Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  This was in that twilit Indian hour when bazaars are shadowed and beggars rest.

  The voices of Calcutta, that great city, change then from the loud cries of the workaday world to murmurous pleas of evening. Nobody knows how many people there are in Calcutta.

  Nor how many cats died yesterday there.

  Nobody knows how many cats were born in Calcutta yesterday.

  All The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Cats-Of-Calcutta is certain about is that there are going to be more cats in Calcutta tomorrow than there are today.

  Nobody knows why it is that crows pursue hawks on the quais of Calcutta; while in every other port it is the hawks that pursue the crows.

  All The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Hawks-Of-Calcutta is sure about is that, if the crows keep it up, there are going to be fewer hawks in Calcutta tomorrow than there are today.

  Nobody knows how many cows there are in Calcutta. All The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Cows-Of-Calcutta is sure about is that some are standing up but others are lying down. It looks like the work of The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Cows-Of-Calcutta will have to be divided into a Committee-For-Cows-Standing-Up and a Committee-For-Counting-Cows-Lying-Down.

  Nobody knows why the dogs of Calcutta never bark, but run away. All that The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Dogs-Of-Calcutta can report is that you have to catch a dog before you can count him—and how can you count him when he runs away?

  At this writing it appears that there are going to be more people on The-Committee-For-Counting-People-In-Calcutta at this time tomorrow than there are today.

  We plan to tackle that as soon as The-Committee-Dividing-The-Work-Of-The-Committee-For-Counting-Cows has been organized.

  A bureaucrat of nine fell into step beside me, wearing only a pair of ragged shorts. His arms, thin as reeds, had been tattooed with a butterfly on one arm and a cobra on the other.

  “Go to ship, Papa?” he wanted to know.

  I nodded yes.

  “You go wrong way to ship, Papa.”

  I was going the right way. But if I believed I was going wrong I would hire him to guide me, and he’d take me to the ship by another route. He took my hand. I took it away.

  “You want to go to American movie, Papa?”

  I didn’t answer. He kept stepping right with me. I increased my pace. He increased his.

  “You want to go to library, Papa?”

  I made no answer. His hard little fingernails clawed my arm. I came to a dead stop.

  He deadstopped too.

  I made a feinting movement to the right.

  He feinted to my right.

  I feinted to the left. He feinted to my left.

  I made a fast u-turn and hurried in the opposite direction. He hurried with me. I broke into a run. He ran with me. I stopped to get my breath. He stopped too.

  “Don’t you have a home?” I asked him.

  He nodded. Yes. He had a home.

  “Why don’t you go there then?”

  “Cannot go to home without baksheesh, Papa.”

  I offered him a dime. He shook his head. No.

  “What’s wrong with a dime?” I wanted to know.

  “Quarter, Papa.”

  “Go to hell,” I told him, and reversed my direction back toward the ship.

  He stayed beside me. I broke into a run. I was six feet long and he was four, but he maintained the pace. I ran faster.

  We ran along a wall. What was on the other side I had no idea—but it would only take a moment to scoop him up, toss him over and lose him forever. He seemed to divine some such intention; because he put himself out of reaching distance without losing stride.

  I ducked, between hacks, across a street: he ducked between hacks with me. I raced back across the same street: he raced with me. Now I had only a few yards to go to a gate he could not enter.

  I reached it and leaned against it, knees shaking, heart racing, chest heaving, sweat pouring. He wasn’t even out of breath—merely stood there regarding me curiously.

  “Eckersize, Papa?”

  It could be put that way. It felt more like the wildest workout in town.

  “Baksheesh, Papa?”

  I handed him a cigar.

  “Match, Papa?”

  The Malaysia Mail loomed ominously at the quai. A line of porters were toting sacks of flour off her into a warehouse. Danielsen was leaning over the rail. He watched me climbing the ramp as if waiting to tell me something.

  “I thought you were at Ezekiel’s,” I told him.

  “Customs are questioning the old man,” he explained, “they found a thousand watches behind Manning’s medicine cabinet. He thought his medicine cabinet had immunity from inspection.”

