Jack Kerouac - Orpheus Emerged

jack
A N E W N OV E L L A BY
kerouac
I NTRODUCTION BY ROB E RT CR E E LEY
ORPHEUS
EMERGED
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ORPHEUS
EMERGED
A N OV E L L A BY
JOHN KEROUAC
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Copyright © the Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas,

Literary Representative, 2000
Introduction copyright © Robert Creeley, 2000
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-9706110-0-5
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LiveREADS ORPHEUS EMERGED 4

Contents
© Allen Ginsberg Trust

USING THIS LIVEREAD
8 ABOUT THE BOOK
10 INTRODUCTION, “THINKING OF JACK,” BY
ROBERT CREELEY
ORPHEUS EMERGED
16 I
44 II
72 III
122 IV
156 V
180 VI
196 VII
210 VIII
218 IX
236 X
246 EXCERPTS FROM JACK KEROUAC’S JOURNALS
252 BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
256 AUTOBIOGRAPHY - KEROUAC’S INTRODUCTION
TO LONESOME TRAVELER
260 TIMELINE
266 BOOKS BY JACK KEROUAC
268 THE BEAT MOVEMENT
273 THE WORLD OF JACK KEROUAC
274 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS ABOUT
JACK KEROUAC
276 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS ABOUT
THE BEATS
278 MULTIMEDIA ELEMENTS (AUDIO & VIDEO)
280 CAPTIONS
282 ABOUT LIVEREADS AND CREDITS

About the Book

After Jack Kerouac died in 1969, his widow Stella kept
his extensive archive private. Since her death in 1990,
executor John Sampas has worked with publishers and
scholars to bring Kerouac's unpublished work to light.
Viking Penguin has published The Portable Kerouac, two
volumes of Selected Letters, Book of Blues, Some of the
Dharma, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other
Writings, and Joyce Johnson's correspondence with
Kerouac, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters
1957-1958.
The allegorical novella Orpheus Emerged, published for the

first time by LiveReads, was completed in 1945 when the 23-
year-old writer still signed his work “John Kerouac” and was
deeply immersed in the process of finding the voice that came
to express the spirit of a generation.
Kerouac wrote the novella shortly after meeting Allen

Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and others in and
around Columbia University. These new friends would form
the core of the group of writers know as the Beats, and they
are reflected in the characters in Orpheus Emerged, a book
filled with references to the books Kerouac was reading, the
music and art he was discovering, and the concepts he was
exploring.
Set in and around an urban university, Orpheus Emerged

follows the obsessions, passions, conflicts and dreams of a
group of colorful, searching, bohemian intellectuals. At its
core is a petit roman a clef, a portrait of an artist as a young
man torn between art and life—formulating his ideas
about love, work, art, suffering, and ecstasy.

Thinking of Jack
Introduction by Robert Creeley
It was Allen Ginsberg who introduced us – if that’s the
appropriate word for what happened that evening in spring,
San Francisco, 1956. I’d come into the city for the first time
a few weeks before and had met Allen through the fact that
both he and poet friend Ed Dorn were working at the
Greyhound Bus Station on Market Street. So Allen had
come up to the Dorns’ apartment where I was staying –
crashed is the better term – and we talked most of the night,
remaining till Ed’s shift was done. Not very long after Allen
told us that his friend Jack Kerouac would shortly be com-
ing into town and that if we went the next night to The
Place, a local bar in North Beach run by old Black
Mountaineers, he’d be meeting Jack there after work. At
that time just one of Jack’s novels had been published, The
Town and the City, and that book by itself would probably
have made little difference finally, either to us or the world.
It was what hadn’t been published yet – the great unwind-
ing string of narratives, the veritable river of “spontaneous
prose” – we so respected. Few had read any of it but the
word was out. He was the astounding writer who had man-
aged to keep a thousand pages moving wherein the only
external action was a neon light going off and on out the
window, over a drugstore across the street. So we went,
hoping to meet the young novelist, already legendary at
least to such as ourselves.
Memory recalls a young man sitting by himself at
a far corner of the small space of the bar, just to the left
of the turn for the toilets, where the sidewall met the
back. There was no remarkable lighting focussed on
him, but I do see him now as singular, isolated, quite still
as he drinks. At some point he must have caught me
looking at him, so he looks back – his eyes a striking

blue, intense, very particular. I had no idea as yet this
person was Jack but when Allen came in, seeing us, he
asked if Jack had come, then saw the same fellow and
said, “There he is!” Going over, we found his seeming
quiet was a fact of his being altogether drunk, and I
never did meet him that evening more than to help with
getting him across the Bay and into bed in Berkeley.
I knew that drinking, however. I’d grown up in a
farm town in New England close to Lowell, Jack’s family
home, some fifteen miles east. For us Lowell was the big
city, along with places like Waltham. Boston itself was a
glowing metropolis almost beyond imagination. My moth-
er got my annual outfit for Easter in the Bon Marche in
Lowell. Route 3 went through it on its way north to New
Hampshire and the Boston and Maine Railroad took the
same route as well along the Merrimac River. In the awk-
wardness of that time, drinking, it appeared, eased the male
confusion, made inarticulate feelings far simpler to accom-
modate, and let one feel an unaccustomed comfort in the
increasingly blurred surroundings. Whatever the fact,
drinking was the way through, be it sexual delight –
although how drunkenness helps such circumstance is hard
to fathom – or rapport with a various social world not one’s
own. Hale fellow, well met! might quickly turn to Throw that
bum out! – but by then one heard nothing anyhow.
So, in this poignantly fledgling novella what males
do, along with write and talk, is drink – with women then
as an ambience, even a resource and company, but always
with a marked distance, made into objects as they are,
from the real exchange apparent. If they do enter the
action, it’s with a wry and dislocating sense of contest. For

example, Marie is Anthony’s securing wife but then
Anthony is given a determinedly vulnerable person. When
Marie goes off with Michael to have an “affair,” she is the
most substantial of all three. She also smokes!
Michael followed her into the bedroom.

Anthony was peacefully asleep, with just the
hint of a smile on his lips.
“What a big baby!” Michael exclaimed soft-
ly. Marie turned to him and almost smiled. But
solemnly she said, “And what do you think you
are?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“Hmm?”
Marie lowered the window pane, arranged
Anthony’s blankets, motioned Michael out of
the room, and quietly closed the door. She
went over to a desk drawer and took out a cig-
arette and lit it.
Jack’s journals provide an interesting reference to

Orpheus Emerged – “The Half Jest” as he calls it then, dated
“Jan. 1944.” As The Book of Symbols (February, 1945) oth-
erwise makes clear, he is casting his thoughts and work
into large, symbolizing patterns with the sense of heroic
forbears writ large indeed: “Saroyan period,” “Joycean
period,” “Wolfean period,” “Nietzschean period (Neo-
Rimbaudian),” “post-Nietzschean period (Yeats period),”
which is where he locates Orpheus Emerged, “Spenglerian
period,” “American period (Dos Passos),” with the con-
cluding one being the “post-neurotic period,” aptly

enough. It does him no disservice, like they say, to note
that he is still not twenty-two years old. (His birthday is
March 12, 1922.) No one’s told him how to write other than
what he’s got from books as best he can. There’s no defin-
ing tradition for such as he is, no social habit sustaining
him. He’s gloriously making it up as he goes along but try-
ing with such moving determination to be a real writer, an
encompassing writer, a great writer. When his lifelong
friend and elder, William Burroughs, was asked to give his
sense of Kerouac, he emphasized that, first and last, he was
a writer.
Here then he is at work, at the beginning of it all,
and whatever one makes of the result, it’s fascinating to see
his moves, call them, the interaction he manages between
his characters, foretelling what will be the “story” of so
much of his subsequent work. Allen Ginsberg is the char-
acter “Leo,” for example, or so he seems to me. Who else
would ask those charming questions? But it is the way the
imagination of a life is conceived, that life and art must find
a viable company; that the relations of men, among them-
selves and with that outer “other” of women, must be end-
lessly rehearsed – all such matters are those of his own life
as book after book records.
“Art is the only true twin life has,” Charles Olson,
fellow poet, wrote in these same years. He lived in
Gloucester and was said to be the inventor of “Projective
Verse,” just as Jack was credited with “Spontaneous
Prose.” In fact, there was even an edge of contest between
the two groups comprising their followers as to just who
was first in authority. Despite Olsen’s having written him
in September, 1957 to acknowledge his powers as a poet,

Jack was not to meet Olson until well along in his life after
he had come back to live in Lowell — as Olson had him-
self returned to Gloucester, to live on the upper floor of a
fisherman’s family house. One Sunday two of Jack’s wife
Stella Sampas’ brothers drove him the short distance from
Lowell to Gloucester to meet Olson. They sat in the car
while Jack went in. As it happened, the Boston Globe had
reviewed a novel of Jack’s that day – which one I can’t now
remember – and gave it solid approval. Olson had taken
the pages of the paper and spread them on the wooden
steps outside leading up to his place, so that Jack might
walk up in regal manner.
In America one has to find one’s own way, step by dif-
ficult step. At any time there is much to be learned, much to
be discarded, much to be engaged and contested. To the
young man or woman it must seem often that the world they
try finally to enter, whatever their hopes, has locked its
doors. Is this what it means to be taught? To be nurtured?
To be recognized as existing? Why doesn’t Kerouac use the
French he knows instead of those literary “Parisian” tags?
Because he’s learning, because he’s young, because he
wants to be let in. We know, of course, that a few years later
it will be Kerouac who, as Allen Ginsberg usefully noted,
makes the very transforming point, that one can write in the
same manner as one would speak to friends. But now he is
in New York, has dropped out of Columbia, is trying with all
his powers simply to write.
There will never be another moment like this one.
—Buffalo, N.Y.
October 28, 2000

I
Paul stood
in the Book
Shop facing
a shelf of
books. He came
in every day
at the same
time, shuf-
fling in his
old shoes, and
pored through
the same score
or so of books
with his dirty
fingers.

And despite the complete disreputability of
his appearance—the shabby clothing, the
matted locks of dark hair protruding over the
collar—and his constant smoking that filled
the bright little Shop with smoke and its clean
floors with cigarette ends, no one seemed to
pay any attention to him. His daily visits had
by now assumed the character of routine.
One or two of the clerks, however, were wont
to comment on his habit of looking at the same
twenty or so books every day. Nietzsche’s com-
plete works, a novel by Stendhal,
Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Ulysses, The Oxford
Book of English Verse, and many others of this
kind, he peered at impatiently each and every
day, and always walked away from them with a

preoccupied frown on his face.
It was a beautiful day in early spring...
Spring Day Eve, for a fact—when Paul was
interrupted in his perusal of Kenneth
Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight by
Leo, a student at the University. Slim, dark
haired, wearing blue horn-rimmed glasses,
the boyishly ugly Leo hurried across the
Shop and slapped Paul on the back.
“Paul!” he cried. “I heard you had been
fired from your job. Is that true?”
Paul, glancing up to see who it was, and
annoyed by the question, returned his atten-
tion to the book.
“You have!” ejaculated Leo, leaning
toward Paul anxiously.

The other waved his hand and sent Leo step-
ping back. “Don’t annoy me,” he hissed
sharply. “It’s my affair. Don’t start asking for
details. Please shut up.”
At this, Leo began to smile sporadically,
and he bowed from the waist as a sign of def-
erence. He could always manage to conceal
his feelings.
“Where’s Arthur?” Paul then curtly inquired.
“In class. I’m headed there now.”
“I’ll come,” Paul said, and replaced the
book on the shelf. He gave the shelf a last
frowning look and started out to the street.
Leo, at his heels, shrugged his shoulder
doubtfully.
“You know, don’t you,” he said, “that the
Professor is beginning to dislike your sitting
in on his class. After all, you’re not an
enrolled student here…”
“I know, I know. He can do no more than
throw me out of the class.”
“Well that’s true.”
“Then come.” Paul led Leo hastily
across the street onto the green grass of
the campus. He began to talk all at once.

“Those books! If
only I had time
to read them, and
more. This morn-
ing, after I lost
my job, I went to
the University
Library itself,
and do you know,
there were hun-
dreds of thou-
sands of books
there I honestly
felt
I should read!
And the ideas
that rush through
my mind. The
impatience I
feel! The time
running off like
sand.
Ah...” and he dismissed the question with a
wave of his hand.
Leo laughed. “Do you know,” he said,
“this is about the fifth time you’ve told me
that. Always, you’re talking about books,
and all the things to be learned, like
Faustus in reverse himself. Arise, Paul!
Come across the moonlit fields and seek
the Golden Tree of Knowledge.”
Paul almost sneered. He was hurrying
along with his hands in his pockets.
Despite his haste, he looked like a loafer of
some sort, for his clothes were those of a
tramp, and his shoe soles flapped rhythmi-
cally as he walked; and his large red and
raw hands, like those of a peasant, were
always in his pockets, so that he gave the
conventional impression of the loafer and

ne’er-do-well. Yet, he no longer created a
sensation on the campus.
He had arrived two months ago, in
February, “from the road,” and from the
North—and had taken a room on the campus,
a sort of semi-coal-bin in the cellar of an
apartment house on M street. He had imme-
diately struck up an acquaintanceship with
several of the students who had attracted his
fancy in order to be accompanied to the use of
the various cultural conveniences around the
campus, such as the library, the music library,
the art studio, and to be afforded a chance to
sit in on lectures when he had occasion to. It
was all very mysterious indeed. Some con-
tended that he was a mere country bumpkin

come to the big city and the big university, with-
out sufficient funds to register as a student. But
others saw in him a great deal of sophistication
and previous education, and dismissed the
whole matter as some sort of psychopathic
technique on his part.
Of Paul, Arthur had this to say one day to
Michael, who lived on the campus with his
mistress and was himself some sort of loafer:
“Paul has something in his past that drives
him like a madman. He is daemonic man per-
sonified! I wonder what it is!?”
And to this, the laconic Michael only
answered, “Yes, I suppose so. It must interest
you a great deal. But as for me, I can’t stand
him.” “It’s because he’s so much like you,”
Arthur had been quick to remark.
“Peut-etre,” Michael had replied, smiling faintly,
and turning to resume the meal that had been set
up on his work desk by his mistress, Maureen.
Now Leo led Paul into the classroom as he
had done several times before in the past two
months. The other students paid no notice,
for none of them knew that Paul was not a
registered student, except Arthur, who now
rose to come and greet the two young men.
“Paul,” he said. “I hope it will go off today
as it did last week, although I think our distin-

guished Professor is beginning to spout at
the seams. Today’s lecture, in case you’re
interested, will deal with the Zarathustra of
Nietzsche.”
“It’s strange that he hasn’t thrown you out
yet,” Leo put in. They took their seats in the
last row of the class. “Perhaps he’s discreet.”
“Do you have any definite ideas on
today’s lecture?” Paul inquired of Arthur.
“Yes! You’ll hear me air them in full. I
have my notes here.”
“And you’ll manage as usual to get his
gander up,” Leo laughed.
“I for my part haven’t had time to formu-
late anything specific,” Paul said gloomily.
He began to clean his fingernails with the
nails of his other hand. “And of course, if I

had, it wouldn’t be right to speak up. I must
keep my silence and listen. There’s a
limit…”
“Last night, at his apartment. He was writ-
ing a poem and wouldn’t allow me to see it.
He hardly acknowledged my presence!” Paul
smiled craftily. “But of course, that can be
expected of him. He’s afraid of me.”
“Have you known each other before?” Leo
demanded.
“Oh yes.”
“But Michael claims otherwise!”
“Well?” Paul smiled angelically, and
almost began to blush. “That can be expect-
ed of him.”
“I don’t understand—” Leo began, but at
this point, the Professor, bushy of eyebrow,

had entered the class bearing a briefcase under
his arm. From his mouth protruded a cigarette
holder into which he had not as yet inserted a cig-
arette. Now he paused at the desk in front of the
class and dramatically inserted a cigarette and
lighted it with a flagrantly large and decorative
lighter.
“Gentlemen,” he said, and his eye fell on the
dishevelled Paul in the back of the room. “Good
morning,” he now concluded, addressing Paul
directly. The latter blandly nodded back.
“Today’s lecture,” went on the Professor, talk-
ing straight at Paul with a great deal of irony in
his tone, “deals with Nietzsche’s great philo-
sophical poem, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra.’ ”
The door of the classroom opened and a pro-
fessor’s head appeared, beckoning to the other.
“William, a moment.”
While the class Professor was thus engaged
outside, in the hall, Leo turned excitedly to Paul.
“Now, tell me! You say that you knew Michael
before? Where? When?”
“Some time ago. He refuses to admit it, of course.”

“But why!?” cried Leo in perfect agony.
Paul smiled. “It’s all very involved and mys-
terious. I knew him when he was not the man
he is today.”
“Well tell us!”
“I shall, some time. You’ll find out anyway”
The Professor had returned and now he sat on
the edge of the desk at the front of the class and
began puffing meditatively on his cigarette.
“ ‘I bid you lose me,’ ” he began without warn-
ing, “ ‘and find yourselves. Only when ye have
rejected me, may I return onto you.’ Does any-
one recall reading these lines during the exe-
cution of the assignment?” There was more
irony in this last remark, and the bushy eye-
brows contracted portentously.
Arthur, glancing quickly over his class notes,
now raised his hand.
“Well!” cried the Professor. “Do you remem-
ber it? Do you?”
“I remember it vaguely.”
“Vaguely!” shouted the Professor with savage
triumph. “And what does it mean to you?”

Arthur smiled mockingly at the Professor.
“Shall I be frank?”
“Frank?” The Professor puffed on his cig-
arette. “Yes, do!”
“Well—Zarathustra is speaking as the
voice of ultimate society, and as society in
general. I bid you lose me—society as it is,
this pre-ultimate society—and find your-
selves; and only when ye have all rejected
me, this false, pre-ultimate society, this com-
promising civilization, may ye at last find
Zarathustra, the ultimate, artistic society.”
“Your own interpretation, I presume?”
“Precisely,” answered Arthur quickly.
Paul, who sat next to him, had begun to
frown almost angrily.
The Professor was pacing in front of the
class. “Do you think,” he roared, “that
Nietzsche can be embodied in your private
desires? Heh?” Silence. “Is it ever going to
be possible that anyone will resist reading
himself into the man?”

The others of the class turned disconso-
late faces on Arthur, as though he had been
a culprit. Some of them were raising their
hands tentatively in order to put in a word
or two when Paul, who had by now reached
a great state of suppressed excitement,
jumped up on his feet and spoke:
“I thoroughly agree with you, Professor,
where you condemn Arthur’s liberal use of
Nietzsche’s meanings. But of course—that in
itself is not the greater crime. Now, if you will
permit me, I can point out where Arthur is
making a far more serious mistake…” Paul
paused here in order to catch his breath. The
Professor was staring at him with something
of indignation and outrage written on his face,
but Paul ignored this.
“All asceticism,” Paul began nervously,
waving his large hands for emphasis, “is non-
sense—and I construe Arthur’s remark on the
rejection of society as a broad, sweeping form
of asceticism.” Paul turned to Arthur, nodding
his head at him eagerly.

“You see, now
we are embark-
ing on the
business of
rejecting life,
happiness, nat-
uralness, for
the sake of
some dim ideal
as the ultimate
state or what-

ever it was.
This is the
first step
towards the
disease of
good and evil,
the first
rather child-
ish overture
to false
‰ aintliness...”
Paul had lost all of his nervousness now,
and the more he spoke, the more confident
he became. He was just about to launch
himself further into his little speech when
the Professor held up his hand.
There was silence. But Arthur broke it by
directly addressing his opponent: “What do you
mean, false saintliness? Explain that, please…”
And Leo, sensing that all was not well,
added eagerly: “Yes, do…”
But the Professor was not to be dissuad-
ed. He was still holding up his hand, and
the silence fell heavily all over. Some of the

students had turned and were peering curi-
ously at Paul, for they had grown accus-
tomed to his silence on the occasion of his
rare visits, and now, suddenly, he had burst
out with a lot of nonsense that bewildered
and annoyed them.
“Sir…whatever your name is, young
man…you know, don’t you,” the Professor
began, “the circumstances attending your
presence here today, and several times pre-
viously in the course. I haven’t mentioned it
before, for reasons, er, commensurate with
the unpleasantness involved.”
Paul nodded and walked towards the door.
“I have a definite course to pursue in these
lectures,” the Professor went on, going to the
door and blocking Paul’s way, “and much of
my time is very precious. Any interrup-
tions…. Well, and there’s the matter of my
responsibility. If the Dean were to know…”
The Professor was opening the door.
Paul quite suddenly bowed and smiled
angelically to the Professor.
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “I hope to meet
you under more favorable circumstances in the
future…” And with this he was gone out the
door, with the Professor looking after him with
a rather preoccupied expression on his face.

“Thankyou,sir”

Leo and Arthur, meanwhile, were exchanging
anxious looks; but after the Professor had
closed the door, and returned to his station at
the front of the class as though nothing had
happened, they rested easily.
After the hour, they found Paul waiting
for them downstairs in the lobby of the
building.
“Well,” Leo called, “that’s that!”
“Yes,” said Paul, “it was good while it last-
ed.” And with this, all three burst out into
laughter and went out on the walk. It was
lunch hour.
“You’re going to have to do a lot of
explaining to me about that false saintliness
business,” Arthur admonished in mock
anger. “And Good Lord! What a mess you
made of things, all because of your opposi-

tion to my ideas!”
“Where to?” Leo asked.
“Come with me,” Paul said, hurrying off,
“and we’ll go to my room. You two must buy
some sandwiches and we’ll have lunch
there.”
“Again! Are you broke again?”
“Yes.”
“He lost his job today,” Leo explained to
Arthur. “Tell us, Paul… What happened?
Did you just walk out?”
“No, nothing like that. I stayed up late
two nights ago trying to read all of
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things you
know—and in the morning I couldn’t get up.
So when I reported for work today, poof! I
was fired. There was another man running
the elevator.”

They were walking on M street. Halfway
towards the boulevard, Paul turned in at an
iron gate and led the two others down a
short flight of stone steps to an iron grill-
work door beneath the landing of the sec-
ond floor entrance to the building. A nar-
row dusty hall led to a crude wooden door
that opened with a loud scrape against the
concrete basement floor.
Sitting on Paul’s sagging cot was a gray-
haired man of indeterminate age—he could
have been anywheres from twenty-five to
forty years old—who jumped up immediate-
ly and greeted Paul.
“Well, it’s Anthony!”
“Paul!” repeated Anthony nervously,
glancing at Leo and Arthur, who were
depositing their books on the little table in
the corner. “I came to see you about… Well,
it’s…” and Anthony could only look rather
rudely in the direction of the two students.
Paul, sensing what was up, immediately
handled the situation. “Go out and get the
sandwiches, Leo, and you too Arthur. Get
me some beer to drink with it. We’ll have

another of our provocative luncheons.. ”
“Yes,” mocked Arthur, “in these, your
luxurious chambers. All right, we’ll be back
in a minute.” And with this, Leo and Arthur
went out.
Anthony was instantly back on the couch
with his hands over his face. Paul went over
and sat at the table, and pretended to be
absorbed in the examining of the tall oil
lamp.
“I hit her!” Anthony announced, on the
point of sobbing. “This morning. I’ve been

looking for you since. I’m dying of… I can’t
face it!”
Paul smiled. “All right, all right. Let’s get
to the point of this.”
Anthony had begun to weep.
“None of that!” snapped Paul. “Till you’ve
told me the details.”
“Will you help me?”
“Of course, if I can.”
“Oh,” cried Anthony, starting to sob
again, “my brother, my brother!”
“To the point!”
“Well—” and Anthony rose to walk back
and forth across the little room.
“I struck Marie
this morning;
it was a stupid
little argument
over little
things, but she
had gotten the
best of me, and
I was suddenly
enraged at her.
Why? Can I tell
you why? Can
anyone explain
why a man
should suddenly
strike his
wife?
By all let this be known, you know…the
brave man—killing the one you love—with
sword or kiss—in Oscar Wilde…”
“Go on!” cried Paul impatiently.
“Well—and I was a little drunk—”
“Is that all?” Paul shouted. “Then there’s
no problem. Go back to her this very
minute and kiss her hand and weep there,
not here.. ”
“I can’t do it!”

Paul came over to Anthony and smiled at
him. “Nonsense. You can. And Marie is
accustomed to that sort of thing, anyway—
she told me so herself. You struck her, you
remember, about a month ago, when I first
met you. Did Marie hold it against you? Did
…. But this is all a waste of time. Now, Tony,
go immediately to Marie and do as I say.
And don’t be a baby!”
Anthony’s lip was quivering.
“You’re in a terribly nervous state,” Paul
added. “Otherwise you would realize how
simple the whole thing is. Are you going
now?”
Anthony hesitated. Then he started
towards the door, shuffling his feet patheti-
cally as though wishing to arouse his
friend’s sympathy. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”
“Goodbye. I’ll see you tonight.”
Anthony turned. “And we were supposed
to go to the party tonight, now everything is
terrible!—” He was almost on the verge of
crying again.
“You’ll make up, and you’ll be at the party

tonight. Goodbye! I’ll see you when you’re
not in one of your neurotic moods, then we
can have a talk about things, and enjoy a
few drinks together.”
Anthony began to chuckle. “I guess
you’re right. I’ll go now. And without the
fortitude of a drink, too. Watch me.”
“All right.” There was a minute or two of
brooding silence…
“A la vue!” Anthony now flung carelessly.
Then he paused again: “But it’s going to be so
hard. You don’t understand me, Paul, although
you claim to. You’re too young! I’m older than
you are, and I’m more complex…”
Leo and Arthur were at the door, pushing
it in. They had packages of food with them.
Without a word, Anthony walked past them
and out, giving a show of resoluteness and
purpose. Arthur motioned his thumb after
the departing Anthony and said to Paul,
“He’s in a strange state! What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, as usual,” Paul said. “Now,
let’s eat.”

II
AS FAR AS
MAUREEN WAS
CONCERNED,
Paul was by the way of being an unwel-
come guest in her apartment—nay, an
intruder. He was always neglected in his
habits, and left cigarette butts around the
house, sometimes in her flowerpots.
When Paul called at three o’clock that
afternoon, Michael was out.
“Where is he?”
“He went out for a walk,” answered

Michael’s mistress, disdaining to open the
door any wider. “He’s probably sitting in the
park meditating or something.”
“Well, then—” Paul reflected.
“No one is here,” Maureen added
unpleasantly. She was a woman in her late
twenties, buxom, sensual—yet strangely
maternal in her attitude towards the boy
who lived with her. At times, however, her
earthiness got the better of her maternal
instinct, and she was wont to minimize the
intellectualism of her lover.
Paul turned and started down the stairs.
Then he paused and seemed to reflect again.
“In the park,” Maureen reminded him.

