William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  “Well, I reckon what started me off was this. This—After he finished his story he asked me where I’d been, and I told him the Solomons and New Britain, and then he asked me—all in the smoothest way, you understand, without seeming to pry at all—if I’d gotten hurt any, and I said no, I’d been lucky—physically, that is—but that I’d gotten pretty beat up mentally for a while, enough to put me in a hospital for a spell, at any rate. Then he wanted to know if this experience hadn’t deepened me, hadn’t added to my work; then tacked on something heavy about how this Yugoslavian business, and fear, and suffering there, was the key to his own talent. And it’s a funny thing, he wouldn’t let it go at that, you see; in the nicest way he kept wanting to know what happened to me. So I poured myself out another Regal and I told him: about landing at Gloucester in the mists, in that tremendous hovering jungle, and how it wasn’t anything that exactly happened to me that eventually cracked me up, but how the Japs were way back in the bosky dells, waiting, and when we advanced—lucky old Cass being point, lead man in the lead squad of the leading platoon in the leading company, et cetera—it was like being pioneer in an experience so nightmarish and scary that all reality just drained away from your consciousness on the spot, and that being waist-deep in this incalculable muck anyway, the fact of sudden death from some invisible machine gun or sniper stuck up in a tree somewhere seemed at once so inviting and so foregone and so inevitable that from then on, once you miraculously pulled through it all, fear was never the same again. It was a land and an empire whose citizen you would be for the rest of your life. And no doubt for the rest of your life you would be paying it homage. That was my experience, I said, and as I droned away there—getting a little mawkish, I guess, what with the memory and the booze and all—my eyes misted up and I told him this. I told him we done a good job in that war. I told him that it was a war we had to fight, that if there’s such a thing as a just war it was no doubt juster than most. But as for experience, I said, you could keep your goddam experience and give me back those days when I could have been swimming on the green coast of Carolina, washed over by clean green waves and left upright and ready for living, instead of half buckled-over remembering some misbegotten quagmire of a jungle, and with the dirty taste of fear in my mouth. Experience, I said, was for the birds, when it diminished a man. Bugger that kind of experience. Bugger it. Bugger it forever.

  “Then came the snapper, you see. Mason’s eyes were all glittery by now. Looking back on it, it must have been just the sorehead renegade talk he was led to expect from this Polish what’s-hisname. Anyway, as I ended up my little outburst, feeling all mean and bitter and drunk and sorry for myself, as I finished up there Mason’s beautiful lips parted and this, so help me God, is what he said. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands gracefully behind his head and said: ‘Well, I don’t consider myself a member of the beat generation, Waldo, though I certainly sympathize. But I think I can understand why you’re considered one of the leading spokesmen.’ Which is a pretty sweet piece of ass-kissing, you must admit. He had everything all sewed up. With a couple million bucks he couldn’t exactly be beat, and he knew it, but to be beat was fashionable, and he sure could sympathize. Old Mason. He would of sympathized with cancer if he thought it was a la mode. Well, anyway, that did it. What it was I don’t know—an accumulation of things, I suppose. Him pretending to care for my art, which was so poor. Francesca, and the booze, and this sudden memory of the war again, and my general misery and inadequacy, and on top of that this glib young fellow with his fast chitterchatter about abstract expressionism and jazz and this guy Bird with his death-wish and now, drug in by its heels, the beat generation, knowing that was pretty chic, too. I mean, whether justly or not, for a moment there he seemed to be the bleeding shallow and insincere epitome of a bleeding neo-yahoo snakepit of a fifth-rate juvenile culture that only a moron could live in, or a lunatic. He burnt my ass.

