Kafka Was the Rage Page 10

  As I watched them, it was Delmore’s reaction I noticed most, because he had such a large face. He was looking at the dancers with a terrific intelligence—but his intelligence bounced off them like someone trying to force his way across the dance floor. I could see that he didn’t know what to make of the Park Plaza. So this is the real, he seemed to be thinking, this is what Flaubert meant when he said, Ils sont dans le vrai. He looked bemused, as if he was trying to imagine another culture, one in which dancing took the place of books.

  The band was playing Sopa de Pichon, and I explained that pigeon soup was slang for pot. I translated the first stanza of the song: “If on your wedding day / you’re lacking a kidney [pun for cojon, “ball”] I advise you to take / some pigeon soup.” Most of the songs, I explained, contained puns and double meanings—like the pit humor in Shakespeare.

  A tall, beautiful girl in front of us was vibrating one buttock while holding the other still. In elaborately crossing his legs, her partner slipped and fell—but he converted it into a flourish. Or perhaps he hadn’t fallen at all. In the middle of the next number, the piano played a long riff called a montuno and after that the bongo and conga had a long duet. They were especially good, so when the music stopped, a few of the dancers fell to the foor and closed their eyes in ecstasy and cried, ¡No! ¡No!—meaning, Don’t stop, or ¡Fenómeno!

  Would you like to dance? I said to my guests. I knew one or two girls who came regularly to the Park Plaza and I offered to find partners for our group. Delmore, who never hesitated to play the crazy, impulsive poet, had a blank look on his face. Clem was sliding his eyes around—not like an art critic, but a tourist. Only Dwight, who was a permanent revolutionary, wanted to dance and appeared to be at home in the Park Plaza. I found him a girl named Dinamita, which appealed to his political tastes, and he gyrated away with her. He didn’t know what he was doing, but it didn’t matter, because he had rhythm, and also an air of conviction, as if there was nothing in human behavior that was alien to him. Tall, thin, white-haired even then, with glasses and a goatee, he was every inch an intellectual—yet he was something more too. He wasn’t standing outside of culture looking in. He was in the thick of it. He felt its rhythm.

  Delmore and Clem were different. Younger than Dwight, they were part of the first bookish generation of American writers. They were writer-intellectuals in a sense that Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald—and the generation before them—were not. Not even Joyce was an intellectual to the degree that they were.

  It worried me, this bookishness of theirs. I was afraid I would never be able to keep up with it. I didn’t have the patience to spend whole days reading. I was too restless. And I was too much attracted to the world. I read only for what I needed to know, or what gave me pleasure; I never read out of any abstract hunger for knowledge. Also, I was suspicious of bookishness.

  When Dwight came back, he announced that Dinamita had drums in her belly.

  In the end, though, the Park Plaza disappointed me—not that night, but sometime later. I had often admired a girl there—her name, of course, was Carmen. She was the best female dancer in the place. She was Cuban, with chinky eyes and a jutting ass that looked hard as a rock.

  She had a cruel, sullen face that never changed expression as she went through an apparently endless series of improvisations. Like any other young American male, I assumed that she knew more about sex or was closer to it than I was. She could dance so well, I thought, because she could direct her sexuality wherever she pleased.

  I desired her, the way you have a desire to go on a safari, or to the South Seas. I desired her as you sometimes hunger for a Mexican dinner that will burn your mouth. I thought of her as a test that I would have liked to pass. Also, she was more authentically other than any woman I had ever known.

  With one exception, the girls I had slept with had been typically American. The exception was a Japanese girl in a geisha house in Tokyo. But though she was even more foreign to me than Carmen, I didn’t find her exciting. She was beyond my understanding. I didn’t know what moved her. It was as if I was trying to speak Japanese like the naval officers who came to the geisha houses with phrase books.

  But I thought I knew something about Carmen. I thought that she too had drums in her belly, that her life was a strong rhythm. I believed I could learn from her, that I could warm my hands over her flames. It was unlikely, though, because I had nothing to offer her. Those cruel slanting eyes of hers passed right over me. I was so pale to her as to be invisible.

