The Crack-Up Read online

  The abundant waiters at Dartmouth seemed to me rather comedy characters—I mean not in themselves but in their roles. They go all out of character and begin to talk to the guests just like the man who hires himself out to do that.

  St. Paul in 1855 (or ’66): The rude town was like a great fish just hauled out of the Mississippi and still leaping and squirming on its bank.

  The lobby of the Hôtel Roi d’Angleterre was as desolate as a schoolhouse after school. In the huge, scarcely completed palace a few servants scurried about like rabbits, a few guests sidled up to the concierge, spoke in whispers and vanished with a single awed look around at the devastating emptiness. They were mostly women escaped from the deep melancholy at home, and finding that the torture chamber was preferable to the tomb.

  Passing the building which housed the Negro wards. The patients were singing always. Among the voices that lay suspended in sweet melancholy on the August air in the early summer night, Owen recognized the deep bass of Doofus, who had been there two years—an interne on that ward had told him that Doofus was due to die; his place in the chorus would be hard to fill.

  E

  EPIGRAMS, WISECRACKS AND JOKES

  A man says to another man: “I’d certainly like to steal your girl.” Second man: “I’d give her to you, but she’s part of a set.”

  “Has D. P. injured you any way?” “No, but don’t remind her. Maybe she hasn’t done her bad deed for the day.”

  The movies are the only court where the judge goes to the lawyer for advice.

  Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

  Not a word in the Roosevelt inaugural was as logical as Zangara saying he shot at Roosevelt because he had a stomach ache.

  Agility (vitality)—pleasing people you perversely shouldn’t please and can’t reach.

  Her unselfishness came in pretty small packages well wrapped.

  After all, the portrait of an old shoe by Van Gogh hangs in the Louvre, but where is there a portrait of Van Gogh by an old shoe?

  Berry Wall. He doesn’t dare go back. He was drafted for the Civil War and he doesn’t know it’s over.

  Optimism is the content of small men in high places.

  She’s bashful. She has small-pox. She stumbles so she couldn’t get up.

  Wouldn’t a girl rather have half of him than a whole Spic with a jar of pomade thrown in? Life was so badly arranged—better no women at all than only one woman.

  One of those tragic efforts like repainting your half of a delapidated double house.

  Bryan to Darrow. Fellow Apes of the Scopes trial.

  Trying to support a large and constantly increasing French family who jokingly referred to themselves as “our servants.”

  Sent a girl flowers on Mothers’ Day.

  You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.

  Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it.

  Get a man for Elspeth, a man for Elspeth, was the cry. This was difficult because Elspeth had had so many men. Two of her sisters rode, so to speak, Elspeth’s discarded mounts.

  Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

  Cotton manufacturer who worries because African chiefs go in for rayon.

  No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

  Ye Old Hooke Shoppe.

  Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

  No such thing as a man willing to be honest—that would be like a blind man willing to see.

  Hospitality is a wonderful thing. If people really want you, they’ll have you even if the cook has just died in the house of small-pox.

  Suddenly he turned in bed and put his arms around her arm. Her free hand touched his hair.

  “You’ve been bad,” she said.

  “I can’t help it.”

  She sat with him silently for half an hour; then she changed her position so that her arm was under his head. Stooping over him, she kissed him on the brow. (See Two Wrongs.)

  Any walk through a park that runs between a double line of mangy trees and passes brazenly by the ladies’ toilet is invariably known as “Lover’s Lane.”

  Gynecologist to trace his pedigree.

  Women are going to refuse to build with anything but crushed brick.

  Shy beaten man named Victor.

  Clumsy girls named Grace.

  Great truck drivers named Earl and Cecil.

  She was one of those people who would just as soon starve in a garret with a man—if she didn’t have to.

  Beatrice Lillie broke up the British Empire with March to the Roll of the Drums.

  Mencken forgives much to the Catholic church—perhaps because it has an index.

  All my characters killed each other off in the first act because I couldn’t think of any more hard boiled things for them to say.

  They thought a child would be nice, too, because they had a nursery and the Harold Lloyds had one.

  They have more money. (Ernest’s wisecrack.)*

  She’s got to be a loyal, frank person if she’s got to bitch everyone in the world to do it.

  For a statesman—any school child knows that hot air rises to the top.

  Suicide and wife arrive in Cuba.

  Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.

  He repeated to himself an old French proverb that he had made up that morning.

  A sleeping porch is a back room with no pictures on the walls. It should contain at least one window.

  Forgotten is forgiven.

  If all your clothes are worn to the same state, it means you go out too much.

  American actresses now use European convents as a sort of female Muldoon’s.

  The guy that played Sergeant Quirt in Romeo and Juliet.

  Three men better known as Christ’s nails.

  The spiritual stomach of the race was ruined those fifty years when Mid-Western women didn’t go to the toilet.

  To bring on the revolution it may be necessary to work inside the Communist Party.

