New York: ‘Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities’ (under the title ‘Old New York’s Classic Yegg’);
The New Yorker: ‘The Wizard Postponed’, ‘A Theologian in Death’, ‘The Mirror of Ink’, ‘The Chamber of Statues’, ‘Tale of the Two Dreamers’ (collected under the title ‘Twice-told Tales’);
TriQuarterly: ‘The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv’;
Western Humanities Review: ‘ Streetcorner Man’;
‘The Generous Enemy’ first appeared in Selected Translations 1948-1968 by W. S. Merwin (Athenaeum Publishers); the preface to the 1954 edition, in TriQuarterly.
I inscribe this book to S.D.: English, innumerable and an Angel. Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
Contents
____
Preface to the 1954 Edition
Preface to the First Edition
The Dread Redeemer
Lazarus Morell
Tom Castro,
The Implausible Imposter
The Widow Ching,
Lady Pirate
Monk Eastman,
Purveyor of Iniquities
The Disinterested
Killer Bill Harrigan
The Insulting Master
Of Etiquettte Kôtsuké no Suké
The Masked Dyer,
Hakim of Merv
et cetera
A Theologian in Death
The Chamber of Statues
Tale of the Two Dreamers
The Wizard Postponed
The Mirror of Ink
A Double for Mohammed
The Generous Enemy
Of Exactitude in Science
List of Sources
Preface to
the 1954 Edition
I should define as baroque that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities and which borders on its own parody. It was in vain that Andrew Lang, back in the eighteen-eighties, attempted a burlesque of Pope’s Odyssey; that work was already its own parody, and the would-be parodist was unable to go beyond the original text. ‘Baroque’ is the name of one of the forms of the syllogism; the eighteenth century applied it to certain excesses in the architecture and painting of the century before. I would say that the final stage of all styles is baroque when that style only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has stated that all intellectual labour is essentially humorous. Such humour is not deliberate in the work of Baltasar Gracian, but is deliberate, or self-conscious, in John Donne’s.
The very tide of these pages flaunts their baroque character. To curb them would amount to destroying them; that is why I now prefer to invoke the pronounce-ment ‘What I have written I have written’ (John 19:22) and to reprint them, twenty year later, as they stand. They are the irresponsible game of a shy young man who dared not write stories and so amused himself by falsifying and distorting (without any aesthetic justification whatever) the tales of others. From these ambiguous exercises, he went on to the laboured composition of a straightforward story ‘Streetcorner Man’ which he signed with the name of one of his great grandfathers, Francisco Bustos, and which has enjoyed an unusual and somewhat mystifying success.
In that story, which is about life on the outer edge of old-time Buenos Aires, it will be noted that I have introduced a few cultivated words ‘intestines,’ ‘involutions,’ and so forth. I did so because the hoodlum aspires to refinement, or (this reason invalidates the other but is perhaps the true one) because hoodlums are individuals and do not always speak like The Hoodlum, who is a platonic type.
The theologians of the Great Vehicle point out that the essence of the universe is emptiness. Insofar as they refer to that particle of the universe which is this book, they are entirely right. Scaffolds and pirates populate it, and the word ‘infamy’ in the title is thunderous, but behind the sound and fury there is nothing. The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable. Its author was a somewhat unhappy man, but he amused himself writing it; may some echo of that pleasure reach the reader.
In the ‘Etcetera’ section, I have added three new pieces.
—J. L. B.
Preface to
the First Edition
The exercises in narrative prose that make up this book were written in 1933 and 1934. They stem, I believe, from my rereadings of Stevenson and Chesterton, and also from Sternberg’s early films, and perhaps from a certain biography of Evaristo Carriego. They overly exploit certain tricks: random enumerations, sudden shifts of continuity, and the paring down of a man’s whole life to two or three scenes. (A similar concern with visual aims gives shape to the story “Streetcorner Man”) They are not, they do not try to be, psychological.
As for the examples of magic that close the volume, I have no other rights to them than those of translator and reader. Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers. Will anyone deny that the pieces attributed by Valery to his pluperfect Edmond Teste are, on the whole, less admirable than those of Teste’s wife and friends? Reading, obviously, is an activity which comes after that of writing; it is more modest, more unobtrusive, more intellectual.
—J. L. B.
Buenos Aires, 27 May 1935
The Dread Redeemer
Lazarus Morell
The Remote Cause
In 1517, the Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, taking great pity on the Indians who were languishing in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines, suggested to Charles V, king of Spain, a scheme for importing blacks, so that they might languish in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines. To this odd philanthropic twist we owe, all up and down the Americas, endless things W. C. Handy’s blues; the Parisian success of the Uruguayan lawyer and painter of Negro genre, don Pedro Figari; the solid native prose of another Uruguayan, don Vicente Rossi, who traced the origin of the tango to Negroes; the mythological dimensions of Abraham Lincoln; the five hundred thousand dead of the Civil War and its three thousand three hundred millions spent in military pensions; the entrance of the verb ‘to lynch’ into the thirteenth edition of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy; King Vidor’s impetuous film Hallelujah; the lusty bayonet charge led by the Argentine captain Miguel Soler, at the head of his famous regiment of ‘Mulattoes and Blacks,’ in the Uruguayan battle of Cerrito; the Negro killed by Martín Fierro; the deplorable Cuban rumba ‘The Peanut Vender’; the arrested, dungeon-ridden Napoleonism of Toussaint L’Ouverture; the cross and the snake of Haitian voodoo rites and the blood of goats whose throats were slit by the papaloi’s machete; the habanera, mother of the tango; another old Negro dance, of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the candombe.
