OPUS 21 Read online

  Unfortunately, half of that would be turned over to the government, as income tax. Most of the balance was ear-marked for furniture which Ricky now might or might not buy. I thought about the tax . . .

  Business is the lone God of our Congress. Let a man open a pie factory or begin to mold cement blocks and he becomes Privileged. His property is taxed as a sacred, eternal entity. His costs are deductible. Only the profit he pockets is thought of by our Congress as income; his every barrel of flour or bag of cement is capital. But let a man create books or serials in his head and Congress sees him as a social inferior, a mere wage earner.

  The accumulation of intellectual property for a book may require three-quarters of a life. Its sale, for a year or two, may be considerable. After that one book--or after two or three--an author may return to pittances. What he has written may become the mental and emotional capital of his countrymen, or of the world, for generations. Yet Congress does not deem it equal to pies or bricks and sometimes skims away in a year the whole capital of an author--as if it were but annual income. America bounteously provides for the makers of bricks and pies; it short-changes book-makers and the winners of Nobel Prizes.

  Indeed, such is the unconscious hostility of the mob toward the fruits of intelligence that, not long ago, a group of representatives, commercial he-whores and contumelious morons, endeavored to do away with copyright altogether on the grounds that what a man thought and wrote down, or what he felt and painted, belonged free of charge to the whole people: noneconomic, since it was Art. To such men as these, only junk fabricators, gadgeteers, tram operators, pop bottlers and the like are entitled to the best profit for their contribution to life. History will note the fact when history writes how American avarice held in open contempt all culture and all thought, decerebrated itself and so died headless.

  As a man about to perish I could not but think bitterly of this. Had my labors, my work, my business, my investment of skill and thought and sweat been deemed equivalent, by my government, to the activities of a manufacturer of flea powder, I could have left the people I loved far better off.

  A relative complaint, under the circumstances and in my case. But when I thought of the "successful" writers I knew who had been taxed into poverty for their genius, and when I thought of the potbellied yuts I'd met who turned up fortunes in sewer pipes, cemetery lots and toilet paper, my sentiments toward the people and their politicians were rude . . .

  They would get along--Karen and Ricky and Ricky's mother and those who would now depend on them. My death might even accelerate the sale of my books for a while.

  There might be movie sales. Plays. Posthumous editions. Anthologies. If I had led Ricky to be careless and extravagant, she would nonetheless be capable, under necessity, of good management. The hundred-year-old house in the country would continue to fend off the winters and to doze through the summers in its great lawns. Karen would attend Swarthmore. If Ricky wished, she could work again; she was well enough now. Marry again.

  The thought jarred and I considered that sensation. Marry? Of course she would.

  She should. What is wickeder than inhibiting sentiment, than memory turned prison?

  I am not a jealous man and even my envies are of an obscure sort. The momentary shock came from the fact that, never before, had I thought of Ricky as married to another man. Romantic about another man--perhaps. (Hadn't I said, in fun and also meaning it, that if, in our seventies, she were to swear she had been faithful, I would regard it as sad?

  No man desires a wanton for a wife. But a great many men love their wives in such a fashion as to consider them people--human, curious, imaginative, subject to sensations of staleness, capable of discretion, and not intended to be--through every hour of all that is a life-belled, balled and chained, hobbled and kept like cattle. An academic point--now. We might never see those seventies--note the envisaged smiles--or hear the candlelit confidence.) She would marry again. Karen would marry. The bonds I'd bought, the real estate, the insurance I'd purchased down the years--flush or borrowing--would provide a measure of security.

  Come war? Come vast inflation? Costly sickness?

  There is no security on our planet. There is no way, by money, wills, investments, legal instruments, or other means, to carry even the smallest wish or the most minimal responsibility beyond crematory and urn. Such is the aching truth--the irony we try to avoid. No one understands it better than I--but I had done what I could to avoid it, too.

  Done it--in spite of a national tax philosophy that evaluates authorship as a meaner trade than pawnbroking.