  I started to feel elation; then my elation died. “What do they want with the old man?”

  “They want to know whether he was in on it.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “No.”

  “How much could he have gotten for the loot?”

  “At least thirty thousand.”

  “I’d never have given him credit for the nerve,” I had to admit.

  It came to me, at last, how strongly fear had been driving Manning.

  In my stateroom I picked up an accusation of Hemingway, yellow with years, written by a critic named Rascoe, now forgotten, in the thirties. Hemingway was infantile when he had written The Sun Also Rises and had since grown increasingly childish, Rascoe had decided. On the other hand, James T. Farrell had reached the full flowering of his maturity. Well, good.

  I found another review, of a decade later, entitled “The Dark Night of Ernest Hemingway,” which proclaimed Hemingway’s failure “because there is no freedom in work when it becomes compulsion. The word for that is anarchy—a strange God to put before God. Personally, I would settle for just one story in which the Ten Commandments did not get kicked all over the place.” When Billy Graham came along Hemingway lost this critic for certain.

  If Hemingway hadn’t written himself out in the twenties, as Rascoe had announced, he’d certainly written himself out in the thirties—left-wing critics were agreed by the forties: the writer to watch, however, was no longer Farrell. Now it was Howard Fast.

  Somehow or other Hemingway must have managed to keep writing through the forties, because, by the fifties, it was clearly understood that now he had really written himself out. There was always somebody else who was more mature, someone more profound; someone more promising. Someone more true.

  Yet the forties had passed, and the fifties had passed, and new critics came on and old critics passed; and new writers came on, and old writers failed and still Hemingway stood them off. Like Sal Maglie, he had nothing left and yet he won ball games. And still he went to the wars and still he went to the bullfights and still he enjoyed his life against all the rules: until he had not only the full pack of American Podhoretzes in pursuit, but European Podhoretzes as well.

  “I do not like that old man,” one boy, withered by bitterness, because others were richer, wrote for L’ Express, “for certain reasons I have simmered all along in the reading of his books. This man is a comedian who during all his life walked around with his testicles for a necklace. But I do suspect that he has none, and that he is a comedian whose literature, by means of tricks, realizes nothing more than the assumptions of Reader’s Digest. Ernesto’s virility is wine and literature. Don Ernesto is afflicted with an awfully sly and wicked look. Hiding behind his beard, Don Ernesto has a mischievous air, mischievous, very mischievous.”

  I remembered this withered boy. He’d once petitioned Jean-Paul Sartre for employment as a secretary, but had later to be dismissed for selling old manuscripts of Sartre’s on the sly. The game worked so long as buyers were interested only in collecting—when one began publishing, somebody had to go. He went. Apparently in pursuit of Hemingway. Some people can’t wait to get rich.

  “In nearly all of Hemingway’s books we feel his sympathy with those who are worthy of it,” one faint-praiser observed
; failing to realize that the great thing about the man’s books is their sympathy for those unworthy of it.

  “There are no women in his books!” Professor Fiedler exclaims. “If in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway has written the most absurd love-scene in the history of the American novel it is not because he lost momentarily his skill and authority. It is a giveaway—a moment which illuminates the whole erotic content of his fiction.”

  Catch that “if.” Because when the Professor himself revealed a homosexual relationship between Huck Finn and Nigger Jim, he extended absurdity in love scenes into naked asininity. Thereby illuminating nothing but the Professor.

  Well, there’s one on every campus. In Fiedler we have the classic mediocrity avenging itself for its deprivation. His method is the equivalent process, in academic terms, of Hollywood writers in “licking a book into shape.”

  Fiedler employs symbolism to drain art of its life. He does not criticize: he adapts. By transferring the writer’s meaning into arbitrary abstractions, he can leave any work for dead. We find, for example, that Hemingway’s description of Mount Kilimanjaro, in The Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber, as “wide as all the world, great, high and unbelievably white” really means (says the Professor) “the whiteness from which the American author tries so vainly to flee, the bland whiteness of the irrational taboo in Melville, and antarctic whiteness of polar disaster in Poe, the whiteness of the White Goddess herself—who having been denied as giver of life and source of love, must be recognized as dealer of death!”

