I knelt before him. “I don’t like this any better than you do,” I said, “and I can’t get over the feeling too that it has all happened before. But what is there to do, D’Arcy: tell me, my friend, what else is there to do?” My voice broke. I could not help myself. I had really cared for him after all. It was not his fault.
The old feeling, the old admiration returned; the old courage and determination. I reached before me and put the book under my arm. “Don’t worry,” I said to him as he lay so slack, so drained, so broken on the carpet. “This is not where it all ends. There will be other times, other places, D’Arcy. We will meet again.”
I stood then, went to the door, looked at him for the last time and then on an impulse returned to pick up the scattered decanter, turned it above him and poured the last streams into his hair. It lay there redly, glistening in the black surfaces.
“There will be other times,” I said to him again and went to the door, opened the door, looked at him for the last time and stepped out into the hall, pulling the knob before me. Down the stairs, all the way, I felt terror at leaving my biographer’s commitment to once again confront the surfaces of the world, but as I came out into the air the apprehension vanished, dwindled to a slow, modest appreciation. It was really all the same. Outside, inside, it was all the same. It was a cool spring day, much as it had been in D’Arcy’s apartment. I walked through it gracefully, jauntily, eyes toward the sun, pushing the ancient frame toward that final time of resting when the biography itself could begin.
June 1968
New York, New York
Afterword:
The Man in the Glass Booth
“No true history of the 20th century can be written without an account of my friend Ernie” Schwarz-Bart opens The Last of the Just and the same could be said of Maurice Girodias and 20th century publishing. Girodias (1919-1990), the son of the first publisher of the Paris Olympia Press was caught in the French occupation, changed his surname (as brother Eric did not) and essentially waited out the occupation underground; when he returned to publishing as his father’s designated successor it was with a political program to supplement what might have been his father’s rather simpler ambition to publish pornography of compensatory literary interest in English for tourists in which pornography’s indelicate reputation made it of unusual interest to foreign seekers of the truth. Jack Kahane found Henry Miller among some other celebrants of copulation but was less interested in literary than commercial outcome.
His son, who must have exuded an air of weary, fallen aristocracy in his 20’s might have had the same goal but after the ravages of WW II and years of what must have been unending anxiety and fermenting anger was driven by ideology which he once explained to me. “Government wants to repress freedom, personality, choice, individual expression but the people instinctively resist this so Government learned that the best means of repression was to campaign against pornography. Who will openly defend pornography? So they clamp down on that which is acceptable to most of the reading class and then, having established the right to repress they go after everything else. The first thing a Government on the march wants to cancel is public expression of sex and when you have that approval you go on the march.”
Girodias then in that weary elegance of which I have written decades ago (Introduction to the New Olympia Reader ) embarked upon a weary and shuffling postwar crusade; revived his father’s Olympiad, created the Traveler’s Companion imprint and in 1955 acquired a novel which was deemed unpublishable by the 30 or 40 publishers to whom it had been offered. Girodias shrugged, paid a one thousand dollar advance to the agent who had had nowhere left to send it and found himself at the center of a scandal and controversy which utterly changed publishing and very possibly the modern sensibility. Lolita made everyone but Girodias wealthy (and respectable); he was never able to sequester the English language rights and while Putnam and Walter Minton made out comfortably on a novel essentially pirated, Maurice had nothing to console him but fame. Ultimately he was more distressed by the failure of the Parisian nightclub he had spent far too much to sustain and he fled with his usual dignity to New York City in 1967 where he presumed to begin Olympia America on a shoestring, a smile and an elegant weariness which by this time had become almost monarchial.
It is then April of 1968 which was when the first Olympia America titles were published in paperback with one faint hardcover title, Robert Turner’s Pretty Thing when Maurice’s odyssey and mine intersected, first gradually and then in tight fusion. (“Just like the sex, eh?” he might have said.) He called for manuscripts from writers who would in that cascading year of collapse willing to enlist with him in the new resistance; Vietnam was the flashpoint for an ideological, raging protest the governmental response to which confirmed his theory of literature as the central agent of resistance.
