Straws In the Wind: Collected Work Volume I: 1938-1967

By John Thompson

John Thompson was part of the vibrant, post-modern, New York literary scene of the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies. That scene was famously fueled by love, liquor, food, and parties, but most of all by ideas, by words, serious and witty, spoken and written. Thompson’s writing embodies the spirit of the times, and naturally so, as he was a close friend and colleague of many of the other prominent literary and publishing figures of the era. These two volumes of Thompson’s collected work include his essays, book reviews, and stories, as well as poems, some previously unpublished. The pieces are clever and beautifully written; many of them resonate with current issues of race, climate change, war, and economic disparity. The early stories are especially moving. The works trace the development of Thompson's thinking and are thus an important part of the post-war era. As critical commentary, they contain astute insights into the cultural movements and intellectual history of the time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Sep 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483476049

Book preview

STRAWS IN THE

WIND

COLLECTED WORK

JOHN THOMPSON

Volume I: 1938-1967

Copyright © 2018 Louise S. Thompson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review, Vol. VII, No. 3 (Autumn 1954). Copyright © 1954 by John Thompson Jr.

Reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review, Vol. VIII, No. 3 (Autumn 1955). Copyright © 1955 by The Hudson Review, Inc.

Reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review, Vol. XI, No. 3 (Autumn 1958). Copyright © 1958 by The Hudson Review, Inc.

Reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review, Vol. XII, No. 3 (Autumn 1959). Copyright © 1959 by The Hudson Review, Inc.

Reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review, Vol. XII, No. 4 (Winter 1959-60). Copyright © 1960 by The Hudson Review, Inc.

Reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review, Vol. XIII, No. 4 (Winter 1960-61). Copyright © 1961 by The Hudson Review, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7603-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7604-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916363

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 8/30/2018

This book is

dedicated to the grandchildren of John Thompson: Peter Otis Thompson, Adeline Thompson, John A. Thompson III, Jacob Spaulding Miller, Earl Thompson, Anderson Keeler Miller, and Isaac Thompson.

ALSO BY JOHN THOMPSON

The Founding of English Metre

The Talking Girl and Other Poems

Things to Put Away

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the typists Sarah Sweeney and Chris Pomorski for typing the original printed manuscripts into Word documents, a lengthy task we could not have easily undertaken.

We would also like to thank Leo Kundas for creating the covers for both volumes and for putting the illustrations into the proper format.

Justin Scholfield of Lulu Publishing has given us invaluable support and assistance during the entire production process.

In addition we are grateful to the following publications for permission to reproduce material first published in their pages: The American Scholar, Commentary, Genesis, Harper’s, The Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Poetry, The Reporter, Shenandoah, Simon and Schuster (Collier Books), Soundings, and Sumac.

Editors’ Introduction

John Thompson was part of the vibrant, post-modern, New York literary scene of the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies. That scene was famously fueled by love, liquor, food, and parties, but most of all by ideas, by words, serious and witty, spoken and written.

Thompson’s writing embodies the spirit of the times, and naturally so, as he was a close friend and colleague of many of the other prominent literary and publishing figures of the era, including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, Randall Jarrell, Robie Macauley, Lionel Trilling, Norman Mailer, Jim Jones, Jim Harrison, Jean Stafford, Norman Podhoretz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jason and Barbara Epstein, and John Hollander.

These two volumes of Thompson’s collected work include his essays, book reviews, and stories, as well as poems that do not appear in The Talking Girl and Other Poems (1968). The pieces are clever and beautifully written; many of them resonate with current issues of race, climate change, war, and economic disparity. The early stories are especially moving.

The works trace the development of Thompson’s thinking and are thus an important part of the post-war era. As critical commentary, they contain astute insights into the cultural movements and intellectual history of the time.

Thompson was a poet at heart. He began as a poet and story writer at Kenyon College in the thirties, studying under Ransom, the chief proponent of the new criticism, and living with Lowell, Taylor, Macauley, and Jarrell.

