“And then—?”
“Ah well,” he said, in a leveler tone. “It was gruesome. You know, the great trouble with self-disgust is not the ruination it works on oneself—though that’s bad enough—but the way it so easily can begin to upset other people’s lives. Oh, I’d had difficult times with Poppy off and on—who the hell who’s married hasn’t? —but this was the first time I’d ever done something like that. It was sickening, really; and what I’d really done, it’s plain enough to see, was to simply turn the loathing I felt for myself outward upon Poppy and the children. Ah God, it was sickening! Once in Sam-buco, during one of my better—or sober—periods, I remember I awoke from a dream. I can’t recall this particular dream, except that it had a written message for me. It was one of the strangest dreams I ever had, because it was as if some fruity old moralist of the subconscious had risen up and written in chalk this maxim right straight across my brain. For a moment I thought I was the reincarnation of some great philosopher, it all seemed so perfectly true. It went like this: ’To triumph over self is to triumph over Death. It is to triumph over that beast which one’s self interposes between one’s soul and one’s God.’ It’s true as hell, you know. Anyway, I had no such notions or insights there in Paris. Self. Self! God, I was a regular puddle of self. I mean I felt I could hear—almost see—every contraction of my ulcerous stomach, and watch my kidneys straining away and sieving out all the crud, and see the loops of my intestines slick and gray and sweaty in their battle against all the poison I was guzzling down, and my bronchial tubes all filthy with French cigarettes, and my brain! My poor old aching, suffering brain! God, I was a mess. Of self. Conscious of nothing in the world so much as my own miserable ambulating corpuscles.
“Well, that day I suppose I got as low as I could get. Later that day, anyway. I remember that after they had left I went to the window and watched them scampering down the street. Whenever I think of it now it near about breaks my heart, but at the time, as I say, I was in a perfect alcoholic fog, absolutely unmoved by the picture: Poppy, not much bigger than a mouse, with the baby in her arms, hustling down the street with its dusty springtime light—a real Utrillo street—and the kids tagging and galloping after, all of them heading for God knows where. Then they were gone around a corner. They were gone, and I was alone in the house, sort of sagging there with my nauseating self. I had an old beat-up record player at the time—you saw it in Sambuco. A man can’t live properly, of course, without music. Even though music itself, when abused, is a form of corruption. I remember reading somewhere in The Republic a passage where Plato says that in the ideal State music will have to be curtailed and regulated by law, its appeal is so powerful—it’s so likely to dope the spirit. There’s truth in that, I know, because at the time along with all the booze I was using music as a sort of—oh, an auxiliary drug, which gave me even bigger kicks and let me tear loose my emotions. Just like everything else that’s good you’ve got to use music wisely. Anyway, as I say, I had this record player that I’d picked up at the Flea Market for a few thousand francs, and I’d oiled it and fixed it up. It played loud as hell. It was a scratchy hoarse monster but I had a few records: The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni and some early Haydn and Christian Bach and the St. Matthew Passion and a Palestrina mass and—oh yes, I had an ancient Leadbelly album with about every record held together by Scotch tape. Old Leadbelly. Every time I heard ’The Midnight Special’ I got right back to Carolina. Anyway—So that day, I remember, after they had gone —gone forever at that moment, for all I cared or knew—I opened another bottle of this crummy brandy and got my Magic Flute out and put it on and staggered around the joint for a while, hating myself, hating Poppy and my own glands and the life-force or whatever it was that caused me to produce such a useless, snotty-nosed, colicky tribe, and I began to trip over things—one of Poppy’s galoshes or some goddam toy—and I fetched it a lick with my foot, and missed, and kicked the wall, which almost broke my toe, and that set me to stamping around again and cursing and hating myself even more, as if I was caught up in some endless circle of selfloathing and venom and meanness. Well, I began to simmer down —gradually, I guess—most likely the music was stealing into my bones, and I took another terrific slug out of the bottle, and then—I remember the moment so clear and plain—I walked over to the window. Now, ever since—well, ever since I’ve straightened out, or whatever you want to call it—I’ve tried to figure out what was happening to me at the time, inside of my body, that is. I’ve thought about it and I’ve read about it, and the only conclusion that I’ve been able to come to is that these—well, these visions I had were not psychic, that is, they weren’t mystical or supernatural or anything except the simple fact that I was a soggy lush-head in whose scrambled brain all sorts of hallucinations could happen—must happen, in fact. I don’t mean the D.T.’s, either. It’s a simple fact that when you set out, as I had been doing, to destroy yourself and don’t eat, preferring instead to slop down each day about two quarts of swill lacking vitamins, minerals, calories, corpuscles, humors, gray matter, or any other substance necessary to both health and sanity—when you do this, I say, and flog your lungs with Gauloises Bleues (and cheap cigars) and stumble about the streets of Paris breathing the fumes of incinerated gasoline and get so low as I did, I swear, so depleted and exhausted, that even the old pecker refuses to twitch at the most wildly pornographic fantasy—when you’re in this state, all I’m trying to say is that some kind of hallucination, some kind of weird displacement of the mind, is not only likely, but bound to happen.
