OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  "I know."

  "You know. And a lot of my clients know. And a lot of women. But they can't change anything."

  "Yeah."

  "What do I really do here, then? Ask yourself. I'm in the business of supplying erotic fun to people who are made for it, born to it, urged from the cradle to the grave to take part in it, who depend upon it for mental health, for a decent feeling of good will toward others--and aren't allowed to engage in it even with their own wedded wives, by the statutes of New York State and forty-seven other little penitentiaries! That's my trade.

  And because I'm in it--I am regarded as the greatest blight in civilized society, by millions. Holy, jumped-up St. Peter's be-hee!"

  Through a recollected haze of alcohol I heard this same tirade from old and distant days. And Hattie was right, in her way. The theory of accession to culture and intelligence, to morality and Godliness, through the restraint of desire by the demeaning of it, had run its course in the Western world and unstrung nearly all of us. And where that thesis did not exist, there were others, still more absurd, to bring other peoples to their repetitive, obnoxious dooms.

  Quite suddenly, I felt like weeping.

  She left the window and sat down. "Relax."

  The feeling passed like a bird's shadow.

  "What were you doing all evening?" she asked. "How come you're up so late?

  Work?"

  I thought of telling her--telling her the truth. Thought of it hard and seriously.

  "Out with a dame," I said, which was not what I meant by the truth. "A wife. A pretty package of all the quality advertising, from Pasadena, who had caught her hubby in flagrante with a gent--and fled. Protesting too much, if you understand."

  "Half the girls in the country--if they had the nerve--!"

  "A latent thing. In maturity, according to the psychologists, it becomes the psychological stuff by which we understand and appreciate our own sex."

  "And it does, too."

  "If you say so, it must be right, Hat."

  "There--you are damned tooting!" She looked at me. "So you took her out--?"

  "Rumbaing. I've got good at it--since I knew you."

  "Really good?"

  "Good enough to please the Cuban girls. So we danced. And I brought her back to the hotel--and turned her loose."

  "Nice guy!"

  "I wanted her to exercise her mind. After all--I only met her at lunch--and she's already moved up on my floor, next door."

  "You should change hotels, then."

  "Too lazy. Too busy. And I can deal with her. Spoiled--and too bad--because the guy she left sounds okay. I wish I could help her out. Taking--what they call--advantage of her, probably wouldn't. And you can't re-do a person's attitude and background in a few days--especially with a serial to correct. Usually requires years, and a good analyst--"

  "Another wife--to be hated."

  "By you?"

  Hattie nodded. "I hate thousands of them. Some, I adore."

  We didn't seem to find anything to say for a minute. I could have given her one more name for the short side of the ledger but I didn't want to. Finally I said, "If you get any ideas about Marcia--?"

  "Call me up--when you've met her. Better still-come by again."

  "I will." I had no idea whether I would or not.

  She got up. "Look. Do me a favor and autograph a couple of your books for me, will you? And have another cup of coffee while I go downstairs and get them?"

  "All right."

  She went. Pretty soon a tall, redheaded girl came in without knocking, just as I'd expected one would. Brown-red hair--long, curled at the ends, and a pair of legs to look at. A girl like a mannequin--but no pose; no hauteur. She had enough sex appeal for the end of anybody's chorus line. She smiled open a wide mouth on even teeth and fixed her hazel eyes on me. Hattie remembered: I had never approved of whores who looked like whores. This one looked like a bright assistant on a magazine--or maybe the wife of a lucky prof.

  "My name," she said, "is Gwen Taylor. Hattie got stuck for a few minutes--and told me to come in. I've heard a lot about you--here and there."

  I stood and shook her hand.

  She briefly grabbed her lower lip with her upper teeth. "Or is that--indelicate?"

  "No. I'm pleased. And not fooled for a minute. You see--I know Hattie."

  "After all," said the girl, "it's her profession. She said we were having coffee."

  Viola came again with a tray. Gwen poured. "There are half a dozen of us around.

  Would you like to meet them?"

  "One's enough."

  Her eyes flickered and she smiled. "Thanks." She handed me the cup, served the sugar with tongs, poured cream, and fixed her own. "Warm night."

  We talked about that.

  By and by she nodded toward the radio-phonograph. "Hattie said you like to rumba. So do I."

  I shook my head. "Sometime--"

  She looked at me and smiled. "I hope!"

  Hattie came with the books, by and by. She made an apology. I wrote in both volumes and signed my name and Hattie accompanied me down one of the two long halls with the many shut doors.

  "Like Gwen?"

  "Very much."

  "I thought you would. She's--something! It's been marvelous to see you, Phil. Call me up!"

  The exceedingly noncommittal elevator man took me back to the street. It was gravy--thick with the smell of the river.

  I got a cab.

  It slatted downtown.

  Once, I leaned forward to tell the driver to tum around.

  But I didn't speak.

