Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Life in the fast track, the dashing about and scrambling for tenure and for recognition from one’s peers, continued at a frenetic pace. When I was manic, the tempo seemed slow; when I was normal, frenetic seemed fine; when I was depressed, the pace was impossible. Other than my psychiatrist, there was no one I could talk to about the real extent of the difficulties I was having. Or perhaps there was, but it never really occurred to me to try. There were next to no other women in the adult psychiatry division; the women that did exist in the department all clumped together in child psychiatry. They were no protection against the weasels in the woodwork, and, besides, they had weasels enough in their own quarters. Although most of my male colleagues were fair, and many were exceptionally supportive, there were several men whose views of women had to be experienced to be believed. The Oyster was one such man, one such experience. Named for his smooth and slithery essence, the Oyster was a senior professor: he was patronizing, smug, and had all of the intellectual and emotional complexity of, as one might expect, a small mollusk. He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most women had both. He also thought women who strayed into academic medicine were fundamentally flawed, and, as I was particularly disinclined to be deferential, I seemed especially to annoy him. We served together on the Appointments and Promotions Committee for the department, where I was the only woman among the eighteen members. On the occasions when he would actually show up for meetings—the Oyster was notorious for earning a maximum amount of money for spending a minimum amount of time in the hospital—I would try to sit directly across the table from him and watch his failed attempts to be unfailingly polite.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  down his father’s altar of Baal—an action that seems quite inconsistent with his subsequent idol worship. Another editorial touch can be seen in the report in 6:7 that the Lord sent a prophet to remind the Israelites of the exodus and covenant. Prophets figure prominently in the later historical books, but they seem anachronistic in the context of Judges. Gideon’s success against the Midianites provides the occasion for the first proposal of kingship in Israel. The people invite him to “rule over us, you and your son and your grandson also” (8:22). The people in question are ostensibly all Israel, but only the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim have been involved in the story. In any case, Gideon declines the offer. There was evidently much ambiguity about kingship in early Israel. Some of the stories in the Deuteronomistic History suggest a process of evolution that naturally led to kingship in Israel as in other peoples in the region. Other passages suggest that there was a tension between the rule of YHWH and the rule of a human king. This is the case in Gideon’s reply to the people in Judg 8:23. We shall see this resistance to the kingship articulated more fully in 1 Samuel. Kingship is also at issue in the story of Abimelech in Judges 9. Abimelech’s name (“my father is king”) suggests that Gideon may not have been as reticent about kingship as the Deuteronomist would have it. In any case, Abimelech has no reservations about claiming the kingship, and he clears his path by murdering his seventy brothers, except for the youngest, Jotham, who escapes. Like Jephthah in Judges 11, Abimelech is of dishonorable birth; he is the son of a slave woman. Unlike Jephthah, or some other underprivileged figures in the Hebrew Bible, he is not asked to assume leadership but pursues it aggressively, even murderously. The incident evokes Jotham’s fable about the trees who tried to choose a king. The olive, the fig, and the vine all decline, because they are engaged in productive activity that brings them honor. Only the bramble wants to be king, and it backs its desire with a threat of violence. The fable is all too easily applicable to power seekers of any age. In the context of Judges, it articulates the deep-seated distrust of monarchy in some strands of Israelite tradition. It should be noted, however, that Abimelech is king of Shechem, not of Israel, and that Shechem appears here to be a Canaanite city with a temple to

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Maybe you’re right. I wish I weren’t so damned critical. But these dirty little Jews who hang around the Dôme, Jesus, they give me the creeps. They sound just like textbooks. If I could talk to you every day maybe I could get things off my chest. You’re a good listener. I know you don’t give a damn about me, but you’re patient. And you don’t have any theories to exploit. I suppose you put it all down afterward in that notebook of yours. Listen, I don’t mind what you say about me, but don’t make me out to be a cunt- chaser—it’s too simple. Some day I’ll write a book about myself, about my thoughts. I don’t mean just a piece of introspective analysis... I mean that I’ll lay myself down on the operating table and I’ll expose my whole guts... every goddamned thing. Has anybody ever done that before?—What the hell are you smiling at? Does it sound naïf?” I’m smiling because whenever we touch on the subject of this book which he is going to write some day things assume an incongruous aspect. He has only to say “my book” and immediately the world shrinks to the private dimensions of Van Norden and Co. The book must be absolutely original, absolutely perfect. That is why, among other things, it is impossible for him to get started on it. As soon as he gets an idea he begins to question it. He remembers that Dostoevski used it, or Hamsun, or somebody else. “I’m not saying that I want to be better than them, but I want to be different,” he explains. And so, instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not going to tread on their private property. And the more he reads the more disdainful he becomes. None of them are satisfying; none of them arrive at that degree of perfection which he has imposed on himself.