In the garden apartment at 216 West 78th Street I was certainly paying attention, if not to Maurice’s ideology but his finances. I was writing literary novels for Harry Shorten published under titles like Nympho Nurse and Instant Sex for advances less than half of Maurice’s presumed offer and furthermore Lolita was being evoked as central to his history and at least possibly, then for his program. “He wants Lolita?” I thought. “I’ve read Lolita. I’ll give him that,” and in that kind of storm of misguidance which characterized my self-administered career advice through the decades, I wrote the first twenty pages of what was first less floridly titled The Oracle and mailed them to the Gramercy Park brownstone the bedroom of which was Maurice’s first headquarters. Four or five weeks later a contract was offered. “Okay, he does want Lolita” I thought in affirmation and wrote the damned novel in two or three weeks: unreliable narrator, shifting perspective, doubling of narrator and protagonist with a big reveal implied but never quite enacted, awkward, plunging sex scenes, and of course self-service as the narrator’s central sexual expression. Mad, tilted comedy as the Oracle at a crucial instant, flogging himself in a barnyard, inadvertently touches an electrified fence. This is what Girodias addressed when he summoned me to Gramercy Park a week after the manuscript had been mailed.
“Well,” he said, in summary, “This is not your number one bestseller but it is amusing and I guess I can publish it. As a favor to you. Now I want you to do a favor for me.” He proceeded to outline Screen which he promised would be the bestselling and most scandalous novel of his time. “I know you are the man to do it.” Later I learned that he had offered the central conception to every writer who had passed to or by Gramercy Park over several months, all of whom had politely or impolitely refused. That central conception seemed actionable to me. “I will protect you, I will assume any legal expense” Maurice averred. I wrote the novel in less time than Oracle had taken. The rest of the story is in my Afterword to the reissue, kindly published by Stark House a few months ago. Screen in its subterranean way has hung around for half a century and without ever quite surfacing into the culture above ground has found a quiet readership over the years. (Gene Wilder wanted to star in a movie adaptation but the saintly producer, Sidney Glazier, could not raise the money.)
Oracle did not incur a similar fate; maybe the Nabokovian pastiche (at least in technical terms) was all wrong for the mass audience Girodias wanted; maybe the fact that every USA publisher with whom Girodias had been involved was waiting with avidity to destroy him, maybe I was not sufficiently Nabokovian; if you want to do that kind of job you’d better know, as Donald Westlake might advise, to have a getaway car and know where it is stashed.
But here it is, nonetheless. The Friday after the Wednesday on which I had delivered the novel I went out to dinner with my wife talking about it incessantly. “I have written the novel I always wanted to write, just the way I wanted to write it,” I said. I was 29 years old. “I am at peace. If I go right now, at least I have done that.” Fifty-two years later I still have done it.
August 2020: New Jersey
In My Parents’ Bedroom
by Barry N. Malzberg
For My Wife, Joyce
“. . . Me next to sleep
All that is left to Eden.”
Delmore Schwartz: GENESIS
“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
—old aphorism as quoted by
Michael Malzberg, circa 1949
ONE
The home in which I grew up has become a museum and, with a group of others, I am now on a guided tour. Exactly why I have chosen to do this and why the house itself has become a collection of artifacts is something which I do not know; perhaps some of this will come clear later, although almost everything in my more recent experience militates against my belief in easy answers. The fact is that I am tired, very tired, and hope to go to sleep at some point along the tour, possibly on the couch which I remember as having been in the living room, adjacent to the grand piano. I doubt very much that I will be missed because the other tourists are most excited about the tour and have no eyes for anything except what is before them.
