The Uncollected Works of Thomas Pynchon

Introduction

This collection was assembled with the best of intentions. For years, the minions of Pynchon faithful have eagerly purchased his books and pondered about his existence during the years in between. We delighted when Slow Learner , his collection of early short works, appeared in 1984. Not just for the stories. I, and I suspect many like me, purchased the book more for the introduction than for the body text. It was the first evidence, at least since his introduction to Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, that there was a real man behind the writing.

More and more in recent years, he seems to have come out of his shell. It is now known that he has settled in New York City, is married and has a son. Either he got tired of hiding as a lifestyle of choice, or he realized there was no longer much of a limelight zigzagging across the country, seeking him out, to hide from.

It continues to surprise me how many educated people have never heard of Pynchon, or Gravity’s Rainbow . Even more disheartening is when the mention of his novel V . elicits the response, “You mean that awful TV miniseries.”

Nearer, My Couch, to Thee

IN HIS CLASSICAL DISCUSSION OF THE SUBJECT in the “Summa Theologica,” Aquinas termed Sloth, or acedia, one of the seven capital sins. He said he was using “capital” to mean “primary” or “at the head of” because such sins gave rise to others, but there was an additional and darker sense resonating luridly just beneath and not hurting the power of his argument, for the word also meant “deserving of capital punishment.” Hence the equivalent term “mortal,” as well as the punchier English “deadly.”

But come on, isn’t that kind of extreme, death for something as lightweight as Sloth? Sitting there on some medieval death row, going, “So, look, no offense, but what’d they pop you for anyway?”

“Ah, usual story, they came around at the wrong time of day, I end up taking out half of some sheriff’s unit with my two-cubit crossbow, firing three-quarter-inch bolts on auto feed. Anger, I guess.... How about you?”

“Um, well ... it wasn’t anger....”

“Ha! Another one of these Sloth cases, right?”

“. . fact, it wasn’t even me.”

“Never is, slugger — say, look, it’s almost time for lunch. You wouldn’t happen to be a writer, by any chance?”

Writers of course are considered the mavens of Sloth. They are approached all the time on the subject, not only for free advice, but also to speak at Sloth Symposia, head up Sloth Task Forces, testify as expert witnesses at Sloth Hearings. The stereotype arises in part from our conspicuous presence in jobs where pay is by the word, and deadlines are tight and final — we are presumed to know from piecework and the convertibility of time and money. In addition, there is all the glamorous folklore surrounding writer’s block, an affliction known sometimes to resolve itself dramatically and without warning, much like constipation, and (hence?) finding wide sympathy among readers.

Writer’s block, however, is a trip to the theme park of your choice alongside the mortal sin that produces it. Like each of the other six, Sloth was supposed to be the progenitor of a whole family of lesser, or venial, sins, among them Idleness, Drowsiness, Restlessness of the Body, Instability and Loquacity. “Acedia” in Latin means sorrow, deliberately self-directed, turned away from God, a loss of spiritual determination that then feeds back on in to the process, soon enough producing what are currently known as guilt and depression, eventually pushing us to where we will do anything, in the way of venial sin and bad judgment, to avoid the discomfort.

But Sloth’s offspring, though bad — to paraphrase the Shangri-Las — are not always evil, for example what Aquinas terms Uneasiness of the Mind, or “rushing after various things without rhyme or reason,” which, “ if it pertains to the imaginative power... is called curiosity.” It is of course precisely in such episodes of mental traveling that writers are known to do good work, sometimes even their best, solving formal problems, getting advice from Beyond, having hypnagogic adventures that with luck can be recovered later on. Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do. We sell our dreams. So real money actually proceeds from Sloth, although this transformation is said to be even more amazing elsewhere in the entertainment sector, where idle exercises in poolside loquacity have not infrequently generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

As a topic for fiction, Sloth over the next few centuries after Aquinas had a few big successes, notably “Hamlet,” but not until arriving on the shores of America did it take the next important step in its evolution. Between Franklin’s hectic aphorist, Poor Richard, and Melville’s doomed scrivener, Bartleby, lies about a century of early America, consolidating itself as a Christian capitalist state, even as acedia was in the last stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a secular condition.

Philadelphia, by Franklin’s time, answered less and less to the religious vision that William Penn had started off with. The city was becoming a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods and services coming out, traffic inside flowing briskly about a grid of regular city blocks. The urban mazework of London, leading into ambiguities and indeed evils, was here all rectified, orthogonal. (Dickens,; visiting in 1842, remarked, “After walking about in it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.”) Spiritual matters were not quite as immediate as material ones, like productivity! Sloth was no longer so much a Sin against God or spiritual good as against a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible — that is, against clock time, which got everybody early to bed and early to rise.

Poor Richard was not shy in expressing his distaste for Sloth. When he was not merely repeating well-known British proverbs on the subject, he was contributing Great Awakening- style outbursts of his own — “O Lazy-bones ! Dost think God would have given thee arms and legs if he had not designed thou shouldst use them?” Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity. “You may delay, but time will not.” And Sloth, being continual evasion, just kept piling up like a budget deficit, while the dimensions of the inevitable payback grew ever less merciful.

In the idea of time that had begun to rule city life in Poor Richard’s day, where every second was of equal length and irrevocable, not much in the course of its flow could have been called nonlinear, unless you counted the ungovernable warp of dreams, for which Poor Richard had scant use. In Frances M. Barbour’s 1974 concordance of the sayings, there is nothing to be found under “Dreams,” dreams being as unwelcome in Philly back then as their frequent companion, sleep, which was considered time away from accumulating wealth, time that had to be tithed back into the order of things to purchase 20 hours of productive waking. During the Poor Richard years, Franklin, according to the “Autobiography,” was allowing himself from l A.M. to 5 A.M. for sleep. The other major nonwork block of time was four hours, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M., devoted to the Evening Question, “What good have I done this day?” This must have been the schedule’s only occasion for drifting into reverie — there would seem to have been no other room for speculations, dreams, fantasies, fiction. Life in that orthogonal machine was supposed to be nonfiction.

BY the time of “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (1853), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robberbaron capitalism, the title character develops what proves to be terminal acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the desperado keeps making choices that only herd him closer to the one disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall Street repeating, “I would prefer not to.” While his options go rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this miserable scrivener — this writer! — who, though among the lowest of the low in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on interacting anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who collaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow? “Bartleby” is the first great epic of modern Sloth, prese ntly to be followed by work from the likes of Kafka, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre, Musil and othersÑtake your own favorite list of writers after Melville and you’re bound sooner or later to run into a character bearing a sorrow recognizable as peculiarly of our own time.

In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920’s and 30’s being perhaps Sloth’s finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike are full of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing good present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass them by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life. Though it has never lost its deepest notes of mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as outright despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price, a deliberate turning against faith in anything because of the inconvenience faith presents to the pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers and the rest. The compulsive pessimist’s last defense — stay still enough and the blade of the scythe, somehow, will pass by — Sloth is our background radiation, our easy-listening station — it is everywhere, and no longer noticed.

Any discussion of Sloth in the present day is of course incomplete without considering television, with its gifts of paralysis, along with its creature and symbiont, the notorious Couch Potato. Tales spun in idleness find us Tubeside, supine, chiropractic fodder, sucking it all in, re-enacting in reverse the transaction between dream and revenue that brought these colored shadows here to begin with so that we might feed, uncritically, committing the six other deadly sins in parallel, eating too much, envying the celebrated, coveting merchandise, lusting after images, angry at the news, perversely proud of whatever distance we may enjoy between our couches and what appears on the screen.

Sad but true. Yet, chiefly owing to the timely invention — not a minute too soon ! — of the remote control and the VCR, maybe there is hope after all. Television time is no longer the linear and uniform commodity it once was. Not when you have instant channel selection, fast-forward, rewind and so forth. Video time can be reshaped at will. What may have seemed under the old dispensation like time wasted and unrecoverable is now perhaps not quite as simply structured. If Sloth can be defined as the pretense, in the tradition of American settlement and spoliation, that time is one more nonfinite resource, there to be exploited forever, then we may for now at least have found the illusion, the effect, of controlling, reversing, slowing, speeding and repeating time — even imagining that we can escape it. Sins against video time will have to be radically redefined.

Is some kind of change already in the offing? A recent issue of The National Enquirer announced the winner of their contest for the King of Spuds, or top Couch Potato in the United States, culled from about a thousand entries. “ ‘All l do is watch television and work,’ admits the 35-year-old bachelor, who keeps three TV sets blaring 24 hours a day at his Fridley, Minn., home and watches a fourth set on the job.

“’There’s nothing I like more than sitting around with a six-pack of beer, some chips and a remote control.... The TV station even featured me in a town parade. Th ey went into my house, got my couch and put it on a float. I sat on the couch in my bathrobe and rode in the parade ! ‘”

Sure, but is it Sloth? The fourth television set at work, the fact that twice, the Tuber in question mentions sitting and not re clining, suggest something different here. Channel-surfing and VCR-jockeying may require a more nonlinear awareness than may be entirely compatible with the venerable sin of Sloth — some inner alertness or tension, as of someone sitting in a yoga posture, or in Zen meditation. Is Sloth once more about to be, somehow, transcended? Another possibility of course is that we have not passed beyond acedia at all, but that it has only retreated from its long-familiar venue, television, and is seeking other, more shadowy environments — who knows? computer games, cult religions, obscure trading floors in faraway cities — ready to pop up again in some new form to offer us cosmic despair on the cheap.

Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of serious concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue to evolve away from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal. The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth — defiant sorrow in the face of God’s good intentions — was a deadly sin.

Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems increasingly to define us — technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow, despite technology’s good intentions, there we’ll sit with our heads in virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth’s good old days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains of the Acedia Squad.

The New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1993

Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity. It’s about then that we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.

At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on life’s limb, at least. Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love “forever,” but actually to follow through on it— to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one’s alloted stake of precious time where one’s heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s new novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.

In the postromantic ebb of the 70’s and 80’s, with everybody now so wised up and even growing paranoid about love, once the magical buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any writer to decide to work in love’s vernacular, to take it, with all its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously— that is, as well worth those higher forms of play that we value in fiction. For Garcia Marquez the step may also be revolutionary. “ I think that a novel about love is as valid as any other,” he once remarked in a conversation with his friend, the journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (published as “El Olor de la Guayaba,” 1982). “In reality the duty of a writer— the revolutionary duty, if you like— is that of writing well.”