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Fillmore was more elated than I by the prospect—he had good reason to be. For me it was just a transfer from one purgatory to another. There was no future ahead of me; there wasn’t even a salary attached to the job. One was supposed to consider himself fortunate to enjoy the privilege of spreading the gospel of Franco-American amity. It was a job for a rich man’s son. The night before I left we had a good time. About dawn it began to snow: we walked about from one quarter to another taking a last look at Paris. Passing through the Rue St. Dominique we suddenly fell upon a little square and there was the Eglise Ste.-Clotilde. People were going to mass. Fillmore, whose head was still a little cloudy, was bent on going to mass too. “For the fun of it!” as he put it. I felt somewhat uneasy about it; in the first place I had never attended a mass, and in the second place I looked seedy and felt seedy. Fillmore, too, looked rather battered, even more disreputable than myself; his big slouch hat was on assways and his overcoat was still full of sawdust from the last joint we had been in. However, we marched in. The worst they could do would be to throw us out. I was so astounded by the sight that greeted my eyes that I lost all uneasiness. It took me a little while to get adjusted to the dim light. I stumbled around behind Fillmore, holding his sleeve. A weird, unearthly noise assailed my ears, a sort of hollow drone that rose up out of the cold flagging. A huge, dismal tomb it was with mourners shuffling in and out. A sort of antechamber to the world below. Temperature about 55 or 60 Fahrenheit. No music except this undefinable dirge manufactured in the subcellar—like a million heads of cauliflower wailing in the dark. People in shrouds were chewing away with that hopeless, dejected look of beggars who hold out their hands in a trance and mumble an unintelligible appeal. That this sort of thing existed I knew, but then one also knows that there are slaughterhouses and morgues and dissecting rooms. One instinctively avoids such places. In the street I had often passed a priest with a little prayer book in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines. Idiot, I would say to myself, and let it go at that. In the street one meets with all forms of dementia and the priest is by no means the most striking. Two thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it. However, when you are suddenly transported to the very midst of his realm, when you see the little world in which the priest functions like an alarm clock, you are apt to have entirely different sensations. For a moment all this slaver and twitching of the lips almost began to have a meaning.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “Don’t mind her,” he says, throwing her a look of supreme contempt, “she’s just a big sow. Give her a pinch in the ass, if you like. She won’t say anything.” And then addressing her, in English, he says. “Come here, you bitch, put your hand on this!” At this I can’t restrain myself any longer. I burst out laughing, a fit of hysterical laughter which infects the maid also, though she doesn’t know what it’s all about. The maid commences to take down the pictures and the photographs, mostly of himself, which line the walls. “You” he says, jerking his thumb, “come here! Here’s something to remember me by”—ripping a photograph off the wall—”when I go you can wipe your ass with it. See,” he says, turning to me, “she’s a dumb bitch. She wouldn’t look any more intelligent if I said it in French.” The maid stands there with her mouth open; she is evidently convinced that he is cracked. “Hey!” he yells at her as if she were hard of hearing. “Hey, you! Yes, you! Like this…!” and he takes the photograph, his own photograph, and wipes his ass with it. “Comme ça! Savvy? You’ve got to draw pictures for her,” he says, thrusting his lower lip forward in absolute disgust. He watches her helplessly as she throws his things into the big valises. “Here, put these in too,” he says, handing her a toothbrush and the douche bag. Half of his belongings are lying on the floor. The valises are crammed full and there is nowhere to put the paintings and the books and the bottles that are half empty. “Sit down a minute,” he says. “We’ve got plenty of time. We’ve got to think this thing out. If you hadn’t come around I’d never have gotten out of here. You see how helpless I am. Don’t let me forget to take the bulbs out… they belong to me. That wastebasket belongs to me too. They expect you to live like pigs, these bastards.” The maid has gone downstairs to get some twine. … “Wait till you see… she’ll charge me for the twine even if it’s only three sous. They wouldn’t sew a button on your pants here without charging for it. The lousy, dirty scroungers!” He takes a bottle of Calvados from the mantelpiece and nods to me to grab the other. “No use carrying these to the new place. Let’s finish them off now. But don’t give her a drink! That bastard, I wouldn’t leave her a piece of toilet paper. I’d like to ruin the joint before I go. Listen… piss on the floor, if you like. I wish I could take a crap in the bureau drawer.” He feels so utterly disgusted with himself and everything else that he doesn’t know what to do by way of venting his feelings.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’d slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why. As I watch Van Norden tackle her, it seems to me that I’m looking at a machine whose cogs have slipped. Left to themselves, they could go on this way forever, grinding and slipping, without ever anything happening. Until a hand shuts the motor off. The sight of them coupled like a pair of goats without the least spark of passion, grinding and grinding away for no reason except the fifteen francs, washes away every bit of feeling I have except the inhuman one of satisfying my curiosity. The girl is lying on the edge of the bed and Van Norden is bent over her like a satyr with his two feet solidly planted on the floor. I am sitting on a chair behind him, watching their movements with a cool, scientific detachment; it doesn’t matter to me if it should last forever. It’s like watching one of those crazy machines which throw the newspaper out, millions and billions and trillions of them with