  In all America are only five thousand of us who make our whole livelihood by writing, anyway. To Congress--a scattered, inconsequential number--vote-voiceless and therefore impotent. It is a figure--five thousand in one hundred and fifty millions--which the aspiring writer should bear in mind. And some are communists, or leftists, besides--

  which, in the miserable eyes of Congress these days, no doubt makes our whole profession suspect. Freedom is sick. Freedom is dying.

  Why not?

  Everything is sick and doomed.

  Including me--now, I thought jeeringly.

  My plate came--the toast-brown fish, the green-speckled potato, a salad I hadn't ordered, tartar sauce in a dish, and the applesauce in another.

  I pushed Congress out of my mind.

  More accurately, the girl did.

  She cleared her throat. A little sound, with faint annoyance clinging to it.

  I had been sitting there, smoking two cigarettes, oblivious to her for ten minutes.

  She must have assumed that I had chosen to sit beside her because she was attractive--

  which was true. But now, owing to the absence of sidewise glances, of self-conscious bread-buttering, of any aura of awareness, she had irritatedly cleared her throat. If I had spoken to her forthwith she would, perhaps, have made a short, polite, but discouraging reply. Since, however, I had broken off even the peripheral touching of consciousness, she coughed vexedly, exploringly.

  So I glanced at her book. I had already noticed the jacket. It was Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley. She had been reading with a slight frown. But now I saw that the jacket did not fit the book, which was thicker than Mr. Huxley's post-atomic predictions.

  The jacket, then, was camouflage--for a larger book with maroon binding. What sort of reading, I wondered, would a glamorous young woman hide behind Aldous Huxley?

  And, abruptly, I knew: the Kinsey Report.

  I leaned back and verified it.

  This amused me.

  The people of Miami Beach, where I had lived in the winter, and the people of New York, whom I had encountered in the spring, had been busy for both seasons with Dr. Kinsey's refreshing work.

  It was, at least, refreshing to me. . . .

  I am interested in psychology. For a quarter of a century I have known, by way of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, Ellis, and many others, the same facts, in comparable orders of magnitude as those which Dr. Kinsey elicited by his scientific cross-questioning of cross sections. My own experience of life, taken with the confidences of my associates, has merely confirmed what others have noted. I have published such data in my books, years before Kinsey. And all that time I have reflected with a hooting pique upon the unconquerable illusions of Americans. What I have long known to be true, and often written down, they have refused to consider as real. Until the first of the Kinsey Reports, all erotic activity except that mechanical minimum permitted by state legislatures has been regarded, even by most enlightened citizens, either as an accident carefully hidden in their own lives, or else as the perverted behavior of persons who, eventually, would land on the couches of psychiatrists--if not in prison. It is the most depraved truth about us.

  Kinsey--with the august reputation of Rockefeller money to give his findings the one sort of credibility acceptable to Americans--had accomplished what hundreds of psychologists and scores of writers like myself had been unable to do: he had convi
nced multitudes that the sexual behavior of people is mammalian in every respect. He had shown, where we had failed, that erotic activity of some sort is universal, that the earlier and more vigorously such activities are commenced, the more potent and sexually capable its practitioners become--that use, not restraint (as the "pure" have decreed), develops the nerves, capillaries and muscles of the sexual organs precisely as it does those of other organs and that what we call sins and perversions are as ubiquitous as what we call normal sex acts. He had made an ass of the law and a fool of the church and held up an odious society in such a light that its heathen taboos and wholehearted hypocrisies were at long last more visible than t he foul rags covering them.