After the war, he studied English literature at Columbia University under Trilling and wrote his doctoral thesis on prosody, later published as The Founding of English Metre, in which he describes the development of sixteenth century poetry with reference to the conflict between metrical pattern and the sound in the language. The article included here, Sir Philip and the Forsaken Iamb, an excerpted chapter from The Founding, discusses this issue in detail. It is engrossing to the linguist and worth the attempt by the layman:

This is our English meter at last. And it is time to try to answer the question of what it is good for. One thing we know it can do, it can allow the metrical pattern to be sometimes used as a way of controlling the intonation of the language. The words have their own pattern, usually obvious enough; if the meter is to work in this way, the sentence must first of all appear to be something that might really be said. It had better be colloquial, that is, the full resources of our speech in indicating meaning ought to be in it. (Sir Phillip and the Sacred Iamb, 1958)

Thompson’s fascination with spoken language and the structure of sounds is evident in all his writing. In his review, The Function of Syntax (1959), he claims, this [the language of speech] is where we have to be if we are to share the kind of concern with language that poets have.

In his fictitious essay about language itself he says, I think of the actual sounds, the noises we make when we talk, and of how they get so little attention from us under ordinary circumstances. (The Sound of Voices, 1968) There he also discusses the mysterious process of translating from the spoken language to the written language and back again:

For even there, in writing, where we can take all the time in the world to it if we want to, trying over and over again, we might well suppose we could never succeed, just by the nature of things; because who is it really who is speaking, and to whom, whose words in what air, whose meanings, whose searchings and whose concealments, whose? It is your voice now that is saying what I have written, not mine.

Words themselves are primary to Thompson. In a review from 1959, he states, poems are made of one small word and phrase after another; they are very fragile and risky things; they go wrong much more often than they go right. (A Poetry Chronicle)

And in a review from 1968, A word is less than a breath; it can’t even blow out a candle, let alone keep one lit. Words are all the poets have left. But then, words are really all that we have ever had. (An Alphabet of Poets) Later in this review Thompson indicates his disillusionment with art and culture when he says, …those high offices which Sidney claimed for poets—and rightly claimed—no longer exist for any of the arts. Of all these poets [here reviewed], and they are among our best, only Berryman, I should say, … aspires to bring in civility, to make us honest men, to make us immortal. Without this aspiration, perhaps even words, which, as I said, are all we have ever had, are still not enough.

Thompson came to feel that while poetry and the other arts had been vital in all cultures in the past, consciousness and knowledge had somehow now destroyed the potency of art and culture to heal us and to bring us catharsis. And to Thompson it is language that is the vehicle and means of this catharsis in all cultural and artistic forms. In The End of Culture (1969) ideas from Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax are brought to bear in this hypothesis. There, Thompson offers an incisive assessment of the decline of the traditional arts beginning with epic Greek tragedy through the various high arts to a preference for movies, television, and popular music, [which] are something else, diversions like smoking cigarettes. He explores this idea in more detail in Catharsis, Linguistics, and All That (1970).

In a different vein, Thompson voices the then (1969) nascent worry over our planet:

There is another part of culture in addition to that which has to do with regulating the relations of human beings with one another, and that includes all those things we do to protect humanity against nature. Who would not smile to hear this today? We have been monstrously successful in subduing nature, so successful that we are now terrified of what we have done, and even fear our mortal end through this success, in the steady destruction of the oxygen and carbon dioxide balance of our air, in the poisoning of our lands and our seas. We hear the clamor and are unable to stop what we do. (The End of Culture)

Thompson incorporates his vision of contemporary culture into the book reviews, which are witty and fun to read. A review of a lengthy autobiography of Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, Mr. Moses’s Public Works (1970), begins,

He stands thus portrayed on the cover of the book, just as he stands in its nearly one thousand pages, posed masterfully (if in rather baggy pants) with a rolled blueprint like a scepter or fasces under one arm, fist on hip, one foot on a raw red girder. He glares down. Does the reader suppose that the glare is for him, where he sprawls or kneels in the dust, and that the foot would be, in all reality, on the reader’s neck? Perhaps.

He later suggests that the 1966 retirement of Moses happened to coincide with the end of an American era of expansion and the beginning of an unknowable decline:

Nobody knows what happens to a great juggernaut that is grinding to a halt, any more than anyone knew what would happen when the juggernaut started rolling, a generation ago, over land and sea, and some people thought they were steering it.

