasts as cool as jelly, white pigeons come to flutter and
rut in the ice-blue veins of the Himalayas.
The wallpaper with which the men of science have
covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand
whorehouse which they have made of life requires no
decoration; it is essential only that the drains function
adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the
balls in America, is finished. To fathom the new reality it is
first necessary to dismantle the drains, to lay open the
gangrened ducts which compose the genitourinary system
that supplies the excreta of art. The odor of the day is
permanganate and formaldehyde. The drains are clogged
with strangled embryos.
The world of Matisse is still beautiful in an old-fashioned
bedroom way. There is not a ball bearing in evidence, nor a
boiler plate, nor a piston, nor a monkey wrench. It is the
same old world that went gaily to the Bois in the pastoral
days of wine and fornication. I find it soothing and refreshing
to move amongst these creatures with live, breathing pores
whose background is stable and solid as light itself. I feel it
poignantly when I walk along the Boulevard de la Madeleine
and the whores rustle beside me, when just to glance at
them causes me to tremble. Is it because they are exotic or

well-nourished? No, it is rare to find a beautiful woman
along the Boulevard de la Madeleine. But in Matisse, in the
exploration of his brush, there is the trembling glitter of a
world which demands only the presence of the female to
crystallize the most fugitive aspirations. To come upon a
woman offering herself outside a urinal, where there are
advertised cigarette papers, rum, acrobats, horse races,
where the heavy foliage of the trees breaks the heavy mass
of walls and roofs, is an experience that begins where the
boundaries of the known world leave off. In the evening now
and then, skirting the cemetery walls, I stumble upon the
phantom odalisques of Matisse fastened to the trees, their
tangled manes drenched with sap. A few feet away,
removed by incalculable eons of time, lies the prone and
mummy-swathed ghost of Baudelaire, of a whole world that
will belch no more. In the dusky corners of cafés are men
and women with hands locked, their loins slather-flecked;
nearby stands the garçon with his apron full of sous, waiting
patiently for the entr’acte in order to fall upon his wife and
gouge her. Even as the world falls apart the Paris that
belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms,
the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees
tangled like hair. On its wobbly axle the wheel rolls steadily
downhill; there are no brakes, no ball bearings, no balloon
tires. The wheel is falling apart, but the revolution is intact.
…

Out of a clear sky there comes one day a letter from Boris
whom I have not seen for months and months. It is a
strange document and I don’t pretend to understand it all
clearly. “What happened between us—at any rate, as far as I
go—is that you touched me, touched my life, that is, at the
one point where I am still alive: my death. By the emotional
flow I went through another immersion. I lived again, alive.
No longer by reminiscence, as I do with others, but alive.”
That’s how it began. Not a word of greeting, no date, no
address. Written in a thin, pompous scrawl on ruled paper
torn out of a blank book. “That is why, whether you like me
or not—deep down I rather think you hate me—you are very
close to me. By you I know how I died: I see myself dying
again: I am dying. That is something. More than to be dead
simply. That may be the reason why I am so afraid to see
you: you may have played the trick on me, and died. Things
happen so fast nowadays.”
I’m reading it over, line by line, standing by the stones. It
sounds nutty to me, all this palaver about life and death and
things happening so fast. Nothing is happening that I can
see, except the usual calamities on the front page. He’s
been living all by himself for the last six months, tucked
away in a cheap little room—probably holding telepathic
communication with Cronstadt. He talks about the line
falling back, the sector evacuated, and so on and so forth,
as though he were dug into a trench and writing a report to
headquarters. He probably had his frock coat on when he
sat down to pen this missive, and he probably rubbed his
hands a few times as he used to do when a customer was
calling to rent the apartment. “The reason I wanted you to
commit suicide…” he begins again. At that I burst out
laughing. He used to walk up and down with one hand stuck

in the tail flap of his frock coat at the Villa Borghese, or at
Cronstadt’s—wherever there was deck space, as it were—
and reel off this nonsense about living and dying to his
heart’s content. I never understood a word of it, I must
confess, but it was a good show and, being a Gentile, I was
naturally interested in what went on in that menagerie of a
brainpan. Sometimes he would he on his couch full length,
exhausted by the surge of ideas that swept through his
noodle. His feet just grazed the bookrack where he kept his
Plato and Spinoza—he couldn’t understand why I had no use
for them. I must say he made them sound interesting,
though what it was all about I hadn’t the least idea.
Sometimes I would glance at a volume furtively, to check up
on these wild ideas which he imputed to them—but the
connection was frail, tenuous. He had a language all his
own, Boris, that is, when I had him alone; but when I
listened to Cronstadt it seemed to me that Boris had
plagiarized his wonderful ideas. They talked a sort of higher
mathematics, these two. Nothing of flesh and blood ever
crept in; it was weird, ghostly, ghoulishly abstract. When
they got on to the dying business it sounded a little more
concrete: after all, a cleaver or a meat ax has to have a
handle. I enjoyed those sessions immensely. It was the first
time in my life that death had ever seemed fascinating to
me—all these abstract deaths which involved a bloodless
sort of agony. Now and then they would compliment me on
being alive, but in such a way that I felt embarrassed. They
made me feel that I was alive in the nineteenth century, a
sort of atavistic remnant, a romantic shred, a soulful
Pithecanthropus erectus. Boris especially seemed to get a
great kick out of touching me; he wanted me to be alive so
that he could die to his heart’s content. You would think that
all those millions in the street were nothing but dead cows
the way he looked at me and touched me. But the letter…
I’m forgetting the letter. …

“The reason why I wanted you to commit suicide that
evening at the Cronstadts’, when Moldorf became God, was
that I was very close to you then. Perhaps closer than I shall
ever be. And I was afraid, terribly afraid, that some day
you’d go back on me, die on my hands. And I would be left
high and dry with my idea of you simply, and nothing to
sustain it. I should never forgive you for that.”
Perhaps you can visualize him saying a thing like that!
Myself it’s not clear what his idea of me was, or at any rate,
it’s clear that I was just pure idea, an idea that kept itself
alive without food. He never attached much importance,
Boris, to the food problem. He tried to nourish me with
ideas. Everything was idea. Just the same, when he had his
heart set on renting the apartment, he wouldn’t forget to
put a new washer in the toilet. Anyway, he didn’t want me
to die on his hands. “You must be life for me to the very
end,” so he writes. “That is the only way in which you can
sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you
see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I
shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live
more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I
speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It’s hard to
talk of one’s self so intimately.”
You would imagine perhaps that he was anxious to see
me, or that he would like to know what I was doing—but no,
not a line about the concrete or the personal, except in this
living-dying language, nothing but this little message from
the trenches, this whiff of poison gas to apprise all and
sundry that the war was still on. I sometimes ask myself
how it happens that I attract nothing but crackbrained
individuals, neurasthenics, neurotics, psychopaths—and
Jews especially. There must be something in a healthy
Gentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour
black bread. There was Moldorf, for example, who had made
himself God, according to Boris and Cronstadt. He positively

hated me, the little viper—yet he couldn’t stay away from
me. He came round regularly for his little dose of insults—it
was like a tonic to him. In the beginning, it’s true, I was
lenient with him; after all, he was paying me to listen to
him. And though I never displayed much sympathy I knew
how to be silent when it involved a meal and a little pin
money. After a while, however, seeing what a masochist he
was, I permitted myself to laugh in his face now and then;
that was like a whip for him, it made the grief and agony
gush forth with renewed vigor. And perhaps everything
would have gone smoothly between us if he had not felt it
his duty to protect Tania. But Tania being a Jewess, that
brought up a moral question. He wanted me to stick to Mlle.
Claude for whom, I must admit, I had a genuine affection.
He even gave me money occasionally to sleep with her.
Until he realized that I was a hopeless lecher.
I mention Tania now because she’s just got back from
Russia—just a few days ago. Sylvester remained behind to
worm his way into a job. He’s given up literature entirely.
He’s dedicated himself to the new Utopia. Tania wants me to
go back there with her, to the Crimea preferably, and start a
new life. We had a fine drinking bout up in Carl’s room the
other day discussing the possibilities. I wanted to know what
I could do for a living back there—if I could be a proofreader,
for example. She said I didn’t need to worry about what I
would do—they would find a job for me as long as I was
earnest and sincere. I tried to look earnest, but I only
succeeded in looking pathetic. They don’t want to see sad
faces in Russia; they want you to be cheerful, enthusiastic,
light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America
to me. I wasn’t born with this kind of enthusiasm. I didn’t let
on to her, of course, but secretly I was praying to be left
alone, to go back to my little niche, and to stay there until
the war breaks. All this hocus-pocus about Russia disturbed
me a little. She got so excited about it, Tania, that we

finished almost a half dozen bottles of vin ordinaire. Carl
was jumping about like a cockroach. He has just enough Jew
in him to lose his head over an idea like Russia. Nothing
would do but to marry us off—immediately. “Hitch up!” he
says, “you have nothing to lose!” And then he pretends to
run a little errand so that we can pull off a fast one. And
while she wanted it all right, Tania, still that Russia business
had gotten so solidly planted in her skull that she pissed the
interval away chewing my ear off, which made me
somewhat grumpy and ill at ease. Anyway, we had to think
about eating and getting to the office, so we piled into a taxi
on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, just a stone’s throw away
from the cemetery, and off we whizzed. It was just a nice
hour to spin through Paris in an open cab, and the wine
rolling around in our tanks made it seem even more lovely
than usual. Carl was sitting opposite us, on the strapontin,
his face as red as a beet. He was happy, the poor bastard,
thinking what a glorious new life he would lead on the other
side of Europe. And at the same time he felt a bit wistful,
too—I could see that. He didn’t really want to leave Paris,
any more than I did. Paris hadn’t been good to him, any
more than it had to me, or to anybody, for that matter, but
when you’ve suffered and endured things here it’s then that
Paris takes hold of you, grabs you by the balls, you might
say, like some lovesick bitch who’d rather die than let you
get out of her hands. That’s how it looked to him, I could see
that. Rolling over the Seine he had a big foolish grin on his
face and he looked around at the buildings and the statues
as though he were seeing them in a dream. To me it was like
a dream too: I had my hand in Tania’s bosom and I was
squeezing her titties with all my might and I noticed the
water under the bridges and the barges and Notre-Dame
down below, just like the post cards show it, and I was
thinking drunkenly to myself that’s how one gets fucked, but
I was sly about it too and I knew I wouldn’t ever trade all
this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or

anything on earth. It was a fine afternoon, I was thinking to
myself, and soon we’d be pushing a feed down our bellies
and what could we order as a special treat, some good
heavy wine that would drown out all this Russia business.
With a woman like Tania, full of sap and everything, they
don’t give a damn what happens to you once they get an
idea in their heads. Let them go far enough and they’ll pull
the pants off you, right in the taxi. It was grand though,
milling through the traffic, our faces all smudged with rouge
and the wine gurgling like a sewer inside us, especially
when we swung into the Rue Laffitte which is just wide
enough to frame the little temple at the end of the street
and above it the Sacré-Cœur, a kind of exotic jumble of
architecture, a lucid French idea that gouges right through
your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly in
the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and
yet doesn’t jar your nerves.
With Tania back on the scene, a steady job, the drunken
talk about Russia, the walks home at night, and Paris in full
summer, life seems to lift its head a little higher. That’s why
perhaps, a letter such as Boris sent me seems absolutely
cockeyed. Most every day I meet Tania around five o’clock,
to have a Porto with her, as she calls it. I let her take me to
places I’ve never seen before, the swell bars around the
Champs-Elysées where the sound of jazz and baby voices
crooning seems to soak right through the mahogany
woodwork. Even when you go to the lavabo these pulpy,
sappy strains pursue you, come floating into the cabinet
through the ventilators and make life all soap and iridescent
bubbles. And whether it’s because Sylvester is away and
she feels free now, or whatever it is, Tania certainly tries to
behave like an angel. “You treated me lousy just before I
went away,” she says to me one day. “Why did you want to
act that way? I never did anything to hurt you, did I?” We
were getting sentimental, what with the soft lights and that

creamy, mahogany music seeping through the place. It was
getting near time to go to work and we hadn’t eaten yet.
The stubs were lying there in front of us—six francs, four-
fifty, seven francs, two-fifty—I was counting them up
mechanically and wondering too at the same time if I would
like it better being a bartender. Often like that, when she
was talking to me, gushing about Russia, the future, love,
and all that crap, I’d get to thinking about the most
irrelevant things, about shining shoes or being a lavatory
attendant, particularly I suppose because it was so cosy in
these joints that she dragged me to and it never occurred to
me that I’d be stone sober and perhaps old and bent… no, I
imagined always that the future, however modest, would be
in just this sort of ambiance, with the same tunes playing
through my head and the glasses clinking and behind every
shapely ass a trail of perfume a yard wide that would take
the stink out of life, even downstairs in the lavabo.
The strange thing is it never spoiled me trotting around to
the swell bars with her like that. It was hard to leave her,
certainly. I used to lead her around to the porch of a church
near the office and standing there in the dark we’d take a
last embrace, she whispering to me “Jesus, what am I going
to do now?” She wanted me to quit the job so as I could
make love night and day; she didn’t even care about Russia
any more, just so long as we were together. But the moment
I left her my head cleared. It was another kind of music, not
so croony but good just the same, which greeted my ears
when I pushed through the swinging door. And another kind
of perfume, not just a yard wide, but omnipresent, a sort of
sweat and patchouli that seemed to come from the
machines. Coming in with a skinful, as I usually did, it was
like dropping suddenly to a low altitude. Generally I made a
beeline for the toilet—that braced me up rather. It was a
little cooler there, or else the sound of water running made
it seem so. It was always a cold douche, the toilet. It was

real. Before you got inside you had to pass a line of
Frenchmen peeling off their clothes. Ugh! but they stank,
those devils! And they were well paid for it, too. But there
they were, stripped down, some in long underwear, some
with beards, most of them pale, skinny rats with lead in
their veins. Inside the toilet you could take an inventory of
their idle thoughts. The walls were crowded with sketches
and epithets, all of them jocosely obscene, easy to
understand, and on the whole rather jolly and sympathetic.
It must have required a ladder to reach certain spots, but I
suppose it was worth while doing it even looking at it from
just the psychological viewpoint. Sometimes, as I stood
there taking a leak, I wondered what an impression it would
make on those swell dames whom I observed passing in and
out of the beautiful lavatories on the Champs-Elysées. I
wondered if they would carry their tails so high if they could
see what was thought of an ass here. In their world, no
doubt, everything was gauze and velvet—or they made you
think so with the fine scents they gave out, swishing past
you. Some of them hadn’t always been such fine ladies
either; some of them swished up and down like that just to
advertise their trade. And maybe, when they were left alone
with themselves, when they talked out loud in the privacy of
their boudoirs, maybe some strange things fell out of their
mouths too; because in that world, just as in every world,
the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth,
sordid as any garbage can, only they are lucky enough to be
able to put covers over the can.
As I say, that afternoon life with Tania never had any bad
effect upon me. Once in a while I’d get too much of a skinful
and I’d have to stick my finger down my throat—because
it’s hard to read proof when you’re not all there. It requires
more concentration to detect a missing comma than to
epitomize Nietzsche’s philosophy. You can be brilliant
sometimes, when you’re drunk, but brilliance is out of place

in the proofreading department. Dates, fractions,
semicolons!—these are the things that count. And these are
the things that are most difficult to track down when your
mind is all ablaze. Now and then I made some bad blunders,
and if it weren’t that I had learned how to kiss the boss’s
ass, I would have been fired, that’s certain. I even got a
letter one day from the big mogul upstairs, a guy I never
even met, so high up he was, and between a few sarcastic
phrases about my more than ordinary intelligence, he hinted
pretty plainly that I’d better learn my place and toe the
mark or there’d be what’s what to pay. Frankly, that scared
the shit out of me. After that I never used a polysyllabic
word in conversation; in fact, I hardly ever opened my trap
all night. I played the high-grade moron, which is what they
wanted of us. Now and then, to sort of flatter the boss, I’d
go up to him and ask politely what such and such a word
might mean. He liked that. He was a sort of dictionary and
timetable, that guy. No matter how much beer he guzzled
during the break—and he made his own private breaks too,
seeing as how he was running the show—you could never
trip him up on a date or a definition. He was born to the job.
My only regret was that I knew too much. It leaked out now
and then, despite all the precautions I took. If I happened to
come to work with a book under my arm this boss of ours
would notice it, and if it were a good book it made him
venomous. But I never did anything intentionally to
displease him; I liked the job too well to put a noose around
my neck. Just the same it’s hard to talk to a man when you
have nothing in common with him; you betray yourself,
even if you use only monosyllabic words. He knew goddamn
well, the boss, that I didn’t take the least bit of interest in
his yarns; and yet, explain it how you will, it gave him
pleasure to wean me away from my dreams and fill me full
of dates and historical events. It was his way of taking
revenge, I suppose.

The result was that I developed a bit of a neurosis. As
soon as I hit the air I became extravagant. It wouldn’t
matter what the subject of conversation happened to be, as
we started back to Montparnasse in the early morning, I’d
soon turn the fire hose on it, squelch it, in order to trot out
my perverted dreams. I liked best talking about those things
which none of us knew anything about. I had cultivated a
mild sort of insanity, echolalia, I think it’s called. All the tag
ends of a night’s proofing danced on the tip of my tongue.
Dalmatia—I had held copy on an ad for that beautiful
jeweled resort. All right, Dalmatia. You take a train and in
the morning your pores are perspiring and the grapes are
bursting their skins. I could reel it off about Dalmatia from
the grand boulevard to Cardinal Mazarin’s palace, further, if
I chose to. I don’t even know where it is on the map, and I
don’t want to know ever, but at three in the morning with all
that lead in your veins and your clothes saturated with
sweat and patchouli and the clink of bracelets passing
through the wringer and those beer yarns that I was braced
for, little things like geography, costume, speech,
architecture don’t mean a goddamn thing. Dalmatia belongs
to a certain hour of the night when those high gongs are
snuffed out and the court of the Louvre seems so
wonderfully ridiculous that you feel like weeping for no
reason at all, just because it’s so beautifully silent, so
empty, so totally unlike the front page and the guys upstairs
rolling the dice. With that little piece of Dalmatia resting on
my throbbing nerves like a cold knife blade I could
experience the most wonderful sensations of voyage. And
the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the
globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even
further lost than a lost continent, because with the lost
continents I felt some mysterious attachment, whereas with
America I felt nothing at all. Now and then, it’s true, I did
think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura of time
and space, but separately, detached, as though she had

blown up into a great cloudlike form that blotted out the
past. I couldn’t allow myself to think about her very long; if I
had I would have jumped off the bridge. It’s strange. I had
become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I
thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce
the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me
back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.
For seven years I went about, day and night, with only
one thing on my mind—her. Were there a Christian so
faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus
Christs today. Day and night I thought of her, even when I
was deceiving her. And now sometimes, in the very midst of
things, sometimes when I feel that I am absolutely free of it
all, suddenly, in rounding a corner perhaps, there will bob up
a little square, a few trees and a bench, a deserted spot
where we stood and had it out, where we drove each other
crazy with bitter, jealous scenes. Always some deserted
spot, like the Place de l’Estrapade, for example, or those
dingy, mournful streets off the Mosque or along that open
tomb of an Avenue de Breteuil which at ten o’clock in the
evening is so silent, so dead, that it makes one think of
murder or suicide, anything that might create a vestige of
human drama. When I realize that she is gone, perhaps
gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am
falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is
worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is
the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no
climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or
human touch of hand.
How many thousand times, in walking through the streets
at night, have I wondered if the day would ever come again
when she would be at my side: all those yearning looks I
bestowed on the buildings and statues, I had looked at them
so hungrily, so desperately, that by now my thoughts must
have become a part of the very buildings and statues, they

must be saturated with my anguish. I could not help but
reflect also that when we had walked side by side through
these mournful, dingy streets now so saturated with my
dream and longing, she had observed nothing, felt nothing:
they were like any other streets to her, a little more sordid
perhaps, and that is all. She wouldn’t remember that at a
certain corner I had stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that,
when I bent down to tie her laces, I remarked the spot on
which her foot had rested and that it would remain there
forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and
the whole Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever.
Walking down the Rue Lhomond one night in a fit of
unusual anguish and desolation, certain things were
revealed to me with poignant clarity. Whether it was that I
had so often walked this street in bitterness and despair or
whether it was the remembrance of a phrase which she had
dropped one night as we stood at the Place Lucien-Herr I do
not know. “Why don’t you show me that Paris,” she said,
“that you have written about?” One thing I know, that at the
recollection of these words I suddenly realized the
impossibility of ever revealing to her that Paris which I had
gotten to know, the Paris whose arrondissements are
undefined, a Paris that has never existed except by virtue of
my loneliness, my hunger for her. Such a huge Paris! It
would take a lifetime to explore it again. This Paris, to which
I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with
the best of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that
has to be experienced each day in a thousand different
forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer,
and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it.
Stumbling down the Rue Mouffetard, with these
reflections stirring in my brain, I recalled another strange
item out of the past, out of that guidebook whose leaves
she had asked me to turn but which, because the covers
were so heavy, I then found impossible to pry open. For no

reason at all—because at the moment my thoughts were
occupied with Salavin in whose sacred precincts I was now
meandering—for no reason at all, I say, there came to mind
the recollection of a day when, inspired by the plaque which
I passed day in and day out, I impusively entered the
Pension Orfila and asked to see the room Strindberg had
occupied. Up to that time nothing very terrible had befallen
me, though I had already lost all my worldly possessions
and had known what it was to walk the streets in hunger
and in fear of the police. Up to then I had not found a single
friend in Paris, a circumstance which was not so much
depressing as bewildering, for wherever I have roamed in
this world the easiest thing for me to discover has been a
friend. But in reality, nothing very terrible had happened to
me yet. One can live without friends, as one can live without
love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non.
One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and
anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for
certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of
my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. I had time and
sentiment enough to spare to peep into other people’s lives,
to dally with the dead stuff of romance which, however
morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between the covers of
a book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous. As I was
leaving the place I was conscious of an ironic smile hovering
over my lips, as though I were saying to myself “Not yet, the
Pension Orfila!”
Since then, of course, I have learned what every madman
in Paris discovers sooner or later; that there are no ready-
made infernos for the tormented.
It seems to me I understand a little better now why she
took such huge delight in reading Strindberg. I can see her
looking up from her book after reading a delicious passage,
and, with tears of laughter in her eyes, saying to me:
“You’re just as mad as he was… you want to be punished!”

What a delight that must be to the sadist when she
discovers her own proper masochist! When she bites
herself, as it were, to test the sharpness of her teeth. In
those days, when I first knew her, she was saturated with
Strindberg. That wild carnival of maggots which he reveled
in, that eternal duel of the sexes, that spiderish ferocity
which had endeared him to the sodden oafs of the
northland, it was that which had brought us together. We
came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I
sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the
surface again I could not recognize the world. When I found
myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over
and I had been picked clean. …
After leaving the Pension Orfila that afternoon I went to
the library and there, after bathing in the Ganges and
pondering over the signs of the zodiac, I began to reflect on
the meaning of that inferno which Strindberg had so
mercilessly depicted. And, as I ruminated, it began to grow
clear to me, the mystery of his pilgrimage, the flight which
the poet makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he
had been ordained to re-enact a lost drama, the heroic
descent to the very bowels of the earth, the dark and
fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody
struggle to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a
bright, gory sun god cast up on an alien shore. It was no
mystery to me any longer why he and others (Dante,
Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to
Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the
tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I
understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel,
one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible
theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here
that one reads again the books of his youth and the
enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair.
One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed,

because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent
faces are the visages of one’s keepers. Here all boundaries
fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad
slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to
infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs
rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing., The air is chill and
stagnant, the language apocalyptic. Not an exit sign
anywhere; no issue save death. A blind alley at the end of
which is a scaffold.
An eternal city, Paris! More eternal than Rome, more
splendorous than Nineveh. The very navel of the world to
which, like a blind and faltering idiot, one crawls back on
hands and knees. And like a cork that has drifted to the
dead center of the ocean, one floats here in the scum and
wrack of the seas, listless, hopeless, heedless even of a
passing Columbus. The cradles of civilization are the putrid
sinks of the world, the charnel house to which the stinking
wombs confide their bloody packages of flesh and bone.
The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand
the glamor of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in
them, until he has become a straw that is tossed here and
there by every zephyr that blows. One passes along a street
on a wintry day and, seeing a dog for sale, one is moved to
tears. While across the way, cheerful as a cemetery, stands
a miserable hut that calls itself “Hôtel du Tombeau des
Lapins.” That makes one laugh, laugh fit to die. Until one
notices that there are hotels everywhere, for rabbits, dogs,
lice, emperors, cabinet ministers, pawnbrokers, horse
knackers, and so on. And almost every other one is an
“Hôtel de l’Avenir.” Which makes one more hysterical still.
So many hotels of the future! No hotels in the past
participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis.
Everything is hoary, grisly, bristling with merriment, swollen
with the future, like a gumboil. Drunk with this lecherous
eczema of the future, I stagger over to the Place Violet, the

colors all mauve and slate, the doorways so low that only
dwarfs and goblins could hobble in; over the dull cranium of
Zola the chimneys are belching pure coke, while the
Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears to the
bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads
which squat by the roadside.
Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des
Thermopyles? Because that day a woman addressed her
puppy in the apocalyptic language of the slaughterhouse,
and the little bitch, she understood what this greasy slut of
a midwife was saying. How that depressed me! More even
than the sight of those whimpering curs that were being
sold on the Rue Brancion, because it was not the dogs which
filled me so with pity, but the huge iron railing, those rusty
spikes which seemed to stand between me and my rightful
life. In the pleasant little lane near the Abattoir de Vaugirard
(Abattoir Hippophagique), which is called the Rue des
Périchaux, I had noticed here and there signs of blood. Just
as Strindberg in his madness had recognized omens and
portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila, so, as I
wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered
with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and
floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst
forebodings. I saw my own blood being spilled, the muddy
road stained with it, as far back as I could remember, from
the very beginning doubtless. One is ejected into the world
like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood
and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling
his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good
things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession
scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there,
such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are
trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.
My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly
alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the

streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language
compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure,
wasted effort. Passing under the viaduct along the Rue
Broca, one night after I had been informed that Mona was ill
and starving, I suddenly recalled that it was here in the
squalor and gloom of this sunken street, terrorized perhaps
by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me and
with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would
never leave her, never, no matter what happened. And, only
a few days later, I stood on the platform of the Gare St.
Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the train that was
bearing her away; she was leaning out of the window, just
as she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New
York, and there was that same, sad, inscrutable smile on her
face, that last-minute look which is intended to convey so
much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a vacant
smile. Only a few days before, she had clung to me
desperately and then something happened, something
which is not even clear to me now, and of her own volition
she boarded the train and she was looking at me again with
that sad, enigmatic smile which baffles me, which is unjust,
unnatural, which I distrust with all my soul. And now it is I,
standing in the shadow of the viaduct, who reach out for
her, who cling to her desperately and there is that same
inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have clamped
down over my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly,
and no matter how fervid my prayers, no matter how
desperate my longing, there is an ocean between us; there
she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk from one
street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face.
It is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets;
it is that which stares out from the walls and terrifies us
when suddenly we respond to a nameless fear, when
suddenly our souls are invaded by a sickening panic. It is
that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish twists, which

makes them beckon to us and lure us to their strangling
grip; it is that which makes certain houses appear like the
guardians of secret crimes and their blind windows like the
empty sockets of eyes that have seen too much. It is that
sort of thing, written into the human physiognomy of the
streets which makes me flee when overhead I suddenly see
inscribed “Impasse Satan.” That which makes me shudder
when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is
written: “Mondays and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays
and Fridays syphilis.” In every Metro station there are
grinning skulls that greet you with “Défendez-vous contre la
syphilis!” Wherever there are walls, there are posters with
bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No
matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is
cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and
dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and
we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.