Paul turned his face up to her. “Don’t
worry, Maureen, I don’t want to come into
your house. I was just thinking.”
“All of you are crazy,” Maureen
remarked sweepingly. She too had now
begun to reflect. “All of you. I wonder
sometimes what I’m doing here.”
The boy grinned and went down a few
more steps; then he stopped again.
“Maureen,” he said, “I won’t come into your
house if you don’t want me to. I only come to
see Michael, and if he’s not in…” Maureen
was silent. “So don’t worry. I’m leaving now.”
“Goodbye,” said Maureen. “It’s only that
you dirty up the house.”

“Yes,”
admitted Paul,
“houses don’t
mean anything
to me. If I had
one, the wind
would blow
through it all
year, round and
it would get
all dusty and
I’d freeze to
death.”
“All of you are crazy,” Maureen repeated.
“Back home, the kids aren’t like all of you
around here. They enjoy life, they have
good times…”
“I’m looking for Michael,” Paul put in.
“You can tell me of your past the next time I
come. I’m in a hurry now.” Maureen
slammed the door before he could finish,
and so he descended the stairs and was
presently out on the street. It was warmish
April afternoon, pregnant already with the
sunny and lyrical thaw of an early spring.
Paul walked rapidly towards the park
and scanned all the benches. He could not
find Michael on any of them. Then he went
back towards the campus, and crossed the
street to go into the Boulevard Bar. Anthony
was there, reeling in front of the counter
and holding a glass of beer in his hand.

“This gentleman,” Anthony announced
as soon as he saw Paul, “has been kind
enough to buy me drinks this afternoon. He
is a sailor, a man of the sea.” Paul nodded to
the man who sat on a stool next to Anthony.
“Reason? Because he has a social thirst, and
craves to converse with a man well steeped,
as I am, in Western culture.”
“Largely Slavic,” said the man, whose eyes
seemed a trifle crossed, which gave him an
appearance of zaniness. “Largely Slavic!” he
repeated, for he too was drunk and repetitive.
“Your friend, sir,” he addressed to Paul, “is a
man of learning and manners.”
Paul threw a coin on the counter and

asked for a glass of beer.
“Your friend and I have been indulging in
intellectual conversation this long afternoon,”
the man went on. “At sea, where there is but
silence and ennui, a man develops a social
thirst; and as soon as he reaches land, his first
impulse is to venture forth to meet kindred
spirits of his like, with whom to discuss and
share the various beauties of wisdom.”
Paul inwardly winced. He thought the
man insane, for a moment, although he had
a great deal of money with him. He had
extracted a large bill from his wallet, and
with a flourish, was ordering two more
drinks for himself and his friend Anthony.

“Anthony”

“Anthony,” Paul said. “Have you gone to
her today?”
Anthony did not answer.
“Have you?” But Anthony still did not
deign to answer.
“You bungler,” Paul hissed. “But ah—that
is you all over, that’s poor Anthony himself!”
he added gloomily.
Anthony had now turned, and he shouted
loudly and emphatically into Paul’s face; “No,
I did not go to see her!”
“All right,” Paul said, and drank down his
beer. “I’ll have to go and see her myself,
although I should be doing something else.”
“Are you?” Anthony breathed. “Are you, Paul?”
— and suddenly he had begun to sob. The sea
gentleman looked very confused at all this.
“Excuse it all,” Paul told the stranger.
“Buy Tony some more drinks. Sit him over
there in the booth, sit with him and discuss
the beauties of wisdom as you call them. I’ll
arrange everything. There’s a private matter,
you understand. Anthony’s meeting you
saved him the emotional stress of executing a
most painful…”

“I believe,” interrupted the man, holding
up his hand with tense drama, “I believe I
begin to comprehend the entire matter. I
believe so. I see. This friend, Anthony, is
full of sorrow, and you are his friend. Very
well. I shall take care of him.”
Paul went over to Anthony, who was still
sobbing, and pulled on his ear. “Anthony,
shut up. Sit with your friend. I’m going over
to see her now and everything’ll be all right.”
Anthony now
sobbed more loud-
ly than ever,
and, having put
his hand on
Paul’s sleeve, he
was clutching it
desperately.
”You’re too good,
Paul, too good.
Your goodness
will kill you."

“Likely!” scoffed Paul, his eyes gleaming.
“My brother, my brother,” bawled
Anthony, making no attempt to control him-
self.
Paul finished his beer and turned to the
man. “Take care of him. I’m going there
now.”
“Anthony is a man of great learning,” the
stranger pronounced. “And I understand he is a
musician of no inconsiderable talent. I shall be
honored to pay him my friendly respects for the
remainder of the afternoon, perhaps far into the
watches of the night indeed!..”
“Yes,” Paul said.
“So do not worry, young friend.

Everything—” Here, the man hiccuped and
then turned his crossed, aimless glance
back to focus in Paul’s general direction.
“Everything is in firm hands.” Paul was cer-
tain that this man was mad. “Everything
will come safely to port. You have entrust-
ed your friend well.…”
Paul was out on the boulevard and as he
began to walk toward Marie’s house, he
caught sight of Michael emerging from a
doorway across the street.
“Michael!” he called, starting across the
street in a half-trot. But Michael, at the
same instant, had caught sight of Paul, and
he had begun to walk away very swiftly.
Paul persisted in his chase, until Michael,
turning to see that it was hopeless, decided
to run—and run he did, so that in a few
moments, he had disappeared around a
corner and was gone.
Paul gave it up and stopped in his tracks.
He shrugged his shoulders and muttered
under his breath.

“He will con-
tinue to be
stupid like
that. He
insists on
running away,
as though it
were in any
way possible.
It’s all a
waste of time,
that’s all I
care! Time.
He’s having
his so-called
season in
hell, ha-ha.”
Paul walked for awhile, thinking, until
suddenly he realized that he had passed
Marie’s house. He turned and hurried back
towards his original destination. Breathless
— for all the hurrying — he arrived in the
lobby of her apartment house and glanced
at the brass plates near the buzzers. He
rang her buzzer and was soon admitted. He
went up the stairs, where Marie had already
left open her door, though she herself was
not standing in the doorway. “May I come
in?” Paul shouted through the open door.
“Of course,” answered a quiet voice,
Marie’s, from the front room.

Marie was
wearing her
rose-colored
pajamas,seat-
ed on the
bright quilt
laid out on
the divan,
and smoking
a red-tipped
cigarette.

The radio was on to a Bach organ fugue.
“And where is my darling?” Marie said
straight off, with mockery in her tone. “Did
you close the door?”
“I just saw him. Yes, I closed the door.
Marie—he is weeping.”
Marie snuffed down her nose contemp-
tuously. “Shut up about that weeping! Do
you think that when a thing is a rule, and
not an exception, it’ll continue to move one?
Ghastly!”
“Marie, you’re cruel—but sensitive.”
“Thank you.”
“Marie, you must realize that Anthony is
not a well man. He’s a lot like I am now, you
see, but of course, of course, he doesn’t
have what I have. He’s searching, you see…
I’ve my Helen, and—”
“Stop babbling,” interrupted the girl.
“Do you realize,”

“Do you realize,” Paul went on uncon-
cernedly, throwing himself on the divan next
to Marie, “that love is painful, that it makes a
man like Anthony suffer? Oh, I know, I
know—it’s all the pain of happiness. But he is
the weeping kind. And do you realize, my
dear, that if he is weak, he can do nothing
about it? So he hit you this morning! … and for
that little slap in the face, he’s endured upon
himself an eight-hour session of imponder-
able sorrow, unspeakable angoisse.”
“You crazy child!”
“Does your face hurt? Does your face
hurt?”
“Shut up.”
“His heart is broken, Marie you diaboli-
cal witch!..”
“You came here to call me names?”
“Yes, because I love you.”
Marie got up from the couch and threw

her cigarette out the open window. Then
she stopped in front of the radio and
laughed.
“Ha ha,” mocked Paul, getting up also. “It’s
just that I love you enough to want you to love
Anthony, and I know Anthony well…”
“My God!” cried Marie. “You’re mad,
aren’t you?”
“No, no.”
They were silent, and Paul began to pace
the rooms.
“Now,” he said at length. “I come to see
you as Anthony’s envoy, to tell you that he is
weak, and that he’s sorry, and that nothing
matters but that you love him as he loves
you. Can you do that? Can you do that?”
“Can I do that?” Marie echoed contemp-
tuously. “Have you eaten lately?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll heat you some soup. You’re in a
delirium.”
Marie went off into the kitchen, with Paul
right at her heels, talking furiously. “Marie, will
you forgive him? Oh, this waste of time!! People
waste all their time. They’re alive for just so
long, and they waste their time on recrimina-
tions and retributions and all such nonsense.

Wait, you’ll
find out all
about me some
day, and
you’ll realize
what I’m say-
ing. You
might meet my
Helen...

Give me some soup, yes, and some bread. I
am rather hungry…”
Marie was calmly giving him a piece of
bread, and removing a soup bowl from the
cupboard. The soup was heating on the
stove.
“A lovely kitchen,” Paul was saying. “Tell
me, Marie. What shall I do? Shall I get
Anthony, sober him up, and bring him
here?”
“No. He’s got to come of his own accord.”
“Then my words have done some good?!..
haven’t they?”
“No, not your words. I love my husband.
We’d have made up eventually. I dare say
we don’t need your help, either.”

“Ha ha!” cried Paul. “I’m a time saver…”
“Balderdash!”
Paul sat at the little table and took the
spoon Marie had offered him. “You see,” he
cried, “I’ve done some good. I’ve saved
time. Accept Anthony, accept him…he’s a
good man, a wonderful soul. He’s weeping
in the Boulevard Bar now, because he
struck you…”
“You nor anyone else can’t patch up our
troubles,” Marie said, placing the steaming
bowl of soup before the hungry Paul.
“Anthony strikes me…it’s his problem. No
one else can help. That’s why he weeps,
you little fool, because he realizes that he
alone is guilty.”

“It’s you”

“And you?”
“I, of course, have my share of guilt. And
it’s none of your business, little Jesus Christ.
I’m restless and intolerant, and I never
seem to have made up my mind one way or
another about Anthony. Well…”
Paul slurped up several spoonfuls of
soup and then jumped up. “Now I’ve got to
go. I’m pressed for time, goodbye, and look
I’ll take this bread with me. Thank you…”
And suddenly, Paul had walked out of the
kitchen and was gone.
Marie picked up the bowl from the table
and emptied the soup in the sink. She went to
the door and closed it, for Paul had forgotten to
close it in his haste. Then she went back to her
divan and sat down with a freshly-lit cigarette.
She was smiling secretly.
The buzzer rang again and she thought it
was Paul rushing back to say something
further. But a few moments later, Michael
knocked at the door and walked in.
“It’s you,” Marie said.
“You coming to the party tonight?”
Michael asked outright.
“Sit down,” Marie said. “Yes, I suppose
so. You must remember that it’s Maureen’s
party.”

“I don’t care. I want to see you.”
“You and your inconvenient remarks,”
Marie said.
“Well? And who cares?” Michael had sat
down in a chair in the other room and was
watching Marie gloomily. There was a
silence during which nothing further need-
ed to be said.
“I’ve fixed up a little apartment in the
Quarter,” Michael finally said. “I expect you
soon.” His tone was firm, but gloomy.
Marie did not reply. She was watching
him with something of weariness in her
demeanor. Finally, she said: “What do you
expect of me?”
“I only expect you to be sensible.”

“What? You
want me to
leave my
husband for
a while! You
call that
sensible?”
“Of course.
For both of
us. I desire
you, that’s
all there is.”

“And suppose I didn’t desire you, as you
so romantically put it?"
“Why can’t you?”
“I don’t think you’re capable of a decent
affair, that’s why I can’t. You neurotics are
all the same as lovers. Foo! Go home!”
Michael began to smile sardonically.
“How can you be so sure?” he asked. “I
know, I know also by the expression on your
face that the idea appeals to you. You know
that I have money and that we can have the
best for as long as we want it to last. You
also need a change, I can sense that in your
voice.”
“Nonsense.”
Michael got up, and, without a word,
walked out of the apartment. He left Marie
in a very pensive mood.

III
IN THAT LAND,
the biggest holiday of the year occurs on
the 27th of April, which is usually the first
fine day of spring, and if not—the weather
being unfavorable—it is at least a day
breathing with the first sharply defined
odor of spring, and rife with its gentleness.

Now, Maureen had planned a party for
the eve of the Spring Day, and all that day—
even during Paul’s unwelcome visit—she’d
been very busy preparing the apartment for
the festivities. Michael had given her some
money with which to buy things to prettify
the rooms, and also for hors d’oeuvres and
such things as are served at parties.
Maureen had taken great care in setting
out flowers throughout the house, for she
loved flowers, and candles, and brightly col-
ored bowls full of nuts and candies.
It was seven o’clock before she allowed
herself time to sit down and rest. By that
time, Michael was back from his afternoon
stroll, and was deeply absorbed in his writ-
ing. The invitations had been send out, and
their friends would start coming sometime
around nine o’clock.
“And dinner?” Michael demanded, look-
ing up from his desk. Maureen gave him a
beseeching look. “It’s out we go for dinner,
then,” Michael concluded. He was in good
spirits now, and had just written some lines
that met with his judged approval; and just
the night before, he had completed a philo-

sophical essay of which he was inordinately
proud. “Come,” he said now, “let’s go down
to a good restaurant—how about the
Lobster Shack?—and have something deli-
cious to eat. Lobster, steamed clams, any-
thing you like.”
They went to dinner and, as they were
crossing the campus, Leo accosted them.
“Well, well—hello. And the big party
tonight, I’ve got my invitation with me right
here. I’ve just wound up my studies, and I
was on my way over to your place now.

Thought it wouldn’t be out of place to come
a little early.”
“It would,” Michael replied gruffly.
“Maureen and I are going to eat. She’s been
preparing the apartment all day.”
“Well, can I accompany you to the
restaurant? I’ve nothing else to do.
Although I’ve already eaten…”

Michael smiled shyly. “All right, Leo.”
Each time he was gruff to Leo, and each
time that the other yielded so stickily, he
became ashamed of himself. He was not a
sadist, not Michael except where it gave
him pleasure, and for that his attacks need-
ed a contained resistance of a sort, such as
Maureen offered him.
They had dinner while Leo drank coffee
and babbled endlessly about his studies and
about Paul. Maureen was in a pleasant
mood, and she was enjoying her lobster

thermidor and paying no attention to Leo.
“Now,” she said at length, “we’ll go back,
and I’ll get things done for good. Oh
Michael darling,” she said, while Leo was
off to buy cigarettes at the counter of the
restaurant, “say that you love me.”
“Just for today? Spring Day eve?”
“No, for always.” Maureen squeezed

Michael’s hand beneath the table. She was
ten years older than Michael, and each time
that she squeezed his hand in a public
place, it reminded Michael unpleasantly of
his mother, and of the way that she too used
to show affection in public places. “Are you
happy?” she asked.
“Certainly. You’re a fine woman,
Maureen; and I love you very much.”
“Say that you’ll never go away from me.”
“I’ll never go away from you,” Michael
said. Sometimes, when they were in bed,
she would make Michael repeat those
words over and over again while she held
his head in her bosom and rocked it back
and forth. Michael, by nature very non-
committal, could always cope with these sit-
uations by the sheer weight of his general
indifference towards life.
“I wish,” went on Maureen wistfully,
“that we could fall in love like those two,
Anthony and that Marie.”
“Do you think so?” Michael asked, frown-
ing. “Look at poor Anthony…”

“I wish”
“I know, but it’s that witch of his, Marie—
even though I can’t see what she sees in him,
he’s such a drunkard and a pest sometimes.”
Leo was back. “Come on,” he said, “let’s
go out while it’s still light, and take a little
walk.”
They went out and strolled around the
campus. Michael had bought a cigar and
was puffing it contentedly. He was already
on fire with a new poem—he would go right
straight to bed, now, and prop up on some
pillows and write it.
It was just sundown when they had
returned to X Street. A bird was sitting on the
top branch of a small poplar in front of their
apartment house entrance. Michael stopped
and looked up at the bird.

Leo laughed. “Hail to thee, blithe spirit…”
“No,” cried Michael, “quiet, Leo. Listen to
him? Do you remember what I was telling
you about the impulse of God? The sparrow
there is expressing it. He knows. Listen!”
“My God,” said Maureen. “Are we going
to stand here for hours listening to the
impulse of God?”
“Of course not,” said Michael, with some
annoyance. “I’m sleepy. I’m going to take a
nap before the party begins. Listen to the
sparrow. Its imagination is filled with God…”
They all three were silent as the bird
trilled. Michael smiled secretly. He looked
up at the street and saw, over the library roof,
the last faint hues of the sunset. “The bird,”
he went on, “is singing the song of dusk, on

Spring Day eve. Could there be more per-
fect happiness? Not just to be expressing,
but to be your expression. Isn’t that love?
Isn’t that life?” he now asked harshly of
Leo. “Isn’t that more than human love,
than human life, more, much more?”
“Foo!” said Maureen. “Let’s go up.”
“What do you mean?” Leo asked, showing
eager interest, and lighting up a cigarette.
Michael began, “I mean—” But Maureen
had clutched at his arm.
“Look,” she whispered. “There’s that Paul.”
Michael and Leo turned nervously in the
direction she had indicated with her head.
Paul was standing in the shadows of a door-
way just a few feet away watching them.
There was a brief silence, during which the
bird too had interrupted its song.
“Well?” Maureen said warily.
“What are you doing there?” laughed
Leo. “You’re a ghost; you hover in door-
ways. Come here. Are you coming to the
party tonight?”
Paul did not answer, nor did he move
away from the doorway.
“Are you?”
“I wasn’t invited,” he said quietly and
casually.

Michael turned to Maureen, but kept his
tongue. Leo fell into an embarrassed silence.
“Of course,” Paul went on quietly from
his doorway, “of course, my not being invit-
ed has nothing to do with anything. You all
know me well, and my ways. I may walk
into the middle of the party, and no one will
object. It’s only Paul, they’ll say, and he does
things like that…”
“That’s right,” Michael interrupted in a
surly tone. “So why do you have to bemoan
that part of it.”
Paul smiled and began to walk away up X
street.
“Are you going to come anyway?”
Michael suddenly called. This came as a
great surprise to both Maureen and Leo,
and to Paul himself no less. He stopped in
his tracks and stood still, stiffly, as though a
stunning thought had just shot into his
mind. Maureen gave Michael a strange,
puzzled look, and Leo was again vaguely
embarrassed.
Paul had not yet turned, was still stand-

ing numbly, as though struck.
Michael strode up the steps and into the
dark hall of the apartment house. Maureen
followed, while Leo, for his part, wavered
near the steps, to wait and see what Paul
would do. Paul had not yet moved, not yet
turned, and although Leo hesitated at least
ten seconds while Michael and Maureen
were going up the steps, he did not see Paul
move, and reported it so later.
Michael immediately went to his bed to lie
down, stating that he would sleep awhile and
wake up in time for the party. Before he could
fall asleep, Maureen questioned him about
Paul. “I thought you didn’t want him around?
I felt sure you wouldn’t have liked my inviting
him to the party, he’s such a madman, and a lot
of people don’t want him around.”
“Who for instance?” Michael illogically
pouted.
“Well, my friend Barbara.”
“Barbara is a bore.”
“She is not! And she’s a nice girl, and a
whole lot smarter than the lot of you with all

“Oh shut
up”

your fancy talk.”
“Oh shut up. I want to sleep now.”
“Don’t shut me up, you brat!” Maureen
shouted, and she hit Michael with his own
shoe that lay at the foot of the bed.
“Is this the way to start a party!?” called
Leo from the other room, where he was sat-
isfying his aesthetic impulse by moving the
flowers around to different parts of the
room. “Yelling at each other. Look, I’ve
arranged things nicely here. Look at it.”
“Now I’m sleeping,” said Michael, and
turned over.
“Yes, and you’ll wrinkle your trousers. I
just pressed them this morning.”
Michael sighed, rose from his bed,
removed his trousers, handed them to
Maureen, and lay down again to sleep.
“Close the door,” he added.
“The dreamer, the dreamer,” said Leo,
with his face in the bedroom door. “Tell me
what you dream this time, Michael. ‘Life,
you impalpable phantom, thrust not your
fog shapes at me, I reject you! Oh dreams! Oh
powerful, tangible dreams—I’ll dream till

death is a dream!’ He wrote that himself,
Maureen, now look at him. He’s—”
“Shut up,” interrupted Maureen. The
doorbell was ringing. “Answer the bell,” she
ordered Leo. She closed the door and
Michael was left to sleep.
“It’s Arthur and Toni!” Leo cried from the
hall. “And they have wine and record albums
with them. Hello, hello, hello. And Julius is with
them. Hello Julius. Come in, come in, the place
is all fixed up; you won’t recognize it! What’s that
you’ve got under your arm, Arthur? Ha! T. S.
Eliot. ‘Ash Wednesday,’ is it?”
“ ‘Quartets,’ ” corrected Arthur, brushing
into the room with his load of records.
Maureen was standing arranging the candy
bowls and preparing to light the candles.
“Well, well,” cried Arthur, “how nice
everything is! And Maureen—you look beau-
tiful. Where’s Michael?”
“Taking a nap.”
“Taking a nap, taking a nap. Toni, see how
nice these gladiolas are.”

Toni entered the room demurely and
smiled at Maureen. “My God,” she said, look-
ing around, “the place doesn’t look the same.
You must have been working all day. Is
Barbara coming?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, indeed,” Julius echoed softly, and sat
down on the couch. Leo sat down next to
him and offered him a cigarette. “Julius,” he
said straight off, “what happened during your
trip?”
“I rode,” he answered. “I rode and I rode.”
“Wine!” cried Arthur, holding up a bottle of
vermouth. He held it up to the candlelight.
“See the color? Get some glasses, somebody.”
The doorbell rang again.
“Well!” cried Leo, jumping up.
“Everyone’s coming early. It’s going to be
some night. That must be Anthony and
Marie. Perhaps they have some wine too.”
Julius had stretched out on the couch
and was perusing a volume of Baudelaire’s
works. “Take your big feet off my couch,”

Maureen warned as she ran up to the
kitchen to fetch glasses. Toni was standing
in front of the mirror preening her hair.
Anthony and Marie came in, and soon
the party was well underway.
“Big surprise!” cried Arthur, holding
up his albums of records for all to see.
“I have here the Brahms Clarinet
Quintet in G minor. We’re going to
play this and also some others I have
here. Stravinsky’s Petruchka ballet
suite, who likes that?”
“I do, I do!” cried Anthony happily.
“I borrowed these from Bartholomew,
the capitalist aesthete. Look! And here I
have Shostakovich’s Fifth, the ‘Apassionata
Sonata’ and shorter pieces.”
“Shostakovich!” cried Anthony wildly,
running up to Arthur. He had already begun
drinking, and had a head start on everyone
else. “Let me hold it to my heart! And here,
you didn’t show us this one…Rachmaninoff!
His Second Concerto! Marie, Marie,” he
cried, turning to his beloved. “The Russian
soul!”
“Yes,” she said, “I know.”
“Said the rooster to the hen, or some-

“I do,I do!”

thing,” Julius mumbled from the couch. “Is
this the Slavic soul I’ve heard so much
about?”
“What is it from?” cried Leo, reflecting.
“I read it somewhere…”
The doorbell was ringing again.
“Barbara that must be, and her friend
Hubert!” Leo went on, hurrying towards the
hall. “I’ll bet it’s them. That completes it,
all right…”
“Only the Russians know how to write
music,” Anthony was saying to Julius, who
lay demurely on the couch. “Don’t talk to
me about those damned classic forms. Pah!

Rachmaninoff!” he shouted, carried away
again with excitement. “Rachmaninoff!”
Anthony had not yet taken his hat off, he
was too excited; it was a slouch hat, dark
and limp, and he looked utterly fantastic in
it. “Let me hold it to my heart!!” he repeat-
ed, picking up the album.
Barbara, a girl about Maureen’s age, and
her escort, Hubert, were the last to arrive.
Immediately after, with the serving of wine
and hors d’oeuvres, and the beginning of
the record concert, the party was in full
swing—and Michael still slept.
Anthony had insisted on beginning the
concert with Stravinsky’s Petruchka suite,

but Arthur protested, and they compro-
mised on playing excerpts. All during the
performance, Anthony was in raptures; and
he would have started dancing hadn’t there
been so many people, or, rather, hadn’t he
had so little wine as yet. When the music
was finished, and everybody applauded,
and the hubbub grew, Arthur and Anthony
argued violently over the next piece to be
played.
“But did you notice,” Arthur put in, after
they had come to an agreement, “that pecu-
liar ebullient quality in Petruchka, in all of
Stravinsky? Eh? I would compare that art
with that of Tchelichev, and with Joyce too.”
“Yes, yes,” nodded Anthony, drinking up
some wine. Julius was at their side. “You
know why?” Arthur went on. “Well, it
should be evident. It seethes with life—
there are great eruptions of organic matter,
and behind a sort of ripple of amoebae. Ho!
That’s good!”
“Vaguely,” said Julius. “Tell me, Arthur.
Since I’ve been gone, I hear you’ve been
espousing poetry. Can I lay that to
Michael’s influence?”
“Perhaps,” said Arthur, putting on the
new record in the machine. “This!” he now

cried to the party in general, “is the new
Brahms Clarinet Quintet in G minor.
Everybody listen!”
The music started, but this time every-
body kept talking; wine had loosened all
their tongues. They were assembled in lit-
tle groups throughout both the rooms.
Arthur sat rapturously by the machine,
while Anthony sulked over by the couch.
“Only the Russians know how to write
music,” he insisted darkly, but Arthur paid
him no attention.
“Well, tell me,” Julius persisted, sitting by
Arthur. “Tell me now in all seriousness:
what does the modern poet want, hey?”
“That’s a vague question. But perhaps I
can answer it. Yes! He wants a return to the
conditions of the Golden Age.”
Julius chuckled softly. “That does sound
like Michael. You know, I know him better
than you think. He’s got you in his grip…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, nothing. But—” and Julius chuckled
again — “that business of wanting a return

to the conditions of the Golden Age, you
know that sounds terribly like the phrase,
‘he wants a return to the conditions of the
nursery,’ now doesn’t it?”
Arthur waved an impatient hand.
Just after the music ended on the phono-
graph—at the termination of the second
movement of the quintet, to be exact—and
as everyone began clapping their hands,
and laughing and talking while Arthur
somewhat proudly and bashfully removed
the record from the turntable, Michael
gloomily emerged from his bedroom.
There was a pause in the hubbub, and
then Leo cried out his name and ran up to
him with a glass and a bottle of wine: “Here,
here, help yourself to some wine! Wake up!
… you’re half asleep.”
Michael stared sullenly at Leo, rubbing
his eyes with his knuckles. Then he gradu-
ally became conscious of the large group
assembled in the two rooms, most of whom
were staring and smiling at him, for he was
technically and undeniably the “host.”