their meaningless headlines. The machine seems more sensible, crazy as it is, and more fascinating to watch, than the human beings and the events which produced it. My interest in Van Norden and the girl is nil; if I could sit like this and watch every single performance going on at this minute all over the world my interest would be even less than nil. I wouldn’t be able to differentiate between this phenomenon and the rain falling or a volcano erupting. As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance. The machine is better to watch. And these two are like a machine which has slipped its cogs. It needs the touch of a human hand to set it right. It needs a mechanic. I get down on my knees behind Van Norden and I examine the machine more attentively. The girl throws her head on one side and gives me a despairing look. “It’s no use,” she says. “It’s impossible.” Upon which Van Norden sets to work with renewed energy, just like an old billy goat. He’s such an obstinate cuss that he’ll break his horns rather than give up. And he’s getting sore now because I’m tickling him in the rump. “For God’s sake, Joe, give it up! You’ll kill the poor girl.” “Leave me alone,” he grunts.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  The process may take the form of repetitive prayer, chanting or speaking-in-tongues, self-hypnosis or diverse methods of meditation….Such techniques, when practiced in moderation, may yield real physical and mental health benefits….Prolonged stilling of the mind, however, may wear on the brain physically until it readjusts, suddenly and sharply, to its new condition of not thinking. When that happens, we have found, the brain’s information-processing capacities may be disrupted or enter a state of complete suspension…disorientation, detachment…hallucinations, delusions and, in extreme instances, total withdrawal.”804 Racism Li Hongzhi has also garnered attention because of his racist remarks. He claims that mixed-race people are part of a plot hatched by evil extraterrestrials. In 1998 Li told a gathering in Switzerland, “By mixing the races of humans, the aliens make humans cast off gods.” He claims that “mixed races” are supposedly excluded from the “truth” and “have lost their roots, as if nobody in the paradise will take care of them. They belong to nowhere, and no places would accept them… The higher levels do not recognize such a human race.”805 According to Li Hongzhi the offspring of mixed race unions are therefore “intellectually incomplete” or “with an incomplete body.” In such cases only he, Master Li, can “take care of it” by resolving that “incomplete” state. This can supposedly be done only if “such a person wants to practice cultivation” according to the precepts of Falun Gong.806 Members responding to an article I once wrote about such racist teachings didn’t deny that Li Hongzhi made the statements quoted but instead insisted that they must be understood in context. A Falun Gong practitioner defending Li said, “My understanding is that when gods created man, we were created to god’s image, different races was created by gods of different races and when a child is born from a marriage of two people from different races it will be hard for the gods to trace the child’s origin and therefore hard to save.”807 The strain this must cause affected relationships is not considered, nor is the potential for emotional damage concerning the children of such couples. Homophobia Statements by Li Hongzhi also seem to encourage the hatred of homosexuals. Li said, “The disgusting homosexuality shows the dirty abnormal psychology of the gay who has lost his ability of reasoning at the present time,” Li Hongzhi wrote this in volume two of Zhuan Falun or “Turning the Law Wheel,” which was translated into English in 1996. In a talk in Switzerland, Li also stated that “the gods” would eliminate gay people. While visiting Frankfurt, Germany, Li was asked in 1998 whether gays might practice Falun Gong. He answered, “You can cultivate, but you must give up the bad conduct.”808 During 2006 in the gay-friendly city of San Francisco, city supervisors voted on a resolution of support for Falun Gong; this caused controversy and angered many residents. “What a disappointing vote.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  F. Westcott sums up this word by saying that it describes someone whose mind recognizes nothing higher than earth, for whom there is nothing sacred, who has no reverence for the unseen. An unhallowed life is a life without any awareness of or interest in God. In its thoughts, aims and pleasures, it is completely earthbound. We must always take care that we do not drift into a frame of mind and heart which has no horizon beyond this world. To sum it all up, the writer to the Hebrews cites the example of Esau. He really puts two stories together – Genesis 25:28– 34 and Genesis 27:1–39. In the first, Esau came in from the field ravenously hungry and sold his birthright to Jacob for a share of the food which he was preparing. The second story tells how Jacob subtly robbed Esau of his birthright by impersonating him when Isaac was old and blind, and so gained the blessing which belonged to Esau as the elder of the two sons. It was when Esau sought the blessing that Jacob had shrewdly obtained and learned he could not get it that he lifted up his voice and wept (Genesis 27:38). There is more to this than lies upon the surface. In Jewish legend and in Rabbinic elaboration, Esau had come to be looked upon as the entirely sensual man, the man who put the needs of his body first. Jewish legend says that while Jacob and Esau – they were twins – were still in their mother’s womb, Jacob said to Esau: ‘My brother, there are two worlds before us, this world and the world to come. In this world, men eat and drink and traffic and marry and bring up sons and daughters; but all this does not take place in the world to come. If you like, take this world and I will take the other.’ And Esau was well content to take this world, because he did not believe that there was any other. On that very day when Jacob’s deception gained him Isaac’s blessing, legend said that Esau had already committed five sins: ‘he had worshipped with strange worship, he had shed innocent blood, he had pursued a betrothed damsel, he had denied the life of the world to come, and he had despised his birthright’. Jewish interpretation saw Esau as the sensual man, the man who saw no pleasures beyond the crude pleasures of this world. People like that sell their birthright; for they throw away their inheritance when they throw away eternity. The writer to the Hebrews says, according to the Authorized Version, that Esau found no place for repentance.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  First, there is the danger of heresy-hunting. The very desire to keep the faith pure tends to make people eager to track down and eliminate the heretic and the person whose faith has gone astray. Second, there is the danger of stern and unsympathetic treatment of those whose nerve and faith have failed. The very necessity of unswerving loyalty in a hostile pagan world tends to make more rigorous the treatment of any who in some crisis did not have the courage to stand up for their faith. It is a great thing to keep the faith pure; but, when the desire to do so makes us censorious, harsh and unsympathetic, mutual love is destroyed, and we are left with a situation which may be worse than the one we tried to avoid. Somehow or other, we have to combine two things – an earnestness in the faith and a kindness to those who have strayed from it. (2) There is hospitality. The ancient world loved and honoured hospitality. The Jews listed six things which were important both in this life and for the life to come, and the list begins: ‘Hospitality to the stranger and visiting the sick.’ The Greeks gave Zeus, as one of his favourite titles, the title Zeus Xenios, which means Zeus, the god of strangers. The traveller and the stranger were under the protection of the king of the gods. Hospitality, as James Moffatt says, was a very important aspect of ancient religion. Inns were filthy and ruinously expensive, and had a bad reputation. The Greeks always had a dislike of hospitality given for money; innkeeping seemed to them an unnatural business. In The Frogs by Aristophanes, Dionysus asks Heracles, when they are discussing finding a lodging, if he knows where there are fewest fleas. Plato in The Laws speaks of the innkeeper holding travellers to ransom. It is not without significance that Josephus says that Rahab, the prostitute who sheltered Joshua’s scouts in Jericho, kept an inn. When Theophrastus wrote his character sketch of the reckless man, he said that he was fit to keep an inn or run a brothel; he put both occupations on the same level. In the ancient world, there was a rather wonderful system of what were called ‘guest friendships’. Throughout the years, families, even when they had lost active touch with each other, had an arrangement that, whenever it was needed, they would make accommodation available for each other. This hospitality was even more necessary among Christians. Slaves had no home of their own to go to. Wandering preachers and prophets were always on the roads. In the ordinary business of life, Christians had journeys to make.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Maybe she had the clap, yes-—but she is not pregnant.” “But why does she want to marry him? Is she really in love with him?” “Love? Pfooh! She has no heart, Ginette. She wants someone to look after her. No Frenchman would ever marry her—she has a police record. No, she wants him because he’s too stupid to find out about her. Her parents don’t want her any more—she’s a disgrace to them. But if she can get married to a rich American, then everything will be all right. … You think maybe she loves him a little, eh? You don’t know her. When they were living together at the hotel, she had men coming to her room while he was at work. She said he didn’t give her enough spending money. He was stingy. That fur she wore—she told him her parents had given it to her, didn’t she? Innocent fool! Why, I’ve seen her bring a man back to the hotel right while he was there. She brought the man to the floor below. I saw it with my own eyes. And what a man! An old derelict. He couldn’t get an erection!” If Fillmore, when he was released from the château, had returned to Paris, perhaps I might have tipped him off about his Ginette. While he was still under observation I didn’t think it well to upset him by poisoning his mind with Yvette’s slanders. As things turned out, he went directly from the château to the home of Ginette’s parents. There, despite himself, he was inveigled into making public his engagement. The banns were published in the local papers and a reception was given to the friends of the family. Fillmore took advantage of the situation to indulge in all sorts of escapades. Though he knew quite well what he was doing he pretended to be still a little daffy. He would borrow his father-in-law’s car, for example, and tear about the countryside all by himself; if he saw a town that he liked he would plank himself down and have a good time until Ginette came searching for him. Sometimes the father-in-law and he would go off together—on a fishing trip, presumably—and nothing would be heard of them for days. He became exasperatingly capricious and exacting. I suppose he figured he might as well get what he could out of it. When he returned to Paris with Ginette he had a complete new wardrobe and a pocketful of dough. He looked cheerful and healthy, and had a fine coat of tan. He looked sound as a berry to me. But as soon as we had gotten away from Ginette he opened up.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  She almost wore me out.” By this time the one in bed had come to and was rubbing her eyes. She looked pretty young to me, too. Not bad looking, but dumb as hell. Wanted to know right away what we were talking about. “She lives here in the hotel,” said Carl. “On the third floor. Do you want to go to her room? I’ll fix it up for you.” I didn’t know whether I wanted to or not, but when I saw Carl mushing it up with her again I decided I did want to. I asked her first if she was too tired. Useless question. A whore is never too tired to open her legs. Some of them can fall asleep while you diddle them. Anyway, it was decided we would go down to her room. Like that I wouldn’t have to pay the patron for the night. In the morning I rented a room overlooking the little park down below where the sandwich-board men always came to eat their lunch. At noon I called for Carl to have breakfast with him. He and Van Norden had developed a new habit in my absence—they went to the Coupole for breakfast every day. “Why the Coupole?” I asked. “Why the Coupole?” says Carl. “Because the Coupole serves porridge at all hours and porridge makes you shit.”