by Paul Ableman
By this time, Horace, that tender-hearted girl was sobbing and clutching my shoulders. I wasn’t exactly conning her but I could tell my rhetoric was matching her response, becoming pathetic or virile as required. A moment later, when I lifted her chin gently and saw the tears streaming down her cheeks and stooped to plant the first, fine kiss on her lips, I was part chuckling inside. Part sobbing too because I’d also been moved by the pathos of my words.
So that’s how—
Horace?
Hear me, boy, if we high-tail it back to Catch Creek we might find Helen waiting there. She could have come back from the East. She never wanted to leave me. She only took that job in the East because she was afraid of getting clapped. She hated me visiting Lily. Why the hell did I patronize that whore, boy? You recall that time I took you with me and you met Lily—she dressed in her working outfit of just a pink bow round her waist. When we’d left her apartment, I slapped you on the back and asked:
“Well, what do you think, boy? Fine gal?”
You shook your head with a polite, incredulous, British smile. I pressed you for a reply and you said—sure, you said I was like a hog. Okay, son, you didn’t say it in words but I took the oblique sense. You really said:
“No—it’s just—”
“Spit it out, boy.”
“I mean—Helen is—well—fresh and rather lovely—”
“Which is my opinion exactly. So?”
“Well, I don’t really understand—”
I knew what you didn’t understand—how I could be like a hog. You offer a hog some titbit, like a slice of apple pie or a chicken leg and what does that old hog do? It pokes its snout right back into a bin of slops. You figured if I had the favours of a dainty maid like Helen why’d I want to go poking around in an old slop bin like Lily. Correct?
Tough one to explain, boy. It is just part of my nature and I tend to think, from observing the conduct of my fellow men, that a lot of other guys have the same impulse. What happens is: you pull a dame like Helen with a sweet oval face and her slim curves provocatively draped in a pretty dress. You think when you first meet her the most wondrous thing in this world would be to peel away that pretty dress and explore the territory beneath. And—oh boy!—when you first get to do it, why it really is like being a tourist in heaven. But then, as time goes by, the excitement kind of drains away. You reach a stage, maybe after a week, a month, a year, when the same dame is peeling off the same pretty dress—or an even prettier one—and you never lift your eyes from the goddamm New York Times. But—and this is the cruel paradox!—some other dame floats by—maybe nothing like as good looking—with her haunch and breast and pungent triangle veiled in a pretty dress, and you bulge with longing to explore the new one. Now you might argue that Lily wasn’t new but she had cute games which refreshed things and—she made a change. Shit, boy, I never had it in mind to shack up with Lily but—did you know of Helen’s intentions, boy? She sneaked off so sly. You always denied you knew but I’ve sometimes wondered. But she’ll come back, Horace. She’ll come back because she happens to love me. How do I know? She gave Ray—that Jew-boy—the push, didn’t she? He came by once and said: let her go. I came back at him: go to hell, son. My need is greater than yours. That was true, Horace, because that young guy had everything he needed to score with a hundred dames whereas I was old and stringy and I figured Helen might be my last. Are you in touch with her, boy? You sometimes get letters—oh sure, with English stamps while she went to Siam or—what do they call it now?—Thailand—and she’s a nurse there, looking after the kids of junkies and whores. Suppose she’s returned, Horace? We’ve been away—how long have we been away? No matter. We’re going to high-tail it home, boy. So get us a couple of airline tickets, pay the hotel bill and we’ll head—
YOU’RE HEADING FOR THE LAST ROUND-UP, PRATT
I’ll try and round it up for you, Horace, because—laugh your head off maybe—but I sometimes figured the reason you were hanging around was: to write an autobiography—is that—a biography—of—okay me. Sounds wild—yeah—I mean, who knows me? Ask the President of the United States: who’s Tornado Pratt? He’d come right back: you got me, boy, who’s Tornado Pratt? But you ask the man in the street: who’s Tornado Pratt? It just might be different. I mean, you pick the right man in the street—some old geezer been around a long time—he might admit: I’ve heard that name. Pratt was—it’s coming back—sure, real big when I was a kid—he was always in the headlines around Chicago and the Middle West. I recall my pappy saying: I reckon Tornado Pratt’d know how to straighten out this country. Tornado Pratt’s a self-made man. So if you ask around some, Horace, you could hit some guy remembers me. Isss—pretty thin ground for a book, huh? Okay, forget it. But just tell me: why have you been hanging around? You’re not claiming to be crazy about old Tornado. You’re not claiming that, are you, Horace?
So I’ll go ahead and round it up for you, boy. I could say: I lived. But what does it feed you, Horace, of the kind you wish to weave into your book and thrill your readers with sharks, romance and love? No help and no joy. So let’s get down to a narrative. But straightaway, Horace, we hit the rapids. Suppose we mention: some thing, motion, being, attribute, perception, instant, experience, recollection, we perceive it won’t run on its own. It is meaningless without the next thing, moment, mention, experience, notion. Suppose you start with the day of my birth. You write: it was hot and dry and, in the evening, a tornado came whipping out of the south. But—and this is a tough one—what day was that, Horace? You come back: I give the date. But, baby, where does that date come from? It’s just sounds and numbers. To make it vibrate you have to give the background to dates and calendars and history and how men write history and where the notion of history comes from and how it first got going and you find you have to write about five hundred goddamm books just to give the date of my birth. So, scrub the date. Let’s ask: where was Tornado born? No hassle with that one—or is there? Where is where? Kansas. Where’s Kansas? America. Where’s America? On Earth. Where’s Earth? In the Solar System. Where’s the Solar System? In the fucking Universe. Where’s—you ready for that one, Horace? Just naming a town, if you do it truly so it’s not a candidate for whereof you cannot speak thereof you must be silent, shoots you into geography and geometry and astronomy and ripples out into every subject there is or ever was so that by the time you’ve located Tornado wriggling out of his ma you’ve had to produce a billion libraries. And that would be just the first line of my autobiography, I mean, my biography. The fact is, Horace, I have this notion that to really answer even the most trivial question—like who dropped the gum wrapper on the sidewalk or where did the mouse run—you’d have to tell everything and leave out nothing that is or was or even might be in space and time. And if you don’t say it all why you have to lie. To isolate is to lie and yet without isolating nothing can be said. That is the trap and the anguish of our state. So my final advice, Horace, is to reluctantly forget the truth and just write about me as you remember me but very kindly so that people will discern my good and bad sides and still have an inspiration to go out and make the most of their lives, maybe ending up a big man like me. But I was never just a big man, Horace, because I recollect sitting in my swell office above Chicago, aware that my power lines ran out through the States and Europe, and going light-headed and weird because I knew too I was just a kid dancing on the green hill who knew nothing except the love of love and you must include that, Horace, about my mighty power of love for women and friends and the sweet green ball of earth. So don’t be scared off by the challenge, Horace, but head back to Catch Creek which is yours now because I’ve left you everything. When you get there, place my mother in a good home because she has few wits left. Then sit down at my big desk and write
CHAPTER ONE
And then by way of every curve of words and love, with all my waving arms grabbing at glints and instances, paint the rainbow dust kicked up by my spinning heels and, singing the wonder
of my path, tell the tale of days and faces, joy and loss, until you reach my
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Paul Ableman, 1977
Preface © Margaret Drabble, 2006, 2014
The right of Paul Ableman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The preface by Margaret Drabble is reproduced with kind permission of the Independent, where it first appeared.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–31419–5