In Away From It All, from 1970, Thompson reviews Helen and Scott Nearing’s prescriptive book, Living the Good Life, How to Live Sanely in a Troubled World, along with a study of an Eskimo tribe by Asen Balicki, pointing out that while the detailed descriptions of stone house building and organic gardening and such make for charming armchair escapism, the Nearing’s move to an off the grid lifestyle in Vermont was not without conflict with their local community. In addition, Thompson mentions that Nearing, a socialist,

writes regularly for the independent Marxist journal, Monthly Review. In these pages this rugged individualist, tireless debater and speaker, full of his fruit and his nuts, his honey and turnips and figs, can blandly deem that civil liberties and freedom of speech are simply not necessary in the Socialist countries.

After a discussion of the brighter and darker sides of Eskimo life of yore, Thompson concludes,

Oh to break away from civilization and its complicated discontents! Power failures, transit strikes, epidemics of heroin overdoses, air pollution, crashing airplanes…. Yes, these we can escape from, but is it not the oldest knowledge of all, that we cannot escape from the human condition? Perhaps a quiet weekend is all we should really try for. It is possible that we could get too far away from the complications, could get deeper than we may care to venture into the condition itself.

Two later pieces from 1979, the futuristic dystopian screenplay, Sapicide, and Calling Them As You See Them: The Connoisseur’s Guide to Foul Language, co-authored with J.D. Reed, are also influenced by Thompson’s linguistic awareness and concern with the environment. In Sapicide, life on earth is coming to an end in 2040 after decades of environmental disasters, and finally the human race is almost destroyed by a Professor of Linguistics who gets his hands on and alters a fusion oscillator developed but abandoned by the linguist Chicomsksy at MIT:

Professor Hanson and Evangeline on his terrace.

"Yes, I could have put the Pill, as we used to call it, in the earth’s water; but of course that would have inhibited reproduction in all mammals, not only homo sapiens.

Then I thought of the Phonological Oscillations which Chicomsky discovered and was adapting to porpoises. He was about to teach animals to speak, you’ll remember, when he caught that overload from the fusion oscillator in Cambridge, and nobody wanted to mess with it after that…. So I put one in each satellite: they thought it was a simple amplitude modifier…. And every time we said a word, my dear, or sang a song, we destroyed the reproductive capacities of our spermatozoa and our ovaries…. All of us. Except, somewhere, you were born.

The lights of the fishing boat are still visible out at sea.

There will be fish for breakfast. …

Calling Them As You See Them is unique in tone. It is a humorous guide to the correct use of common current invectives in such phrases as, "The head dude over at the McManus agency is a mean son of a bitch, or He was a real bastard. He told Marge that I was married, [and he’s not]. Thompson and Reed state their aim as: to provide a guide by which you can identify a prick in everyday life and so label him, without confusing him with a cocksucker or an asshole." When defining a bastard, they write, for example:

The British have always been fond of this term, applying it to everything from horses and hunting dogs to engine parts and mustaches. And a true bastard does resemble one of the characters from English Victorian literature—the orphan. The bastard makes his way through life as a loner, and by taking advantage of others. He’s ruthless, usefully unprincipled and quick.

The piece ends with an amusing Character-Analysis Test.

In his review The Professionals (1967), a decade earlier than A Connoisseurs Guide, while writing of James Jones’s Go to the Widow-Maker, Thompson states, Jones’s language is quite conventional …. But his use of the proletarian dialect of obscenity allows him an entirely new accuracy of fact and of valuation in speaking of sexual experience. No other writer has ever done this so well. It’s more than a matter of using obscenities, as we call them, it is a profound honesty….

Thompson wrote several reviews of fiction set in Africa where he emphasizes not only the profound cultural and political transformations occurring there, but also the linguistic honesty that unites these authors with their counterparts elsewhere. In his review of Kofi Awoonor’s, This Earth, My Brother …An Allegorical Tale of Africa he states,

The narrative sections present the village, the mission school, Empire Day, the boys going off to be soldiers, London, and the Accra of a leading lawyer, his work, his marriage, his mistress, the politicians, and the bureaucrats. These scenes have the sudden microscopic accuracy of appearance and the perfect pitch of speech and dialect that have made reality for us in the prose art of this century. Accra is there as Joyce’s Dublin is there and Faulkner’s Jefferson is… (In Africa, 1971)

Thompson’s work presents a range of ideas on writers and writing, language, culture and civilization. And yet Thompson himself possessed a remarkable charm and humility both in his personality and in his very language. Many people gave his writing high praise. In a letter to him about his review in Parnassus (1977) of Lowell’s Selected Poems, Helen Vendler said,

It was so like you—clever, (in the good sense), full of wonderful phrases (by which I mean the phrases of a writer, not a critic) – the Aztec sight, the daemon, horrific and tutelary, the pure and innocent reader, … the over-pedigreed subspecies…. Opinions, insights, explanations, and judgments—even truths—are a dime a dozen; but words, now, that’s another matter.