—“I see,” said I. So it’s just like it used to be again. The three of us walking back and forth to work. Petty dissensions, petty rivalries. Van Norden still bellyaching about his cunts and about washing the dirt out of his belly. Only now he’s found a new diversion. He’s found that it’s less annoying to masturbate. I was amazed when he broke the news to me. I didn’t think it possible for a guy like that to find any pleasure in jerking himself off. I was still more amazed when he explained to me how he goes about it. He had “invented” a new stunt, so he put it. “You take an apple,” he says, “and you bore out the core. Then you rub some cold cream on the inside so as it doesn’t melt too fast. Try it some time! It’ll drive you crazy at first. Anyway, it’s cheap and you don’t have to waste much time.” “By the way,” he says, switching the subject, “that friend of yours, Fillmore, he’s in the hospital. I think he’s nuts. Anyway, that’s what his girl told me. He took on a French girl, you know, while you were away. They used to fight like hell. She’s a big, healthy bitch—wild like. I wouldn’t mind giving her a tumble, but I’m afraid she’d claw the eyes out of me. He was always going around with his face and hands scratched up. She looks bunged up too once in a while—or she used to. You know how these French cunts are—when they love they lose their minds.” Evidently things had happened while I was away.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  There are people in this world for whom the word “esoteric” seems to act as a divine ichor. Like “settled” for Herr Peeperkorn of the Magic Mountain . Kruger was one of those saints who have gone wrong, a masochist, an anal type whose law is scrupulousness, rectitude and conscientiousness, who on an off day would knock a man’s teeth down his throat without a qualm. He seemed to think I was ripe to move on to another plane, “a higher plane,” as he put it. I was ready to move on to any plane he designated, provided that one didn’t eat less or drink less. He chewed my head off about the “threadsoul,” the “causal body,” “ablation,” the Upanishads, Plotinus, Krishnamurti, “the Karmic vestiture of the soul,” “the nirvanic consciousness,” all that flapdoodle which blows out of the East like a breath from the plague. Sometimes he would go into a trance and talk about his previous incarnations, how he imagined them to be, at least. Or he would relate his dreams which, so far as I could see, were thoroughly insipid, prosaic, hardly worth even the attention of a Freudian, but, for him, there were vast esoteric marvels hidden in their depths which I had to aid him to decipher. He had turned himself inside out, like a coat whose nap is worn off. Little by little, as I gained his confidence, I wormed my way into his heart. I had him at such a point that he would come running after me, in the street, to inquire if he could lend me a few francs. He wanted to hold me together in order to survive the transition to a higher plane. I acted like a pear that is ripening on the tree. Now and then I had relapses and I would confess my need for more earthly nourishment—a visit to the Sphinx or the Rue St. Apolline where I knew he repaired in weak moments when the demands of the flesh had become too vehement. As a painter he was nil; as a sculptor less than nil. He was a good housekeeper, that I’ll say for him. And an economical one to boot. Nothing went to waste, not even the paper that the meat was wrapped in. Friday nights he threw open his studio to his fellow artists; there was always plenty to drink and good sandwiches, and if by chance there was anything left over I would come round the next day to polish it off. Back of the Bal Bullier was another studio I got into the habit of frequenting—the studio of Mark Swift. If he was not a genius he was certainly an eccentric, this caustic Irishman. He had for a model a Jewess whom he had been living with for years; he was now tired of her and was searching for a pretext to get rid of her.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  As I listen to his tales of America I see how absurd it is to expect of Gandhi that miracle which will deroute the trend of destiny. India’s enemy is not England, but America. India’s enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit. He thinks the Americans are a very gullible people. He tells me about the credulous souls who succored him there—the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Theosophists, the New Thoughters, the Seventh-day Adventists, etc. He knew where to sail his boat, this bright young man. He knew how to make the tears come to his eyes at the right moment; he knew how to take up a collection, how to appeal to the minister’s wife, how to make love to the mother and daughter at the same time. To look at him you would think him a saint. And he is a saint, in the modern fashion; a contaminated saint who talks in one breath of love, brotherhood, bathtubs, sanitation, efficiency, etc. The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to “the fucking business.” He has had a full program all day—conferences, cablegrams, interviews, photographs for the newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice to the faithful, etc., etc. At dinner time he decides to lay aside his troubles. He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at the garçon and behaves in general like the boorish little peasant that he is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the good places he suggests now that I show him something more primitive. He would like to go to a very cheap place, order two or three girls at once. I steer him along the Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be careful of his pocketbook. Around Aubervilliers we duck