Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  He sighed and admitted that one or two of them were sexually incorrigible. We departed together and I drove him to his field clinic. There were only three patients there but one was a boy with a massive ulcer on his thigh I’ve never forgotten. After he’d treated them, we drank canned beer and talked for about twenty-four hours non stop. I told him about my crack-up and Mike Dobie said:

  “You have only explored the perimeter of night which surrounds the world of light. But even there you have seen strange forms that you never encountered in the secular world. These are just different perspectives on the same reality. I’m a doctor not an intellectual and I can’t tell you everything you wish to know. But I am as certain of the invisible world as you are of the visible.”

  I asked him:

  “Could you help me to lick time and to live forever?”

  He replied:

  “Consider this: eternity is unlimited and so every part of it must be the same length.”

  I got so interested talking to Mike Dobie that I forgot all about women. In my hotel I wrote letters to Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and many other brilliant thinkers but then Mike Dobie told me about a professor he’d had called Father Debré who, Mike said, was a real intellectual and I took off for San Francisco to talk with him. For this reason, I can’t tell if Einstein and the others replied to my letters but I doubt it.

  In San Francisco, I made three or four visits to Father Larsen Debré but he had low vitality and finally, to tame my impatience, he said:

  “I will write you a letter of introduction to Dr Maurice Gardiner at Oxford. You have heard of him perhaps? He’s the eminent symbolic logician. You can visit him and learn about the modern school.”

  This was when I was in my early fifties, Horace, after I’d survived a debilitating psychotic breakdown. I wasn’t crazy any more but I couldn’t see much meaning in life. I met a young American priest called Mike Dobie and he embarked me on this search for ultimate wisdom.

  PRATT’S SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM

  When I got to Oxford I found I’d lost Debré’s letter. But I struck lucky. I bumped into a captain I’d known in the army who was now studying philosophy at Oxford and he introduced me to Gardiner in a pub.

  Gardiner was a slim, elegant man. I came at him with:

  “Do you believe in God?”

  And he pursed his lips, shrugged with faint distaste and averred:

  “I neither believe nor disbelieve. By that I mean that I recognize the term and I could, rather inadequately since I’m not a historian, trace its origins in human psychology and its influence in human experience, but that I nevertheless consider your question to be strictly speaking without meaning. You see, when evidence is irrelevant to the answer to a question then that question is merely empty noise.”

  “Suppose you hit evidence?”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “Well, just suppose a big hand reached in the door, pulled you out, lifted you about a mile in the air to confront a mouth like the grand canyon which boomed: ‘I am God.’”

  “In that case, I should be forced to regard the existence of God as a valid hypothesis.”

  Everything Gardiner said was precise and objective. He gave the impression that the universe was composed of neat wooden blocks and that every evening he, Gardiner, packed them all away neatly in a little chest. About half way through the evening, however, he began to get drunk and then his austere personality split open like a chrysalis and out of it fluttered a gaudy queen. He lisped fag gags, squeezed men’s knees and finally gave an amazingly nimble representation, with obscene embellishments, of the dancer Nijinsky in action. Before he’d reached the end of his performance, and in deference to the restiveness of the guy behind the bar, several of his disciples escorted Gardiner out into the parking lot to his car. At the last moment, however, he broke away and staggered over to me. He seized and squeezed my hand and purred:

  “You must come—I know you will—Sunday—any time, dear boy, after lunch—just a few civilized friends—you won’t forget, will you?”