I think it was the Fourth of July when they took the chair
from under my ass again. Not a word of warning. One of the
big muck-a-mucks from the other side of the water had
decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders
and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses
of his trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he
occupied at the Ritz. After paying what little debts I had
accumulated among the linotype operators and a goodwill
token at the bistro across the way, in order to preserve my
credit, there was scarcely anything left out of my final pay. I
had to notify the patron of the hotel that I would be leaving;
I didn’t tell him why because he’d have worried about his
measly two hundred francs.
“What’ll you do if you lose your job?” That was the phrase
that rang in my ears continually. Ça y est maintenant!
Ausgespielt! Nothing to do but to get down into the street
again, walk, hang around, sit on benches, kill time. By now,
of course, my face was familiar in Montparnasse; for a while
I could pretend that I was still working on the paper. That
would make it a little easier to bum a breakfast or a dinner.
It was summertime and the tourists were pouring in. I had
schemes up my sleeve for mulcting them. “What’ll you do.
…?” Well, I wouldn’t starve, that’s one thing. If I should do
nothing else but concentrate on food that would prevent me
from falling to pieces. For a week or two I could still go to
Monsieur Paul’s and have a square meal every evening; he
wouldn’t know whether I was working or not. The main thing
is to eat. Trust to Providence for the rest!
Naturally, I kept my ears open for anything that sounded
like a little dough. And I cultivated a whole new set of
acquaintances—bores whom I had sedulously avoided
heretofore, drunks whom I loathed, artists who had a little

money, Guggenheim-prize men, etc. It’s not hard to make
friends when you squat on a terrasse twelve hours a day.
You get to know every sot in Montparnasse. They cling to
you like lice, even if you have nothing to offer them but your
ears.
Now that I had lost my job Carl and Van Norden had a
new phrase for me: “What if your wife should arrive now?”
Well, what of it? Two mouths to feed, instead of one. I’d
have a companion in misery. And, if she hadn’t lost her good
looks, I’d probably do better in double harness than alone:
the world never permits a good-looking woman to starve.
Tania I couldn’t depend on to do much for me; she was
sending money to Sylvester. I had thought at first that she
might let me share her room, but she was afraid of
compromising herself; besides, she had to be nice to her
boss.
The first people to turn to when you’re down and out are
the Jews. I had three of them on my hands almost at once.
Sympathetic souls. One of them was a retired fur merchant
who had an itch to see his name in the papers; he proposed
that I write a series of articles under his name for a Jewish
daily in New York. I had to scout around the Dôme and the
Coupole searching for prominent Jews. The first man I picked
on was a celebrated mathematician; he couldn’t speak a
word of English. I had to write about the theory of shock
from the diagrams he left on the paper napkins; I had to
describe the movements of the astral bodies and demolish
the Einsteinian conception at the same time. All for twenty-
five francs. When I saw my articles in the newspaper I
couldn’t read them; but they looked impressive, just the
same, especially with the pseudonym of the fur merchant
attached.
I did a lot of pseudonymous writing during this period.
When the big new whorehouse opened up on the Boulevard
Edgar-Quinet, I got a little rake-off, for writing the

pamphlets. That is to say, a bottle of champagne and a free
fuck in one of the Egyptian rooms. If I succeeded in bringing
a client I was to get my commission, just like Kepi got his in
the old days. One night I brought Van Norden; he was going
to let me earn a little money by enjoying himself upstairs.
But when the madame learned that he was a
newspaperman she wouldn’t hear of taking money from
him; it was a bottle of champagne again and a free fuck. I
got nothing out of it. As a matter of fact, I had to write the
story for him because he couldn’t think how to get round
the subject without mentioning the kind of place it was. One
thing after another like that. I was getting fucked good and
proper.
The worst job of all was a thesis I undertook to write for a
deaf and dumb psychologist. A treatise on the care of
crippled children. My head was full of diseases and braces
and workbenches and fresh air theories; it took about six
weeks off and on, and then, to rub it in, I had to proofread
the goddamned thing. It was in French, such a French as I’ve
never in my life seen or heard. But it brought me in a good
breakfast every day, an American breakfast, with orange
juice, oatmeal, cream, coffee, now and then ham and eggs
for a change. It was the only period of my Paris days that I
ever indulged in a decent breakfast, thanks to the crippled
children of Rockaway Beach, the East Side, and all the coves
and inlets bordering on these sore points.
Then one day I fell in with a photographer; he was making
a collection of the slimy joints of Paris for some degenerate
in Munich. He wanted to know if I would pose for him with
my pants down, and in other ways. I thought of those skinny
little runts, who look like bellhops and messenger boys, that
one sees on pornographic post cards in little bookshop
windows occasionally, the mysterious phantoms who inhabit
the Rue de la Lune and other malodorous quarters of the
city. I didn’t like very much the idea of advertising my

physiog in the company of these élite. But, since I was
assured that the photographs were for a strictly private
collection, and since it was destined for Munich, I gave my
consent. When you’re not in your home town you can permit
yourself little liberties, particularly for such a worthy motive
as earning your daily bread. After all, I hadn’t been so
squeamish, come to think of it, even in New York. There
were nights when I was so damned desperate, back there,
that I had to go out right in my own neighborhood and
panhandle.
We didn’t go to the show places familiar to the tourists,
but to the little joints where the atmosphere was more
congenial, where we could play a game of cards in the
afternoon before getting down to work. He was a good
companion, the photographer. He knew the city inside out,
the walls particularly; he talked to me about Goethe often,
and the days of the Hohenstaufen, and the massacre of the
Jews during the reign of the Black Death. Interesting
subjects, and always related in some obscure way to the
things he was doing. He had ideas for scenarios too,
astounding ideas, but nobody had the courage to execute
them. The sight of a horse, split open like a saloon door,
would inspire him to talk of Dante or Leonardo da Vinci or
Rembrandt; from the slaughterhouse at Villette he would
jump into a cab and rush me to the Trocadéro Museum, in
order to point out a skull or a mummy that had fascinated
him. We explored the 5th, the 13th, the 19th and the 20th
arrondissements thoroughly. Our favorite resting places
were lugubrious little spots such as the Place Nationale,
Place des Peupliers, Place de la Contrescarpe, Place Paul-
Verlaine. Many of these places were already familiar to me,
but all of them I now saw in a different light owing to the
rare flavor of his conversation. If today I should happen to
stroll down the Rue du Château-des-Rentiers, for example,
inhaling the fetid stench of the hospital beds with which the

13th arrondissement reeks, my nostrils would undoubtedly
expand with pleasure, because, compounded with that odor
of stale piss and formaldehyde, there would be the odors of
our imaginative voyages through the charnel house of
Europe which the Black Death had created.
Through him I got to know a spiritual-minded individual
named Kruger, who was a sculptor and painter. Kruger took
a shine to me for some reason or other; it was impossible to
get away from him once he discovered that I was willing to
listen to his “esoteric” ideas. There are people in this world
for whom the word “esoteric” seems to act as a divine ichor.
Like “settled” for Herr Peeperkorn of the Magic Mountain.
Kruger was one of those saints who have gone wrong, a
masochist, an anal type whose law is scrupulousness,
rectitude and conscientiousness, who on an off day would
knock a man’s teeth down his throat without a qualm. He
seemed to think I was ripe to move on to another plane, “a
higher plane,” as he put it. I was ready to move on to any
plane he designated, provided that one didn’t eat less or
drink less. He chewed my head off about the “threadsoul,”
the “causal body,” “ablation,” the Upanishads, Plotinus,
Krishnamurti, “the Karmic vestiture of the soul,” “the
nirvanic consciousness,” all that flapdoodle which blows out
of the East like a breath from the plague. Sometimes he
would go into a trance and talk about his previous
incarnations, how he imagined them to be, at least. Or he
would relate his dreams which, so far as I could see, were
thoroughly insipid, prosaic, hardly worth even the attention
of a Freudian, but, for him, there were vast esoteric marvels
hidden in their depths which I had to aid him to decipher. He
had turned himself inside out, like a coat whose nap is worn
off.
Little by little, as I gained his confidence, I wormed my
way into his heart. I had him at such a point that he would
come running after me, in the street, to inquire if he could

lend me a few francs. He wanted to hold me together in
order to survive the transition to a higher plane. I acted like
a pear that is ripening on the tree. Now and then I had
relapses and I would confess my need for more earthly
nourishment—a visit to the Sphinx or the Rue St. Apolline
where I knew he repaired in weak moments when the
demands of the flesh had become too vehement.
As a painter he was nil; as a sculptor less than nil. He was
a good housekeeper, that I’ll say for him. And an economical
one to boot. Nothing went to waste, not even the paper that
the meat was wrapped in. Friday nights he threw open his
studio to his fellow artists; there was always plenty to drink
and good sandwiches, and if by chance there was anything
left over I would come round the next day to polish it off.
Back of the Bal Bullier was another studio I got into the
habit of frequenting—the studio of Mark Swift. If he was not
a genius he was certainly an eccentric, this caustic
Irishman. He had for a model a Jewess whom he had been
living with for years; he was now tired of her and was
searching for a pretext to get rid of her. But as he had eaten
up the dowry which she had originally brought with her, he
was puzzled as to how to disembarrass himself of her
without making restitution. The simplest thing was to so
antagonize her that she would choose starvation rather than
support his cruelties.
She was rather a fine person, his mistress; the worst that
one could say against her was that she had lost her shape,
and her ability to support him any longer. She was a painter
herself and, among those who professed to know, it was
said that she had far more talent than he. But no matter
how miserable he made life for her she was just; she would
never allow anyone to say that he was not a great painter. It
was because he really has genius, she said, that he was
such a rotten individual. One never saw her canvases on the
wall—only his. Her things were stuck away in the kitchen.

Once it happened, in my presence, that someone insisted
on seeing her work. The result was painful. “You see this
figure,” said Swift, pointing to one of her canvases with his
big foot. “The man standing in the doorway there is just
about to go out for a leak. He won’t be able to find his way
back because his head is on wrong. … Now take that nude
over there. … It was all right until she started to paint the
cunt. I don’t know what she was thinking about, but she
made it so big that her brush slipped and she couldn’t get it
out again.”
By way of showing us what a nude ought to be like he
hauls out a huge canvas which he had recently completed.
It was a picture of her, a splendid piece of vengeance
inspired by a guilty conscience. The work of a madman—
vicious, petty, malign, brilliant. You had the feeling that he
had spied on her through the keyhole, that he had caught
her in an off moment, when she was picking her nose
absent-mindedly, or scratching her ass. She sat there on the
horsehair sofa, in a room without ventilation, an enormous
room without a window; it might as well have been the
anterior lobe of the pineal gland. Back of her ran the zigzag
stairs leading to the balcony; they were covered with a
bilious-green carpet, such a green as could only emanate
from a universe that had been pooped out. The most
prominent thing was her buttocks, which were lopsided and
full of scabs; she seemed to have slightly raised her ass
from the sofa, as if to let a loud fart. Her face he had
idealized: it looked sweet and virginal, pure as a cough drop.
But her bosom was distended, swollen with sewer gas; she
seemed to be swimming in a menstrual sea, an enlarged
fetus with the dull, syrupy look of an angel.
Nevertheless one couldn’t help but like him. He was an
indefatigable worker, a man who hadn’t a single thought in
his head but paint. And cunning as a lynx withal. It was he
who put it into my head to cultivate the friendship of

Fillmore, a young man in the diplomatic service who had
found his way into the little group that surrounded Kruger
and Swift. “Let him help you,” he said. “He doesn’t know
what to do with his money.”
When one spends what he has on himself, when one has
a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt
to say “he doesn’t know what to do with his money.” For my
part, I don’t see any better use to which one can put money.
About such individuals one can’t say that they’re generous
or stingy. They put money into circulation—that’s the
principal thing. Fillmore knew that his days in France were
limited; he was determined to enjoy them. And as one
always enjoys himself better in the company of a friend it
was only natural that he should turn to one like myself, who
had plenty of time on his hands, for that companionship
which he needed. People said he was a bore, and so he was,
I suppose, but when you’re in need of food you can put up
with worse things than being bored. After all, despite the
fact that he talked incessantly, and usually about himself or
the authors whom he admired slavishly—such birds as
Anatole France and Joseph Conrad—he nevertheless made
my nights interesting in other ways. He liked to dance, he
liked good wines, and he liked women. That he liked Byron
also, and Victor Hugo, one could forgive; he was only a few
years out of college and he had plenty of time ahead of him
to be cured of such tastes. What he had that I liked was a
sense of adventure.
We got even better acquainted, more intimate, I might
say, due to a peculiar incident that occurred during my brief
sojourn with Kruger. It happened just after the arrival of
Collins, a sailor whom Fillmore had got to know on the way
over from America. The three of us used to meet regularly
on the terrasse of the Rotonde before going to dinner. It was
always Pernod, a drink which put Collins in good humor and
provided a base, as it were, for the wine and beer and fines,

etc., which had to be guzzled afterward. All during Collins’s
stay in Paris I lived like a duke; nothing but fowl and good
vintages and desserts that I hadn’t even heard of before. A
month of this regimen and I should have been obliged to go
to Baden-Baden or Vichy or Aix-les-Bains. Meanwhile Kruger
was putting me up at his studio. I was getting to be a
nuisance because I never showed up before three a.m. and
it was difficult to rout me out of bed before noon. Overtly
Kruger never uttered a word of reproach but his manner
indicated plainly enough that I was becoming a bum.
One day I was taken ill. The rich diet was taking effect
upon me. I don’t know what ailed me, but I couldn’t get out
of bed. I had lost all my stamina, and with it whatever
courage I possessed. Kruger had to look after me, had to
make broths for me, and so on. It was a trying period for
him, more particularly because he was just on the verge of
giving an important exhibition at his studio, a private
showing to some wealthy connoisseurs from whom he was
expecting aid. The cot on which I lay was in the studio; there
was no other room to put me in.
The morning of the day he was to give his exhibition,
Kruger awoke thoroughly disgruntled. If I had been able to
stand on my feet I know he would have given me a clout in
the jaw and kicked me out. But I was prostrate, and weak as
a cat. He tried to coax me out of bed, with the idea of
locking me up in the kitchen upon the arrival of his visitors. I
realized that I was making a mess of it for him. People can’t
look at pictures and statues with enthusiasm when a man is
dying before their eyes. Kruger honestly thought I was
dying. So did I. That’s why, despite my feelings of guilt, I
couldn’t muster any enthusiasm when he proposed calling
for the ambulance and having me shipped to the American
Hospital. I wanted to die there, comfortably, right in the
studio; I didn’t want to be urged to get up and find a better

place to die in. I didn’t care where I died, really, so long as it
wasn’t necessary to get up.
When he heard me talk this way Kruger became alarmed.
Worse than having a sick man in his studio should the
visitors arrive, was to have a dead man. That would
completely ruin his prospects, slim as they were. He didn’t
put it that way to me, of course, but I could see from his
agitation that that was what worried him. And that made me
stubborn. I refused to let him call the hospital. I refused to
let him call a doctor. I refused everything.
He got so angry with me finally that, despite my
protestations, he began to dress me. I was too weak to
resist. All I could do was to murmur weakly—“you bastard
you!” Though it was warm outdoors I was shivering like a
dog. After he had completely dressed me he flung an
overcoat over me and slipped outside to telephone. “I won’t
go! I won’t go!” I kept saying but he simply slammed the
door on me. He came back in a few minutes and, without
addressing a word to me, busied himself about the studio.
Last minute preparations. In a little while there was a knock
on the door. It was Fillmore. Collins was waiting downstairs,
he informed me.
The two of them, Fillmore and Kruger, slipped their arms
under me and hoisted me to my feet. As they dragged me
to the elevator Kruger softened up. “It’s for your own good,”
he said. “And besides, it wouldn’t be fair to me. You know
what a struggle I’ve had all these years. You ought to think
about me too.” He was actually on the point of tears.
Wretched and miserable as I felt, his words almost made
me smile. He was considerably older than I, and even
though he was a rotten painter, a rotten artist all the way
through, he deserved a break—at least once in a lifetime.
“I don’t hold it against you,” I muttered. “I understand
how it is.”

“You know I always liked you,” he responded. “When you
get better you can come back here again … you can stay as
long as you like.”
“Sure, I know. … I’m not going to croak yet,” I managed to
get out.
Somehow, when I saw Collins down below my spirits
revived. If ever any one seemed to be thoroughly alive,
healthy, joyous, magnanimous, it was he. He picked me up
as if I were a doll and laid me out on the seat of the cab—
gently too, which I appreciated after the way Kruger had
manhandled me.
When we drove up to the hotel—the hotel that Collins was
stopping at—there was a bit of a discussion with the
proprietor, during which I lay stretched out on the sofa in
the bureau. I could hear Collins saying to the patron that it
was nothing … just a little breakdown … be all right in a few
days. I saw him put a crisp bill in the man’s hands and then,
turning swiftly and lithely, he came back to where I was and
said: “Come on, buck up! Don’t let him think you’re
croaking.” And with that, he yanked me to my feet and,
bracing me with one arm, escorted me to the elevator.
Don’t let him think you’re croaking! Obviously it was bad
taste to die on people’s hands. One should die in the bosom
of his family, in private, as it were. His words were
encouraging. I began to see it all as a bad joke. Upstairs,
with the door closed, they undressed me and put me
between the sheets. “You can’t die now, goddamn it!” said
Collins warmly. “You’ll put me in a hole. … Besides, what the
hell’s the matter with you? Can’t stand good living? Keep
your chin up! You’ll be eating a porterhouse steak in a day
or two. You think you’re ill! Wait, by Jesus until you get a
dose of syphilis! That’s something to make you worry. …”
And he began to relate, in a humorous way, his trip down
the Yangtze Kiang, with hair falling out and teeth rotting
away. In the feeble state that I was in, the yarn that he spun

had an extraordinary soothing effect upon me. It took me
completely out of myself. He had guts, this guy. Perhaps he
put it on a bit thick, for my benefit, but I wasn’t listening to
him critically at the moment. I was all ears and eyes. I saw
the dirty yellow mouth of the river, the lights going up at
Hankow, the sea of yellow faces, the sampans shooting
down through the gorges and the rapids flaming with the
sulfurous breath of the dragon. What a story! The coolies
swarming around the boat each day, dredging for the
garbage that was flung overboard, Tom Slattery rising up on
his deathbed to take a last look at the lights of Hankow, the
beautiful Eurasian who lay in a dark room and filled his
veins with poison, the monotony of blue jackets and yellow
faces, millions and millions of them hollowed out by famine,
ravaged by disease, subsisting on rats and dogs and roots,
chewing the grass off the earth, devouring their own
children. It was hard to imagine that this man’s body had
once been a mass of sores, that he had been shunned like a
leper; his voice was so quiet and gentle, it was as though his
spirit had been cleansed by all the suffering he had
endured. As he reached for his drink his face grew more and
more soft and his words actually seemed to caress me. And
all the while China hanging over us like Fate itself. A China
rotting away, crumbling to dust like a huge dinosaur, yet
preserving to the very end the glamor, the enchantment,
the mystery, the cruelty of her hoary legends.
I could no longer follow his story; my mind had slipped
back to a Fourth of July when I bought my first package of
firecrackers and with it the long pieces of punk which break
so easily, the punk that you blow on to get a good red glow,
the punk whose smell sticks to your fingers for days and
makes you dream of strange things. The Fourth of July the
streets are littered with bright red paper stamped with black
and gold figures and everywhere there are tiny firecrackers
which have the most curious intestines; packages and

packages of them, all strung together by their thin, flat, little
gutstrings, the color of human brains. All day long there is
the smell of powder and punk and the gold dust from the
bright red wrappers sticks to your fingers. One never thinks
of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your
fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward,
when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells
like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and
the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and
the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people
and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood,
mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or
space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and
more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind,
but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is
wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two
hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it
stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.
A few weeks later, upon receipt of a pressing invitation
from Collins who had returned to Le Havre, Fillmore and I
boarded the train one morning, prepared to spend the
weekend with him. It was the first time I had been outside of
Paris since my arrival here. We were in fine fettle, drinking
Anjou all the way to the coast. Collins had given us the
address of a bar where we were to meet; it was a place
called Jimmie’s Bar, which everyone in Le Havre was
supposed to know.
We got into an open barouche at the station and started
on a brisk trot for the rendezvous; there was still a half
bottle of Anjou left which we polished off as we rode along.
Le Havre looked gay, sunny; the air was bracing, with that
strong salty tang which almost made me homesick for New
York. There were masts and hulls cropping up everywhere,
bright bits of bunting, big open squares and high-ceilinged
cafés such as one only sees in the provinces. A fine

impression immediately; the city was welcoming us with
open arms.
Before we ever reached the bar we saw Collins coming
down the street on a trot, heading for the station, no doubt,
and a little late as usual. Fillmore immediately suggested a
Pernod; we were all slapping each other on the back,
laughing and spitting, drunk already from the sunshine and
the salt sea air. Collins seemed undecided about the Pernod
at first. He had a little dose of clap, he informed us. Nothing
very serious—“a strain” most likely. He showed us a bottle
he had in his pocket—“Vénétienne” it was called, if I
remember rightly. The sailors’ remedy for clap.
We stopped off at a restaurant to have a little snack
before repairing to Jimmie’s place. It was a huge tavern with
big, smoky rafters and tables creaking with food. We drank
copiously of the wines that Collins recommended. Then we
sat down on a terrasse and had coffee and liqueurs. Collins
was talking about the Baron de Charlus, a man after his own
heart, he said. For almost a year now he had been staying
at Le Havre, going through the money that he had
accumulated during his bootlegging days. His tastes were
simple—food, drink, women and books. And a private bath!
That he insisted on.
We were still talking about the Baron de Charlus when we
arrived at Jimmie’s Bar. It was late in the afternoon and the
place was just beginning to fill up. Jimmie was there, his
face red as a beet, and beside him was his spouse, a fine
buxom Frenchwoman with glittering eyes. We were given a
marvelous reception all around. There were Pernods in front
of us again, the gramophone was shrieking, people were
jabbering away in English and French and Dutch and
Norwegian and Spanish, and Jimmie and his wife, both of
them looking very brisk and dapper, were slapping and
kissing each other heartily and raising their glasses and
clinking them—altogether such a bubble and blabber of

merriment that you felt like pulling off your clothes and
doing a war dance. The women at the bar had gathered
around like flies. If we were friends of Collins that meant we
were rich. It didn’t matter that we had come in our old
clothes; all Anglais dressed like that. I hadn’t a sou in my
pocket, which didn’t matter, of course, since I was the guest
of honor. Nevertheless I felt somewhat embarrassed with
two stunning-looking whores hanging on my arms waiting
for me to order something. I decided to take the bull by the
horns. You couldn’t tell any more which drinks were on the
house and which were to be paid for. I had to be a
gentleman, even if I didn’t have a sou in my pocket.
Yvette—that was Jimmie’s wife—was extraordinarily
gracious and friendly with us. She was preparing a little
spread in our honor. It would take a little while yet. We were
not to get too drunk—she wanted us to enjoy the meal. The
gramophone was going like wild and Fillmore had begun to
dance with a beautiful mulatto who had on a tight velvet
dress that revealed all her charms. Collins slipped over to
my side and whispered a few words about the girl at my
side. “The madame will invite her to dinner,” he said, “if
you’d like to have her.” She was an ex-whore who owned a
beautiful home on the outskirts of the city. The mistress of a
sea captain now. He was away and there was nothing to
fear. “If she likes you she’ll invite you to stay with her,” he
added.
That was enough for me. I turned at once to Marcelle and
began to flatter the ass off her. We stood at the corner of
the bar, pretending to dance, and mauled each other
ferociously. Jimmie gave me a big horse-wink and nodded
his head approvingly. She was a lascivious bitch, this
Marcelle, and pleasant at the same time. She soon got rid of
the other girl, I noticed, and then we settled down for a long
and intimate conversation which was interrupted
unfortunately by the announcement that dinner was ready.

There were about twenty of us at the table, and Marcelle
and I were placed at one end opposite Jimmie and his wife.
It began with the popping of champagne corks and was
quickly followed by drunken speeches, during the course of
which Marcelle and I played with each other under the table.
When it came my turn to stand up and deliver a few words I
had to hold the napkin in front of me. It was painful and
exhilarating at the same time. I had to cut the speech very
short because Marcelle was tickling me in the crotch all the
while.
The dinner lasted until almost midnight. I was looking
forward to spending the night with Marcelle in that beautiful
home up on the cliff. But it was not to be. Collins had
planned to show us about and I couldn’t very well refuse.
“Don’t worry about her,” he said. “You’ll have a bellyful of it
before you leave. Tell her to wait here for you until we get
back.”
She was a bit peeved at this, Marcelle, but when we
informed her that we had several days ahead of us she
brightened up. When we got outdoors Fillmore very
solemnly took us by the arm and said he had a little
confession to make. He looked pale and worried.
“Well, what is it?” said Collins cheerfully. “Spit it out!”
Fillmore couldn’t spit it out like that, all at once. He
hemmed and hawed and finally he blurted out—“Well, when
I went to the closet just a minute ago I noticed something.
…”
“Then you’ve got it!” said Collins triumphantly, and with
that he flourished the bottle of “Vénétienne.” “Don’t go to a
doctor,” he added venomously. “They’ll bleed you to death,
the greedy bastards. And don’t stop drinking either. That’s
all hooey. Take this twice a day … shake it well before using.
And nothing’s worse than worry, do you understand? Come
on now. I’ll give you a syringe and some permanganate
when we get back.”

