A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (12 page)

At last we descended from that comical unlucky bedroom, and spent half the morning strolling along the ocean; and sitting on great shelves of vivid granite crosshatched by the millennial waves; and watching two or three families of bathers, none glamorous, on a weedy strong-smelling beach; and chatting of our friends and of modern morality and modern art. It was gloriously sunny; and the little successive scene along shore and across estuary could not have been more beguiling, or more truly American in style: almost every shape in the foreground big and simple; almost everything in the distance little and distinct, speckled and spotted like birds’ eggs; the light as specific as the hand of a miniature-painter. My Hawthorn, very proudly native to all this, told me which subjects he had already painted, which he had selected for future endeavor. I spoke encouragingly and suggestively, but it seemed a waste of time. His way of painting is not quite inappropriate for the simple reason that it is amateurish, literal. But with his shaving-brush brush work and muddy stirring together of miscellaneous squirts from inexpensive tubes of paint, how could he approximate all this American surface as of taffeta, this brilliance as of enamel, these clean lively shapes as of a school of fish?

The style of our more accomplished landscape-painters is inappropriate. For example, their preference for backgrounds of blurred air and fused foliage, inspired by the late Venetians, Rubens, Claude: I suppose they will never get anywhere until they cease that. Instead, surely, the right style for our scenery would derive from, or at least be comparable to, the bird’s-eye of, let us say, Lucas van Leyden or even Patinir or, indeed, Brueghel: bright-colored as birds’ eyes also. I do not think it essential for a painter to have much knowledge of the history of painting; but I soon run out of vocabulary, talking to one who has not.

Then we visited another marine museum, a small collection housed in a handsome old round fortress on Pemaquid Point, marine only in a manner of speaking, inclusive of unsorted bits of bone, stopped clocks, foxed engravings, teacups, and spindles—the ocean through tiny military windows shining in like crystal on fire. Finally the elder Hawthorn came for us; and back in Clamariscassett, we had a hearty meal of crustaceans and berries as usual.

Bit by bit then, Hawthorn told me what resulted from Allen’s introduction of him to dear Pavlik: one of the latter’s characteristic tyrannical, farcical, talkative little orgies … He came to their rendezvous accompanied by none other than, alas, his protege Ignazio, George’s Ignazio, my Ignazio; and then took them both to the flat of one Sylvester Dick, where he urged, or, perhaps, to be exact, ordered them to take all their clothes off. Which Hawthorn did with some unwillingness and misgiving, he told me. But, not having had much variety of sexual experience, he was interested to see what would happen and how it would affect him. And, as a provincial, he felt that in Rome one should do as the Romans do; that is, in New York, he should do as the Russians do. And it pleased him to participate a bit in the private life of so celebrated a painter.

Ignazio’s beauty thrilled him, he said; and he assured me that Ignazio also somewhat fancied him. But they exchanged only a few caresses. Pavlik meanwhile not only poured forth his usual improper eloquence, but kept urging them to go ahead and do what they wished to do: which may have weakened their wishing. Also apparently he and Sylvester were all set to join in any amorous action they might commence: a prospect which, for all his admiration and good-sportsmanship, Hawthorn did not relish. Then Pavlik and Ignazio withdrew to a bedroom for twenty minutes. Hawthorn drew the natural conclusion, and was vexed and saddened by it. Upon their reappearance, Pavlik urged, that is, ordered, Hawthorn to stay there with Sylvester; and he and Ignazio departed. Then, upon specific and shameless request, phenomenal phallus was implanted phenomenally in Sylvester’s person. My inexperienced provincial was even more surprised that it should be possible than I was to hear of it. He enjoyed it, but soon intensely disliked Sylvester, he said. Whereas he had not forgotten Ignazio’s beauty; and Pavlik promised for them to meet again this winter.

To this coarse tale I listened with very mixed emotion, naturally. I replied with somewhat cunning characterization of dear Pavlik, cunning although honest: how he occasionally likes to maneuver his young acquaintances into awkward posture or scandalous relationship, to couple them, and avidly watch their courtship or intercourse, and perhaps slip a little in between them, and playfully uncouple them again—the wind of his strange spirit blowing where it listeth. It gratifies his terrible mental sensuality; or serves to furnish his great draughtsman’s imagination; and flatters his sense of his own moral and social superiority. I refer not only to the occasional evenings of amorous fooling, indecent eyewitnessing; his general friendliness toward his inferiors, advising and interfering and gossiping, is in much the same spirit. And, as I warned Hawthorn, he does not as a rule show much respect or esteem for the young men in question, at least not unless they have seemed perfectly obedient.

My warning was perhaps unnecessary. For Hawthorn proceeded to congratulate himself warmly upon being altogether too idealistic and “wholesome” for such goings-on. Also, Pavlik had taken no interest in him as a painter. Perhaps Pavlik would not wish to be friends with him. In any case, he guessed he did not care or dare to be friends with Pavlik. Needless to say, my rather heartsick and halfhearted malice was with reference to his possible future intimacy not with Pavlik, but with Ignazio.