  All my life, Horace, as you well know, I have been diffident about accepting friendly advances from persons having a homosexual disposition. Even during the last ten—fifteen—years when my reluctance has not been motivated by fear of the unpleasant necessity of having to ward off advances—because no one makes advances at old geezers like me—I still tend to shun inverts. Why? Hard to know because I don’t have any of that fear which the books say some people have that they’ve got some homosexual side to their nature. I have none or very little, maybe as much as any normal guy has, and I have never consciously dug it except for one time with a Chicago rat. It is therefore necessary to seek elsewhere for my abhorrence of mincing pooves and I haven’t time for it now. But—hee—yerm—who? Wee—kar—ratch—kratch—Horace, Horace? You—yup!—there? Horace? Are you there, where there where there where there, Horace? There is—plim—there—in Oxford, when I was in Oxford. Just before I continue, son. Just ask the doctor—ask him, Doc, how long Doc does my friend here have to stay here in the hospital? Could you ask him that, Horace? How long boy? What does he say? Years—ten—ten years—thousand—ten thousand years? That’s a long stretch, Doc! Tell him, Horace. Tell him I’m going to complain to the bar association—no the American bar—ber—medical association. That’s too long for a cure Doc. Only good thing is—I can think of—it’ll give me time to finish this—hoo—life? So—where was I? Oxford? Sure, I was and I was telling you how I was invited to this party one Sunday by—gee! It was in the New York Times—a couple of years back—he died, Professor Gardiner. Chews us all up in the end, doesn’t it, Doc? Time is what I’m accusing. But in my case, I have lots of vigour yet and I intend to live at least another—ten—min—min—but when I was in Oxford around nineteen fifty-three, I wasn’t much concerned with living but with thinking. I wanted to plunge deep into the gumbo and fish up a wad of truth. So pretty soon I left Oxford for Zurich in order to consult Harry Prishnipushni—or some name like that—who was a guru setting up a big meditating operation in both Europe and the States. I found him with little difficulty and he turned out to be just a smart operator.

  No way a thinker. If I said to him:

  “Could you explain to me the nature of time and what is the point of forms continually changing?”

  He’d come back with something like:

  “Count the petals of the rose”, or “Drink the desert sand”, or some other maybe paradoxical injunction. I’m not saying it was phoney, but it was at best muffled truth. That’s wrong. It wasn’t truth at all but it did kind of compel you to seek harder in yourself for truth. That’s what all that Eastern Zen and mumbo-jumbo stuff is really for, Horace. It’s not for handing you a nugget of twenty-two carat, government-stamped truth but for generating a little truth inside you. Maybe that’s the best way to go about it but I wasn’t too confident, having had my wits curdled for about two years, that anything I pulled up out of my own tub would be worth much.

  The other thing I didn’t like about that guru was his materialism. He’d glide through Zurich in the back of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, waving a daisy. And although I lost confidence in that guru I have to admit, Horace, that some of the things he said have stuck in my mind. Maybe, in some way we can only know outside ourselves the things that are inside. He was a real hustler that guru and pulled in a quarter of a million bucks a year.

  So, before I went to Zurich, I made up my mind that I would accept Professor Gardiner’s invitation because I hadn’t received the impression, during that first evening in the pub, that he’d developed a wild yen for me personally—although you have to remember, Horace, that in my early fifties I was still a swell catch. Maybe I had a small pot-belly but you’d have had to search a while to cull five grey hairs from my head. My shoulders were like battlements and my face, rugged from its wartime adventures, was thrilling to most women and queers. What I expected at Professor Gardiner’s, conforming with certain previ
ous experiences with the British sophisticated classes, was a kind of genteel orgy with men smacking each other on the butt. I figured I’d have to be ready to dive out pretty quick to preserve my ring from violation. So in that case, Tornado, why did you go at all? The answer is because I was still hung up on this God no-God thing. Gardiner was one of the greatest brains in the world in the matter of positivism. I didn’t want to miss the chance to speak with him and also I knew I could still break the spine of any poove that goosed me. So I turned up.

  First surprise: he lived in a small palace. Later, I discovered that that professor was also a Jewish millionaire, whose father was a carpet king who had left him a big pile of bread. Gardiner, which is not a very Jewish name, had given up all connection with the carpet business but used the carpet dough to mount a fantastic lifestyle. My second surprise was that everything was orderly and decorous. Noways an orgy. Attractive intellectuals of both sexes drifted about, served with most any damned thing by white-jacketed waiters.

  I hung around on the edge of the professor’s circle and, after a while, found myself briefly alone with him. He smiled and said:

  “I’ve got some books for you.”

