by Paul Ableman
PRATT LEARNS THAT THE WORLD IS INDEED, AS THE BARD PUT IT, AN INSUBSTANTIAL PAGEANT
I guess I was going through the male menopause when I got back from Tokyo, Horace. I had no ambition, hardly even for sex. I think, looking back on it, I perceived the horror that was looming ahead but only as you might, out hunting, get just a hint of foul weather below the horizon. It seemed to me I needed to understand. How had they evaporated Nagasaki? What were we? Monkeys that could wield the sun. As a kid I knew the horse as the chief motor of my species. Now we were getting ready for voyages to the moon.
I settled in New York because Alex was there and I wanted to be near her. I got a modest apartment on East Thirty-eighth Street, just off Park Avenue. My bank account was okay for a few years and, as I said, I just had no more ambition for money-making.
But then fear began to creep over me. At first it was very faint and, as I have learned from my later reading in psychology, psychopathology and psychoanalysis, would probably be clinically assessed as “anxiety”. But I prefer to call it fear because that’s what it was. A diffuse kind of fear as if something was about to pounce. I’d suddenly glance to my left with a shiver. If I was at a party I might get struck silent by apprehension. Someone would ask, grinning:
“Hey Tornado, seen a ghost?”
And I’d grin back but feel my scalp ripple.
And I know one thing: it wasn’t physical fear. I know that because of a curious thing that happened one night. Well, the thing in itself isn’t all that unusual in New York: I was set upon by two young punks, one white and one black. What was curious was my reaction, both to the anticipation of the event and to its aftermath. I was able to anticipate the event, if only by a few seconds, because, walking home from Alex’s one night, looking for a cab, I was passing up one of the long blocks on the West Side when I sensed what was going to happen. It was about three in the morning. There was no one else on the block and I was walking beside a corrugated iron fence, screening off a building site. About fifty yards ahead of me was a small shed jutting out on to the sidewalk and next to it was a narrow alley leading back on to the site. As I approached, I caught a quiver of movement in the alley, just a shadow stirring in shadow, but, on the instant, a pulse of joy shot through me. I knew I was going to be jumped and it made me exult. I began to breathe hard and sharp and I strove to keep my pace even and not reveal that I’d been alerted. I didn’t think anything except: right. With vision and hearing keyed up to exquisite pitch, I paced steadily on until, just after I’d passed the dark alley mouth, I caught a breathed: “get him.” Then I spun round and side-stepped. I wasn’t as good as I had been on Guam but I was good enough for them. The first got a chop on the neck that laid him groaning on the sidewalk while I sparred with the other. They didn’t have knives or guns, surprisingly, and, in a couple of minutes, I’d got the black kid, a lout of about eighteen, in a headlock and was dragging him up towards Seventh Avenue. The white thug had recovered enough to stumble off in the other direction and I let him go. But no sooner had I won than I had qualms. I stopped, hanging on to the kid. He was yelling: “Cut it out, man, cut it out!” And that was his undoing because, if he’d kept his trap shut, I’d probably have let him go. As it was, his yelling brought one or two doughty spirits out on to the street and, in a little while, we had quite a crowd and soon after that a patrol car.
It was then I began to feel the fear and it increased over the next few weeks as I had to make depositions and appear in court. What scared me was that, as near as I can express it, I’d blown my cover. Oh hell, I wasn’t scared of that kid or his big brother or any mobster buddies he might have. I was scared of the universe. I’d brought myself to its attention again. Does that sound crazy, Horace? Well, that’s the kind of fear I was suffering from, the fear that God might peep over the Chrysler building one afternoon and point a finger at me. Since I’d hit New York, I’d been laying pretty low. I read most of the day, took my meals in a restaurant, visited a hooker in the village once or twice a week and spent as many evenings as I could with Alex. I avoided making new acquaintances or cultivating old ones. I was downright rude to a general who turned up at my apartment one day to invite me to join a clandestine, ultra-right circle called: The New Minutemen. Shit, I wouldn’t have joined anything reactionary like that in any case but I’d have declined politely, especially since Sandy Hammond, the general in question, had once been a friend.