And so we started out into the night, down toward the
waterfront where there was the sound of music and shouts
and drunken oaths, Collins talking quietly all the while about
this and that, about a boy he had fallen in love with, and the
devil’s time he had to get out of the scrape when the
parents got wise to it. From that he switched back to the
Baron de Charlus and then to Kurtz who had gone up the
river and got lost. His favorite theme. I liked the way Collins
moved against this background of literature continuously; it
was like a millionaire who never stepped out of his Rolls
Royce. There was no intermediate realm for him between
reality and ideas. When we entered the whorehouse on the
Quai Voltaire, after he had flung himself on the divan and
rung for girls and for drinks, he was still paddling up the
river with Kurtz, and only when the girls had flopped on the
bed beside him and stuffed his mouth with kisses did he
cease his divagations. Then, as if he had suddenly realized
where he was, he turned to the old mother who ran the
place and gave her an eloquent spiel about his two friends
who had come down from Paris expressly to see the joint.
There were about half a dozen girls in the room, all naked
and all beautiful to look at, I must say. They hopped about
like birds while the three of us tried to maintain a
conversation with the grandmother. Finally the latter
excused herself and told us to make ourselves at home. I
was altogether taken in by her, so sweet and amiable she
was, so thoroughly gentle and maternal. And what manners!
If she had been a little younger I would have made
overtures to her. Certainly you would not have thought that
we were in a “den of vice,” as it is called.
Anyway we stayed there an hour or so, and as I was the
only one in condition to enjoy the privileges of the house,
Collins and Fillmore remained downstairs chattering with the
girls. When I returned I found the two of them stretched out
on the bed; the girls had formed a semicircle about the bed

and were singing with the most angelic voices the chorus of
Roses in Picardy. We were sentimentally depressed when we
left the house—Fillmore particularly. Collins swiftly steered
us to a rough joint which was packed with drunken sailors on
shore leave and there we sat awhile enjoying the
homosexual rout that was in full swing. When we sallied out
we had to pass through the red-light district where there
were more grandmothers with shawls about their necks
sitting on the doorsteps fanning themselves and nodding
pleasantly to the passers-by. All such good-looking, kindly
souls, as if they were keeping guard over a nursery. Little
groups of sailors came swinging along and pushed their way
noisily inside the gaudy joints. Sex everywhere: it was
slopping over, a neap tide that swept the props from under
the city. We piddled along at the edge of the basin where
everything was jumbled and tangled; you had the
impression that all these ships, these trawlers and yachts
and schooners and barges, had been blown ashore by a
violent storm.
In the space of forty-eight hours so many things had
happened that it seemed as if we had been in Le Havre a
month or more. We were planning to leave early Monday
morning, as Fillmore had to be back on the job. We spent
Sunday drinking and carousing, clap or no clap. That
afternoon Collins confided to us that he was thinking of
returning to his ranch in Idaho; he hadn’t been home for
eight years and he wanted to have a look at the mountains
again before making another voyage East. We were sitting
in a whorehouse at the time, waiting for a girl to appear; he
had promised to slip her some cocaine. He was fed up with
Le Havre, he told us. Too many vultures hanging around his
neck. Besides, Jimmie’s wife had fallen in love with him and
she was making things hot for him with her jealous fits.
There was a scene almost every night. She had been on her
good behavior since we arrived, but it wouldn’t last, he

promised us. She was particularly jealous of a Russian girl
who came to the bar now and then when she got tight. A
troublemaker. On top of it all he was desperately in love
with this boy whom he had told us about the first day. “A
boy can break your heart,” he said. “He’s so damned
beautiful! And so cruel!” We had to laugh at this. It sounded
preposterous. But Collins was in earnest.
Around midnight Sunday Fillmore and I retired; we had
been given a room upstairs over the bar. It was sultry as the
devil, not a breath of air stirring. Through the open windows
we could hear them shouting downstairs and the
gramophone going continually. All of a sudden a storm broke
—a regular cloudburst. And between the thunderclaps and
the squalls that lashed the window-panes there came to our
ears the sound of another storm raging downstairs at the
bar. It sounded frightfully close and sinister; the women
were shrieking at the tops of their lungs, bottles were
crashing, tables were upset and there was that familiar,
nauseating thud that the human body makes when it
crashes to the floor.
About six o’clock Collins stuck his head in the door. His
face was all plastered and one arm was stuck in a sling. He
had a big grin on his face.
“Just as I told you,” he said. “She broke loose last night.
Suppose you heard the racket?”
We got dressed quickly and went downstairs to say good-
bye to Jimmie. The place was completely demolished, not a
bottle left standing, not a chair that wasn’t broken. The
mirror and the show window were smashed to bits. Jimmie
was making himself an eggnog.
On the way to the station we pieced the story together.
The Russian girl had dropped in after we toddled off to bed
and Yvette had insulted her promptly, without even waiting
for an excuse. They had commenced to pull each other’s
hair and in the midst of it a big Swede had stepped in and

given the Russian girl a sound slap in the jaw—to bring her
to her senses. That started the fireworks. Collins wanted to
know what right this big stiff had to interfere in a private
quarrel. He got a poke in the jaw for an answer, a good one
that sent him flying to the other end of the bar. “Serves you
right!” screamed Yvette, taking advantage of the occasion
to swing a bottle at the Russian girl’s head. And at that
moment the thunderstorm broke loose. For a while there
was a regular pandemonium, the women all hysterical and
hungry to seize the opportunity to pay off private grudges.
Nothing like a nice barroom brawl … so easy to stick a knife
in a man’s back or club him with a bottle when he’s lying
under a table. The poor Swede found himself in a hornet’s
nest; everyone in the place hated him, particularly his
shipmates. They wanted to see him done in. And so they
locked the door and pushing the tables aside they made a
little space in front of the bar where the two of them could
have it out. And they had it out! They had to carry the poor
devil to the hospital when it was over. Collins had come off
rather lucky —nothing more than a sprained wrist and a
couple of fingers out of joint, a bloody nose and a black eye.
Just a few scratches, as he put it. But if he ever signed up
with that Swede he was going to murder him. It wasn’t
finished yet. He promised us that.
And that wasn’t the end of the fracas either. After that
Yvette had to go out and get liquored up at another bar. She
had been insulted and she was going to put an end to
things. And so she hires a taxi and orders the driver to ride
out to the edge of the cliff overlooking the water. She was
going to kill herself, that’s what she was going to do. But
then she was so drunk that when she tumbled out of the
cab she began to weep and before any one could stop her
she had begun to peel her clothes off. The driver brought
her home that way, half-naked, and when Jimmie saw the
condition she was in he was so furious with her that he took

his razor strop and he belted the piss out of her, and she
liked it, the bitch that she was. “Do it some more!” she
begged, down on her knees as she was and clutching him
around the legs with her two arms. But Jimmie had enough
of it. “You’re a dirty old sow!” he said and with his foot he
gave her a shove in the guts that took the wind out of her—
and a bit of her sexy nonsense too.
It was high time we were leaving. The city looked different
in the early morning light. The last thing we talked about, as
we stood there waiting for the train to pull out, was Idaho.
The three of us were Americans. We came from different
places, each of us, but we had something in common—a
whole lot, I might say. We were getting sentimental, as
Americans do when it comes time to part. We were getting
quite foolish about the cows and sheep and the big open
spaces where men are men and all that crap. If a boat had
swung along instead of the train we’d have hopped aboard
and said good-bye to it all. But Collins was never to see
America again, as I learned later; and Fillmore … well,
Fillmore had to take his punishment too, in a way that none
of us could have suspected then. It’s best to keep America
just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture
post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that,
you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged,
unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep
and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight,
man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name
you give to an abstract idea. …

Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing,
you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five
minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You
feel tricked.
I returned to Paris with money in my pocket—a few
hundred francs, which Collins had shoved in my pocket just
as I was boarding the train. It was enough to pay for a room
and at least a week’s good rations. It was more than I had
had in my hands at one time for several years. I felt elated,
as though perhaps a new life was opening before me. I
wanted to conserve it too, so I looked up a cheap hotel over
a bakery on the Rue du Château, just off the Rue de Vanves,
a place that Eugene had pointed out to me once. A few
yards away was the bridge that spans the Montparnasse
tracks. A familiar quarter.
I could have had a room for a hundred francs a month, a
room without any conveniences to be sure—without even a
window—and perhaps I would have taken it, just to be sure
of a place to flop for a while, had it not been for the fact that
in order to reach this room I would have been obliged to first
pass through the room of a blind man. The thought of
passing his bed every night had a most depressing effect
upon me. I decided to look elsewhere. I went over to the Rue
Cels, just behind the cemetery, and I looked at a sort of rat
trap there with balconies running around the courtyard.
There were birdcages suspended from the balcony too, all
along the lower tier. A cheerful sight perhaps, but to me it
seemed like the public ward in a hospital. The proprietor
didn’t seem to have all his wits either. I decided to wait for
the night, to have a good look around, and then choose
some attractive little joint in a quiet side street.

At dinnertime I spent fifteen francs for a meal, just about
twice the amount I had planned to allot myself. That made
me so wretched that I wouldn’t allow myself to sit down for
a coffee, even despite the fact that it had begun to drizzle.
No, I would walk about a bit and then go quietly to bed, at a
reasonable hour. I was already miserable, trying to husband
my resources this way. I had never in my life done it; it
wasn’t in my nature.
Finally it began to come down in bucketsful. I was glad.
That would give me the excuse I needed to duck somewhere
and stretch my legs out. It was still too early to go to bed. I
began to quicken my pace, heading back toward the
Boulevard Raspail. Suddenly a woman comes up to me and
stops me, right in the pouring rain. She wants to know what
time it is. I told her I didn’t have a watch. And then she
bursts out, just like this: “Oh, my good sir, do you speak
English by chance?” I nod my head. It’s coming down in
torrents now. “Perhaps, my dear good man, you would be so
kind as to take me to a café. It is raining so and I haven’t
the money to sit down anywhere. You will excuse me, my
dear sir, but you have such a kind face… I knew you were
English right away.” And with this she smiles at me, a
strange, half-demented smile. “Perhaps you could give me a
little advice, dear sir. I am all alone in the world… my God, it
is terrible to have no money. …”
This “dear sir” and “kind sir” and “my good man,” etc.,
had me on the verge of hysteria. I felt sorry for her and yet I
had to laugh. I did laugh. I laughed right in her face. And
then she laughed too, a weird, high-pitched laugh, off key,
an altogether unexpected piece of cachinnation. I caught
her by the arm and we made a bolt for it to the nearest
café. She was still giggling when we entered the bistro. “My
dear good sir,” she began again, “perhaps you think I am
not telling you the truth. I am a good girl… I come of a good
family. Only”—and here she gave me that wan, broken smile

again—“only I am so misfortunate as not to have a place to
sit down.” At this I began to laugh again. I couldn’t help it—
the phrases she used, the strange accent, the crazy hat she
had on, that demented smile. …
“Listen,” I interrupted, “what nationality are you?”
“I’m English,” she replied. “That is, I was born in Poland,
but my father is Irish.”
‘So that makes you English?”
“Yes,” she said, and she began to giggle again,
sheepishly, and with a pretense of being coy.
“I suppose you know a nice little hotel where you could
take me?” I said this, not because I had any intention of
going with her, but just to spare her the usual preliminaries.
“Oh, my dear sir,” she said, as though I had made the
most grievous error, “I’m sure you don’t mean that! I’m not
that kind of a girl. You were joking with me, I can see that.
You’re so good… you have such a kind face. I would not dare
to speak to a Frenchman as I did to you. They insult you
right away. …”
She went on in this vein for some time. I wanted to break
away from her. But she didn’t want to be left alone. She was
afraid—her papers were not in order. Wouldn’t I be good
enough to walk her to her hotel? Perhaps I could “lend” her
fifteen or twenty francs, to quiet the patron? I walked her to
the hotel where she said she was stopping and I put a fifty
franc bill in her hand. Either she was very clever, or very
innocent—it’s hard to tell sometimes—but, at any rate, she
wanted me to wait until she ran to the bistro for change. I
told her not to bother. And with that she seized my hand
impulsively and raised it to her lips. I was flabbergasted. I
felt like giving her every damned thing I had. That touched
me, that crazy little gesture. I thought to myself, it’s good to
be rich once in a while, just to get a new thrill like that. Just
the same, I didn’t lose my head. Fifty francs! That was quite

enough to squander on a rainy night. As I walked off she
waved to me with that crazy little bonnet which she didn’t
know how to wear. It was as though we were old playmates.
I felt foolish and giddy. “My dear kind sir… you have such a
gentle face… you are so good, etc.” I felt like a saint.
When you feel all puffed up inside it isn’t so easy to go to
bed right away. You feel as though you ought to atone for
such unexpected bursts of goodness. Passing the “Jungle” I
caught a glimpse of the dance floor; women with bare backs
and ropes of pearls choking them—or so it looked—were
wiggling their beautiful bottoms at me. Walked right up to
the bar and ordered a coupe of champagne. When the
music stopped, a beautiful blonde—she looked like a
Norwegian—took a seat right beside me. The place wasn’t
as crowded or as gay as it had appeared from outside. There
were only a half dozen couples in the place—they must
have all been dancing at once. I ordered another coupe of
champagne in order not to let my courage dribble away.
When I got up to dance with the blonde there was no one
on the floor but us. Any other time I would have been self-
conscious, but the champagne and the way she clung to
me, the dimmed lights and the solid feeling of security
which the few hundred francs gave me, well. … We had
another dance together, a sort of private exhibition, and
then we fell into conversation. She had begun to weep—that
was how it started. I thought possibly she had had too much
to drink, so I pretended not to be concerned. And meanwhile
I was looking around to see if there was any other timber
available. But the place was thoroughly deserted.
The thing to do when you’re trapped is to breeze—at
once. If you don’t, you’re lost. What retained me, oddly
enough, was the thought of paying for a hat check a second
time. One always lets himself in for it because of a trifle.
The reason she was weeping, I discovered soon enough,
was because she had just buried her child. She wasn’t

Norwegian either, but French, and a midwife to boot. A chic
midwife, I must say, even with the tears running down her
face. I asked her if a little drink would help to console her,
whereupon she very promptly ordered a whisky and tossed
it off in the wink of an eye. “Would you like another?” I
suggested gently. She thought she would, she felt so rotten,
so terribly dejected. She thought she would like a package
of Camels too. “No, wait a minute,” she said, “I think I’d
rather have les Pall Mall.” Have what you like, I thought, but
stop weeping, for Christ’s sake, it gives me the willies. I
jerked her to her feet for another dance. On her feet she
seemed to be another person. Maybe grief makes one more
lecherous, I don’t know. I murmured something about
breaking away. “Where to?” she said eagerly. “Oh,
anywhere. Some quiet place where we can talk.”
I went to the toilet and counted the money over again. I
hid the hundred franc notes in my fob pocket and kept a
fifty franc note and the loose change in my trousers pocket.
I went back to the bar determined to talk turkey.
She made it easier for me because she herself introduced
the subject. She was in difficulties. It was not only that she
had just lost her child, but her mother was home, ill, very ill,
and there was the doctor to pay and medicine to be bought,
and so on and so forth. I didn’t believe a word of it, of
course. And since I had to find a hotel for myself, I
suggested that she come along with me and stay the night.
A little economy there, I thought to myself. But she wouldn’t
do that. She insisted on going home, said she had an
apartment to herself—and besides she had to look after her
mother. On reflection I decided that it would be still cheaper
sleeping at her place, so I said yes and let’s go immediately.
Before going, however, I decided it was best to let her know
just how I stood, so that there wouldn’t be any squawking at
the last minute. I thought she was going to faint when I told
her how much I had in my pocket. “The likes of it!” she said.

Highly insulted she was. I thought there would be a scene.
… Undaunted, however, I stood my ground. “Very well, then,
I’ll leave you,” I said quietly. “Perhaps I’ve made a mistake.”
“I should say you have!” she exclaimed, but clutching me
by the sleeve at the same time. “Ecoute, chéri… sois
raisonnable!” When I heard that all my confidence was
restored. I knew that it would be merely a question of
promising her a little extra and everything would be O.K. “All
right,” I said wearily, “I’ll be nice to you, you’ll see.”
“You were lying to me, then?” she said.
“Yes,” I smiled, “I was just lying. …”
Before I had even put my hat on she had hailed a cab. I
heard her give the Boulevard de Clichy for an address. That
was more than the price of room, I thought to myself. Oh
well, there was time yet… we’d see. I don’t know how it
started any more but soon she was raving to me about
Henry Bordeaux. I have yet to meet a whore who doesn’t
know of Henry Bordeaux! But this one was genuinely
inspired; her language was beautiful now, so tender, so
discerning, that I was debating how much to give her. It
seemed to me that I had heard her say—“quand il n’y aura
plus de temps.” It sounded like that, anyway. In the state I
was in, a phrase like that was worth a hundred francs. I
wondered if it was her own or if she had pulled it from Henry
Bordeaux. Little matter. It was just the right phrase with
which to roll up to the foot of Montmartre. “Good evening,
mother,” I was saying to myself, “daughter and I will look
after you—quand il n’y aura plus de temps!” She was going
to show me her diploma, too, I remembered that.
She was all aflutter, once the door had closed behind us.
Distracted. Wringing her hands and striking Sarah Bernhardt
poses, half undressed too, and pausing between times to
urge me to hurry, to get undressed, to do this and do that.
Finally, when she had stripped down and was poking about
with a chemise in her hand, searching for her kimono, I

caught hold of her and gave her a good squeeze. She had a
look of anguish on her face when I released her. “My God!
My God! I must go downstairs and have a look at mother!”
she exclaimed. “You can take a bath if you like, chéri. There!
I’ll be back in a few minutes.” At the door I embraced her
again. I was in my underclothes and I had a tremendous
erection. Somehow all this anguish and excitement, all the
grief and histrionics, only whetted my appetite. Perhaps she
was just going downstairs to quiet her maquereau. I had a
feeling that something unusual was happening, some sort of
drama which I would read about in the morning paper. I
gave the place a quick inspection. There were two rooms
and a bath, not badly furnished. Rather coquettish. There
was her diploma on the wall—“first class,” as they all read.
And there was the photograph of a child, a little girl with
beautiful locks, on the dresser. I put the water on for a bath,
and then I changed my mind. If something were to happen
and I were found in the tub… I didn’t like the idea. I paced
back and forth, getting more and more uneasy as the
minutes rolled by.
When she returned she was even more upset than before.
“She’s going to die… she’s going to die!” she kept wailing.
For a moment I was almost on the point of leaving. How the
hell can you climb over a woman when her mother’s dying
downstairs, perhaps right beneath you? I put my arms
around her, half in sympathy and half determined to get
what I had come for. As we stood thus she murmured, as if
in real distress, her need for the money I had promised her.
It was for “maman.” Shit, I didn’t have the heart to haggle
about a few francs at the moment. I walked over to the chair
where my clothes were lying and I wiggled a hundred franc
note out of my fob pocket, carefully keeping my back turned
to her just the same. And, as a further precaution, I placed
my pants on the side of the bed where I knew I was going to
flop. The hundred francs wasn’t altogether satisfactory to

her, but I could see from the feeble way that she protested
that it was quite enough. Then, with an energy that
astonished me, she flung off her kimono and jumped into
bed. As soon as I had put my arms around her and pulled
her to me she reached for the switch and out went the
lights. She embraced me passionately, and she groaned as
all French cunts do when they get you in bed. She was
getting me frightfully roused with her carrying on; that
business of turning out the lights was a new one to me… it
seemed like the real thing. But I was suspicious too, and as
soon as I could manage conveniently I put my hands out to
feel if my trousers were still there on the chair.
I thought we were settled for the night. The bed felt very
comfortable, softer than the average hotel bed—and the
sheets were clean, I had noticed that. If only she wouldn’t
squirm so! You would think she hadn’t slept with a man for a
month. I wanted to stretch it out. I wanted full value for my
hundred francs. But she was mumbling all sorts of things in
that crazy bed language which goes to your blood even
more rapidly when it’s in the dark. I was putting up a stiff
fight, but it was impossible with her groaning and gasping
going on, and her muttering: “Vite chéri! Vite chéri! Oh,
c’est bon! Oh, oh! Vite, vite, chéri!” I tried to count but it
was like a fire alarm going off. “Vite, chéri!” and this time
she gave such a gasping shudder that bango! I heard the
stars chiming and there was my hundred francs gone and
the fifty that I had forgotten all about and the lights were on
again and with the same alacrity that she had bounced into
bed she was bouncing out again and grunting and squealing
like an old sow. I lay back and puffed a cigarette, gazing
ruefully at my pants the while; they were terribly wrinkled.
In a moment she was back again, wrapping the kimono
around her, and telling me in that agitated way which was
getting on my nerves that I should make myself at home.

“I’m going downstairs to see mother,” she said. “Mais faites
comme chez vous, chéri. Je reviens tout de suite.”
After a quarter of an hour had passed I began to feel
thoroughly restless. I went inside and I read through a letter
that was lying on the table. It was nothing of any account—a
love letter. In the bathroom I examined all the bottles on the
shelf; she had everything a woman requires to make herself
smell beautiful. I was still hoping that she would come back
and give me another fifty francs’ worth. But time dragged
on and there was no sign of her. I began to grow alarmed.
Perhaps there was someone dying downstairs. Absent-
mindedly, out of a sense of self-preservation, I suppose, I
began to put my things on. As I was buckling my belt it
came to me like a flash how she had stuffed the hundred
franc note into her purse. In the excitement of the moment
she had thrust the purse in the wardrobe, on the upper
shelf. I remembered the gesture she made—standing on her
tiptoes and reaching for the shelf. It didn’t take me a minute
to open the wardrobe and feel around for the purse. It was
still there. I opened it hurriedly and saw my hundred franc
note lying snugly between the silk coverlets. I put the purse
back just as it was, slipped into my coat and shoes, and
then I went to the landing and listened intently. I couldn’t
hear a sound. Where she had gone to, Christ only knows. In
a jiffy I was back at the wardrobe and fumbling with her
purse. I pocketed the hundred francs and all the loose
change besides. Then, closing the door silently, I tiptoed
down the stairs and when once I had hit the street I walked
just as fast as my legs would carry me. At the Café Boudon I
stopped for a bite. The whores there having a gay time
pelting a fat man who had fallen asleep over his meal. He
was sound asleep; snoring, in fact, and yet his jaws were
working away mechanically. The place was in an uproar.
There were shouts of “All aboard!” and then a concerted
banging of knives and forks. He opened his eyes for a

moment, blinked stupidly, and then his head rolled forward
again on his chest. I put the hundred franc bill carefully
away in my fob pocket and counted the change. The din
around me was increasing and I had difficulty to recall
exactly whether I had seen “first-class” on her diploma or
not. It bothered me. About her mother I didn’t give a damn. I
hoped she had croaked by now. It would be strange if what
she had said were true. Too good to believe. Vite chéri…
vite, vite! And the other half-wit with her “my good sir” and
“you have such a kind face”! I wondered if she had really
taken a room in that hotel we stopped by.

It was along the close of summer when Fillmore invited me
to come and live with him. He had a studio apartment
overlooking the cavalry barracks just off the Place Dupleix.
We had seen a lot of each other since the little trip to Le
Havre. If it hadn’t been for Fillmore I don’t know where I
should be today—dead, most likely.
“I would have asked you long before,” he said, “if it
hadn’t been for that little bitch Jackie. I didn’t know how to
get her off my hands.”
I had to smile. It was always like that with Fillmore. He
had a genius for attracting homeless bitches. Anyway, Jackie
had finally cleared out of her own accord.
The rainy season was coming on, the long, dreary stretch
of grease and fog and squirts of rain that make you damp
and miserable. An execrable place in the winter, Paris! A
climate that eats into your soul, that leaves you bare as the
Labrador coast. I noticed with some anxiety that the only
means of heating the place was the little stove in the studio.
However, it was still comfortable. And the view from the
studio window was superb.
In the morning Fillmore would shake me roughly and
leave a ten franc note on the pillow. As soon as he had gone
I would settle back for a final snooze. Sometimes I would lie
abed till noon. There was nothing pressing, except to finish
the book, and that didn’t worry me much because I was
already convinced that nobody would accept it anyway.
Nevertheless, Fillmore was much impressed by it. When he
arrived in the evening with a bottle under his arm the first
thing he did was to go to the table and see how many pages
I had knocked off. At first I enjoyed this show of enthusiasm
but later, when I was running dry, it made me devilishly
uneasy to see him poking around, searching for the pages

that were supposed to trickle out of me like water from a
tap. When there was nothing to show I felt exactly like some
bitch whom he had harbored. He used to say about Jackie, I
remembered—“it would have been all right if only she had
slipped me a piece of ass once in a while.” If I had been a
woman I would have been only too glad to slip him a piece
of ass: it would have been much easier than to feed him the
pages which he expected.
Nevertheless, he tried to make me feel at ease. There
was always plenty of food and wine, and now and then he
would insist that I accompany him to a dancing. He was
fond of going to a nigger joint on the Rue d’Odessa where
there was a good-looking mulatto who used to come home
with us occasionally. The one thing that bothered him was
that he couldn’t find a French girl who liked to drink. They
were all too sober to satisfy him—He liked to bring a woman
back to the studio and guzzle it with her before getting
down to business. He also liked to have her think that he
was an artist. As the man from whom he had rented the
place was a painter, it was not: difficult to create an
impression; the canvases which we had found in the armoire
were soon stuck about the place and one of the unfinished
ones conspicuously mounted on the easel. Unfortunately
they were all of a surrealistic quality and the impression
they created was usually unfavorable. Between a whore, a
concierge and a cabinet minister there is not much
difference in taste where pictures are concerned. It was a
matter of great relief to Fillmore when Mark Swift began to
visit us regularly with the intention of doing my portrait.
Fillmore had a great admiration for Swift. He was a genius,
he said. And though there was something ferocious about
everything he tackled nevertheless when he painted a man
or an object you could recognize it for what it was.
At Swift’s request I had begun to grow a beard. The shape
of my skull, he said, required a beard. I had to sit by the

window with the Eiffel Tower in back of me because he
wanted the Eiffel Tower in the picture too. He also wanted
the typewriter in the picture. Kruger got the habit of
dropping in too about this time; he maintained that Swift
knew nothing about painting. It exasperated him to see
things out of proportion. He believed in Nature’s laws,
implicitly. Swift didn’t give a fuck about Nature; he wanted
to paint what was inside his head. Anyway, there was Swift’s
portrait of me stuck on the easel now, and though
everything was out of proportion, even a cabinet minister
could see that it was a human head, a man with a beard.
The concierge, indeed, began to take a great interest in the
picture; she thought the likeness was striking. And she liked
the idea of showing the Eiffel Tower in the background.
Things rolled along this way peacefully for about a month
or more. The neighborhood appealed to me, particularly at
night when the full squalor and lugubrious-ness of it made
itself felt. The little Place, so charming and tranquil at
twilight, could assume the most dismal, sinister character
when darkness came on. There was that long, high wall
covering one side of the barracks against which there was
always a couple embracing each other furtively—often in
the rain. A depressing sight to see two lovers squeezed
against a prison wall under a gloomy street light: as if they
had been driven right to the last bounds. What went on
inside the enclosure was also depressing. On a rainy day I
used to stand by the window and look down on the activity
below, quite as if it were something going on on another
planet. It seemed incomprehensible to me. Everything done
according to schedule, but a schedule that must have been
devised by a lunatic. There they were, floundering around in
the mud, the bugles blowing, the horses charging—all within
four walls. A sham battle. A lot of tin soldiers who hadn’t the
least interest in learning how to kill or how to polish their
boots or currycomb the horses. Utterly ridiculous the whole

thing, but part of the scheme of things. When they had
nothing to do they looked even more ridiculous; they
scratched themselves, they walked about with their hands
in their pockets, they looked up at the sky. And when an
officer came along they clicked their heels and saluted. A
madhouse, it seemed to me. Even the horses looked silly.
And then sometimes the artillery was dragged out: and they
went clattering down the street on parade and people stood
and gaped and admired the fine uniforms. To me they
always looked like an army corps in retreat; something
shabby, bedraggled, crestfallen about them, their uniforms
too big for their bodies, all the alertness, which as
individuals they possess to such a remarkable degree, gone
now.
When the sun came out, however, things looked different.
There was a ray of hope in their eyes, they walked more
elastically, they showed a little enthusiasm. Then the color
of things peeped out graciously and there was that fuss and
bustle so characteristic of the French; at the bistro on the
corner they chattered gaily over their drinks and the officers
seemed more human, more French, I might say. When the
sun comes out, any spot in Paris can look beautiful; and if
there is a bistro with an awning rolled down, a few tables on
the sidewalk and colored drinks in the glasses, then people
look altogether human. And they are human—the finest
people in the world when the sun shines! So intelligent, so
indolent, so carefree! It’s a crime to herd such a people into
barracks, to put them through exercises, to grade them into
privates and sergeants and colonels and what not.
As I say, things were rolling along smoothly. Now and then
Carl came along with a job for me, travel articles which he
hated to do himself. They only paid fifty francs a piece, but
they were easy to do because I had only to consult the back
issues and revamp the old articles. People only read these
things when they were sitting on a toilet or killing time in a

waiting room. The principal thing was to keep the adjectives
well furbished—the rest was a matter of dates and statistics.
If it was an important article the head of the department
signed it himself; he was a half-wit who couldn’t speak any
language well, but who knew how to find fault. If he found a
paragraph that seemed to him well written he would say
—“Now that’s the way I want you to write! That’s beautiful.
You have my permission to use it in your book.” These
beautiful paragraphs we sometimes lifted from the
encyclopaedia or an old guide book. Some of them Carl did
put into his book—they had a surrealistic character.
Then one evening, after I had been out for a walk, I open
the door and a woman springs out of the bedroom. “So
you’re the writer!” she exclaims at once, and she looks at
my beard as if to corroborate her impression. “What a horrid
beard!” she says. “I think you people must be crazy around
here.” Fillmore is trailing after her with a blanket in his hand.
“She’s a princess,” he says, smacking his lips as if he had
just tasted some rare caviar. The two of them were dressed
for the street; I couldn’t understand what they were doing
with the bedclothes. And then it occurred to me
immediately that Fillmore must have dragged her into the
bedroom to show her his laundry bag. He always did that
with a new woman, especially if she was a Française. “No
tickee, no shirtee!” that’s what was stitched on the laundry
bag, and somehow Fillmore had an obsession for explaining
this motto to every female who arrived. But this dame was
not a Française—he made that clear to me at once. She was
Russian—and a princess, no less.
He was bubbling over with excitement, like a child that
has just found a new toy. “She speaks five languages!” he
said, obviously overwhelmed by such an accomplishment.
“Non, four!” she corrected promptly.
“Well, four then…. Anyway, she’s a damned intelligent
girl. You ought to hear her speak.”