  4

  There is a metal clip on every door in the Astolat; mail and written messages are put in it--so the guests won't have to stoop. I had a letter. A tidy backhand with little circles for periods and dots over the i's. It looked like a billet-doux from Yvonne--and it was:

  You meanie!

  Everything you said got me so tremendously stimulated I couldn't sleep. I decided, after a struggle, if you were going to stir girls up that way, you were responsible for their condition. So I phoned you--and no answer! Don't you know hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? If you feel like a little chitchat when you do come in, phone me. I don't have to work tomorrow so you needn't be scrupulous about the hour. And even if you don't, thanks ever so much for a very disturbing, unsatisfying, lovely evening.

  Yours,

  Y

  It was four o'clock and my body was tired, though my mind was running round and round like a toy electric train.

  I didn't want to see any more of Yvonne at the moment.

  I turned out the lights in the sitting room, undressed, took a short, warm shower, and lay down on the double bed, naked. Usually, about two minutes after the lights go out, I fall asleep. But I knew it would take longer that night.

  So I piled up the pillows and opened Vogt's Road to Survival at the page where the jacket was enclosed. Mr. Vogt's thesis is simple and damning; I had somewhat reflected upon it earlier that evening.

  It is the philosophy of modern man to produce. To industrialize himself. To learn the techniques and technologies of science and of applied science. This is progress.

  Chinese, Soviets, Americans---everybody strives to speed up production, distribution, consumption. It is also the object of all nations to increase their populations.

  The earth cannot support either of these two goals.

  The topsoil of the planet will not feed the existing numbers of us, even now--and our method of using it is diminishing it at a gruesome rate. Faster and faster, we starve; and as we multiply, more of us will starve. Medicine, which increases the percentage of persons who survive infancy and extends the life span of all these, is but rapidly adding to sure victims of starvation.

  We are busy breeding mouths to eat our future out of house and home.

  Ideas of this sort have been around since Malthus's time.

  These days, the facts accumulate.

  I often reflect that man's contempo
rary sexual taboos lead (as they must, by the law of opposites) to sexual excesses: these are seen in man's witless overbreeding. His

  "moral" Catholic couch, his unregulated Baptist bed, sustains orgy and is the senseless agent of biological catastrophe. This is the riposte of Nature to man's refusal to use reason concerning his own nature.

  Vogt wants planet-wide birth control, before the teeming hordes locust up the hope of a human hereafter.

  Try and get it!

  There are other truths about ourselves of this same order:

  The minerals. We are digging them up with the reckless violence of pigs after truffles. Truffles can grow again--but not minerals. We are converting the earth's elements into forms all but irrecoverable even by the most immense expenditures of human energy and time.

  Our genes--and the holy habit we've got into, of inhibiting birth among our most likely specimens--of proliferating boobs and nuts--of maintaining the feeble and the dim, abetting their rabbity bedding together--and of sending the cream of each generation to war's slaughter.

  This, alone, will drive us back toward apehood faster even than our growing physical destitution. Some European nations are doubtless already floundering in the poverty of residual blood-lines--bereft of brains and leadership by their religious devotion and their glorious wars.

  Also, of course, there is our failure to perceive our instinctual nature. My own elected department in the category of dooms. Instinctively, as we must, all of us feel the weight of such colossal crimes against the meaning of instinct as those above--our cosmic disavowals (by our acts) of any responsibility toward men to come. That is why, at bottom, no one is happy in modern society--happy in his spirit, content, full of a sense of purpose and significance. It is why we shall have to remake civilization consciously--or to suffer its self-destruction.

  Mr. Vogt, I thought, would feel the power of instinct, as it now blindly controls us, when he saw how religious men reacted to his simple indication of the necessity for using reason in our sex relations. And he would see the inertia of our traditions when he saw how utterly his warning was disbelieved, ignored, ridiculed, and forgotten. Others, with the same wild cry of despair, have had such reception, for the same reason.

  It is not that man cannot do for himself.

  But that he will not.

  And he will not because he is self-flattered into the incredible illusion that Mr.

  and Mrs. America are doing very well already, thank you kindly.

  After a long while, grinning over the tremendous sins of those who take it upon themselves to reject knowledge and yet to say what sin is, I closed the book.

  Hell has one funny aspect.

  It is where everybody lives.

  I sent a thought to Messrs. Sheen, Niebuhr, and their ilk: The up-to-date devil, which you so earnestly seek, gentlemen, may readily be found--wearing the costume of your own minds: unconsciousness.

  I slept like a log.

  PART THREE: Andante

  1

  REVEILLE WAS THE HEAT of burning gasoline, gears grating, rubber clattering on the sticky pavement and bits of shouts, floating around like confetti. I can remember when it used to be hoofbeats, quiet neighbor-talk, and sometimes, utter silence.