We feel it is fitting to close our introduction to this collection with John Thompson’s own words from The End of Culture, which might well apply to all of his writing:

The quotations I have scattered about in this essay are only some signs of it, of what is in the air. They are not meant to be proofs of what is unprovable. They tend in their sources to the journalistic, they are not even appeals to authority: just straws in the wind. All I say here is speculative, imperfectly informed, and, I believe, true.

Louise Thompson and Ruth Losack

Daughter’s Note

As a girl, I read only a few of my father’s many published articles, stories and reviews. He would mention in passing, or my step-mother would, that he had a piece in, say, Commentary, or The New York Review, or any of the various important literary journals, and I would see the journal on the coffee table for a while.

I was of course given an inscribed copy of his volume of poetry, The Talking Girl and Other Poems, which I very much enjoyed (although I was embarrassed that one poem was titled Adultery at the Plaza), and of his important volume on prosody, which I found quite too dense for me at the time.

Growing up I was intimately familiar with his voluminous reading and note-taking, always with a yellow number 1 pencil on a yellow legal pad, and with his writing of long-hand drafts, also on the legal pads, of his correcting in margins, and with his typing on plain typing paper with an efficiently clacking old Royal. He had several typewriters, I supposed because his father had run a typewriter shop in Grand Rapids. I recall asking him, on a sunny weekend morning, as he read and took notes as usual in the Victorian chair he favored, how he chose what to note. I just write down what’s important or interesting, he said. Impertinently, I asked important and interesting to whom, and he replied, To me.

But my father’s behavior was what fathers did, I thought. The unique quality of being the daughter of a scholar and writer did not fully strike me until I was an adult.

I was aware of his frustration late in his life with his inability to find a publisher for his beautiful novel, Things to Put Away. And after he died in 2002 I formed a vague plan to try to have it published.

Contacting and enlisting the once again indispensable aid of my father’s amanuensis of his later years, Ruth Losack, I started going through the boxes and boxes of original periodicals and manuscripts. Fairly soon we realized that the collected work of fifty-some years was very worth reading, even the book reviews written decades ago. His astute critical mind and the power and beauty of his language are enduring, in spite of our title, Straws in the Wind.

Hence the volumes you hold in your hands, on paper or on screen. May you take pleasure in reading them, occasionally, or at once.

Louise Thompson

Notes on the Editing

We have chosen to arrange the contents of Straws in the Wind in chronological order of publication or time written in order to demonstrate the continuity of each era and Thompson’s development as a critic and author. The periodical in which it was published appears at the end of each piece. Previously unpublished pieces, including three stories and a dystopian screenplay, are noted as such.

Thompson’s deliberate preference for British spelling and usage has been maintained.

RL and LT

1930’s and 1940’s

The Rape of the Lock

Nelson presents his mustache as a criticism of life, said Carl. As he unrolled the waxed paper from his sandwiches he glanced sideways under his glasses which seemed over-sized, almost like goggles on his thin face. When he saw the ruddy cheeks of his friend Edwards curve into a smile of appreciation, he felt a little twinge of regret and wished that he had acknowledged the quotation. He twisted uncomfortably as he remembered with shame how often he had sought to impress Edwards with borrowed remarks. He wondered how many of them Edwards recognized, or found later in the books which he lent to him.

Edwards swallowed a mouthful of bread and peanut butter, rinsed it down with coffee from his thermos bottle, exhaled loudly in satisfaction, and replied.

No such thing. You’re always looking for significances in things. He wouldn’t know what criticism of life was. He wouldn’t even think of criticizing life. Anyway, his mustache looks like hell, and we’re going to do away with it. He thrust the end of a sandwich into his mouth and bit it off emphatically. As his jaws worked automatically at masticating the sandwich, his temples throbbed in unison with his jaws, his eyes slid about the room haphazardly

Students were coming in, shouting greetings and tossing their packaged lunches on the tables. The room formerly had been a cafeteria, but now, since most of the students at the college were local residents, those who did not go home for lunch found that it was much more economical to carry a few sandwiches. The long counter and the kitchen were no longer in use.