Meanwhile, I was reading science and philosophy. And one day I suddenly realized what was wrong with it and that led me to understand what was right with it too. I was reading Hume and it struck me that when Hume analysed the structure of reality, he couldn’t be right because all he produced was a series of words. How could a series of words, any imaginable series of words, be congruent with the universe? How could even the most resonant verbal evocations of reality be on the same plane as the reality itself which included the processes which generated the mind writing the philosophy? All human philosophy would necessarily be a function of human social history and not of the structure of the cosmos. If one could imagine a panoramic vision of totality, something that could legitimately be called “the truth”, quite probably human beings and their philosophy, perhaps their whole galaxy, would hardly be visible. Imagine an intelligent red blood corpuscle trying to write the fundamental truth about the world. All it could ever know would be the stream of plasma in which it lived, and all we can know is the stream of cosmic plasma in which we live.
*
PRATT’S PURE PASSION FOR ALEXANDRA WILKS
There was a girl called Opal Zinovich, I think—or Zinovinsky, anyhow kind of Russian—whom I met in Chicago at an auction before I took off for Europe for the first time, so I’d have been about twenty-four, twenty-five. She was a caucasian blonde and a feast for the eye. After the auction, where we bid against each other and so got acquainted, she took me to her automobile and drove me to her place. As the door of her swell apartment clicked shut behind us, she swung me into a kiss and her hand fluttered about my loins.
She was probably the most voluptuous girl I ever met and the next dawn found us still ingeniously coaxing sensation from each other’s flagging bodies. It was such an exciting night that, during the afternoon, its memory lured me from my office to the john to try to recapture its flavour with the help of friction. Opal went travelling and I didn’t see her again for about a month but naturally when she got back I phoned for a date. I took her to dinner at some expensive joint and during the meal she revealed such a peevish, snobbish and humourless nature that all my lust vanished and I tried to drop her without screwing her. But she pulled me back into her pad again and when our haunches met it was another blockbuster.
All of which—what? I was going to say: what was I going to say, Horace? Oh yeah, I was going to say that with Alexandra Wilks—sure, sure, I begin to figure the connection between Alexandra and that much-forgotten blonde. It’s less a connection than a contrast. The point is, I got to know that blonde better in one night than I—in two nights I should have said—than I ever knew another human being—physically. But it turned out that I didn’t know her at all. So I have to conclude that physically—oh yeah, one night was right because after the first night I found out what she was really like and so it doesn’t apply—that physical, carnal knowledge is a very superficial thing. There’s some truth in the vulgar gag: all dames are alike in the dark. And the lust of the body is the dark, the dark of mindless protoplasm. The most shameless and prolonged intimacy of which the body is capable is compatible not only with indifference to the personality but actual dislike. But Alexandra Wilks—what? Why do I keep breaking down, Horace? Why can’t I organize the life of Tornado Pratt into a great banner of truth? Why can’t I gallop to the horizon of my mind? Why—
*
PRATT’S PERSISTING DEVOTION TO ALEXANDRA WILKS
Devotion? I guess that’s the right word but—that wasn’t—she—was a journalist when—with maps—when—
I do
n’t think I can do it, Horace. I know it’s important. I don’t want to leave anything out but I can’t tune in at present. Maybe I’m scared. Scared of the phosphorous layers glimmering below and that if I sink down into them I’ll get burned. Boosted by the drugs—they keep feeding me drugs, don’t they?—my brain could heat up to incandescence. Of course, there was no physical heat the first time. Oh, sure, I felt devotion to Alexandra Wilks. I’d probably have perished without her.
It set in in the late forties. At first it took the form of dissatisfaction with philosophy. One night I was thinking about philosophy as I walked through Gramercy Park and I stopped dead with a shudder, at the thought:
“If philosophy dries up on me, what’s left?”
