Mosquitoes

by William Faulkner

  “Oh,” Fairchild said. “Well, maybe you are like me, and prefer a live poet to the writings of any man.”

  “Make it a dead poet, and I’ll agree.”

  “Well . . .” He settled his spectacles. “Listen to this.” Mark Frost groaned, rising, and departed. Fairchild read implacably:

  “On rose and peach their droppings bled,

  Love a sacrifice has lain,

  Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,

  Beneath his hand his mouth is dead—

  “No: wait.” He skipped back up the page. Mrs. Wiseman listened restively, her brother with his customary quizzical phlegm.

  “The Raven bleak and Philomel

  Amid the bleeding trees were fixed,

  His hoarse cry and hers were mixed

  And through the dark their droppings fell

  “Upon the red erupted rose,

  Upon the broken branch of peach

  Blurred with scented mouths, that each

  To another sing, and close—”

  He read the entire poem through. “What do you make of it?” he asked.

  “Mostly words,” the Semitic man answered promptly, “a sort of cocktail of words. I imagine you get quite a jolt from it, if your taste is educated to cocktails.”

  “Well, why not?” Mrs. Wiseman said with fierce protectiveness. “Only fools require ideas in verse.”

  “Perhaps so,” her brother admitted. “But there’s no nourishment in electricity, as you poets nowadays seem to believe.”

  “Well, what would you have them write about, then?” she demanded. “There’s only one possible subject to write anything about. What is there worth the effort and despair of writing about, except love and death?”

  “That’s the feminine of it. You’d better let art alone and stick to artists, as is your nature.”

  “But women have done some good things,” Fairchild objected. “I’ve read—”

  “They bear geniuses. But do you think they care anything about the pictures and music their children produce? That they have any other emotion than a fierce tolerance of the vagaries of the child? Do you think Shakespeare’s mother was any prouder of him than, say, Tom o’Bedlam’s?”

  “Certainly she was,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Shakespeare made money.”

  “You made a bad choice for comparison,” Fairchild said. “All artists are kind of insane. Don’t you think so?” he asked Mrs. Wiseman.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “Almost as insane as the ones that sit around and talk about them.”

  “Well—” Fairchild stared again at the page under his hand. He said slowly, “It’s a kind of dark thing. It’s kind of like somebody brings you to a dark door. Will you enter that room, or not?”

  “But the old fellows got you into the room first,” the Semitic man said. “Then they asked you if you wanted to go out or not.”

  “I don’t know. There are rooms, dark rooms, that they didn’t know anything about at all. Freud and these other—”

  “Discovered them just in time to supply our shelterless literati with free sleeping quarters. But you and Eva just agreed that subject, substance, doesn’t signify in verse, that the best poetry is just words.”

  “Yes . . . infatuation with words,” Fairchild agreed. “That’s when you hammer out good poetry, great poetry. A kind of singing rhythm in the world that you get into without knowing it, like a swimmer gets into a current. Words. . . . I had it once.”

  “Shut up, Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Julius can afford to be a fool.”

  “Words,” repeated Fairchild. “But it’s gone out of me now. That first infatuation, I mean; that sheer infatuation with and marveling over the beauty and power of words. That has gone out of me. Used up, I guess. So I can’t write poetry any more. It takes me too long to say things, now.”

  “We all wrote poetry, when we were young,” the Semitic man said. “Some of us even put it down on paper. But all of us wrote it.”

  “Yes,” repeated Fairchild, turning slowly onward through the volume. “Listen:

  “. . . O spring O wanton O cruel

  baring to the curved and hungry hand

  of march your white unsubtle thighs . . .

  And listen.” He turned onward. Mrs. Wiseman was gazing aft where Jenny and Mr. Talliaferro had come into view and now leaned together upon the rail. The Semitic man listened with weary courtesy.

  “. . . above unsapped convolvulae of hills

  april a bee sipping perplexed with pleasure . . .

  “It’s a kind of childlike faith in the efficacy of words, you see, a—kind of belief that circumstance somehow will invest the veriest platitude with magic. And, darn it, it does happen at times, let it be historically or grammatically incorrect or physically impossible; let it even be trite: there comes a time when it will be invested with a something not of this life, this world, at all. It’s a kind of fire, you know. . . .” He fumbled himself among words, staring at them, at the Semitic man’s sad quizzical eyes and Mrs. Wiseman’s averted face.

  “Somebody, some drug clerk or something, has shredded the tender—and do you know what I believe? I believe that he’s always writing it for some woman, that he fondly believes he’s stealing a march on some brute bigger or richer or handsomer than he is; I believe that every word a writing man writes is put down with the ultimate intention of impressing some woman that probably don’t care anything at all for literature, as is the nature of women. Well, maybe she ain’t always a flesh and blood creature. She may be only the symbol of a desire. But she is feminine. Fame is only a by-product. . . . Do you remember, the old boys never even bothered to sign their things. . . . But, I don’t know. I suppose nobody ever knows a man’s reasons for what he does: you can only generalize from results.”

