A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (18 page)

When I was a small boy, hearing my pioneer grandparents tell of their early trips west, I confused them with the three wise men, the Three Kings of the Orient. And later I had a little repeating dream in which those three appeared, not wise and royal but young and foolish, wearing coonskin caps and poke bonnets, traveling after their star to Bethlehem by covered wagon and canal boat. Now it seems to me that this childish mistake and infantile dream were not altogether stupid; the Magi in fact must have been like that. They went by their optimism and prognostication, not really knowing what they would find at the spot marked for them on their map of starlight, or what would result from it. They would make very suitable patron saints for us too, now, here on the frontiers of culture and commerce in New York.

Then I turned back uptown, with my grandiose notion of New York, the threat of its failure and the wonder of its future, still in my mind. And I decided that, with no more than my usual pretentiousness—all imaginative men are pretentious, at least all imaginative American men—I could call it a kind of epiphany. The matters of fact and my make-believe were so mixed in it, and seemed so nearly the same thing, that I would never try to distinguish them; and I had so great a sense of its importance and so strange a feeling of my own unimportance that it made me shiver. As plain as day, and as promising, it shone there, as it were, before my eyes, under my nose, in the poor damp dirty street which indeed was no better than a stable, amid the asininity and the bovine simplicity and sloth of my various fellow men pushing along on the sidewalk with me, on their way home to their dinners.

Shop windows, a thousand shop windows, a weary dirty crowd, and things like that, are the factual detail of New York, and I cannot pretend to think any of that beautiful, or important. There was nothing in the shop windows made to last, nothing except Mr. Kress’s Giorgione. New York is lovable, strange, and sometimes funny; it is not beautiful or important, yet. It is a thousand things, unfinished, misused, potential, wasted; and until we have great art, especially a great literary art, no one will be able to make much sense of it. It is a question mark, to which imagination keeps answering. No matter whether my particular answer is the right answer; there is an answer, and someone more important than I will find it out before long. It is a promise broken again and again and again, it is vacuous and virgin. I can find fault with it by the hour; and therefore I love it, in view of the fact that it has time and energy enough to remedy everything. I love it because this is its time. I love it because it is lucky. I love it because, like most New Yorkers, I am an optimist.

Oh, it may turn out badly, growing dramatic and tragic as the years go by, in the long run, like the cities of Europe. For God is not mocked, even by American cheerfulness, God is tragic. In any event it will not be the same drama, the old fatalistic theme and trap-like plot. Insofar as we can see ahead in history, we shall not be overthrown by fate, in a kind of mockery of Greek tragedy, as it has been in Europe; nor will it be a mimicry of Wagner, as European historians and philosophers have expressed their sense of fate lately, with an excuse and an alibi for everyone and no hope for anyone. There is plenty of hope for us. If New York fails it will be like a strong young person, in pride and folly, with its future in its power, its heart’s desire in its hands, letting it drop. There will be no excuse for us. Perhaps because I am a New Yorker, I prefer that. I think that in the whole of history there has never been a city which had so great a degree of free will.

As I walked back up Fifth Avenue the weather began to change, rapidly and romantically as it does here. The temperature fell, the humidity decreased, the dimness cleared up. With unexpected motion the sky was putting itself in order, the clouds, as the daylight waned out of them, shifting away; then down the west-side side streets a very slight sunset waved like a handkerchief. At the street corners there were little winds; the cold was coming for Christmas. There is a certain hardship in this brilliant, ever vacillating climate, which New Yorkers like. If you relax in it, you collapse, but if you keep from collapsing long enough, you become a part of it and begin to draw upon a certain force by which it seems inhabited. You cease to be tired and you begin to tire others. New York is a hard place to accomplish anything in. Something about it tends to prevent any kind of facility. If you try to do facile work in it, you find yourself doing bad work, which is not the same thing.

It got dark fast; a transparent or translucent darkness. The lights came on. In apartment buildings curtains were drawn, but in office buildings the windows of a million white- collar workers shone, some with long piercing beams, some with a fiery and puffy illumination for them to finish their day’s work by. In one skyscraper, idler, darker than the others, a single bulb of who knows how many watts twinkled so strongly that I could not look straight at it. A hotel on the east side looked like a Christmas tree, festooned; but in general the bright scene in the air did not have a holiday aspect; it was solemn. There was nothing crimson or green anywhere except the stop lights up the avenue.