  “So I let him have it, number-two shot in both barrels. I got up and I looked down at him and I said, very gently: ‘You want to know something, my friend? I think you’re as full of shit as a Christmas goose.’ Then I said, very softly, very even-tempered, see: ‘Let me tell you something. I don’t know what you’re driving at, but those bums don’t know what beat is. They’re just a bunch of little boys playing with theirselves. Get me some men, friend, and I might set myself up in the spokesman business. In the meantime, don’t call me Waldo.’ Well, you’d have thought Mason had been cold-cocked with a wrench. He gave a little jump and his eyes got as gray and washed-out as a couple of oysters. And then that shoulder of his started to jerking and twitching and heaving and he looked like he was trying to say something, but what could he say? Either I wasn’t Waldo at all, or I was sort of a super-Waldo who had transcended even himself, and was so way-out that here I was repudiating the generation I was supposed to be the mouthpiece for. He looked absolutely clobbered. And before he had a chance to collect himself I was charging on, half out of my head, I guess, with drunken spite and bitterness and general all-around anti-everything. And I said: ’Who the hell are you, anyway, some bleeding smart-aleck Joe College with half a semester of art appreciation and several fancy chapters from Bernard Berenson who’s come over here to yawn over whatever Renaissance genius is passe this year?’ (He wasn’t that, of course, but I didn’t know it. Mason might have heard of B.B., but anybody who painted before 1900 was on his shit list anyway.) ‘People like you give me a king-sized pain in the butt. The whole suave smooth Ivy League lot of you should be made to run high hurdles from here to the Strait of Messina, barefooted like one of these contadini and nothing to eat but some week-old bread full of weevils, then by God maybe you’ll know a painting when you see one!’ His shoulder was heaving like mad and—I don’t know—he looked so displaced, all of a sudden, that I sat down and altered my tone a bit. ‘The trouble is, you see, it’s not that you’re not nice, you young Americans, it’s just that you don’t know anything. Take the Greeks, par exemple. Do you know anything about the Greeks?’ He just sat there for a moment, looking walleyed, then he said somewhat stiffly: ‘Of course I know something about the Greeks.’ Then I said: ‘Quote me something! Quote me from Iphigenia, quote me from Orestes’ And he said: ‘You don’t have to be able to quote to show your knowledge, for Jesus sake.’ Which the Lord knows is true enough, but I said: ‘Ha! See! A man who can’t quote one line from Euripides hasn’t got no education whatsoever. And you a play writer? What is your line, my friend? Communications? Some sort of drummer? I thought so. Well, let me tell you something, friend. You’d better prepare for doom. Because when the great trump blows and the roll is called up yonder and the nations are arranged for judgment you and all your breed are going to be shit out of luck. They don’t allow communicators into heaven, or traveling men either.’

  “Well, I was getting quite a kick out of needling this guy, and I sloped off on a general tirade against America, its degradation of its teachers and its men of mind and character, and its childish glorification of scoundrels and nitwits and movie trash, and its devotion to political cretins—military scum and Presbyterians and such like whose combined wisdom would shame some country sheriff’s harelip daughter—and its eternal belief that it’s God’s own will that illiterates and fools shall lay down the law to the wise. Ad infinitum. Right on down the line. And Mason was taking it all in, nodding and looking sad and hurt, and with his shoulder going up and down. Except that, talking about America as I had been doing, a swarm of memories had begun to rollick in the back of my mind, and then they calmed down and began to flow through me in one clear continuous stream, clear as water, so that even as I halted, then tried to speak again, there came upon me this spell which I had had in Europe so many times—where touched a bit by this wine, you know, I would glimpse such simple homely things as the fold of a curtain or the knob of a door or a frosted windowpane, and these I would somehow connect with the same things at home, and then I’d remember a house or an old tobacco barn
and the way it looked on a wintry evening in the full light of sunset, or the gulls white and motionless in a mad wild gale over Hatteras, or a girl’s voice would come back to me, clear as a bell on some street in New York many years ago, and her eyes and her hair, or the scent of perfume as she passed, or then the sound of a freight train lumbering up through the pinewoods near home, and its long whistle in my ears both a monotone and an ecstasy. So as I say, this reverie came upon me as I sat there, and as I thought of all these things and the memories flowed through me I began to feel like a total stranger, and the anguish and mystery of myself, you see—of who and what I was and had been and was to be—all of these were somehow tied up with these visions and sounds and smells of America, which were slowly breaking my heart as I sat there, and I knew I had to get up and get out of there and be alone. It was as simple as that. I remember I cleared my throat and looked at Mason, who was sort of suspended there in a yellowish winy fog, and then I got up. The only true experience, by God,’ I said, ‘is the one where a man learns to love himself. And his country!’ And as I said these words, and turned around, why so help me God that nightmare I’d had came crashing back like a wave, and then those Negroes and that ruined cabin so long ago and all of that, which seemed to be the symbol of the no-count bastard I’d been all my life, and I became absolutely twisted and wrenched with a feeling I’d never felt before—guilt and homesickness and remorse and pity all combined—and I felt the tears streaming idiotically down my cheeks.