“All right,” smiled Michael bashfully, tak-
ing the bottle and the glass. “I guess I do
need to wake up. I had only intended to
take a nap…”
“Famous last words!” cried Julius, and at
this, the tension was released: laughter and
the babble were resumed, during which
Michael, with a sort of sigh of relief, poured
himself some wine and drank it. At this
point, the doorbell rang once more, and Leo
immediately dashed into the hall. Maureen,
excitedly relating something to her friend
Barbara in the next room, had not heard the
ringing. Michael sat down on the couch and
began to scratch his hair sleepily.
“Well, well, Mike,” said Arthur, coming
over. “You missed the Brahms quintet.”
“On the contrary, no,” Michael said, smil-
ing up at Arthur. “It woke me up; I listened
in bed. It was comfortable in bed and the
music was soothing, particularly the second
movement—although there was so much
noise I could hardly hear it.”
“It’s wonderful music,” said Arthur, sit-
ting down beside Michael. He lit a cigarette.
Michael drained another glassful of

wine. He smacked his lips. “Can you imag-
ine that music?” he said eagerly. “Those
slow movements? God! What an incredibly
sensitive man Brahms must have been, to
feel that type of thing in him…”
“It’s Paul!” Leo cried from the hallway.
“Come on in, friend. We have wine, music,
everything. We’ve all been waiting for you,
as you so accurately predicted…”
There was an answering mumble.
Arthur rose from the couch and went into
the hallway: “Hi there, you…”
Michael picked up his bottle and glass
and stood up irresolutely. Then he walked
quickly to the other room and stood at the
fringe of a group comprised of Anthony,
Marie, Toni and Barbara’s friend Hubert.
They were talking about the latest psycho-

logical advances, and Hubert was holding
forth on hypno-analysis. Michael refrained
from looking directly at Marie; instead, he
concentrated his gaze on Toni, Arthur’s
blonde girl, and would have spoken to her
hadn’t she been so engrossed in what
Hubert was saying.
“It’s a great thing,” Hubert was saying,
motioning with his long thin hands.
“Certain blind spots deny you and the psy-
choanalyst both an insight into certain
important matters. Under hypno-analysis,
of course, one lets loose completely—the
blind spot becomes an illumined eye…”
“You turn your phrases like a poet,”
Michael interrupted suddenly, and without
warning to the little group. “Let me tell
you,” he rushed on, as the others stared at

him with some surprise, “in psycho-analysis
one very important factor is completely
overlooked, as far as I am concerned you
see—although I’m no expert on the subject.”
Hubert was staring coldly. “So you’re given
an adult insight into child emotions which
have formed certain emotional patterns in
you, so that is so…”
“Well,” began Hubert. Michael held up
his hand. At this instant, Anthony caught
sight of Paul in the next room and shouted
at him across the apartment. “Paul, Paul,
you’ve come. It worked, you know!” And
with this, Anthony ran to Paul, and as he
disengaged himself from the little circle of
conversation, he left a little place for
Michael to step into. Before the others
could turn their attentions to the effusive
greeting Anthony was tendering Paul in the
next room, Michael rushed on, hardly
knowing what he was talking about: “You
see, now, as I was saying, look! The analy-
sis regains your right, psychologically
speaking, to make adult decisions, under-
stand? It has revealed to you certain blind
spots, say as hypno-analysis does, it is a
revelation. What can I find out about my-

self, for instance, hey? Plenty, plenty. But I
refuse to find out!— it would ruin me, I
would no longer contain dark secrets, and
nightmares, and dualisms, and thrilling con-
flicts. No, I would be left completely cleaned
out of all my poetic equipment, and I would
have to say, in a broad sweeping voice,
‘Now—I begin anew!’ and the world would
ask, well he has cleared out all the decks,
well? So now, what does he have to say?
That’s what I mean by what I was saying!
Don’t you see the psychoanalysis rids you of
the rich store of your imagination, it thieves
you, rich thievery, ha ha!”
Hubert, strangely enough, seemed to be

interested in all this prattle, despite its inco-
herence, and was maintaining a polite atti-
tude of receptivity; but of Marie and Toni,
this could not be said. Subtly, they had
opened a sub-discourse of their own and
were now standing slightly apart from the
two men, and any moment they would find
the opportunity to casually walk away.
Meanwhile, in the other room, there was
great noise, with Paul at the center of it all.

He had come in wearing a rose in his hair,
and everybody seemed to be deriving great
enjoyment out of this. Paul was now taking
the flower out of his hair—he had previous-
ly purchased it in the flower store on M
Street—and with a deep bow and a flourish,
he was presenting it to Maureen.
“To the hostess, charming and lovely,” he
said. “A rose to keep you when you’re sad.
Food for the stomach, love for the heart, a
rose for melancholia.” He made a dramatic
gesture as she took the rose from his hand.
It was evident that he had been drinking, for
as he straightened up from his bow, he tot-
tered and wavered.
“You know don’t you,” Hubert was now
telling Michael, who had turned his eyes to
the slightly maudlin scene in the other room
while Hubert was seriously absorbed in
their topic, “that what you’re saying is, to
me, a whole mess of theoretical and aimless
nonsense?”
“Yes?” Michael said politely. “By the way,
have we met before?”

“No. My name is Hubert. How do you
do.” They shook hands. Hubert went on:
“What did you precisely mean?”
“Another thing,” Michael said, “before I
explain the latter: it might as a matter of fact
illumine my whole conception of psycholo-
gy as a whole. Now. Do you know, for
instance, why my output—I am a writer, I
write poetry and other things—why this
output is so large, why I keep steadily writ-
ing? It’s because of what you would call an
insecurity sense in psychology. Now, look,
suppose I were to rid myself of this insecu-
rity sense through psychoanalysis, I would
not be driven to my work as before a wind—
perhaps I would never write again, because
I’d find out what it is that makes me want to
write, to create..!”
Hubert digested this slowly and with a
serious mien. Then he took a sharp little
intake of breath. “Overlooking the assump-
tion,” he said slowly, with precision, “that…
creation…might not necessarily be your
supreme individual function, why should

quantity of output be set up as an argument
against psychoanalytical house-cleaning?..”
This quite overwhelmed Michael; and on
top of that, he wasn’t listening too attentively.
He was annoyed that Marie and Toni had
wandered away from his conversation. He
merely nodded, his eyes on Marie, who stood
in the other room talking to Julius, radiant in
red slacks, with a red ribbon in her dark hair,
and a sort of crimson shell bracelet on her
slender wrist. Michael, half-awake, feverish
from wine and sleepiness, could not take his
eyes off her.
Hubert, with his eyes fastened on
Michael’s face, was going to say something

else devastating when Barbara suddenly ran
up to him and pulled him into the next room
to show him the watercolor reproduction of
Degas’ “Interior” over the small table in the
corner. There was complete chaos every-
where in the apartment, as is to be expected
at a gathering where wine has begun to be
the moving spirit. Michael was left standing
alone, and he began to sulk. He went to the
window and looked at the night outside in an
attempt to seem composed. The noise
behind him was beginning to annoy his
nerves.
Leo came up and handed him a glass of
wine. “Come on, you’re way behind every-

body. Drink up! What’s the matter with you,
you seem annoyed?” The first notes of
Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony rang out
behind them.
“Too much noise,” Michael mumbled. He
drank the wine. “And I’ve been snubbed,” he
added sharply.
“What?” Leo laughed. But Paul was sud-
denly beside them, laughing also.
“Snubbed, Michael?” he said, slapping
the latter on the back. “You resent it, my
asocial friend? How were you snubbed?
Who? Ha ha ha.”
Michael turned a glowering countenance
on Paul.
“You don’t like people,” Paul mocked.
“You hate people. Your emotions are unre-
servedly aesthetic, aren’t they? Didn’t you
tell me that when you left?…”
“When he left where?” Leo asked curious-
ly. “What’s all the mystery?”
“Shut up,” said Michael to Leo. Suddenly,
Paul was standing just in front of Michael,

and swaying a little.
“I need some money,” he said quietly. “I
just spent my last sous on a few drinks and a
flower for Maureen.”
“Well?” Michael grunted, turning away.
“I’ve lost my job. I can’t work. I’m too
nervous. Michael, I’ve had enough of this
anyway. If you can’t… well, at least give me
some money. I’m hungry, damn you!”
Leo began to edge away in embarrass-
ment, but he couldn’t bear to miss what was
going on, so he hovered a few feet away and
pretended to be absorbed in his glass.
Michael was morosely silent. Paul waited.
Then finally Michael withdrew several bills
from his wallet and pushed them to Paul
across the top of the bookcase that stood
beside them. Leo could not help noticing
that it was an unusually large sum in view of
the circumstances.
Paul put the money in his pocket and said,
“Thank you.” Michael have him a look
drenched with contempt, put out his hand to

“What’s that?”

push Paul out of the way, and strode into the
other room to mingle with the others.
Paul turned to Leo and smiled happily.
“Come on Leo,” he said. “Let’s have some
more wine. This is a wonderful party.”
“I should say it is,” Leo drawled signifi-
cantly. Paul’s eye flashed for just a moment,
but then he began to laugh heartily at Leo’s
hint and dragged him along into the other
room, to the table where the bottles were.
They poured themselves some wine.
“Leo,” said Paul, “I’ve a little acte gratuit
in mind. Did you ever hear of the acte gra-
tuit—as in Gide, for instance? I was reading
him the other week. People commit atroci-
ties on an impulse, but the impulse is gra-
tuitous, there’s no reason for it.”
“I know,” said Leo. “What about it?”
“I have here a little acte that is not
entirely gratuitous. But just because it’s so
coldly premeditated, it becomes more than
an acte gratuit.”
“What on earth are you driving at?”
Smiling, Paul raised his glass and poured
some wine down the back of Leo’s collar.
Leo yelled excitedly and backed away.
“What’s that? What’s that for?” But Paul,
laughing loudly, was patting Leo on the back.

No one had noticed this little incident,
except for Julius, who lay languidly on the
couch watching every move that Paul made.
He had been the only one in the party, as
well, who had seen the exchange of money
between Michael and Paul.
“You’re crazy!” Leo spluttered at Paul,
wiping his neck with a handkerchief, half-
angry, half on the point of laughing good-
naturedly. He couldn’t quite express what
he really felt about Paul’s having poured
wine on him. “You’re a sadist, I think, Paul.”
“Just a little premeditated acte gratuit,”
Paul said. “I took great pains to explain
everything…”
Julius had sauntered over to them.
“A little wine bath for little Leo?” he
inquired softly. “Paul, you do surprise me
sometimes. What a strange form of
revenge!”
“Revenge!” mocked Paul. “I don’t know

what you mean…revenge.” But Julius
maintained a teasing silence.
“Julius,” Paul said at length, “I think
you’d better get back to your couch and
observe further events—for you are an
observer, you know, you observe things,
that’s why you live. A super-voyeur. But
your fault is that you think yourself omnis-
cient. You types are all the same; you think
you have everything figured out. Now,” said
Paul, taking a letter from a pocket of his
filthy jacket, and waving it at Julius, “try to
figure this out.” He started away, then he
came back and looked closely at Julius:
“Ah, now I see. You saw Michael giving me
money. Tell me, omniscient one, what was
that for? Explain it.”
“Perhaps I’m not up to it,” Julius said.
A clamorous Shostakovich sequence
thundered behind them, with Anthony’s
happy yells exceeding all other sounds.

“Come now,” said Paul. “Do you suspect
that Michael is my brother?”
“I’m not saying a word,” Julius smiled.
“And that I punished Leo for thinking
cheaply of the money incident, hey?” Julius
still smiled. “All figured out?” Paul cried.
“Then watch this—oh, by the way, this will
mark the end of the party!” And, saying this,
Paul started off again with the letter in his
hand, going straight to Michael, who was
standing with Arthur listening to the latter’s
anecdote of his last foray into the Bohemian
Quarter.
Paul thrust himself between them,
waved a letter before Michael’s face, and
said: “Michael, I have a letter.”

Michael frowned and pushed the letter
away. “All right, so you have a letter. What
do I care?”
Paul smiled. “But it’s from Helen.”
Michael opened his mouth in an expres-
sion of great exasperation; but suddenly, as
he understood Paul’s words, the expression
turned to that of pain—pain and anguish.
He seemed on the verge of a stroke, he had
become so pale and trembling, with his fists
knotted hard at his sides.
“And she’s coming here soon,” Paul
added, still waving the letter.
Michael seemed to take a deep breath,
with his lips compressed; then suddenly he
emitted a loud yell of rage at Paul and
pushed blindly at him. Paul backed up a
few steps. Thickly, Michael was now curs-
ing Paul, and his face had grown so red that
Maureen, who had turned swiftly at the
sound of the yell, now advanced anxiously
to do something about this latest atrocity of
Paul’s. A hush had fallen over the party,
although the music played on unmindful of
the surrounding tension, and weaved out a
little drama of its own. “You!” Michael was
thickly yelling. And suddenly, now at the
height of his rage, he wrapped his hand

around the brass stem of the floor lamp next
to him and began hoisting it with great
effort.
“Look out!” cried Leo, jumping back.
Michael had lifted the floor lamp now with
both hands and was raising it aloft over his
head, trailing the light cord. Paul stood
indecisively.
Down came the lamp in a slow but
vicious arc, and Paul stepped aside just in
time, for on the spot where he had been
standing, the lamp, lampshade and bulbs
and all now smashed jarringly and hissed
and sparked on the floor and went out. The
room was plunged in the half darkness of
the candlelight, and all the girls had
momentarily screamed in terror. And the
music played on as indomitably as before.
There was a frantic scuffling as Michael

reached out for Paul, who had begun to
hurry towards the window of the other
room. Michael tripped over the fallen lamp
and fell with a crash, precipitating a vase to
the floor with him. Paul, now at the window,
was raising the sash and letting himself out
on the fire escape. Michael was back on his
feet—but hands had reached out to restrain
him. Shaking them off violently, Michael
broke loose and lunged to the window. But
Paul had disappeared, and Michael, panting
with emotional exhaustion, now fell to his
knees and leaned his elbows wearily on the
windowsill.
“What? What? What?” Barbara kept sob-
bing, while Leo and Arthur and Hubert were
anxiously hovering behind Michael, who was
staring down from his station at the win-
dowsill, at the next landing of the fire escape.

“Good Lord!” Leo was panting, “what’s all
this damned business?! Stop it, will you, the
both of you? You’re crazy, the both of you!”
“My lamp!” Maureen suddenly cried
from the other room, and Toni was forced to
giggle.
“But Paul’s not gone,” Arthur now said
wondrously, for he had leaned over
Michael’s head and was looking down.
“He’s on the flight of the fire escape below.”
Paul was sitting on the landing below,
looking up calmly at Michael, who, kneel-
ing at the window, was looking down with
equal calm.
Michael motioned his hand at Paul and
said, gently, almost sorrowfully, “Go away.”
Paul was silent. Then he stood up and
grasped the handrail. Across the apartment
building court, some windows were opening,
and people were looking up and down the
darkness trying to fathom the mystery of the
noise.
“You feel like sending everybody home,
don’t you?” Paul said, still looking up calm-
ly at the fellow who had just tried to brain
him. “But you don’t know how. Love or

“My lamp!”

hate, you’re a failure.”
“Go away,” Michael repeated, as gently
and sorrowfully as before.
Arthur was so amazed at all this, he
wouldn’t budge from the window as Leo
tugged at his sleeve so that he too could wit-
ness the strange scene. Julius had gone to
the other window and was opening it.
Paul began to descend the fire escape.
Then, pausing once again, he looked up at
Michael through the framework of the bars.
“The moon,” he pronounced, pointing up at
the sky. “Why don’t you fly to it?”
Michael didn’t answer, and Paul descend-
ed the remaining flight and was soon dis-
solved into the darkness of the alley below.
Michael then got up and walked across

the two rooms under the scrutiny of all the
eyes. He went into his room and closed the
door quietly. There was a hush—followed
by many mumbles of excitement and
curiosity, and finally, the murmur of depar-
ture. The party was quietly breaking up and
everybody was going elsewhere.
Maureen put on her coat and went out
with the others. She confessed that she was
afraid of Michael—at least, for this night—
and that she wouldn’t sleep there at all costs;
and Barbara extended her an invitation to
stay at her place for the night. So that Michael
was left alone in the apartment that night,
with the broken lamp left as it lay—and with
whatever thoughts he had.

IV
WHEN MAUREEN
RETURNED
to her apartment the following day, she
found a note from Michael stating that
he would be gone for awhile, perhaps a
week or so, on a trip south. He had
packed a small bag.
Michael had the habit of going off on
short trips, especially when he began to
feel the pressure of his own nervous
tension, so that Maureen was not too
alarmed at his absence. He always
came back.

Paul, too, had disappeared from the
campus scene. Leo was of the opinion that
he, for all that had happened, was probably
gone for good. No one as yet understood
the full significance of the violent scene at
the party, with its touching and gentle
denouement, so that the absence of both
“participants” tended to reduce interest in
the mysterious affair to a minimum.
A third absence was noted around the
general campus neighborhood, that of
both Anthony and Marie. Arthur, who had
grown accustomed to plenty of excite-
ment, now felt suddenly becalmed; and
though he was immersed in his studies of
that week, he waited with some impa-
tience for the return of Michael, or even of
Paul or Anthony, for life was certainly not
the same without these tempestuous
beings.
And so one day, Paul returned—exactly a
week after Spring Day eve—and it was Leo
who found him sitting on a bench in the
park. It was a rather gloomy, gray-skied,
ominous day full of the smell of rain and
thawing spring muds.

“Where have you been, Paul?” cried Leo
happily, looking anxiously into his friend’s
face. “I thought you were gone for good.”
“I knew you would think that,” Paul
answered, smiling and blushing. “Well,
how are you, Leo?”
“All right. Where did you go?”
“Just out of the city for a while.”
“To do what?” Leo persisted.
“Come on,” Paul ignored his questioning.
“Let’s go straightaway to Michael’s. I was
going there myself, but now that you’re
here, we’ll go together…”
Leo glanced sharply at the other.
“Do you think Michael will want to see
you?” he asked, remembering all too clear-
ly the incident of the floor lamp.
“Certainly. He’ll have forgotten about
everything. Don’t you even know Michael
at all?”
They walked up X Street. “Michael’s
been gone all this time too,” Leo told Paul.
“They say he took a trip south. And where
did you go?…what did you do?”
“Well, if you insist on knowing…I just
went on a little excursion through the country.

I slept
on the
grass, ate
fruit for
breakfast.

That’s all.”
They were going up the stairs at
Michael’s apartment when they met
Maureen coming down with a shopping bag
under her arm. She seemed to be in a hurry.
“Well,” was the first thing she said.
“Michael’s going to be glad to see you!” She
paused and glanced at Paul’s clothes. “You
might as well give it up anyway. Michael’s
not back from his trip yet. Why do you insist
on bothering him?”
“It’s none of your business,” said Paul
evenly. Maureen shrugged her shoulders
and went down the stairs; they heard the
hall door alarm as she went out. Paul con-
tinued on up the stairway and walked care-
lessly into Maureen’s apartment; he went to
the front room and flung himself on the
couch. “Where are you, Leo?” he called.
Leo walked into the apartment indecisively.
“What are we going to do here?” he asked. “I
don’t think Maureen will like it!” He stood over
the couch and looked down at Paul.
“You noticed the door wasn’t locked,
didn’t you?” Paul said to him. “It’s fairly an
invitation, my friend. But I had a purpose
in wanting to come up here…what was it?
Oh, yes! Poetry.”

“What?”
Paul went into Michael’s bedroom and
began going through the workdesk drawer.
“Ah,” he said, holding up several sheets of
paper. “At last. This has been my first oppor-
tunity to take these.”
Leo, with his head in the doorway—a pic-
ture of reluctant eagerness—asked, “What
are they?”
“They’re Michael’s writings, some of
them, at least.”
Paul stuffed the papers in his pockets and
started to walk out of the apartment. “Come
on,” he beckoned to Leo. “Let’s go out now.”
“What’s Michael going to say your walk-
ing into his bedroom and stealing his writ-
ings. He’ll be so mad all over again, only
worse!”
Paul was laughing.
“Are you going to keep them?” Leo
inquired.

“If I
like them.”
They were down on the street again.
Paul, who had stopped, was looking up at the
dark cloudy sky and sniffing the air. “What a
terrible day,” he shuddered. “And yet there’s
energy in the air. It may be a day of power.”
They walked on up X Street. “Well,” Leo
concluded. “That was a neat bit of lifting.
Now what are you going to do with his poet-
ry?”
“Read it.” Paul was already reading a page
as he walked.
“Is that all you did,” Leo asked, smiling at
Paul, “on your excursion, sleep on the grass
and eat fruit for breakfast? Hey?”
“That’s enough, isn’t it?” Paul said. “It
was beautiful, you know. Will you look at

this,” he added, waving a paper at Leo.
“Listen. I’ll read you a line or two here:
‘Symbols pristine and splendorous I need,
for my journey down this corridor: here,
now, too late to rejoin the others, and acci-
dent need not apologize.’ Foo! As though
accident apologized for anything! What
utter rot he writes!”
“What is he talking about?” Leo asked,
leaning over to look at the paper. “Symbols,
corridors…”
“And here’s some more,” Paul went on,
ignoring Leo’s question. “ ‘I am high—I
reprise my sympathy for the masses.’ More
nonsense—he won’t call a spade a spade,
the masses indeed! He means his family, of
course. That’s the rotten part about all this
business, this poetry. Oh! And look here:
‘On the other side of this corridor, across
these obstructions inviting insanity, I see
new emotions and a new humanity: a cul-
tural emotional, ultimacies, new man, shad-
ows of this grotesque deformity: Beauty is
tyrant, passion overrules; this instinct is
mute, this vision Eternal.’ You see, don’t
you, Leo, that when he cannot express what
he means, he says ‘this instinct is mute’ and
such trash. Ultimacies… Now as to that, I

don’t know. Cultural emotionals… Yes.
Hmm. I only criticize what I understand, of
course. Those points there, they may be of
course way beyond my learning. Michael is
a very learned fellow…”
Leo began to laugh and had to stop short
in the midst of their walking. “Really, Paul,
you make me laugh. First you call Michael
a dunce and a fool, and the next moment
you dub him as ‘very learned.’ He’s neither,
you know. You should learn to control your
excesses—”
“Yes? Well, then, if that’s so, what does

this mean: ‘Mind the basis of Eternity.’ Now
what on earth is that if it isn’t profound and
learned? Mark you, Leo, I only criticize
those parts of the work that I understand.
But there are places where Michael is far
beyond me…”
Leo was still laughing.
“ ‘Mind the basis of Eternity,’ ” repeated
Paul almost angrily. “Explain that if you
will, Professor!”
“It wouldn’t be difficult,” gasped Leo
faintly, “if I had knowledge of his special
vocabulary, or even if I read the whole
poem. You can be so charmingly naive—
really, it’s amazing to watch.”
Paul was thumbing through some other
pages…now, he cried out exultantly, “And
this! This I expected to find, by all means!
Listen:

‘One October
feeling is worth
ten archetypal
tragedies that
occur beneath
the tender blue
char of morning
skies: and one
melancholy
frowse of har-
vest stack, now,
beyond measure
surpasses this
news of human
travail.’

Don’t you see, in order to speak with God—
as he puts it—he’s trying to de-humanize
himself. Claims here October moves him
more than news of human tragedy.”
“That’s interesting…”
“And now, to cap all the nonsense, is this
despairing cry!” Paul went on excitedly.
“‘Quelqu’un à dérangé ma noirçeur! This I
scream to a deaf and dumb cosmos.’ That’s
nice, isn’t it Leo, but yet so typical of the stu-
pid poet. ‘Someone has disturbed my dark-
ness,’ he cries in French. Why on earth in
French? His darkness indeed! That’s why he
will sleep at all times of the day and night,
and dream. What was that I heard a few
weeks ago in class, someone was talking
about it…the death-instinct, the death-
instinct of Freud…”
“Perhaps.”
“And he adds here, rather sulkily, ‘better
to live in hell than to die in heaven.’ Does he
claim it was heaven before?…ha ha! Then
he admits it…”
“What on earth are you talking about?”