The princess was nervous—she kept scratching her thigh
and rubbing her nose. “Why does he want to make his bed
now?” she asked me abruptly. “Does he think he will get me
that way? He’s a big child. He behaves disgracefully. I took
him to a Russian restaurant and he danced like a nigger.”
She wiggled her bottom to illustrate. “And he talks too
much. Too loud. He talks nonsense.” She swished about the
room, examining the paintings and the books, keeping her
chin well up all the time but scratching herself
intermittently. Now and then she wheeled around like a
battleship and delivered a broadside. Fillmore kept following
her about with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other.
“Stop following me like that!” she exclaimed. “And haven’t
you anything to drink but this? Can’t you get a bottle of
champagne? I must have some champagne. My nerves! My
nerves!”
Fillmore tries to whisper a few words in my ear. “An
actress… a movie star… some guy jilted her and she can’t
get over it. … I’m going to get her cockeyed. …”
“I’ll clear out then,” I was saying, when the princess
interrupted us with a shout. “Why do you whisper like that?”
she cried, stamping her foot. “Don’t you know that’s not
polite? And you, I thought you were going to take me out? I
must get drunk tonight, I have told you that already.”
“Yes, yes,” said Fillmore, “we’re going in a minute. I just
want another drink.”
“You’re a pig!” she yelled. “But you’re a nice boy too. Only
you’re loud. You have no manners.” She turned to me. “Can
I trust him to behave himself? I must get drunk tonight but I
don’t want him to disgrace me. Maybe I will come back here
afterward. I would like to talk to you. You seem more
intelligent.”
As they were leaving the princess shook my hand
cordially and promised to come for dinner some evening
—“when I will be sober,” she said.

“Fine!” I said. “Bring another princess along—or a
countess, at least. We change the sheets every Saturday.”
About three in the morning Fillmore staggers in… alone.
Lit up like an ocean liner, and making a noise like a blind
man with his cracked cane. Tap, tap, tap, down the weary
lane. … “Going straight to bed,” he says, as he marches
past me. “Tell you all about it tomorrow.” He goes inside to
his room and throws back the covers. I hear him groaning
—“what a woman! what a woman!” In a second he’s out
again, with his hat on and the cracked cane in his hand. “I
knew something like that was going to happen. She’s
crazy!”
He rummages around in the kitchen a while and then
comes back to the studio with a bottle of Anjou. I have to sit
up and down a glass with him.
As far as I can piece the story together the whole thing
started at the Rond-Point des Champs Elysées where he had
dropped off for a drink on his way home. As usual at that
hour the terrasse was crowded with buzzards. This one was
sitting right on the aisle with a pile of saucers in front of her;
she was getting drunk quietly all by herself when Fillmore
happened along and caught her eye. “I’m drunk,” she
giggled, “won’t you sit down?” And then, as though it were
the most natural thing in the world to do, she began right off
the bat with the yarn about her movie director, how he had
given her the go-by and how she had thrown herself in the
Seine and so forth and so on. She couldn’t remember any
more which bridge it was, only that there was a crowd
around when they fished her out of the water. Besides, she
didn’t see what difference it made which bridge she threw
herself from—why did he ask such questions? She was
laughing hysterically about it, and then suddenly she had a
desire to be off—she wanted to dance. Seeing him hesitate
she opens her bag impulsively and pulls out a hundred franc

note. The next moment, however, she decided that a
hundred francs wouldn’t go very far. “Haven’t you any
money at all?” she said. No, he hadn’t very much in his
pocket, but he had a checkbook at home. So they made a
dash for the checkbook and then, of course, I had to happen
in just as he was explaining to her the “No tickee, no
shirtee” business.
On the way home they had stopped off at the Poisson
d’Or for a little snack which she had washed down with a
few vodkas. She was in her element there with everyone
kissing her hand and murmuring Princesse, Princesse. Drunk
as she was, she managed to collect her dignity. “Don’t
wiggle your behind like that!” she kept saying, as they
danced.
It was Fillmore’s idea, when he brought her back to the
studio, to stay there. But, since she was such an intelligent
girl and so erratic, he had decided to put up with her whims
and postpone the grand event. He had even visualized the
prospect of running across another princess and bringing
the two of them back. When they started out for the
evening, therefore, he was in a good humor and prepared, if
necessary, to spend a few hundred francs on her. After all,
one doesn’t run across a princess every day.
This time she dragged him to another place, a place
where she was still better known and where there would be
no trouble in cashing a check, as she said. Everybody was in
evening clothes and there was more spine-breaking, hand-
kissing nonsense as the waiter escorted them to a table.
In the middle of a dance she suddenly walks off the floor,
with tears in her eyes. “What’s the matter?” he said, “what
did I do this time?” And instinctively he put his hand to his
backside, as though perhaps it might still be wiggling. “It’s
nothing,” she said. “You didn’t do anything. Come, you’re a
nice boy,” and with that she drags him on to the floor again
and begins to dance with abandon. “But what’s the matter

with you?” he murmured. “It’s nothing,” she repeated. “I
saw somebody, that’s all.” And then, with a sudden spurt of
anger—“why do you get me drunk? Don’t you know it makes
me crazy?”
“Have you got a check?” she says. “We must get out of
here.” She called the waiter over and whispered to him in
Russian. “Is it a good check?” she asked, when the waiter
had disappeared. And then, impulsively: “Wait for me
downstairs in the cloakroom. I must telephone somebody.”
After the waiter had brought the change Fillmore
sauntered leisurely downstairs to the cloakroom to wait for
her. He strode up and down, humming and whistling softly,
and smacking his lips in anticipation of the caviar to come.
Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Still whistling softly.
When twenty minutes had gone by and still no princess he
at last grew suspicious. The cloakroom attendant said that
she had left long ago. He dashed outside. There was a
nigger in livery standing there with a big grin on his face.
Did the nigger know where she had breezed to? Nigger
grins. Nigger says: “Ah heerd Coupole, dassall sir!”
At the Coupole, downstairs, he finds her sitting in front of
a cocktail with a dreamy, trancelike expression on her face.
She smiles when she sees him.
“Was that a decent thing to do,” he says, “to run away
like that? You might have told me that: you didn’t like me.
…”
She flared up at this, got theatrical about it. And after a
lot of gushing she commenced to whine and slobber. “I’m
crazy,” she blubbered. “And you’re crazy too. You want me
to sleep with you, and I don’t want to sleep with you.” And
then she began to rave about her lover, the movie director
whom she had seen on the dance floor. That’s why she had
to run away from the place. That’s why she took drugs and
got drunk every night. That’s why she threw herself in the
Seine. She babbled on this way about how crazy she was

and then suddenly she had an idea. “Let’s go to Bricktop’s!”
There was a man there whom she knew… he had promised
her a job once. She was certain he would help her.
“What’s it going to cost?” asked Fillmore cautiously.
It would cost a lot, she let him know that immediately.
“But listen, if you take me to Bricktop’s, I promise to go
home with you.” She was honest enough to add that it
might cost him five or six hundred francs. “But I’m worth it!
You don’t know what a woman I am. There isn’t another
women like me in all Paris. …”
“That’s what you think!” His Yankee blood was coming to
the fore. “But I don’t see it. I don’t see that you’re worth
anything. You’re just a poor crazy son-of-a-bitch. Frankly, I’d
rather give fifty francs to some poor French girl; at least
they give you something in return.”
She hit the ceiling when he mentioned the French girls.
“Don’t talk to me about those women! I hate them! They’re
stupid… they’re ugly… they’re mercenary. Stop it, I tell
you!”
In a moment she had subsided again. She was on a new
tack. “Darling,” she murmured, “you don’t know what I look
like when I’m undressed. I’m beautiful!” And she held her
breasts with her two hands.
But Fillmore remained unimpressed. “You’re a bitch!” he
said coldly. “I wouldn’t mind spending a few hundred francs
on you, but you’re crazy. You haven’t even washed your
face. Your breath stinks. I don’t give a damn whether you’re
a princess or not… I don’t want any of your high-assed
Russian variety. You ought to get out in the street and hustle
for it. You’re no better than any little French girl. You’re not
as good. I wouldn’t piss away another sou on you. You ought
to go to America—that’s the place for a bloodsucking leech
like you. …”

She didn’t seem to be at all put out by this speech. “I
think you’re just a little afraid of me,” she said.
“Afraid of you? Of you?”
“You’re just a little boy,” she said. “You have no manners.
When you know me better you will talk differently. … Why
don’t you try to be nice? If you don’t want to go with me
tonight, very well. I will be at the Rond-Point tomorrow
between five and seven. I like you.”
“I don’t intend to be at the Rond-Point tomorrow, or any
other night! I don’t want to see you again… ever. I’m
through with you. I’m going out and find myself a nice little
French girl. You can go to hell!”
She looked at him and smiled wearily. “That’s what you
say now. But wait! Wait until you’ve slept with me. You don’t
know yet what a beautiful body I have. You think the French
girls know how to make love… wait! I will make you crazy
about me. I like you. Only you’re uncivilized. You’re just a
boy. You talk too much….”
“You’re crazy,” said Fillmore. “I wouldn’t fall for you if you
were the last woman on earth. Go home and wash your
face.” He walked off without paying for the drinks.
In a few days, however, the princess was installed. She’s
a genuine princess, of that we’re pretty certain. But: she has
the clap. Anyway, life is far from dull here. Fillmore has
bronchitis, the princess, as I was saying, has the clap, and I
have the piles. Just exchanged six empty bottles at the
Russian épicerie across the way. Not a drop went down my
gullet. No meat, no wine, no rich game, no women. Only
fruit and paraffin oil, arnica drops and adrenalin ointment.
And not a chair in the joint that’s, comfortable enough.
Right now, looking at the princess, I’m propped up like a
pasha. Pasha! That reminds me of her name: Macha.
Doesn’t sound so damned aristocratic to me. Reminds me of
The Living Corpse.

At first I thought it was going to be embarrassing, a
ménage à trois, but not at all. I thought when I saw her
move in that it was all up with me again, that I should have
to find another place, but Fillmore soon gave me to
understand that he was only putting her up until she got on
her feet. With a woman like her I don’t know what an
expression like that means; as far as I can see she’s been
standing on her head all her life. She says the revolution
drove her out of Russia, but I’m sure if it hadn’t been the
revolution it would have been something else. She’s under
the impression that she’s a great actress; we never
contradict her in anything she says because it’s time
wasted. Fillmore finds her amusing. When he leaves for the
office in the morning he drops ten francs on her pillow and
ten francs on mine; at night the three of us go to the
Russian restaurant down below. The neighborhood is full of
Russians and Macha has already found a place where she
can run up a little credit. Naturally ten francs a day isn’t
anything for a princess; she wants caviar now and then and
champagne, and she needs a complete new wardrobe in
order to get a job in the movies again. She has nothing to
do now except to kill time. She’s putting on fat.
This morning I had quite a fright. After I had washed my
face I grabbed her towel by mistake. We can’t seem to train
her to put her towel on the right hook. And when I bawled
her out for it she answered smoothly: “My dear, if one can
become blind from that I would have been blind years ago.”
And then there’s the toilet, which we all have to use. I try
speaking to her in a fatherly way about the toilet seat. “Oh
zut!” she says. “If you are so afraid I’ll go to a café.” But it’s
not necessary to do that, I explain. Just use ordinary
precautions. “Tut tut!” she says, “I won’t sit down then… I’ll
stand up.”
Everything is cockeyed with her around. First she wouldn’t
come across because she had the monthlies. For eight days

that lasted. We were beginning to think she was faking it.
But no, she wasn’t faking. One day, when I was trying to put
the place in order, I found some cotton batting under the
bed and it was stained with blood. With her everything goes
under the bed: orange peel, wadding, corks, empty bottles,
scissors, used condoms, books, pillows. … She makes the
bed only when it’s time to retire. Most of the time she lies
abed reading her Russian papers. “My dear,” she says to
me, “if it weren’t for my papers I wouldn’t get out of bed at
all.” That’s it precisely! Nothing but Russian newspapers.
Not a scratch of toilet paper around—nothing but Russian
newspapers with which to wipe your ass.
Anyway, speaking of her idiosyncrasies, after the
menstrual flow was over, after she had rested properly and
put a nice layer of fat around her belt, still she wouldn’t
come across. Pretended that she only liked women. To take
on a man she had to first be properly stimulated. Wanted us
to take her to a bawdy house where they put on the dog and
man act. Or better still, she said, would be Leda and the
swan: the flapping of the wings excited her terribly.
One night, to test her out, we accompanied her to a place
that she suggested. But before we had a chance to broach
the subject to the madam, a drunken Englishman, who was
sitting at the next table, fell into a conversation with us. He
had already been upstairs twice but he wanted another try
at it. He had only about twenty francs in his pocket, and not
knowing any French, he asked us if we would help him to
bargain with the girl he had his eye on. Happened she was a
Negress, a powerful wench from Martinique, and beautiful
as a panther. Had a lovely disposition too. In order to
persuade her to accept the Englishman’s remaining sous,
Fillmore had to promise to go with her himself soon as she
got through with the Englishman. The princess looked on,
heard everything that was said, and then got on her high
horse. She was insulted. “Well,” said Fillmore, “you wanted

some excitement—you can watch me do it!” She didn’t want
to watch him—she wanted to watch a drake. “Well, by
Jesus,” he said, “I’m as good as a drake any day… maybe a
little better.” Like that, one word led to another, and finally
the only way we could appease her was to call one of the
girls over and let them tickle each other… When Fillmore
came back with the Negress her eyes were smoldering. I
could see from the way Fillmore looked at her that she must
have given an unusual performance and I began to feel
lecherous myself. Fillmore must have sensed how I felt, and
what an ordeal it was to sit and look on all night, for
suddenly he pulled a hundred franc note out of his pocket
and slapping it in front of me, he said: “Look here, you
probably need a lay more than any of us. Take that and pick
someone out for yourself.” Somehow that gesture endeared
him more to me than anything he had ever done for me,
and he had done considerable. I accepted the money in the
spirit it was given and promptly signaled to the Negress to
get ready for another lay. That enraged the princess more
than anything, it appeared. She wanted to know if there
wasn’t anyone in the place good enough for us except this
Negress. I told her bluntly NO. And it was so—the Negress
was the queen of the harem. You had only to look at her to
get an erection. Her eyes seemed to be swimming in sperm.
She was drunk with all the demands made upon her. She
couldn’t walk straight any more—at least, it seemed that
way to me. Going up the narrow winding stairs behind her I
couldn’t resist the temptation to slide my hand up her
crotch; we continued up the stairs that way, she looking
back at me with a cheerful smile and wiggling her ass a bit
when it tickled her too much.
It was a good session all around. Everyone was happy.
Macha seemed to be in a good mood too. And so the next
evening, after she had had her ration of champagne and
caviar, after she had given us another chapter out of the

history of her life, Fillmore went to work on her. It seemed as
though he was going to get his reward at last. She had
ceased to put up a fight any more. She lay back with her
legs apart and she let him fool around and fool around and
then, just as he was climbing over her, just as he was going
to slip it in, she informs him nonchalantly that she has a
dose of clap. He rolled off her like a log. I heard him
fumbling around in the kitchen for the black soap he used
on special occasions, and in a few moments he was
standing by my bed with a towel in his hands and saying
—“can you beat that? that son-of-a-bitch of a princess has
the clap!” He seemed pretty well scared about it. The
princess meanwhile was munching an apple and calling for
her Russian newspapers. It was quite a joke to her. “There
are worse things than that,” she said, lying there in her bed
and talking to us through the open door. Finally Fillmore
began to see it as a joke too and opening another bottle of
Anjou he poured out a drink for himself and quaffed it down.
It was only about one in the morning and so he sat there
talking to me for a while. He wasn’t going to be put off by a
thing like that, he told me. Of course, he had to be careful…
there was the old dose which had come on in Le Havre. He
couldn’t remember any more how that happened.
Sometimes when he got drunk he forgot to wash himself. It
wasn’t anything very terrible, but you never knew what
might develop later. He didn’t want any one massaging his
prostate gland. No, that he didn’t relish. The first dose he
ever got was at college. Didn’t know whether the girl had
given it to him or he to the girl; there was so much funny
work going on about the campus you didn’t know whom to
believe. Nearly all the coeds had been knocked up some
time or other. Too damned ignorant… even the profs were
ignorant. One of the profs had himself castrated, so the
rumor went. …

Anyway, the next night he decided to risk it—with a
condom. Not much risk in that, unless it breaks. He had
bought himself some of the long fish skin variety—they were
the most reliable, he assured me. But then, that didn’t work
either. She was too tight. “Jesus, there’s nothing abnormal
about me,” he said. “How do you make that out? Somebody
got inside her all right to give her that dose. He must have
been abnormally small.”
So, one thing after another failing, he just gave it up
altogether. They lie there now like brother and sister, with
incestuous dreams. Says Macha, in her philosophic way: “In
Russia it often happens that a man sleeps with a woman
without touching her. They can go on that way for weeks
and weeks and never think anything about it. Until paff!
once he touches her… paff! paff! After that it’s paff, paff,
paff!”
All efforts are concentrated now on getting Macha into
shape. Fillmore thinks if he cures her of the clap she may
loosen up. A strange idea. So he’s bought her a douche bag,
a stock of permanganate, a whirling syringe and other little
things which were recommended to him by a Hungarian
doctor, a little quack of an abortionist over near the Place
d’Aligre. It seems his boss had knocked up a sixteen-year-
old girl once and she had introduced him to the Hungarian;
and then after that the boss had a beautiful chancre and it
was the Hungarian again. That’s how one gets acquainted in
Paris—genitourinary friendships. Anyway, under our strict
supervision, Macha is taking care of herself. The other night,
though, we were in a quandary for a while. She stuck the
suppository inside her and then she couldn’t find the string
attached to it. “My God!” she was yelling, “where is that
string? My God! I can’t find the string!”
“Did you look under the bed?” said Fillmore.

Finally she quieted down. But only for a few minutes. The
next thing was: “My God! I’m bleeding again. I just had my
period and now there are gouttes again. It must be that
cheap champagne you buy. My God, do you want me to
bleed to death?” She comes out with a kimono on and a
towel stuck between her legs, trying to look dignified as
usual. “My whole life is just like that,” she says. “I’m a
neurasthenic. The whole day running around and at night
I’m drunk again. When I came to Paris I was still an innocent
girl. I read only Villon and Baudelaire. But as I had then
300,000 Swiss francs in the bank I was crazy to enjoy
myself, because in Russia they were always strict with me.
And as I was even more beautiful then than I am now. I had
all the men falling at my feet.” Here she hitched up the
slack which had accumulated around her belt. “You mustn’t
think I had a stomach like that when I came here… that’s
from all the poison I was given to drink… those horrible
apéritifs which the French are so crazy to drink. … So then I
met my movie director and he wanted that I should play a
part for him. He said I was the most gorgeous creature in
the world and he was begging me to sleep with him every
night. I was a foolish young virgin and so I permitted him to
rape me one night. I wanted to be a great actress and I
didn’t know he was full of poison. So he gave me the clap…
and now I want that he should have it back again. It’s his
fault that I committed suicide in the Seine. … Why are you
laughing? Don’t you believe that I committed suicide? I can
show you the newspapers… there is my picture in all the
papers. I will show you the Russian papers some day… they
wrote about me wonderfully. … But darling, you know that
first I must have a new dress. I can’t vamp this man with
these dirty rags I am in. Besides, I still owe my dressmaker
12,000 francs. …”
From here on it’s a long story about the inheritance which
she is trying to collect. She has a young lawyer, a

Frenchman, who is rather timid, it seems, and he is trying to
win back her fortune. From time to time he used to give her
a hundred francs or so on account. “He’s stingy, like all the
French people,” she says. “And I was so beautiful, too, that
he couldn’t keep his eyes off me. He kept begging me
always to fuck him. I got so sick and tired of listening to him
that one night I said yes, just to keep him quiet, and so as I
wouldn’t lose my hundred francs now and then.” She
paused a moment to laugh hysterically. “My dear,” she
continued, “it was too funny for words what happened to
him. He calls me up on the phone one day and he says: “I
must see you right away… it’s very important.” And when I
see him he shows me a paper from the doctor—and it’s
gonorrhea! My dear, I laughed in his face. How should I
know that I still had the clap? “You wanted to fuck me and
so I fucked you!” That made him quiet. That’s how it goes in
life… you don’t suspect anything, and then all of a sudden
paff, paff, paff! He was such a fool that he fell in love with
me all over again. Only he begged me to behave myself and
not run around Montparnasse all night drinking and fucking.
He said I was driving him crazy. He wanted to marry me and
then his family heard about me and they persuaded him to
go to Indo-China. …”
From this Macha calmly switches to an affair she had with
a Lesbian. “It was very funny, my dear, how she picked me
up one night. I was at the “Fétiche” and I was drunk as
usual. She took me from one place to the other and she
made love to me under the table all night until I couldn’t
stand it any more. Then she took me to her apartment and
for two hundred francs I let her suck me off. She wanted me
to live with her but I didn’t want to have her suck me off
every night… it makes you too weak. Besides, I can tell you
that I don’t care so much for Lesbians as I used to. I would
rather sleep with a man even though it hurts me. When I get
terribly excited I can’t hold myself back any more… three,

four, five times… just like that! Paff, paff, paff! And then I
bleed and that is very unhealthy for me because I am
inclined to be anemic. So you see why once in a while I must
let myself be sucked by a Lesbian. …”

When the cold weather set in the princess disappeared. It
was getting uncomfortable with just a little coal stove in the
studio; the bedroom was like an icebox and the kitchen was
hardly any better. There was just a little space around the
stove where it was actually warm. So Macha had found
herself a sculptor who was castrated. She told us about him
before she left. After a few days she tried coming back to
us, but Fillmore wouldn’t hear of it. She complained that the
sculptor kept her awake all night kissing her. And then there
was no hot water for her douches. But finally she decided
that it was just as well she didn’t come back. “I won’t have
that candlestick next to me any more,” she said. “Always
that candlestick… it made me nervous. If you had only been
a fairy I would have stayed with you. …”
With Macha gone our evenings took on a different
character. Often we sat by the fire drinking hot toddies and
discussing the life back there in the States. We talked about
it as if we never expected to go back there again. Fillmore
had a map of New York City which he had tacked on the
wall; we used to spend whole evenings discussing the
relative virtues of Paris and New York. And inevitably there
always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that
one lone figure which America has produced in the course of
her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes
to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death.
Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has
expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The future
belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of
the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet.
He is almost undecipherable today, a monument covered
with rude hieroglyphs for which there is no key. It seems
strange almost to mention his name over here. There is no

equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he
immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full
of dead bones and her museums are bursting with
plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a
free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN. Goethe was
the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by
comparison. Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a
bore, a universal spirit, but stamped with the German trade-
mark, with the double eagle. The serenity of Goethe, the
calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the drowsy
stupor of a German burgeois deity. Goethe is an end of
something, Whitman is a beginning.
After a discussion of this sort I would sometimes put on
my things and go for a walk, bundled up in a sweater, a
spring overcoat of Fillmore’s and a cape over that. A foul,
damp cold against which there is no protection except a
strong spirit. They say America is a country of extremes,
and it is true that the thermometer registers degrees of cold
which are practically unheard of here; but the cold of a Paris
winter is a cold unknown to America, it is psychological, an
inner as well as an outer cold. If it never freezes here it
never thaws either. Just as the people protect themselves
against the invasion of their privacy, by their high walls,
their bolts and shutters, their growling, evil-tongued,
slatternly concierges, so they have learned to protect
themselves against the cold and heat of a bracing, vigorous
climate. They have fortified themselves: protection is the
keyword. Protection and security. In order that they may rot
in comfort. On a damp winter’s night it is not necessary to
look at the map to discover the latitude of Paris. It is a
northern city, an outpost erected over a swamp filled in with
skulls and bones. Along the boulevards there is a cold
electrical imitation of heat. Tout Va Bien in ultraviolet rays
that make the clients of the Dupont chain cafés look like
gangrened cadavers. Tout Va Bien! That’s the motto that

nourishes the forlorn beggars who walk up and down all
night under the drizzle of the violet rays. Wherever there
are lights there is a little heat. One gets warm from
watching the fat, secure bastards down their grogs, their
steaming black coffees. Where the lights are there are
people on the sidewalks, jostling one another, giving off a
little animal heat through their dirty underwear and their
foul, cursing breaths. Maybe for a stretch of eight or ten
blocks there is a semblance of gaiety, and then it tumbles
back into night, dismal, foul, black night like frozen fat in a
soup tureen. Blocks and blocks of jagged tenements, every
window closed tight, every shopfront barred and bolted.
Miles and miles of stone prisons without the faintest glow of
warmth; the dogs and the cats are all inside with the canary
birds. The cockroaches and the bedbugs too are safely
incarcerated. Tout Va Bien. If you haven’t a sou why just
take a few old newspapers and make yourself a bed on the
steps of a cathedral. The doors are well bolted and there will
be no draughts to disturb you. Better still is to sleep outside
the Metro doors; there you will have company. Look at them
on a rainy night, lying there stiff as mattresses—men,
women, lice, all huddled together and protected by the
newspapers against spittle and the vermin that walks
without legs. Look at them under the bridges or under the
market sheds. How vile they look in comparison with the
clean, bright vegetables stacked up like jewels. Even the
dead horses and the cows and sheep hanging from the
greasy hooks look more inviting. At least we will eat these
tomorrow and even the intestines will serve a purpose. But
these filthy beggars lying in the rain, what purpose do they
serve? What good can they do us? They make us bleed for
five minutes, that’s all.
Oh, well, these are night thoughts produced by walking in
the rain after two thousand years of Christianity. At least
now the birds are well provided for, and the cats and dogs.