  “He very seldom knows his reasons, himself,” the other said. “And by the time he has recovered from his astonishment at the unforeseen result he got, he has forgotten what reason he once believed he had. . . . But how can you generalize from a poem? What result does a poem have? You say that substance doesn’t matter, has no proper place in a poem. You have,” the Semitic man continued with curious speculation, “the strangest habit of contradicting yourself, of fumbling around and then turning tail and beating your listener to the refutation. . . . But God knows, there is plenty of room for speculation in modern verse. Fumbling, too, though the poets themselves do most of this. Don’t you agree, Eva?”

  His sister answered, “What?” turning upon him her dark, preoccupied gaze. He repeated the question. Fairchild interrupted in full career:

  “The trouble with modern verse is, that to comprehend it you must have recently passed through an emotional experience identical with that through which the poet himself has recently passed. The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose feet are shaped like the cobbler’s feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear—”

  “Like overshoes,” the other suggested.

  “Like overshoes,” Fairchild agreed. “But, then, I ain’t disparaging. Perhaps the few that the shoes fit can go a lot farther than a whole herd of people shod alike could go.”

  “Interesting, anyway,” the Semitic man said, “to reduce the spiritual progress of the race to terms of an emotional migration; esthetic Israelites crossing unwetted a pink sea of dullness and security. What about it, Eva?”

  Mrs. Wiseman, thinking of Jenny’s soft body, came out of her dream. “I think you are both not only silly, but dull.” She rose. “I want to bum another cigarette, Dawson.”

  He gave her one, and a match, and she left them. Fairchild turned a few pages. “It’s kind of difficult for me to reconcile her with this book,” he said slowly. “Does it strike you that way?”

  “Not so much that she wrote this,” the other answered, “but that
she wrote anything at all. That anybody should. But there’s no puzzle about the book itself. Not to me, that is. But you, straying trustfully about this park of dark and rootless trees which Dr. Ellis and your Germans have recently thrown open to the public—You’ll always be a babe in that wood, you know. Bewildered, and slightly annoyed; restive, like Ashur-bani-pal’s stallion when his master mounted him.”

  “Emotional bisexuality,” Fairchild said.

  “Yes. But you are trying to reconcile the book and the author. A book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can’t reconcile them. And with you, when the inevitable clash comes, the author’s actual self is the one that goes down, for you are of those for whom fact and fallacy gain verisimilitude by being in cold print.”

  “Perhaps so,” Fairchild said, with detachment, brooding again on a page. “Listen:

  “Lips that of thy weary all seem weariest,

  Seem wearier for the curled and pallid sly

  Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy

  Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;

  Lay not to heart thy boy’s hand, to protest

  That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,

  For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled

  With secret joy of thine own woman’s breast.

  “Weary thy mouth with smiling; canst thou bride

  Thyself with thee and thine own kissing slake?

  Thy virgin’s waking doth itself deride

  With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake,

  And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide

  For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.

  “‘Hermaphroditus,’” he read. “That’s what it’s about. It’s a kind of dark perversion. Like a fire that don’t need any fuel, that lives on its own heat. I mean, all modern verse is a kind of perversion. Like the day for healthy poetry is over and done with, that modern people were not born to write poetry any more. Other things, I grant. But not poetry. Kind of like men nowadays are not masculine and lusty enough to tamper with something that borders so close to the unnatural. A kind of sterile race: women too masculine to conceive, men too feminine to beget. . . .”

  He closed the book and removed his spectacles slowly. “You and me sitting here, right now, this is one of the most insidious things poetry has to combat. General education has made it too easy for everybody to have an opinion on it. On everything else, too. The only people who should be allowed an opinion on poetry should be poets. But as it is—But then, all artists have to suffer it, though: oblivion and scorn and indignation and, what is worse, the adulation of fools.”

  “And,” added the Semitic man, “what is still worse: talk.”

  TWELVE O’CLOCK

  “You must get rather tired of bothering about it,” Fairchild suggested as they descended toward lunch. (There was an offshore breeze and the saloon was screened. And besides, it was near the galley.) “Why don’t you leave it in your stateroom? Major Ayers is pretty trustworthy, I guess.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Pete replied. “I’ve got used to it. I’d miss it, see?”

  “Yes,” the other agreed. “New one, eh?”

  “I’ve had it a while.” Pete removed it and Fairchild remarked its wanton gay band and the heavy plaiting of the straw.