  “ ‘How will I ever forgive myself, for all the things I’ve done?’ I said to him, hardly knowing what I was saying.

  “And then Mason said: ’What have you done, Waldo? What’s the matter? Why, man, you’ve got it made!’

  “But I said: ‘The name is Kinsolving’—spelling it out—‘journeyman cartoonist from Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina.’

  “And then I got out of there. I went hunting for Francesca, thinking that I might be able to find her and buy her an ice cream or something. But then I realized I didn’t have a nickel to my name. So I staggered down the mountainside and sat and looked at the sea.”

  “Tell me, how did you ever get so involved—so chummy with him?” I asked Cass later.

  “Well, I’ll tell you a short little incident that I remember very clearly. One morning, you see, not long after that day I got up and started to go down to the cafe for my daily workout with Luigi and the wine bottle. I had just stepped out into the street there when down the cobblestones cruised Mason in that monstrous pneumatic barge of his, loaded down to the gun’ls with the damndest pile of boxes you ever saw. I mean cartons of Maxwell House and Campbell’s soups and catchup and Kleenex, this and that, anything you can name. He’d just come back from the PX in Naples, you see. He was really setting up housekeeping in a big way. He had enough there to outfit Admiral Byrd.

  “He drew to a halt and pitched me a big grin and got out and started unloading all his loot. I remember in the back he had a huge big boxful of cans—Crisco, I believe it was, or maybe Fluff o —anyway, it was some kind of fancy American lard, and he had enough of it to fry potatoes in till kingdom come—but the box was heavy and he was having a little bit of a time with it, so I shuffled over to help him out. Funny, this must have been about a week after he arrived. I hadn’t seen much of him up to then, but we’d waved to each other and smiled as we passed in the courtyard—both of us pretty sheepish, I guess, over the jackasses we’d made of ourselves that first day. As a matter of fact, once we’d even stopped there and mumbled a few apologies at each other—he for mistaking me for old ding-dong what’s-his-name from Rimini, and me of course for getting so drunk and outrageous and insulting. Mason must have been in a sort of pickle at the time, you know. I mean he was pretty well stuck there in Sambuco, for one thing. He was committed. Then at the same time, this blow job he’d given me about his work—I wasn’t the Polish boy, to be sure, but after all he had told me that my work was right up there with Matisse and Cezanne, and he couldn’t very well go back on his judgment without looking like a perfect cluck. Well, I didn’t think of all this at the time. Inside he must have been boiling—at himself and at me—but there was no way out, really. If he’d showed his resentment and, say, cut me dead, why he’d look all the more foolish and asinine, that’s all. But maybe, you know, he wasn’t boiling at all. Because maybe I had something else to offer him.

  “Anyway, as I say, at that point we were on decent enough terms, even though possibly somewhat distant, and I figured what the hell, I’d help him out with his Crisco. So we huffed and puffed the box into the courtyard, making sort of stiff little formal wisecracks and so on, and while we were doing this I said to myself, for God sake, I’d been pretty stinking and rude to this guy, he really seemed like a decent enough type; if he was going to be around Sambuco—sharing the same house, too—we might as well be friendly, so I just went on and helped him with the rest of his groceries. All that lard! It did seem maybe a little too much at the time, I guess, but who was I to begrudge him all his dough, and besides, he had boxes and boxes of books, too, which sort of excited me, and I remember thinking that maybe he’d loan me one or two. He said he’d picked them up at the dock in Naples, shipped over from New York. And there were a lot of other things that came along behind just then, in a truck he’d hired: that damn buffalo head, and these paintings—a Hans Hofmann, and a couple of de Koonings, and a huge black-assed Kline—and a Toast-master. And a bunch of fancy elephant guns all crated up and packed in cosmoline… .”