Every time I pass the concierge’s window and catch the full
icy impact of her glance I have an insane desire to throttle
all the birds in creation. At the bottom of every frozen heart
there is a drop or two of love—just enough to feed the birds.
Still I can’t get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there
is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation,
though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it
won’t go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no
sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot
exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to
living: liver ideas, kidney ideas, interstitial ideas, etc. If it
were only for the sake of an idea Copernicus would have
smashed the existent macrocosm and Columbus would have
foundered in the Sargasso Sea. The aesthetics of the idea
breeds flowerpots and flowerpots you put on the window sill.
But if there be no rain or sun of what use putting flowerpots
outside the window?
Fillmore is full of ideas about gold. The “mythos” of gold,
he calls it. I like “mythos” and I like the idea of gold, but I
am not obsessed by the subject and I don’t see why we
should make flowerpots, even of gold. He tells me that the
French are hoarding their gold away in water-tight
compartments deep below the surface of the earth; he tells
me that there is a little locomotive which runs around in
these subterranean vaults and corridors. I like the idea
enormously. A profound, uninterrupted silence in which the
gold softly snoozes at a temperature of 17 ¼ degrees
Centigrade. He says an army working 46 days and 37 hours
would not be sufficient to count all the gold that is sunk
beneath the Bank of France, and that there is a reserve
supply of false teeth, bracelets, wedding rings, etc. Enough
food also to last for eighty days and a lake on top of the
gold pile to resist the shock of high explosives. Gold, he
says, tends to become more and more invisible, a myth, and
no more defalcations. Excellent! I am wondering what will

happen to the world when we go off the gold standard in
ideas, dress, morals, etc. The gold standard of love!
Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself
has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea
briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions,
to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere
of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium. To paint a pre-
Socratic being, a creature part goat, part Titan. In short, to
erect a world on the basis of the omphalos, not on an
abstract idea nailed to a cross. Here and there you may
have come across neglected statues, oases untapped,
windmills overlooked by Cervantes, rivers that run uphill,
women with five and six breasts ranged longitudinally along
the torso. (Writing to Gauguin, Strindberg said: “J’ai vu des
arbres que ne retrouverait aucun botaniste, des animaux
que Cuvier n’a jamais soupçonnés et des hommes que vous
seul avez pu créer.”)
When Rembrandt hit par he went below with the gold
ingots and the pemmican and the portable beds. Gold is a
night word belonging to the chthonian mind: it has dream in
it and mythos. We are reverting to alchemy, to that fake
Alexandrian wisdom which produced our inflated symbols.
Real wisdom is being stored away in the sub-cellars by the
misers of learning. The day is coming when they will be
circling around in the middle air with magnetizers; to find a
piece of ore you will have to go up ten thousand feet with a
pair of instruments—in a cold latitude preferably—and
establish telepathic communication with the bowels of the
earth and the shades of the dead. No more Klondikes. No
more bonanzas. You will have to learn to sing and caper a
bit, to read the zodiac and study your entrails. All the gold
that is being tucked away in the pockets of the earth will
have to be re-mined; all this symbolism will have to be
dragged out again from the bowels of man. But first the
instruments must be perfected. First it is necessary to

invent better airplanes, to distinguish where the noise
comes from and not go daffy just because you hear an
explosion under your ass. And secondly it will be necessary
to get adapted to the cold layers of the stratosphere, to
become a cold-blooded fish of the air. No reverence. No
piety. No longing. No regrets. No hysteria. Above all, as
Philippe Datz says—“NO DISCOURAGEMENT!”
These are sunny thoughts inspired by a vermouth cassis
at the Place de la Trinité. A Saturday afternoon and a
“misfire” book in my hands. Everything swimming in a
divine mucopus. The drink leaves a bitter herbish taste in
my mouth, the lees of our Great Western civilization, rotting
now like the toenails of the saints. Women are passing by—
regiments of them—all swinging their asses in front of me;
the chimes are ringing and the buses are climbing the
sidewalk and bussing one another. The garçon wipes the
table with a dirty rag while the patronne tickles the cash
register with fiendish glee. A look of vacuity on my face,
blotto, vague in acuity, biting the asses that brush by me. In
the belfry opposite the hunchback strikes with a golden
mallet and the pigeons scream alarum. I open the book—the
book which Nietzsche called “the best German book there
is”—and it says:
“MEN WILL BECOME MORE CLEVER AND MORE ACUTE; BUT NOT BETTER,
HAPPIER, AND STRONGER IN ACTION—OR, AT LEAST, ONLY AT EPOCHS. I
FORESEE THE TIME WHEN GOD WILL HAVE NO MORE JOY IN THEM, BUT WILL
BREAK UP EVERYTHING FOR A RENEWED CREATION. I AM CERTAIN THAT
EVERYTHING IS PLANNED TO THIS END, AND THAT THE TIME AND HOUR IN THE
DISTANT FUTURE FOR THE OCCURRENCE OF THIS RENOVATING EPOCH ARE
ALREADY FIXED. BUT A LONG TIME WILL ELAPSE FIRST, AND WE MAY STILL FOR
THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF YEARS AMUSE OURSELVES ON THIS DEAR
OLD SURFACE.”
Excellent! At least a hundred years ago there was a man
who had vision enough to see that the world was pooped
out. Our Western world!—When I see the figures of men and
women moving listlessly behind their prison walls,
sheltered, secluded for a few brief hours, I am appalled by

the potentialities for drama that are still contained in these
feeble bodies. Behind the gray walls there are human
sparks, and yet never a conflagration. Are these men and
women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of
puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom
apparently, but they have nowhere to go. In one realm only
are they free and there they may roam at will—but they
have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there have
been no dreams that have taken wing. Not one man has
been born light enough, gay enough, to leave the earth! The
eagles who flapped their mighty pinions for a while came
crashing heavily to earth. They made us dizzy with the flap
and whir of their wings. Stay on the earth, you eagles of the
future! The heavens have been explored and they are
empty. And what lies under the earth is empty too, filled
with bones and shadows. Stay on the earth and swim
another few hundred thousand years!
And now it is three o’clock in the morning and we have a
couple of trollops here who are doing somersaults on the
bare floor. Fillmore is walking around naked with a goblet in
his hand, and that paunch of his is drumtight, hard as a
fistula. All the Pernod and champagne and cognac and
Anjou which he guzzled from three in the afternoon on, is
gurgling in his trap like a sewer. The girls are putting their
ears to his belly as if it were a music box. Open his mouth
with a buttonhook and drop a slug in the slot. When the
sewer gurgles I hear the bats flying out of the belfry and the
dream slides into artifice.
The girls have undressed and we are examining the floor
to make sure that they won’t get any splinters in their ass.
They are still wearing their high-heeled shoes. But the ass!
The ass is worn down, scraped, sandpapered, smooth, hard,
bright as a billiard ball or the skull of a leper. On the wall is
Mona’s picture: she is facing northeast on a line with Cracow
written in green ink. To the left of her is the Dordogne,

encircled with a red pencil. Suddenly I see a dark, hairy
crack in front of me set in a bright, polished billiard ball; the
legs are holding me like a pair of scissors. A glance at that
dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain
opens up: all the images and memories that had been
laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted, labeled,
documented, filed, sealed and stamped break forth pell-mell
like ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world
ceases to revolve, time stops, the very nexus of my dreams
is broken and dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand
schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to
face with the Absolute. I see again the great sprawling
mothers of Picasso, their breasts covered with spiders, their
legend hidden deep in the labyrinth. And Molly Bloom lying
on a dirty mattress for eternity. On the toilet door red chalk
cocks and the madonna uttering the diapason of woe. I hear
a wild, hysterical laugh, a room full of lockjaw, and the body
that was black glows like phosphorus. Wild, wild, utterly
uncontrollable laughter, and that crack laughing at me too,
laughing through the mossy whiskers, a laugh that creases
the bright, polished surface of the billiard ball. Great whore
and mother of man with gin in her veins. Mother of all
harlots, spider rolling us in your logarithmic grave, insatiable
one, fiend whose laughter rives me! I look down into that
sunken crater, world lost and without traces, and I hear the
bells chiming, two nuns at the Palace Stanislas and the
smell of rancid butter under their dresses, manifesto never
printed because it was raining, war fought to further the
cause of plastic surgery, the Prince of Wales flying around
the world decorating the graves of unknown heroes. Every
bat flying out of the belfry a lost cause, every whoopla a
groan over the radio from the private trenches of the
damned. Out of that dark, unstitched wound, that sink of
abominations, that cradle of black-thronged cities where the
music of ideas is drowned in cold fat, out of strangled
Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between beauty

and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when
he looks down and sidelong is Satan himself and when he
looks upward sees a buttered angel, a snail with wings.
When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign,
the world at balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace
of remainder. Not the zero on which Van Norden turned his
flashlight, not the empty crack of the prematurely
disillusioned man, but an Arabian zero rather, the sign from
which spring endless mathematical worlds, the fulcrum
which balances the stars and the light dreams and the
machines lighter than air and the lightweight limbs and the
explosives that produced them. Into that crack I would like
to penetrate up to the eyes, make them waggle ferociously,
dear, crazy, metallurgical eyes. When the eyes waggle then
will I hear again Dostoevski’s words, hear them rolling on
page after page, with minutest observation, with maddest
introspection, with all the undertones of misery now lightly,
humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until
the heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding,
scorching light, the radiant light that carries off the
fecundating seeds of the stars. The story of art whose roots
lie in massacre.
When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I
feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and
crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper’s skull.
If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of
this world there would not be left him a square foot of
ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears
down on him and breaks his back. There are always too
many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering
humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and
the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of
centuries there does appear a man with a desperate,
hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world
upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he

brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a
scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode,
pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and
curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a
man whose only defenses left are his words and his words
are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the
world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the
cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If
any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to
put down what is really his experience, what is truly his
truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it
would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no
will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the
indestructible elements that have gone to make up the
world.
In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul
appeared, the last man to know the meaning of ecstasy,
there has been a constant and steady decline of man in art,
in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there isn’t a
dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have
the slightest regard for these existent governments, laws,
codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos? If
anyone knew what it meant to read the riddle of that thing
which today is called a “crack” or a “hole,” if any one had
the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are
labeled “obscene,” this world would crack asunder. It is the
obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which
makes this crazy civilization look like a crater. It is this great
yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and
mothers of the race carry between their legs. When a
hungry, desperate spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs
squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of
sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of
indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound
that never heals. And he puts the live wire right between

the legs; he hits below the belt, scorches the very gizzards.
It is no use putting on rubber gloves; all that can be coolly
and intellectually handled belongs to the carapace and a
man who is intent on creation always dives beneath, to the
open wound, to the festering obscene horror. He hitches his
dynamo to the tenderest parts; if only blood and pus gush
forth, it is something. The dry, fucked-out crater is obscene.
More obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous
than the bloodiest oath is paralysis. If there is only a gaping
wound left then it must gush forth though it produce nothing
but toads and bats and homunculi.
Everything is packed into a second which is either
consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid
plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female
with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows;
she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked
and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of
the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her
gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves
amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla
that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the
cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits
with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that
has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for
the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate,
despair, pity, rage, disgust—what are these amidst the
fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty,
terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing
suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the
remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster.
She used to say to me, Mona, in her fits of exaltation,
“you’re a great human being,” and though she left me here
to perish, though she put beneath my feet a great howling
pit of emptiness, the words that lie at the bottom of my soul
leap forth and they light the shadows below me. I am one

who was lost in the crowd, whom the fizzing lights made
dizzy, a zero who saw everything about him reduced to
mockery. Passed me men and women ignited with sulfur,
porters in calcium livery opening the jaws of hell, fame
walking on crutches, dwindled by the skyscrapers, chewed
to a frazzle by the spiked mouth of the machines. I walked
between the tall buildings toward the cool of the river and I
saw the lights shoot up between the ribs of the skeletons
like rockets. If I was truly a great human being, as she said,
then what was the meaning of this slavering idiocy about
me? I was a man with body and soul, I had a heart that was
not protected by a steel vault. I had moments of ecstasy
and I sang with burning sparks. I sang of the Equator, her
red-feathered legs and the islands dropping out of sight. But
nobody heard. A gun fired across the Pacific falls into space
because the earth is round and pigeons fly upside down. I
saw her looking at me across the table with eyes turned to
grief; sorrow spreading inward flattened its nose against her
spine; the marrow churned to pity had turned liquid. She
was light as a corpse that floats in the Dead Sea. Her fingers
bled with anguish and the blood turned to drool. With the
wet dawn came the tolling of bells and along the fibers of
my nerves the bells played ceaselessly and their tongues
pounded in my heart and clanged with iron malice. Strange
that the bells should toll so, but stranger still the body
bursting, this woman turned to night and her maggot words
gnawing through the mattress. I moved along under the
Equator, heard the hideous laughter of the green-jawed
hyena, saw the jackal with silken tail and the dick-dick and
the spotted leopard, all left behind in the Garden of Eden.
And then her sorrow widened, like the bow of a dreadnought
and the weight of her sinking flooded my ears. Slime wash
and sapphires slipping, sluicing through the gay neurons,
and the spectrum spliced and the gunwales dipping. Soft as
lion-pad I heard the gun carriages turn, saw them vomit and
drool: the firmament sagged and all the stars turned black.

Black ocean bleeding and the brooding stars breeding
chunks of fresh-swollen flesh while overhead the birds
wheeled and out of the hallucinated sky fell the balance
with mortar and pestle and the bandaged eyes of justice. All
that is here related moves with imaginary feet along the
parallels of dead orbs; all that is seen with the empty
sockets bursts like flowering grass. Out of nothingness
arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spirals
slowly sinks the gaping hole. The land and the water make
numbers joined, a poem written with flesh and stronger than
steel or granite. Through endless night the earth whirls
toward a creation unknown. …
Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on
my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself
like a litany—“Fay ce que vouldras!… fay ce que vouldras!”
Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it
yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this
to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones,
the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her
wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the
latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime,
holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my
adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words
they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and
the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they
created. But above all, the ecstasy!
Things, certain things about my old idols bring the tears
to my eyes: the interruptions, the disorder, the violence,
above all, the hatred they aroused. When I think of their
deformities, of the monstrous styles they chose, of the
flatulence and tediousness of their works, of all the chaos
and confusion they wallowed in, of the obstacles they
heaped up about them, I feel an exaltation. They were all
mired in their own dung. All men who over-elaborated. So
true is it that I am almost tempted to say: “Show me a man

who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!” What
is called their “over-elaboration” is my meat: it is the sign of
struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it,
the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit. And
when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I
will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am
unattracted… I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that
the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to
overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him
an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that
by the emotional release those who are dead may be
restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and
imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their
stuttering is like divine music to my ears. I see in the
beautifully bloated pages that follow the interruptions the
erasure of petty intrusions, of the dirty footprints, as it were,
of cowards, liars, thieves, vandals, calumniators. I see in the
swollen muscles of their lyric throats the staggering effort
that must be made to turn the wheel over, to pick up the
pace where one has left off. I see that behind the daily
annoyances and intrusions, behind the cheap, glittering
malice of the feeble and inert, there stands the symbol of
life’s frustrating power, and that he who would create order,
he who would sow strife and discord, because he is imbued
with will, such a man must go again and again to the stake
and the gibbet. I see that behind the nobility of his gestures
there lurks the specter of the ridiculousness of it all—that he
is not only sublime, but absurd.
Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a
man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy
me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I
belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to
do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the
creaking machinery of humanity—I belong to the earth! I
say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns

sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those
cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed,
consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent
tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking
skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin,
and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind
my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls,
some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if
they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin,
the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on.
Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the
skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the
rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with
excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my
madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows
through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this
unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly
through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible
vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side
with the human race there runs another race of beings, the
inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown
impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the
fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy
dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into
song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed
a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals
ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down,
their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands
always empty, always clutching and grasping for the
beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within
reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their
vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to
comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that
when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see
that this is right, that there is no other path to pursue. A
man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high

place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It
is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls
short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering,
less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less
contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is
human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.
When I think of Stavrogin for example, I think of some
divine monster standing on a high place and flinging to us
his torn bowels. In The Possessed the earth quakes: it is not
the catastrophe that befalls the imaginative individual, but a
cataclysm in which a large portion of humanity is buried,
wiped out forever. Stavrogin was Dostoevski and Dostoevski
was the sum of all those contradictions which either
paralyze a man or lead him to the heights. There was no
world too low for him to enter, no place too high for him to
fear to ascend. He went the whole gamut, from the abyss to
the stars. It is a pity that we shall never again have the
opportunity to see a man placed at the very core of mystery
and, by his flashes, illuminating for us the depth and
immensity of the darkness.
Today I am aware of my lineage. I have no need to consult
my horoscope or my genealogical chart. What is written in
the stars, or in my blood, I know nothing of. I know that I
spring from the mythological founders of the race. The man
who raises the holy bottle to his lips, the criminal who
kneels in the marketplace, the innocent one who discovers
that all corpses stink, the madman who dances with
lightning in his hands, the friar who lifts his skirts to pee
over the world, the fanatic who ransacks libraries in order to
find the Word—all these are fused in me, all these make my
confusion, my ecstasy. If I am inhuman it is because my
world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be
human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by
the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by
platitudes and isms. I am pouring the juice of the grape

down my gullet and I find wisdom in it, but my wisdom is
not born of the grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine.
…
I want to make a detour of those lofty arid mountain
ranges where one dies of thirst and cold, that “extra-
temporal” history, that absolute of time and space where
there exists neither man, beast, nor vegetation, where one
goes crazy with loneliness, with language that is mere
words, where everything is unhooked, ungeared, out of joint
with the times. I want a world of men and women, of trees
that do not talk (because there is too much talk in the world
as it is!) of rivers that carry you to places, not rivers that are
legends, but rivers that put you in touch with other men and
women, with architecture, religion, plants, animals—rivers
that have boats on them and in which men drown, drown
not in myth and legend and books and dust of the past, but
in time and space and history. I want rivers that make
oceans such as Shakespeare and Dante, rivers which do not
dry up in the void of the past. Oceans, yes! Let us have
more oceans, new oceans that blot out the past, oceans that
create new geological formations, new topographical vistas
and strange, terrifying continents, oceans that destroy and
preserve at the same time, oceans that we can sail on, take
off to new discoveries, new horizons. Let us have more
oceans, more upheavals, more wars, more holocausts. Let
us have a world of men and women with dynamos between
their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama,
dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not
dry farts. I believe that today more than ever a book should
be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we
must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that
has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the
body and soul.
It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for
us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last

agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war
whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and
dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries
and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones
dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But
a dance!
“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton
of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I
awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his
rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is
exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that
flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words,
sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the
bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel
and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and
the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics
and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all
the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the
Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine
float on through dream and legend in an open boat and
drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that
flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed
unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric,
perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that
flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that
brings us back to the beginning where there is never end:
the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy,
the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany,
the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in
the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that
pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and
dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified,
that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit
toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is
to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the

beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that
is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.
It was close to dawn on Christmas Day when we came
home from the Rue d’Odessa with a couple of Negresses
from the telephone company. The fire was out and we were
all so tired that we climbed into bed with our clothes on. The
one I had, who had been like a bounding leopard all
evening, fell sound asleep as I was climbing over her. For a
while I worked over her as one works over a person who has
been drowned or asphyxiated. Then I gave it up and fell
sound asleep myself.
All during the holidays we had champagne morning, noon
and night—the cheapest and the best champagne. With the
turn of the year I was to leave for Dijon where I had been
offered a trivial post as exchange professor of English, one
of those Franco-American amity arrangements which is
supposed to promote understanding and good will between
sister republics. Fillmore was more elated than I by the
prospect—he had good reason to be. For me it was just a
transfer from one purgatory to another. There was no future
ahead of me; there wasn’t even a salary attached to the job.
One was supposed to consider himself fortunate to enjoy
the privilege of spreading the gospel of Franco-American
amity. It was a job for a rich man’s son.
The night before I left we had a good time. About dawn it
began to snow: we walked about from one quarter to
another taking a last look at Paris. Passing through the Rue
St. Dominique we suddenly fell upon a little square and
there was the Eglise Ste.-Clotilde. People were going to
mass. Fillmore, whose head was still a little cloudy, was bent
on going to mass too. “For the fun of it!” as he put it. I felt
somewhat uneasy about it; in the first place I had never
attended a mass, and in the second place I looked seedy
and felt seedy. Fillmore, too, looked rather battered, even

more disreputable than myself; his big slouch hat was on
assways and his overcoat was still full of sawdust from the
last joint we had been in. However, we marched in. The
worst they could do would be to throw us out.
I was so astounded by the sight that greeted my eyes
that I lost all uneasiness. It took me a little while to get
adjusted to the dim light. I stumbled around behind Fillmore,
holding his sleeve. A weird, unearthly noise assailed my
ears, a sort of hollow drone that rose up out of the cold
flagging. A huge, dismal tomb it was with mourners shuffling
in and out. A sort of antechamber to the world below.
Temperature about 55 or 60 Fahrenheit. No music except
this undefinable dirge manufactured in the subcellar—like a
million heads of cauliflower wailing in the dark. People in
shrouds were chewing away with that hopeless, dejected
look of beggars who hold out their hands in a trance and
mumble an unintelligible appeal.
That this sort of thing existed I knew, but then one also
knows that there are slaughterhouses and morgues and
dissecting rooms. One instinctively avoids such places. In
the street I had often passed a priest with a little prayer
book in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines. Idiot, I
would say to myself, and let it go at that. In the street one
meets with all forms of dementia and the priest is by no
means the most striking. Two thousand years of it has
deadened us to the idiocy of it. However, when you are
suddenly transported to the very midst of his realm, when
you see the little world in which the priest functions like an
alarm clock, you are apt to have entirely different
sensations.
For a moment all this slaver and twitching of the lips
almost began to have a meaning. Something was going on,
some kind of dumb show which, not rendering me wholly
stupefied, held me spellbound. All over the world, wherever
there are these dim-lit tombs, you have this incredible

spectacle—the same mean temperature, the same
crepuscular glow, the same buzz and drone. All over
Christendom, at certain stipulated hours, people in black are
groveling before the altar where the priest stands up with a
little book in one hand and a dinner bell or atomizer in the
other and mumbles to them in a language which, even if it
were comprehensible, no longer contains a shred of
meaning. Blessing them, most likely. Blessing the country,
blessing the ruler, blessing the firearms and the battleships
and the ammunition and the hand grenades. Surrounding
him on the altar are little boys dressed like angels of the
Lord who sing alto and soprano. Innocent lambs. All in skirts,
sexless, like the priest himself who is usually flat-footed and
nearsighted to boot. A fine epicene caterwauling. Sex in a
jockstrap, to the tune of J-mol.
I was taking it in as best I could in the dim light.
Fascinating and stupefying at the same time. All over the
civilized world, I thought to myself. All over the world.
Marvelous. Rain or shine, hail, sleet, snow, thunder,
lightning, war, famine, pestilence—makes not the slightest
difference. Always the same mean temperature, the same
mumbo jumbo, the same high-laced shoes and the little
angels of the Lord singing soprano and alto. Near the exit a
little slot-box—to carry on the heavenly work. So that God’s
blessing may rain down upon king and country and
battleships and high explosives and tanks and airplanes, so
that the worker may have more strength in his arms,
strength to slaughter horses and cows and sheep, strength
to punch holes in iron girders, strength to sew buttons on
other people’s pants, strength to sell carrots and sewing
machines and automobiles, strength to exterminate insects
and clean stables and unload garbage cans and scrub
lavatories, strength to write headlines and chop tickets in
the subway. Strength… strength. All that lip chewing and
hornswoggling just to furnish a little strength!