I am with a girl and our hands touch lightly now and then; she is blonde and wearing a dark raincoat made of thin material which does good things for her body. I seem to have some distinct memory of this girl, of having in the recent past gone to bed with her and exchanged words of love and remorse but at this time her name escapes me as well as the exact circumstances of our meeting and our relationship. She apparently feels close to me because her face is always on mine when I turn toward her and her eyes seem to light with that sense of rising intensity which, I have been led to understand, indicates that a girl is on the make. The fact is that I know very little about women, far less than I would have dared to hope years ago, and this girl’s conduct, to say nothing of her antecedents, is a mystery to me. Nevertheless, I am moved by her—there is a real chance that I might even be “in love”—and I hope that as the tour proceeds I will learn more about her and what we have done together and what we may hope to be in the future. She seems to be about twenty-three years old with the tender, slightly naive expression of a virgin past her long-sought deflowering, and I hope, although this is unreasonable, that I have brought nothing but joy to her in the course of whatever relationship we might have known.
But there is little time to think of her now and little inclination as well, although her fingers are rather tight against my palm and seem to be full of messages. If I do not know what she is doing, then, she does and I am somewhat relieved to know that at the least she is not discontent with me. The tour guide, an old man with baggy trousers and a face wrinkled by sun into the color and dimensions of a rather forbidding plum, has led us through the doors of the house and into the large vestry which precedes the living room. There is more than enough room for us to gather around him there in a tight mass and as we do so he takes from his pocket a large notebook with paper coming unevenly from it at all angles and, opening it, begins to talk to us in a high voice, his eyes not so much on us as deeply withdrawn, caught by some intricacy of webbing in the shattered wall which lies to our rear. He seems faintly nervous and occasionally tugs at an earlobe, scratches his stomach as he talks and it occurs to me that this is probably a very cheap guided tour—the kind of thing which is put together by small men working on margin for the titillation of tourists who would not understand anything else—and that the house itself may be a very minor grade of attraction.
“This is the Westfield home,” he says, “restored to its present condition by a large grant given by the National Council on Ruins and Relics and currently supported by a series of government grants which permit it to be open to viewing five days a week as well as on holidays. The Westfields, of course, were a family of moderate circumstances living in New York in the middle of the twentieth century, whose tasks and deeds have long since elevated them to genuine significance in the historical survey. The home itself is an excellent example of the architecture of its time and, indeed, contains many points of interest to say nothing of the complete furniture collection and that of objets d’art which are considered to be very fine examples of their type. All in all the home can be considered to be one of the most interesting exhibits available on the life of its time and I think that you will enjoy our walk through it this morning. Refreshments will be available in the kitchen after the tour has concluded and, throughout, the facilities of the bathroom will be available to those of you who need it. I ask you to use routine caution in the course of the tour and not to touch any of the objects or furniture without permission and then only very carefully; most of this material is extremely fragile and its condition under stress could not be spoken for. I suggest that we all go through the vestry one by one, trying to wipe our shoes off on the carpet, and then reassemble in the living room, before the grand piano, where we will begin our tour. The tour itself lasts for four hours so perhaps we will have a cigarette now; no smoking is permitted in the corridors, of course, and the house is hermetically sealed anyway, meaning that smoke would quickly asphyxiate all of us.”
The guide seems to have taken this last line as a joke because he begins to laugh uneasily in a rising croak, and then, briskly motioning us to pass, he steps aside and does produce a cigarette from his inner coat pocket which he carefully inspects and then wets with his tongue. It is obviously his intention to compel smoking in the vestry if at all, but this is obviously impossible; the ten of us are almost shoulder to shoulder in the gripping space and whatever smoke might do to us in the inner rooms, it would be even more damaging in this confine. Besides that, I have given up smoking very recently, having cut down from two packs a day to almost nothing, and I do not wish to succumb to temptation. I am, then, on the point of trying to lead the girl into the living room when she gives me a sharp, if affectionate, tug on the wrist and looking up at me says, “Let’s go outside and smoke there. It’s too crowded in here and besides you heard him say it’s going to be a long tour; we could use the fresh air.”