  And he led me out of the huge room where the party was being held and down some corridors. For a while I thought: he’s going to make his play now. But where we ended up was in a fine library and he gave me a stack of books on symbolic logic and logical positivism. He was beginning to explain them when a dignified servant appeared and spoke to him about catering and he had to split. I never spoke to that professor again and about six months later I sent the books back to him in the mail.

  They were terrible books, Horace. They were full of weird symbols and no one but a mathematician could have read them and I have doubts that even most mathematicians could have read them. Sometimes they contained a few lines of English but it was so tangled up with loops and zigzags and quaint symbols that you could hardly make sense of even those few lines. Just one thing I recall well and that was the last line in the most important of the books according to Gardiner. That line was: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Now you’ll dig immediately that this sentiment was on the same lines as the professor’s remarks when I asked him if he believed in God.

  I took the Tractatus and Quine and stuff on a punt and went punting up the river. Then, on the banks of the Thames river at Oxford, I lay on summer grass and brooded about that thought of Wittgenstein’s: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. And I licked it in the end. You look at it absolutely logically, the way that symbolic logician had kidded himself he was doing, and you have to be silent about everything. Because whereof can you really speak, Horace? Nowhereof. If you could speak about anything you would have to really know something. Just one thing maybe. But you would have to know that one thing in a different way from the way humans know all things. But I perceived, Horace, that there was no dividing line. Everything blends and melts and blurs into every other thing. There’s not some things you can know and other things you can’t. In that case, I hear you ask, how about science? First there’s no nuclear fission and then there’s nuclear fission and Nagasaki evaporates. Wasn’t it all those symbols of Wittgenstein’s rubbing together that got so hot they burned up the city? But consider this, Horace, the nuclear fission was there before. It wasn’t invented by us or if it was the potential for it was already there. And the key thing is that the human mind didn’t move towards it using some special kind of talk that was meaningful but through a thousand mazes, each one of them partly composed of mysterious perceptions that Wittgenstein would have disallowed. He and Gardiner would have said, at every stage of the way: “That’s just empty noise—there’s no evidence.” But if we’d really proceeded like that, Horace, we’d never have reached the Tractatus or nuclear fission or anything.

  So I pulled out of Oxford and buzzed about the world for six months. I spent some time with a guru in Switzerland and spoke to sage men in other parts of the world. But the fact is I never found the answer to the mystery of life.

  ALL SCHEDULED AIRLINE ROUTES LEAD TO ROME

  When I got to Rome, I found Thorquist had moved on to Poland or some place. I refer to Lysander Thorquist, the economist, who was on my wisdom list. Why an economist? Because everyone said Thorquist was more than an economist. He just used economics as a crow-bar to lever out the deep ores. He was supposed to be a polymath. Thorquist was supposed to know everything. But it so happened in the plane going to Rome they showed a film in which Thorquist played a comic diplomat. Later I heard that he’d done it as a favour for his boy-friend, Mathew Crane, the film director. Watching Thorquist in that vulgar film gave me a revulsion from asking him about the mystery of life and so I was relieved when I found he’d left Rome. In the film, in one scene, Thorquist negotiated with a black African chief dressed in a leopard skin and the comic aspect was the way he adapted his diplomacy to the primitive conditions and turned up himself in a leopard skin. This struck me as armpit humour and I lost interest in Thorquist. I think that film did Thorquist a lot of harm because he was never as prominent after it came out.

  In Rome I decided to take a look at the Catholic Church. I’d better come clean with you, Horace, and admit what I hardly admitted to myself at the time which was that I was thinking of embracing that religion. Two elements were prominent in my consciousness at that stage of my life. One of these was nostalgia for my childhood. I kept stumbling over fragments of my youth. I’d find, say, a beech tree I’d once climbed growing in someone’s living-room and my eyes filled with tears. A bright swirl of water where we kids had swum bare-ass suddenly replaced a length of sidewalk and made me gulp. And very often, I’d find myself sitting again on the bench in the wooden chapel of my home town. I had religious thoughts. I took to reading the Bible and I felt religion reaching out for me. But I felt I’d outgrown the Baptist faith of my boyhood. It wasn’t glamorous enough or cosmopolitan enough for me any more. It just seemed a dusty, provincial kind of religion, fit for hicks, and what I wanted, what I felt I deserved, was the glowing, golden crown of Rome. It sickens me to contemplate it now when I have transcended the spiritual weakness of those years.