We were moving about from one spot to another,
surveying the scene with that clearheadedness which
comes after an all-night session. We must have made
ourselves pretty conspicuous shuffling about that way with
our coat collars turned up and never once crossing
ourselves and never once moving our lips except to whisper
some callous remark. Perhaps everything would have
passed off without notice if Fillmore hadn’t insisted on
walking past the altar in the midst of the ceremony. He was
looking for the exit, and he thought while he was at it, I
suppose, that he would take a good squint at the holy of
holies, get a close-up on it, as it were. We had gotten safely
by and were marching toward a crack of light which must
have been the way out when a priest suddenly stepped out
of the gloom and blocked our path. Wanted to know where
we were going and what we were doing. We told him politely
enough that we were looking for the exit. We said “exit”
because at the moment we were so flabbergasted that we
couldn’t think of the French for exit. Without a word of
response he took us firmly by the arm and, opening the
door, a side door it was, he gave us a push and out we
tumbled into the blinding light of day. It happened so
suddenly and unexpectedly that when we hit the sidewalk
we were in a daze. We walked a few paces, blinking our
eyes, and then instinctively we both turned round; the priest
was still standing on the steps, pale as a ghost and scowling
like the devil himself. He must have been sore as hell. Later,
thinking back on it, I couldn’t blame him for it. But at that
moment, seeing him with his long skirts and the little skull
cap on his cranium, he looked so ridiculous that I burst out
laughing. I looked at Fillmore and he began to laugh too. For
a full minute we stood there laughing right in the poor
bugger’s face. He was so bewildered, I guess, that for a
moment he didn’t know what to do; suddenly, however, he
started down the steps on the run, shaking his fist at us as if
he were in earnest. When he swung out of the enclosure he

was on the gallop. By this time some preservative instinct
warned me to get a move on. I grabbed Fillmore by the coat
sleeve and started to run. He was saying, like an idiot: “No,
no! I won’t run!”—“Come on!” I yelled, “we’d better get out
of here. That guy’s mad clean through.” And off we ran,
beating it as fast as our legs would carry us.
On the way to Dijon, still laughing about the affair, my
thoughts reverted to a ludicrous incident, of a somewhat
similar nature, which occurred during my brief sojourn in
Florida. It was during the celebrated boom when, like
thousands of others, I was caught with my pants down.
Trying to extricate myself I got caught, along with a friend of
mine, in the very neck of the bottle. Jacksonville, where we
were marooned for about six weeks, was practically in a
state of siege. Every bum on earth, and a lot of guys who
had never been bums before, seemed to have drifted into
Jacksonville. The YMCA, the Salvation Army, the firehouses
and police stations, the hotels, the lodging houses,
everything was full up. Complet absolutely, and signs
everywhere to that effect. The residents of Jacksonville had
become so hardened that it seemed to me as if they were
walking around in coats of mail. It was the old business of
food again. Food and a place to flop. Food was coming up
from below in trainloads—oranges and grapefruit and all
sorts of juicy edibles. We used to pass by the freight sheds
looking for rotten fruit—but even that was scarce.
One night, in desperation, I dragged my friend Joe to a
synagogue, during the service. It was a Reformed
congregation, and the rabbi impressed me rather favorably.
The music got me too—that piercing lamentation of the
Jews. As soon as the service was over I marched to the
rabbi’s study and requested an interview with him. He
received me decently enough—until I made clear my
mission. Then he grew absolutely frightened. I had only
asked him for a handout on behalf of my friend Joe and

myself. You would have thought, from the way he looked at
me, that I had asked to rent the synagogue as a bowling
alley. To cap it all, he suddenly asked me point-blank if I was
a Jew or not. When I answered no, he seemed perfectly
outraged. Why, pray, had I come to a Jewish pastor for aid? I
told him naively that I had always had more faith in the Jews
than in the Gentiles. I said it modestly, as if it were one of
my peculiar defects. It was the truth too. But he wasn’t a bit
flattered. No, siree. He was horrified. To get rid of me he
wrote out a note to the Salvation Army people. “That’s the
place for you to address yourself,” he said, and brusquely
turned away to tend his flock.
The Salvation Army, of course, had nothing to offer us. If
we had had a quarter apiece we might have rented a
mattress on the floor. But we hadn’t a nickel between us. We
went to the park and stretched ourselves out on a bench. It
was raining and so we covered ourselves with newspapers.
Weren’t there more than a half hour, I imagine, when a cop
came along and, without a word of warning, gave us such a
sound fanning that we were up and on our feet in a jiffy, and
dancing a bit too, though we weren’t in any mood for
dancing. I felt so goddamned sore and miserable, so
dejected, so lousy, after being whacked over the ass by that
half-witted bastard, that I could have blown up the City Hall.
The next morning, in order to get even with these
hospitable sons of bitches, we presented ourselves bright
and early at the door of a Catholic priest. This time I let Joe
do the talking. He was Irish and he had a bit of a brogue. He
had very soft, blue eyes, too, and he could make them
water a bit when he wanted to. A sister in black opened the
door for us; she didn’t ask us inside, however. We were to
wait in the vestibule until she went and called for the good
father. In a few minutes he came, the good father, puffing
like a locomotive. And what was it we wanted disturbing his
likes at that hour of the morning? Something to eat and a

place to flop, we answered innocently. And where did we
hail from, the good father wanted to know at once. From
New York. From New York, eh? Then ye’d better be gettin’
back there as fast as ye kin, me lads, and without another
word the big, bloated turnip-faced bastard shoved the door
in our face.
About an hour later, drifting around helplessly like a
couple of drunken schooners, we happened to pass by the
rectory again. So help me God if the big, lecherous-looking
turnip wasn’t backing out of the alley in a limousine! As he
swung past us he blew a cloud of smoke into our eyes. As
though to say—“That for you!” A beautiful limousine it was,
with a couple of spare tires in the back, and the good father
sitting at the wheel with a big cigar in his mouth. Must have
been a Corona Corona, so fat and luscious it was. Sitting
pretty he was, and no two ways about it. I couldn’t see
whether he had skirts on or not. I could only see the gravy
trickling from his lips—and the big cigar with that fifty-cent
aroma.
All the way to Dijon I got to reminiscing about the past. I
thought of all the things I might have said and done, which I
hadn’t said or done, in the bitter, humiliating moments
when just to ask for a crust of bread is to make yourself less
than a worm. Stone sober as I was, I was still smarting from
those old insults and injuries. I could still feel that whack
over the ass which the cop gave me in the park—though
that was a mere bagatelle, a little dancing lesson, you might
say. All over the States I wandered, and into Canada and
Mexico. The same story everywhere. If you want bread
you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over all the
earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement.
Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more
dog biscuits, more lawn mowers, more ball bearings, more
high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap,
more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more

churches, more libraries, more museums. Forward! Time
presses. The embryo is pushing through the neck of the
womb, and there’s not even a gob of spit to ease the
passage. A dry, strangulating birth. Not a wail, not a chirp.
Salut au monde! Salute of twenty-one guns bombinating
from the rectum. “I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out,”
said Walt. That was a time when you could still get a hat to
fit your head. But time passes. To get a hat that fits now you
have to walk to the electric chair. They give you a skull cap.
A tight fit, what? But no matter! It fits.
You have to be in a strange country like France, walking
the meridian that separates the hemispheres of life and
death, to know what incalculable vistas yawn ahead. The
body electric! The democratic soul! Flood tide! Holy Mother
of God, what does this crap mean? The earth is parched and
cracked. Men and women come together like broods of
vultures over a stinking carcass, to mate and fly apart
again. Vultures who drop from the clouds like heavy stones.
Talons and beak, that’s what we are! A huge intestinal
apparatus with a nose for dead meat. Forward! Forward
without pity, without compassion, without love, without
forgiveness. Ask no quarter and give none! More
battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More
gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines!
More and more of it—until the whole fucking works is blown
to smithereens, and the earth with it!
Stepping off the train I knew immediately that I had made
a fatal mistake. The Lycée was a little distance from the
station; I walked down the main street in the early dusk of
winter, feeling my way toward my destination. A light snow
was falling, the trees sparkled with frost. Passed a couple of
huge, empty cafés that looked like dismal waiting rooms.
Silent, empty gloom—that’s how it impressed me. A
hopeless, jerkwater town where mustard is turned out in

carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and cute-
looking little jars.
The first glance at the Lycée sent a shudder through me. I
felt so undecided that at the entrance I stopped to debate
whether I would go in or not. But as I hadn’t the price of a
return ticket there wasn’t much use debating the question. I
thought for a moment of sending a wire to Fillmore, but then
I was stumped to know what excuse to make. The only thing
to do was to walk in with my eyes shut.
It happened that M. le Proviseur was out—his day off, so
they said. A little hunchback came forward and offered to
escort me to the office of M. le Censeur, second in charge. I
walked a little behind him, fascinated by the grotesque way
in which he hobbled along. He was a little monster, such as
can be seen on the porch of any halfassed cathedral in
Europe.
The office of M. le Censeur was large and bare. I sat down
in a stiff chair to wait while the hunchback darted off to
search for him. I almost felt at home. The atmosphere of the
place reminded me vividly of certain charity bureaus back in
the States where I used to sit by the hour waiting for some
mealy-mouthed bastard to come and cross-examine me.
Suddenly the door opened and, with a mincing step, M. le
Censeur came prancing in. It was all I could do to suppress a
titter. He had on just such a frock coat as Boris used to
wear, and over his forehead there hung a bang, a sort of
spitcurl such as Smerdyakov might have worn. Grave and
brittle, with a lynxlike eye, he wasted no words of cheer on
me. At once he brought forth the sheets on which were
written the names of the students, the hours, the classes,
etc., all in a meticulous hand. He told me how much coal
and wood I was allowed and after that he promptly informed
me that I was at liberty to do as I pleased in my spare time.
This last was the first good thing I had heard him say. It
sounded so reassuring that I quickly said a prayer for France

—for the army and for the navy, the educational system, the
bistros, the whole goddamned works.
This folderol completed, he rang a little bell, whereupon
the hunchback promptly appeared to escort me to the office
of M. l’Econome. Here the atmosphere was somewhat
different. More like a freight station, with bills of lading and
rubber stamps everywhere, and pasty-faced clerks
scribbling away with broken pens in huge, cumbersome
ledgers. My dole of coal and wood portioned out, off we
marched, the hunchback and I, with a wheelbarrow, toward
the dormitory. I was to have a room on the top floor, in the
same wing as the pions. The situation was taking on a
humorous aspect. I didn’t know what the hell to expect next.
Perhaps a spittoon. The whole thing smacked very much of
preparation for a campaign; the only things missing were a
knapsack and rifle—and a brass slug.
The room assigned me was rather large, with a small
stove to which was attached a crooked pipe that made an
elbow just over the iron cot. A big chest for the coal and
wood stood near the door. The windows gave out on a row
of forlorn little houses all made of stone in which lived the
grocer, the baker, the shoemaker, the butcher, etc.—all
imbecilic-looking clodhoppers. I glanced over the rooftops
toward the bare hills where a train was clattering. The
whistle of the locomotive screamed mournfully and
hysterically.
After the hunchback had made the fire for me I inquired
about the grub. It was not quite time for dinner. I flopped on
the bed, with my overcoat on, and pulled the covers over
me. Beside me was the eternal rickety night table in which
the piss pot is hidden away. I stood the alarm on the table
and watched the minutes ticking off. Into the well of the
room a bluish light filtered in from the street. I listened to
the trucks rattling by as I gazed vacantly at the stove pipe,
at the elbow where it was held together with bits of wire.

The coal chest intrigued me. Never in my life had I occupied
a room with a coal chest. And never in my life had I built a
fire or taught children. Nor, for that matter, never in my life
had I worked without pay. I felt free and chained at the same
time—like one feels just before election, when all the crooks
have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the
right man. I felt like a hired man, like a jack-of-all-trades, like
a hunter, like a rover, like a galley slave, like a pedagogue,
like a worm and a louse. I was free, but my limbs were
shackled. A democratic soul with a free meal ticket, but no
power of locomotion, no voice. I felt like a jellyfish nailed to
a plank. Above all, I felt hungry. The hands were moving
slowly. Still ten more minutes to kill before the fire alarm
would go off. The shadows in the room deepened. It grew
frightfully silent, a tense stillness that tautened my nerves.
Little dabs of snow clung to the windowpanes. Far away a
locomotive gave out a shrill scream. Then a dead silence
again. The stove had commenced to glow, but there was no
heat coming from it. I began to fear that I might doze off
and miss the dinner. That would mean lying awake on an
empty belly all night. I got panic-stricken.
Just a moment before the gong went off I jumped out of
bed and, locking the door behind me, I bolted downstairs to
the courtyard. There I got lost. One quadrangle after
another, one staircase after another. I wandered in and out
of the buildings searching frantically for the refectory.
Passed a long line of youngsters marching in a column to
God knows where; they moved along like a chain gang, with
a slave driver at the head of the column. Finally I saw an
energetic-looking individual, with a derby, heading toward
me. I stopped him to ask the way to the refectory. Happened
I stopped the right man. It was M. le Proviseur, and he
seemed delighted to have stumbled on me. Wanted to know
right away if I were comfortably settled, if there was
anything more he could do for me. I told him everything was

O.K. Only it was a bit chilly, I ventured to add. He assured
me that it was rather unusual, this weather. Now and then
the fogs came on and a bit of snow, and then it became
unpleasant for a while, and so on and so forth. All the while
he had me by the arm, guiding me toward the refectory. He
seemed like a very decent chap. A regular guy, I thought to
myself. I even went so far as to imagine that I might get
chummy with him later on, that he’d invite me to his room
on a bitter cold night and make a hot grog for me. I
imagined all sorts of friendly things in the few moments it
required to reach the door of the refectory. Here, my mind
racing on at a mile a minute, he suddenly shook hands with
me and, doffing his hat, bade me good night. I was so
bewildered that I tipped my hat also. It was the regular thing
to do, I soon found out. Whenever you pass a prof, or even
M. l’Econome, you doff the hat. Might pass the same guy a
dozen times a day. Makes no difference. You’ve got to give
the salute, even though your hat is worn out. It’s the polite
thing to do.
Anyway, I had found the refectory. Like an East Side clinic
it was, with tiled walls, bare light, and marble-topped tables.
And of course a big stove with an elbow pipe. The dinner
wasn’t served yet. A cripple was running in and out with
dishes and knives and forks and bottles of wine. In a corner
several young men conversing animatedly. I went up to
them and introduced myself. They gave me a most cordial
reception. Almost too cordial, in fact. I couldn’t quite make it
out. In a jiffy the room began to fill up; I was presented from
one to the other quickly. Then they formed a circle about me
and, filling the glasses, they began to sing
L’autre soir l’idée m’est venue
Cré nom de Zeus d’enculer un pendu;
Le vent se lève sur la potence,
Voilà mon pendu qui se balance,
J’ai dû l’enculer en sautant,

Cré nom de Zeus, on est jamais content.
Baiser dans un con trop petit,
Cré nom de Zeus, on s’écorche le vit;
Baiser dans un con trop large,
On ne sait pas où l’on décharge;
Se branler étant bien emmerdant,
Cré nom de Zeus, on est jamais content.
With this, Quasimodo announced the dinner.
They were a cheerful group, les surveillants. There was
Kroa who belched like a pig and always let off a loud fart
when he sat down to table. He could fart thirteen times in
succession, they informed me. He held the record. Then
there was Monsieur le Prince, an athlete who was fond of
wearing a tuxedo in the evening when he went to town; he
had a beautiful complexion, just like a girl, and never
touched the wine nor read anything that might tax his brain.
Next to him sat Petit Paul, from the Midi, who thought of
nothing but cunt all the time; he used to say every day—“à
partir de jeudi je ne parlerai plus de femmes.” He and
Monsieur le Prince were inseparable. Then there was
Passeleau, a veritable young scallywag who was studying
medicine and who borrowed right and left; he talked
incessantly of Ronsard, Villon and Rabelais. Opposite me sat
Mollesse, agitator and organizer of the pions, who insisted
on weighing the meat to see if it wasn’t short a few grams.
He occupied a little room in the infirmary. His supreme
enemy was Monsieur l’Econome, which was nothing
particularly to his credit since everybody hated this
individual. For companion Mollesse had one called Le
Pénible, a dour-looking chap with a hawklike profile who
practiced the strictest economy and acted as moneylender.
He was like an engraving by Albrecht Dürer—a composite of
all the dour, sour, morose, bitter, unfortunate, unlucky and

introspective devils who compose the pantheon of
Germany’s medieval knights. A Jew, no doubt. At any rate,
he was killed in an automobile accident shortly after my
arrival, a circumstance which left me twenty-three francs to
the good. With the exception of Renaud who sat beside me,
the others have faded out of my memory; they belonged to
that category of colorless individuals who make up the world
of engineers, architects, dentists, pharmacists, teachers,
etc. There was nothing to distinguish them from the clods
whom they would later wipe their boots on. They were zeros
in every sense of the word, ciphers who form the nucleus of
a respectable and lamentable citizenry. They ate with their
heads down and were always the first to clamor for a
second helping. They slept soundly and never complained;
they were neither gay nor miserable. The indifferent ones
whom Dante consigned to the vestibule of Hell. The upper-
crusters.
It was the custom after dinner to go immediately to town,
unless one was on duty in the dormitories. In the center of
town were the cafés—huge, dreary halls where the
somnolent merchants of Dijon gathered to play cards and
listen to the music. It was warm in the cafés, that is the best
I can say for them. The seats were fairly comfortable, too.
And there were always a few whores about who, for a glass
of beer or a cup of coffee, would sit and chew the fat with
you. The music, on the other hand, was atrocious. Such
music! On a winter’s night, in a dirty hole like Dijon, nothing
can be more harassing, more nerve-racking, than the sound
of a French orchestra. Particularly one of those lugubrious
female orchestras with everything coming in squeaks and
farts, with a dry, algebraic rhythm and the hygienic
consistency of toothpaste. A wheezing and scraping
performed at so many francs the hour—and the devil take
the hindmost! The melancholy of it! As if old Euclid had
stood up on his hind legs and swallowed prussic acid. The

whole realm of Idea so thoroughly exploited by the reason
that there is nothing left of which to make music except the
empty slats of the accordion, through which the wind
whistles and tears the ether to tatters. However, to speak of
music in connection with this outpost is like dreaming of
champagne when you are in the death cell. Music was the
least of my worries. I didn’t even think of cunt, so dismal, so
chill, so barren, so gray was it all. On the way home the first
night I noticed on the door of a café an inscription from the
Gargantua. Inside the café it was like a morgue. However,
forward!
I had plenty of time on my hands and not a sou to spend.
Two or three hours of conversational lessons a day, and that
was all. And what use was it, teaching these poor bastards
English? I felt sorry as hell for them. All morning plugging
away on John Gilpin’s Ride, and in the afternoon coming to
me to practice a dead language. I thought of the good time I
had wasted reading Virgil or wading through such
incomprehensible nonsense as Hermann und Dorothea. The
insanity of it! Learning, the empty breadbasket! I thought of
Carl who can recite Faust backwards, who never writes a
book without praising the shit out of his immortal,
incorruptible Goethe. And yet he hadn’t sense enough to
take on a rich cunt and get himself a change of underwear.
There’s something obscene in this love of the past which
ends in breadlines and dugouts. Something obscene about
this spiritual racket which permits an idiot to sprinkle holy
water over Big Berthas and dreadnoughts and high
explosives. Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an
enemy to the human race.
Here was I, supposedly to spread the gospel of Franco-
American amity—the emissary of a corpse who, after he had
plundered right and left, after he had caused untold
suffering and misery, dreamed of establishing universal
peace. Pfui! What did they expect me to talk about, I

wonder? About Leaves of Grass, about the tariff walls, about
the Declaration of Independence, about the latest gang
war? What? Just what, I’d like to know. Well, I’ll tell you—I
never mentioned these things. I started right off the bat
with a lesson in the physiology of love. How the elephants
make love—that was it! It caught like wildfire. After the first
day there were no more empty benches. After that first
lesson in English they were standing at the door waiting for
me. We got along swell together. They asked all sorts of
questions, as though they had never learned a damned
thing. I let them fire away. I taught them to ask still more
ticklish questions. Ask anything!—that was my motto. I’m
here as a plenipotentiary from the realm of free spirits. I’m
here to create a fever and a ferment. “In some ways,” says
an eminent astronomer, “the material universe appears to
be passing away like a tale that is told, dissolving into
nothingness like a vision.” That seems to be the general
feeling underlying the empty breadbasket of learning.
Myself, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe a fucking thing
these bastards try to shove down our throats.
Between sessions, if I had no book to read, I would go
upstairs to the dormitory and chat with the pions. They were
delightfully ignorant of all that was going on—especially in
the world of art. Almost as ignorant as the students
themselves. It was as if I had gotten into a private little
madhouse with no exit signs. Sometimes I snooped around
under the arcades, watching the kids marching along with
huge hunks of bread stuck in their dirty mugs. I was always
hungry myself, since it was impossible for me to go to
breakfast which was handed out at some ungodly hour of
the morning, just when the bed was getting toasty. Huge
bowls of blue coffee with chunks of white bread and no
butter to go with it. For lunch, beans or lentils with bits of
meat thrown in to make it look appetizing. Food fit for a
chain gang, for rock breakers. Even the wine was lousy.

Things were either diluted or bloated. There were calories,
but no cuisine. M. l’Econome was responsible for it all. So
they said. I don’t believe that, either. He was paid to keep
our heads just above the water line. He didn’t ask if we were
suffering from piles or carbuncles; he didn’t inquire if we
had delicate palates or the intestines of wolves. Why should
he? He was hired at so many grams the plate to produce so
many kilowatts of energy. Everything in terms of horse
power. It was all carefully reckoned in the fat ledgers which
the pasty-faced clerks scribbled in morning, noon and night.
Debit and credit, with a red line down the middle of the
page.
Roaming around the quadrangle with an empty belly most
of the time I got to feel slightly mad. Like Charles the Silly,
poor devil—only I had no Odette Champ-divers with whom
to play stinkfinger. Half the time I had to grub cigarettes
from the students, and during the lessons sometimes I
munched a bit of dry bread with them. As the fire was
always going out on me I soon used up my allotment of
wood. It was the devil’s own time coaxing a little wood out
of the ledger clerks. Finally I got so riled up about it that I
would go out in the street and hunt for firewood, like an
Arab. Astonishing how little firewood you could pick up in
the streets of Dijon. However, these little foraging
expeditions brought me into strange precincts. Got to know
the little street named after a M. Philibert Papillon—a dead
musician, I believe—where there was a cluster of
whorehouses. It was always more cheerful hereabouts;
there was the smell of cooking, and wash hanging out to
dry. Once in a while I caught a glimpse of the poor half-wits
who lounged about inside. They were better off than the
poor devils in the center of town whom I used to bump into
whenever I walked through a department store. I did that
frequently in order to get warm. They were doing it for the
same reason, I suppose. Looking for someone to buy them a

coffee. They looked a little crazy, with the cold and the
loneliness. The whole town looked a bit crazy when the blue
of evening settled over it. You could walk up and down the
main drive any Thursday in the week till doomsday and
never meet an expansive soul. Sixty or seventy thousand
people—perhaps more—wrapped in woolen underwear and
nowhere to go and nothing to do. Turning out mustard by
the carload. Female orchestras grinding out The Merry
Widow. Silver service in the big hotels. The ducal palace
rotting away, stone by stone, limb by limb. The trees
screeching with frost. A ceaseless clatter of wooden shoes.
The University celebrating the death of Goethe, or the birth,
I don’t remember which. (Usually it’s the deaths that are
celebrated.) Idiotic affair, anyway. Everybody yawning and
stretching.
Coming through the high driveway into the quadrangle a
sense of abysmal futility always came over me. Outside
bleak and empty; inside, bleak and empty. A scummy
sterility hanging over the town, a fog of book-learning. Slag
and cinders of the past. Around the interior courts were
ranged the classrooms, little shacks such as you might see
in the North woods, where the pedagogues gave free rein to
their voices. On the blackboard the futile abracadabra which
the future citizens of the republic would have to spend their
lives forgetting. Once in a while the parents were received in
the big reception room just off the driveway, where there
were busts of the heroes of antiquity, such as Molière,
Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, etc., all the scarecrows whom the
cabinet ministers mention with moist lips whenever an
immortal is added to the waxworks. (No bust of Villon, no
bust of Rabelais, no bust of Rimbaud.) Anyway, they met
here in solemn conclave, the parents and the stuffed shirts
whom the State hires to bend the minds of the young.
Always this bending process, this landscape gardening to
make the mind more attractive. And the youngsters came

too, occasionally—the little sunflowers who would soon be
transplanted from the nursery in order to decorate the
municipal grassplots. Some of them were just rubber plants
easily dusted with a torn chemise. All of them jerking away
for dear life in the dormitories as soon as night: came on.
The dormitories! where the red lights glowed, where the bell
rang like a fire alarm, where the treads were hollowed out in
the scramble to reach the educational cells.
Then there were the profs! During the first few days I got
so far as to shake hands with a few of them, and of course
there was always the salute with the hat when we passed
under the arcades. But as for a heart-to-heart talk, as for
walking to the corner and having a drink together, nothing
doing. It was simply unimaginable. Most of them looked as
though they had had the shit scared out of them. Anyway, I
belonged to another hierarchy. They wouldn’t even share a
louse with the likes of me. They made me so damned
irritated, just to look at them, that I used to curse them
under my breath when I saw them coming. I used to stand
there, leaning against a pillar, with a cigarette in the corner
of my mouth and my hat down over my eyes, and when
they got within hailing distance I would let squirt a good gob
and up with the hat. I didn’t even bother to open my trap
and bid them the time of the day. Under my breath I simply
said: “Fuck you, Jack!” and let it go at that.
After a week it seemed as if I had been here all my life. It
was like a bloody, fucking nightmare that you can’t throw
off. Used to fall into a coma thinking about it. Just a few
days ago I had arrived. Nightfall. People scurrying home like
rats under the foggy lights. The trees glittering with
diamond-pointed malice. I thought it all out, a thousand
times or more. From the station to the Lycée it was like a
promenade through the Danzig Corridor, all deckle-edged,
crannied, nerve-ridden. A lane of dead bones, of crooked,
cringing figures buried in shrouds. Spines made of sardine

bones. The Lycée itself seemed to rise up out of a lake of
thin snow, an inverted mountain that pointed down toward
the center of the earth where God or the Devil works always
in a strait jacket grinding grist for that paradise which is
always a wet dream. If the sun ever shone I don’t remember
it. I remember nothing but the cold greasy fogs that blew in
from the frozen marshes over yonder where the railroad
tracks burrowed into the lurid hills. Down near the station
was a canal, or perhaps it was a river, hidden away under a
yellow sky, with little shacks pasted slap up against the
rising ledge of the banks. There was a barracks too
somewhere, it struck me, because every now and then I met
little yellow men from Cochin-China—squirmy, opium-faced
runts peeping out of their baggy uniforms like dyed
skeletons packed in excelsior. The whole goddamned
medievalism of the place was infernally ticklish and restive,
rocking back and forth with low moans, jumping out at you
from the eaves, hanging like broken-necked criminals from
the gargoyles. I kept looking back all the time, kept walking
like a crab that you prong with a dirty fork. All those fat little
monsters, those slablike effigies pasted on the façade of the
Eglise St. Michel, they were following me down the crooked
lanes and around corners. The whole façade of St. Michel
seemed to open up like an album at night, leaving you face
to face with the horrors of the printed page. When the lights
went out and the characters faded away flat, dead as words,
then it was quite magnificent, the façade; in every crevice
of the old gnarled front there was the hollow chant of the
nightwind and over the lacy rubble of cold stiff vestments
there was a cloudy absinthe-like drool of fog and frost.
Here, where the church stood, everything seemed turned
hind side front. The church itself must have been twisted off
its base by centuries of progress in the rain and snow. It lay
in the Place Edgar-Quinet, squat against the wind, like a
dead mule. Through the Rue de la Monnaie the wind rushed

like white hair streaming wild: it whirled around the white
hitching posts which obstructed the free passage of
omnibuses and twenty-mule teams. Swinging through this
exit in the early morning hours I sometimes stumbled upon
Monsieur Renaud who, wrapped in his cowl like a gluttonous
monk, made overtures to me in the language of the
sixteenth century. Falling in step with Monsieur Renaud, the
moon busting through the greasy sky like a punctured
balloon, I fell immediately into the realm of the
transcendental. M. Renaud had a precise speech, dry as
apricots, with a heavy Brandenburger base. Used to come at
me full tilt from Goethe or Fichte, with deep base notes that
rumbled in the windy corners of the Place like claps of last
year’s thunder. Men of Yucatan, men of Zanzibar, men of
Tierra del Fuego, save me from this glaucous hog rind! The
North piles up about me, the glacial fjords, the blue-tipped
spines, the crazy lights, the obscene Christian chant that
spread like an avalanche from Etna to the Aegean.
Everything frozen tight as scum, the mind locked and rimed
with frost, and through the melancholy bales of chitter-wit
the choking gargle of louse-eaten saints. White I am and
wrapped in wool, swaddled, fettered, hamstrung, but in this
I have no part. White to the bone, but with a cold alkali
base, with saffron-tipped fingers. White, aye, but no brother
of learning, no Catholic heart. White and ruthless, as the
men before me who sailed out of the Elbe. I look to the sea,
to the sky, to what is unintelligible and distantly near.
The snow under foot scurries before the wind, blows,
tickles, stings, lisps away, whirls aloft, showers, splinters,
sprays down. No sun, no roar of surf, no breaker’s surge.
The cold north wind pointed with barbed shafts, icy,
malevolent, greedy, blighting, paralyzing. The streets turn
away on their crooked elbows; they break from the hurried
sight, the stern glance. They hobble away down the drifting
lattice work, wheeling the church hind side front, mowing

down the statues, flattening the monuments, uprooting the
trees, stiffening the grass, sucking the fragrance out of the
earth. Leaves dull as cement: leaves no dew can bring to
glisten again. No moon will ever silver their listless plight.
The seasons are come to a stagnant stop, the trees blench
and wither, the wagons roll in the mica ruts with slithering
harplike thuds. In the hollow of the white-tipped hills, lurid
and boneless Dijon slumbers. No man alive and walking
through the night except the restless spirits moving
southward toward the sapphire grids. Yet I am up and about,
a walking ghost, a white man terrorized by the cold sanity of
this slaughterhouse geometry. Who am I? What am I doing
here? I fall between the cold walls of human malevolence, a
white figure fluttering, sinking down through the cold lake, a
mountain of skulls above me. I settle down to the cold
latitudes, the chalk steps washed with indigo. The earth in
its dark corridors knows my step, feels a foot abroad, a wing
stirring, a gasp and a shudder. I hear the learning chaffed
and chuzzled, the figures mounting upward, bat slime
dripping aloft and clanging with pasteboard golden wings; I
hear the trains collide, the chains rattle, the locomotive
chugging, snorting, sniffing, steaming and pissing. All things
come to me through the clear fog with the odor of
repetition, with yellow hangovers and Gadzooks and
whettikins. In the dead center, far below Dijon, far below the
hyperborean regions, stands God Ajax, his shoulders
strapped to the mill wheel, the olives crunching, the green
marsh water alive with croaking frogs.
The fog and snow, the cold latitude, the heavy learning,
the blue coffee, the unbuttered bread, the soup and lentils,
the heavy pork-packer beans, the stale cheese, the soggy
chow, the lousy wine have put the whole penitentiary into a
state of constipation. And just when everyone has become
shit-tight the toilet pipes freeze. The shit piles up like ant
hills; one has to move down from the little pedestals and

