The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Read online

  The aspic of my eye.

  The next page of manuscript suggested that I was probably not reading the poems in the order in which they’d been written, in the order, that is, of Sweetie’s spiritual and aesthetic development over the years the material spanned. It was a series of couplets done in the offhand mixture of rhyme and near-rhyme of the early Auden:

  No need to cry “Touché!”

  When scalped of your toupée.

  All that’s false must go.

  Breast the future so:

  Comrades marching bald

  Of all illusion, galled

  By nothing but a fattish

  Sentimental fetish.

  Beware the well-groomed prexy

  Whose daughter wants your proxy;

  Don’t pay for those coiffures

  Seen in rotogravures.

  Beware the smiling briber.

  Develop lots of fiber.

  Plan on growing thinner

  Of a reasonable dinner,

  And leave the past to puke

  Into its own peruke.

  It was odd to think of Sweetie embracing proletarian thought and sounding calls to revolution, till one remembered her old obsession with the vested “They”—now simply transposed into an economic key—and that she probably didn’t realize what she was saying anyway. A more interesting question to me was how long it had taken her to play it down, to “throw it away” as they were saying in the theater at the same time that the antipoetic was proceeding on other fronts. Many influences must have been at work before the Oxford Group had their way with Sweetie, not least of which would be the conversational tone of more obvious origin as displayed in a poem entitled “Stopping at a Country Auction on a Summer Afternoon:”

  Whose goods these are I think I know.

  His house is in the churchyard though;

  He will not see me stopping here

  To see how well his goods will go.

  “Brother!” I thought, very possibly aloud. This went beyond the question of influences. Sweetie was at it again—shoplifting. She had plagiarized from every poet who amounted to a damn since Whitman, sometimes riding about in her appropriations (taking stolen cars as the specific metaphor) without bothering to file the serial numbers off the motors. The result was almost a parody history of modern verse.

  Knowing I was a fool, I kept an ear cocked for a note I had not heard before, that would announce our Sweetie had at last found her own style. I died hard, on the theory, I guess, that what obtains in legal burglaries must be true of the artistic, namely their requiring enough skill to suggest what the criminal might do if he went straight. While it was one thing to turn out yet another hieroglyphic of Cummings, complete with no capitals and looking as though it had been punctuated with a pepper shaker, and maybe not much better to note the swing to religion among intellectuals in a paraphrase of T. S. Eliot ending:

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a wimple …

  While these were, I say, one thing, it was something else again to forge a lyric entitled “All Isles Are Blessed While the Voyage Lasts” that would not entirely have disgraced its model, Elinor Wylie:

  All isles are blessèd while

  The Voyage lasts,

  All harbors handsome

  From the masts.

  Living with you’s lovely,

  But I’d sooner

  Go to seek you

  In my schooner.

  I took hope from my not being altogether sure whether it was Wylie or Millay bleeding through here; it had the strain of girlish irony running in both. And it required a bit of something or other to produce a mimicry of Wallace Stevens that I recognized as such even from the title—“The Courtesan Takes Cortisone”—some of whose further word-plays ran:

  Perhaps

  Her paps

  Are not what was expected.

  In short, Sweetie not only talked about poetry—she did something about it.

  What was I going to do about that?

  After reading about half of this goulash I asked Mme. Pique-puss (who had been going quietly about the room dividing hornets) whether I might take the manuscript home with me for more leisurely perusal. She saw no objections, except to my holding it longer than overnight, for she had stolen it from a drawer of Sweetie’s desk without the latter’s knowing it. So it was that midnight found me in my own easy chair, reading avidly. The foolscap was intermingled with sheets of ruled and punched notebook paper, many of them old and scuffed. The writing was in both pencil and typewriter.

  For a long time it was more of the same. Jeffers, de la Mare, Yeats and even Rossetti passed in chronologically untidy review. I was grateful for all my past immersion in the originals, which stood me in good stead in spotting the thieveries.

  As I approached the end of the manuscript, I came to a page that straightened me in my chair. Here was a beat that was new to me, and one that I found instantly exhilarating. Lush sensuous imagery and sheer reveling in words created an effect that broke over me like a wave:

  While still erect as gravestones let us sing

  How in the Sabbeth-gentled west the rose

  Blooms from the groin of the sea where all

  My long boatmen lie detained, whose salt blood ticks in my wrist

  Here on the hill where bleeds the pubic spring,

  And the bridegroom came.

  I make this in a summer’s dalliance, when all the lion-loined

  And loaned and lying loves have left, and a clenching wind

  Turns me to the ribbed shore beyond. In the field

  Behind me waves tomorrow’s bread. In ocean beds

  The seamen in their beards are tweaked by every tide.

  Then the red reptile in my vine of veins

  Quickens to music from the fluting bones of birds.

  So clutching that prophet pickled long in brine

  I let his grandson pluck me from the Scriptures south

  Straight to that shuttered room in Mozambique

  Where a twist of the dial will shut the ectoplasm off,

  Killing the suitor with the smoking gun, the débutante in splints,

  The cross-eyed cop, and all the the’s we got from Auden and his boys.