  They try to be Jesus (Forsythe)* while I only attempt to be God, which is easier.

  To most women art is a form of scandal.

  Impersonating 46 presidents at once.

  “What kind of man was he?”

  “Well, he was one of those men who come in a door and make any woman with them look guilty.”

  Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

  Dieticians: They have made great progress in the last few years. They know pretty definitely that bichloride of mercury or arsenic in the right dose will kill you and that food should probably be eaten rather than taken in gas form or over the radio.

  Honi soit qui Malibu.

  Trained nurses who eat as if they didn’t own the food but it was just lent them.

  Parked his pessimism in her sun-parlour.

  No such thing as graceful old age.

  Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

  What is the point at which loan becomes property of loanee and at the offer of a refund one says, “But I don’t like to take your money”? What is the point when one accepts return of loan with most profuse thanks?

  The inevitable shallowness that goes with people who have learned everything by experience.

  Somebody’s specimen hijacked on way to doctor’s.

  The biggest temptation we can offer people to let us talk is to cry “say” (or dîtes) to them.

  This isn’t the South. This is the center of the country. We’re only polite half the time.

  I’m going through the crisis of my life like railroad ties.

  For Esther M.: In mem
ory of an old friendship or a prolonged quarrel that has gone on so long and accumulated so much moss that it is much the same thing.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jay O’Brien moving like the center of population.

  “I can’t pay you much,” said the editor to the author, “but I can give you some good publicity.”

  “I can’t pay you much,” said the advertiser to the editor, “but I can give you some beautiful ads.”

  When he buys his ties he has to ask if gin will make them run.

  Very bad jokes should be known as “employer’s jokes” or “creditor’s jokes.” The listener has to laugh, so it seems wasteful to use up a good story on him.

  The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

  You are contemplating a gigantic merger between J. P. Morgan and the Queensboro Bridge.

  Beware of him who would give his last sou to a beggar in the street. He would also give it to you and that is something you would not be able to endure.

  Fashion’s Blessing: Think how many flappers would have been strangled like Porphyria except for bobbed hair.

  Don’t get thinking it’s a real country because you can get a lot of high school kids into gym suits and have them spell out “bananas” for the news reels.

  I used to whip you up to a nervous excitement that bore a resemblance to intelligence.

  It grows harder to write, because there is much less weather than when I was a boy and practically no men and women at all.

  F

  FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS (WITHOUT GIRLS)

  Ah, it was a great feeling to relax—the best feeling, unlike any sinking down he had ever known before.

  “I have half an hour, an hour, two hours, ten hours, a hundred hours. God Almighty, I have even time to take a drink of water from the cooler in the hall; I can sleep eight full hours tonight, with a piece of paper stuffed in the telephone buzzer; I can face everybody in the office knowing they’ll be paid again this week, the week after, the week after next!”

  But most of all—he had that first half an hour. Having no one to communicate with, Andrew Fulton made sounds. One was like Whee-ee-ooo, but though it was expressive for awhile it palled presently, and he tried a gentle yawning sigh, but that was not enough. Now he knew what he wanted to do—he wanted to cry. He wanted to drink but there was nothing to drink, or to take his office force for an aeroplane ride or wake up his parents out of their graves and say, “Look—I too can rest.”

  He might find the ecstasy and misery, the infatuation that he wanted.

  The thrilling staccato joy of the meeting.

  “I feel as if I had a cannon ball in my stomach.”

  Wait for what? Wait while he swam off into a firmament of his own, so far off that she could, only see his feathers gleaming in the distance, only hear distintly the clamor of war or feel the vacuum that he created when sometimes he fell through space. He came back eventually with spoils, but for her there was always another larger waiting—for the end of youth, the blurring of her uniqueness: her two menacing deaths beside which mortal death was no more than sleep

  She looked lovely, but he thought of a terrible thing she had said once when they were first married—that if he were away she could sleep with another man and it wouldn’t really affect her, or make her really unfaithful to him. This kept him awake for another hour, but he had a little fine deep restful sleep toward morning.

  The blind luck that had attended the industry, and he knew croupiers who raked in the earning of that vast gambling house. And he knew that the Europeans were impressed with it as they were impressed with the skyscrapers, as something without human rhythm or movement. They had left rhythm behind them and it was their rhythm he wanted. He was tired of his own rhythm and the rhythms of the people in Hollywood. He wanted to see people with more secrets than the necessity of concealing a proclivity for morphine.

  Two Dreams: (1) A trip to Florida with Howard Garrish and many bathing beauties. Asleep standing on the prow, the beach and girls dancing. The one with skates like skiis. Like Switzerland, far castles and palaces. The horseman in the sea, the motor truck on sand, the horsemen coming ashore, the Bishop rears, falls, the horse saves him. My room, suits and ties, the view, the soldiers drilling under arcs in khaki, the wonderful water man is now Tom Taylor, I buy ties and wake in strange room. Blunder into Mother, who nags me. My mean remarks.