leave it on the floor. It lies there stiff and frozen, waiting for
the thaw. On Thursdays the hunchback comes with his little
wheelbarrow, shovels the cold, stiff turds with a broom and
pan, and trundles off dragging his withered leg. The
corridors are littered with toilet paper; it sticks to your feet
like flypaper. When the weather moderates the odor gets
ripe; you can smell it in Winchester forty miles away.
Standing over that ripe dung in the morning, with a
toothbrush, the stench is so powerful that it makes your
head spin. We stand around in red flannel shirts, waiting to
spit down the hole; it is like an aria from one of Verdi’s great
operas—an anvil chorus with pulleys and syringes. In the
night, when I am taken short, I rush down to the private
toilet of M. le Censeur, just off the driveway. My stool is
always full of blood. His toilet doesn’t flush either but at
least there is the pleasure of sitting down. I leave my little
bundle for him as a token of esteem.
Toward the end of the meal each evening the veilleur de
nuit drops in for his bit of cheer. This is the only human
being in the whole institution with whom I feel a kinship. He
is a nobody. He carries a lantern and a bunch of keys. He
makes the rounds through the night, stiff as an automaton.
About the time the stale cheese is being passed around, in
he pops for his glass of wine. He stands there, with paw
outstretched, his hair stiff and wiry, like a mastiff’s, his
cheeks ruddy, his mustache gleaming with snow. He
mumbles a word or two and Quasimodo brings him the
bottle. Then, with feet solidly planted, he throws back his
head and down it goes, slowly in one long draught. To me
it’s like he’s pouring rubies down his gullet. Something
about this gesture which seizes me by the hair. It’s almost
as if he were drinking down the dregs of human sympathy,
as if all the love and compassion in the world could be
tossed off like that, in one gulp—as if that were all that
could be squeezed together day after day. A little less than a

rabbit they have made him. In the scheme of things he’s not
worth the brine to pickle a herring. He’s just a piece of live
manure. And he knows it. When he looks around after his
drink and smiles at us, the world seems to be falling to
pieces. It’s a smile thrown across an abyss. The whole
stinking civilized world lies like a quagmire at the bottom of
the pit, and over it, like a mirage, hovers this wavering
smile.
It was the same smile which greeted me at night when I
returned from my rambles. I remember one such night
when, standing at the door waiting for the old fellow to
finish his rounds, I had such a sense of well-being that I
could have waited thus forever. I had to wait perhaps half an
hour before he opened the door. I looked about me calmly
and leisurely, drank everything in, the dead tree in front of
the school with its twisted rope branches, the houses across
the street which had changed color during the night, which
curved now more noticeably, the sound of a train rolling
through the Siberian wastes, the railings painted by Utrillo,
the sky, the deep wagon ruts. Suddenly, out of nowhere,
two lovers appeared; every few yards they stopped and
embraced, and when I could no longer follow them with my
eyes I followed the sound of their steps, heard the abrupt
stop, and then the slow, meandering gait. I could feel the
sag and slump of their bodies when they leaned against a
rail, heard their shoes creak as the muscles tightened for
the embrace. Through the town they wandered, through the
crooked streets, toward the glassy canal where the water
lay black as coal. There was something phenomenal about
it. In all Dijon not two like them.
Meanwhile the old fellow was making the rounds; I could
hear the jingle of his keys, the crunching of his boots, the
steady, automatic tread. Finally I heard him coming through
the driveway to open the big door, a monstrous, arched
portal without a moat in front of it. I heard him fumbling at

the lock, his hands stiff, his mind numbed. As the door
swung open I saw over his head a brilliant constellation
crowning the chapel. Every door was locked, every cell
bolted. The books were closed. The night hung close,
dagger-pointed, drunk as a maniac. There it was, the
infinitude of emptiness. Over the chapel, like a bishop’s
miter, hung the constellation, every night, during the winter
months, it hung there low over the chapel. Low and bright, a
handful of dagger points, a dazzle of pure emptiness. The
old fellow followed me to the turn of the drive. The door
closed silently. As I bade him good night I caught that
desperate, hopeless smile again, like a meteoric flash over
the rim of a lost world. And again I saw him standing in the
refectory, his head thrown back and the rubies pouring
down his gullet. The whole Mediterranean seemed to be
buried inside him—the orange groves, the cypress trees, the
winged statues, the wooden temples, the blue sea, the stiff
masks, the mystic numbers, the mythological birds, the
sapphire skies, the eaglets, the sunny coves, the blind
bards, the bearded heroes. Gone all that. Sunk beneath the
avalanche from the North. Buried, dead forever. A memory.
A wild hope.
For just a moment I linger at the carriageway. The shroud,
the pall, the unspeakable, clutching emptiness of it all. Then
I walk quickly along the gravel path near the wall, past the
arches and columns, the iron staircases, from one
quadrangle to the other. Everything is locked tight. Locked
for the winter. I find the arcade leading to the dormitory. A
sickish light spills down over the stairs from the grimy,
frosted windows. Everywhere the paint is peeling off. The
stones are hollowed out, the banister creaks; a damp sweat
oozes from the flagging and forms a pale, fuzzy aura pierced
by the feeble red light at the head of the stairs. I mount the
last flight, the turret, in a sweat and terror. In pitch darkness
I grope my way through the deserted corridor, every room

empty, locked, molding away. My hand slides along the wall
seeking the keyhole. A panic comes over me as I grasp the
doorknob. Always a hand at my collar ready to yank me
back. Once inside the room I bolt the door. It’s a miracle
which I perform each night, the miracle of getting inside
without being strangled, without being struck down by an
ax. I can hear the rats scurrying through the corridor,
gnawing away over my head between the thick rafters. The
light glares like burning sulfur and there is the sweet, sickish
stench of a room which is never ventilated. In the corner
stands the coal box, just as I left it. The fire is out. A silence
so intense that it sounds like Niagara Falls in my ears.
Alone, with a tremendous empty longing and dread. The
whole room for my thoughts. Nothing but myself and what I
think, what I fear. Could think the most fantastic thoughts,
could dance, spit, grimace, curse, wail—nobody would ever
know, nobody would ever hear. The thought of such
absolute privacy is enough to drive me mad. It’s like a clean
birth. Everything cut away. Separate, naked, alone. Bliss and
agony simultaneously. Time on your hands. Each second
weighing on you like a mountain. You drown in it. Deserts,
seas, lakes, oceans. Time beating away like a meat ax.
Nothingness. The world. The me and the not-me.
Oomaharumooma. Everything has to have a name.
Everything has to be learned, tested, experienced. Faites
comme chez vous, chéri.
The silence descends in volcanic chutes. Yonder, in the
barren hills, rolling onward toward the great metallurgical
regions, the locomotives are pulling their merchant
products. Over steel and iron beds they roll, the ground
sown with slag and cinders and purple ore. In the baggage
car, kelps, fishplate, rolled iron, sleepers, wire rods, plates
and sheets, laminated articles, hot rolled hoops, splints and
mortar carriages, and Zorès ore. The wheels U-80
millimeters or over. Pass splendid specimens of Anglo-

Norman architecture, pass pedestrians and pederasts, open
hearth furnaces, basic Bessemer mills, dynamos and
transformers, pig iron castings and steel ingots. The public
at large, pedestrians and pederasts, goldfish and spun-glass
palm trees, donkeys sobbing, all circulating freely through
quincuncial alleys. At the Place du Brésil a lavender eye.
Going back in a flash over the women I’ve known. It’s like
a chain which I’ve forged out of my own misery. Each one
bound to the other. A fear of living separate, of staying born.
The door of the womb always on the latch. Dread and
longing. Deep in the blood the pull of paradise. The beyond.
Always the beyond. It must have all started with the navel.
They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap on the ass, and
presto! you’re out in the world, adrift, a ship without a
rudder. You look at the stars and then you look at your
navel. You grow eyes everywhere—in the armpits, between
the lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet.
What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes
distant. Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins, a
turning inside out. You drift around like that for years and
years, until you find yourself in the dead center, and there
you slowly rot, slowly crumble to pieces, get dispersed
again. Only your name remains.

It was spring before I managed to escape from the
penitentiary, and then only by a stroke of fortune. A
telegram from Carl informed me one day that there was a
vacancy “upstairs”; he said he would send me the fare back
if I decided to accept. I telegraphed back at once and as
soon as the dough arrived I beat it to the station. Not a word
to M. le Proviseur or anyone. French leave, as they say.
I went immediately to the hotel at 1 bis, where Carl was
staying. He came to the door stark naked. It was his night
off and there was a cunt in the bed as usual. “Don’t mind
her,” he says, “she’s asleep. If you need a lay you can take
her on. She’s not bad.” He pulls the covers back to show me
what she looks like. However, I wasn’t thinking about a lay
right away. I was too excited. I was like a man who has just
escaped from jail. I just wanted to see and hear things.
Coming from the station it was like a long dream. I felt as
though I had been away for years.
It was not until I had sat down and taken a good look at
the room that I realized I was back again in Paris. It was
Carl’s room and no mistake about it. Like a squirrel cage and
shithouse combined. There was hardly room on the table for
the portable machine he used. It was always like that,
whether he had a cunt with him or not. Always a dictionary
lying open on a gilt-edged volume of Faust, always a
tobacco pouch, a beret, a bottle of vin rouge, letters,
manuscripts, old newspapers, water colors, teapot, dirty
socks, toothpicks, Kruschen Salts, condoms, etc. In the bidet
were orange peels and the remnants of a ham sandwich.
“There’s some food in the closet” he said. “Help yourself!
I was just going to give myself an injection.”
I found the sandwich he was talking about and a piece of
cheese that he had nibbled at beside it. While he sat on the

edge of the bed, dosing himself with his argyrol, I put away
the sandwich and cheese with the aid of a little wine.
“I liked that letter you sent me about Goethe,” he said,
wiping his prick with a dirty pair of drawers.
“I’ll show you the answer to it in a minute—I’m putting it
in my book. The trouble with you is that you’re not a
German. You have to be German to understand Goethe.
Shit, I’m not going to explain it to you now. I’ve put it all in
the book. … By the way, I’ve got a new cunt now—not this
one—this one’s a half-wit. At least, I had her until a few days
ago. I’m not sure whether she’ll come back or not. She was
living with me all the time you were away. The other day her
parents came and took her away. They said she was only
fifteen. Can you beat that? They scared the shit out of me
too. …”
I began to laugh. It was like Carl to get himself into a
mess like that.
“What are you laughing for?” he said. “I may go to prison
for it. Luckily, I didn’t knock her up. And that’s funny, too,
because she never took care of herself properly. But do you
know what saved me? So I think, at least. It was Faust. Yeah!
Her old man happened to see it lying on the table. He asked
me if I understood German. One thing led to another and
before I knew it he was looking through my books.
Fortunately I happened to have the Shakespeare open too.
That impressed him like hell. He said I was evidently a very
serious guy.”
“What about the girl—what did she have to say?”
“She was frightened to death. You see, she had a little
watch with her when she came; in the excitement we
couldn’t find the watch, and her mother insisted that the
watch be found or she’d call the police. You see how things
are here. I turned the whole place upside down—but I
couldn’t find the goddamned watch. The mother was
furious. I liked her too, in spite of everything. She was even

better-looking than the daughter. Here—I’ll show you a letter
I started to write her. I’m in love with her. …”
“With the mother?”
“Sure. Why not? If I had seen the mother first I’d never
have looked at the daughter. How did I know she was only
fifteen? You don’t ask a cunt how old she is before you lay
her, do you?”
“Joe, there’s something funny about this. You’re not
shitting me, are you?”
“Am I shitting you? Here—look at this!” And he shows me
the water colors the girl had made—cute little things—a
knife and a loaf of bread, the table and teapot, everything
running uphill. “She was in love with me,” he said. “She was
just like a child. I had to tell her when to brush her teeth and
how to put her hat on. Here—look at the lollypops! I used to
buy her a few lollypops every day—she liked them.”
“Well, what did she do when her parents came to take her
away? Didn’t she put up a row?”
“She cried a little, that’s all. What could she do? She’s
under age. … I had to promise never to see her again, never
to write her either. That’s what I’m waiting to see now—
whether she’ll stay away or not. She was a virgin when she
came here. The thing is, how long will she be able to go
without a lay? She couldn’t get enough of it when she was
here. She almost wore me out.”
By this time the one in bed had come to and was rubbing
her eyes. She looked pretty young to me, too. Not bad
looking, but dumb as hell. Wanted to know right away what
we were talking about.
“She lives here in the hotel,” said Carl. “On the third floor.
Do you want to go to her room? I’ll fix it up for you.”
I didn’t know whether I wanted to or not, but when I saw
Carl mushing it up with her again I decided I did want to. I
asked her first if she was too tired. Useless question. A

whore is never too tired to open her legs. Some of them can
fall asleep while you diddle them. Anyway, it was decided
we would go down to her room. Like that I wouldn’t have to
pay the patron for the night.
In the morning I rented a room overlooking the little park
down below where the sandwich-board men always came to
eat their lunch. At noon I called for Carl to have breakfast
with him. He and Van Norden had developed a new habit in
my absence—they went to the Coupole for breakfast every
day. “Why the Coupole?” I asked. “Why the Coupole?” says
Carl. “Because the Coupole serves porridge at all hours and
porridge makes you shit.”—“I see,” said I.
So it’s just like it used to be again. The three of us walking
back and forth to work. Petty dissensions, petty rivalries.
Van Norden still bellyaching about his cunts and about
washing the dirt out of his belly. Only now he’s found a new
diversion. He’s found that it’s less annoying to masturbate. I
was amazed when he broke the news to me. I didn’t think it
possible for a guy like that to find any pleasure in jerking
himself off. I was still more amazed when he explained to
me how he goes about it. He had “invented” a new stunt, so
he put it. “You take an apple,” he says, “and you bore out
the core. Then you rub some cold cream on the inside so as
it doesn’t melt too fast. Try it some time! It’ll drive you crazy
at first. Anyway, it’s cheap and you don’t have to waste
much time.”
“By the way,” he says, switching the subject, “that friend
of yours, Fillmore, he’s in the hospital. I think he’s nuts.
Anyway, that’s what his girl told me. He took on a French
girl, you know, while you were away. They used to fight like
hell. She’s a big, healthy bitch—wild like. I wouldn’t mind
giving her a tumble, but I’m afraid she’d claw the eyes out
of me. He was always going around with his face and hands
scratched up. She looks bunged up too once in a while—or

she used to. You know how these French cunts are—when
they love they lose their minds.”
Evidently things had happened while I was away. I was
sorry to hear about Fillmore. He had been damned good to
me. When I left Van Norden I jumped a bus and went
straight to the hospital.
They hadn’t decided yet whether he was completely off
his base or not, I suppose, for I found him upstairs in a
private room, enjoying all the liberties of the regular
patients. He had just come from the bath when I arrived.
When he caught sight of me he burst into tears. “It’s all
over,” he says immediately. “They say I’m crazy—and I may
have syphilis too. They say I have delusions of grandeur.”
He fell over onto the bed and wept quietly. After he had
wept a while he lifted his head up and smiled—just like a
bird coming out of a snooze. “Why do they put me in such
an expensive room?” he said. “Why don’t they put me in the
ward—or in the bughouse? I can’t afford to pay for this. I’m
down to my last five hundred dollars.”
“That’s why they’re keeping you here,” I said. “They’ll
transfer you quickly enough when your money runs out.
Don’t worry.”
My words must have impressed him, for I had no sooner
finished than he handed me his watch and chain, his wallet,
his fraternity pin, etc. “Hold on to them,” he said. “These
bastards’ll rob me of everything I’ve got.” And then
suddenly he began to laugh, one of those weird, mirthless
laughs which makes you believe a guy’s goofy whether he is
or not. “I know you’ll think I’m crazy,” he said, “but I want to
atone for what I did. I want to get married. You see, I didn’t
know I had the clap. I gave her the clap and then I knocked
her up. I told the doctor I don’t care what happens to me,
but I want him to let me get married first. He keeps telling
me to wait until I get better—but I know I’m never going to
get better. This is the end.”

I couldn’t help laughing myself, hearing him talk that way.
I couldn’t understand what had come over him. Anyway, I
had to promise him to see the girl and explain things to her.
He wanted me to stick by her, comfort her. Said he could
trust me, etc. I said yes to everything in order to soothe
him. He didn’t seem exactly nuts to me—just caved-in like.
Typical Anglo-Saxon crisis. An eruption of morals. I was
rather curious to see the girl, to get the lowdown on the
whole thing.
The next day I looked her up. She was living in the Latin
Quarter. As soon as she realized who I was she became
exceedingly cordial. Ginette she called herself. Rather big,
rawboned, healthy, peasant type with a front tooth half
eaten away. Full of vitality and a kind of crazy fire in her
eyes. The first thing she did was to weep. Then, seeing that
I was an old friend of her Jo-Jo—that was how she called him
—she ran downstairs and brought back a couple of bottles
of white wine. I was to stay and have dinner with her—she
insisted on it. As she drank she became by turns gay and
maudlin. I didn’t have to ask her any questions—she went
on like a self-winding machine. The thing that worried her
principally was—would he get his job back when he was
released from the hospital? She said her parents were well
off, but they were displeased with her. They didn’t approve
of her wild ways. They didn’t approve of him particularly—
he had no manners, and he was an American. She begged
me to assure her that he would get his job back, which I did
without hesitancy. And then she begged me to know if she
could believe what he said—that he was going to marry her.
Because now, with a child under her belt, and a dose of clap
besides, she was in no position to strike a match—with a
Frenchman anyway. That was clear, wasn’t it? Of course, I
assured her. It was all clear as hell to me—except how in
Christ’s name Fillmore had ever fallen for her. However, one
thing at a time. It was my duty now to comfort her, and so I

just filled her up with a lot of baloney, told her everything
would turn out all right and that I would stand godfather to
the child, etc. Then suddenly it struck me as strange that
she should have the child at all—especially as it was likely
to be born blind. I told her that as tactfully as I could. “It
doesn’t make any difference,” she said, “I want a child by
him.”
“Even if it’s blind?” I asked.
“Mon Dieu, ne dites pas ça!” she groaned. “Ne dites pas
ça!”
Just the same, I felt it was my duty to say it. She got
hysterical and began to weep like a walrus, poured out more
wine. In a few moments she was laughing boisterously. She
was laughing to think how they used to fight when they got
in bed. “He liked me to fight with him,” she said. “He was a
brute.”
As we sat down to eat, a friend of hers walked in—a little
tart who lived at the end of the hall. Ginette immediately
sent me down to get some more wine. When I came back
they had evidently had a good talk. Her friend, Yvette,
worked in the police department. A sort of stool pigeon, as
far as I could gather. At least that was what she was trying
to make me believe. It was fairly obvious that she was just a
little whore. But she had an obsession about the police and
their doings. Throughout the meal they were urging me to
accompany them to a bal musette. They wanted to have a
gay time—it was so lonely for Ginette with Jo-Jo in the
hospital. I told them I had to work, but that on my night off
I’d come back and take them out. I made it clear too that I
had no dough to spend on them. Ginette, who was really
thunderstruck to hear this, pretended that that didn’t matter
in the least. In fact, just to show what a good sport she was,
she insisted on driving me to work in a cab. She was doing it
because I was a friend of Jo-Jo’s. And therefore I was a friend
of hers. “And also,” thought I to myself, “if anything goes

wrong with your Jo-Jo you’ll come to me on the double-quick.
Then you’ll see what a friend I can be!” I was as nice as pie
to her. In fact, when we got out of the cab in front of the
office, I permitted them to persuade me into having a final
Pernod together. Yvette wanted to know if she couldn’t call
for me after work. She had a lot of things to tell me in
confidence, she said. But I managed to refuse without
hurting her feelings. Unfortunately I did unbend sufficiently
to give her my address.
Unfortunately, I say. As a matter of fact, I’m rather glad of
it when I think back on it. Because the very next day things
began to happen. The very next day, before I had even
gotten out of bed, the two of them called on me. Jo-Jo had
been removed from the hospital—they had incarcerated him
in a little château in the country, just a few miles out of
Paris. The château, they called it. A polite way of saying “the
bughouse.” They wanted me to get dressed immediately
and go with them. They were in a panic.
Perhaps I might have gone alone—but I just couldn’t make
up my mind to go with these two. I asked them to wait for
me downstairs while I got dressed, thinking that it would
give me time to invent some excuse for not going. But they
wouldn’t leave the room. They sat there and watched me
wash and dress, just as if it were an everyday affair. In the
midst of it, Carl popped in. I gave him the situation briefly,
in English, and then we hatched up an excuse that I had
some important work to do. However, to smooth things
over, we got some wine in and we began to amuse them by
showing them a book of dirty drawings. Yvette had already
lost all desire to go to the château. She and Carl were
getting along famously. When it came time to go Carl
decided to accompany them to the château. He thought it
would be funny to see Fillmore walking around with a lot of
nuts. He wanted to see what it was like in the nuthouse. So
off they went, somewhat pickled, and in the best of humor.

All the time that Fillmore was at the château I never once
went to see him. It wasn’t necessary, because Ginette
visited him regularly and gave me all the news. They had
hopes of bringing him around in a few months, so she said.
They thought it was alcoholic poisoning—nothing more. Of
course, he had a dose—but that wasn’t difficult to remedy.
So far as they could see, he didn’t have syphilis. That was
something. So, to begin with, they used the stomach pump
on him. They cleaned his system out thoroughly. He was so
weak for a while that he couldn’t get out of bed. He was
depressed, too. He said he didn’t want to be cured—he
wanted to die. And he kept repeating this nonsense so
insistently that finally they grew alarmed. I suppose it
wouldn’t have been a very good recommendation if he had
committed suicide. Anyway, they began to give him mental
treatment. And in between times they pulled out his teeth,
more and more of them, until he didn’t have a tooth left in
his head. He was supposed to feel fine after that, yet
strangely he didn’t. He became more despondent than ever.
And then his hair began to fall out. Finally he developed a
paranoid streak—began to accuse them of all sorts of
things, demanded to know by what right he was being
detained, what he had done to warrant being locked up, etc.
After a terrible fit of despondency he would suddenly
become energetic and threaten to blow up the place if they
didn’t release him. And to make it worse, as far as Ginette
was concerned, he had gotten all over his notion of
marrying her. He told her straight up and down that he had
no intention of marrying her, and that if she was crazy
enough to go and have a child then she could support it
herself.
The doctors interpreted all this as a good sign. They said
he was coming round. Ginette, of course, thought he was
crazier than ever, but she was praying for him to be
released so that she could take him to the country where it

would be quiet and peaceful and where he would come to
his right senses. Meanwhile her parents had come to Paris
on a visit and had even gone so far as to visit the future
son-in-law at the château. In their canny way they had
probably figured it out that it would be better for their
daughter to have a crazy husband than no husband at all.
The father thought he could find something for Fillmore to
do on the farm. He said that Fillmore wasn’t such a bad chap
at all. When he learned from Ginette that Fillmore’s parents
had money he became even more indulgent, more
understanding.
The thing was working itself out nicely all around. Ginette
returned to the provinces for a while with her parents.
Yvette was coming regularly to the hotel to see Carl. She
thought he was the editor of the paper. And little by little
she became more confidential. When she got good and tight
one day, she informed us that Ginette had never been
anything but a whore, that Ginette was a bloodsucker, that
Ginette never had been pregnant and was not pregnant
now. About the other accusations we hadn’t much doubt,
Carl and I, but about not being pregnant, that we weren’t so
sure of.
“How did she get such a big stomach, then?” asked Carl.
Yvette laughed. “Maybe she uses a bicycle pump,” she
said. “No, seriously,” she added, “the stomach comes from
drink. She drinks like a fish, Ginette. When she comes back
from the country, you will see, she will be blown up still
more. Her father is a drunkard. Ginette is a drunkard. Maybe
she had the clap, yes-—but she is not pregnant.”
“But why does she want to marry him? Is she really in
love with him?”
“Love? Pfooh! She has no heart, Ginette. She wants
someone to look after her. No Frenchman would ever marry
her—she has a police record. No, she wants him because
he’s too stupid to find out about her. Her parents don’t want

her any more—she’s a disgrace to them. But if she can get
married to a rich American, then everything will be all right.
… You think maybe she loves him a little, eh? You don’t
know her. When they were living together at the hotel, she
had men coming to her room while he was at work. She said
he didn’t give her enough spending money. He was stingy.
That fur she wore—she told him her parents had given it to
her, didn’t she? Innocent fool! Why, I’ve seen her bring a
man back to the hotel right while he was there. She brought
the man to the floor below. I saw it with my own eyes. And
what a man! An old derelict. He couldn’t get an erection!”
If Fillmore, when he was released from the château, had
returned to Paris, perhaps I might have tipped him off about
his Ginette. While he was still under observation I didn’t
think it well to upset him by poisoning his mind with
Yvette’s slanders. As things turned out, he went directly
from the château to the home of Ginette’s parents. There,
despite himself, he was inveigled into making public his
engagement. The banns were published in the local papers
and a reception was given to the friends of the family.
Fillmore took advantage of the situation to indulge in all
sorts of escapades. Though he knew quite well what he was
doing he pretended to be still a little daffy. He would borrow
his father-in-law’s car, for example, and tear about the
countryside all by himself; if he saw a town that he liked he
would plank himself down and have a good time until
Ginette came searching for him. Sometimes the father-in-
law and he would go off together—on a fishing trip,
presumably—and nothing would be heard of them for days.
He became exasperatingly capricious and exacting. I
suppose he figured he might as well get what he could out
of it.
When he returned to Paris with Ginette he had a complete
new wardrobe and a pocketful of dough. He looked cheerful
and healthy, and had a fine coat of tan. He looked sound as

a berry to me. But as soon as we had gotten away from
Ginette he opened up. His job was gone and his money had
all run out. In a month or so they were to be married.
Meanwhile the parents were supplying the dough. “Once
they’ve got me properly in their clutches,” he said, “I’ll be
nothing but a slave to them. The father thinks he’s going to
open up a stationery store for me. Ginette will handle the
customers, take in the money, etc., while I sit in the back of
the store and write—or something. Can you picture me
sitting in the back of a stationery store for the rest of my
life? Ginette thinks it’s an excellent idea. She likes to handle
money. I’d rather go back to the château than submit to
such a scheme.”
For the time being, of course, he was pretending that
everything was hunky-dory. I tried to persuade him to go
back to America but he wouldn’t hear of that. He said he
wasn’t going to be driven out of France by a lot of ignorant
peasants. He had an idea that he would slip out of sight for
a while and then take up quarters in some outlying section
of the city where he’d not be likely to stumble upon her. But
we soon decided that that was impossible: you can’t hide
away in France as you can in America.
“You could go to Belgium for a while,” I suggested.
“But what’ll I do for money?” he said promptly. “You can’t
get a job in these goddamned countries.”
“Why don’t you marry her and get a divorce, then?” I
asked.
“And meanwhile she’ll be dropping a kid. Who’s going to
take care of the kid, eh?”
“How do you know she’s going to have a kid?” I said,
determined now that the moment had come to spill the
beans.
“How do I know?” he said. He didn’t quite seem to know
what I was insinuating.