And— oh boy— does he write well. He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcimarquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar, as in this description of a turn-of-the-century balloon trip:

“From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor.

“They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by everyone’s shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.”

This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality—youthful idiocy, to some— may yet be honored, much later in Iife when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable. This is, effectively, to assert the resurrection of the body, today as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea. Through the ever-subversive medium of fiction, Garcia Marquez shows us how it could all plausibly come about, even— wild hope— for somebody out here, outside a book, even as inevitably beaten at, bought and resold as we all must have become if only through years of simple residence in the injuring and corruptive world.

Here’s what happens. The story takes place between about 1880 and 1930, in a Caribbean seaport city, unnamed but said to be a composite of Cartagena and Barranquilla— as well, perhaps, as cities of the spirit less officially mapped. Three major characters form a triangle whose hypotenuse is Florentino Ariza, a poet dedicated to love both carnal and transcendent, though his secular fate is with the River Company of the Caribbean and its small fleet of paddle-wheel steamboats. As a young apprentice telegrapher he meets and falls forever in love with Fermina Daza, a “beautiful adolescent with . . . almondsshaped eyes,” who walks with a “natural haughtiness . . . her doe’s gait making her seem immune to gravity.” Though they exchange hardly a hundred words face to face, they carry on a passionate and secret affair entirely by way of letters and telegrams, even after the girl’s father has sound out and taken her away on an extended “journey of forgetting.” But when she returns, Fermina rejects the lovesick young man after all, and eventually meets and marries instead Dr. Juvenal Urbino who, like the hero of a I9th-century novel, is well born, a sharp dresser, somewhat stuck on himself but a terrific catch nonetheless.

For Florentino, love’s creature. this is an agonizing setback, though nothing fatal. Having sworn to love Fermina Daza forever, he settles in to wait for as long as he has to until she’s free again. This turns out to be 51 years, 9 months and 4 days later, when suddenly, absurdly, on a Pentecost Sunday around 1930, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies, chasing a parrot upon mango tree. After the funeral, when everyone else has left, Florentino steps forward with his hat over his heart “Fermina,” he declares, “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.” Shocked and furious, Fermina orders him out of the house. “And don’t show your face again for the years of life that are left to you . . . I hope there are very few of them.”

The heart’s eternal vow has run up against the world’s finite terms. The confrontation occurs near the end of the first chapter, which recounts Dr. Urbino’s last day on earth and Fermina’s first night as a widow. We then flash back 50 years, into the time of cholera. The middle chapters follow the lives of the three characters through the years of the Urbinos’ marriage and Florentino Ariza’s rise at the River Company, as one century ticks over into the next. The last chapter takes up again where the first left off, with Florentine now, in the face of what many men would consider major rejection, resolutely setting about courting Fermina Daza all over again, doing what he must to win her love.

In their city, throughout a turbulent half-century, death has proliferated everywhere, both as el c—lera, the fatal disease that sweeps through in terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la c—lera, defined as choler or anger, which taken to its extreme becomes warfare. Victims of one, in this book, are more than once mistaken for victims of the other. War, “always the same war,” is presented here not as the continuation by other means of any politics that can possibly matter, but as a negative force, a plague, whose only meaning is death on a massive scale. Against this dark ground, lives, so precarious, are often more and less conscious projects of resistance, even of sworn opposition, to death. Dr. Urbino, like his father before him, becomes a leader in the battle against the cholera, promoting public health measures obsessively, heroically. Fermina, more conventionally but with as much courage, soldiers on in her chosen role of wife, mother and household manager, maintaining a safe perimeter for her family. Florentino embraces Eros, death’s well-known long-time enemy, setting off on a career of seductions that eventually add up to 622 “long term liaisons, apart from . . . countless fleeting adventures,” while maintaining, impervious to time, his deeper fidelity, his unquenchable hope for a life with Fermina. At the end he can tell her truthfully— though she doesn’t believe it for a minute— that he has remained a virgin for her.

So far as this is Florentino’s story, in a way his Bildungsroman, we find ourselves, as he earns the suspension of our disbelief, cheering him on, wishing for the success of this stubborn warrior against age and death, and in the name of love. But like the best fictional characters, he insists on his autonomy, refusing to be anything less ambiguous than human. We must take him as he is, pursuing his tomcat destiny out among the streets and lovers’ refuges of this city with which he lives on terms of such easy intimacy, carrying with him a potential for disasters from which he remains safe, immunized by a comical but dangerous indifference to consequences that often borders on criminal neglect. The widow Nazaret, one of many widows he is fated to make happy, seduces him during a nightlong bombardment from the cannons of an attacking army outside the city. Ausencia Santander’s exquisitely furnished home is burgled of every movable item while she and Florentino are frolicking in bed. A girl he picks up at Carnival time turns out to be a homicidal machete-wielding escapee from the local asylum. Olimpia Zuleta’s husband mu rders her when he sees a vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on her body in red paint. His lover’s amorality causes not only individual misfortune but ecological destruction as well: as he learns by the end of the book, his River Company’s insatiable appetite for firewood to fuel its steamers has wiped out the great forests that once bordered the Magdalena river system, leaving a wasteland where nothing can live. “With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina Daza he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in a new river.”

In fact, dumb luck has as much to do with getting Florentino through as the intensity or purity of his dream. The author’s great affection for this character does not entirely overcome a sly concurrent subversion of the ethic of machismo, of which Garcia Marquez is not especially fond, having described it elsewhere simply as usurpation of the rights of others. Indeed, as we’ve come to expect from his fiction, it’s the women in this story who are stronger, more attuned to reality. When Florentino goes crazy with live, developing symptoms like those of cholera, it is his mother Transito Ariza, who pulls him out of it. His innumerable lecheries are rewarded not so much for any traditional masculine selling points as for his obvious and aching need to be loved. Women go for it. “He is ugly and sad,” Fermina Daza’s cousin Hildebranda tells her, “but he is all love.”

And Garcia Marquez, straight-faced teller of tall tales, is his biographer. At the age of 19, as he has reported, the young writer underwent a literary epiphany on reading the famous opening lines of Kafka’s “ Metamorphosis,” in which a man wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. “Gosh,” exclaimed Garcia Marquez, using in Spanish a word in English we may not, “that’s just the way my grandmother used to talk!” And that, he adds is when novels began to interest him. Much of what come [sic] in his work to be called “magical realism” was, as he tells it, simply the presence of that grandmotherly voice.

Nevertheless, in this novel we have come a meaningful distance from Macondo, the magical village in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” where folks routinely sail through the air and the dead remain in everyday conversation with the living: we have descended, perhaps in some way down the same river, all the way downstream, into war and pestilence and urban confusions to the edge of a Caribbean haunted less by individual dead than by a history which has brought so appallingly many down, without ever having sopoken, or having spoken gone unheard, or having been heard, left unrecorded. As revolutionary as writing well is the duty to redeem these silences, a duty Garcia Marquez has here fulfilled with honor and compassion. It would be presumptuous to speak of moving “beyond” “One Hundred Years of Solitude” but clearly Garcia Marquez has moved somewhere else, not least into deeper awareness of the ways in which, as Florentino comes to learn, “nobody teaches life anything.” There are still delightful and stunning moments contrary to fact, still told with the same unblinking humor— presences at the foot of the bed, an anonymously delivered doll with a curse on it, the sinister parrot, almost a minor character, whose pursuit ends with the death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. But the predominant claim on the author’s attention and energies comes from what is not so contrary to fact, a human consensus about “ reality” in which love and the possibility of love’s extinction are the indispensable driving forces, and varieties of magic have become, if not quite peripheral, then at least more thoughtfully deployed in the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no less clement.

It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera—all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel—but not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level of understanding, is an author’s ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.

In translating “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Edith Grossman has been attentive to this element of discipline, among many nuances of the author’s voice to which she is sensitively, imaginatively attuned. My Spanish isn’t perfect, but I can tell that she catches admirably and without apparent labor the swing and translucency of his writing, its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those end-of-sentence zingers he likes to hit us with. It is a faithful and beautiful piece of work.

There comes a moment, early in his career at the River Company of the Caribbean when Florentino Ariza, unable to write even a simple commercial letter without some kind of romantic poetry creeping in, is discussing the problem with his uncle Leo XII, who owns the company. It’s no use, the young man protests— “Love is the only thing that interests me.”

“The trouble,” his uncle replies,” is that without river navigation, there is no love.” For Florentino, this happens to be literally true: the shape of his life is defined by two momentous river voyages, half a century apart. On the first he made his decision to return and live forever in the city of Fermina Daza, to persevere in his love for as long as it might take. On the second, through a desolate landscape, he journeys into love and against time, with Fermina, at last by his side. There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance— at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs “Love in the Time of Cholera,” this shining and heartbreaking novel.

The New York Times 10 April1988

Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?

As if being 1984 weren’t enough, it’s also the 25^th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow’s famous Rede lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming polarized into “literary” and “scientific” factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people’s attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.

Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever “beyond” the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy, and access fee can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty.

What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of a long-ago high-table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow’s immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, “If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.” Such “intellectuals,” for the most part “literary,’ were supposed by Lord Snow, to be “ natural Luddites.”

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, “people who read and think.” Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

HISTORICALLY, Luddites flourished In Britain from about 1811 to 1816. They were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry. They swore allegiance not to any British king but to their own King Ludd. It Isn’t clear whether they called themselves Luddites, although they were so termed by both friends and enemies. C.P. Snow’s use of the word was clearly polemical, wishing to imply an irrational fear and hatred of science and technology. Luddites had, in this view, come to be imagined as the counter- revolutionaries of that “ Industrial Revolution” which their modern versions have “never tried, wanted, or been able to understand.”

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage in a long evolution. The phrase was first popularized a hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and has had its share of revisionist attention, lately in the July 1984 Scientific American. Here, in “Medieval Roots of the Industrial Revolution,” Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the steam m engine (1765)) may have been overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the idea of a technosocial “revolution,” in which the same people came out on top as in France and America, has proven of use to many over the years, not least to those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that In “Luddite”” they have discovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting tale to tell. In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and “ ;in a fit of insane rage” destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged — this had been going on, sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710 — folks would respond with the catch phrase “Lud must have been here.” By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname “King (or Captain) Ludd,” and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out In the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick —every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

But it’s important to remember that the target even of the original assault of l779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589, when, according to the folklore, it was invented by the Rev. William Lee, out of pure meanness. Seems that Lee was in love with a young woman who was more interested in her knitting than in him. He’d show up at her place. “Sorry, Rev, got some knitting.” “What, again?” After a while, unable to deal with this kind of rejection, Lee, not, like Ned Lud, in any fit of insane rage, but let’s imagine logically and coolly, vowed to invent a machine that would make the hand-knitting of hosiery obsolete, and so he did. According to the encyclopedia, the jilted cleric’s frame “was so perfect in its conception that it continued to be the only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years.”