  And then one night this all changed. I had come to the Park Plaza with a group. I was their guide, the aficionado. I was with a girl named Sandra, a model, a cover girl in fact. We had taken a table and I was going to the bar to get pitchers of beer when Carmen came up to me and said, Dance with me.

  I was so surprised that I gave her a stupid answer. I’m not a dancer like you, I said. I can’t dance with you. I was referring to the fact that there was a strict hierarchy in the Park Plaza. You asked a girl to dance only if you were as good as she was. No good dancer would ever accept an invitation from anyone who was not recognized. There was no allowance for sentiment.

  Of course I felt that this was true of sex too. I could no more sleep with Carmen than I could dance with her. I don’t know what I thought she could do, but I imagined that she was more serious about it, more concentrated than I could ever be. I was afraid of being exposed as a sexual imposter, or something like that. At the same time I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to see whether I could get down to the elemental.

  So I took her in my arms and started dancing. I had taken about three steps when she said, Let’s get out of here. Without a moment’s hesitation, I abandoned Sandra and my friends. We went out and got a cab, and I gave the cabbie my address.

  I hate that music, Carmen said, leaning back in the cab. She spoke English almost without an accent, except that she bit off her words.

  You hate it? I said. What kind of music do you like?

  Classical music, she said. André Kostelanetz, Morton Gould. Then she crooned the entire lyrics to Nat King Cole’s “Lush Life.”

  She wasn’t what I had thought, but as I walked up the four flights to my apartment behind her, I looked at her ass, which was right in front of my face, and said to myself that this at least was real.

  There were no preliminaries, no desperate grappling. She began immediately to pull off her clothes, the way an actress pulls off her costume when the play is over. It turned out that she was wearing a girdle. When she took it off, her ass filled my little bedroom. It was like those life preservers that expand when you pull the cord.

  When she was naked, she spoke only Spanish. In fact, she never stopped talking. ¡Ay, que rico eres! ¡Que sabroso! ¡Que fuerte! Y su cuerpo tan blanco, and so on.

  After that she began to give me instructions. Take me from behind! Harder! Slower! Faster! Wait for me! Don’t come until I tell you!

  I felt like I was taking a dance lesson. The drums were not in her belly—they were in her commands. I was so occupied with her exhortations that I never got into the spirit of the thing. I remained detached and, as a result, the business went on for quite a while.

  ¡Hombre, she said, fenómeno!

  After that I couldn’t get rid of her. She would call me up and plead with me on the phone. I’ll wash you; I’ll powder you. I’ll light your cigarettes and bring you a glass of whiskey. She had an interminable list of the things she would do, and none of them interested me. What I had wanted was to cross over into her world, and what she wanted was to enter mine.

  15

  I first saw Caitlin Thomas at a party given by Maya Deren in her apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. I saw only the bottom half of her, her legs, thighs, and cotton underpants, because she was holding her dress up over her head as if she was pulling it off, or hiding behind it like a child. She was dancing, a sort of elememtary hootchy-kootch that didn’t have much to do with the fast Haitian drum music tha
t filled the room.

  Maya was dancing, too, barefoot, with bells on her ankles. She had just come back from Haiti, where she had been studying Haitian dance and mythology. Maya was also an avant-garde filmmaker, an avant-garde everything. Short, stocky, with a dark red, before-its-time Afro, she looked like a Little Orphan Annie who had been kidnapped once again, this time by art.

  While Dylan Thomas was the proclaimed guest of honor, Maya was always the real guest of honor at her parties. She had made sure of this with the tapes of Haitian drumming, because none of the poets and literary camp followers she had invited seemed willing to get out on the floor with her.

  So it was mano a mano between Maya and Caitlin. I had yet to see Caitlin’s angry, intellectual milkmaid’s face. I hadn’t realized who it was beneath the dress until I asked a slender, elegant young man next to me. That, he said, with an irony that was the chief ingredient of the new American poetry, is Caitlin Thomas.

  It was like a war of worlds out there on the floor: the childbearing, cottage-keeping, pub-crawling wife of the Welsh bard against a rising star of Greenwich Village. Caitlin relied on the immemorial argument of bump and grind, while Maya, who wore trousers, danced not exactly to the tapes but to the different drummer of the American art establishment. I wondered who would win and where Dylan was. Was he hiding his face, too?

