and his girlfriend Olive Oil. They, too, had separated themselves from their clothes and were respectively, balls naked and pudendum naked. (Will Wimlib’s study of the sexism permeating our language be complete without a close look into the circumstance that we have all sorts of lively terms for male nudity but none, none at all, for female?) Popeye had insinuated himself into Olive Oil from the rear. His footloose organ was exiting from her mouth to the tune of maybe two feet worth. She looked slack-jawed and crosseyed, understandably; he was puffing absorbedly on his corncob. The exchange they were having went:
POPEYE: Don’t you worry about me running short, little cactus flower, in case you need a few more feet I got plenty to spare, I just ate two whole cans of spinach.
OLIVE OYL: You might run through another yard or so if it’s not too much trouble, my heart, that should be enough to mop the floor with where you spilled all that spinach juice, you’re sure a sloppy eater.
I thought that was damn good writing, if a little wordy, considering the limited possibilities. The text was not prurient and I found it to have redeeming social value. It didn’t capitalize in an obvious way on the setup. It didn’t try to put any icing on the already rich cake. It showed an original turn of mind, a free-wheeling imagination ready to work against the given materials, which takes courage. I couldn’t see how these lines could be improved on but the man for some reason was not satisfied.
“Well, sonny boy, let’s see what you can do,” he now said. “Take this page. As you see it’s a proof of the same drawing but with the balloons blank. O.K., you fill them in. Give us some lines that grow out of this interesting situation and sort of round out the visual picture, tell some kind of a little story. Here’s a pencil. Don’t rush, I got all afternoon, we’d rather have it right than Tuesday.”
My plot mind had retired to the old soldier’s home. My knack for snappy dialogue was out on some street-corner selling apples. After several false starts this was the best I could think of to write in those balloons:
POPEYE: Where do you stand on a third term for Franklin D. Roosevelt?
OLIVE OYL: Is that with one “o” or two, I never seem to remember.
The man studied my effort. He studied it for quite some time. He looked out the window and whistled soundlessly, which is said to be an ominous sign. His one black eye appeared to be getting blacker.
“All right,” he said. “I’m counting to five. I’d count to one but I’m not primarily a murderer. When I get to five should you not have your smart ass halfway down the stairs it’ll be leaving by this window—”
I was in rapid transit. I was never to know just who had given him that black eye but there were all sorts of possibilities, any one of the Tijuana publishers he stole from, any one of the American cartoonists they stole from, any of the bright young men he gave his balloon-inflating tests to, the NAM (for the way he maligned a pillar-of-the-community capitalist like Daddy Warbucks), the American CP (for his demeaning of an honest proletarian like Popeye), come to think of it, even Little Orphan Annie, for assorted indignities.
That man—when I picture him today I see him with argyle hair, too—did not know his own business. He was of the opinion that I lacked the golden touch for porno. Wait till you hear.
Why did I keep going after jobs in the word industry? Well, what are you going to do when non-word industry up and down the land keeps slamming its doors in your face?
One sector of it, the war plants (they were beginning to acquire a more amiable face by being called defense plants) was, if I can put it this way, going great guns. But every time I showed up they had to exert themselves to keep from leveling all those guns at me. My plight had something to do with my being a college graduate. That biographical detail was everywhere, and especially by people in hiring positions, taken to be an ID, not just a clue as to where I’d spent the four years after high school.
They were good Manicheans, those personnel people, last-ditch dualists; where they saw any trace of psyche they wouldn’t allow for the merest soupçon of soma. Assuming that college had pumped my head too full, they also took it for granted that my body had somehow gotten lost in the cerebral shuffle and dropped off, and bodies were the items in short supply in their booming defense plants, and over-bred heads they were making short shrift (an organic-food variety of shortbread) of. Language was where I had to get some occupational footing because language was where I was dumped by the industrial body-snatchers.
All the things I’ve just said are true but not the truth. There had been signs along the way that words and I were a good deal more than kissing cousins, were, indeed, as Damon to Pythias, Sears to Roebuck.
Item. From any number of people who were around at the time, presumably with hands pressed to ears, had come the report that I was speaking whole sentences, loudly and firmly, before my first birthday. I’ll save my main comment on this noisy prodigality until later. Here I’ll record the one thought that at that time, somewhere along in 1916, I probably didn’t have much to say, just the urge to say it well, fully, emphatically—some well-chosen words, no doubt, as to how badly things were already going, and how much worse they could be expected to get, and how this was in no way my doing, indeed went counter to all my plans and objectives, and how the swarms of people out there on all sides whose doing this transparently was were all bobbing and weaving in the most disgusting manner to dodge the responsibility, and how they’d probably be getting away with their who-me act if I hadn’t been endowed with the set of tonsils to denounce them and itemize their assorted shoddinesses for the world to shudder at. A few such marginalia from a beginner with lynxy eyes and none of that existential passivity toward the given, the latest form of do-nothing stoicism.
Item. An English teacher in New Haven’s Hillhouse High assigned us to write a page or two of description with a warning to avoid trite subjects like trees, snowflakes, flowers, bunny rabbits and sunsets. She seemed to take a particularly dim view of sunsets. I sat down and composed a piece of surging, singing prose about a nightfall to end all nightfalls, a lyrical accolade which was in one part a forerunner of today’s psychedelic light shows, in another an anticipation of Hiroshima.
I was determined, you see, to get it established that for such as me no subject was trite, my flashing prose would make the most overdone matters all shiny and new. Somewhere in France at just about that time, and unknown to me, James Joyce was recording his immortal line, “I can do anything I want with words.” In this early essay, I see now, I was making the same statement.
My aim, it has to be faced, was not altogether literary. This teacher, by name Nora, was very young, very blond, and luscious, which New England teachers of English at that time were conspicuously not. If I thought I could do anything with words one of the things I most meant to do was make her aware of my presence, pay attention. I thought it worked but I wasn’t sure. Nora did give my paper an “A.” She also wrote in the margin, “If we have more sunsets like this, sunrises are going to go out of business.”
Item. As a result of such virtuosity I became president of the Hillhouse Writers Club, then editor of the class book and the literary annual. I can’t remember much about the first honor except that I somehow made use of it to get excused from gym, maybe on the grounds that in born writers the head has so overshadowed and sapped the body as to render it unfit for physical exertions. (A lesson about the literary life I’ve never forgotten: it can, if you work it right, get you exempted from lifting things, including yourself.)
Unwilling to compromise on quality, I undertook to fill the pages of the literary magazine with the best prose around, my own. My first appearances in print were in this annual. One item was an essay entitled “On Being Lazy,” a treatise elaborating on all the delights of not working, designed, clearly, to annoy the