I had been counting on philosophy to combat the nervousness inspired in me by Manhattan. That city seemed increasingly putrid. You might think I could have made a trip to England or some place else but those places seemed dried up in a different way. The only place I wanted to be in was the hopeful land of philosophy and at that moment in Gramercy Park I perceived that it didn’t exist.
I turned to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and found the wit refreshing but also disturbing. I read paragraphs with mental shivers which sometimes took the form of actually making me physically cold. Several times, at the end of a chapter, I found I’d turned the heating up so high that I was pouring with sweat.
Then one night I had a bad attack. I read the chapter in Bertrand Russell about Kant and it made me grin several times. Then one time, just after I’d grinned, I threw the book away as if it was a primed grenade and sat shuddering with fear and gazing at it with revulsion. It seemed like a coiled snake. I had to kick the fat volume out of sight under the lounger and then, so potent was the dread, fish it out again and rush it to the garbage chute.
Then I sat in my room, trembling and sweating although the room was cold. I felt like a cumbersome monster. I switched on the radio and listened to Bob Hope. But he sounded evil so I switched off the radio and conquered an impulse to send the radio after the book. I achieved a state of calm which was really congealed terror and held me catatonic for three or four cigarettes. Then I realized that I had a need to be with people. At once the correct spot lit up in my mind. It was called Debby’s and was a chow-house with a bar in the Village. I phoned for a cab and took off for Debby’s.
When I got there I ordered a meal. They had a black jazz quintet and a buck-toothed white girl vocalist. For a long time the only thing I noticed that was wrong was that I only laughed at the buck-toothed girl vocalist, who was singing funny-sexy songs, when everyone else laughed. I couldn’t see the humour on my own. I also had a feeling that the roof rose above me in a chimney stretching thousands of miles into space. I tried to control the impulse to glance up because I was aware that my feeling was just a psychological quirk. I knew the roof was really normal. The part I could see was made of moulded white stucco but I suspected the chimney might begin where I couldn’t have seen it without glancing back conspicuously.
A girl I knew sat down at my table. She told me that Abner had punched her brother. She developed this story, laughing raucously, for a long time and I began to gasp and swallow. I perceived that I’d made a mistake in seeking my own kind. At first I hoped that she alone was turning into something revolting but when the waiter brought some cognac I saw that he too had undergone an unpleasant metamorphosis.
Now this is very hard to describe, Horace. I have to be careful because I cannot compare what I felt then with what I am feeling now, especially since there is no one in this white watch to examine. Those people at Debby’s did not assume unnatural or sinister shapes. No, I did not see snakes growing from their heads nor their eyes become red and huge. They remained people but I realized that people had always been horrible, lumbering, arbitrary shapes infesting eternity. I was so dismayed by their appearance that I tossed a bill—ten bucks maybe or even twenty—on the table and made tracks. At the door, I felt a pang of regret at my rudeness and I turned but the girl just waved drunkenly. Then I grabbed a cab and rode home with my eyes shut.
PRATT’S TIME OF HORROR
What I lost, Horace, was the sense of life and the value of life. One of the first things I did next morning was look at some flowers that Alexandra Wilks had given me. I always liked flowers and ensured that any room of mine was enriched by them. Now I inspected this bunch of mixed chrysanthemums. They didn’t seem attractive or cheerful any more. They didn’t seem any more alive than a dry turd. But worse: they seemed cold and alien. Maybe arbitrary is the key word I’m looking for. I stood at the window, breathing like a man about to go into action and the people shuffling up and down seemed like automata, who could do nothing meaningful, who would only melt like ice in the end.
I said to myself: I’m having some kind of crack-up. I don’t want to end up screeching and shitting in a padded cell.
So I went and looked up shrinks in the phone book. I dialled one of them but hung up before he answered. I had a sense that if I came through on my own I’d be myself again afterwards but if I was piloted through by a shrink I’d leave a big part of myself in the frozen tunnel. A cheerful midget might dance out at the other end and that wouldn’t be Tornado Pratt. So I decided to buck it alone.