  (2) The colored burglar. Found clothes in hotel—underwear, suit; I discover pocket book, Echenard, my accusation.

  By the next morning she realized that she was the only one who cared, the only one who had the time and youth for the luxury of caring. Her aunt, her old cousins, were mercifully anaesthetized against death—her brother was already worrying about his wife and children back in West Virginia. She and her father were alone; since the funeral had been held over for her, the others somehow looked to her to summarize their grief. They were thin-drawn, wornout Anglo-Saxon stock and all that remained of their vitality seemed to have flowed by a mysterious distillation into her. They were chiefly interested in her. They wanted boldly to know whether it was true about the Prince of—.

  Slaves may love their bondage, but all those in slavery are not slaves. What joy in the threat that the solid wall surrounding us is falling to rack and ruin—the whispers of measles running through the school on Monday morning, the news that the supply officer has run away with the mess fund, the rumor that the floor manager has appendicitis and won’t be downtown for two weeks! “Break it up! Tear it down!” shouted the sans culottes, and I can distinguish my voice among the others. Stripes and short rations tomorrow, but for God’s sake, give us our measure of hysteria today.

  Fed up with it—he wanted to deal again in the vapid, to deliver a drop of material solid out of the great gaseous world of men, and never again waste his priceless hours watching nothing and nothing with nothing.

  She was alone at last. There was not even a ghost left now to drift with through the years. She might stretch out her arms as far as they could reach into the night without fear that they would brush friendly cloth.

  Liking a man when he’s tired.

  Felt utterly forlorn and defeated and outlasted by circumstances.

  She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.

  She fronted the appalling truth. She could never love him, never while he lived. It was as if he had charged her to react negatively and so long as the current flowed she had no choice. Passionately she tried to think back to a few minutes before when the world had been tragic and glorious, but the moment was gone. He was alive, and as she heard his feet take up the chase again, the wings of her mind were already preening themselves for flight.

  G

  DESCRIPTIONS OF GIRLS

  She turned her slender smile full upon Lew for a moment, and then aimed it a little aside, like a pocket torch that might dazzle him.

  She was the dark Günther—dark and shining and driven.

  He had not realized that flashing fairness could last so far into the twenties.

  Nevertheless, the bright little apples of her cheeks, the blue of the Zuyder Zee in her eyes, the braided strands of golden corn on the wide forehead, testified to the purity of her origin. She was the school beauty.

  Her beauty was as poised and secure as a flower on a strong stem; her voice was cool and sure, with no wayward instruments in it that played on his emotions.

  She was not more than eighteen—a dark little beauty with the fine crystal gloss over her that, in brunettes, takes the place of a blond’s bright glow.

  Becky was nineteen, a startling little beauty, with her head set upon her figure as though it had been made separately and then placed there with the utmost precision. Her body was sturdy, athletic; her head was a bright, happy composition of curves and shadows and vivid color, with that final kinetic jolt, the element that is eventua
lly sexual in effect, which made strangers stare at her. (Who has not had the excitement of seeing an apparent beauty from afar; then, after a moment, seeing that same face grow mobile and watching the beauty disappear moment by moment, as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with the meager joints of a paper doll?) Becky’s beauty was the opposite of that. The facial muscles pulled her expressions into lovely smiles and frowns, disdains, gratifications and encouragements; her beauty was articulated, and expressed vividly whatever it wanted to express.

  Anyone looking at her then, at her mouth which was simply a kiss seen very close up, at her head that was a gorgeous detail escaped from the corner of a painting, not mere formal beauty but the beholder’s unique discovery, so that it evoked different dreams to every man, of the mother, of the nurse, of the lost childish sweetheart or whatever had formed his first conception of beauty—anyone looking at her would have conceded her a bisque on her last remark.

  She was a stalk of ripe corn, but bound not as cereals are but as a rare first edition, with all the binder’s art. She was lovely and expensive, and about nineteen.

  A lovely dress, soft and gentle in cut, but in color a hard, bright, metallic powder blue.

  An exquisite, romanticized little ballerina.

  He imagined Kay and Arthur Busch progressing through the afternoon. Kay would cry a great deal and the situation would seem harsh and unexpected to them at first, but the tender closing of the day would draw them together. They would turn inevitably toward each other and he would slip more and more into the position of the enemy outside.

  Her face, flushed with cold and then warmed again with the dance, was a riot of lovely, delicate pinks, like many carnations, rising in many shades from the white of her nose to the high spot of her cheeks. Her breathing was very young as she came close to him—young and eager and exciting.

  The intimacy of the car, its four walls whisking them along toward a new adventure, had drawn them together.

  A beauty that had reached the point where it seemed to contain in itself the secret of its own growth, as if it would go on increasing forever.