  I lay glistening in a depression of the bed. At first, the big noise of the city, diminishing when the lights changed, and plunging up with new zeal a moment afterward, gave me only the pleasant sensation, the titillations and satisfactions, of being in New York. Then I remembered my circumstance. The frightened little animal that I am tore terribly around while I tried to catch it and to hold it and to remind it that the thin tissue on the front of its brain was capable of managing its panic. I spent some time at the job and sat up trickling.

  All my life I have listened to a wearisome cell repeat an old saw: the coward dies a thousand times, the brave man once.

  A person is afraid to be cowardly.

  For many years, owing to this rather superficial sentence, I had to accept the inner humiliation of cowardice. A boy with my kind of imagination, my style of projecting, could not but help finding in his head the taste of the thousand deaths. And I am often cowardly still. In those few morning minutes, I chased my coward a long distance.

  But I do think the aphorism should be discarded. Certainly the coward dies a thousand times. So, too, however, does the man of imagination. It is the manner of the thousand deaths that is important. And bravery--our poor, human bravery--is not necessarily consonant with faulty imagination or none at all, as this dumbbell's apothegm implies.

  I finally caught my animal--a real beast and not a dream.

  I ordered coffee and stepped into the sitting room.

  It was after nine.

  The morning papers had been put at my door. There was mail.

  A letter from Ricky.

  I ripped it open and read it hungrily.

  Dear:

  Would you please, if you get a chance, go to the Lingerie Department at Saks and ask for Miss Drewson? Tell her I'd like to have three more slips like the blue satin ones I got last July when we were in town. I could order them by mail, but I want to be sure to get the same kind and she will know. Size twelve, which I guess I needn't tell you. We miss you--everything is just the same, which is dandy--and have fun. I love you very much.

  Ricky

  I had a second little beast to chase, then.

  There was a bank statement.

  There were four publicity releases from business concerns which keep sending me their bilge even though I took the pains, almost a year ago, to write them that I'd quit doing a newspaper column and had no way of airing their propaganda even if I felt the urge. There were three letters from people who liked my books. There was a letter from the assistant to the dean of a small college in Illinois: Dear Wylie:

  Just how does one go about getting so swellheaded and self-righteous that he thinks he can tell off everybody on earth? I would like to know, because it must be a wonderful sensation to balloon around so gassily. Look out for pins, though!

  Please reply.

  Sincerely,

  John F. Casselberry.

  I put the letter between my big toe and the next one, held it out at body length, and reflected.

  There is nothing unusual about this letter; I get a version of it every few days, sometimes running into thousands of derogatory words. And, of course, it is true.

  Of course, of course, of course.

  Authorship is the supreme act of ego.

  Whether it is good or evil, as an act, depends, I suppose not so much on what's written, as how the writing is.

  Most authors conceal the egoistic aspect of the business under the nom de plumes of their characters.

  But exactly as every man is all that he thinks and does--and dreams, too--so is an author all he writes.

  A mystery writer is a murderer in his head and he sets down his gory lore for an audience of murderers.

  What does that make you, Wylie? You first-person author!

  Did I use it to take the blame and the guilt--to take the responsibility--and to tear down the artifice of the third person? And was it true (as I felt) that, since my purpose was to turn the thoughts of better authors into a vernacular more popular than their own, my I was the mere agent--and not the excreted vanity which it so constantly deplored? Or was the whole affair a secret exercise in look-ma-I'm-dancing?

  God knows, some part of it had to be.

  I fancied myself as a teacher.

  I was mostly a ham.

  What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort and understanding in--all this--and the long years I'd spent endeavoring to give it a dignified texture--forever emerged as the overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet.

  The truths were somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a cheap world.

  Some people heard my mentors. Yes.

  A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the atten
tion-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those whom I ballyhooed.

  But others--oh, how rightly--saw me!

  Yakkety-yak.

  Wylie's next.

  Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set bristles standing on old Comstock's neck.

  Christ Jesus!

  I had thought a havoc in prose might be a substitute for havoc itself--sparing a man here and a woman there from the reality of acquainting them with the instinct.

  O tin messiah.

  Tawdry complex.

  Bawling calfcake.

  Jackass of your own worst describing.

  Balloon.

  It must be 'a wonderful sensation.

  Not truth, so much as show-off.

  Not love of you--infatuation with me.

  Not--for what I did--but, like most of us, for what I might have done--and used instead to inflate the First Person Singular with the airs of my hot compartments.

  The extravert posing as the introvert.

  The hoofer philosopher.

  Shame, shame, shame!

  Shame ran off me.

  And I shall die, in it and with it.

  I went to my window to look at the city the messy cubes in the haze and somebody's radio performed an act of God.

  Ja-da

  Ja-da

  Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jingo

  Shimmy, I thought.

  Shimmy.

  Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.

  You wear 'em in the winter and you wear 'em in the fall You wear 'em in the summer if you wear 'em at all.

  Shimmy.

  Shimmy!

  Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.

  This is a message to and of the American people.

  The Dream.

  The Cross.

  Everybody

  Loves my body

  But my body

  Don't love nobody

  But me.