And, further, the great and blameworthy life of the nefarious redeemer Lazarus Morell.
The Place
The Father of Waters, the Mississippi, the largest river in the world, was the worthy theatre of this peerless scoundrel. (Alvarez de Pineda discovered the river, and its earliest explorer was Captain Hernando de Soto, the old conqueror of Peru, who helped while away the Inca chief Atahualpa’s months of prison, teaching him the game of chess. When de Soto died, he was given the Mississippi’s waters for a grave.)
The Mississippi is a broad-bosomed river, an immense, dim brother of the Paraná, the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of muddy waters; each year, disgorged by it, over four hundred million tons of silt profane the Gulf of Mexico. From time immemorial, so much muck has built up a delta, where gigantic swamp cypresses grow out of the debris of a continent in perpetual dissolution, and where labyrinths of mud and rushes and dead fish extend the bounds and the peace of this foul-smelling alluvial domain. Upstream, between the Arkansas and the Ohio, is another stretch of lowlands. Living there is a s
allow race of squalid men, prone to fever, who avidly gape at stone and iron, for in their environs there is little but sand, timber, and muddy water.
The Men
At the beginning of the nineteenth century (the date that concerns us), the vast cotton plantations along the river were worked, from sunup to sundown, by blacks. These blacks slept on dirt floors in wooden cabins. Apart from mother-child relations, kinships were casual and unclear. They had first names, but they made do without family names. Nor could they read. Their soft falsetto voices intoned an English of drawled vowels. They worked in rows, bent under the overseer’s lash. When they ran away, full-bearded men, springing onto beautiful horses, tracked them down with snarling packs of hounds.
To successive layers of animal hopes and African fears there had been added the words of the Bible. Their faith, therefore, lay in Christ, They sang deeply and in chorus, ‘Go down, Moses.’ The Mississippi served them as a magnificent image of the paltry Jordan. The owners of this hard-worked land and of these black gangs were idle, greedy gentlemen with flowing locks, who lived in big mansions that overlooked the river always with a white pine, Greek Revival portico. A good slave was worth a thousand dollars and did not last long. Some of them were thankless enough to fall ill and die. Out of such uncertainties, one had to wring the greatest return. This is why slaves were kept in the fields from first light to last; this is why plantations required yearly crops, such as cotton or tobacco or sugarcane. The soil, overworked and mismanaged by this greedy cultivation, was left exhausted within a short time, and tangled, miry wastes encroached upon the land. On abandoned farms, on the outskirts of towns, among the thick canebrakes, and in the abject bayous lived the poor whites. They were fishermen, occasional hunters, and horse thieves. They often begged bits of stolen food from the blacks, and even in their lowly condition these poor whites kept up a certain pride that of their untainted, unmixed blood. Lazarus Morell was one of them.
The Man
The daguerreotypes of Morell usually published in American magazines are not authentic. This lack of genuine representations of so memorable and famous a man cannot be accidental. We may suppose that Morell resisted the camera, essentially, so as not to leave behind pointless clues, and, at the same time, to foster the mystery that surrounded him. We know, however, that as a young man he was not favoured with looks, and that his eyes, which were too close together, and his straight lips were not prepossessing. Thereafter, the years conferred upon him that majesty peculiar to white-haired scoundrels and daring, unpunished criminals. He was an old Southern gentleman, despite a miserable childhood and an inglorious life. Versed in Scripture, he preached with unusual conviction ; ‘I saw Lazarus Morell in the pulpit,’ noted the proprietor of a Baton Rouge gambling house, ‘and I listened to his edifying words and I saw the tears gather in his eyes. I knew that in God’s sight he was an adulterer, a Negro-stealer, and a murderer, but my eyes wept, too.’
Another fair record of these holy effusions is furnished by Morell himself. ‘I opened my Bible at random,’ he wrote, ‘and came upon a fitting verse from Saint Paul, and I preached an hour and twenty minutes. Nor was this time misspent by my assistant Crenshaw and his confederates, for they were outside rounding up all the hearers’ horses. We sold them on the Arkansas side of the river, except for one spirited chestnut that I reserved for my own private use. He pleased Crenshaw as well, but I made him see that the animal was not for him.’
