people, grasp their situations, develop an interactive dynamic between them, get them into motion toward some culminative finale or at least some turning-point. The incapacity to move forward can generate a lot of sideways crawling.
I’m saying, in short, that a great deal of eloquent prose, at times extremely effective, is triggered by a massive writing block. So much for the simple souls who are undialectical enough to think that the writer who’s dammed up doesn’t produce words. Look at Hemingway. He made a whole new kind of literature, think of it what you will, out of the minimality that comes from chronic clogging. He made stoppage into a style. That’s not to say that Thomas Wolfe was not a torrential bore.
So there were my endlessly rewritten pages about the forever disintegrating ceiling as observed inch by inch by the permanently immovable young man, all of them buried under piles of newspaper clippings and press releases about the Moscow Dials. And Eleanor Clark came visiting.
Eleanor (now, and for many years past, Robert Penn Warren’s wife) was very young but already beginning to be known as a writer of talent. She was aside from that an editor at Macmillan’s—all in all a figure from the literary world. She and the Czech were rummaging in the papers on the work table one afternoon when I was off in town trying to find out how many limonadas con tequila I could wash down with limonada con tequila. They found those pages about the ceiling and were struck by their lack of connection with the Moscow Trials or anything else this household was concerned with.
Thinking it over today, I suspect they liked the writing, though it gave no indication of going anywhere. Chiefly what impressed them was the painstaking evocation of a moribund ceiling. It was a whole new note in literature. Recent fiction had tended to slight ceilings, being fixated on sidewalks and gutters. When I met them later for a drink they asked a natural question—had I written those pages?
With the rapidity of a tic, a reflex, hand flying from hot stove, I said—no, what pages were they talking about? They described the pages. I said I’d never heard of them and had no idea where they might have come from.
When a grown man is accused of unzipping his fly in a kindergarten playground, if even the thought of so doing has crossed his mind once or twice, he will loudly and hastily deny it. It was in similar spirit that I washed my hands of any responsibility for those pages. The thing about furtive writers is that it is hard for them to make a clean breast of it in public, they being addicts of the dirty breast.
It was slashingly clear from the circumstances in our household that nobody else with access to our premises could have written those pages and deposited them on the dining-room table. A fair number of people in our circles, no doubt, had spent time in close proximity to ceilings of this order of decrepitude, but I was the only one who might be trying to recapture them on paper.
Eleanor was a sensitive and sensible girl. She understood without more being said that it was of burning importance to me to disown my words, though she couldn’t have guessed at all the complicated emotions that led me to it. She changed the subject.
The minute I got back to the house that night I burned the pages. It’s really too bad. That was a most superior rendition of a decomposing ceiling; I’ve never seen it equaled. I’m sure I could make good use of it in this or that book, now that I’m putting my name on my words. No matter what kind of story you’re writing there’s bound to be a ceiling in it somewhere, or room to work one in.
You’re probably confused about the time element here. That would be because I am. This has been coming out in a jumble for the simple reason that that’s how it came in, that’s how the years happened and looked. I’m trying to give the facts as they showed up, in all their sprawl, not a writer’s tidy-up, which always calls attention to the tidier and slights or distorts the facts.
There was no continuity in our lives in those days, just a stewing around with now this bobbing to the surface, now that—that’s my point. If you want the truth I don’t remember the porno months in the context of the calendar at all. They don’t fit into the slot after Munich and Maginot, no, they stick in my head as the time I wasn’t rolling my own. In those years we used to come together in somebody’s room with several of those devices for rolling cigarettes out of cheap bulk tobacco, and play poker and roll, talk politics and roll, drink and roll, sometimes just smoke and roll. When I got into porno I gave up these homemades because I had enough money for store-boughts. During my porno months I was nice to myself, I treated myself to Murads and Melachrinos, so to me porno will always have the faintly musky odor of exotic Turkish tobaccos, will, as a matter of fact, suggest shapes oval rather than round.
Art makes order out of chaos, do they still teach that hogwash in the schools? It’s liars who give order to chaos, then go around calling themselves artists and in this way give art a bad name. Here high up on their cerebral peaks are all the artists sifting and sorting out the facts and pasting them together any old way to show how neat it all is and how they’re at the controls of the whole works, and there under their feet the facts go on tumulting and pitching them on their asses over and over, and what’s the whole demonstration worth? Don’t tell me the real artists are tidiers. Céline is in the grand spatter business. Henry Miller spatters too, though a good part of the time by plan, by program, and that’s his tension. Hemingway held it all in his tight hand and pretended it was one packed ball of wax till the end, then his true spewing self came out and he spattered all right, spattered all his order-making brains over the living room, and the lie of having it all together was done for he arrived at the moment of going at his authenticity, his one moment of truth. When do you see Dostoevsky laying out his reality with a T-square?
No, the ones who want to make a big display of how they master facts through words, all they master most of the time is words. The words tend to get in the way of the facts. The words get to be lies because they don’t reflect and illuminate the runaway facts, they conceal them. The worst thing about an art that’s forever making packaged sense out of the world is that it leaves no room for the randomizing senselessness that pervades most of the daily scene. In Hemingway’s neat print world held together and presided over by the code of grace under pressure there’s just no room for graceless berserkers who with enough pressure blow their heads off—such unstyled people are even made fun of, and often are Jews.
What a new and exhilarating art we’d come to, finally, if artists set out to feature the amuckness of the world instead of their own imposed and irrelevant designs—an art that faced the simple roughhouse facts and told the plain ramble-scramble truth—revolutionary! This is by way of saying that I mean to tell this story, no world-shaker, I admit, I insist, in the hit or miss way it happened. If at times I seem to go every-whichway, well, that’s pretty much how things were going back there at the tail-end of the rampageous Thirties, without let-up, around the clock, and it seems to me all that needs recounting, not rendering.
I hope I’ve shown you in these introductory words where I was before porno—nowhere. On the outer limits of all matters. Limbo. Beyond any pale you care to name. You will appreciate that porno came into my life not as a pardon or commutation of sentence, nothing that histrionic, but at least as an opportunity to discharge some words from that mass of language pent up and squirming in me, a needed bleeding in the last skinny nick of time.
It had to appear to me as a bountiful gift from the gods I did not believe in. I clutched at it as the drowning man at a cabin cruiser, one well stocked with supplies and, more important still, equipped with a powerful shortwave radio.
Somebody out there in the wide, wide world actually wanted me to write something. They wanted my words. They were more than ready to pay me for them.
I’d be eating, the precondition for writing. I would write, the only way I knew to eat. Words and money had finally been introduced to each other in my life and made partners in my head.
I suddenly