  “I like a panama, myself,” he murmured. “A soft hat. This must have cost five or six dollars, didn’t it?”

  “Yeh,” Pete agreed, “but I guess I can look out for it.”

  “It’s a nice hat,” the Semitic man said. “Not everybody can wear a stiff straw hat. But it rather suits the shape of Pete’s face, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, that’s so,” Fairchild agreed. “Pete has a kind of humorless reckless face that a stiff hat just suits. A man with a humorous face should never wear a stiff straw hat. But then, only a humorless man would dare buy one.”

  Pete preceded them into the saloon. The man’s intent was kindly, anyway. Funny old bird. Easy. Easy. Somebody’s gutting. Anybody’s. Fairchild spoke to him again with a kind of tactful persistence:

  “Look here, here’s a good place to leave it while you eat. You hadn’t seen this place, I reckon. Slip it under here, see? It’ll be safe as a church under here until you want it again. Look, Julius, this place was made for a stiff straw hat, wasn’t it?” This place was a collapsible serving table of two shelves that let shallowly into the bulkhead: it operated by a spring and anything placed on the lower shelf would be inviolate until someone came along and lowered the shelves again.

  “It don’t bother me any,” Pete said.

  “All right,” the other answered. “But you might as well leave it here: it’s such a grand place to leave a hat. Lots better than the places in theaters. I kind of wish I had a hat to leave there, don’t you, Julius?”

  “I can hold it all right,” Pete said again.

  “Sure,” agreed Fairchild readily, “but just try it a moment.” Pete did so, and the other two watched with interest. “It just fits, don’t it? Why not leave it there, just for a trial?”

  “I guess not. I guess I’ll hold onto it,” Pete decided. He took his hat again and when he had taken his seat he slid it into its usual place between the chairback and himself.

  Mrs. Maurier was chanting, “Sit down, people,” in an apologetic, hopeless tone. “You must excuse things. I had hoped to have lunch on deck, but with the wind blowing from the shore—”

  “They’ve found where we are and that we are good to eat, so it doesn’t make any difference where the wind blows from,” Mrs. Wiseman said, businesslike with her tray.

  “And with the steward gone, and things so unsettled,” the hostess resumed in antistrophe, roving her unhappy gaze. “And Mr. Gordon—”

  “Oh, he’s all right,” Fairchild said heavily helpful, taking his seat. “He’ll show up all right.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Aunt Pat,” the niece added. “What would he want to get drowned for?”

  “I’m so unlucky,” Mrs. Maurier moaned, “things—things happen to me, you see,” she explained, haunted with that vision of a pale implacability of water, and sodden pants, and a red beard straying amid the slanting green regions of the sea in a dreadful simulation of life.

  “Ah, shucks,” the niece protested, “ugly like he is, and so full of himself. . . . He’s got too many good reasons for getting drowned. It’s the ones that don’t have any excuse for it that get drowned and run down by taxis and things.”

  “But you never can tell what people will do,” Mrs. Maurier rejoined, becoming profound through the sheer disintegration of comfortable things. “People will do anything.”

  “Well, if he’s drowned, I guess he wanted to be,” the niece said bloodlessly. “He certainly can’t expect us to fool around here waiting for him, anyway. I never heard of anybody fading out without leaving a note of some kind. Did you, Jenny?”

  Jenny sat in a soft anticipatory dread. “Did he get drownded?” she asked. “One day at Mandeville, I saw—” Into Jenny’s heavenly eyes there welled momentarily a selfless emotion, temporarily pure and clean. Mrs. Wiseman looked at her, compelling her with her eyes. She said:

  “Oh, forget about Gordon for a while. If he’s drowned (which I don’t believe) he’s drowned; if he isn’t he’ll show up again, just as Dawson says.”

  “That’s what I say,” the niece supported her quickly. “Only he’d better show up soon, if he wants to go back with us. We’ve got to get back home.”

  “You have?” her aunt said with heavy astonished irony. “How are you going, pray?”

  “Perhaps her brother will make us a boat with his saw,” Mark Frost suggested.

  “That’s an idea,” Fairchild agreed. “Say, Josh, haven’t you got a tool of some sort that’ll get us off again?” The nephew regarded Fairchild solemnly.

 
; “Whittle it off,” he said. “Lend you my knife if you bring it back right away.” He resumed his meal.

  “Well, we’ve got to get back,” his sister repeated. “You folks can stay around here if you want to, but me and Josh have got to get back to New Orleans.”

  “Going by Mandeville?” Mark Frost asked.

  “But the tug should be here at any time,” Mrs. Maurier insisted, reverting again to her hopeless amaze. The niece gave Mark Frost a grave speculative stare.