Now, given that kind of time span, it’s just not easy to think of Ned Lud as a technophobic crazy. No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single- mindedness of his assault. But the words “fit of insane rage” are third-hand and at least 68 years after the event. And Ned Lud’s anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.

There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening Ñ- it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery Ñ- especially when it’s been around for a while —not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work Ñ- to be “worth” that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don’t we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass — the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero Ñ-who will resist what otherwise would over whelm us? Of course, the real or secular frame-bashing was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead of their time, using the night, and their own solidarity and discipline, to achieve their multiplications of effect.

It was open-eyed class war. The movement had its Parliamentary allies, among them Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812 compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressive measures, to make frame- breaking punishable by death. “Are you not near the Luddites?” he wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore. “By the Lord! if there’s a row, but I’ll be among ye! How go on the weavers — the breakers of frames — the Lutherans of politics — the reformers?” He includes an “amiable chanson,” which proves to be a Luddite hymn sop inflammatory that it wasn’t published until after the poet’s death. The letter is dated December 1816: Byron had spent the summer previous in Switzerland, cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with the Shelleys, watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories. By that December, as it happened, Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her novel “ Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.”

If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best. Victor Frankenstein’s creature also, surely, qualifies as a major literary Badass. “I resolved...,” Victor tells us, “to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large,” which takes care of Big. The story of how he got to be so Bad is the heart of the novel, sheltered innermost: told to Victor in the first person by the creature himself, then nested inside of Victor’s own narrative, which is nested in its turn in the letters of the arctic explorer Robert Walton. However much of “ Frankenstein’s” longevity is owing to the undersung genius James Whale, who translated it to film, it remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine.

Look, for example, at Victor’s account of how he assembles and animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the details, but we’re left with a procedure that seems to include surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale’s galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that results is mechanical.

This is one of several interesting similarities between “Frankenstein” ; and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, “The Castle of Otranto” (1765), by Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. For one thing, both authors, in presenting their books to the public, used voices not their own. Mary Shelley’s preface was written by her husband, Percy, who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later did she write an introduction to “Frankenstein” in her own voice. Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book an entire made-up publishing history, claiming it was a translation from medieval Italian. Only in his preface to the second edition did he admit authorship.

THE novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld the creature being brought to life, the images arising in her mind “with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.” Walpole had been awakened from a dream, “of which, all I could remember was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle... and that on the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw a gigantic hand in armour.”

In Walpole’s novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the castle’s resident Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein’s creature, is assembled from pieces — sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them, like the hand, quite oversized — which fall from the sky or just materialize here and there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud’s slow return of the repressed. The activating agencies, again like those in “Frankenstein,” are non-mechanical. The final assembly of “the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude,” is achieved through supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of Otranto’s patron saint.

The craze for Gothic fiction after “The Castle of Otranto” was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. I ways more and less literal, folks in the 18^th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake’s dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation — bodily resurrection, if possible — remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however “irrational,” to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing. “Gothic” became code for “medieval,” and that has remained code for “miraculous,” ; on through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of- the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps and comics, down to “Star Wars” and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.

TO insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you recall, goes, “Well, the airplanes got him.” “No... it was Beauty killed the Beast.” In which we again encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only different, between the human and the technological.

But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature — of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself — then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way that adults have traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortal children they must deal with. Looking back on “Frankenstein,” which she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, “I have affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart.” The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunits, murder, being a pretext for a logical puzzle, is hardly ever an irrational act. In science fiction, where entire worlds may be generated from simple sets of axioms, the constraints of our own everyday world are routinely transcended. In each of these cases we know better. We say, “But the world isn’t like that.” These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label “escapist fare.”

This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.

By 1945, the factory system — which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution — had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watch nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust [///] eight-figure body counts has become [///] particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies — conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in the 50’s, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns — exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions — most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of “human” as particularly distinguished from “machine.” Like their earlier counterparts, 20^th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age — curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.

But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the “future in their bones.” It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk — realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.

THE word “Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come — you heard it here first — when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flatfooted. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron’s mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:

As the Liberty lads o’er the sea

Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,

So we; boys, we

Will die fighting, or live free,

And down with all kings but King Ludd!

The New York Times Book Review , 28 October 1984

The Gift

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock (Viking) has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who, partly because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, believes he is a hero. He is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. It is Blaisdell’s private abyss, and not too different from the town’s public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with— the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power— the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

Holiday vol. 38, #6 December 1965

A Journey Into The Mind of Watts

The night of May 7, after a chase that began in Watts and ended some 50 blocks farther north, two Los Angeles policemen, Caucasians, succeeded in halting a car driven by Leonard Deadwyler, a Negro. With him were his pregnant wife and a friend. The younger cop (who’d once had a complaint brought against him for rousting some Negro kids around in a more than usually abusive way) went over and stuck his head and gun in the car window to talk to Deadwyler. A moment later there was a shot; the young Negro fell sideways in the seat, and died. The last thing he said, according to the other cop, was, “She’s going to have a baby.”

The coroner’s inquest went on for the better part of two weeks, one cop claiming the car had lurched suddenly, causing his service revolver to go off by accident; Deadwyler’s widow claiming it was cold-blooded murder and that the car had never moved. The verdict, to no one’s surprise, cleared the cop of all criminal responsibility. It had been an accident. The D.A. announced immediately that he thought so too, and that as far as he was concerned the case was closed.

But as far as Watts is concerned, it’s still very much open. Preachers in the community are urging calm-or, as others are putting it: “Make any big trouble, baby, The Man just going to come back in and shoot you, like last time.” Snipers are sniping but so far not hitting much of anything. Occasional fire bombs are being lobbed at cars with white faces inside, or into empty sports models that look as if they might be white property. There have been a few fires of mysterious origin. A Negro Teen Post- part of the L.A. poverty war’s keep-them-out-of-the-streets effort - has had all its windows busted, the young lady in charge expressing the wish next morning that she could talk with the malefactors, involve them, see if they couldn’t work out the problem together. In the back of everybody’s head, of course, is the same question: Will there be a repeat of last August’s riot?

An even more interesting question is: Why is everybody worrying about another riot—haven’t things in Watts improved any since the last one? A lot of white folks are wondering. Unhappily, the answer is no. The neighborhood may be seething with social workers, data collectors, VISTA volunteers and other assorted members of the humanitarian establishment, all of whose intentions are the purest in the world. But somehow nothing much has changed. There are still the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the desperate, all hanging in there with what must seem a terrible vitality.

The killing of Leonard Deadwyler has once again brought it all into sharp focus ; brought back long-standing pain, reminded everybody of how very often the cop does approach you with his revolver ready, so that nothing he does with it can then really be accidental, of how, especially at night, everything can suddenly reduce to a matter of reflexes: your life trembling in the crook of a cop’s finger because it is dark, and Watts, and the history of this place and these times makes it impossible for the cop to come on any different, or for you to hate him any less. Both of you are caught in something neither of you wants, and yet night after night, with casualties or without, these traditional scenes continue to be played out all over the South central part of this city.

Whatever else may be wrong in a political way—like the inadequacy of Great Depression techniques applied to a scene that has long outgrown them; like an old-fashioned grafter’s glee among the city fathers over the vast amounts of poverty-war bread that Uncle is now making available to them—lying much closer to the heart of L.A.’s racial sickness is the coexistence of two very different cultures: one white and one black.

While the white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized folly—the economy of the area in fact depending on it—the black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen—and can afford—to ignore. The two cultures do not understand each other, though white values are displayed without let-up on black people’s TV screens, and though the panoramic sense of black impoverishment is hard to miss from atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must drive at least twice every working day. Somehow it occurs to very few of them to leave at the Imperial Highway exit for a change, go east instead of west only a few blocks, and take a look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind of beginning. But Watts is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles further than most whites seem at present willing to travel.

On the surface anyway, the Deadwyler affair hasn’t made it look any different, though underneath the mood in Watts is about what you might expect. Feelings range from a reflexive, angry, driving need to hit back somehow, to an anxious worry that the slaying is just one more bad grievance, one more bill that will fall due some warm evening this summer. Yet in the daytime’s brilliance and heat, it is hard to believe there is any mystery to Watts. Everything seems so out in the open, all of it is real, no plastic faces, not transistors, no hidden Muzak, or Disneyfied landscaping, or smiling little chicks to show you around. Not in Raceriotland. Only a few historic landmarks, like the police substation, one command post for the white forces last August, pigeons now thick and cooing up on its red-tiled roof. Or, on down the street, vacant lots, still looking charred around the edges, winking with emptied Tokay, port and sherry pints, some of the bottles peeking out of paper bags, others busted.

A kid could come along in his bare feet and step on this glass—not that you’d ever know. These kids are so tough you can pull slivers of it out of them and never get a whimper. It’s part of their landscape, both the real and the emotional one: busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste. Traditionally Watts. An Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia spent 30 years gathering some of it up and converting a little piece of the neighborhood along 107^th Street into the famous Watts Towers, perhaps his own dream of how things should have been: a fantasy of fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, encrusted with a dazzling mosaic of Watts debris. Next to the Towers, along the old Pacific Electric tracks, kids are busy every day busting more bottles on the steel rails. But Simon Rodia is dead and now the junk just accumulates.

A few blocks away, other kids are out playing on the hot blacktop of the school playground. Brothers and sisters too young yet for school have it better— wherever they are they have yards, trees, hoses, hiding places. Not the crowded, shadeless tenement living of any Harlem; just the same one- or two-story urban sprawl as all over the rest of L.A. giving you some piece of grass at least to expand into when you don’t especially feel like being inside.

In the business part of town there is a different idea of refuge. Pool halls and bars, warm and dark inside, are crowded; many domino, dice and whist games in progress. Outside, men stand around a beer cooler listening to a ball game on the radio; others lean or hunker against the sides of buildings—low, faded stucco boxes that remind you oddly, of certain streets in Mexico. Women go by, to and from what shopping there is. It is easy to see how crowds, after all, can form quickly in these streets, around the least seed of a disturbance or accident. For the moment, it all only waits in the sun.