Leo now inquired impatiently.
“All esoteric matters,” Paul said. “And
look at this!” — he had found more lines to
read — “ ‘Alone with no one to love, is hell
alive: can I not wait for bunglers and stum-
blers that straggle out to me? Here, as at the
end of a telescope, a crater of the moon. I
wait for one of my kind with whom to wallow
in my kindness.’ Now that,” Paul scoffed, “is
sheer nonsense. He’s trying to work up the
reader’s pity, or God’s. And he adds:
‘Aesthetic hell, I’m home.’ Ho ho! That’s
good…he knows more about himself than he
cares to admit. Calls it a ‘sordid denoue-
ment.’ But here, his hope is regained; he
says, ‘Tell me—for my emotions have always
been, since then, but shifting sand—tell me
that this is Eternity, the Sphinx and not the
sand.’ What does he think he’s found? Is he
panting after the new vision too, like all the
others? Ha ha ha.”
“I swear,” Leo said, “I’ve never heard
anything like your criticism. Why don’t you
do it objectively? It’s terrible to walk with

you and hear you defame the work of a man
which you’ve just stolen.”
“I’ll go one better,” Paul laughed, leering
at Leo. “I’ll burn the whole works—what
would you think of that?”
“What? You mean, what would he think of
that! You’re being very stupid, by the way; I
don’t think you understand what he’s saying…”
“Oh, yes!” cried Paul. “I understand bet-
ter than he does. Look! He bases the whole
long poem on a line from one of his dreams.
Here, on the first page, it says ‘from a
dream—’ and the quotation, taken, you see,
from a dream he had, reads like this: ‘Is this
the way I’m supposed to feel?’ Don’t you see,
Leo, he’s searching for a new emotion, since
he has rejected the one he had before. So
first he disclaims the old emotion by saying,
am I supposed to feel it anyway? Then…at
the end of the poem, after a thorough explo-
ration of his so-called new emotion and new
vision, which is some sort of mystical solip-
sism undergone in a ‘dark corridor’—per-
haps a symbolism from a dream—he finds
that his journey into these regions, across
this corridor, has been a failure. It reads:
‘This corridor alone remains—this corridor-
ial loneliness.’ Now, I admit that all this is

lovely and appealing to the eye, to some
extent, but it’s failure altogether.”
“You may be right,” Leo put in, “but still
it’s no reason for you to burn it. And I want
to read these some time.”
“Failure altogether,” Paul continued,
ignoring Leo’s remarks. “He finds that
there is no new emotion, or if there is, that
it’s denied to him at least. Like that fellow
Rimbaud that Arthur is always talking
about. I was thinking about this Rimbaud
all the past week.”
“Paul,” said Leo warmly, “you’re the most
unusual fellow! Is that what you were think-
ing about on your bed of grass as you
munched your fruit?”
“Perhaps,” Paul laughed. “That and many
other things, I admit. Now, let’s look at a few
more of these things. This one is called ‘Song

of My Modern Sorrow.’ A likely title! He has a
flair for attracting the eye! Look, that first line
explains his whole failure—let’s sit down
here and I’ll read you this…”
They were now in the middle of the cam-
pus green, and sat on a bench.
Immediately, a flurry of pigeons swarmed
around them.
“ ‘Happiness is dead!’ he cries straight off.
There is the root of his failure—I’ll explain.
He goes on—‘Imponderable sorrow now
rules, now stretches its moody nether-glow
across my life, my city, and my soul. In the
cities, silence mutters smokily. This is the
Black Age.’ Ho ho! Now he really is down in
the dumps, the Black Age he calls it. First
having failed to find a new emotion, the
foolish artist turns on his age and attacks it
indiscriminately. And listen to this:

‘Beauty, now
dead, we have
enshrined on
public squares;
and twice
daily, queues
of dark-shawled
women come to
weep at the
tombstone of
joy.’
My, my, such sadness! ‘There is a child I
hear weeping in the steel tunnel beneath
the street; and on the street above, a crowd
is congregated beholding mutilation, as it
rains.’ That is rather strange, isn’t it, Leo? —
I like it, but as they say, I can see all this a lit-
tle too crystal-clear. For instance, this: ‘Life
is an unpleasant sensation—’ like a
toothache, ha ha!” Paul inserted wildly.
“And then it says, ‘knowledge is the
enchantress of sorrow, and the mood of
death.’ That’s rather nice. ‘For the sun has
gone out,’ he goes on to say, ‘and small fires
rage on rooftops: and in the north, sieged
cities leave their dead on the frozen boule-
vards. Gardens are brown and bare, and
birds are gone forever south: the wounded
sparrow peers out of ferret eyes from his
nest of corpse hairs in the eave of the Public
Library..’ ”
Paul lowered the sheets. “Oh, what terri-
ble stuff!” he cried. “But as I say, I under-
stand it all too well. And maybe, maybe it
moves me.”
“I’ve seen other things that Michael has
written,” Leo put in at this point, “which are
perhaps better than this. Didn’t you read his

poem on the impulse of God?”
“I may have it here, but I’ll have to read it
before I listen to anyone praise it. Michael is
a failure, I tell you!”
“Why do you keep insisting that?” Leo
demanded.
Paul didn’t answer. Now he was holding
up another sheet and reading it. “Here it is,”
he said, “I think this one here is the poem
that you were just talking about. Hmm, let’s
see…he entitles it ‘Notes Gleaned From a
Voyage to Morphina’… Morphina,
Morphina? Where’s that?”
“Well,” Leo said, “it should be clear to
you. It’s a mythical land, the land you go to
when you take morphine. De Quincey and
his opium, he went there, and all the others
like him. It’s the paradis artificiel of
Baudelaire…”
“And so Michael has been taking to
drugs?” Paul asked innocently.
“He’s not an addict,” Leo assured him.
“Under the influence, you see, of drugs, he’s
managed to discover a new poetic idea—if
such one can call it. Here, let me have that
paper…I’ll read you the poem. I’ve read it
before.”
Leo took the paper from Paul’s hand.

Paul reached into his pocket and pulled out
a handful of peanuts, which he threw at the
pigeons surrounding their bench.
“Here’s the way it goes,” Leo said, begin-
ning to read. “ ‘Contemplate the universe—
close your eyes—and, like God, begin to
sense, without words or image, sound or
shape, the impulse of all creation. This is the
pure moment of God’s imagination before
the epileptic fit of fault and history begins..’ ”
“That,” interrupted Paul, “that is rather
strange, and I don’t understand it.”

“Wait. Now… ‘A white rhythm under-
lines the impulse that is soon to issue
Logos— The impulse of creation is the key
to the sign of the Macrocosm: it is the
silence of the Golden Age, the stasis of the
soul in repose. I am about to go up in a con-
suming flame—I am an old saint—and soon
I will disappear!’ ”
“What?” cried Paul incredulously. “Does
he say that in all seriousness? Oh, the folly of
all this…”
“Never mind,” Leo warned him, and con-
tinued to read. “ ‘I feel everything, I sense
God, and I exist with Eternity. I have lost my
human self: I am one with Paramatma!
Listen!—silence rings its immortal chord…’ ”
But Paul had jumped up on his feet and
was pacing nervously back and forth in
front of the bench.

“ ‘In the middle
of creation, in
an attitude of
silence and cun-
ning, with my
hands over my
eyes and ears, I
think, I feel, I
pray to the mute
darkness of my
soul, I wait, I
hold my breath,
and now, slowly,
softly, all
meaning marches
to me, and God
is on the
threshold of my
being, and is
soon to enter
me, and become
One with me!
Then!…I open my eyes, uncover my ears,
and breathe, and there is the sky on the pool
atremble, here is the birdsong and the mur-
mur, the morning-moist grass—clean as the
rain on dark tree-trunks—and an odor from
the meadow beyond where the cows stand
mute, and a crow caws and the forest roof
reverberates. I know what the flower is, just
after the break of sun! I know with God!…’ ”
Paul came back and sat down on the
bench beside Leo.
“He can’t!” he was mumbling. “He
should realize that—”
“Look!” cried Leo, who had been reading
another part of the sheet. “This is strange!
Can it be?… look what he wrote here. ‘This
is an age that has created sick men like
me—’ ”
“The age again!” Paul scoffed impatient-
ly. “Age! Age! Completely absolved of all
responsibility to himself, isn’t he!…”
“ ‘What we need is a journey to new
lands. I shall embark soon on one of these.
I shall sleep on the grass and eat fruit for
breakfast.’ Now, isn’t that what you just told
me a while ago, isn’t that what you did? How

can he have— But I know, when you knew
each other in the past, it was a stock phrase
between the two of you, isn’t that it?”
“Nothing of the sort!” cried Paul, almost
angrily.
“But of course! Unless it’s a famous line
from some other poet. No? How can it be?
You said that very same thing just a few
minutes ago, you told me you had slept on
the grass and eaten fruit for breakfast, don’t
you remember? Maybe it’s that…yes, you’ve
obviously read this poem before, and you
were quoting his lines…”
“No,” said Paul gravely, “no, not at all.”
“But that’s impossible!” Leo cried.
“Oh, is it?” Paul replied, again getting up
nervously from the bench. “No, Leo, I
assure you: the same phrase happened to
enter his mind.”
“Nonsense.”
“And why shouldn’t it be possible? Who
are you to deny it! It’s very simple…”
“It’s not so simple,” Leo answered firmly.
“It is!” Paul fairly screamed. “You don’t know
the facts… Oh shut up!” And with this, Paul had
started to walk away; then he came back and

wrenched the papers from Leo, who was grin-
ning at the angry Paul. At this point Arthur hove
into sight around the walk.
“Well, Paul,” he greeted. “You’re back…”
“Where are you going?” Leo inquired of
Arthur.
“I’m on my way to Michael’s. I just saw
Julius, and he told me that Michael was
back from his trip.”
“He’s not home. We just went there.”
“He’s home now. Here comes Julius
now, he’ll tell you.” And with this, Arthur
hurried on to Michael’s house. Julius was
coming up the walk in his slow leisurely
gait.
“Hello Paul!” he called. Paul, with the
papers in his pockets, was walking away
from Leo. “Wait a minute!” called Julius,
hurrying his pace.
“Well?” said Paul defiantly. “What do you

want, Julius?”
Julius stopped and began smiling at Paul.
“I have a little news for you,” he said.
“About Michael’s so-called trip…”
“What of it?”
“Yes,” pressed Leo, “tell us.”
“You might as well know,” Julius began,
“since it’s all beginning to come out. This
past week, Michael, on his so-called trip,
has really been living in the Bohemian
Quarter with Anthony’s wife, Marie…”
“What?” Paul gasped.
“Yes. And they say that Anthony is all out
of sorts, because Marie had just left him a
note, and didn’t explain where she was
going or why. The truth was, she went on a
little holiday with our Michael, they’ve been
having an affair down in the Quarter…”
“And you say that Anthony is…?” Paul
stammered.

“He’s ill, I heard. From the shock, they
say; but I happen to know that it’s mostly
from drink. With Marie gone, he just let
himself go and drank and drank, and the
reason why no one’s seen him all this past
week is because he’s been staying in his
room drinking and starving himself. Both
Michael and Marie just came back a half an
hour ago. I just saw Michael on X Street,
and he told me that Marie had gone to her
place to tend to the derelict husband…”
“You seem to be happy about it all!” Paul
accused, for Julius was saying all this in a
tone of great relish.
Julius held up his hands, as though to say,
‘What do I care? These are the tribulations
of others—and they amuse me.’
“Well!” Leo said at length, and fell into a
daze of reflection.
“I was the first to know all about this
affair,” Julius went on, with a faint smile on
his face. “You see, I was down in the
Quarter about five days ago, and I saw
Michael and Marie walking across the
Quarter Park. I kept everything to myself, of
course, but I knew, after I’d seen them down
there, what was going on. Michael had
stopped to talk to some little children who

were playing in the park, and I managed to
duck into a doorway and watch to see
where they were going. They went into a
small apartment house.”
“All right, all right!” cried Paul impatiently.
“You seem to resent this news!” Julius
said, surprised.
“It’s only your attitude,” Paul muttered,
“although I can understand that, too.” And
with this, Paul walked away without any
further say.

“Where are you going?” Leo called.
“To Anthony’s,” Paul flung back, and he
hurried on. Leo nodded briefly to Julius
and started out after Paul.
“Paul,” he cried, “I have to go to my class
this afternoon. I wish I could go with you!”
Paul was in too much of a hurry to answer,
so that Leo stopped, gazed rather ruefully
after the other, and then turned dutifully
around and went to his class.
Paul had reached Marie’s apartment
house and was climbing the steps when he
met her coming down. “Marie!” he said.
“I’ve just heard…”
“Yes, yes,” she muttered impatiently, push-
ing him out of the way to pass. Paul persist-
ed and followed her down to the landing.
“But Marie, what’s it all about? How’s
Anthony?”
Marie stopped and glared at Paul. “Will

you shut up? It’s none of your business. If
you insist on being little Jesus Christ, go on
up and watch Anthony while I’m out.”
“Well, where are you going now?”
“I’m going to see Maureen and I’m going
to get some medicine. Is that all you want to
know?”
“But this is all so crazy!” Paul cried, hold-
ing out his hands. “I don’t understand what
you’ve done…and Michael: I mean, why?”
“And you’re the craziest of the lot,” Marie
told him. “Shut up and play your part.” And
with this, Marie walked out on the street.
Paul stood for at least a whole minute,
after that, and staring after the vanished
Marie. Then he shrugged his shoulders and
went upstairs to Marie’s apartment.
There, in the bedroom, he found poor Anthony
asleep; Marie had obviously put him to bed.

The room
smelled terri-
bly of liquor
and of fever.
There were at
least five
quart bottles
of whiskey,
all of them
empty, strewn
around the
floor;
and dirty clothes abounded on all the
chairs. Anthony had obviously been living
in this room ever since Marie’s departure—
in the room, significantly enough, where
they slept together as man and wife—and it
was evident from the general wreckage
around that at first he had flown into a
destructive rages and broken furniture and
flower pots; and later, when that had died
down, he had bought a week’s store of

liquor and proceeded to annihilate his mis-
ery. Paul knew, as he stood there looking
down at Anthony, that the wretch had
planned his game well; that he knew, when
Marie returned, that she would find him
there in their marital chamber, a complete
wreck. And this, it must be remarked, was
Anthony’s revenge on Marie: she would find
him in this state, and thus feel guilty about
her escapade. It was a perfect martyr-
technique.
Paul went back into the front room and
sat down by the window. It was growing
darker outside with the thickening clouds,
and there was the smell of rain in the air.
Marie finally came back, with packages
under her arm. Without saying a word to
Paul, who, for his part, was also silent, she
went to work on her husband. Ice bags, pills,
hot soup—everything was marshaled into
the devotional labor, and Paul could hear,
from his seat in the other room, the cooing
sounds of Anthony’s revival. “Marie, Marie,”
he was mumbling. “Why did you do it?”
And Marie only answered, “Shut up!” and
marched out of the bedroom with the empty
whiskey bottles and threw them in the
dumb-waiter.

V
ARTHUR
OPEN PUSHED
the door of Michael’s bedroom and
looked in. Michael was sitting in the
easy chair by the window, smoking a
cigarette and staring gloomily outside
at the gray rooftops.
“Michael!” greeted Arthur. “Just got
back?”
Michael looked up. “Yes,” he said.
“How are you, Arthur? Have you seen
Maureen?”
Arthur smiled. “Yes, I just saw her
down by the markets. She’s out shopping,
I guess. I don’t suppose she knows—”
“Knows what?”
“Well,” Arthur began with a half-
mocking, half-bashful smile. “I know all
about it, I mean your affair with Marie in
the Quarter…”
Michael seemed startled.

“Our friend Julius happened to see you
there a few days ago, well … and he told me
about it.”
Smiling nervously, Michael motioned
Arthur to sit on the bed; then he shrugged his
shoulders wearily. “I suppose everyone will
know in time.”
“And moreover,” Arthur went on, “Paul is
back. He’s been away for a spell himself. I
saw him just now with Leo in the campus
park.”
Michael didn’t say anything. Quite irrele-
vantly, he raised his eyebrows and said, “I
don’t care who finds out about Marie and me.
I don’t care at all what happens. What have
you been doing, Arthur?” Michael extin-
guished his cigarette in the ashtray on the
arm of the chair. He looked very gloomy.
“I’ve been thinking something out,” Arthur
said, making himself comfortable on the bed,
propping a pillow under his arm and leaning
on his elbow. “I want your opinion on these
matters. I’ve prepared a sort of manifesto,
let’s say, or an essay of a sort. It’s on the sub-
ject of the artist…”
“That’s a nonsensical pursuit,” smiled
Michael.
“Not theoretically.

You must admit
that much of
modern thought
is centered
around the
problem of the
artist and
society, of
the artist and
himself

—as in Rimbaud, for instance, in his case…”
“Yes, I know,” admitted Michael discon-
solately, “but so many artists are preoccu-
pied with the question, they can’t find time
to create.”
“One sometimes has to clear the decks.
Wagner spent years arranging his intellec-
tual system before he could compose.
Clearly, also, it is one of the central absorp-
tions of Thomas Mann.”
“I admit that.”
“Look, Michael…” and Arthur extracted
a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Here I’ve
worked out a symbolism, a modern one that
is…ah, applicable to my system. It’s
Prometheus! The artist, Prometheus,
steals fire from the gods—the fire, the
secret, of creation—and brings it down to
earth. I admit of course that none of this is
original. Rimbaud secured an idea much
like it from Ballanche, and I, of course, from
Rimbaud. Now you see the system implies
much that is Cabalistic, in a sense: you

know, to stand on the threshold of vegetable life
facing God and sharing his secrets, as in Blake
also. You! You, for instance, fit into the symbol-
ism—as Prometheus, the thief of divine fire.
I’ve read your poetry. In it, I find that you are
attempting to speak with the impulse of
God…in that poem ‘Morphina’ for instance.
I’m beginning to see what you’re after, but I
have here something further for you…”
“I Prometheus?” asked Michael almost
angrily.
“As a symbol—”
“I know. But when I could be Orpheus!
Have you ever looked into that? There’s a sym-
bol for you!”
“What do you mean?”
“Orpheus! Orpheus!” shouted Michael.
Then he relapsed once more to his shy smile.
“Oh this is all nonsense.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, you say that the artist—in this case,
myself—you say that I am a plausible symbol
of Prometheus. Prometheus the artist, when

I could be Orpheus, the artist-man! Do you
understand what I’m trying to say? When I
could be the whole artist and man.
Unchained! you see—for Prometheus is
chained to a rock, God knows—unwound-
ed, unlike Cocteau’s poet, or Henry
James’ artist; unsevered, Arthur, unsev-
ered!”
“You’ll have to explain.”
“I fear that it will all be clear to you any-
way before long. A chain of events and not
my words will illumine the meaning. Ah, but
I’m tired…”
“Never mind that. In those poems that
you completed I found—”
“Completed!” interrupted Michael. “But
I’ve never completed anything.”
“How could you then account for ever
having created anything?”
“I don’t know. That’s how I feel. The
pathways of creation are devious.”
“Well,” said Arthur, “I still don’t follow
you. You sound incoherent.”
“I mean—Well perhaps I have completed
something. There are the parts, and since
these parts are in themselves complete, then
there must exist somewhere a complete

whole.”
“Precisely,” said Arthur wearily, as though
he had wanted to explain this all along, and
was impatient to continue with what he was
saying. “Now, the artist—”
“The artist! The artist!” Michael was in a
savage mood, and he was constantly pressed
to smile, in order to undo his antagonism.
“All right, go on. But be careful…”
“Of what?”
Michael turned his eyes to the rooftops
again. “I don’t know. I sound like a smug
father, to tell you that; and God knows, no
one is ever old enough to give advice. Well
what I mean is be careful of art, as art: if you
take it seriously, ultra-seriously, there is
liable to be—”
“The consequences are what I crave,”
Arthur said subtly.
Michael looked at Arthur in surprise.
“We’re dissimilar,” he concluded, after
watching Arthur for several moments.
“Perhaps, at least… What I mean—and I
often wonder if I ever say anything that is
anywhere near the point—is that the conse-
quences of espousing art like a priest, say, are
often—harmful—to the whole man.”

“In art I
intend to find
wholeness,”
Arthur put in.
“In art,”
Michael said,
“I found
halfness.”
They were silent, staring at each other.
The door suddenly opened and Maureen
walked in. Her jaw was trembling, she was
pale, and glaring at Michael. There was a
shocked silence.
“Get out,” she said.
“Well?” Michael began.
“Get out. I just saw that witch Marie down at
the markets—and she told me everything.”
After a pause, Michael shrugged. “I don’t
care,” he said wearily.
“Get out,” repeated Maureen. “I want
you to get out.” She was holding a bag of
provisions under her arm that she’d just
been buying before Marie approached her.
“And why?”
“I’ll kill you if you don’t get out. And you
too, young man. Get out with him. All of
you are children, and all of you are fools.”

Michael laughed.
“Laugh,” said Maureen. “Laugh because
you’re ignorant. Get out. Don’t ever come
back, it might be dangerous.”
“Nay fatal,” Michael mocked.
“Get out,” she repeated again quietly.
Michael sighed and rose from the chair:
“My clothes—”
“I’ll pack them and give them to you
tomorrow. Get out right away.”
Michael and Arthur walked out of the
apartment.
“Well,” said Arthur as they walked down
the stairs and out onto X Street, “does that
mean the end of your affair with Maureen?
I guess it does,” he concluded himself.
“Yes,” sighed Michael. He seemed a lit-
tle weary; even the menacing scene with
Maureen had not succeeded in bringing
him out of his indolent ennui. “It was con-

venient while it lasted.”
Arthur gave Michael a slanting glance.
“Is that all you can say?”
Michael sighed again and didn’t answer.
They walked along across the campus.
Presently, he said, “That’s all the situation
warrants.”
Arthur, a trifle embarrassed, repressed an
impulse to express his feelings for Maureen
and for her position in the matter. It had
been fairly evident to him, that to Maureen,
the affair had held more meaning than could
be encompassed in Michael’s bland use of
the word “convenient.”
“Now—” Michael said, falling deeper and
deeper into his gloominess, “Now, I suppose
it’s time to go to Marie’s.”
“Why?”
“She is a witch, that Marie,” Michael
reflected tiredly. “There was no need to tell
Maureen everything. What can hurt a
woman like Maureen more than to tell her
to her face that her lover has been made the
victim of a conquest—”
“Well, hardly.”
“I suppose,” Michael droned on, “that
Marie is the type who does a good job, a thor-
ough job, of things when she transgresses…”

“Well, hardly!”
Arthur almost laughed. “Strange talk!
Transgression! Now you’re no longer the artist
beyond good and evil, but a sinner in arms…”
“You must admit it’s hard to purge your
system of the notion,” Michael mumbled. “I
knew a man once who had himself psycho-
analyzed in order to get rid of the notion,
and to be happy: good and evil, he didn’t
care one way or the other.
Good and evil

blur your
vision—God does-
n’t make the
distinction, you
know. You can’t
rid yourself of
it...especially
when you’re a
human being.
Biologically speaking, I’m afraid all poetic
vision is rot.”
“Now, now,” Arthur leered, “don’t let lit-
tle things let you down?”
Arthur laughed to conceal his confusion
on the matter. They had crossed the cam-
pus, and now they were walking down the
boulevard in the direction of Marie’s house.
“It’s going to rain soon,” Michael
observed. “It’s the end…”
Paul was sitting in Marie’s front room
when they arrived there, with his head
leaning on his hand, and staring fixedly into
space. When he saw Michael and Arthur,
he looked up and smiled, but said nothing.
Marie came out of the bedroom carrying
a towel and stopped short on seeing
Michael.
“Well?”
“Nothing,” mumbled Michael. “I only
came to see you about your telling
Maureen. It wasn’t necessary, you know.”
“It wasn’t necessary!” mimicked Marie

savagely. “Shut up, won’t you, and go home.”
She brushed past Michael and Arthur and
went into the kitchen.
“Well? Was it?” cried Michael, following
her. Marie did not answer. Michael came
back and dropped himself wearily on the
couch. He stared dully at Paul across the
room.
“And where have you been?” he demand-
ed sullenly.
“I heard that while you were in the
Bohemian Quarter—that is, when Julius saw
you,” Paul rushed on to say, heedless of the
question, “and according to his version, of
course, that you stopped to talk to some children
in the park—that was the way he put it—”
“Well, what of that?”
“I’m only referring to the incident he
described where you stopped to talk to some
children—”
“All right, all right!” cried Michael impa-
tiently. “What are you saying?”
“Just—thank you.”
There was a silence, during which Arthur
seemed bewildered at all this. Michael only
tilted his head to one side and gave Paul a
grave and scornful glance.
Marie was back, crossing the room. “I’ll

have no loud talking and yelling. All of you
had best go home, anyway. You’re of no use
here.”
Michael followed her into the bedroom.
Anthony was peacefully asleep, with just the
hint of a smile on his lips.
“What a big baby!” Michael exclaimed
softly. Marie turned to him and almost
smiled. But solemnly she said, “And what
do you think you are?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“Hmm?”
Marie lowered the windowpane,
arranged Anthony’s blankets, motioned
Michael out of the room, and quietly closed
the door. She went over to a desk drawer
and took out a cigarette and lit it.
Arthur, of course, was very embarrassed
and uncomfortable; particularly now since
Michael and Marie had ceased to harangue
with one another: the situation warranted
some haranguing, else how account, in
moral terms, for the derelict in the next
room. But Marie seemed quite calm with
her cigarette, and Michael seemed to have
forgotten his anger over the Maureen mat-
ter. Paul, for his part, though betraying no
signs of discomfort, had lapsed again into a

preoccupied contemplation of space. The
first raindrop spat against the windowpane.
Marie went to the lamp and turned it on.
The evening had come on within the space
of a raindrop and the click of a lamp.
“Well?” Marie said, for none of the three
youths had spoken. Arthur looked with
some desperation towards Michael, then to
Paul.
Michael got up from the couch. “I guess
I’ll go home,” he said. Paul made no move
to rise from his chair.
“Do you still want to know why I told
Maureen?” Marie asked.
Michael shrugged. “I guess I know. Yes,
I do know. But I think it was stupid on your
part — you want to flagellate yourself, com-
plete the picture; but Maureen, well, what
about her?”
Marie was laughing. “Discounting what

you just said about flagellation, what are
you supposed to care about people’s feel-
ings, according to what you told me in the
Quarter?”
Marie was watching Michael intently.
Paul, too, was now watching.
“Suppose,” Michael said wearily, “sup-
pose I wanted the freedom to care when I
wanted to, and not to care when I didn’t?”
“That’s complicated!” Marie mocked,
blowing smoke towards Michael.
“Oh, is it?” sneered Michael, and turned
away.
“You’re a fool,” Marie added slowly.
“You’re frank at least,” he answered. “I
don’t mind your being frank. But you don’t
belong to this world: if you allege yourself
tied to it, why don’t you act accordingly?”
“Does that confuse you?”
“Yes, yes!” yelled Michael suddenly. “Oh,

why don’t you leave me alone!”
“Ha ha ha!” shouted Paul from his chair
in the corner.
“And you!” Michael cried, turning to Paul.
“Why don’t you go back to your wet grass
and your fruits!”
“Oh, you know about that?” Paul inquired
archly.
Michael threw up his hands. “It’s the way
you all think you understand my every next
move. It’s completely disgusting. Don’t you
know what a spectacle you all make of your-
selves? You and that Julius…”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Marie inquired.
“You know damned well what I’m talking
about, but that’s beside the point I suppose
in that damned pattern of yours!”
“Pattern?”
“Ha ha ha!” shouted Paul again from his
chair.
Michael gave him a seething look. Paul
put in quickly, “I know what you’re thinking!
Traitor! Traitor! Oh, what a joke that one is!
By the way, did you know that I stole your
poetry today?”
Michael didn’t seem to have heard, or if
he had, he didn’t seem to care.

Paul took out some papers and waved them
at Michael. “Shall I read you some excerpts,
hey?”
“To hell with all of you!” Michael said grim-
ly. “I’m wasting my time here.” And suddenly
he had hurried to the door, and they heard it
open and slam hard.
“Don’t get lost in your corridor!” Paul yelled
after him, jumping up from his chair and going
to the door. A moment later he was back, and
sat down in his chair and started to laugh.

Marie walked towards him and stopped
to look down at him.
“You can be very mean,” she said. “Do
you know that?”
“I’m talented,” Paul said.
“Hmm.”
Arthur was standing indecisively. It had
begun to rain steadily outside, and the win-
dow drummed and rattled in the wind.
“It seems super-

fluous to have
to be mean to a
person who does-
n’t know how to
be happy,” Marie
went on.
Paul looked up at her, surprised. “You think
that of Michael, that he can’t be happy?”
“He doesn’t know how. We were miser-
able in the Quarter.”
“And as for myself? Do I know how to be
happy?”
“Yes.”

