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A library was a good place to be when you had nothing to drink or to eat, and the landlady was looking for you and for the back rent money.
Then one day I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion.
A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.
Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.
and another thing, you coward, even if you had a dollar you wouldn’t go, because you had a chance to go once in Denver and you didn’t. No, you coward, you were afraid, and you’re still afraid, and you’re glad you haven’t got a dollar.
You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died.
and when she was through, my teeth ached from my clamped jaws and I hated the dirty lowbrow swine around me, shouting their share of a sick joy that belonged to me.
Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book!
“My advice to all young writers is quite simple. I would caution them never to evade a new experience. I would urge them to live life in the raw, to grapple with it bravely, to attack it with naked fists.”
Bandini on the bed, put himself there with an air of casualness, like a man who knew how to sit on a bed.
But you’re cleaner than me because you’ve got no mind to sell, just that poor flesh.
Sometimes an idea floated harmlessly through the room. It was like a small white bird. It meant no ill-will. It only wanted to help me, dear little bird. But I would strike at it, hammer it out across the keyboard, and it would die on my hands.
He was drinking from a bottle in his hand. He was always drinking, day and night, but he never got drunk.
The world was full of uproariously amusing people. Now the thin bartender looked in my direction and I winked a comradely greeting. He tossed his head in an acknowledging nod. I sighed and sat back, at ease with life.
By noon, after an aimless walk downtown, I was sick with self-pity, unable to control my grief. When I got back to my room I threw myself on the bed and wept from deep inside my chest. I let it flow from every part of me, and after I could not cry anymore I felt fine again. I felt truthful and clean.
but every morning you’ll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semitropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.
I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what’s going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art.
But one night he talked to me, left me nauseated and unhappy as he reveled in memories of Memphis, Tennessee, where the real people came from, where there were friends and friends.
He wouldn’t lend me his books. “A matter of principle,” Heilman said.
“Of course you already know my name,” I said. “I’m Arturo Bandini.” “Oh, yes!” she breathed, and her eyes widened with such admiration I wanted to throw myself at her feet and weep. I could feel it in my throat, the ticklish impulse to start sobbing.
I couldn’t understand why I had done that. I sat on the bed and tried to push the episode out of my mind.
and she had nervous black eyes. They were brilliant, the sort of eyes a woman gets from too much bourbon, very bright and glassy and extremely insolent.
Her nose was pudgy at the end but it was not ugly and she had rather heavy lips without rouge, so that they were pinkish; but what got me were her eyes: their brilliance, their animalism and their recklessness.
I said, “Say, what is this, anyway?” She smiled. “Does it matter? You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.”
I told her to tiptoe across the lobby, and she did it; she enjoyed it terribly, like an adventure in little things; it thrilled her and she tightened her fingers around my arm.
It was foggy on Bunker Hill, but not downtown. The streets were deserted, and the sound of her heels on the sidewalk echoed among the old buildings. She tugged my arm and I bent down to hear what she wanted to whisper.
She wasn’t as drunk as I thought. Something was wrong with her and it was not alcohol and I wanted to find out what it was.
“Think of my soul!” she said. “My soul is so beautiful, it can bring you so much! It is not ugly like my flesh!”
“Because you’re such a fine woman, and your body is so beautiful, and all this talk is an obsession, a childish phobia, a hangover from the mumps. So you mustn’t worry and you mustn’t cry, because you’ll get over it. I know you will.”
She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either.
Then my heart pounded in my throat, because she was coming nearer and nearer to what I wanted her to ask, and I waited while she stroked my forehead. “And why doesn’t she love you?” There it was. I could have answered and it would have been in the clear, but I said, “She just doesn’t love me, that’s all.”
But there was a tinge of darkness in the back of my mind. I walked down the street, past the Ferris Wheel and canvassed concessions, and it seemed to come stronger; some disturbance of peace, something vague and nameless seeping into my mind.
I could prove it a dozen ways, but I was wrong, for there was no denying the warm even rhythm of my guilt.
It was better to be a live coward than a dead madman.
Ah life! Thou sweet bitter tragedy, thou dazzling whore that leadeth me to destruction!
What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?
Take all the pleasures of all the spheres, multiply them by endless years, one minute of heaven is worth them all.
I lay there and shuddered, thinking of the old cow alone in the field in the moonlight, old cow mooing for her calf. Murder! Hellfrick and I were through.
And when I had worn the sensation to vaporous nothingness, I got up, disgusted with myself,
Murderer or bartender or writer, it didn’t matter: his fate was the common fate of all, his finish my finish; and here tonight in this city of darkened windows were other millions like him and like me: as indistinguishable as dying blades of grass. Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task.
Her hair spilled over the pillow like a bottle of overturned ink.
And Arturo Bandini, the great author dipped deep into his colorful imagination, romantic Arturo Bandini, just chock-full of clever phrases, and he said, weakly, kittenishly, “Hello.”
I never thought of her as a thing to be considered by daylight.
When the bottle was empty I went down to the drugstore and bought another, a big bottle. All night we wept and we drank, and drunk I could say the things bubbling in my heart, all those swell words, all the clever similes, because you were crying for the other guy and you didn’t hear a word I said, but I heard them myself,
It was a long minute, five times as long as usual.
She opened her lips and kissed me with peculiar fervor, a passionate coldness, a voluptuous indifference.
She belonged to the rolling hills, the wide deserts, the high mountains, she would ruin any apartment, she would lay havoc upon any such little prison as this.
“Inhale,” she said. “Then hold it. Hold it a long time. Until it hurts. Then let it out.”
The telegram said: your book accepted mailing contract today. Hackmuth. That was all. I let the paper float to the carpet. I just sat there. Then I got down on the floor and began kissing the telegram. I crawled under the bed and just lay there. I did not need the sunshine anymore. Nor the earth, nor heaven. I just lay there, happy to die. Nothing else could happen to me. My life was over.
This was the life for a man, to wander and stop and then go on, ever following the white line along the rambling coast, a time to relax at the wheel, light another cigaret, and grope stupidly for the meanings in that perplexing desert sky.
