But in this case he’s come to see me about Claude, but saying it’s about the Merchant Marine. ‘But what was your last job?’ I ask.
‘Bartender in Newark.’
‘Before that?’
‘Exterminator in Chicago. Of bedbugs, that is.
‘Just came to see ya,’ he says, ‘to find out about how to get papers, to ship out.’ But when I had heard about ‘Will Hubbard’ I had pictured a stocky dark-haired person of peculiar intensity because of the reports about him, the peculiar directness of his actions, but here he had come walking into my pad tall and bespectacled and thin in a seersucker suit as tho he’s just returned from a compound in Equatorial Africa where he’d sat at dusk with a martini discussing the peculiarities . . . Tall, 6 foot 1, strange, inscrutable because ordinary-looking (scrutable), like a shy bank clerk with a patrician thinlipped cold bluelipped face, blue eyes saying nothing behind steel rims and glass, sandy hair, a little wispy, a little of the wistful German Nazi youth as his soft hair fluffles in the breeze – So unobtrusive as he sat on the hassock in the middle of Johnnie’s livingroom and asking me dull questions about how to get sea papers . . . Now there’s my first secret intuitive vision about Will, that he had come to see me not because I was a principal character now in the general drama of that summer but because I was a seaman and thus a seaman type to whom one asked about shipping out as a preliminary means of digging the character of said seaman type. He didnt come to me expecting a jungle of organic depths, or a jumble of souls, which b’God on every level I was as you can see, dear wifey and dear reader, he pictured a merchant seaman who would belong in the merchant seaman category and show blue eyes beyond that and a few choice involuntary remarks, and execute a few original acts and go away into endless space a flat, planed ‘merchant seaman’ – And being queer, as he was, but didnt admit in those days, and never bothered me, he expected a little more on the same general level of shallowness. Thus, on that fateful afternoon in July of 1944 in New York City, as he sat on the hassock questioning me about sea papers (Franz smiling behind him), and as I, fresh from the shower, sat in the easy chair in just my pants, answering, began a relationship which, if he thought it was to remain a flat plane of an ‘interesting blue-eyed dark-haired goodlooking seaman who knows Claude’, wasnt destined to remain so (a point of pride with me in that I’ve worked harder at this legend business than they have) – Okay, joke . . . Tho, on that afternoon, he had no reason to surmise anything otherwise than shoptalk from your aunt to mine, ‘Yes, you’ve got to go now and get your Coast Guard pass first, down near the Battery . . .’
XI
The fascination of Hubbard at first was based on the fact that he was a key member of this here new ‘New Orleans School’ and thus this was nothing more than this handful of rich sharp spirits from that town led by Claude, their falling star Lucifer angel boy demon genius, and Franz the champeen cynical hero, and Will as observer weighted with more irony than the lot of em, and others like Will’s caustic charming buddy Kyles Elgins who with him at Harvard had ‘collaborated on an ode’ to ‘orror which showed the Titanic sinking and the ship’s captain (Franz) shooting a woman in a kimono to put on her said kimono and get on a life boat with the women and children and when heroic sprayey men shout ‘Madame will you take this fourteen-year-old boy on your lap?’ (Claude) Captain Franz smirks ‘Why of course’ and meanwhile Kyles’ paranoid uncle who lisps is hacking away at the gunwhales with a Peruvian machete as reaching hands rise from the waters ‘Ya buntha bathadts!’ and a Negro orchestra is playing the Star-Spangled Banner on the sinking ship . . . a story they wrote together at Harvard, which, when I first saw it, gave me to realize that this here New Orleans clique was the most evil and intelligent buncha bastards and shits in America but had to admire in my admiring youth. Their style was dry, new to me, mine had been the misty-nebulous New England Idealist style tho (as I say) my saving grace in their eyes (Will’s, Claude’s especially) was the materialistic Canuck taciturn cold skepticism all the picked-up Idealism in the world of books couldnt hide . . . ‘Duluoz is a shit posing as an angel.’ . . . ‘Duluoz is very funny.’ – Kyles I didnt get to meet till years later, doesnt matter here, but that Virginia gentryman did say (Clancy by name): ‘Everybody who comes from New Orleans in that group is marked with tragedy.’ Which I found to be true.