“As I say, I remember going to the window. It was a spring afternoon, warm, full of pollen; you could almost touch the air and have it turn to yellow dust in your fingers. Then there were these elephant vines, huge and green and tropical. These shiny harmless little ladybugs—the French have a wonderful name for them, bêtes à, Bon Dieu—they were swarming all over the leaves, so that when I bent closely down to watch them, watching these spotted black backs and russet-colored glossy wings, with the great green leaves behind, they looked like some strange surrealistic armadillos crawling through a jungle. A big golden spider had built a web in the crotch of one of the vines, and I wondered why she hadn’t trapped any of the ladybugs, until I remembered that ladybugs are supposed to secrete a smell or something that’s repulsive to spiders. Well, I stood there for a long while looking at the leaves and the ladybugs, smelling bread baking down below, listening to the music. And then finally, in a sort of doze, and with all my hatred and poison lost for the moment, or forgotten, I looked up. And I’ll swear at the moment as I looked up it was as if I were gazing into the kingdom of heaven. I don’t know quite how to describe it—this bone-breaking moment of loveliness. I was almost sick with desire and yearning for what I saw. It was only this same street in Paris, of course, this sad and nondescript Paris street with its leaning gables and tarnished doorknobs and weatherworn, filigreed lamp posts, and a shabby plane tree or two, and now an old woman had come out of a door massaging her hands, and there was a dog vanishing into an alleyway. Way down the street was the wall of the Montparnasse Cemetery and above it the sky rose up blue, blue, and now there were pigeons up there, a great flight of sun-flecked wings, all wheeling around in space. And over all this the sense of afternoon, of Sunday, of spring, of tranquillity and repose. And behind me in the room Mozart splashing away, mad and sane and tender and—what?—good! Brought straight down from the Maker of us all! Ah my God, how can I describe it! It wasn’t just the scene, you see—it was the sense, the bleeding essence of the thing. It was as if I had been given for an instant the capacity to understand not just beauty itself by its outward signs, but the other—the elsen&ss in beauty, this continuity of beauty in the scheme of all life which triumphs even to the point of taking in sordidness and shabbiness and ugliness, which goes on and on and on, and of which this was only a moment, I guess, divinely crystallized. God, the magic of that moment! What was it, really? I just don’t know—the weakness, the li
ght-headedness, the booze, the vertigo. Yet it was there, and for the first time—the first moment of reality I think I had ever known. And the strange thing was that it was in the midst of this, in the midst of a time when I was most wrapped up in self and squalor and meanness, I had a presentiment of selflessness: I mean, it was as if the crummy little street had been for an instant transformed into some grand, gay boulevard of my own spirit, where I no longer walked alone, but where so many countless generations of lovers and old women and dogs and children had walked, and where there would walk generations of lovers and old women and dogs and children yet unborn. It was no longer a street that I was watching; the street was inside my very flesh and bones, you see, and for a moment I was released from my own self, embracing all that was within the street and partaking of all that happened there in time gone by, and now, and time to come. And it filled me with the craziest sort of joy… .”
He paused for a long time, concentrating, as if to summon all that he could of that afternoon.