“It’s interesting that you should know
that,” Paul said quickly.
“Just why?”
“That is the main point about Michael,”
Paul rushed on. “He himself thinks other-
wise, I mean as to the point: he’s always
preoccupied with his so-called amorality,
and just because of that simple fact, he’s not
amoral—but he doesn’t know that, does he?
No, the point about Michael is rather that he
doesn’t know how to be happy.”
“Well,” Arthur ventured, as he moved
towards the door. “I think I’ll be going now,
to dinner. Is anyone going to dinner?”
“Not now,” Marie said.
“Well, good night,” said Arthur, and went
out.
“Arthur’s a nice fellow,” Paul said dreami-
ly, “but he takes Michael much too seriously.”
They were silent as the rain and wind
beleaguered the windowpane.
“Did you enjoy your escapade?” Paul
inquired at length as he lit himself a ciga-
rette.
“Not too much.”
“Does Michael’s inferiority complex
annoy you?”
“It did.”

“Would you do it
again?”
“Perhaps—but not
with him. It was
somewhat pleasant,
though.”

“You’re a strange girl, Marie; way beyond
my comprehension, too.”
Marie laughed scornfully and turned on
the radio.
“Good-bye,” said Paul, getting up from
the chair. “I wish you could meet Helen
when she comes here some day. You’re the
nearest thing to Helen I’ve seen in my life.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s by way of being a compliment from
both Michael and myself.”
“Oh?”
Paul laughed nervously. “I’ll bet you’re
thinking of me as a little fool. Well enough,
I don’t care: it doesn’t bother me. Good-bye,
Marie.”
Marie nodded and Paul went out.

VI
MICHAEL, ON
THE STREET
outside of Marie’s apartment, huddled
up in his coat and turned up the collar to
the rain. He started to walk, hardly car-
ing in what directions his footsteps took
him. But a vague idea was forming in
the back of his mind, and he began to
hurry towards the Boulevard Bar.
Three men were coming down the
sidewalk in Michael’s direction. They
wore raincoats and were shouting and
singing in a carefree manner. As they

approached Michael, they formed a wedge
in the center of the sidewalk and were quiet.
Michael, intent on his destination, and with
his head lowered against the driving rain,
walked straight up to them expecting in any
event that they would make room for him,
since they occupied the entire sidewalk.
But they did not separate, and one of them
suddenly waved his arms and began yelling,
“Out of my way! Out of my way, everybody!”
And saying this, he bumped directly into
Michael, pushed him aside violently with
his elbow, and paused to stare at him ques-
tioningly, with a look of stupefaction on his
face. The other two men began to laugh.
Michael registered only mild astonishment,
since he was so preoccupied with his anger
against Marie and Paul, and it hardly
occurred to him that his person was being
insulted—at least, for the moment.
The three men laughed as Michael shuf-
fled on in the rain.
And just as Michael reached the top of
the street and was turning into the boule-
vard, he heard the men shouting, followed
by the shattering of glass.

He turned in
time to see the
three men,
laughing uproar-
iously, run away
from the street
level window of
an apartment
house that they
had just broken
with a volley of
rocks.
Michael stopped, stunned and fright-
ened. Then he hurried on up the boulevard
towards the bar and walked in quickly. It
was warm and cheery in the bar, and the
place was already filling up despite the din-
ner hour. Michael sat at a table in the cor-
ner, flapped off the rain from his coat collar,
and ordered pernod and water. He looked
at his hand and it was trembling violently.
When his drinks came, he drank up quickly

and began to shiver and tremble all over.
The seaman who had bought Anthony
drinks a week ago was standing at the bar
talking to two men. He was very drunk
again, and occasionally he would totter and
almost fall on his back.
“Someday,” he was crying thickly—and so
loudly that the bartenders were looking at each
other with significance—“someday I’m going to
walk into a rich man’s house, with my dirty boots
covered with mud, and with a gun, I’ll shoot
everything down, the rich man, the paintings on
the wall, the expensive vases, the draperies…
Gentlemen,” he went on ponderously, reeling
back against another man who was just then
crossing the room, “I shall bring his house down
upon his head.”
The man into whom the drunken sea-
man had reeled now gave a violent push, for
he too was drunk, and was annoyed that
someone should reel against him. The sea-
man went hurtling against the bar, and like
a rubber ball, with his crossed eyes gleam-
ing at two divergent points in space, he
bounded back into the annoyed drunkard
and knocked him to the floor. The drunkard
got to his feet immediately and floundered
wildly towards the seaman. There was a

flurry of waving arms, and suddenly the
seaman went down under the impact of an
elbow in his face and smashed his head
against the brass rail running along the
base of the bar. Blood was spewing from the
drunkard’s nose as he panted, and he now
jumped down upon the prostrate seaman
and began to pummel his head with his
forearms. The two bartenders had by now
vaulted over the bar, and in doing so, had
overturned a bottle of beer which went
crashing to the floor and precipitated a
scream from a drunken woman at the cor-
ner of the bar.
In a moment, after much violent hauling
and pushing, the bartenders had directed
the two combatants to the door of the bar
and hurled them out into the rain. The
patrons of the bar now assembled at the
plate glass window, in one excited group,
and watched the resumption of the battle
outside. There was much shouting, and
cries of amazement on the part of the spec-
tators.
“Look at that! Look!”
“He’s going to kill him!” a woman cried
anxiously, dropping her glass to the floor.
“He’s beating his head on the pavement!”

Michael lowered his head and quickly
gulped his pernod. It burned violently in
his throat, and he took water. The specta-
tors were still yelling. Michael buried his
face in his hands, and suddenly, not to his
very great surprise, began to shake vio-
lently and even to sob a little. Then he
began to feel dizzy and sick; he rose
waveringly from the table and rushed to
the lavatory. He was there for what
seemed an eternity.
When he got back to his table, quiet
reigned again in the barroom. They were
saying that some policemen had come
along and broken up the fight with their
billy clubs, and carried the combatants
away in their police cars. The spectators
were back at their stations along the bar,
ordering more drinks. One bartender, with
a gleam in his eye as he shook the mixer,
was shouting down the bar to the other bar-
tender, “Well! That’s it for tonight!”
Michael ordered another pernod and

water and drank it as soon as it came. Now
he no longer felt like weeping; he felt only
bitterness, and there was a fuzz before his
eyes. His hands were still trembling and lit-
tle drops of sweat were running down into
his collar.
After drinking down the third pernod, Leo
was suddenly standing beside his table, car-
rying a load of books and looking contented.
“Michael!” he greeted. “It’s good to see
you again!” He sat down and placed his
books on the table. “I’m going to drink a
glass of beer.”
“How are you?” Michael inquired
gloomily.
“Fine. But you don’t look so well. You’re
pale, and there’s sweat all over your face.
Did you know that Paul was back also? I
thought you were all gone for good; I was
getting lonesome.”
Michael smiled wanly.
“I heard a man was just killed,” Leo went
on, beckoning to the waiter.

“What?”
“Weren’t you around ten minutes ago?
You missed it. Two men were fighting in
here and then out on the sidewalk, and some
policemen came along to break it up, and
killed one of the men with their billy clubs.”
“Are you sure?”
“That’s what they’re all saying. I saw
them carry the dead man into the police car
as I came down the boulevard. Tell me,
where’s Paul?”
Michael was running his hand over his
face in great agitation. Looking up quickly,
he asked, “Paul?”
“Yes, where is he?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Leo smiled reassuringly. “You’re in a
nervous mood, I see. Is it because of the
repercussions of the Marie affair?”
“How did you find out? And I don’t care,
anyway.”
“They’re saying that Maureen has cast
you out, and that Anthony almost died of
grief and neglect and alcohol, and all kinds
of things.”
“Well, what of it?”
“And,” Leo went on garrulously, “you’d
better ask Paul for your poetry. I was with

him today when he stole it, and he threat-
ened to burn it.”
“I don’t care,” Michael said. “God,” he
added, “I don’t care about anything any
more. This is the end. Pah!”
Leo laughed loudly. The waiter set the
glass of beer before him and Leo took a
quick sip.
“I’m going to end my life soon,” Michael
added suddenly.
Leo laughed more loudly than before.
“Now, now,” he mocked indulgently. “None
of that, and besides, people never mean it
when they come out with it that way! Oh,
no—remember Ippolit in Dostoyevsky?”
“Ippolit meant what he said,” Michael
droned, staring into his empty glass. “It

wasn’t his fault that the gun didn’t go off.
That part was the biggest tragedy of the
book, not what came later.”
Leo laughed again; he was in a happy
mood, and the rain had brightened up his
usually dour complexion. “I don’t take you
seriously, at any rate. There’s a lot to live
for, and you must know that…”
Michael didn’t answer. He waved to the
waiter and ordered another pernod. Then
he turned to Leo: “And you say that one of
the men was killed?”
“Yes.”
Michael sighed heavily, shakily. “Look at
my hands,” he said at length, holding them
out for Leo to see. “See them shake violent-
ly? I’m on the verge of a nervous break-
down. I think I’m going crazy. I’ve got to
put an end to it.”
Leo laughed again and squeezed
Michael’s arm. “Don’t be ridiculous. You
dramatize everything. A little misery is
good for the poet. You yourself wrote this
line, I remember it: ‘Pain is the law of the
artist’s life.’ Ha ha! Aren’t I right?”
Michael shrugged gloomily.
“Pain is the substance of your life. That’s
what Goethe said. Remember that. Bear it

out with fortitude.”
“Fortitude!” sneered Michael. “What a
dull word! — I’m sick of hearing it. I don’t
want to be courageous, my emotions are
against it; I want to be happy.”
“Well—” began Leo.
“Shut up!” yelled Michael. The bar-
tenders had begun to look over to their
table. “Not so much noise,” one of them
called, waving his finger.
Michael glowered at the tabletop.
Another Pernod came and he threw a large
bill on the table.
“You’d better not drink much more per-
nod,” Leo warned. “You’ll be very drunk in
a matter of minutes.”
“Well? That’s pre-

cisely what I want.
I’m going to oblit-
erate myself, like
Anthony did, but
I’m going to do it
first with pernod,
and then—”
Michael left off and drank down a whole
glassful of pernod.
Leo grimaced good-naturedly. Suddenly
Michael was sobbing with his face in his
hands. “Michael!” cried Leo, with a look of
consternation. “Now you’ve done it! You’re
so drunk you can’t control yourself. I think
I’d better take you home!” He put his hand
on Michael’s shivering shoulder, but the
other shook him off petulantly and contin-
ued to sob.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Leo in some
embarrassment. He stole a glance down the
length of the bar to see if anyone was watch-
ing this little scene. “Stop being a baby, will
you?” Then he began to laugh nervously.
“General lacrimae rerum is it? Is that why
you’re crying, the tears of things? My God,
you’re making a spectacle of yourself—some
people are beginning to watch you. Stop it,
Michael…”
Michael didn’t seem to hear what Leo
was saying.
Leo curled his lip a bit scornfully: “You
fool,” he said. “Stop being a pampered baby.
I’ve never seen such stickish weakness,
such drunkenness. It’s not like you at all;
when I first knew you—”

“Good Lord!”

But Michael went on sobbing, with his
face hidden in his trembling hands.
“Everybody’s looking at you now,” Leo
whispered. “Stop it! And do you think
they’re sympathizing with you? Not on your
life!! If you think that, you’re certainly a psy-
chotic case—you’re just a foolish spectacle,
that’s about all…”
Leo began to be very embarrassed, sit-
ting there with a man who wept into his
hands like a woman. He picked up his
books tentatively.
“Well,” he said, after a pause. “I’m going
now. You’d better stop this or they’ll throw
you out. Come, now, aren’t you ever going
to stop.” Leo rose from his seat. “I’m going
now, Michael. Good-bye, Michael.”
Michael didn’t answer.
Leo hesitated another moment or two
and then, bestowing a nervous pat on
Michael’s quivering shoulder, he walked
away somewhat self-consciously. A man
was standing near the door as Leo
approached it.
He took Leo’s arm.

“What’s the mat-
ter with him
over there, that
fellow you were
sitting with
who’s crying?
Hey? Has someone
stolen his lol-
lipop, his itsy-
bitsy lollipop?
Hey? Is that
it...”
Leo didn’t answer, and, disengaging himself
from the man’s grip, went out the door.
“That’s what it is, isn’t it?” the man called
after him, and turned back to watch
Michael, laughing and shaking his head.

VII
WALKING ALONG
THE BOULEVARD,
Paul was trying to decide where he
should go in order to find Michael.
Suddenly, he realized that he must go to
his room. Would Michael be there? Most
likely. And if not—it was time to go there
in any event, and tidy up the room a bit,
and perhaps pay another week’s rent in
advance. Paul still had some of the
money that Michael had given him the
night of the party; he hadn’t spent much
during his week in the country.

Although Michael had heretofore never
visited Paul’s room, perhaps he would be
there now, tonight. He might also be in some
bar getting drunk, a habit of his when things
went wrong. Paul decided to go to his room
first.
It was raining harder as he turned up M
street and strode along beneath the dripping
street lamp. Yes—Michael might want to talk
to him at last, of that Paul was almost certain.
With a mounting feeling of certainty, Paul
hurried to his gate and descended the stone
steps. Surely enough, the oil lamp was burn-
ing in his room, its yellow light fell feebly on
the dark puddles outside from underneath
the drawn shade.
Paul hastened along the damp hallway
and flung open his door.
“Helen!” he cried with joyous wonder.
A tall dark-haired girl stood in the center
of the room. She smiled and held out her
hands.
Paul, all beside himself with excitement,
ran up to Helen and stopped just short of her

outstretched hands. He teetered there for a
moment, looking incredulously into her face;
then, with a sighing smile, he dropped down
on his knees and took both of her hands in
his and began to kiss them over and over
again.
“Get off your knees,” Helen cried, blush-
ing. “Don’t be a fool.”
“Helen darling! Helen darling! I knew I
had to come here—I felt it! When did you
arrive here?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” she replied.
“Please get off your knees,” and she blushed
again charmingly.
Paul rose and led Helen to the couch.
Sitting her down slowly, and sitting beside
her, he kissed her reverently on the brow,
and then buried his face in her hair.
“You’ve come at last,” he whispered. “It’s
been so long. But I knew you’d come. Oh,
God! I’m so happy, so damned happy! Look!”
he cried suddenly, jumping up from the
couch and pointing to a pile of books on the
table. “Guess what? I’ve been studying and

learning all the while, and I’ve met all sorts
of intelligent students, friends of Michael’s.”
“Have you really been happy?”
“No! No! That, to say that, is to defame
this moment…Now I’m happy. Oh Helen,”
he cried, changing his tone again impul-
sively, and dropping on the couch beside
her. “Now that you’ve come, now that
you’ve come…it will all be over! Say that it
will!”
“We’ll wait,” she said slowly.
“Wait? Wait? For what?… For Michael?
He never comes here; he hasn’t once come
to my room. Only once he spoke a friendly
word, the night of a party to which I wasn’t
invited, and he wanted to know if I was
going to come anyway. I thought that was
the moment then, but nothing happened.
And later that night, he gave me money—he
still has all that money left he took with
him—but he gave it to me scornfully.

Helen, it’s got
to stop; it’s
got to happen
some time!”
“He’ll come here tonight,” Helen said.
“He may not.”
“We’ll wait here for him.”
“But how can you be sure? Do you feel it,
Helen?”
She was silent.
Paul got up and began to stride around
the room impatiently. Coming back to
Helen, he fell on his knees again and began
to kiss her wrists feverishly. “I don’t know,”
he said, looking up at her fearfully, his face
distorted in the lamplight. “I don’t know,
Helen darling…”
“Well,” Helen assured him, stroking his

hair, “I do.”
Paul now lapsed into an ecstatic silence.
Then he jumped up again and went over to
the table. “All these books,” he said proud-
ly. Then, taking out a sheaf of papers from
his pockets, he threw them on the table.
“And these are some of his writings. I think
I understand most of them—I criticized
them to Leo this afternoon.”
“Who’s Leo?”
“A very brilliant student we know here at
Custos Nostrom University, one of my
friends.”
“And what have you been doing for a liv-
ing?” Helen asked. “Give me those papers
so I can look at them.” Paul brought the
papers over. He looked down at his shoes
and chuckled. “Well,” he said warily, “I
started out all right, when I first got here. I
had a job running an elevator, up and down,
the little children coming home from school
at noon, the old ladies with their dogs, the
old gentlemen going out for their constitu-
tionals, some of them retired savants…”
“And?” Helen persisted.

“Well, after a while, I was so busy, I had
to quit.”
“Busy at what?”
“Well, helping Anthony among other
things—he’s another wonderful friend of
mine, a drunkard but a wonderful soul—
and attending classes. Did I tell you? I
attended classes like a regular student for
awhile, until one day the Professor had to
put me out because I got mad over a theory
that Arthur was propounding. Arthur is
another friend of mine, a bit of a poet.”
“Then what did you do for a living, after
you quit your job?”
Paul looked at Helen. “As I say… You
know, he gave me money.”
Helen shrugged her shoulders.
“And why not?” Paul wanted to know.
“But now!” he added triumphantly, “Now
you’re here, and it will be all over at last,
won’t it?”
“I hope so,” Helen whispered. “Come, sit
with me some more. Kiss me, you fool—you
haven’t kissed me on the mouth yet.”
Paul ran laughing to Helen and kissed
her.

“We’ll go
back,” he whis-
pered savagely,
“we’ll go back
and bask by the
river bank,
won’t we? And
you’ll pre-
pare lunches...”
“Oh,” Helen
said, laughing,
“I hate pic-
nics. You and
your picnics!”

“And I’ve thought of all kinds of wonder-
ful new ideas. Here’s what I’d like us to do.
We’ll spend the whole summer going
around in our bare feet, somewhere among
the pine trees, not far from the surf. I want
to be up in the morning when the first ray of
dawn makes the top of the pines crack!
And—”
“All right,” Helen interrupted happily,
“that’s enough of your dreaming for now.”
“As though these things were impossi-
ble!” Paul cried wrathfully. “Who?” he
asked. “Who is going to tell me it’s impossi-
ble! Are you like those other people, like
Michael—afraid of being happy?”
“You’re talking gibberish,” Helen
mocked, pulling at Paul’s sleeve playfully.
“Don’t get mad!”
“I am mad!” Paul cried. He paced the
room. “I want to know where all this
meanness of spirit comes from—the world’s
crazy!” He went over to the table and
banged it. Then, changing his attitude
again in the flicker of a moment, he came
back to Helen and buried his face in her
hair. “Do you really think he’s coming?”
“I think so, yes.”
“You know, he hasn’t changed much—

he’s the same as when he left, only perhaps
worse. He’s more miserable than ever. He
tried to hit me with a floor lamp one night.
Helen, this can’t go on.” They were silent,
and they could hear the wind blow outside,
and the rain spatter into the street.
“Would you like a sandwich?” Paul asked.
“No, not yet. And your bread is all mouldy.
Let’s lie down and wait.”
Helen and Paul embraced each other,
with both their heads on the same pillow,
and in a few moments, Paul was dozing fit-
fully. Helen was watching him sadly. After
several minutes of droning rain-sounds,
Helen heard a step in the hall; there was a
knock on the door. Paul jumped up, startled
out of a half dream. He went to the door and
opened it. Leo was standing in the hall.
“Ah, here you are,” Leo said.
Paul said coldly, “Well?”
“I’ve been looking for you,” Leo began
uncertainly, in the face of Paul’s morose
reception. “I’m on my way to my room to
study, and…well, I just wanted to tell you
that Michael is in the Boulevard Bar, very
drunk, and he’s weeping and making a com-
plete show of himself…”
“Weeping?” Paul cried anxiously. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Leo. “He’s just drunk,
that’s all, and he looks as though he were com-
ing down with an illness or something—”
Helen came to the door and looked at
Leo. The latter was startled out of his wits,
but not quite enough to lose control of the
situation.
“Why,” he said politely, “how do you do?”
“This is Leo, Helen,” Paul said sullenly.
“Leo, Helen.”
Leo bowed from the waist.
“Goodbye,” said Paul, and closed the
door in the other’s face. “Now,” he said,
turning to Helen, “what are we going to do?
Did you hear what he just said? — Michael’s
sick, and drunk, and he’s crying in the bar.
I knew all this business would break him in
time—just today he was cast out of his com-
fortable little nook with a woman old
enough to be his mother.”
Helen went over to the table and stood by
it reflectively. “What were you saying about
a woman?” she asked presently.
“He was living with Maureen. Then,
when she found out of another affair, she
threw him out.. And the other girl doesn’t
want Michael, and he, like a fool, is taking
everything seriously. Oh! He has done so

many stupid things lately, I’m ashamed of
myself!” Paul sat on the couch. Again he
asked, “What are we going to do?”
“Do? We’ll just wait.” Helen sat down
beside him.
“I don’t see your logic!” Paul cried impa-
tiently.
“There’s no logic involved in it,” Helen
replied calmly. “Let’s lie down and wait
some more. Get some sleep; you look fear-
fully worn out.”
Paul smiled tenderly. “Oh Helen,” he
said, “if you only knew how much I love
you, if only! All right, I won’t be a pest. I’ll
be quiet, and we’ll wait. Everything’ll be all
right, won’t it?”
“Yes, Paul.”
Paul stretched out on the couch and
placed his head in her bosom. “I’m going to
sleep, yes,” he told her. “When I wake up, it
will be all over, and we’ll be together and in
love, like before… Helen, do you think that
Michael’s change will affect us?… do you
think it will be different?”
“Perhaps.”
“He wanted to be an artist,” Paul said

sadly, “and he left. It won’t be the same man
any more,” he added gloomily.
“It might be a better man,” Helen said, “if
only…he will come.”
They again fell into a long, peaceful
silence. Helen was stroking Paul’s hair; her
own long dark hair had disengaged itself
and fallen loosely over her cheek. She
watched Paul, as he began to fall asleep,
and stroked his hair…for a long time…and
waited. The rain drummed on the window.
“Call our secret call from where you are,”
she whispered softly, so as not to waken
Paul, who was now asleep, “and I shall call
back…” And these words she repeated sev-
eral times, and sighed shiveringly.
The rain
drummed and
she waited.

VIII
MICHAEL, LONG
SINCE
having abandoned his tears, was now
uproariously drunk. He had overturned
his table and the waiters were leading
him to the door.
“Revolt! Revolt!” he kept mumbling
drunkenly, and even as they were push-
ing him out into the rain, and the cus-
tomers were laughing, he kept on
repeating these words out loud. He had
been forced to pay for the glasses he’d
broken, and now, with the change in a

crumpled heap in his hand, he waved it at
the wind and rain. He started up the boule-
vard, staggering, and once he almost fell in
a puddle. Pedestrians hurrying by in the
rain have him only briefly curious glances.
Michael weaved along the boulevard,
and then paused to rest on a bench dripping
with rain. There, stuffing the money back
into his pockets, he leaned his head in his
hands and stared at a puddle at his feet.
“I refuse!” he choked, and got up and
walked on.
By now he had reached the bridge and
began walking along the concrete ramp.
Below, the river, softly needled by the rain,
flowed by slowly and in darkness. A tugboat
hooted and blew up steam towards the
bridge. Michael stopped midway across the
bridge and leaned on the railing to look
down. He was standing in the shadows, and
the rain pattered down all around him.
“It’s cold!” he cried, and a gust of wind
blew by, driving rain against his face. “It’s
cold!” he repeated with mounting disgust.

The bridge, at this point, was completely
deserted, except for one trolley car that
clanged and rattled by. As it passed,
Michael opened his mouth and screamed in
the midst of the clamour. Then he began to
moan and sway, shivering, and huddling up
in his coat.
‘I’ve never approved of this method,’ he
thought. ‘It’s much too inconvenient, and
too cold— But I’ve made my pact; I’ve made
my pact. I’ll show him—the poisoner!’ “God
has poisoned me!” he suddenly cried out
loud. “Do you hear me? God has poisoned
me with his damned essence!” No one was
around; the bridge was completely desert-
ed, and a strong wing drove slivers of rain
across the arc lights. A big ship bawled in
the dark distance.
‘But before I do this,’ Michael thought, ‘I
should really see him—Paul, Paul. Ha ha!
I’ll hurl curses in his face, the ape. Making
a fool of me, stealing my poetry and saying
that he’ll burn it, laughing at me, abetting
Marie’s damned teasing, taunting me—

the insensi-
tive, stupid,
thick-headed
ape! The great
genius of love
and life, yes,
I’ll show the
ape...’

Michael had suddenly begun to walk
back in the direction from which he had
come. He was muttering to himself out
loud. “Perhaps I’m mad now, stark raving
mad as they say—” He looked around, eyes
gleaming. “When he sees me, he’ll be terri-
fied. A lunatic! I’ll bang on his window and
tell him his hour’s up! I’ll smother the
wretch to death with me! He’ll faint when he
sees me! Ho Ho! That’ll be the topper of
them all…”
Laughing feverishly, Michael hurried on.
Suddenly he stopped and leaned again on
the railing. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ he thought.
‘I shouldn’t even warn him. Yes, that’s what
this is, this running to see him, it’s a sort of
warning: he doesn’t deserve any sympathy
of mine. I’ve none for him or anyone else.
Calls me a failure! A failure!’ Michael looked
down at the waters below, and carefully
considered them.
‘They’ll think it’s a dishonor,’ he thought,
‘but little they’ll know—it’s not dishonor to
be defeated by God. He’s put this idea in my
head; he wants me out of the way—because
I was seeking his impulse: and don’t think
that I wouldn’t have found it, if I had had the
fortitude to live on. No doubt about that, I

know my powers! But the struggle isn’t
worth it. Struggle is not happiness. I
thought I would find happiness there, curi-
ously enough— It’s a good thing I’ve been
warning Arthur. I should really go and see
Arthur before I do this, and warn him again,
specifically this time. The consequences
are what he craves, hey? I’ll bet—when the
time comes, he won’t be so sophomorically
secure behind his artistic philosophies, oh
no! But maybe he’s shrewder than me,
that’s possible… Well, this is all a pretty
waste of time.’
Michael suddenly leaned far over the
railing until his feet were off the pavement
and he was holding himself only by the
force of his hands, which were knotted

around the bars. “Say something, death,”
he called to the waters below. “Smug
silent death, omniscient death, sottish
death. They tell me corpses dragged out of
rivers are bloated, blue, and black, like
puffed up bullfrogs, that they glisten with
scum, and that the eyes are eaten out by
rats…” Michael opened and closed his
eyes. “That’s about to happen to me!” He
was so drunk now, that he almost lost his
balance; but he only laughed. The dark-
ness below him was swirling dizzily, and
he began to feel sick from the pernod.
“Now!” he muttered. “This is how it will
feel when I am plunging into the gouffre!
Just like this! A note, should have written a
note! Still time! Oh, it’s cold, cold, cold!…”

IX
PAUL, ASLEEP IN
HELEN’S ARMS,
was suddenly awake and shivering all
over very violently. Helen’s hand, which
had been stroking his hair, paused over
his head. Paul opened his eyes.
“I’m cold!” he pronounced hoarsely.
Then, recognizing Helen, he plunged his
face into her bosom and shivered violent-
ly again, as though he had a chill. “I’m
cold, Helen. Is it so cold in the room?”