I don’t think you should do it, Carl said earnestly.

Oh hell, have some fun! You make too much of it. Let yourself go.

A man should never let himself go.

Oh, have some fun once in a while. Edwards gobbled up the remnants of his sandwich and twisted in his chair to look back at the door.

I wonder what happened to them, he said.

You’re going to regret it. Carl became aware of his own tenseness, felt the tightness of the muscles about his mouth, and suddenly wondered if he was being melodramatic.

Oh nuts, Carl. Here’s Goebel! Hey!

Goebel strutted up to the table, his squat body arched stiffly like that of a cadet on dress parade. He threw his lunch onto the table with an arrogant flip of his hand and dragged a chair up to the table. When he was seated, he glanced dramatically at the door and wheeled around to Edwards.

You got it? he asked.

Edwards reach into his pocket and withdrew a gold-plated safety razor which he brandished, shouting.

Like Samson he shall be shorn!

Goebel’s bulldog face split into a grimace as he cackled, leaning far back in his chair and then springing forward and pounding on the table. He took the razor and stroked the air experimentally.

We’ll take that thing off with one swipe!

I don’t know, Carl said. I think I like Nelson’s mustache.

Goebel turned on him in disgust.

You would, he said.

It’s an abomination and it should be liquidated, Edwards said laughing.

Oh, Carl’s just trying to be different, Goebel snorted. He doesn’t like it any better than we do. Why don’t you grow a mustache, if you like it so well?

I express my individuality in other ways, Carl said, frowning.

Look, he’s getting sore already, said Goebel.

Oh, the hell with you, you moron. You couldn’t figure it out.

Goebel laughed and turned to Edwards, who was wishing that Carl would learn not to try to talk seriously to Goebel. Nearly every noon he had to act as peacemaker and interpreter between their irreconcilable attitudes.

Wait til he comes in here, Goebel said. We’ll show him. By God, wait till he sits down, and then we’ll grab him. He laughed and rocked in his chair with glee.

A typical mob reaction to anything which varies from the norm’.

Oh, now, Edwards said seriously, You’re making too much of it. It’s just good fun.

Wake up. Analyze it. An individual violates the code of his time; he wears red pants, or refuses to go to war, or grows a mustaches in this dump of a college. The mob reacts, and if their social disapproval and ridicule has no effect, they resort to violence, and force the individual to conform. Behind his glasses, Carl’s face was drawn in earnestness.

Goebel snorted, There he goes again.

I think you make too much of it, Carl.

No, I don’t. Stop and think about it. You’re just one of the mob now, and can’t see the real cause of the thing; look at it objectively.

Well, but Nelson’s not so—

Did you know that he’s going into the ministry?

Since when did you start getting holy?

Shut up, Goebel. You know that’s not what I meant by that, Edwards.

Oh, I see what you mean, but—

You know I’m right.

Well—

Yeah, Goebel said, go ahead, agree with him, you always do. You’re getting to be just as bad as he is.

Oh hell Goebel!

It’s just mob action, a microcosm of a lynching.

Two youths, who had just sat down at the end of the table in their accustomed places, looked at each other and smiled at hearing the familiar dispute. One of them raised his arms and shouted Hurrah Socialism, Communism! and laughed triumphantly. Carl looked wearily at their bland faces, muttered My God, and turned to his lunch.

As they were all eating in a sullen, resentful silence, Goebel hissed Here he comes, and became elaborately casual as Nelson approached the table.

"Nelson sat down briskly. He was a small, alert youth, the only one at the table who habitually remained good-humored in the daily cross-fire of argument. His buoyant energy gave him an air of enjoyment even in the bitterest blasts of polemic. As he peered up, bright-eyed through the tangle of blond hair which hung over his eyes, his mouth parted expectantly, he had the appearance of an eager, intelligent terrier.

Goebel frowned at him, and glanced back at Edwards with a wink.

I see you’ve still got that thing on your face, he said.

Nelson lifted his alert round face and laughed silently. Beneath his pudgy nose a few yellow hairs bristled in an undetermined pattern.

It’s an abomination, said Edwards. He fingered the razor in his pocket. The two youths at the end of the table shuffled nervously in their seats.

Well, Edwards, what are we going to do about it? Goebel said.

Well, Goebel? Edwards laughed and bit his fingers impatiently. They all sat waiting for something to happen, not knowing how to start.