“I’ve done it badly,” he said finally. “I feel that I’ve only gotten a little bit of it over. I’ve done it badly. But that’s the trouble when —when you try to describe a—a state like this. You end up like some shaggy tenth-century anchorite, hooting and hollering that he’s been raped by a platoon of angels. It’s like the criticism of a painting: it just can’t be done, you’ve got to look at it yourself. Well, anyway, maybe you can see how, if I got such a boot out of these spells, I didn’t want to give up the very thing that caused them, even if the very thing that caused them was a self-destructive thing of booze and slow starvation and nervous exhaustion. Suicide, really. No, I wouldn’t say I didn’t want to give it up. Like anybody who’s hooked, who’s wrassling with the beast, I’d have given anything to be free, to be clean. Besides, a—a seizure like the one I was telling you about didn’t come too often, even when I was pouring it on the most. But I must say the prospect of having one again sort of took some of the curse off—off the horror. Even if the worst—”
“The worst what?” I asked, when he failed to finish the sentence.
“Well, let me go back to where I was. I can’t say how long this moment of rapture—I guess, that’s what it was—I don’t know how long it lasted, maybe not more than half a minute, I suspect even less than that. Then a strange thing happened. Again it was something I had never experienced before. I fainted, blacked out. One moment I was standing there with my heart pumping away, watching the street and the plane trees and the dog trotting up the alleyway and the pigeons high above, and then the scene just dribbled away before my eyes, in rivulets, as if it had all been no more substantial than a rag doll left out in the rain, and I saw all the colors and outlines draining slowly out of sight, and all went black then as if I had been accepted gently but positively into the very bosom of death—I even thought that as I melted away—and I felt nothing except a kind of endless black repose and peace. And yet, do you know something? With all of this—with all of this sense of eternity crowding around me, and passing into some space of infinite time—I didn’t move an inch from the place where I was standing. My head—only my forehead—had drooped down and banged itself gently against the windowpane, and I snapped my neck up and saw not the night or passage of time that I had expected but the woman, by God, still standing there massaging her hands, the plane trees trembling, casting the same shadow, and the pigeons high up still whirling around over the cemetery. Only the dog had finally vanished, and even his shadow I could still see against the far wall of the alleyway with a leg uplifted as he watered a tree. The woman singing Mozart was still soaring off on the same aria, the same measure, in fact. I hadn’t even dropped the bleeding cognac. And I was standing there in the green light from the elephant vines, rubbing the bump on my forehead and breathing like a maniac, and troubled, and close to weeping, feeling that I had tied into the space of a minute more emotion than a man should have in a couple of years.”
The recollection seemed to shake him and sadden him, and so gradually I somehow managed to change the subject. Yet later I happened to touch on that afternoon, inadvertently, and before I was scarcely aware of it he was reliving the whole thing again. But first there was a diversion.
“That reminds me,” he said. “Once, you know, when I was a kid, sixteen or seventeen or so, and living up near Wilmington on this river I was telling you about—once, I remember, one Saturday afternoon I went into town all by myself. Listen! This has a whole lot to do with it all. … I got slicked up and put on my patent-leather shoes and my pin-stripe suit from Montgomery Ward and I went to Wilmington. I was quite a sight, I guess, a young hayseed with big gawky hands and store-bought glasses and a hand-painted tie and a wide simple country-boy’s leer on my face. I don’t know, I might even have had a touch of a mustache then; I remember I grew one at some time: we lived in a mighty depressed area in those days. It was right around the beginning of the war, I remember: the streets were packed with soldiers and Marines, and it was hot, and I remember I had only one thing on my mind and that was to get me a piece of nooky. I hadn’t ever had a girl, you see—hell, never even touched one!—and I figured they were going to put me into the Army, too, and soon, and ship me off to a place where there weren’t anything but colored girls or something, and so I guess I made up my mind that it was now or never. Well, I remember walking around the streets of Wilmington all afternoon, feeling my oats and snooping around and poking my nose into little beer joints, and getting chased out on account of my age, and feeling hornier and hornier, like some young billygoat, really, and making the terrible discovery as I went along that there just weren’t any girls to be had: what few of them there were, the soldiers had. I got pretty downcast after a while. You know, there’s nothing more pitiful on earth than a boy of seventeen and his clumsy, suffering desire. So it got to be evening, finally, and it got later and later and I still hadn’t found me a girl. I remember a soldier told me that I could get a good piece for five bucks at a certain hotel, but five bucks for me in those days was close to being a millionaire.