I gave him an inkling of what Yvette had said. He listened
to me in complete bewilderment. Finally he interrupted me.
“It’s no use going on with that,” he said. “I know she’s going
to have a kid, all right. I’ve felt it kicking around inside.
Yvette’s a dirty little slut. You see, I didn’t want to tell you,
but up until the time I went to the hospital I was shelling out
for Yvette too. Then when the crash came I couldn’t do any
more for her. I figured out that I had done enough for the
both of them. … I made up my mind to look after myself
first. That made Yvette sore. She told Ginette that she was
going to get even with me. … No, I wish it were true, what
she said. Then I could get out of this thing more easily. Now
I’m in a trap. I’ve promised to marry her and I’ll have to go
through with it. After that I don’t know what’ll happen to me.
They’ve got me by the balls now.”
Since he had taken a room in the same hotel with me I
was obliged to see them frequently, whether I wanted to or
not. Almost every evening I had dinner with them,
preceded, of course, by a few Pernods. All through the meal
they quarreled noisily. It was embarrassing because I had
sometimes to take one side and sometimes the other. One
Sunday afternoon, for example, after we had had lunch
together, we repaired to a café on the corner of the
Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. Things had gone unusually well this
time. We were sitting inside at a little table, one alongside
the other, our backs to a mirror. Ginette must have been
passionate or something for she had suddenly gotten into a
sentimental mood and was fondling him and kissing him in
front of everybody, as the French do so naturally. They had
just come out of a long embrace when Fillmore said
something about her parents which she interpreted as an
insult. Immediately her cheeks flushed with anger. We tried
to mollify her by telling her that she had misunderstood the
remark and then, under his breath, Fillmore said something
to me in English—something about giving her a little soft

soap. That was enough to set her completely off the handle.
She said we were making fun of her. I said something sharp
to her which angered her still more and then Fillmore tried
to put in a word. “You’re too quick-tempered,” he said, and
he tried to pat her on the cheek. But she, thinking that he
had raised his hand to slap her face, she gave him a sound
crack in the jaw with that big peasant hand of hers. For a
moment he was stunned. He hadn’t expected a wallop like
that, and it stung. I saw his face go white and the next
moment he raised himself from the bench and with the palm
of his hand he gave her such a crack that she almost fell off
her seat. “There! that’ll teach you how to behave!” he said
—in his broken French. For a moment there was a dead
silence. Then, like a storm breaking, she picked up the
cognac glass in front of her and hurled it at him with all her
might. It smashed against the mirror behind us. Fillmore had
already grabbed her by the arm, but with her free hand she
grabbed the coffee glass and smashed it on the floor. She
was squirming around like a maniac. It was all we could do
to hold her. Meanwhile, of course, the patron had come
running in and ordered us to beat it. “Loafers!” he called us.
“Yes, loafers; that’s it!” screamed Ginette. “Dirty foreigners!
Thugs! Gangsters! Striking a pregnant woman!” We were
getting black looks all around. A poor Frenchwoman with
two American toughs. Gangsters. I was wondering how the
hell we’d ever get out of the place without a fight. Fillmore,
by this time, was as silent as a clam. Ginette was bolting it
through the door, leaving us to face the music. As she sailed
out she turned back with fist upraised and shouted; “I’ll pay
you back for this, you brute! You’ll see! No foreigner can
treat a decent Frenchwoman like that! Ah, no! Not like that!”
Hearing this the patron, who had now been paid for his
drinks and his broken glasses, felt it incumbent to show his
gallantry toward a splendid representative of French
motherhood such as Ginette, and so, without more ado, he

spat at our feet and shoved us out of the door. “Shit on you,
you dirty loafers!” he said, or some such pleasantry.
Once in the street and nobody throwing things after us, I
began to see the funny side of it. It would be an excellent
idea, I thought to myself, if the whole thing were properly
aired in court. The whole thing! With Yvette’s little stories as
a side dish. After all, the French have a sense of humor.
Perhaps the judge, when he heard Fillmore’s side of the
story, would absolve him from marriage.
Meanwhile Ginette was standing across the street
brandishing her fist and yelling at the top of her lungs.
People were stopping to listen in, to take sides, as they do in
street brawls. Fillmore didn’t know what to do—whether to
walk away from her, or to go over to her and try to pacify
her. He was standing in the middle of the street with his
arms outstretched, trying to get a word in edgewise. And
Ginette still yelling: “Gangster! Brute! Tu verras, salaud!”
and other complimentary things. Finally Fillmore made a
move toward her and she, probably thinking that he was
going to give her another good cuff, took it on a trot down
the street. Fillmore came back to where I was standing and
said: “Come on, let’s follow her quietly.” We started off with
a thin crowd of stragglers behind us. Every once in a while
she turned back toward us and brandished her fist. We
made no attempt to catch up with her, just followed her
leisurely down the street to see what she would do. Finally
she slowed up her pace and we crossed over to the other
side of the street. She was quiet now. We kept walking
behind her, getting closer and closer. There were only about
a dozen people behind us now—the others had lost interest.
When we got near the corner she suddenly stopped and
waited for us to approach. “Let me do the talking,” said
Fillmore, “I know how to handle her.”
The tears were streaming down her face as we came up
to her. Myself, I didn’t know what to expect of her. I was

somewhat surprised therefore when Fillmore walked up to
her and said in an aggrieved voice: “Was that a nice thing to
do? Why did you act that way?” Whereupon she threw her
arms around his neck and began to weep like a child, calling
him her little this and her little that. Then she turned to me
imploringly. “You saw how he struck me,” she said. “Is that
the way to behave toward a woman?” I was on the point of
saying yes when Fillmore took her by the arm and started
leading her off. “No more of that,” he said. “If you start
again I’ll crack you right here in the street.”
I thought it was going to start up all over again. She had
fire in her eyes. But evidently she was a bit cowed, too, for it
subsided quickly. However, as she sat down at the café she
said quietly and grimly that he needn’t think it was going to
be forgotten so quickly; he’d hear more about in later on …
perhaps tonight.
And sure enough she kept her word. When I met him the
next day his face and hands were all scratched up. Seems
she had waited until he got to bed and then, without a word,
she had gone to the wardrobe and, dumping all his things
out on the floor, she took them one by one and tore them to
ribbons. As this had happened a number of times before,
and as she had always sewn them up afterward, he hadn’t
protested very much. And that made her angrier than ever.
What she wanted was to get her nails into him, and she did,
to the best of her ability. Being pregnant she had a certain
advantage over him.
Poor Fillmore! It was no laughing matter. She had him
terrorized. If he threatened to run away she retorted by a
threat to kill him. And she said it as if she meant it. “If you
go to America,” she said, “I’ll follow you! You won’t get away
from me. A French girl always knows how to get
vengeance.” And the next moment she would be coaxing
him to be “reasonable,” to be “sage,” etc. Life would be so
nice once they had the stationery store. He wouldn’t have to

do a stroke of work. She would do everything. He could stay
in back of the store and write—or whatever he wanted to do.
It went on like this, back and forth, a seesaw, for a few
weeks or so. I was avoiding them as much as possible, sick
of the affair and disgusted with the both of them. Then one
fine summer’s day, just as I was passing the Credit
Lyonnais, who comes marching down the steps but Fillmore.
I greeted him warmly, feeling rather guilty because I had
dodged him for so long. I asked him, with more than
ordinary curiosity, how things were going. He answered me
rather vaguely and with a note of despair in his voice.
“I’ve just gotten permission to go to the bank,” he said, in
a peculiar, broken, abject sort of way. “I’ve got about half an
hour, no more. She keeps tabs on me.” And he grasped my
arm as if to hurry me away from the spot.
We were walking down toward the Rue de Rivoli. It was a
beautiful day, warm, clear, sunny—one of those days when
Paris is at its best. A mild pleasant breeze blowing, just
enough to take that stagnant odor out of your nostrils.
Fillmore was without a hat. Outwardly he looked the picture
of health—like the average American tourist who slouches
along with money jingling in his pockets.
“I don’t know what to do any more,” he said quietly.
“You’ve got to do something for me. I’m helpless. I can’t get
a grip on myself. If I could only get away from her for a little
while perhaps I’d come round all right. But she won’t let me
out of her sight. I just got permission to run to the bank—I
had to draw some money. I’ll walk around with you a bit and
then I must hurry back—she’ll have lunch waiting for me.”
I listened to him quietly, thinking to myself that he
certainly did need someone to pull him out of the hole he
was in. He had completely caved in, there wasn’t a speck of
courage left in him. He was just like a child—like a child who
is beaten every day and doesn’t know any more how to
behave, except to cower and cringe. As we turned under the

colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli he burst into a long diatribe
against France. He was fed up with the French. “I used to
rave about them,” he said, “but that was all literature. I
know them now. … I know what they’re really like. They’re
cruel and mercenary. At first it seems wonderful, because
you have a feeling of being free. After a while it palls on you.
Underneath it’s all dead; there’s no feeling, no sympathy, no
friendship. They’re selfish to the core. The most selfish
people on earth! They think of nothing but money, money,
money. And so goddamned respectable, so bourgeois!
That’s what drives me nuts. When I see her mending my
shirts I could club her. Always mending, mending. Saving,
saving. Faut faire des économies! That’s all I hear her say all
day long. You hear it everywhere. Sois raisonnable, mon
chéri! Sois raisonnable! I don’t want to be reasonable and
logical. I hate it! I want to bust loose, I want to enjoy myself.
I want to do something. I don’t want to sit in a café and talk
all day long. Jesus, we’ve got our faults—but we’ve got
enthusiasm. It’s better to make mistakes than not do
anything. I’d rather be a bum in America than to be sitting
pretty here. Maybe it’s because I’m a Yankee. I was born in
New England and I belong there, I guess. You can’t become
a European overnight. There’s something in your blood that
makes you different. It’s the climate—and everything. We
see things with different eyes. We can’t make ourselves
over, however much we admire the French. We’re
Americans and we’ve got to remain Americans. Sure, I hate
those puritanical buggers back home—I hate ’em with all
my guts. But I’m one of them myself. I don’t belong here.
I’m sick of it.”
All along the arcade he went on like this. I wasn’t saying a
word. I let him spill it all out—it was good for him to get it off
his chest. Just the same, I was thinking how strange it was
that this same guy, had it been a year ago, would have
been beating his chest like a gorilla and saying: “What a

marvelous day! What a country! What a people!” And if an
American had happened along and said one word against
France Fillmore would have flattened his nose. He would
have died for France—a year ago. I never saw a man who
was so infatuated with a country, who was so happy under a
foreign sky. It wasn’t natural. When he said France it meant
wine, women, money in the pocket, easy come, easy go. It
meant being a bad boy, being on a holiday. And then, when
he had had his fling, when the tent top blew off and he had
a good look at the sky, he saw that it wasn’t just a circus,
but an arena, just like everywhere. And a damned grim one.
I often used to think, when I heard him rave about glorious
France, about liberty and all that crap, what it would have
sounded like to a French workman, could he have
understood Fillmore’s words. No wonder they think we’re all
crazy. We are crazy to them. We’re just a pack of children.
Senile idiots. What we call life is a five and-ten-cent store
romance. That enthusiasm underneath—what is it? That
cheap optimism which turns the stomach of any ordinary
European? It’s illusion. No, illusion’s too good a word for it.
Illusion means something. No, it’s not that—it’s delusion. It’s
sheer delusion, that’s what. We’re like a herd of wild horses
with blinders over our eyes. On the rampage. Stampede.
Over the precipice. Bango! Anything that nourishes violence
and confusion. On! On! No matter where. And foaming at
the lips all the while. Shouting Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Why?
God knows. It’s in the blood. It’s the climate. It’s a lot of
things. It’s the end, too. We’re pulling the whole world down
about our ears. We don’t know why. It’s our destiny. The rest
is plain shit. …
At the Palais Royal I suggested that we stop and have a
drink. He hesitated a moment. I saw that he was worrying
about her, about the lunch, about the bawling out he’d get.
“For Christ’s sake,” I said, “forget about her for a while.
I’m going to order something to drink and I want you to

drink it. Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of this fucking
mess.” I ordered two stiff whiskies.
When he saw the whiskies coming he smiled at me just
like a child again.
“Down it!” I said, “and let’s have another. This is going to
do you good. I don’t care what the doctor says—this time
it’ll be all right. Come on, down with it!”
He put it down all right and while the garçon disappeared
to fetch another round he looked at me with brimming eyes,
as though I were the last friend in the world. His lips were
twitching a bit, too. There was something he wanted to say
to me and he didn’t quite know how to begin. I looked at
him easily, as though ignoring the appeal and, shoving the
saucers aside, I leaned over on my elbow and I said to him
earnestly: “Look here, Fillmore, what is it you’d really like to
do? Tell me!”
With that the tears gushed up and he blurted out: “I’d like
to be home with my people. I’d like to hear English spoken.”
The tears were streaming down his face. He made no effort
to brush them away. He just let everything gush forth. Jesus,
I thought to myself, that’s fine to have a release like that.
Fine to be a complete coward at least once in your life. To let
go that way. Great! Great! It did me so much good to see
him break down that way that I felt as though I could solve
any problem. I felt courageous and resolute. I had a
thousand ideas in my head at once.
“Listen,” I said, bending still closer to him, “if you mean
what you said why don’t you do it… why don’t you go? Do
you know what I would do, if I were in your shoes? I’d go
today. Yes, by Jesus, I mean it… I’d go right away, without
even saying good-bye to her. As a matter of fact that’s the
only way you can go—she’d never let you say good-bye. You
know that.”
The garçon came with the whiskies. I saw him reach
forward with a desperate eagerness and raise the glass to

his lips. I saw a glint of hope in his eyes—far-off, wild,
desperate. He probably saw himself swimming across the
Atlantic. To me it looked easy, simple as rolling off a log. The
whole thing was working itself out rapidly in my mind. I
knew just what each step would be. Clear as a bell, I was.
“Whose money is that in the bank?” I asked. “Is it her
father’s or is it yours?”
“It’s mine!” he exclaimed. “My mother sent it to me. I
don’t want any of her goddamned money.”
“That’s swell!” I said. “Listen, suppose we hop a cab and
go back there. Draw out every cent. Then we’ll go to the
British Consulate and get a visa. You’re going to hop the
train this afternoon for London. From London you’ll take the
first boat to America. I’m saying that because then you
won’t be worried about her trailing you. She’ll never suspect
that you went via London. If she goes searching for you
she’ll naturally go to Le Havre first, or Cherbourg. … And
here’s another thing—you’re not going back to get your
things. You’re going to leave everything here. Let her keep
them. With that French mind of hers she’ll never dream that
you scooted off without bag or baggage. It’s incredible. A
Frenchman would never dream of doing a thing like that …
unless he was as cracked as you are.”
“You’re right!” he exclaimed. “I never thought of that.
Besides, you might send them to me later on—if she’ll
surrender them! But that doesn’t matter now. Jesus, though,
I haven’t even got a hat!”
“What do you need a hat for? When you get to London
you can buy everything you need. All you need now is to
hurry. We’ve got to find out when the train leaves.”
“Listen,” he said, reaching for his wallet, “I’m going to
leave everything to you. Here, take this and do whatever’s
necessary. I’m too weak. … I’m dizzy.”

I took the wallet and emptied it of the bills he had just
drawn from the bank. A cab was standing at the curb. We
hopped in. There was a train leaving the Gare du Nord at
four o’clock, or thereabouts. I was figuring it out—the bank,
the Consulate, the American Express, the station. Fine! Just
about make it.
“Now buck up!” I said, “and keep your shirt on! Shit, in a
few hours you’ll be crossing the Channel. Tonight you’ll be
walking around in London and you’ll get a good bellyful of
English. Tomorrow you’ll be on the open sea—and then, by
Jesus, you’re a free man and you needn’t give a fuck what
happens. By the time you get to New York this’ll be nothing
more than a bad dream.”
This got him so excited that his feet were moving
convulsively, as if he were trying to run inside the cab. At
the bank his hand was trembling so that he could hardly
sign his name. That was one thing I couldn’t do for him—
sign his name. But I think, had it been necessary, I could
have sat him on the toilet and wiped his ass. I was
determined to ship him off, even if I had to fold him up and
put him in a valise.
It was lunch hour when we got to the British Consulate,
and the place was closed. That meant waiting until two
o’clock. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, by way of
killing time, than to eat. Fillmore, of course, wasn’t hungry.
He was for eating a sandwich. “Fuck that!” I said. “You’re
going to blow me to a good lunch. It’s the last square meal
you’re going to have over here—maybe for a long while.” I
steered him to a cosy little restaurant and ordered a good
spread. I ordered the best wine on the menu, regardless of
price or taste. I had all his money in my pocket—oodles of it,
it seemed to me. Certainly never before had I had so much
in my fist at one time. It was a treat to break a thousand
franc note. I held it up to the light first to look at the
beautiful watermark. Beautiful money! One of the few things

the French make on a grand scale. Artistically done, too, as
if they cherished a deep affection even for the symbol.
The meal over, we went to a café. I ordered Chartreuse
with the coffee. Why not? And I broke another bill—a five-
hundred franc note this time. It was a clean, new, crisp bill.
A pleasure to handle such money. The waiter handed me
back a lot of dirty old bills that had been patched up with
strips of gummed paper; I had a stack of five and ten franc
notes and a bagful of chicken feed. Chinese money, with
holes in it. I didn’t know in which pocket to stuff the money
any more. My trousers were bursting with coins and bills. It
made me slightly uncomfortable also, hauling all that dough
out in public. I was afraid we might be taken for a couple of
crooks.
When we got to the American Express there wasn’t a
devil of a lot of time left. The British, in their usual fumbling
farting way, had kept us on pins and needles. Here
everybody was sliding around on castors. They were so
speedy that everything had to be done twice. After all the
checks were signed and clipped in a neat little holder, it was
discovered that he had signed in the wrong place. Nothing
to do but start all over again. I stood over him, with one eye
on the clock, and watched every stroke of the pen. It hurt to
hand over the dough. Not all of it, thank God—but a good
part of it. I had roughly about 2,500 francs in my pocket.
Roughly, I say. I wasn’t counting by francs any more. A
hundred, or two hundred, more or less—it didn’t mean a
goddamned thing to me. As for him, he was going through
the whole transaction in a daze. He didn’t know how much
money he had. All he knew was that he had to keep
something aside for Ginette. He wasn’t certain yet how
much—we were going to figure that out on the way to the
station.
In the excitement we had forgotten to change all the
money. We were already in the cab, however, and there

wasn’t any time to be lost. The thing was to find out how we
stood. We emptied our pockets quickly and began to whack
it up. Some of it was lying on the floor, some of it was on the
seat. It was bewildering. There was French, American and
English money. And all that chicken feed besides. I felt like
picking up the coins and chucking them out of the window—
just to simplify matters. Finally we sifted it all out; he held
on to the English and American money, and I held on to the
French money.
We had to decide quickly now what to do about Ginette—
how much to give her, what to tell her, etc. He was trying to
fix up a yarn for me to hand her—didn’t want her to break
her heart and so forth. I had to cut him short.
“Never mind what to tell her,” I said. “Leave that to me.
How much are you going to give her, that’s the thing? Why
give her anything?”
That was like setting a bomb under his ass. He burst into
tears. Such tears! It was worse than before. I thought he
was going to collapse on my hands. Without stopping to
think, I said: “All right, let’s give her all this French money.
That ought to last her for a while.”
“How much is it?” he asked feebly.
“I don’t know—about 2,000 francs or so. More than she
deserves anyway.”
“Christ! Don’t say that!” he begged. “After all, it’s a rotten
break I’m giving her. Her folks’ll never take her back now.
No, give it to her. Give her the whole damned business. … I
don’t care what it is.”
He pulled a handkerchief out to wipe the tears away. “I
can’t help it,” he said. “It’s too much for me.” I said nothing.
Suddenly he sprawled himself out full length—I thought he
was taking a fit or something—and he said: “Jesus, I think I
ought to go back. I ought to go back and face the music. If
anything should happen to her I’d never forgive myself.”

That was a rude jolt for me. “Christ!” I shouted, “you can’t
do that! Not now. It’s too late. You’re going to take the train
and I’m going to tend to her myself. I’ll go see her just as
soon as I leave you. Why, you poor boob, if she ever thought
you had tried to run away from her she’d murder you, don’t
you realize that? You can’t go back any more. It’s settled.”
Anyway, what could go wrong? I asked myself. Kill
herself? Tant mieux.
When we rolled up to the station we had still about twelve
minutes to kill. I didn’t dare to say good-bye to him yet. At
the last minute, rattled as he was, I could see him jumping
off the train and scooting back to her. Anything might
swerve him. A straw. So I dragged him across the street to a
bar and I said: “Now you’re going to have a Pernod—your
last Pernod and I’m going to pay for it… with your dough.”
Something about this remark made him look at me
uneasily. He took a big gulp of the Pernod and then, turning
to me like an injured dog, he said: “I know I oughtn’t to trust
you with all that money, but… but… Oh, well, do what you
think best. I don’t want her to kill herself, that’s all.”
“Kill herself?” I said. “Not her! You must think a hell of a
lot of yourself if you can believe a thing like that. As for the
money, though I hate to give it to her, I promise you I’ll go
straight to the post office and telegraph it to her. I wouldn’t
trust myself with it a minute longer than is necessary.” As I
said this I spied a bunch of post cards in a revolving rack. I
grabbed one off—a picture of the Eiffel Tower it was—and
made him write a few words. “Tell her you’re sailing now. Tell
her you love her and that you’ll send for her as soon as you
arrive. … I’ll send it by pneumatique when I go to the post
office. And tonight I’ll see her. Everything’ll be Jake, you’ll
see.”
With that we walked across the street to the station. Only
two minutes to go. I felt it was safe now. At the gate I gave
him a slap on the back and pointed to the train. I didn’t

shake hands with him—he would have slobbered all over
me. I just said: “Hurry! She’s going in a minute.” And with
that I turned on my heel and marched off. I didn’t even look
round to see if he was boarding the train. I was afraid to.
I hadn’t thought, all the while I was bundling him off, what
I’d do once I was free of him. I had promised a lot of things—
but that was only to keep him quiet. As for facing Ginette, I
had about as little courage for it as he had. I was getting
panicky myself. Everything had happened so quickly that it
was impossible to grasp the nature of the situation in full. I
walked away from the station in a kind of delicious stupor—
with the post card in my hand. I stood against a lamppost
and read it over. It sounded preposterous. I read it again, to
make sure that I wasn’t dreaming, and then I tore it up and
threw it in the gutter.
I looked around uneasily, half expecting to see Ginette
coming after me with a tomahawk. Nobody was following
me. I started walking leisurely toward the Place Lafayette. It
was a beautiful day, as I had observed earlier. Light, puffy
clouds above, sailing with the wind. The awnings flapping.
Paris had never looked so good to me; I almost felt sorry
that I had shipped the poor bugger off. At the Place
Lafayette I sat down facing the church and stared at the
clock tower; it’s not such a wonderful piece of architecture,
but that blue in the dial face always fascinated me. It was
bluer than ever today. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Unless he were crazy enough to write her a letter,
explaining everything, Ginette need never know what had
happened. And even if she did learn that he had left her
2,500 francs or so she couldn’t prove it. I could always say
that he imagined it. A guy who was crazy enough to walk off
without even a hat was crazy enough to invent the 2,500
francs, or whatever it was. How much was it, anyhow?, I
wondered. My pockets were sagging with the weight of it. I

hauled it all out and counted it carefully. There was exactly
2,875 francs and 35 centimes. More than I had thought. The
75 francs and 35 centimes had to be gotten rid of. I wanted
an even sum—a clean 2,800 francs. Just then I saw a cab
pulling up to the curb. A woman stepped out with a white
poodle dog in her hands; the dog was peeing over her silk
dress. The idea of taking a dog for a ride got me sore. I’m as
good as her dog, I said to myself, and with that I gave the
driver a sign and told him to drive me through the Bois. He
wanted to know where exactly. “Anywhere,” I said. “Go
through the Bois, go all around it—and take your time, I’m in
no hurry.” I sank back and let the houses whizz by, the
jagged roofs, the chimney pots, the colored walls, the
urinals, the dizzy carrefours. Passing the Rond-Point I
thought I’d go downstairs and take a leak. No telling what
might happen down there. I told the driver to wait. It was
the first time in my life I had let a cab wait while I took a
leak. How much can you waste that way? Not very much.
With what I had in my pocket I could afford to have two taxis
waiting for me.
I took a good look around but I didn’t see anything worth
while. What I wanted was something fresh and unused—
something from Alaska or the Virgin Islands. A clean fresh
pelt with a natural fragrance to it. Needless to say, there
wasn’t anything like that walking about. I wasn’t terribly
disappointed. I didn’t give a fuck whether I found anything
or not. The thing is, never to be too anxious. Everything
comes in due time.
We drove on past the Arc de Triomphe. A few sightseers
were loitering around the remains of the Unknown Soldier.
Going through the Bois I looked at all the rich cunts
promenading in their limousines. They were whizzing by as
if they had some destination. Do that, no doubt, to look
important—to show the world how smooth run their Rolls
Royces and their Hispano Suizas. Inside me things were

running smoother than any Rolls Royce ever ran. It was just
like velvet inside. Velvet cortex and velvet vertebrae. And
velvet axle grease, what! It’s a wonderful thing, for half an
hour, to have money in your pocket and piss it away like a
drunken sailor. You feel as though the world is yours. And
the best part of it is, you don’t know what to do with it. You
can sit back and let the meter run wild, you can let the wind
blow through your hair, you can stop and have a drink, you
can give a big tip, and you can swagger off as though it
were an everyday occurrence. But you can’t create a
revolution. You can’t wash all the dirt out of your belly.
When we got to the Porte d’Auteuil I made him head for
the Seine. At the Pont de Sèvres I got out and started
walking along the river, toward the Auteuil Viaduct. It’s
about the size of a creek along here and the trees come
right down to the river’s bank. The water was green and
glassy, especially near the other side. Now and then a scow
chugged by. Bathers in tights were standing in the grass
sunning themselves. Everything was close and palpitant,
and vibrant with the strong light.
Passing a beer garden I saw a group of cyclists sitting at a
table. I took a seat nearby and ordered a demi. Hearing
them jabber away I thought for a moment of Ginette. I saw
her stamping up and down the room, tearing her hair, and
sobbing and bleating, in that beastlike way of hers. I saw his
hat on the rack. I wondered if his clothes would fit me. He
had a raglan that I particularly liked. Well, by now he was on
his way. In a little while the boat would be rocking under
him. English! He wanted to hear English spoken. What an
idea!
Suddenly it occurred to me that if I wanted I could go to
America myself. It was the first time the opportunity had
ever presented itself. I asked myself—“do you want to go?”
There was no answer. My thoughts drifted out, toward the
sea, toward the other side where, taking a last look back, I

had seen the skyscrapers fading out in a flurry of
snowflakes. I saw them looming up again, in that same
ghostly way as when I left. Saw the lights creeping through
their ribs. I saw the whole city spread out, from Harlem to
the Battery, the streets choked with ants, the elevated
rushing by, the theaters emptying. I wondered in a vague
way what had ever happened to my wife.
After everything had quietly sifted through my head a
great peace came over me. Here, where the river gently
winds through the girdle of hills, lies a soil so saturated with
the past that however far back the mind roams one can
never detach it from its human background. Christ, before
my eyes there shimmered such a golden peace that only a
neurotic could dream of turning his head away. So quietly
flows the Seine that one hardly notices its presence. It is
always there, quiet and unobstrusive, like a great artery
running through the human body. In the wonderful peace
that fell over me it seemed as if I had climbed to the top of
a high mountain; for a little while I would be able to look
around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.
Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a
distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to
appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to
be surrounded with sufficient space—space even more than
time.
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me—its
past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently
girdle it about: its course is fixed.

* Copyright © 1960 by Karl Shapiro; reprinted by permission
of the author and Random House. This essay first appeared
in Two Cities, Paris, France.

Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Greatest Living Author
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Footnote
introduction_Footnote