Overhead, big jets now and then come vacuum-cleanering in to land; the wind is westerly, and Watts lies under the approaches to L.A. International. The jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; through the smog they show up more white than silver, highlighted by the sun, hardly solid; only the ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes.

From here, much of the white culture that surrounds Watts—and in a curious way, besieges it—looks like those jets: a little unreal, a little less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the L.A. Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the “ action” everybody mills along the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town.

Watts lies impacted in the heart of this white fantasy. It is, by contrast, a pocket of bitter reality. The only illusion Watts ever allowed itself was to believe for a long time in the white version of what a Negro was supposed to be. But with the Muslim and civil-rights movements that went too.

Since the August rioting, there has been little building here, little buying. Lots whose buildings were burned off them are still waiting vacant and littered with garbage, occupied only by a parked car or two, or kids fooling around after school, or winos sharing a pint in the early morning. The other day, on one of them, there were ground-breaking festivities, attended by a county supervisor, pretty high-school girls, decked in ribbons, a white store owner and his wife, who in the true Watts spirit busted a bottle of champagne over a rock—all because the man had decided to stay and rebuild his $200,000 market, the first such major rebuilding since the riot.

Watts people themselves talk about another kind of aura, vaguely evil; complain that Negroes living in better neighborhoods like to come in under the freeway as to a red-light district, looking for some girl, some game, maybe some connection. Narcotics is said to be a rare bust in Watts these day, although the narco people cruise the area earnestly, on the lookout for dope fiends, dope rings, dope peddlers. But the poverty of Watts makes it more likely that if you have pot or a little something else to spare you will want to turn a friend on, not sell it. Tomorrow, or when he can, your friend will return the favor.

At the Deadwyler inquest, much was made of the dead man’s high blood alcohol content, as if his being drunk made it somehow all right for the police to shoot him. But alcohol is a natural part of the Watts style; as natural as LSD is around Hollywood. The white kid digs hallucination simply because he is conditioned to believe so much in escape, escape as an integral part of life, because the white L.A. Scene makes accessible to him so many different forms of it. But a Watts kid, brought up in a pocket of reality, looks perhaps not so much for escape as just for some calm, some relaxation. And beer or wine is good enough for that. Especially good at the end of a bad day.

Like after you have driven, say, down to Torrance or Long Beach or wherever it is they’re hiring because they don’t seem to be in Watts, not even in the miles of heavy industry that sprawl along Alameda Street, that gray and murderous arterial which lies at the eastern boundary of Watts looking like the edge of the world.

So you groove instead down the freeway, maybe wondering when some cop is going to stop you because the old piece of a car you’re driving, which you bought for $20 or $30 you picked up somehow, makes a lot of noise or burns some oil. Catching you mobile widens The Man’s horizons; gives him more things he can get you on. Like “excessive smoking” is a great favorite with him.

If you do get to where you were going without encountering a cop, you may spend your day looking at the white faces of personnel men, their uniform glance of suspicion, their automatic smiles, and listening to polite put-downs. “I decided once to ask,” a kid says, “one time they told me I didn’t meet their requirements. So I said: ‘Well, what are you looking for? I mean, how can I train, what things do I have to learn so I can meet your requirements?’ Know what he said? ‘We are not obligated to tell you what our requirements are.’”

He isn’t. That right there is the hell and headache: he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do because he is The Man. Or he was. A lot of kids these days are more apt to be calling him the little man—meaning not so much any member of the power structure as just your average white L.A. taxpayer, registered voter, property owner, employed, stable, mortgaged and the rest.

The little man bugs these kids more than The Man ever bugged their parents. It is the little man who is standing on their feet and in their way; he’s all over the place, and there is not much they can do to change him or the way he feels about them. A Watts kid knows more of what goes on inside white heads than possibly whites do themselves. Knows how often the little man has looked at him and thought, “Bad credit risk”—or “Poor learner,” or “Sexual threat,” or “Welfare chisler” without knowing a thing about him personally.

The natural, normal thing to want to do is hit the little man. But what after all, has he done? Mild, respectable, possibly smiling, he has called you no names, shown no weapons. Only told you perhaps that the job was filled, the house rented.

With a cop it may get more dangerous, but at least it’s honest. You understand each other. Both of you silently admitting that all the cop really has going for him is his gun. “There was a time,” they’ll tell you, “you’d say, ‘Take off the badge baby, and let’s settle it.’ I mean, he wouldn’t, but you’d say it. But since August, man, the way I feel, hell with the badge— just take off that gun.”

The cop does not take off the gun; the hassle stays verbal. But this means that, besides protecting and serving the little man, the cop also functions as his effigy.

If he does not get emotional and say something like “boy” or “ nigger,” you then have the option of cooling it or else—again this is more frequent since last August—calling him the name he expects to be called, though it is understood you are not commenting in any literal way on what goes on between him and his mother. It is a ritual exchange, like the dirty dozens.

Usually—as in the Deadwyler incident—it’s the younger cop of the pair who’s more troublesome. Most Watts kids are hip to what’s going on in this rookie’s head—the things he feels he has to prove—as much as to the elements of the ritual. Before the cop can say, “Let’s see your I.D.,” ; you learn to take it out politely and say, “You want to see my I.D.?” Naturally it will bug the cop more the further ahead of him you can stay. It is flirting with disaster, but it’s the cop who has the gun, so you do what you can.

You must anticipate always how the talk is going to go. It’s something you pick up quite young, same as you learn the different species of cop: the Black and White (named for the color scheme of their automobiles), who are L.A.. city police and in general the least flexible; the L.A. county sheriff’s department, who style themselves more of an elite, try to maintain a certain distance from the public, and are less apt to harass you unless you seem worthy; the Compton city cops, who travel only one to a car and come on very tough, like leaning four of you at a time against the wall and shaking you all down; the juvies, who ride in unmarked Plymouths and are cruising all over the place soon as the sun goes down, pulling up alongside you with pleasantries like, “Which one’s buying the wine tonight?” or, “Who are you guys planning to rob this time?” They are kidding, of course, trying to be pals. But Watts kids, like most, do not like being put in with winos, or dangerous drivers or thieves, or in any bag considered criminal or evil. Whatever the cop’s motives, it looks like mean and deliberate ignorance.

In the daytime, and especially with any kind of crowd, the cop’s surface style has changed some since last August. “Time was,” you’ll hear, “ man used to go right in, very mean, pick maybe one kid out of the crowd he figured was the troublemaker, try to bust him down in front of everybody. But now the people start yelling back, how they don’t want no more of that, all of a sudden The Man gets very meek.”

Still, however much a cop may seem to be following the order of the day read to him every morning about being courteous to everybody, his behavior with a crowd will really depend as it always has on how many of his own he can muster, and how fast. For his Mayor, Sam Yorty, is a great believer in the virtues of Overwhelming Force as a solution to racial difficulties. This approach has not gained much favor in Watts. In fact, the Mayor of Los Angeles appears to many Negroes to be the very incarnation of the little man: looking out for no one but himself, speaking always out of expediency, and never, never to be trusted.

The Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency (E.Y.O.A.) is a joint city-county “umbrella agency” (the state used to be represented, but has dropped out) for many projects scattered around the poorer parts of L.A., and seems to be Sam Yorty’s native element, if not indeed the flower of his consciousness. Bizarre, confused, ever in flux, strangely ineffective, E.Y.O.A. hardly sees a day go by without somebody resigning, or being fired, or making an accusation, or answering one—all of it confirming the Watts Negroes’ already sad estimate of the little man. The Negro attitude toward E.Y.O.A. is one of clear mistrust, though degrees of suspicion vary, form the housewife wanting only to be left in peace and quiet, who hoped that maybe The Man is lying less than usual this time, to the young, active disciple of Malcolm X who dismisses it all with a contemptuous shrug.

“But why?” asked one white lady volunteer. “There are so many agencies now that you can go to, that can help you, if you’ll only file your complaint.”

“They don’t help you.” This particular kid had been put down trying to get a job with one of the larger defense contractors.

“Maybe not before. But it’s different now.”

“Now,” the kid sighed, “now. See people been hearing that ‘now’ for a long time, and I’m just tired of The Man telling you, ‘Now it’s OK, now we mean what we say.’”

In Watts, apparently, where no one can afford the luxury of illusion, there is little reason to believe that now will be any different, any better than last time.

It is perhaps a measure of the people’s indifference that only 2 per cent of the poor in Los Angeles turned out to elect representatives to the E.Y.O.A. “poverty board.” For a hopeless minority on the board (7 out or 23), nobody saw much point in voting.

Meantime, the outposts of the establishment drowse in the bright summery smog: secretaries chat the afternoons plaintively away about machines that will not accept the cards they have punched for them; white volunteers sit filing, doodling, talking on the phones, doing any kind of busy-work, wondering where the “clients” are; inspirational mottoes like SMILE decorate the beaverboard office walls along with flow charts to illustrate the proper disposition of “cases,” and with clippings from the slick magazines about “What Is Emotional Maturity?”

Items like smiling and Emotional Maturity are in fact very big with the well-adjusted, middle-class professionals, Negro and white, who man the mimeographs and computers of the poverty war here. Gladly, they seem to be smiling themselves out of any meaningful communication with their poor. Besides a 19^th-century faith that tried and true approaches—sound counseling, good intentions, perhaps even compassion—will set Watts straight, they are also burdened with the personal attitudes they bring to work with them. Their reflexes—especially about conformity, about failure, about violence— are predictable.

“We had a hell of a time with this one girl,” a Youth Training and Employment Project counselor recalls. “You should have seen those hairdos of hers—piled all the way up to here. And the screwy outfits she’d come in with, you just wouldn’t believe. We had to take her aside and explain to her that employers just don’t go for that sort of thing. That she’d be up against a lot of very smooth-looking chicks, heels and stockings, conservative hair and clothes. We finally got her to come around.”

The same goes for boys who like to wear Malcolm hats, or Afro haircuts. The idea the counselors push evidently is to look as much as possible like a white applicant. Which is to say, like a Negro job counselor or social worker. This has not been received with much enthusiasm among the kids it is designed to help out, and is one reason business is slow around the various projects.