  So all my mother tolled me is the clapper in the belle.

  And all I know is what he rages in the dusk, the song

  Whirled out of the wheat in Sunday’s bread, the bread in Monday’s wheat:

  The last harvest is a shower of seed.

  I rose, scarcely able to breathe. Could it be true? Had Beth Appleyard, the girl who had for so long gnawed her braids at an upper window, at last broken through her period of apprenticeship into a style authentically her own? Not only that, but one that would burst upon our generation with all the rioting imagery, wild-soaring music and plain juice-squirting joy in words needed to free poetry itself from its long calcification? And was I destined to be her discoverer?

  Sweetie? No, it was too fantastic. And yet, why not? Stranger human organisms than she had produced the world’s art. And how much infantilism was there not demonstrably at the heart of all talent? “You were silly like us” Auden had written of Yeats himself.

  Trembling, I read the poem again, and two more in the same vein. There was no doubt about it. Here was an idiom I had not encountered before. It sent the chills up my spine. I hardly slept a wink that night. Still quivering with excitement, I hurried over to show my prize to the one man in Decency capable of appreciating it.

  Nickie was sitting outside the Samothrace. He had his head tilted back to put nosedrops into it for some allergy he suffered this time of year, while in the other hand he held a copy of the Kenyon Review which he continued to read in the position required for this medication. It was a way of showing himself “dedicated,” to all the lumpish and witless herd scurrying past his table. In our high school days, we had persuad
ed the Greek to let us drag a few tables out onto the sidewalk, there to sip our coffee in the evening air as true expatriates. The custom had persisted through every summer since, with only a little worried reluctance on the part of the Greek who thought we were talking about being “expatriots,” and whose own wish to be a loyal American, albeit a dirty and sardonic one, was thus severely jarred. Latterly, he was hearing the term Existential bandied about, but he seemed to think it was the name of an insurance company. The only other sidewalk customer at the moment was a man named Pete Shotz who must have been as old as Mme. Piquepuss but in whom, by contrast, the vital saps no longer ran. He had lost all his illusions in 1919 when Shoeless Joe Jackson and his cohorts had thrown the World Series, thereby betraying both the Chicago White Sox and the sport of baseball as such. He rolled his own cigarettes from a sack of Bull Durham, spilling flakes into his beer, which no doubt gained in zest thereby.

  “Setzen Sie sich,” Nickie said.

  “Never mind that,” I said, drawing out a chair so as not to disturb Prud’homme, who was snoozing under another. We lit up cigarettes, and then, in a pause, I drew from my bosom the three or four sheets of manuscript which comprised the samples of my discovery.

  “What do you think of these?” I said, tossing them on the table. “Some poems a local writer gave me to look at.”

  Nickie smoothed them down and read, with no want of absorption I was glad to see. Once, turning a page, he raised his eyebrows in appreciation at some twist of phrase. When he had finished he handed them back to me, nodding.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  “Not bad. Is that all you can say?”

  “They’re amazingly skillful pastiches, sure. Some of the echoes are uncanny. All that sea stuff, and the Sabbath-gentled west, catch him to a T. It’s a favorite trick of Thomas’s, making verbs out of adjectives and nouns. And that sort of sprung rhythm, which he got from Hopkins, of course.”

  Gritting my teeth, I turned in my chair to flag the Greek through the door. But the effort to get him out here was well-nigh hopeless, and I abandoned it. Nickie was nursing a beer which he had undoubtedly fetched himself.

  “Thomas who?” I said. “You act as though he were a personal friend of yours.” Apparently this new voice had already burst on the literary scene while I was tied up with other things than avant-garde publications.

  “Dylan Thomas.”

  “That’s better. Of course Dylan Thomas. Do you think I don’t realize that? Of course every writer is derivative at first. I didn’t come here to ask you that. What I’m trying to decide is whether behind the echoes there’s enough individuality to warrant encouraging her, for Christ’s sweet sake.”

  “‘Her,’ eh? Who is she? Anybody I know?”

  Now there was a funny thing. For days that had been the very thing I’d been meaning to ask him—whether he knew Sweetie. Another one of Nickie’s high-school-day mots had popped into my mind, about a certain girl having “lovely lips but a cruel mouth,” and I wondered if he had said it about her. I now told him her name. “She was called Sweetie.”

  He shook his head. “No, it doesn’t ring any bell. Who is she? What does she want?”

  “Oh, a half-daft girl with vine leaves in her hair, who hears the horns of elfland faintly blowing. She’s going to kill us all yet. She’s the one there was that oratorical contest scandal about.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember that, vaguely.”

  “Well, at least she reads. She keeps up.”

  Dylan Thomas, eh? I must look into him. Evidently the new thing since Auden and Co. all right. It might be pointed out in my defense that though Dylan Thomas had appeared here in print and had even cut that legendary swathe through Midtown Manhattan and down the Eastern girl’s-school circuit that was to establish him as the most Byronic figure since Byron, he was still the pleasure of the few. This was the last poet whose pockets Sweetie Appleyard was to pick, and in whose arms she was destined to lie, but I couldn’t know that then. All I knew then was that I couldn’t sit here and discuss the Apocalyptic Movement with Nickie; I was too busy, with too many people to get organized, including himself. I would see him soon enough at the Flickendens’ brawl. That was where he would get his.