into a cheap dive and immediately we’ve got a flock of them on our hands. In a few minutes he’s dancing with a naked wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls. I can see her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the room—and those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her tenaciously. The table is full of beer glasses, the mechanical piano is wheezing and gasping. The girls who are unoccupied are sitting placidly on the leather benches, scratching themselves peacefully just like a family of chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Organ music starts in the sanctuary, and we drift into a barnlike structure with tall stained glass windows where saints I don’t know are doing saintly things I can’t figure out. We stand and sit and pray for over an hour. People take turns talking at the granite altar. Dev belts out hymns in his brassy alto while I flip pages. Afterward, people eat pastries in the foyer. Kids streak around. A few parents from Dev’s school say hey. Somebody brings me coffee like I like. This uninvited niceness seems like a trap. I keep waiting for them to ask me for money. In the car, I ask Dev whether God was there, expecting him to be as cynical as I am. Instead, he cocks his head and squints, as if saying, Where were you ? We stop going to the Episcopal church after a few weeks because I find it too cold—not emotionally but physically. To heat that vaulted space would cost a fortune, I guess. Still, the scalding baths I take to get blood back into my feet after service feel like penance. Dev nudges me to take him to various places of worship. It’s still a social exercise for me, another maternal duty I hadn’t foreseen. Most places get just one visit. The Hebrew that mesmerizes me at the conservative temple frustrates Dev, who likes the Reform service, though it sometimes sounds to me—with its talk of Middle East strife—more political than spiritual. While I adore the hand-clapping gospel music of the Baptists, the anti-gay diatribe is tough to swallow, ditto the long service. By summer, I figure my half-baked sense of a higher power might resonate with the super-liberal Protestant parishes that shun dogma, but they actually put me off. Church X has the sterile feel of an operating theater. Since the well-off parishioners send their kids to fancy camps, it’s almost totally child-free. The sermon—on justice to one’s fellows—has so squeezed out any mention of God or Jesus, maybe to sound modern, there’s no sense of history. The pastor asks for peace and gives thanks for plenty, but the homily might come from Reader’s Digest . Looking for something to say to the pastor, I ask him how he deals with the problem of evil, and he says, We don’t believe in it —a phrase so obviously untrue, I wonder how they sell it. It’s like a Rotary Club meeting where everybody’s agreed on the agenda in advance and is only waiting for the danish to come out. Lots of professors go to Church Y, so again, I think maybe they’ll rook me in. But where Church X avoids God altogether, Church Y sees gods everywhere, each more or less interchangeable. These gods sound no more potent than the rabbit’s foot Dev carries into the batter’s box on a belt loop. The zendo wants people to sit in silence then chant for five minutes, which Dev could never do.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I sat there silently, as I was bidden, and watched him as he sang and prayed and spat now and then into the washbowl. So this is the wonderful suite of rooms he talked about in New York! The Rue Lafayette! It sounded like an important street to me back there in New York. I thought only millionaires and pearl merchants inhabited the street. It sounds wonderful, the Rue Lafayette, when you’re on the other side of the water. So does Fifth Avenue, when you’re over here. One can’t imagine what dumps there are on these swell streets. Anyway, here I am at last, sitting in the gorgeous suite of rooms on the Rue Lafayette. And this crazy duck with his crooked arm is going through the ritual of washing himself. The chair on which I’m sitting is broken, the bedstead is falling apart, the wallpaper is in tatters, there is an open valise under the bed crammed with dirty wash. From where I sit I can glance at the miserable courtyard down below where the aristocracy of the Rue Lafayette sit and smoke their clay pipes. I wonder now, as he chants the doxology, what that bungalow in Darjeeling looks like. It’s interminable, his chanting and praying. He explains to me that he is obliged to wash in a certain prescribed way—his religion demands it. But on Sundays he takes a bath in the tin tub—the Great I AM will wink at that, he says. When he’s dressed he goes to the cupboard, kneels before a little idol on the third shelf, and repeats the mumbo jumbo. If you pray like that every day, he says, nothing will happen to you. The good lord what’s his name never forgets an obedient servant. And then he shows me the crooked arm which he got in a taxi accident on a day doubtless when he had neglected to rehearse the complete song and dance. His arm looks like a broken compass; it’s not an arm any more, but a knucklebone with a shank attached. Since the arm has been repaired he has developed a pair of swollen glands in the armpit—fat little glands, exactly like a dog’s testicles. While bemoaning his plight he remembers suddenly that the doctor had recommended a more liberal diet. He begs me at once to sit down and make up a menu with plenty of fish and meat. “And what about oysters, Endree—for le petit frère?” But all this is only to make an impression on me. He hasn’t the slightest intention of buying himself oysters, or meat, or fish. Not as long as I am there, at least. For the time being we are going to nourish ourselves on lentils and rice and all the dry foods he has stored away in the attic. And the butter he bought last week, that won’t go to waste either. When he commences to cure the butter the smell is unbearable.