Helen frowned and placed tender finger-
tips on his brow.
“No, darling, it’s not so cold… I don’t feel
it. But your brow is all wet. You have a
fever!”
Paul was shaking in her arms. Helen
underwent a spasm of anxiety: “Paul,” she
cried, “you’re sick!” She started to get up.
Paul detained her with his hand. “No
wait,” he said. “Now, I feel all right. I’m not
cold any more, and look, I’m not shaking
any more…”
“I don’t know—your face is all wet.”
“I must have been dreaming,” Paul
assured her. “What have you been doing,
sleeping?”
“I’ve been watching you, and waiting.”
“Do you trust me?”
“I love you and I trust you.”
“That’s all that counts, then,” Paul said,
and brought his head back to her bosom.
“Oh, it’s still raining. What a terrible, terri-
ble night. And all we do is wait and wait…

Helen, can’t I go out and look for him? He’s
in the bar, Leo told us…”
“No,” Helen said firmly.
“But I tell you—”
“No. We can’t go to him. Don’t you know
that he has to come to us?”
Paul was silent. “That’s nonsense,” he
finally said.
“Not so much as you think,” Helen
affirmed. “Let him come to us.”
“I can’t sleep any more,” Paul said. “I
think I’ll get up and prepare two cups of cof-
fee, and I have some cookies in a bag.”
“Let me do it.”
“No, no!” cried Paul, jumping up and
laughing. “Let me do it. You’re my guest.
You’ve just arrived from a long journey, and
I’m serving you in my role as a host.”
Helen smiled. “Paul, you can be so silly
sometimes…”
“Now stay right there,” Paul cried, running
to his cupboard—for that was what he called
it, his cupboard—and beginning to rummage

around. “I’ll bring you the whole meal on a
tray, as though you were a queen. And that—”
he said, turning triumphantly to Helen — “that
is what you are, a queen! My queen!” He ran
over and kissed Helen; then he dashed back to
his cupboard. “The Queen of the Golden Age.
Did you hear that? The Queen of the Golden
Age! That’s what Michael would call you now,
you know. He has all kinds of fancy terms for
simple beauty. He would call you a symbol of
beauty, perhaps the symbol of beauty, in the
manner of all the poets and artists! They’re all
crazy…”

Suddenly, a
violent knock-
ing came on
the window
from outside,
accompanied by
a thick cry.
“What’s that?” Paul asked, going towards

the window.
Helen didn’t answer.
Paul hastened out into the hall and went
up to open the outside door. A cold gust of
rain blew in. Michael was standing in a
puddle, with the rain dripping down his
face, glaring madly at Paul.
“Do I look mad?” he cried eagerly.
“Good Lord! You’re soaking wet!” cried
Paul. “Come on in and dry up.”
“No!” thundered Michael. “I asked you,
do I look mad?”

“Yes, quite!”
Michael smiled with satisfaction and
shook his head to clear it of rain. “Now will
you come in?” Paul yelled, for the wind was
blowing hard and the rain was making a
great splattering noise.
Michael was smiling strangely in the
darkness. “I’ve come to tell you,” he said,
barely audible in the rainfall, “that this is
your last night on earth. It’s going to be
awful cold, my friend, where you and I are
going, the water, and the earth.”
A flurry of wind drove by them and Paul
cried, “Come on in, you fool!”
“Did you hear what I said? Your last night
on earth?”
“I don’t care,” yelled Paul impatiently,
still standing in the doorway.
“I’ll bet you’re wondering why I’m going
to do it,” Michael went on, shouting against
the rain, even though now he stood right in
front of Paul and had his face right next to
his. “Don’t you want to know the details?
The motive, you ape?”
Paul shook his head bewilderedly.
“Oh,” Michael said, “so you think that

there aren’t any specific details to this, hey,
no motives? A man commits suicide just
because the idea appeals to him, is that it?
Well, you’re lucky. I wasn’t going to come,
because I have no sympathy for you, Paul—
but something drove me here, some idea.
Well, now you’re going to listen to me—”
“You’re not going to commit suicide,”
Paul interrupted. He began to smile angeli-
cally and blush.
“And why not?” Michael demanded sus-
piciously.
“Come in and I’ll show you why,” Paul
replied, still smiling.
“No!” yelled Michael again. “Good-bye!”
He had moved off towards the stone steps,
and Paul had suddenly run out after him and
was clutching at his coat.
“Wait a minute!” They were both stand-
ing in the rain now, and Paul was soon
drenched with rain.
“I wept,” said Michael simply, turning his
face to Paul’s. “Paul!” he suddenly cried,
taking the other’s hand and squeezing it.
“Paul, a man was killed. All today, after
what happened… Did you see how Marie

treated me? I don’t care about her, but I tell
you she’s an impostor that one, she revels in
evil, she’s not a human being!”
“You’re being childish.”
“Oh no, I don’t think so. There are rea-
sons. I wish I could see Arthur before I do
this, and warn him. I was thinking about
him on the bridge—it will be on the bridge.
Well, Paul—” He began to pull away. But
suddenly he went on: “And I was sick in the
bar, and they threw me out. Do you know
where I’m going to sleep tonight? I’m going
to sleep in the river, alone! And you!” he
added with savage triumph, “you are going
to just expire in your mean little hovel…”
“Michael—”
“Do you want some money, Paul? Ha ha
ha. Want some money? Here!” Michael
drew out a wad of bills from his coat pock-
et and scattered them like seed, with a
broad sweep of his arm, at Paul’s feet.
“Stoop! And pick them up. They’re all

yours. Spend them within the next ten min-
utes, for that’s how long you have to live. Ha
ha ha!”
Paul was now holding Michael firmly by
the arm, and rain poured down both their
backs.
“Good-bye,” said Michael, straining away
from the other’s grip. “This is the way the
world ends, you know. Come with me and
I’ll recite you all the death lyrics in litera-
ture, and the love lyrics too, just to prove to
you how far they fall off the mark. I had the
mark!—but it was poisoned; it was the for-
bidden fruit with poison in it! I have a fever,
now, I think I’m sick—that’s where I’m get-
ting all the courage to do this…”
Paul hung on to his arm and said nothing.
“Remember the time I tried to hit you
with the floor lamp?” Michael shouted. “Oh,
I’m remembering everything now, and all
the things I wrote that don’t mean anything,
and the things I wrote that meant too much.

On human terms, you see, that’s how life is.
On human terms. I don’t want those terms.
They’re ugly; there’s no more beauty. I
revolt! I refuse! I’m finished! God’s defeated
me…”
Paul smiled grimly.
“You smile? Do you think it’s a dishonor
to be defeated by God?”
“No,” Paul said simply.
“Do you know what it’s like?” Michael
asked, his eyes gleaming at Paul. “It’s like
being a fish trying to live on land. One suf-
focates. I’m suffocating in the ether; God’s
air is choking me. I went to it in all inno-
cence, I didn’t know it would choke me.
Now, am I supposed to return to human
conditions? Hey? Well, I damned well
refuse, that’s all. Let me go, damn you, let
me go!” And with this, Michael wrenched
away violently. But, no sooner having done
this, he himself grasped Paul’s arm. “Now,”
he said, “Prometheus—that’s a funny one,
Prometheus: Arthur called me that this
afternoon—well, now,

Prometheus
bids thee
farewell...”

Michael interrupted himself with a violent
cough. “I’m sick,” he choked. “I’m too sick to
live. Dégout! Dégout! I abandon all my natu-
ral rights…” He went on talking thickly, and
Paul no longer could make out what he was
saying; and suddenly Michael’s face lit up.
“Paul!” he cried. “I just remembered. You
have my poetry with you, in your room. I
want it! I want it to go down with me!”
“Certainly!” cried Paul happily. “Go in
and get it!”
“Are you hinting anything!?” yelled
Michael suspiciously. “Get out of my way—
I’m going to get it!” And with this he lunged
past Paul, almost knocking him down, and
lumbered heavily into the hall. Paul was
right at his heels.
“It’s got to go with me, as a symbol of my
failure,” Michael was muttering. He went
into Paul’s room and wavered uncertainly.
“Where is it?” he demanded menacingly.
Paul was in the doorway. “On my desk,”
he said. “There.”
Michael scuffled to the desk and scooped
up the papers, and folded them in a heap to
fit into his coat pocket. Turning, he saw
Helen standing by the couch in a shadowy
corner of the room. He rubbed his hand

across his jaw, and smiled inwardly.
“I’m having visions,” he told Paul.
Staggering, he walked towards the door.
“Visions! It’s wonderful. I just saw her…”
“Well?” Paul drawled, still standing in the
doorway and blocking the way.
“Out of my way,” said Michael, waving his
heap of papers.
“It isn’t a vision,” said Paul quietly. “She
is here. I told you she would come.”
Michael frowned at Paul, and his lips
began to tremble. He turned awkwardly,
almost fearfully, and looked once again
towards the shadowy corner. Helen came
out of the shadows and walked soundlessly
to Michael and Paul. The papers dropped
out of Michael’s hand and he breathed out
the name, as though he didn’t believe what
he saw, and was afraid to believe. His
clothes were dripping wet, and a little pool
was forming at his feet; rain water poured
down from his face, and now he was as pale
as a sheet.
Helen stopped just three feet away and
gazed anxiously at Michael, a small wrinkle
forming on her smooth white brow. One
hand, she partly held out, trembling faintly…
Michael’s eyes opened wide with some sort

of terror. He was trying to mumble something,
his lips were working. Finally, he managed to
mutter out, in a hoarse whisper, “I … thought …
I … had no right … to … ever … see… you …
again.”
Helen advanced another foot.
“Why not?” she asked clearly.
Paul, standing in the doorway, was feel-
ing so faint he didn’t dare speak; he thrust
his hands in his pockets, because they were
trembling; and leaned against the doorjamb
in an attitude of complete exhaustion,
watching Michael with something of fearful
expectation. He opened his mouth to say,
“Michael,” but no sound issued from his
throat.
“Because…” Michael was whispering
awesomely, his eyes fastened on Helen’s
face, “…because…of what…I’ve…done.”
“What have you done?” Helen demanded
softly.

Michael was swaying on his feet.
“Lived?” he whispered.
“That’s probably all,” Helen said. “Don’t
you think you’re good enough for me?” She
was almost on the verge of tears.
Michael sobbed out one word, “No,” in a
great quivering cry, and fell to his knees
before Helen, and lay there huddled and
weeping pathetically. Helen, with a groan
of despair, immediately knelt down on the
floor beside him and took him into her
arms.
Slowly, Paul closed the door and wavered
across the room to sit on the couch and
watch. There he sat.
Michael was almost hysterical, his
weeping grew more and more profuse.
Helen said nothing, but only leaned her
head against his and closed her eyes; and
cupping Michael’s face in her hands she
rocked his head gently back and forth, as

though to lull away his tears…
Paul sat for a long while watching.
Suddenly, he realized that the rain had
stopped outside; there was only the sound of
dripping eaves, and of a gentle breeze. He
rose from the couch and went over to the
window to open it.
Michael was holding the weight of
Helen’s dark hair in the palm of his hand
and awesomely looking at it.
Now—explosively, for there had been
much silence—Paul said, “Well! So one
rejoins his true love and the occasion is all
tears! That’s the so-called poet all over. And
money lying outside in the street!” Paul
went to the door. He stopped and gazed

down at the two on the floor. Then, since
they were both smiling up at him, he
kneeled in front of them and took both their
hands, while they too clasped hands. “The
fault,” Paul said to Michael, “is with you,
and not with anything else, not even God…
If you actually know how to love her—
though she can be bitter—she can flood
your soul with light, all of your soul! Aren’t I
right? Helen, tell him—I’m right!”
Helen pressed both their hands tightly
and only smiled…
And in this manner, amid the happy
endearments of the woman, and the silence
of thought and imagination, the miracle of
wholeness was renewed.

X
AT MIDNIGHT,
LEO,
his studies finished, put out the light in
his room and went down the dormitory
hall. He knocked at Arthur’s door.
“Come in!”
Arthur was seated at his desk, writing.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing some poetry.”
“What about examinations?”
“Tomorrow.”
Leo sat on the edge of Arthur’s desk.
“I came here earlier,” he said, “but you
weren’t in. I wanted to tell you some-
thing amazing: I went to Paul’s tonight,

and there, with him in his dirty little room,
was the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my
life, and her name was Helen.”
“Helen?” Arthur exclaimed. “Why, that’s
the name Paul used to get Michael so mad
the night of the party.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think they’re still there?”
“I guess so, but Paul wouldn’t let me in.
He closed the door in my face.”
“Let’s go there,” Arthur said, rising and
putting on his coat. “And where’s Michael?”
“I left him in the Boulevard Bar. He was
weeping and getting drunk.”
“Good Lord!”
They started down the stairs. Arthur
seemed very excited: “I was just working
out something,” he told Leo happily. “I want
to show it to Michael.”
“What is it?”
“It isn’t finished yet. It’s an idea. A poem
about the poet and God.”
They were out on the street; it had
stopped raining. Great gaps in the clouds
revealed clusters of stars, and across the

sodden campus darkness, the boulevard
glistened in the freshness and glitter of the
lights.
Julius was just then coming across the
campus and they met him.
“I’ve just been to the Boulevard Bar,” he
told them. “They told me that Michael was
thrown out for disturbing the peace, upset-
ting the table.”
“Oh my God!” cried Leo, laughing. “I
should have taken him home. I knew he’d
get too drunk!”
“Come on with us,” Arthur told Julius.
“We’re going over to Paul’s to see the myste-
rious Helen we’ve heard so much about.”
“Helen?” exclaimed Julius, suddenly
quite interested.
“Yes. And Leo claims her to be the most
beautiful girl he ever saw.”
They hastened down M street and turned
to enter Paul’s gate.
“There’s no light,” put in Leo.
Arthur pushed open the hall door and
they all trooped in; in Paul’s room, they lit a
match and found an oil lamp. There was no

one there, and even the old tattered rain-
coat that had hung on a nail for months
beside the little table, was gone. Just a pair
of old shoes beneath the bed.
“Let’s go see if they’re in the Boulevard
Bar,” Arthur suggested. “They must be
around somewhere.”
“It’s strange,” Julius said softly.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Once again in the street, they marched
three abreast towards the bar. Suddenly,
Leo cried out and pointed up the boulevard.
“There! There’s Paul now, and he’s with
her!”
Arthur and Julius turned to see.
“But you’re crazy,” Julius said. “That’s
not Paul. That’s Michael.”
“It’s Paul’s old raincoat…don’t you recog-
nize him? Let’s catch up to them…” And
they started hurrying up the boulevard.

Helen and her
lover were
standing on a
trolley island
in the middle
of the boule-
vard, just
beneath a
street lamp,
with arms
entwined
around each
other’s
waists.
A trolley was clanging towards them.
“But he’s too tall to be Paul,” Julius was
saying as he hurried along after Arthur and
Leo. “Michael’s taller.”

“Nonsense,” laughed Leo. “He’s too
husky to be Michael.”
“Hey!” Arthur now yelled, as he hastened
his footsteps and waved his hand at Helen
and her lover. Helen turned and smiled. To
Leo and Julius, Arthur said: “She does look
beautiful from here, that Helen. I’ve always
wanted to meet her, after all the mystery
that enshrouded her!…”
The trolley was now pulling up in front of
the two people on the island and stopping.
Helen turned once again and waved her
hand at the oncoming students.
“There,” Arthur said, hurrying. “She’s
waving at us. But look! They look as
though… They are! They’re getting into the
trolley!”
“Well!” snapped Julius, a little peeved.
“There’s no sense in hurrying any further.”
He stopped in his tracks. They were still
about a hundred or so feet from the trolley
island. Helen and the other had gotten into

the trolley and now it was pulling away and
clanging its bell.
“Well!” panted Arthur, a bit disappointed,
with arms akimbo, standing and watching
the departing trolley.
Then they saw Michael, or Paul, or
whomever they thought it was, come to the
back window of the trolley and wave at
them as it reeled away. Helen was at his
side, and she too was waving.
Then, in another moment, the trolley was
on the bridge and speeding over the river
towards the outskirts of the city.
“They should at least have waited for us,”
Leo was now saying sadly. “But I guess they
wanted to catch that trolley. Damn that
Paul.”
“It wasn’t Paul!” Julius insisted again.
“Well, whoever it was,” Leo went on discon-
solately, “I have a feeling we’ll never see them
again, neither one of them. I can feel it by the
way they were waving us good-bye.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Arthur. “Well, we
might as well go to the Boulevard Bar and
have a few drinks. I want to show you my
poetry.”
“It was Michael,” Julius was still insisting
to Leo.
Leo sighed and waved an impatient hand
at him. “All right, all right. But we’ll never
see them again.”
They were all three very silent as they
walked to the Boulevard Bar. And of course,
they were indeed destined never to see Paul
or Michael again—as Leo had instinctively
divined—but they were not destined to form
any vague notion of what had really hap-
pened that night until several weeks later,
when Arthur, coming back from a class one
day, found a letter in his mailbox.
It read: “Amenehmet looks upon the
beauty of the sun!”—a quotation which
Arthur remembered from his studies in
Egyptian history—and it was signed,
“Orpheus.” This was when the first faint
understanding of the full significance of
what had happened, began to come to
Arthur.

Excerpts from Jack
Kerouac’s Journals

Journals 1943-’44
Jan. 1944
We are all too sensitive to go on: it is too cold, and our

bodies are too exhausted. There is too much life around.
The multitude is feverish and ill. There is war where
men sleep on the snow, and when we waken from sleep
we do not desire to go on. I hiccup very violently, twice.
This is an age that has created sick men, all weaklings
like me. What we need is a journey to new lands. I shall
embark soon on one of these. I shall sleep on the grass
and eat fruit for breakfast. Perhaps when I return, I shall
be well again.
Brief notes on “The Half Jest”

(Orpheus Emerged)
MICHAEL – the genius of imagination and art, 22

PAUL – the genius of life and love, 22
MAUREEN – Michael’s mistress, 32 years old
CLAUDE [Arthur] – Michael’s friend, a student, 20
LEO – a student, 18
ANTHONY – Paul’s friend, a drunkard and artist, 38
“TONI” – Claude’s [Arthur’s] girl, 21
JULES – a strange student, 17
MARIE – Dmitri’s [Anthony’s] beautiful wife, 27
“BARBARA” – Maureen’s friend, 25
“ROBERT”– a psychopath, 26

HELEN – the beloved of Marcel Opheus, 21
MARCEL ORPHEUS, who is never seen, 22
Setting – A large city called West, in the land of Promethea
– or vice versa.
M. has suffered the wound of his calling and deliber-

ately sold out P. The story concerns P.’s return and the
ultimate rejoining, and the struggle with appropriate
principles involved.
Journals 1943-’44
Plot structure of novelette
I. Paul in bookstore; on way to class with Leo, pathetically
expresses his desire for learning; class scene, Claude
[Arthur] introduced; then to Paul’s cellar room; Dmitri
[Anthony] there with problem; poverty and few pathetic
books, and picture of Helen.
II. Paul’s call on Michael; patches up things for Dmitri
[Anthony]; Marie’s ennui emphasized; a call from Michael;
she half-heartedly repels him; his offer; meets Dmitri
[Anthony] coming in
III. Party scene, where Paul’s mention of Helen and
Michael’s rage, Michael’s growing desire for Marie, are
shown, etc. etc.
IV. A week later. Paul has been away "sleeping in grass

and eating fruit for breakfast." He returns – it is a cloudy,
ominous day – he meets Leo in park, they call on Michael.
Maureen tells them that M. has been gone several days on
a trip. P. picks up some of M.’s poetry and mockingly
reads it to Leo. They meet Claude [Arthur], who tells
them that M. and Marie have been living together in
Bohemian Quarter. At this, Paul rushes to Dmitri’s
[Anthony’s] , where Marie has already returned. Dmitri
[Anthony] is a wreck; Marie ministers him. Michael and
Claude [Arthur] arrive; scene between M. and Marie. It
begins to rain. M. goes to bar, Paul to his hovel – he feels
he must, there he finds Helen waiting, etc.
Symbolized Idea – M. trying to transcend human emo-

tions to those of God – emotions of creation, or of Eternity,
etc. Thus he abandons his human self, Paul, and strikes
off for the High Regions. But there he finds himself lost,
lonely, and out of his element: his species-self, biologi-
cally speaking, holds him back. A fish trying to live out of
water, on air alone, M. finds that his life exists unques-
tionably on human terms: he cannot be God, or be like
him, because he is human. This makes him see that the
highest state he can attain is that of the "Lyre of God," and
in a contemporaneous sense, that of God’s representative
to man. "A high meeting…" As Orpheus, the artist-man,
rather than merely man, or merely Prometheus (the
artist), he achieves his great goal of wholeness. This is a

"new vision" – possible only after the cold windy dark-
nesses of the High Regions have been explored. The
"Impulse of God" poem key to M.’s whole success – but he
transcends, yet maintains, this success to that of whole-
ness plus vision.
Book of Symbols 1944

The modern artist must discover new forms or he will per-
ish by the hand of action.
--Narrative
--Poetic prose
--Facts
Time Factor – 3 prongs
(1) Sunset at six – Saroyan period (in Hartford)
(2) Galloway – Joycean period
(3) The Haunted Life – Wolfean period
(4) I Bid You Lose Me – Nietzschean period (Neo-
Rimbaudian)
(5) Orpheus Emerged – post-Nietzschean period (Yeats
period)
(6) Phillip Tourian Novel – Spenglerian period
(2 1/2) The Sea is My Brother – American period (Dos
Passos)
(3 1/2) Supreme Reality – post-neurotic period
Dos Passos’s new form (U.S.A.) severely misused. A truly

creative artist hampered by excessive naturalism.

On this page, you see, I take up the thread of my creative
life and play with it awhile. I don’t live by the calendar of
personal events, but by the almanac of artistic directions.
January 1945 – Edie all right. Returned to N.Y. to try and

make good so we can live together in N.Y. Wrote essay,
story, poem – all determined by new ideas. Cont’d work
on novel with Burroughs.
Feb. – Complete novel with Burroughs. Crucial sense of

"end" and "beginning." Also completed essay on
Nietzsche, Blake, and Yeats; short novel, "Orpheus
Emerged"; story, "God’s Daughter."
March – Seeing a lot of Burroughs. He is responsible for

the education of Lucien, whom I had found, in lieu of his
anarchy (rather than in spite of it), an extremely impor-
tant person. "I lean with fearful attraction over the depths
of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies
atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality" –
and – "The bastard alone has the right to be natural."
(Gide) These lines elicit a picture of the Burroughs
thought. However, the psychoanalytical probing has
upset me prodigiously.

Brief
Biography
Jack Kerouac was born in working-class Lowell,
Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in
a Franco-American family. He spoke a dialect of French
before he learned English. His older brother Gerard
died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine.
Kerouac attended local Catholic and public
schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia
University in New York City in 1939. After dropping out
of college in the fall of 1941, he tried unsuccessfully to fit
in with the military, worked as a deck hand in the
Merchant Marines, and returned to New York. There he
met Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr,
their strange downtown friend William Burroughs, and
the joyful street cowboy from Denver named Neal
Cassady.
His first novel, The Town and the City, an account
of his youth in Lowell and New York City, appeared in
1950, and was well received. But it was not until the pub-
lication of On the Road that he became the rebel/cult
hero who epitomized the style of living and writing asso-
ciated with the Beat movement. Narrated by Sal
Paradise (Kerouac), On the Road is a picaresque chroni-
cle of hitchhiking trips across America with Dean
Moriarty (Neal Cassady), Carlo Marx (Ginsberg), and
others. The novel was originally written as one para-
graph on a long roll of paper. Only after six years of revi-
sion and rejection did it find a publisher, but when On the
Road finally appeared, Kerouac’s place as one of the
best-known and most controversial writers of his time

was secured. With his coffesional approach, long stream-
of-consciousness sentences and page-long paragraphs,
he revolutionized American prose.
During the period before On the Road came out,
Kerouac criss-crossed the country, following Ginsberg
and Cassady to California, where he befriended the Zen
poet Gary Snyder, and embraced Buddhism. But the
phenomenal success of On the Road made Kerouac an
icon. In the long run he did not thrive in the spotlight and
literary critics, dismayed by the “Beatnik fad,” refused to
take Kerouac seriously as a writer.
Publication of his many other books followed, among
them the novels The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans,
and Big Sur, as well a several volumes of poetry and
other writings. Kerouac considered all of his "true story
novels" to be parts of one vast book, the story of his life-
time. The Duluoz Legend consists, in chronological
order, of Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, Maggy Cassidy,
Vanity of Duluoz, On the Road, Vision of Cody, The
Subterraneans, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, Desolation
Angels, The Dharma Bums, Book of Dreams, Big Sur, and
Satori in Paris.
Kerouac’s fictional alter ego, Jack Duluoz, is an
alienated, restless, passionate seeker of dharma (the Zen
concept of "truth") through new experiences, human
adventuring – and drugs, sex, and music along the way.
Toward the end of his life Kerouac, suffering from
his celebrity status and relentless critical beating, drank
heavily. In 1961 he tried to break his drinking habit and

reconnect with his creative spirit by attempting a solitary
retreat in a mid-coastal California cabin, a painful effort
chronicaled in Big Sur.
Kerouac married Stella Sampas, a childhood
friend with whom he had stayed in touch over the years.
Kerouac, Stella, and Jack’s mother Gabrielle lived
together until Jack’s death at the age of 47 in St.
Petersburg, Florida, in 1969.

Autobiography
KEROUAC’S INTRODUCTION TO
Lonesome Traveler

NAME Jack Kerouac
NATIONALITY Franco-American
PLACE OF BIRTH Lowell, Massachusetts
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1922
EDUCATION (schools attended, special courses of study,

degrees and years)
Lowell (Mass.) High School; Horace Mann School for Boys;

Columbia College (1940-42); New School for Social Research
(1948-49). Liberal arts, no degrees (1936-1949). Got an A from
Mark Van Doren in English at Columbia (Shakespeare course).
–Flunked chemistry at Columbia.–Had a 92 average at Horace
Mann School (1939-40). Played football on varsities. Also track,
baseball, chess teams….
SUMMARY OF PRINCIPAL OCCCUPATIONS

AND/OR JOBS
Everything: Let’s elucidate: scullion on ships, gas station
attendant, deckhand on ships, newspaper sportswriter
(Lowell Sun), railroad brakeman, script synopsizer for 20th
Century Fox in N.Y., soda jerk, railroad yardclerk, also rail-
road baggagehandler, cottonpicker, assistant furniture
mover, sheet metal apprentice on the Pentagon in 1942, for-
est service fire lookout 1956, construction laborer (1941).
INTERESTS
HOBBIES I invented my own baseball game, on cards,

extremely complicated, and am in the process of playing a
whole 154-game season among eight clubs, with all the
works, batting averages, E.R.A. averages, etc.

