to fire again. That night, and many cold nights after that, I spent hours on my hands and knees around the cactus and pieces of Aztec statuary in the patio, looking for the spring. It was nowhere to be found.
I really don’t want to talk about the state of our weaponry in Coyoacán. I’m simply drawing your attention to the fact that in that cold room on those cold nights I had to get my hands working at something. Since guns wouldn’t do it for me indefinitely, sooner or later I had to face the fact that there was another piece of apparatus present whose springs wouldn’t take flight so readily—a typewriter. And so began some writing on my nights of vigil because there was nothing else available to keep me from climbing the walls, which were black with tarantulas.
It was hard to get started. If in those days there was any relationship between me and words it was one in which we warily circled each other, unable to come together, unable to break it off and go our separate ways. As a result I was a little stiff with the writers who came visiting at our house. There were many—Jim Farrell, who was later my good and helpful friend, Michael Blankfort (later to be president of the Hollywood Writers’ Guild, currently my neighbor in the Beverly Hills rat trap where I have my office, and am writing these notes), Herb Solow and Johnny Macdonald (both of whom wound up as editors on Fortune), Suzanne LaFollette, Benjamin Stolberg, Charles Rumford Walker, on and on. I felt a bit guilty to be presented to them as someone with a political identity, guiltier yet because my deepest urges were toward writing and I couldn’t say a word about them. What was there to say? That I read like a demon? That I knew a shitpile of novels? What does such information communicate about a man except that he’s an insomniac, and pretty anti-social to boot?
There was my problem. The fancy name for it these days is identity crisis—in those simpler times all we had to say about this shaky condition was, Shit or get off the pot. I had to appear as, and go through the motions of, a politico, at which I really wasn’t very good, mainly I just repeated other people’s phrases. I had to keep under cover those appetites and curiosities about which I could really hold forth because that’s all I’d ever done about them, hold forth, not work with or build on. As a result I was invisible. When later my good friend Ralph Ellison brought out his novel Invisible Man I knew exactly what he was talking about, though my own long bout with invisibility had taken place in a nonracial context.
But, you know, writers were in a certain sense the niggers of the left movements. These days all groups that feel set upon like to apply to themselves the labels of the oppressed black—students talk about being treated like niggers, as being the Harlem of the young, and so on. Writers had plenty of reason to see themselves that way in revolutionary circles. They were looked down upon as cafeteria intellectuals, parlor activists, undisciplined and irresponsible bohemians. They were defined as incorrigibly petty-bourgeois, constantly slapped in the face with their non-prolism. In all respects that counted they were held to be inferior people who if they had any loyalty to the cause of social overhauling at all would allow their names and public weights to be used without ever presuming to question the hallowed fulltime politicos who used them. This anti-egghead arrogance was most vicious in Stalinist circles but it was by no means unknown among certain Trotskyites.
For example. Jim Cannon was the titular head of the tiny Trotskyite movement in those days. He had plenty of reason to feel grateful to Suzanne LaFollette. Suzanne was not in any sense a Trotskyite but she’d been sufficiently repulsed by the Moscow Trials to take an energetic lead in organizing what became known as the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials. That Commission had spent weeks interrogating Trotsky in Coyoacán. (One of the main reasons I’d been sent to Mexico was to help prepare documents for these hearings.) Then it had returned to New York to prepare its two-volume report, which exonerated Trotsky from all charges made against him and established the Trials as complete judicial frame-ups. This was an enormous service to Trotsky and his followers, one they could never have performed for themselves. I had come back to New York to help Suzanne get the documents and verbatim transcripts in order for the publishers, Harpers.
Although spending most of my time with Suzanne, once in a while I ran into Jim Cannon. He was always more curious than I thought he had any right to be about what was going on with Suzanne and her associates from minute to minute. The Commission’s Report was getting put together, it was going to clear Trotsky and indict the Stalinists, that was all Cannon had any call to be concerned about, but his questions didn’t end there. I sensed he was irked that a group of brainy people working on matters vital to him were beyond his control.
At one point he cornered me to insist that a certain formulation in the Report be worded in a certain way. There was no world-shaking principle involved, it really didn’t matter one way or the other, but I saw he was dead serious about this, meant it as a test of strength. When I next saw Suzanne LaFollette I passed on Cannon’s views without comment. Suzanne was smart enough to see that the issue was trivial in itself and that Cannon was simply trying to flex his bureaucratic muscles a bit with the heavy heads. She gave me a message for Cannon which I took some pleasure in delivering: under no circumstances would the passage in the Report be worded his way, further, he was to lay off, the Commission was in no sense an arm of the Trotsky party and did not intend to let itself be so used.
Cannon’s craggy face clouded over when I repeated Suzanne’s words. His cheeks got very red. His tight lips moved just enough to say, “Those pigfuckers.”
I thought of a man capable of calling literary people pigfuckers because they didn’t accept total dictation from him, of such a man rising to the top position in a new workers’ state. I thought of how intellectuals might fare under his short-tempered regime. (Workers too.) I was very sure I’d be in bad trouble if I were among those intellectuals. This was not speculation. We’d had 10 years of Stalinism in Russia. We’d seen a lot of valuable writers disappear into Siberia, from Victor Serge to Isaac Babel. (Serge was to appear again but not Babel.) And many others of no proven value, many not even visible, like me.
So—I was ashamed of the incipient writer in me on several interlocking grounds. On the one hand, because he wasn’t getting anything done, he was being carefully sat on. On the other, because such an inner man, if he could get out, would not be an object of admiration in my circle of activists. I couldn’t get him in the open, I was afraid of the hoots and catcalls he’d be greeted with if I did. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
But he wasn’t to be sat on entirely. It was too damned cold in that dining room in Coyoacán. I huddled there in the small hours with my detriggered Luger and began to write a short story. A young fellow is opening his eyes in a bare room. As they focus he begins to study the cracks and flakes on the ceiling. Lying on his cot, he traces all sorts of significant items on that dingy, crumbing rectangle.
As I remember I did a stunning job of bringing that decaying ceiling all the way to life. Cosmic overtones were discovered in the expanse of sooty plaster, proliferating symbols in each irregularity, each flyspeck. I wrote the opening pages of this story, then wrote them over, then recast them a third time, and that was just warm-up. The trouble was I couldn’t get past that ceiling.
I know exactly why I lingered so. Once I’d exhausted the potential of that ceiling, milked it of all its meaning, I would have to go on to other matters, look into my main people, get a situation set up and some sort of story going, initiate some action—and I didn’t have the least idea where to go once I left the ceiling and came down to earth.
The writing was more or less matchless. I think I’m safe in saying that the literature of the Western world contains few passages about ceilings so impactful. Writers know that some of their best writing gets done in this static mood, this kind of endless lingering over a trifle, inspired by a dread, really, of moving along, of plunging in. Far easier to stay put, meander, blow trivia up into larger—and more inert—than life elements.
This sort of writing is the literary equivalent of jogging in one place. Its source, I will