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  She was not bad-looking, nor could one say that she was good-looking either. She had a fine body, that was the chief thing— and she liked it, as they say. They were so chummy, these two, that sometimes, in order to gratify her curiosity (and also in the vain hope of inspiring her by his prowess), Van Norden would arrange to hide her in his closet during one of his seances. After is was over Bessie would emerge from her hiding place and they would discuss the matter casually, that is to say, with an almost total indifference to everything except “technique.” Technique was one of her favorite terms, at least in those discussions which I was privileged to enjoy. “What’s wrong with my technique?” he would say. And Bessie would answer: “You’re too crude. If you ever expect to make me you’ve got to become more subtle.” There was such a perfect understanding between them, as I say, that often when I called for Van Norden at one-thirty, I would find Bessie sitting on the bed, the covers thrown back and Van Norden inviting her to stroke his penis... “just a few silken strokes,” he would say, “so as I’ll have the courage to get up.” Or else he would urge her to blow on it, or failing that, he would grab hold of himself and shake it like a dinner bell, the two of them laughing fit to die. “I’ll never make this bitch,” he would say. “She has no respect for me. That’s what I get for taking her into my confidence.” And then abruptly he might add: “What do you make of that blonde I showed you yesterday?” Talking to Bessie, of course. And Bessie would jeer at him, telling him he had no taste. “Aw, don’t give me that line,” he would say. And then playfully, perhaps for the thousandth time, because by now it had become a standing joke between them—“Listen, Bessie, what about a quick lay? Just one little lay... no.” And when this had passed off in the usual manner he would add, in the same tone: “Well, what about him? Why don’t you give him a lay?” The whole point about Bessie was that she couldn’t, or just wouldn’t, regard herself as a lay. She talked about passion, as if it were a brand new word. She was passionate about things, even a little thing like a lay. She had to put her soul into it. “I get passionate too sometimes,” Van Norden would say. “Oh, you,” says Bessie. “You’re just a worn-out satyr. You don’t know the meaning of passion. When you get an erection you think you’re passionate.” “All right, maybe it’s not passion... but you can’t get passionate without having an erection, that’s true isn’t it?” All this about Bessie, and the other women whom he drags to his room day in and out, occupies my thoughts as we walk to the restaurant.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  His voice goes out unctuously. His limbs are already paralyzed. To Tania he speaks as if she were a priestess who had broken her vows. “You must make yourself worthy. Sylvester is your God.” And while Sylvester is upstairs suffering (he has a little wheeze in the chest) the priest and the priestess devour the food. “You are polluting yourself,” he says, the gravy dripping from his lips. He has the capacity for eating and suffering at the same time. While he fends off the dangerous ones he puts out his fat little paw and strokes Tania’s hair. “I’m beginning to fall in love with you. You are like my Fanny.” In other respects it has been a fine day for Moldorf. A letter arrived from America. Moe is getting A’s in everything. Murray is learning to ride the bicycle. The victrola was repaired. You can see from the expression on his face that there were other things in the letter besides report cards and velocipedes. You can be sure of it because this afternoon he bought 325 francs worth of jewelry for his Fanny. In addition he wrote her a twenty-page letter. The garçon brought him page after page, filled his fountain pen, served his coffee and cigars, fanned him a little when he perspired, brushed the crumbs from the table, lit his cigar when it went out, bought stamps for him, danced on him, pirouetted, salaamed... broke his spine damned near. The tip was fat. Bigger and fatter than a Corona Corona. Moldorf probably mentioned it in his diary. It was for Fanny’s sake. The bracelet and the earrings, they were worth every sou he spent. Better to spend it on Fanny than waste it on little strumpets like Germaine and Odette. Yes, he told Tania so. He showed her his trunk. It is crammed with gifts—for Fanny, and for Moe and Murray. “My Fanny is the most intelligent woman in the world. I have been searching and searching to find a flaw in her—but there’s not one. “She’s perfect. I’ll tell you what Fanny can do. She plays bridge like a shark; she’s interested in Zionism; you give her an old hat, for instance, and see what she can do with it. A little twist here, a ribbon there, and voilà quelque chose de beau! Do you know what is perfect bliss? To sit beside Fanny, when Moe and Murray have gone to bed, and listen to the radio. She sits there so peacefully. I am rewarded for all my struggles and heartaches in just watching her. She listens intelligently. When I think of your stinking Montparnasse and then of my evenings in Bay Ridge with Fanny after a big meal, I tell you there is no comparison.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  … But when the cable comes… when Miss Mona sends you the money, then you will come with me to look for a room, eh?” And in the next breath he urges me to stay as long as I wish—“six months… seven months, Endree… you are very good for me here.” Nanantatee is one of the Hindus I never did anything for in America. He represented himself to me as a wealthy merchant, a pearl merchant, with a luxurious suite of rooms on the Rue Lafayette, Paris, a villa in Bombay, a bungalow in Darjeeling. I could see from first glance that he was a half-wit, but then half-wits sometimes have the genius to amass a fortune. I didn’t know that he paid his hotel bill in New York by leaving a couple of fat pearls in the proprietor’s hands. It seems amusing to me now that this little duck once swaggered about the lobby of that hotel in New York with an ebony cane, bossing the bellhops around, ordering luncheons for his guests, calling up the porter for theater tickets, renting a taxi by the day, etc., etc., all without a sou in his pocket. Just a string of fat pearls around his neck which he cashed one by one as time wore on. And the fatuous way he used to pat me on the back, thank