  Cass paused for a moment, scraping at the gray stubble on his chin. “I honestly don’t know what must have been bumping around in my subconscious. I knew I was stone-broke, and I knew that Poppy’s last ten thousand lire had dwindled down to almost nothing. I was really quite desperate, if you want to know the truth—way behind on the rent, and a wine-and-Strega bill down at the cafe half a mile long. I didn’t know what I was going to do. And here was this solid-gold young Santa Claus, this patron of the arts, moving in right on top of me. I don’t think it would be honest if I told you that I didn’t say to myself something like: Man, this is some gravy train. He sure doesn’t want all those goodies just for hisself. No. No, maybe nothing quite so crass and outright as that—after all, I still did have one or two scruples left. But when things like food, and milk for the kiddies—the lack of them, that is —is not just a vague possibility but an actual threat, and then along comes this guy who not only looks like he’s going to open up an A. and P. right on your doorstep but has brought along two or three cases of booze to boot, and he looks so generous and all, why your scruples really aren’t the same thing any longer. What was once hard pure diamonds turns into something soft on you. Anyway, this initial polite gesture of mine—helping him with that box of Crisco, that is—had suffered a rather tremendous change, and it wasn’t long before I was sweating there like a coolie. There wasn’t any need for this either, see; he’d gotten a couple of Wind-gasser’s boys to help him by then, but there I was anyway, hauling boxes around and toting these cases of Jack Daniel’s and Mumm’s champagne up the stairs, and by the time a half-hour had went by and we’d gotten everything securely tucked away upstairs, why Mason and I were jabbering away at each other like a couple of old college chums who were about to bunk together in the Phi Delt house. ‘Well, by Jesus, Cass, this is all damn white of you,’ he’d say. Or then, ‘You’ll have dinner with us tonight, won’t you, you and Poppy?’ Or then, Those paintings. ’That de Kooning. I’d like you to take a look at it and tell me where to hang it. You know a lot more about such matters than I do.’ “ Cass paused again. “And what—” he said, then halted. “And what,” he resumed, “what was he after then? What was he trying to do, to get? Here I was, shaggy, down-at-the-heel, not his type at all. I had insulted him, furthermore; and it was because of me that he must have suffered a really miserable humiliation. I was not any chic figure in the firmament he wanted to dwell in; I was a bum and a drunken rascal and he must have known it. Yet here
was Mason—generous, putting out for me, all sweet friendliness and hospitality. What was he after, do you suppose? Was it because he had no friends in this crazy hot exotic scary land, and needed a protection against his loneliness, and preferring to that a broken-down artist to no artist at all? Maybe.

  “Well, soon after that I made my mistake. Soon after that I did the thing that, once I did it, I was in up to my neck with Mason and there was no turning back. We were standing around there among the crates and boxes, chatting and talking and so on, and I heard Poppy call for me downstairs, and I figured it was time to go, because she’d be ready with lunch. So I said I’d be delighted to help him hang the painting, and then—well, even here there was probably more than a little guile behind my thoughts, thinking of that wad of lire Mason must pack around with him—then I asked if he and Rosemarie would like to join me in a game of poker. ‘Poppy will play,’ I said, ‘and this woman I know that runs the cafe, I’ve taught her how to play a decent hand. Plain old stud or draw, none of these ladies’ games—baseball or spit-in-the-ocean or anything like that.’ But Mason said that all he knew about was gin and bridge, and so I figured that the cards was one way I’d never get a penny off him. Well, I was about to leave then, when it happened. He leaned down into one of those liquor cases and he pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Then he said, ‘Here,’ holding the bottle out to me. ‘Here, why don’t you take this along?’ And he just stood there, holding it out, with this little sort of sideways grin on his face, and these elegant knuckles of his all white and bony with noblesse oblige. Very cool of him. Not a case of Rice Krisp-ies, but just what he knew I’d not be able to resist. And then he said: ‘Oh come on, Cass, take it along.’