There is a similar difficulty among the warriors about failure. They are in a socio-economic bag, along with the vast majority of white Angelenos, who seem more terrified of failure than of death. It is difficult to see where any of them have experienced significant defeat, or loss. If they have, it seems to have been long rationalized away as something else.

You are likely to hear from them wisdom on the order of: “Life has a way of surprising us, simply as a function of time. Even if all you do is stand on the street corner and wait.” Watts is full of street corners where people stand, as they have been, some of them, for 20 or 30 years, without Surprise One ever having come along. Yet the poverty warriors must believe in this form of semimiracle, because their world and their scene cannot accept the possibility that there may be, after all, no surprise. But it is something Watts has always known.

As for violence, in a pocket of reality such as Watts, violence is never far from you: because you are a man, because you have been put down, because for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Somehow, sometime. Yet to these innocent, optimistic child-bureaucrats, violence is an evil and an illness, possibly because it threatens property and status they cannot help cherishing.

They remember last August’s riot as an outburst, a seizure. Yet what, from the realistic viewpoint of Watts, was so abnormal? “Man’s got his foot on your neck,” said one guy who was there, “sooner or later you going to stop asking him to take it off.” The violence it took to get that foot to ease up even the little it did was no surprise. Many had predicted it. Once it got going, its basic objective—to beat the Black and White police— seemed a reasonable one, and was gained the minute The Man had to send troops in. Everybody seems to have known it. There is hardly a person in Watts now who finds it painful to talk about, or who regrets that it happened—unless he lost somebody.

But in the white culture outside, in that creepy world full of precardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavoring to stab; of an enormous priest caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise as the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about violence. In terms of strict reality, violence may be a means to getting money, for example, no more dishonest than collecting exorbitant carrying charges from a customer on relief, as white merchants here still do. Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are.

“Sure I did two stretches,” a kid says, “both times for fighting, but I didn’t deserve either one. First time, the cat was bigger than I was; next time, it was two against one, and I was the one.” But he was busted all the same, perhaps because Whitey, who knows how to get everything he wants, no longer has fisticuffs available as a technique, and sees no reason why everybody shouldn’t go the Niceguy route. If you are thinking maybe there is a virility hang-up in here, too, that putting a Negro into a correctional institution for fighting is also some kind of neutering operation, well, you might have something there, who knows?

It is, after all, in white L.A.’s interest to cool Watts any way it can—to put the area under a siege of persuasion: to coax the Negro poor into taking on certain white values. Give them a little property, and they will be less tolerant of arson; get them to go in hock for a car or color TV, and they’ll be more likely to hold down a steady job. Some see it for what it is—this come-on, this false welcome, this attempt to transmogrify the reality of Watts into the unreality of Los Angeles. Some don’t.

Watts is tough: has been able to resist the unreal. If there is any drift away from reality, it is by way of mythmaking. As this summer warms them up, last August’s riot is being remembered less as chaos and more as art. Some talk now of a balletic quality to it, a coordinated and graceful drawing of cops away from the center of the action, a scattering of The Man’s power, either with real incidents or false alarms.

Others remember it in terms of music: through much of the rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights: everybody knowing what to do and when to do it without needing a word or a signal: “You could go up to anybody, the cats could be in the middle of burning down a store or something, but they’d tell you, explain very calm, just what they were doing, what they were going to do next. And that’s what they’d do; man, nobody had to give orders.”

Restructuring of the riot goes on in other ways. All Easter week this year, in the spirit of the season, there was a “Renaissance of the Arts,” a kind of festival in memory of Simon Rodia, held at Markham Junior High, in the heart of Watts.

Along with theatrical and symphonic events, the festival also featured a roomful of sculptures fashioned entirely from found objects—found, symbolically enough, and in the Simon Rodia tradition, among the wreckage the rioting had left. Exploiting textures of charred wood, twisted metal, fused glass, many of the works were fine, honest rebirths.

In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna on top. Inside, where its picture tube should have been, gaping out with scorched wiring threaded like electronic ivy among its crevices and sockets, was a human skull. The name of the piece was “The Late, Late, Late Show.”

Letter to the Editor

NYTBR, July 17, 1966, pp 24, 26

To the Editor:

In a recent letter to the editor, Romain Gary asserts that I took the name “Genghis Cohen” from a novel of his to use in a novel of mine, “ The Crying of Lot 49.” Mr. Gary is totally in error. I took the name Genghis Cohen from the name of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the well-known Mongol warrior and statesman. If Mr. Gary really believes himself to be the only writer at present able to arrive at a play on words this trivial, that is another problem entirely, perhaps more psychiatric than literary, and I certainly hope he works it out.

Thomas Pynchon,

New York City.

Mortality and Mercy in Vienna

Just as Siegel got to the address Rachel had given him it started to rain again. All day rain clouds had hung low and ragged-edged over Washington, ruining the view from the top of the Monument for the high-school kids on their senior trips, sending brief squalls which drove tourists squealing and cursing in to find shelter, dulling the delicate pink of the cherry blossoms which had just come out. The address was a small apartment building on a quiet street near Dupont Circle, and Siegel dove into the lobby, in out of the rain, clutching the fifth of scotch he was carrying as if it were a state secret. There had been times—during the past year, in the Avenue Kleber or the Viale delle Terme di Caracalla—where there had been a brief case where the fifth was now, clutched under the same tweed-clad arm against rain or a deadline or some bureaucratic necessity. And most of these times, especially if he were hung over from the night before, or if a girl fellow junior diplomats had sworn was a sure thing had turned out to be so much more than sure that in the end it had not been worth even the price of drinks, he would shake his head like a drunk who is trying to stop seeing double, having become suddenly conscious of the weight of the briefcase and the insignificance of its contents and the stupidity of what he was doing out here, away from Rachel, following an obscure but clearly-marked path through a jungle of distrainments and affadavits and depositions; wondering why, in his first days with the Commission, he should have ever regarded himself as any kind of healer when he had always known that for a healer—a prophet actually, because if you cared about it at all you had to be both—there is no question of balance sheets or legal complexity, and the minute you become involved with anything like that you are something less; a doctor, or a fortune-teller. When he was thirteen, a little less than a month after his bar mitzvah, his cousin Miriam had died of cancer and perhaps it was then—sitting shivah on an orange crate in a darkened room high over the Grand Concourse, gaunt and looking a little like a John Buchan hero even at thirteen, gazing fixedly at the symbolic razor slash halfway up his black necktie that this awareness had begun to grow, because he still remembered Miriam’s husband cursing Zeit the doctor, and the money wasted on the operations, and the whole AMA, crying unashamed in this dim hot room with the drawn shades; and it had so disquieted young Siegel that when his brother Mike had gone away to Yale to take pre-med he had been afraid that something would go wrong and that Mike whom he loved would turn out to be only a doctor, like Zeit, and be cursed someday too by a distraught husband in rent garments, in a twilit bedroom. He would stand, therefore, out in some street, not moving, hanging on to the briefcase and thinking about Rachel who was 4’ 10” in her stocking feet, whose neck was pale and sleek, a Modigliani neck, whose eyes were not mirror images but both slanted the same way, dark brown almost to fathomlessness, and after awhile he would drift up to the surface again and be annoyed with himself for worrying about these thi ngs when the data inside the briefcase should have been at the office fifteen minutes ago; and realize, reluctantly, that the racing against time, the awareness of being a cog, the elan—almost roguery of the playboy element in the Commission which went well with his British staff officer appearance—even the intradepartmental scheming and counterscheming which went on in jazz cellars at two in the morning, in pensions over brandy and soda, were, after all, exciting. It was only when he forgot to take vitamin B pills the night before to ward off a hangover that these funky periods would come at all. Most of the time the brighteyed and busy tailed Siegel would assert himself and then he would look on the funky days as only brief aberrations. Because when you came down to it it was fun to manoeuvre. In the army he had lived by a golden rule of Screw the Sergeant before He Screweth Thee; later in college he had forged meal tickets, instigated protest riots and panty raids, manipulated campus opinion through the school newspaper; and this was the part of him inherited from a mother who at the age of 19 had struggled with her soul one night in a railroad flat somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen and, half-drunk on bootleg beer, had ended up refuting Aquinas and quitting the Roman church; who would grin fondly at her husband and refer to him as an innocent slob who never had a chance against her female cunning, and advise Seigel never to marrv a schickseh but to find himself some nice quiet Jewish girl because at least there you were given a running start. For this his roommate at college sophomore year had called him Stephen and taunted him mercilessly about the still small Jesuit voice which kept him from being either kicked around or conscious of guilt or simply ineffective like so many of the other Jewish boys on campus seemed to Grossmann to be. “Also, Grossmann,” Siegel had retorted, “it perhaps saves me from being a schmuck like you.” Grossmann would laugh and stick his nose back in a textbook. “It is the seed of your destruction,” he would murmur. “House divided against itself? You know.” Well, here he was, 30 and on the way to becoming a career man, and not particularly aware of destruction mainly because he was unable to give it a name or a face, unless they were Rachel’s and this he doubted. With the bottle under his arm he climbed up two flights of stairs, the few raindrops which had caught him glistening in the shaggy tangle of his tweed coat. He hoped she had said sevenish—he was pretty sure but it would be awkward if he arrived too early. He rang the buzzer in front of a door that said 3F and waited. It seemed to be quiet inside and he was just beginning to wonder if maybe she hadn’t said eightish when the door opened and a wild-looking, rangy man with fierce eyebrows, wearing a tweed coat and carrying what looked like a pig foetus under one arm, stood staring at him, an empty room behind him, and Siegel, annoyed, realized he had goofed and that 30 years was a long time and that this might be a first indication of seni lity. They faced each other like slightly flawed mirror images—different patterns of tweed, scotch bottle and pig foetus but no discrepancy in height —with Siegel experiencing a mixed feeling of discomfort and awe, and the word Doppelganger had just floated into his mind when the other’s eyebrows shot up into twin parabolas and he stuck out his free hand and said, “You’re early but come in. I’m David Lupescu.”

Siegel shook hands, muttering his own name and the spell broke; he looked at the object under Lupescu’s arm and saw that it really was a pig foetus, caught the faint scent of formaldehyde and scratched his head. “I brought some booze” he said. “I’m sorry about this, I’d thought Rachel said seven.” Lupescu smiled vaguely and closed the door behind him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “I’ve got to put this thing someplace.” He motioned Siegel to a seat and picked up an old-fashioned glass from a table, a chair from nearby, dragged the chair to the entrance of what Siegel presumed was the kitchen, stood on the chair, took a thumbtack from his pocket, stuck it through the umbilical cord of the pig foetus and tacked it onto the molding over the entrance, hammering with the bottom of the glass. He jumped down off the chair and above him the foetus swung dangerously. He looked up at it. “I hope it stays there,” he said, and then turned to face Siegel. “Fetching, isn’t it?” Siegel shrugged. “Dada exhibit in Paris on Christmas eve, 1919,” Lupescu said, “used one in place of mistletoe. But ten to one this group won’t even notice it. You know Paul Brennan? He won’t.”