XII
The second time I saw Will he was sitting around talking with Claude and Franz in his apartment in the Village with that terrible intelligence and style of theirs, Claude chewing his beerglass and spitting out slivers, Franz following suit with I s’pose storebought teeth, and Hubbard long and lean in his summer seersucker suit emerging from the kitchen with a plate of razor blades and lightbulbs says, ‘I’ve something real nice in the way of delicacies my mother sent me this week, hmf hmf hmf’ (when he laughs with compressed lips hugging his belly), I sit there with peasant frown getting my first glimpse of the Real Devil (the three of em together).
But I could see that Hubbard vaguely admired me.
But what was this with me with a thousand things to do?
But I bite my lips when I hear the word ‘marvel’ and I shudder with excitement when I hear Will say ‘marvelous’ because when he says it, it really’s bound to be truly marvelous. ‘I just saw a marvelous scene in a movie this afternoon,’ with his face all flushed, exalted, rosy, fresh from wind or rain where he walked, his glasses a little wet or smoky from the heat of his enthused eyeballs, ‘this character in this awful beat movie about sex downtown, you see him with a great horse serum injector giving himself a big bang of dope then he rushes up and grabs this blonde in his arms and lifts her up and goes rushing off into a dark field goin “Yip Yip Yipp ee!”’ But I have to ask a thousand questions to know why Will is so glad:
‘A dark field?’
‘Well it’s one of those dreary movies, real old and full of snaps in the screen, you can hear the rolls clank and blank up in the projection booth so it’s some kind of evening or dusk or somethin, a great endless horizon you see him growin smaller and smaller as he rushes off with his girl Yip Yip Yippeeee, finally, you just dont hear him anymore . . .’
‘He’s gone away across that field?’ asks I, looking for mines and touchdowns and Galsworthy and the Book of Job . . . and I’m amazed by Will’s way of saying ‘Yip Yip Yip Pee’ which he does with a cracky falsetto voice and never can say without bending over to hold his belly and compress his lips and go ‘Hm hm hm’, the high suppressed surprised thoroughly gleeful laugh he has, or at least laughy. One afternoon probably when he’d arrived from Harvard for the summer, 1935 or so, with Kyles downtown kicked a few hours around with a sex movie in a cheap joint around Canal Street, these two great American sophisticates you might say sitting well up front (expensively dressed as always, like Loeb and Leopold) in a half-empty movie full of bums and early Thirties tea heads from the gutters of New Orleans, laughing in that way of theirs (actually Kyles’ laugh, which Will had imitated since their childhood together?) and finally the great scene where the mad dope addict picks up the monstrous syringe and gives himself a big smack of H, and grabs the girl (who is some dumb moveless Zombie of the story and walks hands at her sides), he wild-haired and screaming with rain in the plip-plip of the ruined old film rushes off, her legs and hair dangling like Fay Wray in the arms of King Kong, across that mysterious dark endless Faustian horizon of Will’s vision, happy like an Australian jackrabbit, his feet and heels flashing snow: Yip Yip Yip eee, till, as Will says, his ‘Yips’ get dimmer and dimmer as distance diminishes his eager all-fructified final goal-joy, for what would be greater than that, Will thinks, than to have your arms full of joy and a good shot in you and off you run into eternal gloom to flip all you want in infinity, that vision he must’ve had of that movie that day in that manse of his seat, legs crossed demurely, and so I picture him and Kyles sprawled then in laughter, broken up, on the floor, in tweed coats or something, unwrist
watchable, 1935, laughing Haw haw haw and even repeating Yip Yip Yippeeeee after the scene has long passed but they cant forget it (a classic even greater than their Titanic short story). Then it is I see Will Hubbard that night after dinner at home in New Orleans with in-laws and walking under the trees and lawn lights of suburbia, going, probably, to see some clever friend, or even Claude, or Franz, ‘I just saw a marvelous scene in a movie today, God, Yip Yip Yippee!’
Here I say, ‘And what did the guy look like?’
‘Wild bushy hair . . .’
‘And he said Yip Yip Yippee as he rushed off?’
‘With a girl in his arms.’