SPORTS Played all of them except tennis and lacrosse and skull.
SPECIAL Girls
PLEASE GIVE A BRIEF RESUME OF YOUR LIFE

Had beautiful childhood, my father a printer in Lowell, Mass.,
roamed fields and riverbanks day and night, wrote little nov-
els in my room, first novel written at age 11, also kept exten-
sive diaries and "newspapers" covering my own-invented
horse-racing and baseball and football worlds (as recorded in
novel Doctor Sax).—Had good early education from Jesuit
brothers at St. Joseph's Parochial School in Lowell making me
jump sixth grade in public school later on; as child traveled to
Montreal, Quebec, with family; was given a horse at age 11 by
mayor of Lawrence (Mass.), Billy White, gave rides to all kids
in neighborhood; horse ran away. Took long walks under old
trees of New England at night with my mother and aunt.
Listened to their gossip attentively. Decided to become a
writer at age 17 under influence of Sebastian Sampas, local
young poet who later died on Anzio beach head; read the life
of Jack London at age 18 and decided to also be an adventur-
er, a lonesome traveler; early literary influences Saroyan and
Hemingway; later Wolfe (after I had broken leg in Freshman
football at Columbia read Tom [Thomas] Wolfe and roamed
his New York on crutches). —Influenced by older brother
Gerard Kerouac who died at age 9 in 1925 when I was 4, was
great painter and drawer in childhood (he was)—(also said to
be a saint by the nuns)—(recorded in novel Visions of
Gerard).—My father was completely honest man full of gai-
ety; soured in last years over Roosevelt and World War II and
died of cancer of the spleen. —Mother still living, I live with
her a kind of monastic life that has enabled me to write as
much as I did.—But also wrote on the road, as hobo, railroad-
er, Mexican exile, Europe travel…One sister, Caroline, now
married to Paul E. Blake Jr. of Henderson N.C., a government

antimissile technician—she has one son, Paul Jr., my nephew,
who calls me Uncle Jack and loves me.—My mother’s name
Gabrielle, learned all about natural story-telling from her
long stories about Montreal and New Hampshire.—My peo-
ple go back to Breton France, first North American ancestor
Baron Alexandre Louis Lebris de Kerouac of Cornwall,
Brittany, 1750 or so, was granted land along the Riviere du
Loup after victory of Wolfe over Montcalm; his descendents
married Indians (Mohawk and Caughnawaga) and became
potato farmers; first United States descendant my grandfather
Jean-Baptiste Kerouac, carpenter, Nashua N.H.—My father’s
mother a Bernier related to explorer Bernier—all Bretons on
father’s side—My mother has a Norman name, L’Evesque.—
First formal novel The Town and the City written in
tradition of long work and revision, from 1946 to 1948, three
years, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950.—Then discov-
ered "spontaneous" prose and wrote, say, The Subterraneans
in 3 nights—wrote On the Road in 3 weeks—
Read and studied alone all my life.—Set a record at
Columbia College cutting classes in order to stay in dormito-
ry room to write a daily play and read, say, Louis Ferdinand
Celine, instead of "classics" of the course.—
Had own mind.—Am known as "madman bum and
angel" with "naked endless head" of "prose."—Also a verse
poet, Mexico City Blues (Grove, 1959).—Always considered
writing my duty on earth. Also the preachment of universal
kindness, which hysterical critics have failed to notice
beneath frenetic activity of my true-story novels about the
"beat" generation.—Am actually not "beat" but strange soli-
tary crazy Catholic mystic…
Final plans: hermitage in the woods, quiet writing of
old age, mellow hopes of Paradise (which comes to every-
body anyway)…. © Jack Kerouac, 1960

Jack Kerouac
Timeline
(click on dates for text)
1922 1923 1926 1933 1938 1939

1939- 1940- 1942- 1944 1945 1946
1940 1941 1943

Jack Kerouac
Timeline
1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952

1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958

Jack Kerouac
Timeline
1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964

1965 1966 1967 1968 1969

Books by
Jack Kerouac
(click on titles to purchase)
The Town and the City
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
Some of the Dharma
Old Angel Midnight
Good Blonde and Others
Pull My Daisy
Trip Trap*
Pic*
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Selected Letters: 1940-1956
Selected Letters: 1957-1969
Atop an Underwood: Early Stories
and Other Writings
Poetry
Mexico City Blues

Scattered Poems
Poms All Sizes
Heaven and Other Poems
Book of Blues
The Duluoz Legend
Visions of Gerard
Doctor Sax
Maggie Cassidy
Vanity of Duluoz
On the Road
Visions of Cody
The Subterraneans
Tristessa
Lonesome Traveler
Desolation Angels
The Dharma Bums
Book of Dreams
Big Sur
Satori in Paris
* currently not available online.

The Beat Movement

In the 1950s, a group of writers and artists began to
respond to a growing sense of alienation and psychic
emptiness in postwar America. They felt the culture was
restrictive, hypocritical, repressed, and they were espe-
cially appalled by the virulent racism that continued to
poison the soul of the country. Their general idea was to
open things up. They derived their energy from an
expansive belief in the American traditions of freedom
and adventure, of infinite invention and possibility. They
found spiritual renewal through a connection with sub-
merged black culture. They sought to break free from
the Puritan denial of sex and presaged the "sexual rev-
olution" by freely expressing desire and openly extolling
pleasure. Their message to a generation that felt boxed-
in, shut-down, and spiritually lost: Get out onto the open
road and rediscover your lost American freedom.
The phrase "beat generation" came out of a spe-
cific conversation between Jack Kerouac and John
Clellon Holmes in 1948 in which Kerouac distinguished
his generation from the glamorous Lost Generation.
Kerouac most likely picked up the word "beat" from his
friend Herbert Huncke, who was familiar with the street
lingo of the time. "Beat" connoted broke, homeless,
exhausted, emptied out. But Kerouac also used the word
to imply "beatific." Holmes wrote an article for The New
York Times Magazine in 1952 which was headlined,
"This Is the Beat Generation," and when Kerouac later
published an excerpt from On the Road called "Jazz of
the Beat Generation," the term took hold.
The main figures in the movement were situated

in New York and California. New York writers associated
with the Beats include Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady,
Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Huncke, LeRoi
Jones, Diane DiPrima, and William Burroughs; in San
Francisco were Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley and
Michael McClure. A number of these writers (including
Kerouac, Whalen, Snyder, and Ginsberg) became
involved in meditation and Buddhism. City Lights
Books, established in San Francisco by Ferlinghetti, was
a key factor, both as bookshop and publisher, in making
the work of the Beats known. The quintessential texts of
the movement are Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s On the
Road, and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
But the Beat Movement was more than the output
of these poets and writers. The Beat sensibility was
shared by painters (Larry Rivers), filmmakers and pho-
tographers (Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie), musicians
(David Amram), and others who considered themselves
connected to the long tradition of bohemianism in
America.
As is often the case with counter-cultural, anti-
establishment, outsider movements, the mainstream
culture eventually found ways to categorize, caricature,
de-value, and ultimately co-opt the Beats. They were
depicted in the media as crazy beret-wearing and bongo-
beating weirdos, conspiratorial commies, amoral homos,
filthy drug-addicted hipsters, or just no-talent losers and
hangers-on. The media frenzy actually turned the Beat
Movement into a fad, and inevitably the established lit-

erary and art-criticism world did not take the work seri-
ously.
Over time, however, the works generated by the
Beats have emerged as lasting, valuable contributions to
the culture, and the ideas informing those works have
endured. In an article published in 1982, Ginsberg char-
acterized some of the effects of the Beat ethos in these
terms:
Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation,"

i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women’s libera-
tion, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.
Liberation of the word from censorship.
Demystificaiton and/or decriminalization of some laws

against marijuana and other drugs.
The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as

a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan,
and other popular musicians influenced in the late fifties
and sixties by Beat generation poets’ and writers’ works.
The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized

early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure’s notion of
a "Fresh Planet."
Opposition to the military-industrial machine civiliza-
tion, as emphasized in the writings of Burroughs,
Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.

Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "sec-
ond religiousness" developing within an advanced civi-
lization.
Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state

regimentation.
Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures,

as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the
Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing."
The Beats are now generally regarded as the ven-

erable upholders of a great American tradition that orig-
inated with Thoreau and Whitman. Their attitude, style,
and approach to life first resonated in the youth of the
postwar period. But their spirit and their ideas -- paci-
fism, reverence for nature and naturalness, conscious-
ness-enhancement/expansion, faith in the divinity of the
self – and the art they created will continue to influence
and inspire young people of all generations.

The World of
Jack Kerouac
There are dozens of websites about
Jack Kerouac and/or the Beat
Movement. Most of these sites offer
links to related sites. These are some
of the best sites.
SITES:
Literary Kicks
Beat Poetry
Jack Kerouac Page
The Kerouac Connection
Kerouac Speaks
The Beat Page
Jack Kerouac’s San Francisco Blue
Neon Alley
DHARMA beat
Beat Cafe
DISCUSSION GROUPS:
Subterraneans
alt.books.beatgeneration

Selected Bibliography
of Books About
Jack Kerouac
Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters:
Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack A Young Woman’s Coming of Age in
Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac. New
Press, 1998. York: Penguin, 1999.
Cassady, Carolyn. Heart Beat: My Johnson, Joyce and Jack

Life with Jack and Neal. Berkeley: Kerouac. Door Wide Open: A
Creative Arts Book Company, 1976.* Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-
1958. New York: Viking Press,
Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: My 2000.
Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and
Ginsberg. New York: Penguin, Jones, James T. Jack Kerouac’s
1991. Duluoz Legend: The Mythic
Form of an Autobiographical
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Fiction. Southern Illinois Press,
Biography. San Francisco: 1999.
Straight Arrow, 1973.*
Kazin, Alfred. Contemporaries.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Boston: Little Brown, 1962.*
Biography. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1994. McDarrah, Fred. Kerouac and
Friends: A Beat Generation
Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac. New Album. New York: Morrow,
York: Paragon House, 1984. 1984.*
Giamo, Ben. Kerouac, the Word and McNally, Dennis. Desolation

the Way. Southern Illinois University Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beats
Press, 2000. and America. New York:
Random House, 1979.*
Gifford, Barry and Lawrence Lee.
Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac King
Jack Kerouac. New York: St. of the Beats: A Portrait. New
Martin’s Press, 1978. York: Henry Holt, 1998.
Jarvis, Charles E. Visions of Sandison, David and Carolyn

Kerouac. Lowell, MA: Ithaca Press, Cassady. Jack Kerouac: An
1974.* Illustrated Biography. Chicago:
Chicago Review Press, 1999.
* currently not available online.

Selected Bibliography
of Books About
the Beats
Ash, Mel. Beat Spirit: The Way of McClure, Michael. Scratching
the Beat Writers as Living the Beat Surface. North Point,
Experience. New York: Putnam, 1992.*
1997.
McDarrah, Fred and Gloria.
Carr, R. B. Case and F. Dellar. The The Beat Generation: Glory
Hip: Hipsters, Jazz and the Beat Days in Greenwich Village.
Generation. Faber and Faber, Schirmer Books, 1996.*
1986.*
Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel:
Charters, Anne, editor. The Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso
Portable Beat Reader. New York: in Paris, 1958-1963. New York:
Viking Press, 1992. Grove Press, 2000.
Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. Morgan, Bill. The Beat

New York: Scribner, 1971.* Generation in New York: A
Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s
Duberman, Martin. Black City. San Fransisco: City
Mountain: An Exploration in Lights, 1997.
Community. New York: Dutton
Press, 1972. Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The
Life and Literature of the Beat
George-Warren, Holly, editor. The Generation. New York:
Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Beat Generation and American
Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1999. Tytell, John, photographs by
Mellon. Paradise Outlaws:
Gold, Herbert. Bohemia: Digging Remembering the Beats. New
the Roots of Cool. New York: Simon York: William Morrow, 1999.
& Schuster/Touchstone, 1994.*
Waldman, Anne, editor. The
Gruen, John, photographs by Fred Beat Book: Writings from the
McDarrah. The New Bohemia. Beat Generation. Boston;
Chicago: A Cappella, 1990.* Shambhala, 1999.
Halberstam, David. The Fifties. * currently not available online.

New York: Villard Books, 1993.
Mailer, Norman. The White Negro.
San Francisco: City Lights, 1957.

Multimedia
Elements
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Multimedia
Elements
View a segment from the documentary feature
V
about the Beats, The Source.
The Source is notable for its wealth of vital source

information, including interviews with virtually all
the key participants in the Beat Movement, and
clips of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal
Cassady, and William Burroughs, among others.
There are also performance segments featuring
Johnny Depp, John Turturro, and Dennis Hopper.
The video you will see here focuses on Jack

Kerouac right around the time he first met
Ginsberg and Burroughs – and wrote Orpheus
Emerged. CLICK HERE TO START THE VIDEO.
(This clip is from The Source, a film by Chuck

Workman, presented by Hiro Yamagata, distrib-
uted by Winstar Film and Video.) (Video streamed
through Apple’s QuickTime. You will need
QuickTime to play the video. CLICK HERE IF YOU
NEED THE QUICKTIME PLAYER.)
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CAPTIONS
Captions for pictures in text:
Cover: Jack Kerouac circa 1945, when he completed

Orpheus Emerged.
p. 5: Kerouac, mid-1940s
p. 6: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William
Burroughs at Columbia University.
p. 8: Kerouac, mid-1940s.
p. 35 Kerouac and sister, Caroline, early 1940’s.
p. 48 Kerouac’s wallet ID photo, 1960s.
p. 52 Kerouac self portrait, mid-1940’s.
p. 66: “Two Drinkers,” painting by Jack Kerouac.
p. 69: Kerouac, mid-1960s.
p. 75: “Stella by Jack,” drawing by Jack Kerouac.
p. 83: “God,” painting by Jack Kerouac.
Timeline captions:
1922: Leo and Garielle Kerouac, date unknown.

1923: (top) Leo Kerouac as a young man; (bottom) Jack
and Nin Kerouac, early 1920s.
1926: (top) Kerouac as a boy, circa 1932; (middle) Jack
with sister Nin and Boopsie the cat, circa 1930; (bot-
tom) Kerouac and friend Mike Fournier at Salisbury
Beach, 1931.
1935: (top) Claire and Sebastien Sampas, circa 1939; (bot-
tom) Jack with his dog, Beauty, mid-1930s.
1939: (top) Kerouac as a high school senior, Lowell,
Massachusetts, 1938; (bottom) Kerouac and his
mother with unidentified woman, 1930s.
1939-1940:
(top) A page from the Lowell High School yearbook,
1938; (bottom) Kerouac’s childhood friends Stella
and Sebastien Sampas, on banks of Merrimack River,

circa 1939.
1940-1941:
Kerouac with Columbia College football team.
1942-1943:
“The Blood of the Poet,” November 10, 1944. (Card
reads: “Blood-stained string used as a tourniquet for
finger, November 10, 1944.”)
1944: (top) Jack, sister Caroline, Gabrielle, and Leo Kerouac,
early 1940s; (bottom) Kerouac’s discharge from his job
as “scullion” on freighter, 1942.
1946: Jack and Caroline at Rockaway Beach, 1945.
1947: Kerouac, 1940s.
1948: (top) Kerouac’s handwritten map of his cross-country
trip, July-October, 1947; (bottom) Kerouac (third from
right) and unidentified friends, mid-1940s.
1949: One of Kerouac’s rucksacks.
1950: San Francisco Examiner review of The Dharma Bums,
Sunday, October 8, 1959.
1951: (top) “Two Drinkers,” painting by Kerouac; (bottom)
Kerouac’s paintbox.
1953: Passport, signed “John-Louis Kerouac.”
1954: Kerouac’s copy of the issue of New World Writing con-
taining “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” by “Jean-Louis.”
1955: Keoruac’s sister Caroline, nephew Paul Blake, Jr., moth-
er Gabrielle, and Kerouac in North Carolina, mid-1950s.
1959: Kerouac’s wallet ID photo, 1960s.
1962: Kerouac, early 1960s
1964: (top) Jack in 1966; (bottom) Jack, mid-1960s.
1965: Jack’s mother, 1966.
1966: Kerouac, mid-1960s.
1967: Jack and Stella, late 1960s.
1969: Kerouac with cat, late 1960s.

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Credits
GRAND DHARMA BUM HIMSELF – Jack Kerouac
GUARDIAN OF THE TRUST – John Sampas
CONSUMMATE G ENTLEMAN – Sterling Lord
KEEPER OF THE FLAME – David Stanford
MAGICIAN OF DESIGN – Roger Gorman
EBOOKSMITHS - Danielle Lee and Tim Cooper
MARKETING G URUS – Mark Jupiter and Amara Ingber
SPREADERS OF THE WORD – Scott Manning and Meryl Zegarek
TRUE B ELIEVER – Ben Schafer
All photographs and graphics courtesy of the Estate of Stella

Kerouac, John Sampas, Literary Executor, except photograph of
Kerouac with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Hal Chase, reprinted by
by permission of the Allen Ginsberg Trust.
Video clip from The Source, a film by Chuck Workman, presented

by Hiro Yamagata, distributed by Winstar Film and Video, used by
permission of Chuck Workman. The videocassette and DVD of
The Source are available from Barnes&Noble.com.

Using this LiveREAD
Okay, so now you’ve downloaded what we promise is
one of the first steps into the future of reading: a
LiveREAD. Welcome. Of course, with every first step,
there’s a bit of a learning curve, and this short primer will
help you maneuver and fully enjoy ORPHEUS
EMERGED.
We have created an experience that sets the
novella within the context in which it was written. The
digital medium allows LiveREADS to bring you an inno-
vative design, an interactive timeline, hyperlinks for
related information, a bibliography linked directly to a
bookstore, a short audio version of the story, and an
excerpt from a movie about the Beats.
It’s much more than simply text on a screen.
First off, your Adobe Glassbook Reader offers
some innovative features: bookmarks, sharpening the
text, annotations, rotating screen, among others. Please
refer to the Getting Started Guide that comes with your
Glassbook Reader (in the Library).
As for the LiveREAD, here’s how it works:
1. Click on the LiveREADS logo at the bottom of

each page, and it returns you to the Table of
Contents. Consider it your way home if you get
lost.
2. Any words that you see in orange represent a

Ulysses hyperlink to more information. Give them a
look…you may even learn a new thing or two.
We did.

3. In the novella, you’ll occasionally encounter the
phrase, "see journal entry" handwritten in the mar-
gins. This indicates text that relates to passages in
Kerouac’s journals. Clicking on "see journal entry"
will take you to the relevant portion of the journals.
4. If you see the images to the left and are connect-

ed to the Internet, LiveREADS (care of our friends at
Apple and Salon.com) will stream either an audio
A V excerpt (click A) or short clip from The Source, a
movie about the Beats.
5. In the bibliography, you’ll go directly to Barnes & Noble.com

(if you’re online) and be able to purchase the particular book
you click on.
6. On the timeline, click on the date, and the LiveREAD provides

more information about where Jack was and, more interesting-
ly, what he was doing.
7. If you have Glassbook version 2.0, please read ORPHEUS

EMERGED with the two-page spread (just click on the icon in
the Glassbook panel that indicates two-pages). The right spread
should have even number pages on the left. If, for some reason,
it’s an odd number on the left, drag your mouse to the bottom of
the page; a "Go to Page" marker will appear; drag mouse and
click on an even page.
8. Enjoy the read.
We’d also love your feedback on the LiveREADS’ experience

and your impression of ORPHEUS EMERGED.
Regards,
Neal Bascomb Scott Waxman
Co-Founders of LiveREADS
CLICK HERE --> LiveREADS ORPHEUS EMERGED 285

to return to contents
Text
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Nietzsche. German philosopher, clas-

sical scholar, and poet Frederich Nietszche
(1844-1900) is noted for his theory of the uber-
mensch (“superman”). Nietszche set himself
against the systematic philosophy of the first part
of the 19th Century, particularly that of Hegel.
He tried to go beyond the rational to the irra-
tional, human level. He rejected Christianity
because he felt it directed human thought away
from this world and into the next, thereby ren-
dering man incapable of coping with the reality
of everyday life; he said that Christianity teaches
men how to die but not how to live. He went
insane in 1889, and remained so until he died a
year later.
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Stendhal. This is the pen name of

the French novelist and critic, Marie Henri
Beyle (1783-1842). Stendhal’s fiction strongly
influenced the development of the modern
novel, bridging the realistic and romantic
schools, and including deep character studies
that pointed the way to the psychological
novel. His most celebrated work is The Red
and the Black (1830), a probing study of the
provincial romantic, Julien Sorel, and a satiric
analysis of the French social order under the
Bourbon restoration.
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Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich
Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), whose works
include Crime and Punishment, The Brothers
Karamazov, and The Possessed, is one of the
most important and influential writers of
modern literature. Along with Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky is acknowledged to be the mas-
ter of the realistic novel.
The Idiot (1868) is set in the worldly society of
St. Petersburg, and follows the life and loves of
the saintly Prince Myshkin. Dostoyevky
acknowledged that his goal with Myshkin was to
portray a truly good man – a blend of human and
Christ-like attributes.
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Ulysses. The novel by James Joyce

first published in France in 1922 and banned in
the United States until 1933 that is now recog-
nized as the greatest novel written in English
in the 20th Century. On one level, the novel
recounts the events of a typical day in the lives
of Leopold Bloom; his wife, Molly; and his son,
Stephen Dedalus. Journeys throughout the
city of Dublin are matched by inward journeys
into the consciousness of the characters. Also,
the plan of the book parallels the Odyssey, with
Bloom, Molly, and Stephen echoing Ulysses,
Penelope, and Telemachus. Bloom is engaged
in the life of the world: society, ethics, politics,
love; Stephen is the artist living the life of the
mind, seeking spiritual fulfillment; Molly is the
embodiment of the feminine, regenerative
principle.
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year later.
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Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich
Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), whose works
include Crime and Punishment, The Brothers
Karamazov, and The Possessed, is one of the
most important and influential writers of
modern literature. Along with Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky is acknowledged to be the mas-
ter of the realistic novel.
The Idiot (1868) is set in the worldly society of
St. Petersburg, and follows the life and loves of
the saintly Prince Myshkin. Dostoyevky
acknowledged that his goal with Myshkin was to
portray a truly good man – a blend of human and
Christ-like attributes.
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Text
Hyperlink
Kenneth Patchen’s Journal

of Albion Moonlight. A novel
by the American writer Kenneth Patchen
(1911-1972) who was primarily known for
his poetry – which combined elements of
humor, fantasy, social protest, and surreal-
istic imagery. He illustrated some of his
verse with his own abstract drawings. In
the early 50s, he read his poetry to a jazz
accompaniment, much in the spirit of the
Beat movement. The Journal of Albion
Moonlight attracted a cult following
among college students of the 60s.
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Faustus. A legendary character based

on a 15th Century German magician named
Georg Faust and the inspiration for many
works of literature and operas. Goethe’s Faust
(1808) was the first: a tale of an old scholar
who promises his soul to the destructive spir-
it, Mephistopheles, in exchange for infinite
wisdom – both of the realm of personal feeling
and experience, as well as the larger sphere of
history, politics, and culture. Thomas Mann
wrote a novel called Doktor Faustus (1947);
the Faust legend also inspired operas by
Berlioz, Gounod, and others.
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year later.
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Zarathustra. Frederich Nietzsche

wrote a philosophical narrative called Thus
Spake Zarathustra, in which the Persian
philosopher Zarathustra (also called
Zoroaster) spouts the doctrine of the ubermen-
sch, and other Nietzschian ideas. The word
ubermensch originally appeared in Goethe’s
Faust (see Faustus). Nietzsche used it to mean
the person who devotes himself to achieving
the universal human goal –- as opposed to the
goals unique to a given cultural context. If a
man sacrifices his life for his earthly goal, the
ubermensch ("superman") would arise from
that sacrificial self-destruction.
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Lucretius. The Roman poet (98?-55

BC) who wrote the unfinished De rerum natu-
ra (On the Nature of Things), a six-book trea-
tise intended to explain the science of the uni-
verse. The central thesis is that all things,
including man, operate according to their
own laws, and are not subject to outer, super-
natural powers, and that therefore, men need
not be enslaved by religious superstition and
fear of death. Lucretius committed suicide
before finishing the work, and Cicero pre-
pared the manuscript for publication.
Tennyson wrote a poem in 1869 called
"Lucretius" which recounts the legend that
the poet was driven to suicide after drinking a
love potion given him by his wife.
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year later.
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Oscar Wilde. As an undergradu-

ate at Oxford, the Irish-born poet, dramatist,
and novelist Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was a
disciple of Walter Pater and became the leader
of an aesthetic movement that advocated "art
for art’s sake." He was found guilty of engag-
ing in homosexuality and sentenced to two
years in prison. Wilde is best known for his
plays (Lady Windermere’s Fan, The
Importance of Being Earnest, and others), and
the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
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T. S. Eliot. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-

1965), the American-born poet, essayist, and play-
wright who lived in England from 1914 and eventu-
ally become a British subject, was a preeminent
proponent of literary modernism. Along with con-
temporaries such as Ezra Pound and James Joyce,
he experimented with new techniques and
explored subject areas ignored by the Romantics
and Victorians. His poems ("The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," "Portrait of a
Lady," "Gerontion," "The Hollow Men," and others)
reflect the post-World War I sense of dislocation,
malaise, uncertainty, emotional impoverishment,
ennui, and spiritual emptiness.
In his later life, Eliot converted to Anglicanism,
and poems such as "Ash Wednesday" reflect alter-
nating states of despair/skepticism, hope/joy. "Four
Quartets" is acknowledged as the major work of
Eliot’s late period, consisting of four long medita-
tions exploring the tension between man’s tethered
and limited existence in the material, earthly world,
and his desire to transcend and escape those limits.
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year later.
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Baudelaire. Charles Pierre

Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote only one vol-
ume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers
of Evil), yet this work established him as one
of the most important figures among the
French "symbolists" (Rimbaud, Verlaine,
Mallarme, among others). He led a famously
decadent life, and died at forty-six. One strik-
ing characteristic of his poetry is its fascina-
tion with the beauty of the perverse or morbid.
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year later.
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Brahms. German Romantic composer