There is something so soft and knowledgeable in her voice and expression—this girl obviously knows me well and thinks highly of me—that all argument is stifled. I permit her to lead me away from the tourists and the guide and we go through the clatter of the receiving door and into the small yard where I spent most of my outdoor life before the age of ten, tossing a ball against the eaves of the roof and now and then dabbling in gardening projects which never quite worked out. We stand there for a few moments and, realizing on some basic level that the situation has become awkward, I quickly hand her one of my own cigarettes—although I have almost quit smoking I cannot bear to be without them should something terrible happen—and light it for her.
“That’s better,” she says briskly, tossing her head and blowing out smoke vigorously. “It’s really stuffy in there but it’s nice out here. I’m glad we decided to come though. The Westfield is one of the main spots.”
“I know,” I say and the fact is that I do know. Moreover, it is not as if I am amnesiac so much as that I do not care for the moment to seek perspective. It is like those thick, strange moments of emergence after a pleasant dream when reality hangs over very heavily and could be subsumed but it is far more pleasant, for the instant, to languish in the possibilities of fantasy. It is probable that I know who this girl is and why she cares for me, that I know why I am on this tour and where we will go afterwards, but it would be too much of an effort and besides it is all too confusing for the moment, better to simply take it on its own level and let it make its own sense. I am aware, of course, that this is probably a rationalization and that I fear disaster if I really try to understand what is happening to me, but my talent for speculation, at least since I gave up cigarettes, has diminished and the girl is very pretty. It is apparent, in fact, in this light, that she is close to being beautiful.
“But it’s going to be so boring,” she says. “If he’d only let us walk around and touch things and kind of learn on our own it would be nice, but he’s going to lead us through one of those stuffy walks and probably ask us questions about what we’re seeing and he’ll ruin everything. Why can’t people be trusted to learn everything on their own? Why do they manipulate us so? Don’t they know that we’re far better than what they take us to be? Or can’t they afford to know that so it goes the other way?”
At these profound questions I feel an answering response starting and would begin to talk to her but find, suddenly, that I cannot: the girl is so beautiful, her face so enticing, her breasts even under the raincoat so obviously well-constructed, and I am tired as well, so tired that it is probable that I got no sleep at all last night or maybe even the night before that. So I only nod, losing what amount of esteem in her eyes I do not know, and then, on an impulse, dig for the cigarettes and light one myself. “Yes,” I say, completing this insufficient act and tossing the match into the familiar dirt where I place some earth over it, “that’s all very true but there’s so much to see in the Westfield that we probably wouldn’t see half the things of interest if we found our own way. This way at least we’ll know that we won’t miss anything.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she says, “but I don’t like this guide, I don’t think he takes any interest in his work and besides it’s such a cheap tour. Usually you can do better than this, most of the guides are really quite nice. I suppose we should have waited but that was our schedule.”
“I know,” I say and for no reason then the girl gives me a touch so blank, so urgent, so full of promise that it is all I can do to contain my responses. She has placed her fingers lightly on my thigh and eased them up toward my scrotum, and as she does so there comes to me, along with a wedge of response, a wave of emotion so thick, so deadly, so poignant and so filled with memory and guilt that I literally gag, unable for the moment to stand it. She is so beautiful after all. I put my hand on her wrist and gently take it from me, rub my fingers along her bare upper arm and say, “We better get back inside now. They’ll be waiting for us.”
“Don’t you care?” she says. “Don’t you care for me? Did I make you mad?” She looks soft and vulnerable, as if I had hit her fully across the face, but there is a kind of guile underneath her assumption of pain as well and I am aware of it. It is obvious that I know far more about this girl than I am willing to concede at this moment and it lends a certain double edge of intricacy to our relationship which, I know, will almost certainly mar the day if I do not come to terms with it.