The Method
The stealing of horses in one state and selling them in another were barely more than a digression in Morell’s criminal career, but they foreshadowed the method that now assures him his rightful place in a Universal History of Infamy. This method is unique not only for the peculiar circumstances that distinguished it but also for the sordidness it required, for its deadly manipulation of hope, and for its step by step development, so like the hideous unfolding of a nightmare. Al Capone and Bugs Moran were later to operate in a great city, with dazzling sums of money and lowly submachine guns, but their affairs were vulgar. They merely vied for a monopoly. As to numbers of men, Morell came to command some thousand all sworn confederates. Two hundred of them made up the Heads, or Council, and they gave the orders that the remaining eight hundred carried out. All the risks fell upon these active agents, or strikers, as they were called. In the event of trouble, it was they who were handed over to justice or thrown into the Mississippi with a stone fixed securely about their feet. A good many of them were mulattoes. Their diabolical mission was the following:
Flashing rings on their fingers to inspire respect, they traveled up and down the vast plantations of the South. They would pick out a wretched black and offer him freedom. They would tell him that if he ran away from his master and allowed them to sell him, he would receive a portion of the money paid for him, and they would then help him escape again, this second time sending him to a free state. Money and freedom, the jingle of silver dollars together with his liberty what greater temptation could they offer him? The slave became emboldened for his first escape.
The river provided the natural route. A canoe; the hold of a steamboat; a scow; a great raft as big as the sky, with a cabin at the point or three or four wigwams the means mattered little, what counted was feeling the movement and the safety of the unceasing river. The black would be sold on some other plantation, then run away again to the canebrakes or the morasses. There his terrible benefactors (about whom he now began to have serious misgivings) cited obscure expenses and told him they had to sell him one final time. On his return, they said, they would give him part of both sales and his freedom. The man let himself be sold, worked for a while, and on his final escape defied the hounds and the whip. He then made his way back bloodied, sweaty, desperate, and sleepy.
Final Release
The legal aspect of these doings must now be reviewed. The runaway slave was not put up for sale by Morell’s gang until his first master had advertised and offered a reward to any man who would catch him. An advertisement of this kind warranted the person to take the property, if found. The black then became a property in trust, so that his subsequent sale was only a breach of trust, not stealing. Redress by a civil action for such a breach was useless, as the damages were never paid.
All this was very reassuring but not entirely foolproof. The black, out of sheer gratitude or misery, might open his mouth. A jug of rye whisky in some Cairo brothel, where the son of a bitch, born a slave, would squander those good dollars that they had no business letting him have, and their secret was spilled. Throughout these years, abolitionist agitators roamed the length and breadth of the North a mob of dangerous madmen who opposed private property, preached the emancipation of slaves, and incited them to run away. Morell was not going to let himself be taken in by those anarchists. He was no Yankee, he was a Southern white, the son and grandson of whites, and he hoped one day to retire from business and become a gentleman and have his own miles of cotton fields and rows of bent-over slaves. He was not about to take pointless risks not with his experience.
The runaway expected his freedom. Lazarus Morell’s shadowy mulattoes would give out an order among themselves that was sometimes barely more than a nod of the head, and the slave would be freed from sight, hearing, touch, day, infamy, time, his benefactors, pity, the air, the hound packs, the world, hope, sweat, and himself. A bullet, a knife, or a blow, and the Mississippi turtles and catfish would receive the last evidence.
The Cataclysm
In the hands of reliable men, the business had to prosper. At the beginning of 1834, Morell had already ‘emancipated’ some seventy blacks, and many others were ready to follow the lead of these lucky forerunners. The field of operations grew wider, and it became essential to take on new associates. Among those who swore to the oath was a young man from Arkansas, one Virgil Stewart, who very soon made himself conspicuous for his cruelty. Stewart was the nephew of a gentleman who had had many slaves decoyed away. In August 1834 this young man b
roke his oath and exposed Morell and his whole gang. Morell’s house in New Orleans was surrounded by the authorities. Only due to their negligence, or perhaps through a bribe, was Morell able to make good an escape.
Three days passed. During this time, Morell remained hidden on Toulouse Street in an old house with courtyards that were filled with vines and statues. It seems that he took to eating little and would stalk up and down the dim, spacious rooms in his bare feet, smoking thoughtful cigars. By a slave of the place, he sent two letters to Natchez and a third to Red River. On the fourth day, three men joined him, and they stayed until dawn, arguing over plans. On the fifth day, Morell got out of bed as it was growing dusk and, asking for a razor, carefully shaved off his beard. Then he dressed and left. At an easy pace, he made his way across the city’s northern suburbs. Once in the country, skirting the Mississippi flats, he walked more briskly.
His scheme was foolhardy. He planned to enlist the services of the last men still to owe him honour the South’s obliging blacks. They had watched their companions run off and never seen them reappear. Their freedom, therefore, was real. Morell’s object was to raise the blacks against the whites, to capture and sack New Orleans, and to take possession of the territory. Morell, brought down and nearly destroyed by Stewart’s betrayal, contemplated a nationwide response a response in which criminal elements would be exalted to the point of redemption and a place in history. With this aim, he started out for Natchez, where he enjoyed greater strength. I copy his account of that journey:
Collected Stories Page 29