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was noted for
reconciling the conflicting claims of lyricism
and classicism.
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Baudelaire. Charles Pierre

Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote only one vol-
ume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers
of Evil), yet this work established him as one
of the most important figures among the
French "symbolists" (Rimbaud, Verlaine,
Mallarme, among others). He led a famously
decadent life, and died at forty-six. One strik-
ing characteristic of his poetry is its fascina-
tion with the beauty of the perverse or morbid.
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Stravinsky. Russian composer Igor

Stravinsky (1882-1971) – like Pablo Picasso in art,
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in poetry, and James
Joyce in fiction – was a key figure in the further-
ance of the modernist sensibility. His early works
for Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet -- including "The
Firebird," and "Petruchka" – were considered rev-
olutionary. The premiere performance of "The
Rite of Spring," in 1913, was considered so shock-
ing that it provoked a riot.
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and classicism.
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Rimbaud. French symbolist poet Arthur

Rimbaud (1854-1891) wrote hallucinatory
verse that strongly influenced the surrealists
and modern poetry in general. His best-
known works are Les Illuminations (1886), Le
Bateau ivre (1871), and Une Saison en Enfir (A
Season in Hell) (1873) – a spiritual/psycholog-
ical autobiography in prose-poem form. He
broke away from a poor, religious, provincial
childhood and fled at age fifteen to Paris,
where he studied occult writings, Plato, the
kabbala, and Buddhism. He deliberately
debauched himself in order to reach a tran-
scendent world through sin and suffering. He
wrote all his published poetry before the age
of twenty.
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and classicism.
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Shostakovich. Russian composer

Dmitry Dmitryevich Shostakovich (1906-
1975) wrote popular orchestral works early in
his career, but then incurred the disapproval
of the Soviets for what was seen as Western
decadence. His Symphony No. 5 (1937)
regained official approval. His late work,
Symphony No. 13 (1962), aroused consider-
able controversy because the text (by Russian
poet Yevtushenko) described the Nazi slaugh-
ter of Jews at Babi Yar, and referred to contin-
uing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
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of twenty.
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and classicism.
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Rachmaninoff. Russian composer

and pianist Sergey Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff
(1873-1943) wrote complex, passionate, rhap-
sodic music, notably "Prelude in C-sharp
minor," and the piano concertos.
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and classicism.
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Tchelichev. Exiled from Russia

during the revolution, Pavel Tchelichev (1898-
1957) fled to Berlin and then to Paris, where
he designed sets for Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet
(see Stravinsky). He eventually settled in the
United States, and was best known for his
experimental paintings, characterized by
multiple/simultaneous perspectives and the
use of materials other than paint (sand, coffee,
etc.). He most celebrated painting, Hide and
Seek (1942), depicts a tree composed of
images of infants and children, along with
hidden spectres of old age and death.
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Joyce. Irish novelist, poet, short-story

writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is best known
for his revolutionary novel, Ulysses. His initial
collection of stories, Dubliners (1914), is set in
the beloved/despised homeland he left in
1902 at the age of twenty. His first novel, the
autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916), describes his rebellion
against his Jesuit upbringing, Catholicism,
and Irish nationalism, and the development of
his artist sensibility. He followed the sensa-
tional publication of Ulysses (1922) with the
experimental and complex Finnegans Wake
(1939), characterized by the use of a unique
language of invented words, puns, and
obscure allusions.
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Degas. French painter Edgar Degas

(1834-1917) is closely associated with the
Impressionists. Although he painted, drew,
made lithographs and etchings, and worked
in clay, he is best known for his pastel por-
trayals of ballet dancers, laundresses, and
other women subjects.
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Gide. Like his contemporary, James

Joyce, French writer Andre Gide (1869-1951)
rebelled against his religious (Protestant)
upbringing, and his reaction against the pro-
hibitions of revealed religion informed his life
and work. He gained notoriety for his open
discussion of homosexuality and promotion of
unabashed indulgence in the pleasures of the
flesh. He was preoccupied with the question
of man’s will, and agreed with Dostoyevsky
(a strong influence) that it is subject to good
and evil impulses, not related to love, hate, or
self-interest. This led to his development of
the concept of the acte gratuit ("gratuitous
act") – a seemingly inexplicable action, moti-
vated solely by a personal need to assert one’s
individuality, and thus the only human behav-
ior that reveals one’s essential character. (In
the novel, Lafcadio’s Adventures, Gide pres-
ents a murder as an acte gratuit.)
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of twenty.
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De Quincey. English essayist and crit-

ic Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was a
leading commentator on the romantic move-
ment, as was closely associated with
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other major liter-
ary figures of the era. His best known work
was an autobiographical memoir, Confessions
of an Opium Eater (1822), in which he dis-
cusses the growth and effects of his opium
habit.
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Wagner. The German composer, con-

ductor, and author Richard Wagner (1813-
1883), whose reputation is based mostly on
his operas. His most prodigious work, the
four-part cycle Der Ring des Nibelungun, took
him twenty-five years to complete. A com-
mon theme of many of his operas is the search
for an ideal woman, unconditionally devoted
to the hero, who is so pure in her devotion as
to afford him salvation. Wagner was as
famous for his grandiosity, extreme egotism,
nationalism, and controversial social and
political positions (including overt anti-
Semitism). He had a strong influence on
many writers, including Baudelaire, Mann,
Joyce, and T. S. Eliot.
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Thomas Mann. Mann (1875-1955)

wrote fiction and essays that delved into the
artistic temperament. His work is informed
by the conflict between the bourgeois world of
his family and the spiritual realm of art. This
dualism --between Geist ("spirit") and Leben
("life"); between the world of art, imagination,
and the decadent artistic personality on the
one hand and that of everyday reality, the
"straight" world of conventional society on the
other – is the driving conflict of Mann’s writ-
ings. The notion that true artists need to reject
the restrictions of "ordinary" life reflects the
influence of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and
Nietzsche.
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Burroughs. William Seward

Burroughs (1914-1997) was a student at
Columbia University when Jack Kerouac met
him there. The scion of a rich family, he
became a heroin addict and based his first
novels -- Junk (written as William Lee and
published in 1953, then reissued as Junky in
1964) and Naked Lunch (1959) -- on his drug-
related experiences. Burroughs’ writing is
characterized by biting and hilarious satire of
contemporary society, and disjointed, phan-
tasmagorical prose.
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Prometheus. The Greek god who

stole fire from heaven and gave it to man. As
a punishment, Prometheus was chained to a
mountain; an eagle ate his liver every day, but
it grew back each night. He was eventually
rescued by Heracles.
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Blake. English poet, engraver, painter,

and mystic William Blake (1757-1827) was a
visionary: he bypassed organized religion and
experienced God directly; his personal visions
formed his idiosyncratic mythology. His most
famous works are Songs of Innocence, Songs of
Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell.
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Orpheus. In Greek mythology, Orpheus

was a beloved musician, the son of the muse
Calliope and Apollo, and a follower of Dionysus
(the god of wine and fertile crops). He married
Eurydice, but she was killed by a snake while
fleeing the advances of Aristaeus. Orpheus
descended to Hades to find her. His playing of
the lyre so delighted Hades himself that Orpheus
was permitted to take Eurydice back with him,
provided that he did not look at her until they
arrived in the upper world. When they were
nearly there, however, he no longer heard her
behind him, and he looked back. Eurydice
returned to Hades. He could not get over the
loss of his love, and the women in his home of
Thrace were so outraged that they tore him to
pieces during a bacchanalian orgy. The pieces of
his body were collected by the Muses, and buried
at the foot of Mt. Olympus; but his head was car-
ried out to sea and eventually came ashore on
the island of Lesbos, where it became an oracle.
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Goethe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(1749-1832) was a poet, playwright, novelist,
and research scientist. His early works,
including the poem "Prometheus" and the
short novel The Sorrows of Young Werther,
were associated with the pre-Romantic Sturm
und Drang school. Informing these works
was the theme that man must believe not in
gods but in himself alone. Goethe is perhaps
best known for his play, Faust (Part I, 1808;
Part II, 1832).
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Yeats. The works of the Irish poet and

dramatist William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
are characterized by the three major concerns
of his life: art, Irish nationalism, and occult
studies. He was a founding member of the
Pre-Raphaelite Rhymer’s Club (pure poetry
and aesthetics), and created the influential
Abbey Theatre in Ireland. His late poetry is
considered his greatest work, including
"Byzantium," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Easter
1916," and "Leda and the Swan."
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Cocteau. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

was at the center of modernism, and at the
vanguard of nearly every experimental artistic
movement of the first half of the 20th Century,
especially Cubism and Surrealism. (He was
closely associated with Picasso and
Stravinsky.) He was an innovator in many art
forms, including ceramics, murals, compos-
ing, poetry, drama, film, and fiction. Through
all his works runs the theme of the poet-angel,
defier of destiny and guardian of the divine in
man, who risks being lost in the disorder of
the modern world. One of his theatrical pro-
ductions, Orphee (1926), was based on the
Orpheus myth; this play was the basis of a
later film written and directed by Cocteau in
1950. (Other notable films are The Blood of
the Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Les Enfants
Terrible.)
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Joyce. Irish novelist, poet, short-story

writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is best known
for his revolutionary novel, Ulysses. His initial
collection of stories, Dubliners (1914), is set in
the beloved/despised homeland he left in
1902 at the age of twenty. His first novel, the
autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916), describes his rebellion
against his Jesuit upbringing, Catholicism,
and Irish nationalism, and the development of
his artist sensibility. He followed the sensa-
tional publication of Ulysses (1922) with the
experimental and complex Finnegans Wake
(1939), characterized by the use of a unique
language of invented words, puns, and
obscure allusions.
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year later.
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Dos Passos. The American writer

John Dos Passos (1896-1970), along with
Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings,
went to Europe during World War I to serve in
the Ambulance Corps. This experience went
into his first successful novel, Three Soldiers.
His next important novel, Manhattan Transfer
(1925), asserted the role of the artist as social
critic, and utilized experimental devices like
"newsreel," stream of consciousness, and cin-
ematic techniques. His next three novels --
The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money –
were published together as U.S.A. (1937).
This trilogy is noted for its use of "camera
eye," newsreel sequences, free association,
and other innovative techniques. U.S.A. is
considered Dos Passos’ masterwork: a vast
portrait of American life, with the nation itself
as protagonist.
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Henry James. American novelist,

short-story writer, and critic Henry James
(1843-1916) was a major contributor to the
great tradition of the novel, and a master
craftsman of prose. He brought his finely
honed intelligence and perception to bear in
the development of his main themes: the rela-
tionship between innocence and experience
(as exemplified by the contrasts between the
uncultured but vibrant Americans and the
cultivated but played-out Europeans; the
dilemma of the artist in an alien society; and
the difficult but crucial journey to self-knowl-
edge. His artistic output was prodigious,
including most notably the novels The Portrait
of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of
the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden
Bowl.
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Saroyan. Born in California of

Armenian parents, William Saroyan (1908-
1981) wrote short stories, novels and plays
about the spiritual rootlessness of the immi-
grant. His tales exalt personal emotion and
freedom, and put forth kindness and brother-
ly love as human ideals. He won early renown
with his story collection, The Daring Young
Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), and his
play, The Time of Your Life (1939) won the
Pulitzer Prize.
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of twenty.
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year later.
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Wolfe. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was a

novelist from North Carolina whose autobio-
graphical works – Look Homeward, Angel, Of
Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, and
You Can’t Go Home Again – are characterized
by intense individualism, exuberance of spirit,
extravagant rhetoric, and the mystical cele-
bration of youth, sex, and America. His four
novels – powerful, lyrical, informed with an
intense longing for some kind of faith – com-
prise an American epic.
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Gide. Like his contemporary, James

Joyce, French writer Andre Gide (1869-1951)
rebelled against his religious (Protestant)
upbringing, and his reaction against the pro-
hibitions of revealed religion informed his life
and work. He gained notoriety for his open
discussion of homosexuality and promotion of
unabashed indulgence in the pleasures of the
flesh. He was preoccupied with the question
of man’s will, and agreed with Dostoyevsky
(a strong influence) that it is subject to good
and evil impulses, not related to love, hate, or
self-interest. This led to his development of
the concept of the acte gratuit ("gratuitous
act") – a seemingly inexplicable action, moti-
vated solely by a personal need to assert one’s
individuality, and thus the only human behav-
ior that reveals one’s essential character. (In
the novel, Lafcadio’s Adventures, Gide pres-
ents a murder as an acte gratuit.)
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Blake. English poet, engraver, painter,

and mystic William Blake (1757-1827) was a
visionary: he bypassed organized religion and
experienced God directly; his personal visions
formed his idiosyncratic mythology. His most
famous works are Songs of Innocence, Songs of
Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell.
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Spengler. German historian

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) is best known
for his philosophical work, The Decline of the
West, in which he maintained that history pro-
gresses in natural phases, and each culture
grows, matures, and decays. He predicted
that Western culture, post World War I, was in
its final stage.
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Burroughs. William Seward

Burroughs (1914-1997) was a student at
Columbia University when Jack Kerouac met
him there. The scion of a rich family, he
became a heroin addict and based his first
novels -- Junk (written as William Lee and
published in 1953, then reissued as Junky in
1964) and Naked Lunch (1959) -- on his drug-
related experiences. Burroughs’ writing is
characterized by biting and hilarious satire of
contemporary society, and disjointed, phan-
tasmagorical prose.
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Jan. 1944
We are all too sensitive to go on: it is too
cold, and our bodies are too exhausted.
There is too much life around. The multi-
tude is feverish and ill. There is war where
men sleep on the snow, and when we
waken from sleep we do not desire to go
on. I hiccup very violently, twice. This is
an age that has created sick men, all weak-
lings like me. What we need is a journey
to new lands. I shall embark soon on one
of these. I shall sleep on the grass and
eat fruit for breakfast. Perhaps when I
return, I shall be well again.
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Journal
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Brief notes on “The Half Jest”
(Orpheus Emerged)
Michael – the genius of imagination and art, 22
Paul – the genius of life and love, 22
Maureen – Michael’s mistress, 32 years old
Claude [Arthur] – Michael’s friend, a student,
20
Leo – a student, 18
Anthony – Paul’s friend, a drunkard and artist,
38
“Toni” – Claude’s [Arthur’s] girl, 21
Jules – a strange student, 17
Marie – Dmitri’s [Anthony’s] beautiful wife, 27
“Barbara” – Maureen’s friend, 25
“Robert”– a psychopath, 26
Helen – the beloved of Marcel Opheus, 21
Marcel Orpheus, who is never seen, 22
Setting – A large city called West, in the land of

Promethea – or vice versa.
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Journal
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Symbolized Idea – M. trying to transcend
human emotions to those of God – emotions of
creation, or of Eternity, etc. Thus he abandons
his human self, Paul, and strikes off for the High
Regions. But there he finds himself lost, lonely,
and out of his element: his species-self, biologi-
cally speaking, holds him back. A fish trying to
live out of water, on air alone, M. finds that his
life exists unquestionably on human terms: he
cannot be God, or be like him, because he is
human. This makes him see that the highest
state he can attain is that of the "Lyre of God,"
and in a contemporaneous sense, that of God’s
representative to man. "A high meeting…" As
Orpheus, the artist-man, rather than merely
man, or merely Prometheus (the artist), he
achieves his great goal of wholeness. This is a
"new vision" – possible only after the cold windy
darknesses of the High Regions have been
explored. The "Impulse of God" poem key to
M.’s whole success – but he transcends, yet
maintains, this success to that of wholeness plus
vision.
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vision.
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vision.
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March, 1945 – Seeing a lot of Burroughs. He
is responsible for the education of Lucien, whom
I had found, in lieu of his anarchy (rather than in
spite of it), an extremely important person. "I
lean with fearful attraction over the depths of
each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that
lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and
morality" – and – "The bastard alone has the
right to be natural." (Gide) These lines elicit a
picture of the Burroughs thought. However, the
psychoanalytical probing has upset me prodi-
giously.
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Journal
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March, 1945 – Seeing a lot of Burroughs. He
is responsible for the education of Lucien, whom
I had found, in lieu of his anarchy (rather than in
spite of it), an extremely important person. "I
lean with fearful attraction over the depths of
each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that
lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and
morality" – and – "The bastard alone has the
right to be natural." (Gide) These lines elicit a
picture of the Burroughs thought. However, the
psychoanalytical probing has upset me prodi-
giously.
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Timeline
Hyperlink
1922 . Jean-Louis Lebris de

Kerouac born 5 P.M. March 12 in Lowell,
Massachusetts, third child of Gabrielle and
Leo Kerouac, French-Canadian emigrants
to New England; brother of Caroline and
Gerard; family lives at 9 Lupine Road.
Backward Back to Forward

in Time Timeline in Time
LiveREADS LINK 1
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1923 . Father opens print shop

business, Spotlight Print.

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1926 . Brother
from rheumatic fever.
Gerard dies

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1933 . Skips 6th grade and

enters 7th grade at Bartlett Junior High;
becomes friends with Sebastian Sampas;
writes first short story.

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1938 . Excels in football

and baseball at Lowell High School;
flood destroys father’s printshop.

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1939 .
Graduates from Lowell High School.

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1939-1940
Attends Horace Mann Preparatory School
.
in New York City; short stories, "The
Brothers" and "Une Veille de Noel" pub-
lished in Horace Mann Quarterly; hears
jazz at Harlem clubs; smokes marijuana
for the first time; loses his virginity with a
Manhattan prostitute.

LiveREADS LINK 7
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1940-1941
Attends Columbia College on a scholar-
.
ship; breaks leg in November during a
game; reads Thomas Wolfe novels and
James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man.

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Hyperlink
1942-1943.
Serves in Merchant Marine and sails to
Greenland aboard the Dorchester; joins
Navy in February and is discharged on psy-
chiatric grounds in September; sails to
Liverpool on George Weems; returns to
New York and hangs out at Joan Vollmer’s
apartment at 421 W. 118th St.; meets
Lucien Carr.

LiveREADS LINK 9
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Hyperlink
1944 . Meets William

Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; Carr kills
acquaintance David Kammerer, Kerouac is
arrested for helping Carr dispose of mur-
der weapon; marries Edie Parker to raise
bail money; Parker and Vollmer move into
apartment at 419 W. 115th St., where
Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs also
stay; Herbert Huncke visits often.

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1945 . Completes novella,

Orpheus Emerged, co-writes novella, And
the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, with
Burroughs; hospitalized for throm-
bophlebitis.

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1946 . Father dies of cancer

of the spleen; begins The Town and the
City; meets Neal Cassady in December;
marriage to Edie Parker annulled.

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1947 . Takes bus to Denver,

meets up with Cassady and Carolyn
Robinson (whom Cassady later marries),
hitchhikes to West Coast; returns to New
York in October.

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1948 . Meets John Clellon

Holmes and invents the term "beat gener-
ation"; completes early version of On the
Road based on his 1947 travels.

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1949 . Leaves New York in

January with Cassady, Cassady’s wife
Luanne Henderson, and friend Al Hickle
on second cross-country trip; takes bus
from San Francisco to sister’s home in
North Carolina; The Town and the City sold
to Harcourt Brace for $1,000 advance;
moves to Denver.

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1950 . The Town and the City

published; drives to Mexico with Cassady,
and visits with Bill and Joan Burroughs;
hitchhikes to New York; marries second
wife, Joan Haverty.

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Hyperlink
1951 . Lives with Joan at

454 W. 20th St.; reads manuscripts of
Burroughs’ Junkie and Holmes’ Go in
January-March; in April writes roll manu-
script of On the Road in three weeks in
New York City; Joan orders him out of
apartment in May; in October discovers his
compositional method of "sketching" or
"spontaneous prose" and begins to rewrite
On the Road as the experimental book
Visions of Cody; arrives at San Francisco
home of Neal and Carolyn Cassady in
December; gets $250 advance for On the
Road from Ace Books.

LiveREADS LINK 17
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1952 . Writes Doctor Sax in

Mexico City; works as a student brakeman
and writes "The Railroad Earth" in San
Francisco; daughter, Jan Kerouac, born in
Albany, New York, to Joan Haverty.

LiveREADS LINK 18
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1953 . Writes Maggie Cassidy

and The Subterraneans in New York; works for
Southern Pacific railroad out of San Jose; signs
up as a waiter on the William Carruth bound for
Korea but quits in New Orleans; back in New
York, meets and has love affair with "Mardou
Fox".

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1954 . Begins study

Buddhism in New York and California;
of
writes San Francisco Blues in San

Francisco, Some of the Dharma in New
York and North Carolina; Sterling Lord
becomes his literary agent; arrested for
non-support of his daughter, Jan.

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1955 . Hitchhikes to Mexico

City, falls in love with Esperanza
Villanueva, an Indian prostitute addicted to
drugs; writes Mexico City Blues, begins
Tristessa in Mexico City; travels to San
Francisco to see Ginsberg, meets Kenneth
Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary
Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure;
attends "6 Poets at the 6 Gallery" reading in
San Francisco; returns to North Carolina.

LiveREADS LINK 21
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1956 . Writes Visions of

Gerard in North Carolina; hitchhikes to
California, shares cabin with Snyder in
Marin County; writes Scripture of the
Golden Eternity; meets Alan Watts and
Robert Creeley; works as a firewatcher in
Washington State; returns to Mexico City
and writes first part of Desolation Angels
and completes Tristessa; returns to New
York with Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky;
meets Salvador Dali.

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1957 . Signs book contract

with Viking Press for On the Road; begins
romance with Joyce Glassman; meets
William Carlos Williams; visits Burroughs
in Tangier, travels in Europe; moves with
mother to Berkeley, California, then back
to Orlando, Florida; On the Road published
on September 5th; writes The Dharma
Bums in Florida.

LiveREADS LINK 23
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1958 . The Subterraneans

published by Grove Press; buys house in
Northport, Long Island, and moves mother
there from Florida; starts Memory Babe;
breaks up with Joyce Glassman and begins
affair with Dody Muller.

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Hyperlink
1959 . Narrates film Pull

My Daisy in New York; meets Anais Nin;
Truman Capote, on the David Susskind
television show, refers to Kerouac’s writ-
ing as "typewriting"; drinking heavily;
Doctor Sax published by Grove; sells
Northport home and returns with mother
to Orlando; Maggie Cassidy published as a
paperback original by Avon; breaks off
with Muller and begins relationship with
Lois Sorrell; television sit-com Dobie
Gillis features "beatnik" character,
Maynard G. Krebs; moves mother back to
Northport yet again; appears on the Steve
Allen Show in Hollywood and has dinner
with Mamie Van Doren after the show;
attends screening of Pull My Daisy in San
Francisco; Mexico City Blues published by
Grove; drives back to New York with Lew
Welch and Albert Saijo.
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1960 . Falls while drunk

and injures elbow and head on two occa-
sions; experiences first bouts of delirium
tremens; Avon published Tristessa and
movie version of The Subterraneans is
released; LeRoi Jones’ Totem Press pub-
lishes Scripture of the Golden Eternity and
New Directions issues a limited edition of
Visions of Cody; takes train to San
Francisco and visits with Ferlinghetti and
Cassady; suffers a breakdown in
September; returns to Northport to live
with mother; Lonesome Traveler published
by McGraw-Hill, and Book of Dreams pub-
lished by City Lights.

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1961 . With Allen Ginsberg,

takes psilocybin provided by Timothy
Leary; moves with mother to Florida yet
again; finishes Book of Dreams; flies to
Mexico City and writes second half of
Desolation Angels; returns to Florida and
writes Big Sur in ten nights; heavy drinking
and partying with Lucien Carr and friends
in New York and brief affair with teenager
named Yseult; back to Florida.

LiveREADS LINK 27
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1962 . Goes on a "30-day

drunk" during visit to New York; frequent
trips back and forth from Florida to New
York, Maine, Cape Cod, Connecticut,
Lowell; Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy pub-
lishes Big Sur; moves with mother by train
back to Northport again.

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1963 . Drinks and plays

pool at Gunther’s Bar in Northport;
Cassady comes to visit; Visions of Gerard
released by Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy.

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1964 . Gives reading at

Harvard University; Cassady drives
Kerouac to New York City to meet "Merry
Pranksters" at a party on Park Avenue;
writes Vanity of Duluoz; in an interview,
claims he supports Barry Goldwater for
president; sells Northport house and
moves with mother to St. Petersburg,
Florida, where he is arrested for urinating
in public.

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1965 .Breaks off with Gins-

berg because he is offended by Ginsberg’s
political activity; Coward-McCann publish-
es Desolation Angels; visits Paris and writes
Satori in Paris in one week after returning
to Florida; hangs out at Wild Board Tavern
in Tampa; drives to Connecticut to visit
John Clellon Holmes and to Lowell to see
Tony and Stella Sampas and other Lowell
friends.

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1966 . Sells St. Petersburg

house and moves with his mother to
Hyannis on Cape Cod; Grove publishes
Satori in Paris; mother suffers stroke; trav-
els to Italy to promote Italian edition of Big
Sur; marries Stella Sampas in Hyannis; is
arrested twice in December for public
drunkenness.

LiveREADS LINK 32
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1967 . Moves with Stella

and mother back to Lowell; drinks at
Nicky’s Bar, owned by brother-in-law
Nicky Sampas; attends Expo ’67 in
Montreal; daughter Jan visits in Lowell.

LiveREADS LINK 33
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1968 . Neal Cassady

dies; Vanity of Duluoz is published;
travels to Europe with Tony and Nick
Sampas; spends a night in jail for car-
rying an open bottle of beer on the
street; appears on The Firing Line with
William F. Buckley; reunites with
Burroughs and Carr in New York;
drives to new home in St. Petersburg
with his wife Stella and his mother;
takes large doses of LSD at friend Cliff
Anderson’s cabin in the woods.

LiveREADS LINK 34
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Hyperlink
1969. Gets beaten up in

the Cactus Bar in St. Petersburg; on
October 21, Jack Kerouac dies from hem-
orrhaging at St. Anthony’s Hospital in St.
Petersburg.

LiveREADS LINK 35

Jack Kerouac - Orpheus Emerged

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Jack Kerouac - Orpheus Emerged

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You have successfully downloaded ORPHEUS EMERGED and now own

2. The design of ORPHEUS EMERGED is best viewed in a two-page spread.

3. If you'd like to send an excerpt of this LiveREAD to a friend, go to the

And the beat goes on,

Copyright © the Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas,

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

Every effort has been made to secure rights to textual and

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© Allen Ginsberg Trust

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The allegorical novella Orpheus Emerged, published for the

Kerouac wrote the novella shortly after meeting Allen

Set in and around an urban university, Orpheus Emerged

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Michael followed her into the bedroom.

Jack’s journals provide an interesting reference to

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