  All he overlooked is that Hemingway wasn’t talking of anything but snow. All the rest of the stuff is simply the Professor earning a living. Talentlessness, like asexuality, is never passive, but finds another outlet.

  The Professor’s trouble is simply that he himself cannot react to womanhood unless it is wrapped in erudition enfolded in a symbol tied by a ribbon made of concepts. What he demands is one of those Puritan euphemisms about “the mystery of femininity.” Hemingway disposed of the mystery and presented a woman.

  “What Hemingway’s emphasis on the ritual murder of fish conceals,” the Professor continues, “that it is not so much the sport as the occasion for immersion which is essential to the holy marriage of males. Water is the symbol of the barrier between the Great Good Place and the busy world of women.”

  He boasts of wounds who never bore a scar: he disbelieves that the earth can move who has never felt it move.

  What is saddening about this piggish jargon is that young people with a love of literature pay for courses to learn how to speak it.

  I was glad to be interrupted by a knock. It was Danielsen. “Manning bought the watches in Kowloon,” Danielsen told me, “the merchant tipped off the Customs police. They make a good raid now and then to cover bribery. This was their good one.”

  “What happens with Manning?”

  “If the company stands by him with an American lawyer he’ll get the case transferred to the States. If the company fires him he might have to do time here—I wouldn’t wish that on the worst dog that ever lived.”

  “Can’t he get his own lawyer?”

  “Manning doesn’t have a nickel. In debt. Alimony. More fouled up than Crooked-Neck.”

  “I have to get back into town,” I told Danielsen, “are you coming?”

  “I’ll see you at Ezekiel’s,” he told me.

  “The hell you will,” I thought.

  Chips, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, was lounging outside the door of the stateroom in which Manning was under arrest.

  “I want to see him getting his,” he told me, “with the manacles.”

  He crossed his wrists to be sure I understood what manacles were. “When am I getting mine?” I wanted to know.

  “When I get a draw,” he promised me again.

  The quai was full of old shadows. Out of one came a nine-year-old bureaucrat.

  “Hello, Papa.”

  He was smoking a cigar. “I paid you to go home,” I reminded him, “no more baksheesh.”

  He skipped along as confidently as before.

  “Cigar, Papa?”

  When I got through the gate I jumped into a cab and slammed the door on him hard.

  “Kanani Mansions,” I told the driver.

  KANANI MANSIONS

  Black-market rascals came and went, sedate Sikhs moved Sikhishly about their Sikhish business; American seamen rapped all the wrong doors and ayahs skittered like withered leaves down the careworn corridors of Kanani Mansions.

  The whores of Calcutta don’t live like the whores of Bombay. In that bootlegging, Puritanical, black-marketing, dreadful Bombay, there are no bars for a seaman to find a wife for a week or a month. There are only the great cat-houses (more like curtained cow-houses) run on short-term love. These; and the animalized women of the cages of Kamathipura.

  But in Calcutta’s flashing bars, thronging with attractive girls from every port of Asia, a seaman can find long-term love. This circumstance makes it possible for such a woman as Martha to keep an apartment of her own with civilized appointments: Martha had a high bookshelf lined with books and records—mostly American—as well as her own bedroom, bath, kitchen and a small parlor. She supported an ayah, an infant son and her mother.

  Martha’s mother, Anna, did not live with her. Although Martha’s trade was of her mother’s devising, and Anna would have preferred to live with her daughter, Martha kept her at a distance in a small apartment down the hall.

  A certain looseness in her look and a cleverness in her eyes distinguished mother from daughter more than her years. Anna’s coldly whorish air left Martha seeming to be the more motherly woman of the two.

  Martha was darker. Anna hennaed her hair and powdered her face too heavily; to make herself look less Asiatic. Every afternoon she came in dressed for a ball, with a copy of the trial of one Commander Nanavati, a naval officer who had shot and killed his wife’s lover.