me for being so good to the Hindu boys—“they are all very intelligent boys, Endree… very intelligent!” Telling me that the good lord so-and-so would repay me for my kindness. That explains now why they used to giggle so, these intelligent Hindu boys, when I suggested that they touch Nanantatee for a five-spot. Curious now how the good lord so-and-so is requiting me for my benevolence. I’m nothing but a slave to this fat little duck. I’m at his beck and call continually. He needs me here—he tells me so to my face. When he goes to the crap-can he shouts: “Endree, bring me a pitcher of water, please. I must wipe myself.” He wouldn’t think of using toilet paper, Nanantatee. Must be against his religion. No, he calls for a pitcher of water and a rag. He’s delicate , the fat little duck. Sometimes when I’m drinking a cup of pale tea in which he has dropped a rose leaf he comes alongside of me and lets a loud fart, right in my face. He never says “Excuse me!” The word must be missing from his Gujarati dictionary. The day I arrived at Nanantatee’s apartment he was in the act of performing his ablutions, that is to say, he was standing over a dirty bowl trying to work his crooked arm around toward the back of his neck. Beside the bowl was a brass goblet which he used to change the water. He requested me to be silent during the ceremony.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He never attached much importance, Boris, to the food problem. He tried to nourish me with ideas. Everything was idea. Just the same, when he had his heart set on renting the apartment, he wouldn’t forget to put a new washer in the toilet. Anyway, he didn’t want me to die on his hands. “You must be life for me to the very end,” so he writes. “That is the only way in which you can sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It’s hard to talk of one’s self so intimately.” You would imagine perhaps that he was anxious to see me, or that he would like to know what I was doing—but no, not a line about the concrete or the personal, except in this living-dying language, nothing but this little message from the trenches, this whiff of poison gas to apprise all and sundry that the war was still on. I sometimes ask myself how it happens that I attract nothing but crackbrained individuals, neurasthenics, neurotics, psychopaths—and Jews especially. There must be something in a healthy Gentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour black bread. There was Moldorf, for example, who had made himself God, according to Boris and Cronstadt. He positively hated me, the little viper—yet he couldn’t stay away from me. He came round regularly for his little dose of insults—it was like a tonic to him. In the beginning, it’s true, I was lenient with him; after all, he was paying me to listen to him. And though I never displayed much sympathy I knew how to be silent when it involved a meal and a little pin money. After a while, however, seeing what a masochist he was, I permitted myself to laugh in his face now and then; that was like a whip for him, it made the grief and agony gush forth with renewed vigor. And perhaps everything would have gone smoothly between us if he had not felt it his duty to protect Tania. But Tania being a Jewess, that brought up a moral question. He wanted me to stick to Mlle. Claude for whom, I must admit, I had a genuine affection. He even gave me money occasionally to sleep with her. Until he realized that I was a hopeless lecher. I mention Tania now because she’s just got back from Russia—just a few days ago. Sylvester remained behind to worm his way into a job. He’s given up literature entirely. He’s dedicated himself to the new Utopia. Tania wants me to go back there with her, to the Crimea preferably, and start a new life.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He has one day a week off, Carl, and on that day he’s more miserable, if you can imagine it, than on any other day of the week. Though he professes to despise food, the only way he seems to enjoy himself on his day off is to order a big spread. Perhaps he does it for my benefit—I don’t know, and I don’t ask. If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of vices, let him—it’s O.K. with me. Anyway, last Tuesday, after squandering what he had on a big spread, he steers me to the Dôme, the last place in the world I would seek on my day off. But one not only gets acquiescent here—one gets supine. Standing at the Dôme bar is Marlowe, soused to the ears. He’s been on a bender, as he calls it, for the last five days. That means a continuous drunk, a peregrination from one bar to another, day and night without interruption, and finally a layoff at the American Hospital. Marlowe’s bony emaciated face is nothing but a skull perforated by two deep sockets in which there are buried a pair of dead clams. His back is covered with sawdust—he has just had a little snooze in the water closet. In his coat pocket are the proofs for the next issue of his review, he was on his way to the printer with the proofs, it seems, when some one inveigled him to have a drink. He talks about it as though it happened months ago. He takes out the proofs and spreads them over the bar; they are full of coffee stains and dried spittle. He tries to read a poem which he had written in Greek, but the proofs are undecipherable. Then he decides to deliver a speech, in French, but the gérant puts a stop to it. Marlowe is piqued: his one ambition is to talk a French which even the garçon will understand. Of Old French he is a master; of the surrealists he has made excellent translations; but to say a simple thing like “get the hell out of here, you old prick!”—that is beyond him. Nobody understands Marlowe’s French, not even the whores. For that matter, it’s difficult enough to understand his English when he’s under the weather. He blabbers and spits like a confirmed stutterer… no sequence to his phrases. “You pay!” that’s one thing he manages to get out clearly. Even if he is fried to the hat some fine preservative instinct always warns Marlowe when it is time to act. If there is any doubt in his mind as to how the drinks are going to be paid he will be sure to put on a stunt. The usual one is to pretend that he is going blind.