I was pleased, pleased to the point of ecstasy, with everything, everything except the war. And with imagination at work, or at play—I could not tell which—I saw New York in its entirety and immensity in my mind’s eye as clearly as Fifth Avenue ahead of me: New York, looming as it does when you come in from flat Long Island, New York as a vast cloud in the river, over the diamond wavelets and ferryboats like glowworms and sad extinguished freighters and fighting ships. And my mind also went to the other extreme: I saw myself there in the street very small, with objectivity and subjectivity mixed in a dream, unreal but not untrue; someone going out to dine presently with his dear one, someone not first- rate and yet all right. A man of promise, ineffectual but resolute, more resolute than before taking this walk.

That midsummer day, when I went down on the Fifth Avenue bus to lunch with a friend, there was a jam of traffic, and the sidewalks for several blocks in the Fifties were crowded. It was not a strike, not a parade, not a motor-accident. Everyone was looking up at the Hotel Gotham, or perhaps the church on the opposite corner. I myself could not discover a thing, which vexed and amused me.

We lunched in Fifty-fifth Street, and when we came out of the restaurant there were upward-gazing people all the way to Madison Avenue. It might have been the homecoming of a flier or something of that sort. The many tilted necks and shaded eyes were very impressive; I thought, with no ribaldry, that it might have been the second coming of the Messiah. By that time the assembly in Fifth Avenue had ominously increased. We made our way into it, and learned what the trouble was: a young man with evidently suicidal intent stood on a very narrow cornice outside the seventeenth floor of the Gotham. He had been there several hours. It was impossible to catch hold of him, and so far, it had been impossible to persuade him to come back inside the building, back away from his death.

The crowd too was in a fantastic state of mind, or of two or three minds: hoping to see him saved; hoping to see him leap, if in fact it could not be prevented; hoping, and also fearing, that it was only a stunt. Especially women here and there were getting into arguments as to what he meant, and whether he “really” meant it, and whether he had a right to trouble his fellow citizens so; and those who thought him a coward or only a publicity-seeker were vehemently, but too vehemently, scornful of the others. In many faces appeared a somewhat affected good cheer; and one or two of both sexes were in an enthusiasm verging upon tearfulness. But for most of them apparently it was a moment not of emotion but of a kind of harassed intellectual effort. They were New Yorkers, that is to say, proud of always understanding what goes on in New York. They were trying to concentrate, in response to, and in spite of each other’s innumerable bothering presence; to decide what was happening, what was going to happen, in a hurry, before it happened.

The policemen were having terrible work with them and with the traffic, but they did not curse or blow their whistles loudly; and their faces showed only the kindliest exasperation and anxiety. Some people had equipped themselves with field-glasses. One stout gentle-man with a rosy hard old baby-face such as I shall have myself in twenty years, peered up through tiny mother-of-pearl opera glasses. Judging by the solemnity of his squint and the liveliness of his old lips, the close-up of the wretched young man’s face must have been wonderful. It was ideal weather, not warm enough to make one hate one’s fellow men; and the sun was within a veil, so that it was not blinking. A hurdy-gurdy purveyed its vulgar song down the side-street where the multitude did not prevent it.

At the various vantage points magnificent newsreel cameras were set up, artillery of our quiet hemisphere; and the cameramen kept their hands on the crank in case he suddenly jumped. So why wait? I asked myself. One would be able to see it, indeed one could scarcely avoid seeing it, at every movie theater in town. The block of West Fifty-fifth Street beneath his perch was closed; and there a good many more policemen and reporters stood around on foot. An ambulance was in readiness. A hook-and-ladder truck came, with restrained clang. But I heard someone say that there was no point in spreading a life-net; he was too high; the strands of a net would cut him all up. Someone else had seen him accept a glass of water from one of the men and women who were leaning out of the hotel window, so near him, yet so far. Someone had heard someone say that those were his mother and brother and sister. I took a good look at him. He was young, slight, handsome. He wore a white shirt and no coat. He was smoking a cigarette, and moved restlessly; and to every move the crowd responded with its immense and confused, if not altogether stupid, sympathy.