  “I suppose it’ll be ghastly,” I said. “Fancy dress, have you heard that? God. Why do we keep going to things over and over that drive us crazy, when all we need to get out of them is the guts to say the simple word ‘No’?”

  Nickie agreed with me. Nodding, he sipped his beer with narrowed eyes, perfecting my observation.

  “Yes,” he said at last, “it is to cowardice, rather than to courage, that we pay our tolls of stamina.”

  “Horse pizzle,” I said. “I can’t sit here exchanging horse-pizzly nuances about life. I have work to do. See you Saturday then. Do you know how you’ll go?” I asked, rising. “I haven’t decided on a costume yet.”

  “I may go as an ass,” he said, “because that’s certainly how I’ll feel.”

  If you only knew the half of it, baby! I thought as I bade him good-by and hurried back to the office.

  8

  I WENT as a house painter myself.

  I had spent the afternoon calcimining upstairs bedrooms and been struck with the inspiration of going as the early Schicklgruber, which combined with a ready-made costume the virtue of not having to dress for dinner. It went down poorly with Crystal, who had spent hours, if I shouldn’t say weeks, assembling herself as the Mother of the Gracchi, on the assumption that I would go as Tiberius Sempronius, her husband. My last-minute resource, or rather the unpreparedness it was designed to meet, provoked a bitter quarrel. We had been in touchy spirits since four o’clock when Crystal had chided me for not having “done anything” about Nickie, which I analyzed as pique at her not having been let in on the secret of the threatened divorce. She had learned it that afternoon from Lila herself, in the form of her wondering when I was going to keep my promises about Nickie. She couldn’t indefinitely hang on by her teeth.

  “Wait till tonight,” I had said mysteriously from the scaffolding, under which Crystal stood issuing her queries. “He may get his come-uppance. That’s what he needs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see. He’s what is known in psychiatry as too big for his britches.”

  When I declined to amplify, the exclusion from yet another plot added fuel to the fire, as I saw when I finished my decorating and went into our bedroom. I had knelt to pin the hem of her royal gown, and, impulsively thrusting my head between her thighs, murmured a small devotional. “Oh, Chick, for God’s sake,” she said. “Why does a man always think that will make a thing right? It’s so easy, and so cheap.”

  Luckily the younger Gracchi wandered in just then. Children do indeed hold two people together, but as mortar does the bricks, by also keeping them a little apart. I rose and said, “Is Blitzstein still tied up all right, ye pampered sprats o’ mine?” An incident involving the dog had contributed to the trials of the day.

  A neighbor known to me chiefly as the owner of a low-slung foreign convertible had telephoned complaining that Blitzstein chased his and other cars in a way that constituted a menace on the road. The animal being a mixed Dane and German police of enormous size, he must run alongside any open sports car at about eye-level with the exposed driver, which I could well imagine was unnerving. However, when the fellow went on to protest that you couldn’t drive a car “faster than twenty miles an hour around here for the dogs,” I retorted that that was nearer the speed limit than his sort usually went when there weren’t any dogs around to furnish restraining hazards, but only children.

  As we all four discussed the problem, Blitzstein began to bark furiously in the yard. We knew what the trouble was before we reached the window. His leash chain was hooked to slide along a fifty-foot tie-out wire strung between two trees, which gave him that much mobility—except when, as now, he got the leash snarled around one of the terminals and couldn’t move an inch.

>   “Oh,” Fillmore groaned, “now we’ve got to untangle all that chain again. Come on, Mike, you hold him while I unwind it.”

  “No, no,” I said, “that’s not necessary. You let the dog do it. Watch.”

  We followed me outside. Utilizing the dog’s instinct to caper in its master’s wake, I walked around that tree in a manner reversing the entanglement, in ever-winding circles, till the dog was clear of its predicament and had the freedom of the run-wire restored to it. I became quite dizzy in the process, but the thing was done without any tedious disconnecting of chains, etc., and to the instruction of the boys for future purposes. I had just enough time to pick up the sitter—a woman we knew well, named Mrs. Healy—before hurrying on over to the fête.

  We created quite a stir, arriving as Hitler and Cornelia, but quickly dissolved in the general grotesquerie. Our hosts had come—or rather were waiting for us—as Caesar and Cleopatra. A stuffed viper encircled Helen Flickenden’s arm while Jack’s brow was crowned with a victor’s chaplet woven of rhododendron leaves. Its weight and bulk made it keep slipping down over his eyes, like a derby a size too large, in a manner that hampered his greetings by interfering with his recognition of the guests. A man in a moth-eaten leopardskin dragging a spiked bludgeon sauntered up and was introduced as a house guest. “I’m the bouncer,” he announced facetiously. The Flickendens were in an income group statistically identified as boasting a servant and a half, but a swarm of white-jacketed waiters from the caterer’s carried the field tonight. When we arrived they still outnumbered the guests.