At first I tried to read my way through. I avoided philosophy but accepted anything else that came to hand. I had about a thousand books in the apartment and piles of mags. I started on Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and I stuck to it with grim determination. The story and characters didn’t mean a thing to me. I didn’t believe in the woman, the lover, the husband or the child. I didn’t believe that such people existed or could exist. Tolstoy assured me they were concerned about love, death and reputation but I could no longer attach any force to such concepts. If he’d written: then Anna Karenina turned into a squirrel and lived in a tree eating nuts and her son exploded and her husband liquefied into whisky and was drunk by her lover—it would have seemed as real, or unreal, as the alleged adventures. What I got from the book was the simple, soothing mechanical discipline of reading, holding the volume and traversing the page regularly with my eyes. This was necessary because if, vigilance relaxing, I glanced up from time to time, I became aware of a noisy silence in the room. There seemed to be a mocking roar from one corner. I looked in that direction and then I’d hear the sound from some place else. In the roar were embedded particles of scream and flakes of laughter. I’d sweep the room carefully with my eyes. All the furniture was superficially inert but just might be preparing for an attack. So then I’d carefully return my eyes to my book and begin tracking through the senseless labyrinth of Anna Karenina again. I stuck it for about a week, Horace. The worst times were when I had to go out for food. That forced me close to other people and I felt nostalgia for the love I had once borne them. Having to talk to them, order meat or coffee, was like rehearsing a grim farce. We were wax robots, clicking with incomprehensible code:
“Gimme a cutlet—gimme a container of milk—”
Then I’d pace evenly home along the sidewalk but I felt I was scuttling like an ant. Indoors, one day, I heard a noise and I glanced out at the window-ledge. My apartment was on the first floor so there was nothing especially surprising in seeing what I saw: two little black kids crawling on hands and knees along the ledge. But the spectacle engaged some clutch of nightmare and set me screaming helplessly. The kids heard that and peered, noses flattened against the pane, into the room and I flapped them weakly away while accumulating the strength I finally used to sprint towards them and pull the curtains. Then I beat a retreat into my bedroom, which had no window, locked the door and drank a fifth of bourbon. I’d avoided booze up to then because I remembered the stone men and dust men of my delirium on the hobo trail and was scared that, in my present state, it would blow my mind apart.
After I’d drunk the scotch—or maybe it was bourbon—I made my way to Third Avenue and deliberately bumped against a big Irish hood. When he asked me to ap
ologize I spat at him. Then—I let him beat me up. That hadn’t been my intention. I’d intended to fight him and, by so doing, fight the horror away, punch some humanity back into my life. But when he grinned, he seemed so grotesque and the idea of standing in the arena of the universe, clumsily swinging balled fists at another wad of mobile flesh seemed so—so vulgar!—that I just stood and let him work me over. Finally I sank to the ground. I could have taken a lot more and was not unconscious but I could tell it was not having a therapeutic effect and I wanted to get away from him. The next morning, I went to see Alex.
When she saw me she issued a palatal click of dismay. Then she stepped nimbly out into the passage where I was and pulled her front door partly closed behind her. She explained:
“I’ve got someone here—my God, what have you been doing?”
She was referring to the livid deformation of my features. I asked:
“Who’s here?”
“Dixie—you know, my agent. Paul Dixie—”
I gazed at her blankly or perhaps with a slight frown that accentuated still further the ruin of my face. In fact, I felt great distress. I had reached the end of my solitary powers of resistance and needed Alex. I didn’t know if she could help but I knew that without help I was finished. But Dixie? He was small and exquisite, a silver mine of gossip. I’d never objected to him before and I’d laughed at his lewd shafts but now he seemed horrifying to my imagination. I pictured him coiled and buzzing in a chair like a rattlesnake. I saw him flashing violet bolts like an electric eel. I was afraid that, at the first mannered murmur from his lips, I’d either cower sweating or slap him to death like a mosquito.