  He was in the bedroom that opened off the studio, in a corner where he was surrounded by slender young men. It was as if they had thrown up a picket fence to protect him, not only from Caitlin but from America, from criticism, from mortality. He was no longer the pretty, pouting cherub of the Augustus John painting, but a man swollen by drink, and by sorrow, perhaps, or poetry. He looked like an inflatable toy that had been overinflated.

  You forgot Dylan’s faults when you read his poems or heard him recite, but he was not at his best at parties. To him, an American party was like being in a bad pub with the wrong people. He appeared to have no small talk—or hardly any kind. The slender young men bounced off him in disappointment.

  The party had come to a drumming halt. It was a standoff between Maya and Caitlin. Each succeeded in making the other ridiculous. Never lacking in decision, Maya walked over to Caitlin and tried to usher her off the floor. Caitlin resisted, and one of the guests tried to help Maya remove her, but she broke loose and threw a straight overhand right that Sugar Ray Robinson would not have been ashamed of. It caught the officious guest squarely in the eye and he staggered back with his hand to his face. He would have a shiner as a souvenir of the Thomases. As I looked admiringly at Caitlin, I remembered reading or hearing that she and Dylan often fought and she always won.

  Now she was genuinely aroused. Hell hath no fury like a famous poet’s wife. Maya had brought back a collection of small ceramic Haitian gods, which were arranged on the mantelpiece, and now Caitlin began hurling these against the wall. If she had really tried, Maya could have rallied enough support by now to stop Caitlin, but she couldn’t resist the symbolism of the scene. Plunging her fingers into her curls, she cried, like an Ibsen heroine, She’s smashing my universe!

  This woke Dylan, who had been dozing on his feet in the bedroom. Caitlin was smashing the universe again. He rushed, or rolled, into the studio and seized her by one arm. Then, leaning back, using his weight, he began to swing her in a wide circle—it was a large room—like a game of the Snap the Whip. It was the only safe way to deal with her. He must have worked it out on previous occasions.

  There was a wide opening between the studio and the bedroom and, with a suprising dexterity, Dylan swung Caitlin through it and landed her on the bed, where he immediately sat on her. It was a remarkable performance, like a perfect enjambment in a poem. But he was winded by his exertions—this was more tiring even than writing or declaiming poetry—and Maya gave me the job of holding Caitlin down.

  It wasn’t easy—she was very strong—so I had to more or less lie on top of her as Dylan had. I held my head back because I thought she might bite me. After a minute or two she stopped struggling and her face grew thoughtful. She looked alert, shrewd, very Welsh. Are you queer? she said.

  I was still unsophisticated enough to be annoyed by the question. No, I said. I’m not.

  She threw her arms around my neck. Then for God’s sake, man, she said, love me! Love me!

  She was moving too fast for me. I didn’t even know whether she was drunk or sober, and I couldn’t think of a clever answer. I looked around and Dylan was standing, his back to us, just a few feet away. That would hardly be cricket, I said lamely, betrayed in my confusion into an antiquated English idiom.

  Her face grew savage. Bugger the cricket! she said.

  As the most expendable—or the only reliable—person at the party, I was deputized to take Caitlin to the Chelsea Hotel. Dylan was too drunk for such an extended effort—he couldn’t Snap-the-Whip her all the way up to Twenty-third Street—and besides, Maya was by no means ready to relinquish him. He was going to have to stand in for the Haitian gods.

  Someone had a car and I held on to Caitlin in the backseat. She relaxed and made herself comfortable in my arms. When we reached the hotel the other man drove off right away and I took Caitlin up to their room.

  She unlocked the door and turned to me. I’ll give you a drink, she said. We looked into each other’s eyes. Though I couldn’t read hers, I thought she could see what was in mine. She was too much for me, and I knew it. I had no idea what she was offering me. A drink? A surreptitious, secondhand kind of fame? A heart-to-heart talk about Dylan?

  I made an awkward little bow. Thank you very much, I said. Another time. As I spoke I ducked and the straight right hand whistled over my head. Pushing her gently so I could close the door, I ran down the stairs.