“I don’t know anybody,” Siegel said, “I’ve been sort of out of touch. I just got back from overseas last week. All the old crowd seems to have drifted away.”

Lupescu stuck his hands in his pockets and looked around the room. brooding. “I know,” he said grimly. “Big turnover. But the types are constant.” He moved toward the kitchen, glanced in, paced back again to the French windows, then suddenly turned and shot out a forefinger at Siegel. “You,” he almost roared. “Of course. You’re perfect.” He advanced toward Siegel menacingly, stood looming over him. “Good grief,” Siegel said, cowering a little. “Mon semblable,” Lupescu said, “mon frere.” He gazed at Siegel. “A sign,” he said, “a sign, and deliverance.” Siegel could smell alcohol fumes on Lupescu’s breath. “I beg your pardon,” Siegel said. Lupescu began pacing around the room.

“Only a matter of time,” he said. “Tonight. Of course. Why. Why not. Pig foetus. Symbol. God, what a symbol. And now. Freedom- Deliverance,” he screamed. “Genie. Bottle. Century after century, until Siegel, fisher of souls, pulls the cork.” He began running around the room. “Raincoat,” he said, picking a raincoat up off the sofa, “shaving gear.” He disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, came out with an overnight kit in his hands wearing the raincoat. He paused at the door. “It’s all yours,” he said. “You are now the host. As host you are a trinity: (a) receiver of guests—“ ticking them off on his fingers—“(b) an enemy and (c) an outward manifestation, for them, of the divine body and blood.”

“Wait a minute,” Siegel said, “where the hell are you going?”

“The outside,” Lupescu said, “out of the jungle.”

“But look, hey, I can’t make this. I don’t know any of these people.”

“All part of it,” Lupescu said airily. “You’ll pick it up fast enough,” and was through the door and out before Siegel could think of an answer. Ten seconds later the door opened again and Lupescu stuck his head in and winked. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” he announced owlishly and disappeared. Siegel sat staring at the foetus. “Well now, what the hell,” he said slowly. He stood up and strolled across the room to where the phone was and dialed Rachel’s number. When she answered he said, “Fine friends you have.”

“Where are you?” she said. “I just got back.” Siegel explained. “Well I’m glad you called,” Rachel said. “I called your place and you weren’t in. I wanted to tell you, Sally’s brother-in-law’s sister, a winsome little brat of fourteen, just blew into town from some girls’ school in Virginia and Sally is out with Jeff so Iv’e got to stay here and entertain her till Sally gets back, and by the time I’m able to get away the liquor will be all gone: I know Lupescu’s parties.”

“Oh for god’s sake,” Siegel said irritably, “this is ridiculous. If Lupescu’s friends are anything like him this place is about to be invaded by a horde of raving lunatics, none of whom I know. And now you’re not even coming.”

“Oh it’s a nice crowd,” she said. “ A little curious maybe but I think you’ll like them. You ought to stay.” The door was suddenly and violently kicked open and through it lurched a fat florid adolescent in a sailor suit, carrying a girl piggy-back. “Lewpayskew,” the sailor shouted. “Whay aw yew, yew mothuh-lovin Roumanian.”

“Hold on,” Siegel said. “What was that again,” he asked the sailor, who had deposited his passenger on the floor. “Mayun ah said whay’s Lewpayskew,” the sailor said. “God,” he babbled into the phone, “they’re coming, they’re filtering in already. What do I do, Rachel, they can’t even talk English. There is some nautical looking type here who is speaking no language known to man.”

“Darling,” Rachel laughed, “stop acting like a war flick. That’s probably only Harvey Duckworth, who comes from Alabama and has a charming southern accent. You’ll get along wonderfully, I know you will. Call me tomorrow and let me know everything that has happened.”

“Wait,” Siegel said desperately, but she had already said “ Bye-bye,” and hung up. He stood there holding the dead receiver. Harvey Duckworth was stomping around in the other rooms, yelling for Lupescu; and the girl, who was very young and had long black hair and big hoop earrings and was wearing a sweatshirt and levis — who seemed to Siegel a perfect parody of the girl bohemian of the ‘40’s—stood up and looked at Siegel. “I want to go to bed with you,” she intoned dramatically and all at once Siegel cheered up. He put the receiver back on the hook and smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said suavely, “but statutory rape and all that, you know. Can I get you a drink?”

He went into the kitchen without waiting for an answer and found Duckworth sitting on the sink trying to open a wine bottle. The cork popped out suddenly and the bottle slipped and Chianti splashed all over Duckworth’s whites. “ Gaw damn,” Duckworth said, staring at the purple stain. “Mizzable Guineas can’t even make wahn bottles raht.” The buzzer rang and Siegel called, “Get that would you, beautiful,” and picked the Chianti bottle up off the floor. “Still some more.” he said cheerfully. He was beginning to feel jovial, irresponsibly so; a lightheadedness which he realized might be one of the first stages of hysteria but which he rather hoped was some vestige of the old nonchalance which had sustained him on the Continent for the past two years. In the other room he heard what sounded like a chorus of roaring boys, chanting dirty limericks. The girl came in and said, “My god, it’s Brennan and his friends.”

“Oh goodo,” Siegel said. “They seem to be in fine voice.” Indeed, they were. In his suddenly amiable state it seemed to Siegel that this account of the young fellow named Cheever who had an affair with a beaver took on Deeper Human Significance, was gilded with a certain transcendental light which reminded him of that final trio from Faust, where the golden stairs come down and Margarethe ascends to heaven. “Really lovely,” he mused. The girl looked with disgust at Duckworth and then smiled brightly at Siegel. “By the way,” she said, “I’m Lucy.”

“Hi,” Siegel said. “My name is Cleanth but my friends call me Siegel, out of pity.”

“Where’s David anyway. I ought to give him hell for inviting that oaf Brennan.”

Siegel pursed his lips. Hell, this was impossible. He had to trust somebody. He took her hand and led her into the bedroom and sat her down on a bed. “ No,” he said quickly. “Not what you’re thinking.” He told her about Lupescu’s sudden departure and she shrugged and said, “Maybe it was a good thing. He would have cracked sooner or later, he was going native.” “

That’s a strange way to put it,” Siegel said. After all, going native in Washington, D.C.? In more exotic places, certainly, he had seen that. He remembered a Peter Arno cartoon in the New Yorker he had always liked, showing a girl in Apache costume, sitting on the lap of a depraved-looking Frenchman in a sidewalk cafe; and the girl’s friend, obviously an American tourist, armed with camera, shoulder-bag and guidebook, saying, with a scandalized expression, “But Mary Lou, you mean you’re not going back to Bryn Mawr, ever?” Still, stranger things had happened. In the two semesters he spent at Harvard Siegel had witnessed the gradual degeneration of his roommate Grossmann, a proud and stubborn native of Chicago who denied the presence of any civilization outside of Cook County and for whom Boston was worse even than Oak Park, was in fact, a sort of apotheosis of the effete and the puritan. Grossmann had remained unmarred, majestically sneering, happy-go-lucky, until one Christmas eve he and Siegel and some friends and a group of Radcliffe girls had gone carolling on Beacon hill.

Whether it was the booze they had brought along or the fact that Grossmann had just finished reading not only Santayana’s The Last Puritan but also a considerable amount of T. S. Eliot—and so might have been a little more susceptible to tradi tion in general and to Christmas eve on Beacon hill in particular —or merely the bothersome tendency Grossman had to get sentimental in the company of Radcliffe girls, he had still been touched enough to inform Siegel later on that night that maybe there were a few human beings in Boston after all. And this had been the first tiny rent in that Midwestern hauteur which he had carried up to now as a torero carries his cape; after that night it was all downhill. Grossmann took to strolling in the moonlight with only the most patrician of Radcliffe and Wellesley girls; he discovered a wonderful make-out spot down behind the minute man statue in Concord; he began carrying a black umbrella and gave away all his loud clothes, substituting flawless and expensive tweeds and worsteds. Siegel was mildly disturbed at all this but it was not until one afternoon in the early spring, when he entered their rooms at Dunster and surprised Grossmann standing in front of the mirror, umbrella under one arm, eyebrows raised superciliously and nose ached loftily, reciting “I parked my car in Harvard yard,” over and over, that he was struck with the extent of his roommate’s dissipation.

The strong nasal r’s Siegel had secretly admired there now eneverated and pallid; and in that classic shibboleth, Siegel recognized poor, innocent Grossmann’s swan song. A year later Siegel got a letter, the last: Grossmann had married a Wellesley girl and they were living in Swampscott. Sit tibi terra levis, Grossmann. But Siegel wondered how in the hell it was possible for anyone to sink roots in a town at once as middle class and as cosmopolitan as Washington. You could become bourgeois or one of the international set but this could happen in any city. Unless it had nothing to do with the place at all and was a question of compulsion- -unless there was something which linked people like Gaugin and Eliot and Grossmann, some reason which gave them no other choice; and this was why, when it had happened in Boston and now maybe even in Washington, for god’s sake, Siegel felt uneasy and unwilling to think about it too much.

This little Jesuit thing, this poltergeist, would start kicking around inside his head just as it had done with the briefcase, and call him back to the real country where there were drinks to be mixed and bon mots to be tossed out carelessly and maybe a drunk or two to take care of. It was doing that now. So all he did was look at Lucy quizically and say, “Well I don’t know. He seemed sort of under the weather. Also maybe a little neurotic.”

The girl laughed softly, not trying for rapport any more, not even the bedroom kind; but anxious now for thoughts of her own which Siegel was neither ready to be curious about nor confident he would be able to cope with. “A little neurotic,” she said, “is like being a little bit pregnant. You don’t know David. He’s well, Siegel, he’s the only one of us who is.” Siegel smiled. “I shouldn’t talk,” he said, “I’m a stranger. Look Lucy, would you help me out a little with this group?”