I did not wish to see him leap. It was not the waiting with the crowd that I dreaded: the fatigue of waiting, the crowd-sickness. He looked so restless and fatigued that it seemed to me that I should not have to wait long. I was half ashamed of my disinclination. Is it not part of my literary business to see things, and have I not always enjoyed that part at least? Certainly there would be details of which my imagination would not be apt to inform me, which the candidest photographer could not catch, and which, I dare say, only a Hemingway or a Porter could describe more nicely than I: the heave and the gulp of the crowd when it happened; the tint of the overcast heaven just then; the white-shirted shape just how darkened, just how deformed, by its velocity downward… . No matter; I would not stay. It was from my own melancholy, not the young man’s, that I fled; and it was hard work, slow going, through the upset populace. Now, alas, having started the writing of this little commentary, I must reconsider and be instructed by my own case, which is unpleasant and perhaps unwholesome.

Waiting at home all that summer afternoon to hear what finally happened, I believed—and I still believe—that in the worst way in the world the young man wanted to quit it, give up, go back inside the hotel room. I looked at him strictly, and I am fairly perceptive. Surely it was not the hard or fond face of the true idealizer of death, or the man who has deliberated and found death the lesser of two evils. It was an afraid face, afraid of altitude and abyss and hard pavement among other things. But, oh, what a difficult and disgrace-ful predicament he was in! Right there behind him was the window full of his intimates passionately watching him, mother and brother and sister perhaps, persons who all the rest of his life might be expected to complain of him, to patronize him, to make fun of him and trip him up—if he let them conclude that when he slipped out on the ledge in the first place he had no serious intention of suicide. That intention was his trump-card, and he had shown it, only hesitated to play it. What if he had changed his mind? How could he explain that change to them, so as to prevent their condemnation and entire disrespect? What would life with them be like if he did not kill himself? The present set up had come to this. From this point on he would have to play some new game; at least he would have to get away from the present players. How could he? All day long he kept politely requesting his would-be rescuers to let him alone, to let him think.

I am no psychiatrist; yet I dare say that if I had been in charge I should have sent someone he had never seen before into that hotel room to put a five hundred or a thousand dollar bill on the table by the window where he could see it, and to call out to him that it was his if he wanted it, but that he might do as he liked, jump if he liked. Also I should have lectured his family severely and encouragingly, and given them some potent sedative, and sent them home. Then I should have asked the police department to arrange a detour for the Fifth Avenue traffic, and to oblige the crowd also to go about its business, so that no one should see what he did. Perhaps after dark he might have slipped inside and taken the money and gone somewhere: an evasion of the issue, a postponement. Yes, I know: in a few months he might have been found out on another limb, another ledge. But what more can any man do than postpone his death? As it was, all New York was horribly saying, Now or never! Ah, yes, it meant well.

What pain of fumbling treatment, and bitterness of mistaken medicine! Not to mention the damage done irreparably the instant this all started. For even if he gave up and let himself be saved and never attempted it again, his psyche would be much the worse for wear, I thought. Hours of this shilly-shally, how habit-forming!— poised between the world and the devil, with the thousand worldlings at his feet, their imaginations somewhat at the mercy of his, a thousand little shapes of no more consequence to him than his own shadow… . Surely it was enough to swell and turn a man’s head forever, and in more ways than one. Part of his character must have slipped over the edge, Humpty-Dumpty, whatever the rest of body and soul decided.

What interested me and indeed closely concerned me was not the outcome of his hesitation—life or death, life with a deformation, or death by tumbling and smashing—but the nature of it. Not the present occasion and the immediate provocation, but the trouble that he must have had with himself almost every day for years, similar to this trouble, inconspicuously bringing him little by little to this point. Not the individual instance, but the general modern habit of mind, plight of mind: the combination of a doleful and illusory loneliness with a sudden embarrassing sense of humanity as a whole, which more and more arises and afflicts most of us. My own habit and plight… . This young man’s showy death served me and suited me as an instructive example and allegory.