  16

  I want you to help me buy a suit, Delmore said. He needed me, he said, because he couldn’t look at himself in a mirror. You’ll have to hold the mirror up to nature for me. Tell me—he drew both hands down his chest—whether the suit suits me, be my beau. We can walk up to Brooks Brothers, he said. I need the exercise. So we met in Washington Square and started up Fifth Avenue like a parade.

  Delmore had a peculiar walk, like Dr. Caligari in the movie. He took short, quick steps, as if he had adopted the European walk of his favorite writers, of Dostoyevski perhaps, as opposed to the loping American style. He walked in sputters, in short manic bursts, like his talk. And he was always bumping into me, because he veered when he walked—when he did anything. When he had pushed me almost into the gutter or up against the buildings, I would drop back and come up on the other side of him.

  He was telling me a long and intricate story about Milton Klonsky, who was a friend of his and a much closer friend of mine. The story was untrue from beginning to end, yet anyone who knew Klonsky would probably have believed it. I almost did myself. Even as I laughed at the outrageousness of Delmore’s invention, I felt myself slipping. In my mind’s eye, I could see Klonsky as Delmore presented him, frowning and expostulating in his pleasantly tinny voice. Klonsky had an inhibition about going to the toilet when anyone was in his apartment, so he and Margaret, the girl who lived with him, had tacitly agreed upon a routine. After breakfast, when Klonsky had drunk several-cups of coffee, Margaret would announce that she had errands to run and she would go out for about forty-five minutes.

  The scheme worked for a while, but then Klonsky rounded on Margaret one day. Why can’t you show a little imagination? he said. It’s always the same thing with you—a container of milk, a loaf of bread, a bottle of shampoo, stamps. Surely there’s more than that to the life of a young woman in a great city like New York. Why, you don’t even write letters—what do you need with stamps?

  In Delmore’s version, the story, punctuated by giggles, went on for fifteen minutes. His mind tossed off details like a dog shaking off drops of water. The toilet was badly situated; it jutted into the living room like a corner fireplace. It had a perforated door, like a rattan chair. A perforated door!

&n
bsp; Except for three or four short stories and a handful of poems, I never thought that Delmore’s work was as interesting as his talk. When I knew him, he had already written his best things and most of his talent went into talking. Slander was his genius. Yet his slanders were as lyrical as his best poems. He loved slander as you love the poems and stories you can’t write.

  Klonsky was already a rich character, but Delmore embellished him. Klonsky had all the personal peculiarities of a very good writer and Delmore exaggerated these to the point where Klonsky took on the behaviorial tics of a bad writer. In Delmore’s version of him, Klonsky invariably went too far; he overshot the truth and spilled into obsession. He was like a story whose images are too heavy, whose metaphors are too self-conscious, whose language is strained, and whose technique is outmoded.

  When Delmore described anyone, they regressed; they lost their saving graces, their scruples and hesitations. He made everyone Dostoyevskian—but in an anachronistic twentieth-century setting. His favorite trick was to take away their irony and leave them exposed. He was like the grammar-school bully who rips open your fly buttons.

  I almost wished that Klonsky would do all the things Delmore described, that he would get them off his chest. Delmore’s malice was so brilliant, so unerring, it exalted Klonsky; it freed him to be terrible. It was Delmore who helped me to understand what I came to think of as the malice of modern art.

  Meanwhile, as we walked, the city passed unnoticed. Like Samuel Johnson, whom he resembled in many ways, Delmore was not interested in prospects, views, or landscape. He had looked at the city when he was young and saw no need to do it again. He had looked at it in much the same way that he had read John Dos Passos or James T. Farrell.

  At Brooks Brothers, we went up to the sixth floor, to the less expensive suits. As we waited for the elevator, with Delmore fidgeting beside me, I was reminded of Dostoyevski’s Underground Man, who bought new gloves, a new hat, and a fur collar for his coat—all for the purpose of colliding with an officer on the boulevard where he went for a walk each Sunday. When he met the officer in the crowded street, it was always he who had to give way, and now he was determined to throw himself against this haughty creature. But first his clothes must be equal to the occasion.