Goebel rose and stood behind Nelson, then awkwardly reached around his neck in a half-hearted attempt to pinion his arms. Nelson laughed and did not move. They all remained still, nervous and suddenly embarrassed.

Come on, Goebel shouted with a wrench at Nelson’s shoulders get out that razor! When Nelson saw Edwards draw it from his pocket he stood up, still smiling and without any feeling of alarm, and twisted free from Goebel’s arm. He stepped back from the table and laughed. The others stood paralyzed again.

Then Goebel jumped and grasped Nelson’s arm. The others ran in and without any great spirit tried to hold him. Carl remained seated and attempted to act disinterested, the impartial observer of the follies of man. He thought of leaping in and helping Nelson, but there were too many in the fray now.

Nelson fought self-consciously, dodging and disentangling himself, unable to take the offensive. Then Edwards came in with the razor and grabbed Nelson by the shoulder, laughing and shouting. Nelson twisted away, leaving a piece of his shirt in Edwards’s hand, ducked under Goebel’s arms, and jumped to the top of a table.

He felt a great thrill of excitement and power surge through his body as he looked down on them milling about the table. He heard the others in the lunch room talking excitedly as they gathered about to watch. He felt eager and strong, and was surprised at the wild impulses which shot through his muscles and made him dance back and forth on the table. A memory flashed through his mind of how desperately ashamed he had been when, as a child, he had been dragged about the playground on his knees, crying, by an older boy who had finally let go in disgust when he refused to fight. Now he wanted to fight.

Come on, you bums! he shouted hoarsely. When Edwards came up to the edge of the table, grinning broadly, and reached for his legs, he suddenly swung his fist into Edwards’s mouth and laughed as he saw him stumble back in surprise. He had never hit anyone in his life; he found it surprisingly easy. Instead of being disgusted or sorry, as he had thought he might, he was intoxicated. Then Goebel pulled him backwards off the table and threw him to the floor, shouting for Carl to come and hold his arms. The others were trying to hold his kicking legs, reaching clumsily far out in front of their heads, trying to seize him and at the same time shield themselves from his kicks. A sudden panic struck Nelson as they fell across his legs and he felt himself helpless under their weight. He kicked and struck out blindly in fear and anger. His triumphant belligerence left him; all he wanted now was escape. He heaved his body about, no longer feeling anything, lashing out with his eyes shut in desperation. Goebel yelled for help again and Carl came forward, not knowing why, and tentatively reached out for Nelson’s arm which was beating against Goebel’s back. As soon as his fingers closed about it, it thrashed away from his grip, and a little current of fear ran along his skin.

What the hell, fellows, he said, let him up. No one heard him, and as he stepped back, he saw Goebel’s face convulsed and red as he heaved his weight on Nelson’s shoulders to hold them against the floor. Carl felt strangely frightened and disgusted, and moved away to stand against the wall. The crowd from the other tables was laughing and cheering.

Edwards had mopped the blood from his mouth and eagerly threw himself into the struggling mass. He seized Nelson’s right arm and dragged it back onto the floor. He was breathing rapidly through his clenched teeth, excited and maddened by a sudden fury. He put his knees into the muscle of the arm, pinning it to the floor, and pulled the other arm back. He felt a wild impulse to smash his fist into Nelson’s face, to strangle him and crush the flesh between his fingers. Nelson gasped as Edward’s knees pressed savagely into his arms, and then, as he was completely defeated, he lay quiet, sick with humiliation and anger. Goebel seized the razor, and grabbing a handful of Nelson’s hair to hold his head still, in a few quick strokes scraped off his mustache.

Edwards felt all the strength drain suddenly from him, and as he released Nelson’s arms shame crept upon him, and he could not look at the boy on the floor. They all straightened and stood, stuffing their shirts into their trousers, fingering bruises and laughing uncertainly. Nelson lay still a moment, then as Edwards went to help him, he shook him off and rose to his feet unsteadily. Avoiding their eyes, he walked out, trying to hold himself straight and stop the tremor in his knees and the quick smart of tears in his eyes, trying to stifle the sob swelling within him. He felt his knee-caps bob loosely as he went down the stairs. Edwards and Goebel had been friends; he was not sure what it was that they had done to him but he knew that he could be their friend no longer. He told himself that it had been only play, only in fun. He could not easily imagine the future without them, but he knew that he must go without them now. He reached the foot of the stairs and turned to the door which led to the yard outside.