“Well, I dragged on back toward the bus station finally, figuring that it was a bad job all around. Then just as I turned a corner, standing full in the gorgeous light from the windows of this Rexall drug store, she appeared to me: the black-eyed, heart-stopping, resplendent girl of my dreams. My God, I can even remember her name! It was Vernelle Satterfield. And do you know what she was doing? She was standing there—this little ripe peach of a girl, this delectable nymph in bobbysox, this marvel of nubile and ravishing womanhood—she was standing there in the dazzling Rexall light and she was hawking Watchtowers at five cents a copy for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. For a moment she struck me almost blind, she seemed so beautiful. And she was: all brown hair and round young breasts and soft contours and rose-gold Botticelli flesh. Well, I don’t guess I was any paragon of—of suavity in those days, but somehow I managed it; maybe it was just the force of my unbridled passions. Anyway, I hove to alongside her and gave her a nickel for a Watchtower and then another nickel for a lot of other junk she had, all the time hemming and hawing and trying to act benign and elderly, and finally I laid out fifty cents for the collected sermons of the Judge whatever-his-name-was who ran the outfit, and that clinched it: I told her my name and she told me hers, and she said she was plumb exhausted from having to fend off soldiers all afternoon, and that I was the only gentleman she’d encountered in some time, and though she would have to decline my invitation to have a beer, as her religion forbade it, she would join me in an ice-cream sundae. So I took her into the Rexall’s. Mother of God …
“Vernelle Satterfield!” he exclaimed, with a look of long reminiscence. “Christ, I’ll remember that girl till the day I die! Never on earth was a ripe, toothsome, palpitatingly carnal reality touched with such a glow of virginity and innocence. She was sixteen and a half, she said. Imagine, saying sixteen and a half. She was dressed in what I suppose you would call decollete—though I expect she wasn’t aware of
it—and every time she would lean over, ever so innocently, she’d expose this pink full brassiere and then she’d heave backwards a bit and stroke her lovely hair and say in her gentle sweet voice that she was glad there was one gentleman left in Wilmington, North Carolina. Funny thing, too, was that there didn’t seem to be anything snippy or priggish about this: she was just pure, you see, pure as hell and full of religion, and she thought a whole lot about the verities, as she put it. I remember she said, just as gravely and honestly and sweetly as you please: ’After all, Jesus Hisself was a gentleman.’ Well, after about half an hour of this, what with all the leaning over and all this pristine, silky crossing and recrossing of her legs, I was just one solid sweaty torment, and I asked her if I could take her home. She raised these little plucked eyebrows a bit, and considered, and then she said yes, she supposed I could—again because I was so well-mannered and moral-looking—and so I picked up all the tracts and prayer books and hymnals and we got a bus and went back to her house. She wasn’t really heavy about it, as I remember—she could talk about other things, if pressed—but she seemed to focus pretty consistently on religion, and on the way out on this bus she kept asking me what my affiliation was, and whether I felt I was really prepared and so on, while I kept my hot eyes (do you remember those short skirts girls used to wear then?) on her round plump sweet knees. You know, if you could turn into tiny bits of—of feathers, every word said by all men, in just one year, to all women when the men were thinking of something else; when they were trying to be smooth and polite but when their minds were fixed on that single all-compelling goal, you’d have enough hypocrisy to plug up the entire known universe with feathers. Well, sterling gentleman that I was, I tried to carry the ball, and I tried to focus on the truth. I told her that I was an Episcopalian by baptism and all that, and how my father had been an Episcopalian minister—which was true, of course—but that I’d been left an orphan at ten, and had been brought up by an uncle and aunt who were Methodists. Which was also true. But, as I say, lust brings out the hypocrisy in man or boy—those plump knees and that heaving little bosom, I could hardly think straight by then—and so I told her that, in spite of all this, I’d been powerfully drawn toward the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who always seemed to me to represent the highest-type religion, and I must say this clinched things even further: she said she was an orphan, too, which gave us a kind of kinship, didn’t it, and she thought it was real nice that I might become a Witness, and by the time we got out to her house we were mooning at each other a little and I had hold of one of her sweaty little hands. I was about to burst. I remember saying, ’Lord, ain’t it sad to be an orphan,’ which was true enough, but not at that moment, because all I was thinking about was whether I’d have the courage, and whether God (and then I did believe in a nice loose-type God) would permit me to have my way with this luscious handmaiden of His. And then I heard her say: ‘Lor7, ain’t it true? Jesus called Momma and Poppa away when I was only five.’ I was literally about to burst.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 80