  The other strand in my consciousness about then was alarm at the way the world was tending. The human race seemed to be raving. All it could think about was pounding the planet with bigger and bigger fists of energy. I couldn’t get my bearings. Communism wasn’t that bad. Nor could we capitalists be such pure evil that it was necessary to scour the planet clean to eliminate us. But lethal laboratories sprang up everywhere and produced subtle toxins of such virulence that a whiff would silence New York. The air was full of whizzing shapes and under the sea glided nests of annihilation. I couldn’t keep up with the rate of change, Horace, and so I looked for eternal reassurance in the eternal city.

  I applied for an audience with the Pope but what I got was a Jesuit who talked with me twice a week. Sometimes we walked in the gardens of the Villa Borghese and I have to admit that of all the smart men I met in those days he was the smartest. He spoke such good English, or American, that I assumed at first he was an American. Then I learned he was an Italian who’d lived seven years in the States. I began to understand how intricately organized that big organization is. My Jesuit was just one of a team who were responsible for coaching Americans. And they had a team for every other nationality as well.

  The funny thing is, Horace, I can’t remember much he said. In the Borghese Gardens we talked about every mortal thing. And I didn’t pull any punches. I came at him with things like:

  “Why the hell—forgive me, Father—should I join a church that’s been one of the most bloodthirsty organizations of all time?”

  Or:

  “How can a celibate teach me—or anyone else—about sex? And what the hell’s wrong with sex anyhow?

  But he never got riled and he never dodged the issue. He’d always explain patiently and learnedly that the church, being a human institution, suffered
from human defects. But that nevertheless it was in touch with the divine and therefore could be an aid—no more—to spiritual growth. But somehow everything he said melted back into the great historical fact of the church and in retrospect I don’t hear a voice, when I think about that Jesuit, but I see the gliding black form beside me.

  Then one day I was walking about Rome and there was a kind of shiver in the street. It was like I once experienced in Holland during the war when I was disguised as a Dutchman. On that occasion everyone subtly changed their pattern of motion and the next instant two German armoured cars came roaring up the street and began firing into a shop.

  In Rome, it wasn’t a martial but a spiritual tremor. The crowd gave a start, as if the frames had jerked in the projector, and the next moment I was carried by a tide of people down a narrow side street towards the boulevard while a rising murmur of awe engulfed me. Across the boulevard I saw a woman drop to her knees, crossing herself and sobbing. She was quite young and smart and the thing that particularly registered was that her tight grey skirt was forced half way up her thighs so that she looked obscene and reverent at the same time. A moment later three black cars sighed past and I just caught a glimpse of the Holy Father’s plump unsmiling face and a finger raised in benediction.

  That night, in the café, I asked some people how the crowd had sensed the Pope was about to drive past and a sneering Englishman maintained that Vatican runners always tipped off selected individuals so that there’d be a “spontaneous” demonstration. I don’t know if that’s true but the thing made a very unfavourable impression on me. I couldn’t see how Christ’s Vicar could drive about in big black limousines. That night I tore up my religious pamphlets and booked a flight back to New York.

  But when I reached the airport the next morning I felt an even bigger distaste for New York. What was waiting for me? I couldn’t think of a single person I really wanted to see. A sadness coursed through me. Harvey had been mangled by a truck. Wheatear had disappeared long ago. Jack Borowski was in Japan. My ma and pa were still alive and I had a yen to visit them. But then I thought: what’s happened to all the women? I must have had affairs with hundreds of women. Where have they all got to? And that made me think of Alex. I knew she was travelling for a syndicate of papers. So I phoned the New York office and discovered she was in Cairo. Later in the day, I took a plane to Cairo, my heart lifting at the thought of again seeing Alexandra Wilks. I decided I’d propose to her.