In the lunch room the boys still stood in nervous little groups. The sudden calm after the intense excitement left them lost and unsure of themselves, quivering slightly from exhaustion. Sobered now they were all a little frightened by the wildness which had swept through them. They turned to one another for reassurance, and slowly began to smile again. Goebel looked at the razor in his hand, cackled loudly, and slapped his knee. Already they were throwing a light of humor onto the episode, making it possible for them to chuckle over it long afterwards in reminiscence.

Carl rose and walked out after Nelson. He had been shocked and frightened by the revelation of the ease with which they could use violence. Even Edwards. And they thought it was a joke. If they ever did that to me, he thought, I would have to kill them. If anyone ever touched me, I couldn’t live without killing him. Not because I’m a coward; I am, but that’s not it. Is it just pride? No. He walked to the window and saw Nelson walking across the yard toward the street. He thought of running down and walking with him, but he realized that what Nelson needed was not sympathy but solitude. Carl watched him nervously until he disappeared around the corner of the gymnasium. Then he fumbled for a cigarette and crossed to the front.

Goebel came strutting down the stairs laughing, with Edwards smiling uncertainly beside him. Goebel had his pipe out and was blowing through the stem then snorting in gleeful memory. Edwards hesitantly said something about Nelson, and Goebel said that Nelson would probably come back later and finish his lunch.

HIKA, November 1938

In the City

As soon as I came out I felt better. Inside the house the air had been still heavy from the night, like the air of an old cellar. The house is different in the morning before they are in the rooms. I feel embarrassed in the emptiness, like a man in a strange house walking through the rooms looking for the owner. Sometimes alone in the morning before they were up I would suddenly see the ragged rugs and spindly chairs, the sagging lumpy sofa, and it would seem impossible that this was where I had been living so long. I would be tiptoeing to the kitchen at dawn, and I would remember Mother sitting there sewing the night before and in the grey light I would see that chair she had been sitting in had one rung tied in with cord and the cane in the seat cracked and bristling. Then I would know that for a long time it must have been that way.

But outside the air was moving a little and the early morning sun was slanting between the houses and throwing slender shadows of the trees across the pavement toward me. The sky was like glass. I could see that it was going to be hot later on. In front of the houses the trees were stirring in the breeze. I looked around for a minute and decided to go downtown.

It was crazy to get up so early. A day is long enough. But at night there is nothing to do but go to bed, and if I get up early enough sometimes I can get out of the house before I start thinking.

Down the block Mr. Hause’s Ford slid down the driveway. I could see him hoist himself and shuffle and settle back in his seat, puffing on a cigar. I could have run down and taken a ride downtown with him. I did once. He talked about the recession.

His car bucked and coughed two or three times before it went on down the street through the shadows of the trees with the sunlight flashing and fading across it.

Mornings like this I never used to have to choke it. Even in the winter just kick it once and it started right off like a charm.

I was just going past Gordon’s when old man Gordon came out on the porch to get the paper. He hadn’t shaved and his hair stuck out all over his head. He had his pajamas stuffed into an old pair of pants. His suspenders dangled around his hips. He was scraping one finger across his eye and then opening his eye and looking at the finger. I don’t know why he got up in the morning either. He flipped open the paper and then he saw me and we said good morning. He blinked at the paper and rubbed his hands through his hair. I wondered if he just sat around the house like that all day.

I asked him what he heard from Harry, and he said that the last he heard, Harry was still working. He started looking at the paper and telling me something Harry said about his wife at the same time. The paper won, so I walked on. I remembered when Harry and I used to sail his boats in their bathtub, and how old man Gordon used to come home with his sample cases full of candy and pass them around. Harry is in a mill in Pittsburgh.

Down at the corner Hank Miller was just opening up his gas station. I helped him roll out a couple of tires and set them on display racks and then we sat down and smoked.

If anybody wants gas now, he said, they can go to hell. He looked good that morning. He had on a clean pair of overalls that bagged around his frame and made him look bigger than he really was. One hunk of his black hair was hanging down over his forehead, and he was grinning and squinting through the trees at the sun.

These fat bastards, he said, they can go give some other guy their two-bit trade. Fat bastards.

What’s the matter? No business?

Business? He laughed. Who wants business? Even if I do sell anything there’s no profit in it.