  She would insist on reading excerpts of the trial to us whether we would or no.

  Martha’s little ayah ran for cover as soon as Anna came in. These homeless old women who serve as maids-of-all-work in return for a corner of a floor to sleep on and the leftovers of a table to subsist on, can be obtained anywhere in Calcutta simply by going down the street and finding one, already starving, on the curb.

  “Get rid of that one,” Anna would command Martha, “she’ll steal the carpet while you’re asleep.”

  “She is honest,” Martha defended the old dry leaf huddled, listening, behind a chair.

  This ayah, whose past had no meaning, whose future no one cared about, knew that Anna was speaking of her unfavorably.

  “Send her back to the street,” Anna urged.

  “She is good with the boy,” Martha replied.

  So many autumns had blown down from the north, since this wisp out of the hills of Assam had first come begging into the heat of Calcutta, that they were now beyond counting. Yet the old cracked brown grandmother had a life of her own along the floor; that she shared with Martha’s infant son.

  While Martha and I and Anna lived among records, shelves, chairs and windows, the infant boy and the very old woman crept in and out of caves made of pillows; or hid together under the divan.

  Music, the sound of voices, arguments, orders, food and tea all came down to them mysteriously from somewhere above. And although the ayah did not understand what was being said when we spoke in English, she sensed enough to stay in hiding while Anna carried on about this “fairlooking person of thirty-seven and Commander of I.N.S. Mysore, who was accused in the murder case of PREM BHAGWANDAS AHUJA, an automobile dealer.”

  Martha retired to the bedroom when Anna began reading.

  Even The-Ayah-Who-Lived-On-The-Floor stopped crawling about when Anna got into the heart of the matter of Commander Nanavati.

  But after a while Anna herself would grow bored with this endless Nanavati. Then she’d go for the Scotch.

  The Scotch was The Best Procurable, the same
brand that Hemingway had once offered me. A Hollywood producer, I remembered, also used to keep a bottle of the same handy—but he wouldn’t open it.

  “You are of New York?” Anna wanted to know while she was pouring. “Do you want ice?”

  “Yes. I mean no. I mean yes, I want ice, but I am not of New York. I am of Chicago.”

  “Is that far from Los Angeles?”

  “As far as the width of India,” I answered; with no clearer notion of India’s width than she had of Chicago.

  “I understand you have written a biography of Frank Sinatra,” Anna told me. “He must be a wonderful person.”

  “A great human being,” I assured the poor creature—why disenchant her?

  “All that money,” she marveled, a dream all of glass spinning behind her eyes—“he must spend a great deal on women.”

  “He gives most of it to charity,” I decided. As long as I was Frankie’s biographer I might as well be on his side.

  “He must give wonderful parties,” the woman dreamed on, “in Colorful Los Angeles.”

  “The last one wasn’t in Los Angeles,” I seemed to recall, “he threw it in the cove below Niagara Falls.”

  Anna clasped her hands—“What that must have cost!”

  “A pretty penny,” I guessed, “but the man has such marvelous luck he always ends up ahead. Somebody started a dice game when the guests started to leave, and Frank won more than enough to pay for renting the cove. I lost everything I had,” I added defensively.

  “I’m sorry,” she told me.

  “Small matter,” I assured her, “it’s easy come easy go in Colorful Los Angeles.”

  My mind returned to that bottle of The Best Procurable that I couldn’t get the producer to open in Los Angeles. That city of Good Procurers.

  There I’d lived in an encrusted crypt entitled The Garden of Allah Chateau—which ought to indicate how far ahead of the rest of the world L.A. was. It was already orbiting in 1950.

  Most of the residents of The Chateau were independents—actors, writers and producers; and several were not only independent as artists but independent of the entire human race. The Chateau at sunset, in fact, looked like a reunion of the garden party Alice’s Wicked Queen once gave. There were several wicked queens on the premises and a few wicked kings as well.