  I had seen, that winter, numbers of men relieved (and not always bothering to hide the fact) by the realization that some homosexual experience in their past was not a blot upon their lives without precedent or parallel. And I had seen other numbers of men--

  older men--stare back at the bereavement of their youth, hating themselves for that which barbaric fear (translated as noble character) had prevented them from doing, knowing, sensing, or enjoying. Often, these had turned their irreversible disappointment into a mockery of Kinsey, thus exposing the near-vacuum in which they had endured their decades--without being aware of the exposure. Americans are not mature enough, intelligent enough, discerning or well enough educated to learn from psychology; but it is evident they are, in many cases, of an adequate spiritual development to learn from a Rockefeller-endorsed zoologist.

  It didn't matter to me where the facts came from--so long as people began to perceive they were facts--facts that made a far truer picture of man and sex than all the utterances of priests, preachers, legislators, and other sick-minded slobs put together.

  We behave sexually like other mammals--apes, horses, dogs. Centuries of suppression alter us not a jot. It is a sterling proof that instinct, not vanity-calling-itself-reason, is our guide. It is the hardest blow yet struck against the bishops. In our time, they and their sickly minions will prevail. But after us, and them, some decent men may rise in the debris and put to a proper use what we all know and nearly all deny. . . .

  She was reading the Kinsey Report.

  "What for?" I asked.

  The question startled her, although the introduction itself did not. She was obliged to feign a social surprise. Her inward gray eyes met mine and moved away. She drew part of an annoyed breath. She shut the book. She made up her mind to say, "I beg your pardon. Were you speaking to me?"

  She had a musical voice, pitched low but not husky.

  "I wondered why you were reading the Kinsey Report so avidly--and my curiosity started talking. I usually do ask people things, when I want to know. It's discourteous. But sometimes they tell me."

  That made her smile a little. "You might be asking quite a question."

  "Any question is quite a question. If I merely asked you how to get to Fifth Avenue, you would be telling me, in answering, where to take my life. I might be run over, doing it. I might get into a street fight. Or meet a blonde. If I asked you why you've been crying so much--that would be quite a question, too. If I were a woman, I might ask, simply--what you wore under what, and where you bought it. The answer to that one would describe dozens of your attitudes toward dozens of important matters."

  She didn't say anything. If she nodded, it was the smallest of her nods. She twirled her cocktail glass, sipped the last of the amber drink, and returned to her reading.

  She wanted me to know that she didn't flirt. I expressed my apperception by ordering lemon pie, which I didn't want, and coffee, which I did--and further, by leaving my table and the restaurant while my place was being cleared and my dessert brought. I went across the hot street to the newsstand and bought Time magazine--which I used to read for information and read now to keep abreast of the Biases--and the Telegram. When I carne back to the bar I found the girl had also ordered coffee--and brandy. That settled it.

  "My name," I said immediately, "is Philip Wylie. I'm a writer. The waiters will vouch for me. I live here." The strain left her eyes and they widened slightly. "I've read lots of things you've written! For heaven's sake!"

  Most Americans who get around have read lots of the things I've written. This is a great instant advantage--though often a present handicap--in picking up strangers. They are at first agreeably surprised; but they generally expect writers to "be like" the characters in their books--from God alone knows what an abysmal lack of imagination-and are therefore eventually disappointed.

  Since I said nothing, she went on, "You're the author who hates women!" There was shine in her eyes, then--challenge--amusement. Spite, too.

  "Only moms," I answered. "And not 'hate'--deplore."

  "And Cinderellas, too!"

  "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten the Cinderellas. I deplore them also."

  "Maybe I'm one."

  "A superior specimen--if true." I am semi-gallant.

  "What made you hate women so violently? Did your mother beat you? And why do you blame everything that goes wrong on women?" Two hard lines showed the muscles around her teeth. "Don't you realize that for everything you've written against women--you could say the same--and a hundred times as much--against men?"