‘Across the dark field?’
‘Some kinda field –’
‘What was this field?’
‘My Gawd – we’re getting literary yet, dont bother me with such idiotic questions, a field’ – he says ‘field’ with an angry or impatient shrieking choke – ‘like it’s a FIELD’ – calming down – ‘a field . . . for God’s sake you see him rushing off into the dark horizon –’
‘Yip Yip Yippee,’ I say, hoping Will will say it again.
‘Yi Yip Yippee,’ he says, just for me, and so this is Will, tho at first I really paid less attention to him than he did to me, which is a strange thing to reconsider because he always said ‘Jack, you’re really very funny’. But in those days this truly tender and curious soul looked on me (after that flat seaman phase) as some kind of intensity truth-guy with pride, owing to that scene one night the later week when we were all sitting on a park bench on Amsterdam Avenue, hot July night, Will, Franz, Claude, his girl Cecily, me, Johnnie, and Will says to me ‘Well why dont you wear a merchant seaman uniform man like you said you wore in London for your visit there, and get a lot of soft entries into things, it’s wartime, isnt it, and here you go around in T-shirt and chino pints, or paints, or pants, and nobody knows you’re a serviceman proud, should we say?’ and I answered: “Tsa finkish thing to do’ which he remembered and apparently took to be a great proud statement coming straight from the saloon’s mouth, as he, a timid (at the time) middleclass kid with rich parents had always yearned to get away from his family’s dull ‘suburban’ life (in Chicago) into the real rich America of saloons and George Raft and Runyon characters, virile, sad, factual America of his dreams, tho he took my statement as an opportunity to say, in reply:
‘It’s a finkish world.’
Harbinger of the day when we’d become fast friends and he’d hand me the full two-volume edition of Spengler’s Decline of the West and say ‘EEE di fy your mind, my boy, with the grand actuality of Fact.’ When he would become my great teacher in the night. But in those early days, and at this about our third meeting, hearing me say, “Tsa finkish thing to do’ (which for me was just an ordinary statement at the time based on the way seamen and my wife and I looked proudly and defiantly on the world of un-like-us ‘finks’, a disgusting thing in itself granted, but that’s what it was), hearing me say that, Will apparently marveled secretly, whether he remembers it now or not, and with timid and tender curiosity on top of that, his pale eyes behind the spectacles looking mildly startled. I think it was about then he rather vaguely began to admire me, either for virile independent thinking, or ‘rough trade’ (whatever they think), or charm, or maybe broody melancholy philosophic Celtic unexpected depth, or simple ragged shiny frankness, or hank of hair, or reluctance in the revelation of interesting despair, but he remembered it well (we discussed it years later in Africa) and it was years later that I marveled over that, wishing we would turn time back and I could amaze him again with such unconscious simplicity, as our forefathers gradually unfolded and he began to realize I was really one, one, of Briton blood, and especially, after all, one kind of a funny imbecilic saint. With what maternal care he brooded over my way of saying it, looking away, down, frowning, “Tsa finkish thing to do,’ in that now (to me) ‘New Orleans way of Claude’s’, snively, learned, pronouncing the consonants with force and the vowels with that slight ‘eu’ or ‘eow’ also you hear spoken in that curious dialect they speak in Washington DC (I am trying to describe completely indescribable materials) but you say ‘deu’ or ‘deuo’ and you say ‘f’ as tho it was being spat from your lazy lips. So Will sits by me on the bench in that irrecoverable night with mild amazement going ‘hm hm hm’ and ‘It’s a finkish world’ and he’s instructing me seriously, looking with blank and blink interested eyes for the first time into mine. And only because he knew little about me then, amazed, as ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ and bread on the waters there’s a lotta fish after it.
Where is he tonight? Where am I? Where are you?
XIII
O Will Hubbard in the night! A great writer today he is, he is a shadow hovering over western literature, and no great writer ever lived without that soft and tender curiosity, verging on maternal care, about what others think and say, no great writer ever packed off from this scene on earth without amazement like the amazement he felt because I was myself.