“Me help you? “ Suddenly weak, she answered with something that was so curiously both impotence and scorn that he began to wonder how well she was herself. “All right, I’ll make a deal. Mutual aid. The truth is I need a shoulder to cry on.” Siegel threw a quick glance behind him out into the kitchen, a glance which she caught. “Don’t worry about them,” she smiled, “ they’ll take care of themselves for awhile. They know where the liquor is and everything.” Siegel smiled in apology, pushed the door shut and settled back on the bed next to her, resting on one elbow.

A Klee original was on the wall facing them; two crossed BAR’s, hunting rifles and a few sabres hung around the other walls. The room was sparsely furnished in Swedish modern and carpeted wall to wall. He looked down at her and said, “OK, cry away.”

“I don’t really know why I should be telling you about this,” she began and it was as if she bad said. “Bless me father for I have sinned,” because Siegel often thought that if all the punks, lushes, coeds in love, woebegone PFC’s—the whole host of trodden-on and disaffected—who had approached him with that opening formula were placed end to end they would surely reach from here back to the Grand Concourse and a timid spindleshanked boy in a slashed necktie “Except,” she continued, “that you look like David, you have the same kind of sympathy for anybody who gets kicked around, I feel that somehow.” Siegel shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s Brennan. Brennan and that bitch Considine.”

And she went on to tell how apparentlv this female economics expert named Debby Considine had returned a week ago from an expedition to Ontario and right away Paul Brennan had started chasing her again. There was a tree outside her apartment house on P St. and Brennan had climbed up this tree and waited for her to collie out and whenever she did he would proclaim his passion for her in loud and improvised blank verse. Usually a small crowd would collect and finally one night the cops came with ladders and hauled him down and dragged him away.

“And who does he call to come down to the precinct to bail him out,” Lucy said. “Me, is who. Right before payday too. The bastard still hasn’t paid me back. And to make matters worse he already had a record. Krinkles Porcino, that’s Paul’s roommate, got engaged to this girl Monica back around February. The two kids were really in love, and Paul was fond of both of them, so that when Sybil—she was living with David at the time—started running after Krinkles and threatening to break the thing up—well anyway she finally threw this big bitch scene with Paul in the lobby of the Mayflower and Paul ended up slugging her with a vodka bottle he happened to be carrying, and they got him for assault. And of course David had a bad time of it because he hates to get involved in anything, but Sam Fleischmann, who’s hated Paul’s guts ever since Paul sold him $100 worth of phony uranium stock, felt so sorry for David that he started writing poison pen letters to Sybil, dumping all over Paul. He’d write them in the morning right after we got up, while I made breakfast, and we’d both laugh and laugh because it was so much fun.”

“Oh,” Siegel said, “ha, ha.”

“And then when Paul got out,” she went on, “what should happen but Harvey had to fly into a rage at Paul because he knew I was in love with Paul and was sending him cigarettes and cookies and things while he was in stir, and he chased Paul for seven blocks through the theatre district one night with a boatswain’s knife. That was sort of funny too because Harvey was in uniform and it took four SP’s finally to bring him down, and even then he broke the arm of one of them and sent another to Bethesda Naval Hospital with severe abdominal wounds. So Paul is out on bail now and threatening to get Monica because she’s living with Sam but what the hell else can she do when Krinkles has been out of town for weeks trving to kick the habit and all. The trouble is that damn junkie doesn’t know how really good she is, Siegel. She pawned Krinkles’ baritone sax only a couple of days ago because poor Sam had just lost his job at the Smithsonian and was actually starving before she found out about it and took him in. The girl’s a saint.”

She went on in the same way for fifteen minutes more, layng bare, like a clumsy brain surgeon, synapses and convolutions which should never have been exposed, revealing for Siegel the anatomy of a disease more serious than he had suspected: the badlands of the heart, in which shadows, and crisscrossed threads of inaccurate self-analysis and Freudian fallacy, and passages where the light and perspective were tricky, all threw you into that heightened hysterical edginess of the sort of nightmare it is possible to have where your eyes are open and everything in the scene is familiar, yet where, flickering behind the edge of the closet door, hidden under the chair in the corner, is this je ne sais quoi de sinistre which sends you shouting into wakefulness.

Until finally one of Brennan’s friends, whom Lucy introduced as Vincent, wandered in and informed them that somebody had already walked through the French windows without opening them; and Siegel realized wearily that it was going to be that kind of a party, and having committed himself anyway by the very act of lying next to a girl he did not know and playing the role of crying towel for half an hour, resolved in true British staff officer style to bite the jolly old bullet and make the best of a bad job.

In the kitchen were a couple seated on the sink making out; Duckworth, horribly drunk, lying on the floor and hurling pistachio nuts at the pig foetus; and a group of four or five people in Bermuda shorts sitting in a circle playing Prince. In the other room somebody had put on a cha cha record and a few couples were improvising freely. Presumably intelligent talk flickered around the room with the false brightness of heat lightning: in the space of a minute Siegel caught the words “Zen,” “San Francisco,” and “ Wittgenstein,” and felt a mild sense of disappointment, almost as if he had expected some esoteric language, something out of Albertus Magnus. Beside the pig foetus there was only one other really incongruous note in the whole scene: a swarthy looking person in torn khakis and an old corduroy coat who stood in one corner like some memento mori, withdrawn and melancholy. “ That’s Considine’s latest,” Lucy said, “an Indian she brought back from Ontario. Boy, what a hunk.”

“He looks sad,” Siegel said. Somebody handed Siegel an ambiguous mixture in an old-fashioned glass and he sipped it automatically, grimaced and set it down. “His name is Irving Loon,” she said dreamily.

“Irving what?” said Siegel.

“Loon. He’s Ojibwa. Oh there’s Paul. Talking to Considine the bastard.” She led him over to a corner where a diminutive junior executive type was eagerly haranguing this serpentine brunette with heavily mascaraed eyes. At his first glimpse of Debby Considine Siegel drew in a low whistle and let the four fingers of his left hand wobble to and for a few times, forgetting about Irving Loon, Prince players and drunken sailors. ‘”Marrone, “ he whispered. Lucy glared at him. “Not you too,” she said furiously. “Goddamn all these sex machines.” He was introduced and after awhile Lucy managed to haul Brennan away on some pretext or other and Siegel was left alone with the lady economist.

“And how were the boondocks of Ontario,” he said. She looked at him from under lowered lashes. “So fascinating,” she murmured in a husky, detached voice. “Do you know the Ojibwa?” Seigel began flipping over a stack of mental IBM cards frantically. There was something he knew, something he had had in college. It irritated him not to be able to call the information up because most of the courses he had taken had served no other function—at least such had been his undergraduate protests—than to provide material for conversation at parties like this one. Ojibwa Indians. Somewhere in Ontario. Something weird, even funny, but he was damned if he could pin it down.

“You look compassionate,” Debby said suddenly. “Is there somewhere we can talk?” and Siegel, pulled away from the IBM cards, thought Jesus Christ, here we go again. He led her into the bedroom, which was beginning to look like some perversely-decorated confessional, and wondered whether this had been David Lupescu’s place for listening to bent souls. He had a hunch it was. She stood close to him and played with his Challis tie and gave him the demure bit with the eyelashes again. “You’re the same,” she whispered, “you have this monumental Lupescu coolness. You’re sure you’re not his doubleganger.”

“No,” Siegel said, “I’m not sure. Go ahead.” She hesitated and he prompted her: “Bless me father...”

The eyelids flew open. “David said that too. Who are you, Siegel?”

“For the moment a father confessor. What seems to be your trouble, my child.”

“It’s Irving Loon,” she said, sitting on the bed and playing with the empty highball glass she had brought in with her, ignoring the irony, “he was so happy back in Ontario. At ricing time, you see, all the families are together, everyone happy, Togetherness in Ojibwa land. Blasts, brawls, sex orgies, community sings, puberty rituals. All kinds of wonderful local color to fill up notebook after notebook with. And Irving Loon, ten feet tall with fists like rocks and enough to make even a jaded heart like mine uneasy.” Then, surprisingly— and, for Siegel, embarrassingly—she began reeling off a list of the affairs she had had in all the underdeveloped areas she had visited for the State Dept.; several pages of unofficial statistics which sounded a little like the Catalogue aria from Don Giovanni.

It seemed she had this habit of picking up male specimens wherever she went and bringing them back with her and dropping them after a few weeks. Her exes either assimilated in with The Group or found a niche in some other group or dropped out of sight completely and forever. But Irving Loon, she insisted, was different. He had this brooding James Dean quality about him.

“He’s been standing in the same corner all evening,” she said. “ He hasn’t spoken a word for two days. I feel—“ and her eyes gazed over Siegel’s shoulder, out into god knows where “that it’s not only nostalgia for the wilderness, but almost as if somehow out there, in the hinterlands, with nothing but snow and forests and a few beaver and moose, he has come close to something which city dwellers never find all their lives, may never even be aware exists, and it’s this that he misses, that the city kills or hides from him.” I’ll be damned, thought Siegel. This broad is serious. “And this is just what I can’t tell Paul,” she sighed. “He makes fun of Irving, calIs him ignorant. But it’s a divine melancholia and it’s what I love about him.”

Good grief, that was it.

Melancholia. Just by accident she had used that word, the psychologist’s term, instead of “melancholy.” Little Professor Mitchell, perched like a sparrow on his desk in anthropology lecture, hands in his coat pockets, a permanently sarcastic smile twisting one side of his mouth, talking about psychopathy among the Ojibwa Indians. Of course. The old memory bank was still functioning after all. “You must remember that this group lives forever at the brink of starvation,” Mitchell said in that deprecating, apologetic tone which implied that for him all cultures were equally mad; it was only the form that differed, never the content. “It has been said that the Ojibwa ethos is saturated with anxiety,” and simultaneously 50 pens copied the sentence verbatim.

“The Ojibwa are trained, from childhood, to starve; the male ehild’s entire upbringing is dedicated to a single goal: that of becoming a great hunter. Emphasis is on isolation, self-sufiiciency. There is no sentimentality among the Ojibwa. It is an austere and bleak existence they lead, always one step away from death. Before he can attain to the state of manhood a boy must experience a vision, after starving himself for several days. Often after seeing this vision he feels he has acquired a supernatural companion, and there is a tendency to identify. Out in the wilderness, with nothing but a handful of beaver, deer, moose and bear between him and starvation, for the Ojibwa hunter, feeling as he does at bay, feeling a concentration of obscure cosmic forces against him and him alone, cynical terrorists, savage and amoral deities—“ this time a smile in self-reproach—“which are bent on his destruction, the identification may become complete. When such paranoid tendencies are further intensified bv the highly competitive life of the summer villages at ricing and berry-picking time, or bv the curse, perhaps, of a shaman with some personal grudge, the Ojibwa becomes highly susceptible to the well-known Windigo psychosis.”