  "Lookie," I said. "Many years ago, when I was younger and foolish, I wrote a book about a few of the more conspicuous and lethal flaws in our fair nation. The book was some three hundred and seventy pages long. I devoted all but about twenty pages to the calamitous follies of males. Men, as you call them. But I did, for some twenty pages of light blast, violate the ironclad altar of femininity and point out mom's big mouth and little brain, her puffed crop and shaky pins. A few things. I hardly thought I had loaded the dice-inasmuch as half the people are female and I gave females only about a fifteenth of my slightly caustic attention. But ever since that book came out, almost every woman I've met has accused me of outrageously laying the blame for a manifestly hell-bound society on females. In the first place, this is not true. In the second place, such statements-

  -the hundreds I've collected--tend to show that American women positively refuse to take any blame for anything whatever. They have no conscience and no sense of responsibility. They believe themselves to be as spotless as United States senators say they are, in campaign orations. They lack the capacity for admitting guilt. They are nearly all--I have thus found--psychologically far, far, far more destitute than I claimed only certain kinds of them to be."

  She laughed. "You're still mad! Someday you'll break down and write a wonderful novel about the woman who really poisoned you against them all."

  ' I'll break down," I agreed. "But I'll never write the novel! One reason is-there's no such novel. Women have always been good to me--with a few exceptions I can tolerate.

  Women have made love to me and they have been generous with me, and taught me, and they have been sensitive toward me. My daughter--who is sixteen--adores me.

  My first wife tried every combination she could think of to make me happy--and put up with me for ten years, when I was a drunkard. My second wife has gone even further.

  Past ten years--for one thing. And I quit drinking altogether, after we'd been married for a while. I--to repeat the most readily understandable expression--adore her. And I adore my daughter. I adore women, as a matter of fact. Such vexation as I--have shown represented an aspect of that reverence: a good many women are fundamentally disappointing to anybody who cares much for women. And I resent the general damage such women do.

  A man"--I looked at her as loftily as I could--"has a curious faculty for resenting human sabotage even when he is not, himself, directly involved in the matter. A woman, as a rule, sees harm in the ruinous excursion of a nitwit only if she sees it as a real or potential menace to herself, loved ones, and assigns. It is a comfortingly personal outlook toward which I am hotly antipathetic."

  "You talk like your books," she said.

  "Why not? I wrote the damned things!"

  Sh
e poured her brandy into her coffee and drank a little.

  "Men," I went on, "in this century, are deeply imbued with just that personal, feminine attitude. They refuse to meddle with evils that do not immediately threaten them. They have sold out their duty toward the whole species, for local, temporal advantages. They no longer live lives but merely cadge existences. If a guy is successful and well fixed, the ordinary American does not and cannot see that he has the reason or the right--let alone the need!--to take a dim view of anything on earth." I picked up my copy of Time magazine and waved it at her. "Whenever one of my morally indignant volumes appears, this self-righteous periodical, for instance, usually begins its reviews by saying that lawn a palatial residence in Florida, earn big money writing commendable hack stories for the magazines, fish all the time, and yet--blackguard!--I have the gall to gripe! The inference is that I am a lunatic. Indeed, it has become more than an inference.

  This carburetor of the news called my latest effort a whiff into midnight: Who is nearer the witching hour--the well-heeled gent who still sees imperfections in the planet and says so or the editor who unconsciously imagines that prosperity and criticism are incongruent? That is the Ivy League philosophy--suitable to cover the ruins it soon will bring about."

  "You're mad at Clare Luce," the girl said.

  "There you go! Personal again! See here, ma'am. A man can get as intense feelings from statistical tables as a woman can from Sinatra's brow wave. Vital statistics give them to me. I had such sensations when, after the publication of the Smythe Report, I pensively ran over the Periodic Table. Many other charts and graphs deeply affect me. I hardly know Clare Luce. I had cocktails with her once-though. Very attractive. Very-not bright-ardent. That's the important thing in women, too. We disagreed about everything we discussed. But a woman who enters the field of ideas is obliged, naturally, to follow some man or men. Women have never left any ideas around for men or women to follow.

  Clare said she follows Monseigneur Fulton Sheen--another glitteringly ardent soul. I'm not mad at Clare Luce. In my situation I find it impossible to be mad at anybody on earth.