Tall strange ‘Old Bull’ in his gray seersucker suit sitting around with us on a hot summernight in old lost New York of 1944, the grit in the sidewalk shining the same sad way in ’tween lights as I would see it years later when I would travel across oceans to see him and just that same sad hopeless grit and my mouth like grit and myself trying to explain it to him: ‘Will, why get excited about anything, the grit is the same everywhere?’
‘The grit is the same everywhere? What on EARTH are you talkin about, Jack, really, you’re awfully funny, hm h mf hmf?’ holding his belly to laugh. ‘Whoever heard of such a thing?’
‘I mean I saw the grit where we sat years ago, to me it’s a symbol of your life.’
‘My LIFE? My dear fellow my life is perfectly free of grit, dearie. Let us relegate this subject to the I-Dont-Wanta-Hear-About-It Department. And order another drink . . . Really.’
‘It blows in dreary winds outside the bars where you believe and believingly bend your head with the gray light to explain something to someone . . . it blows in the endless dusts of atomic space.’
‘My GAWD, I’m not going to buy you another drink if you get LITERARY!’
XIV
At this time I’m writing about he was a bartender down on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas, yet.) (Okay.) How my head used to marvel in those days, tug at my heartstrings, break almost, when I thought over what he meant, when he said where he worked. ‘There were tables with chairs where you could sit and look at the sidewalk if you wanted to.’ The utter dismalness of poor Will (I pick on him in vengeance about my own present emptiness, so dont get worried). That Harlequin hopelessness cognizing this, so that it seems as if my whole life I spend facing one way seeing endless interesting panoramas and he, Will, by God, has been placed on just such a chair, to sigh, facing the other way, where nothing happens, his long gray face hopeless. With a mince, a little uplook of his eyes playfully to a hoped-for watcher sympathetic to his plights, he sits, longlegged at the chair, looking at the empty sidewalk ‘where there’s nothing to look at’, by which I’d say that bloody planet he comes from musta been destitute of life. (‘I’m an agent from another planet,’ he said.) He has in fact a destitute rocklike lifelessness, s’reason why he kept pouncing on the subject ‘Blab blub you young men should go out and experience LIFE steada sittin in rooms in your blue jeans wonderin when the rain’ll come again, why when I was your age . . .’
He was nine years older than me but I never noticed it.
The central vision of Will, really, is we’re sitting in a yard in two chairs, later, in Morocco, and I’m reading him a letter I just wrote to a lady, wishing his opinion in whether I expressed myself politely fitly or fitly politely, one, reading: ‘Discriminating readers would be interested in reading what happened so they could form in their mind an idea of Buddhism in America on the practical level.’
‘How could it be an
y better’n at, Master?’ jokes Will, quite pleased that he doesnt have to vouchsafe an opinion. So then we just sit and say nothing, I get frowning a little wondering what’s with ‘Master’ but suddenly we’re just sitting there peacefully not bothering each other at all, as usual, simply blue-eyed Will, in fact both of us listening to sounds of the afternoon or even of Friday Afternoon in the Universe, the soundless hum of inside silence which he claims comes from trees but I been out there in that treeless desert in the night and heard it . . . but we’re happy. And suddenly Will says: ‘Oh God, I have to go to the laundry tomorrow,’ and suddenly he laughs because he realizes he just sounded like a whiny old lady sittin on the porch in Orlanda Foridy and so he says ‘My Gawd, I sound like a dreary old Ka-Ween!’
Book Twelve
I
Anyway meanwhile there’s this fantastic Claude rushing across the campus followed by at least twelve eager students, among them Irwin Garden, Lombard Crepnicz, Joe Amsterdam, I think Arnie Jewel, all famous writers today, he’s hurling back epigram-matical epithets at them and jumping over bushes to get away from them, and way back in the ivied corners of the quadrangle you might see poor Franz Mueller slowly taking up the rear in his long meditative strides. He might even be carrying a new book for Claude to read, see the myth of Philoctetes and Neoptolemus, which he will tell Claude reminds him so much of their own relationship, the healthy young god and the sick old warrior, and all such twaddle. I tell you it was awful, I have notes about everything that was going on, Claude kept yelling stuff about a ‘New Vision’ which he’d gleaned out of Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Yeats, Rilke, Alyosha Karamazov, anything. Irwin Garden was his closest student friend.