Siegel knew about the Windigo, all right. He remembered being scared out of his wits once at camp by the fireside yarn image of a mile-high skeleton made of ice, roaring and crashing through the Canadian wilderness, grabbing up humans by the handful and feeding on their flesh. But he had outgrown the nightmares of boyhood enough to chuckle at the professor’s description of a half-famished hunter, already slightly warped, identifying with the Windigo and turning into a frenzied cannibal himelf, foraging around the boondocks for more food after he had gorged himself on the bodies of his immediate family. “Get the picture,” he had told Grossmann that night, over mugs of Wurtzburger. “Altered perception. Simultaneously, all over god knows how many square miles, hundreds, thousands of these Indians are looking at each other out of the corner of their eye and not seeing wives or husbands or little children at all. What they see is big fat juicy beavers. And these Indians are hungry, Grossmann. I mean, my gawd. A big mass psychosis. As far as the eye can reach—“ he gestured dramatically— “Beavers. Succulent, juicy, fat.”

“How yummy,” Grossmann had commented wryly. Sure, it was amusing, in a twisted sort of way. And it gave anthropologists something to write about and people at parties something to talk about. Fascinating, this Windigo psychosis. And oddly enough its first stages were marked by a profound melancholia. That was what had made him remember, a juxtaposition of words, an accident. He wondered why Irving Loon had not been talking for two days. He wondered if Debby Considine knew about this area of the Ojibwa personality.

“And Paul just won’t understand,” she was saying. “Of course it was a bitchy thing to complain to the police but I’d lie awake nights, thinking of him crouched up in that tree, like some evil spirit, waiting for me. I suppose I’ve always been a little afraid of something like that, something unfamiliar, something I couldn’t manipulate. Oh yes,” she admitted to his raised eyebrows, “I’ve manipulated them all right. I didn’t want to, Siegel, god knows I didn’t. But I can’t help it.” Siegel felt like saying, “Use a little less mascara or something,” but was brought up short by an awareness which had been at the back of his mind since Lupescu had left: a half-developed impression about the role Lupescu had occupied for this group; and it occurred to him that his double would never have said anything like that. You might give absolution or penance, but no practical advice. Tucked snugly in some rectory of the mind, Cleanth Siegel, S.J., looked on with approval. “Changing the subject for a moment,” Siegel said, “do you know, has Irving told you anything about the Windigo?”

“It’s funny you should mention that,” she said, “it’s a nature god or something, that they worship. I’m not on the anthropology end of things or I could tell you more about it. But the last time Irving was talking—he speaks English so well—he said once ‘Windigo, Windigo, stay by me.’ It’s this poetic, religious quality in him that’s so touching.” And right about here Siegel began to feel really uneasy, to hear this tiny exasperating dissonance. Poetic? Religious? Ha, ha.

“I’m afraid,” she was saying. “I get so depressed, so exhausted. Even as a little girl I used to be scared of being hit by a meteorite, isn’t that silly? This terror of the unfamiliar, this sort of arbitrary act of god or something. It got bad, very bad, two years ago and I tried to straighten everything out with an act of Debby Considine, by taking rather more than the prescribed amount of Seconal. Then when it didn’t work I rode up on another crest and I’ve been there for two years and I guess non I’m about due for a trough again.”

Siegel sat up suddenly and glared straight ahead of him, at the crossed BAR’s on the wall. He was getting fed up with this. Lupescu was wrong: you did not pick this sort of thing up quickly at all. It was a slow process and dangerous because in the course of things it was very possible to destroy not only yourself but vour flock as well. He took her hand. “Come on,” he said, “I’d like to meet Irving. Sav for your penance ten Hail Marys and make a good Act of Contrition.”

“Oh my god,” she murmured. “I am heartily sorry . . .” and apparently she was, but probably only because the interview had been cut short. They threaded their way between several inert bodies in the kitchen. The cha cha side had been replaced by Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Siegel smiled grimly because of its appropriateness; because he knew he could listen to anything else but this mad Hungarian without getting bugged, but at the sound of an entire string section run suddenly amok, shrieking like an uprooted mandrakes trying to tear itself apart, the nimble little Machiavel inside him would start to throw things at the mensch who had just cast off adolescence and who still sat perpetual shivall for people like Debby Considine and Lucy and himself and all the other dead, trying to goad it into action; and he wondered if perhaps Lucy’s diagnosis of Lupescu’s trouble hadn’t been correct and if someday he, Siegel, might not find himself standing in front of some mirror with a pig foetus under one arm, rec iting Freudian cant at himself to get the proper inflection right.

“Irving Loon,” Debby said, “Cleanth Siegel.” Irving Loon stood motionless, seemingly unaware of their presence. Debby put her hand on the Ojibwa’s arm and caressed it. “Irving,” she said softly, “ please say something.” Damn the torpedoes, Siegel thought. Full speed ahead. “Windigo,” he said quietly and Irving Loon jumped as if an ice cube had been dropped down his neck. He looked intently at Siegel, probing suddenly with black, piercing eyes. Then he shifted his gaze to Debby and smiled wanly. He put his arm around her waist and nuzzled her cheek. “ Debby,” he murmured, “my beautiful little beaver.”

“Isn’t that sweet,” Debby said, smiling over her shoulder at Siegel. Oh my god, Siegel thought. Oh no. Beaver? Now wait a minute. Somebody was tugging at Siegel’s coat sleeve and he turned swiftly, nervously, and saw Brennan. “Can I see you alone for a minute,” Brennan said. Siegel hesitated. Irving Loon and Debby were whispering endearments to one another. “Sure, okay,” Siegel said absently. They crunched over the broken glass from the French windows and went out on a small balcony, which was just as well, because Siegel was beginning to get a little sick of the bedroom. The rain had dwindled to a light mist and Siegel pulled his coat collar up. “I hear you’re a pretty sympathetic guy,” Brennan began, “and I guess you know how it is with me and Debby. The truth is I’m worried about that Indian.”

“So am I,” Siegel started to say and then caught himself. This theory about why Irving Loon was not talking was based only on suspicion; and this whole absurd, surrealist atmosphere had after all been working on an imagination known occasionally to go off the deep end. So instead he said, “I could see where you might.” Brennan turned crafty. “I think he’s using hypnosis on her,” he confided, darting quick glances back inside to see if anyone was listening. Siegel nodded profoundly.

Brennan went on to explain his side of the tree-climbing episode and by the time he was through Siegel, who had not been paying attention, was surprised to find, on looking at his watch for the first time that evening, that it was almost eleven. A few people had left and the party was showing the first signs of slowing down. Siegel wandered out into the kitchen where he found half a fifth of scotch, and made a scotch on the rocks; his first drink, as a matter of fact, since he had arrived. He stood in the kitchen, alone, trying to assess things. First stage, melancholia. Second stage, direct violence. How much had Irving Loon been drinking? How much did starvation have to do with the psychosis once it got under way? And then the enormity of it hit him. Because if this hunch were true, Siegel had the power to work for these parishioners a kind of miracle, to bring them a very tangible salvation. A miracle involving a host, true, but like no holy eucharist. He was the only one, besides Irving Loon, who knew. Also, a sober voice reminded him, he was apparently the only one who had the Windi go psychosis as his sole piece of information about the Ojibwa. It might be a case of generalization, there might be any number of things wrong with Irving Loon. Still, perhaps . . . a case of conscience.

Vincent came up to him and wanted to talk but he waved him off. Siegel had had about enough of confessions. He wondered how his predecessor had managed to remain as father confessor for as long as he had. It occurred to him now that Lupescu’s parting comment had been no drunken witticism; but that the man really had, like some Kurtz, been possessed by the heart of a darkness in which no ivory was ever sent out from the interior, but instead hoarded jealously by each of its gatherers to build painfully, fragment by fragment, temples to the glory of some imago or obsession, and decorated inside with the art work of dream and nightmare, and locked finally against a hostile forest, each “ agent” in his own ivory tower, having no windows to look out of, turning further and further inward and cherishing a small flame behind the altar. And Kurtz too had been in his way a father confessor. Siegel shook his head, trying to clear it. Somebody had started a crap game in the other room and Siegel sat down on the kitchen table, swinging one leg, looking in at the crowd. “Oh you’re a fine group,” he muttered.

He was beginning to think that maybe he should tell all these people to go to hell and go drop in on Rachel after all when he saw Irving Loon come dreamlike in under the pig foetus, eyes staring straight ahead, unseeing. Siegel, paralyzed, watched Irving Loon go into the bedroom, drag a chair over to one wall, stand on it, and unhook one of the BAR’s. Rapt, entirely absorbed in what he was doing, the Indian began rummaging around in the drawers of Lupescu’s desk. Gingerly Siegel edged himself off the table and tiptoed to the bedroom door. Irving Loon, still singing to himself produced with a smile a box of .30 caliber ammunition. Happily he began putting rounds into the magazine. Siegel counted the rounds as he put them in. The magazine would hold 20. All right, Siegel, he said to himself, here it is. Moment of truth.

Espada broken, muleta lost, horse disembowelled, picadors sick with fear. Five in the afternoon, crowd screaming. Miura bull, sharp horns, charging in. He figured there were about sixty seconds to make a decision, and now the still small Jesuit voice, realizing that the miracle was in his hands after all, for real, vaunted with the same sense of exhiliration Siegel had once felt seeing five hundred hysterical freshmen advancing on the women’s dorms, knowing it was he who had set it all in motion. And the other, gentle part of him sang kaddishes for the dead and mourned over the Jesuit’s happiness, realizing however that this kind of penance was as good as any other; it was just unfortunate that Irving Loon would be the only one partaking of any body and blood, divine or otherwise. It took no more than five seconds for the two sides to agree that there was really only one course to take.

Quietly Siegel strolled back through the kitchen, through the living room, taking his time, unnoticed by the crap shooters, opened the door, stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him. He walked downstairs, whistling. At the first floor landing, he heard the first screams, the pounding of footsteps, the smashing of glass. He shrugged. What the hell, stranger things had happened in Washington. It was not until he had reached the street that he heard the first burst of the BAR fire.

Epoch Spring, 1959