He rolled over on his side and laughed. I’m all through with business. From now on those fat bastards can go someplace else. Selling gas interferes with my sleep.

Sure.

I don’t get any sleep, either. Get up at six o’clock in the morning so I can sell gas to a lot of fat bastards.

You ought to let me work a shift for you.

Work? Why work? he said. Then he collapsed his elbows and lay out flat on the grass.

Oh hell, he said. He was tired of being cocky. Hell. He rolled over onto his back and threw one arm across his eyes. The sun was up above the houses now.

It’s all I can do to get a living out of it, he said.

I know.

Pretty soon Hank said, Where are you going?

I don’t know. I guess I’ll go downtown.

Well, if I hear about anything, but hell…

Then a big Buick swung in by the pumps, so I started down the street again. Hank waved at me while he was holding the hose in the tank of the Buick and I yelled So long.

I usually walked down Lake Drive to Fulton and then down Fulton Street hill to Monroe, but I decided to go down Wealthy instead. I wasn’t in any hurry. I had walked the other way too many times.

It was getting warmer now. I walked down the street, looking at the trees where the sun hit them here and there, and trying not to think. It was still early, but every so often cars were going by with their tires singing on the brick as they headed for downtown. Because it was early and the streets were clear only one or two slowed down for the stop signs. They rolled along fast without much noise except for the sound of the tires.

The day was still fresh and vacant and the houses were quiet.

They have cars.

After I had walked for a while I began to pass people standing on the curb waiting for busses. They stared dully up the street, their faces still stiff with sleep. They looked raw and uncomfortable, as if the morning hadn’t given them time to get used to their clothing. They heard my heels on the sidewalk and turned and looked at me blankly.

At the corner of Diamond the old newsboy was planted. He stood flat-footed in heavy rubbers, like a heap of wet clay in his layers of shapeless clothing. Under his old skating cap his white hair stuck out. His face was broad and flat like a child’s, with smooth, unlined skin. He had big baby-blue eyes. He smiled faintly and once in a while said Morng herld, morng herld, and lifted a paper in his plump old hand.

Along Wealthy Street past Diamond there are big houses that are no good any more. They are tall angular dumps built by the rich men when the furniture factories were running. They are jagged with towers and gables and porches. The people who built them put scrolls and heavy wooden lace on the stiff houses. Now they are cut up into apartments and are painted dull dark green or red or brown. Some of them have covered stairways stuck against the side of the house to the second floor. Big trees used to be in the yards but most of them are dead or cut down.

I walked on towards downtown, past the old houses and the clusters of stores where the clerks were sweeping the sidewalks and cranking up the shutters. People were starting to work on their jobs.

The old houses aren’t any good any more. I went past blocks and blocks of little houses that never were any good.

There was a little colored kid sitting out playing in the dirt with a marble, talking to himself. He threw the marble and then yelled and scrambled over and picked it up and sang over it. Then he’d throw it again. His head was shaved clean, and his button nose was flattened up against his dusty-chocolate face. A bony young negress in a thin torn dress came out on the dirty sagging porch of the old house and called to him.

Albert, Albert, c’mon in, brekfus ready, Albert. He kept throwing the marble and mumbling until she began to walk towards him impatiently. Then he ran up the steps and stood by the door waiting for her to open it. She cuffed him hard across the face and the marble fell out of his mouth. I walked away fast as I heard him start to yell against her muttering.

I remembered one time when I was a kid there was a bunch of us in Harry’s front yard. I was turning a cartwheel in the dirt and I heard Bob Sorrfeld say Look here comes old man Kroll and they started to laugh. I stopped and I saw my father come walking up the street tired and slow in his work clothes. I ran home and I was sick and I cried and I wanted to smash everything in the world. I know now that it wasn’t because they laughed but because I had seen my father.

I was walking downtown past the cheap dirty houses. I heard an alarm clock ringing. On the corner of Sheldon I looked down and in a basement room there was a thin young guy in his undershirt standing under a hanging electric light bulb. His cheeks were smeared with lather and he had a razor in his hand. I looked down and he looked up at me and lifted his hand a little without smiling.

On Sundays we would get in and go to Lake Michigan and swim and after dark we would build a fire of driftwood.

I was getting downtown now. There were gas stations and stores stuck in with the old houses on the streets. The buses were whizzing by loaded up with people going to work. There was a gas war and regular was six for