For here I was back where I started, back in the trouble I had left behind in New York: desire for Ignazio and love of George, the first in a way a substitute for the second; and the present grotesque absurd intimacy only as it were a substitute for the substitute. Absurd and perhaps terrible error; anomalous idealism, idealism always mixed up now with immoral realism, and jealous or envious despairing; and the present little fit of jealousy of daft Pavlik and ridiculous Hawthorn with respect to beauteous Ignazio only a parody of my principle passions … Fortunately, when I have spent the night in anyone’s arms, even coldblooded Hawthorn’s, I can regard practically anything with equanimity; practically nothing seems desperate.

Ignazio assured George that he never yielded to Pavlik; and it may be so. The twenty minutes at Sylvester’s which made Hawthorn nervous may have been quite inactive. I can imagine my old friend just talking, talking, in his own honor, for his own entertainment; even preaching some, in his unique Manichaean manner; and certainly advising his protege not to have much to do with Hawthorn, for this or that subtle reason. In fact, his established darling seems to satisfy him sufficiently; in any case he knows how to check him. As he himself once explained to me in a wonderful conversation, he deliberately encourages himself to think and talk as pornographically as possible and not as a preparation for active immorality or jazzy accompaniment, but as a substitute for it. With a mind excessive in everything, overwrought and over-optimistic, if he really did as a number of his close friends do, or if he did all that he himself would like to do, in fact he would lack strength and tranquility for his art. Year in and year out, at any hour of the day or night, especially after dinner, he is likely to get on the subject of sex, his hobby-horse, always with emphasis upon the actual or imagined magnitude of whatever private part comes in question: his very brain, in an extravagant correspondence to its theme, tumescent, erectible. Around and around and around he talks, and, you might say, all up in the air, like a witch astride a broomstick. Those of us who are not simply disgusted by this habit are often much alarmed by it; he might go crazy. But truly, so far, it has been in the nature of a sane wickedness rather than insanity. It is not degradation, but a “sublimation”; not a mania but only idée fixe; not satyriasis, but a kind of cult worship … Also he likes to make people think that he fornicates tremendously, with all and sundry, harum-scarum. Many would make fun of him if they supposed that his bawdy was all smoke and no fire, all bark and no bite; he must prefer to seem abhorrent or alarming. Also the general credulity adds zest to his daydream of himself; throws a light of reality upon his purposeful fiction. I am sure that, as to the twenty minutes at Sylvester’s, he wanted Hawthorn to think the worst. And, if I were to remind him of that occasion, I should not be surprised to be given to understand that he had enjoyed Hawthorn also, with wondrous abominable details.

I recount all this—not insisting upon the precision of any item, but, I think, generally veracious—as a sidelight upon my old friend’s character and, indeed, his art. And the thought of him is helpful to me, enlightening. Indeed I must say that it is an enlightenment in wild disparate flashes, with bad awe inspiring shadows. For in many respects his sex life has been like the sex lives of those I referred to while shamefully waiting for Hawthorn in the hotel at Belfast—of the kind that gives me an excuse to congratulate myself upon my own ventures, comparatively speaking; the repetitious, lowly, morbid, clownish kind. In other respects it is wonderfully symbolic of the terrible effort I too must make in my way; the policy of high thinking and low behavior to be pursued for art’s sake and (in my case, not his), even for love’s sake as well. He is a truly remarkable artist. He is certainly demented in a way, and not just figuratively speaking. But he suddenly stops the dancing prancing reeling progress of that dementia, right on the brink of his precipice. There on the brink he cheats it, and casts a beneficent spell upon himself, and turns some of it into art. That is why, when his art appears practically evil, then it is most beautiful, most important.

As for Ignazio, and whether or not he did make or might make love to Pavlik, or to others, even this latest “lover” of mine who told me the above tale: it is a distinction which could not in any case make much difference to me. Even were I to begin caring for him again, hoping to have better luck with him presently in changed circumstances, the report of his mere lolling about and exhibiting himself at Pavlik’s behest with that other incongruous couple would discourage me plenty. Hopeless as I am, perhaps I prefer to think the worst, whatever is worst; for George and I have already paid too dearly for our interest in him.

The meal of lobsters and huckleberries and the tale of bawdy ended, it was time to go to a certain drugstore and buy my ticket and wait for the bus back to Amalfi. It was not on schedule, because all morning there had been thunderstorms all up and down the coast.

The drugstore atmosphere troubled me with too many souvenirs of past waiting or loitering, even some pertaining to faraway adolescence: Wisconsin drugstores with Adelaide Bovery or with Roy Kilhart. That is perhaps the most universal and standardized atmosphere in this country. It was hard to believe that outdoors there was Maine’s peculiar stormy brilliance, and a block or two away, vast commencement of a series of majestic waterways, and isles as shapely as the Isles of Greece, and an intelligent architecture, and no billboards. Shadowy indoors full of twinkling of bottles and irritating imperative slogans; tableful of magazines glimmering with movie-star faces, platinum-blondes and redheads; odors of syrups and of chemicals; and the sullen chemist in his enclosed corner like a priest in the confessional or a witchdoctor ready to bewitch; and the lazy sweaty boy behind the soda fountain with a cold-sore on the left side of his smile, with platinum-blond hairs on his voluptuous forearm … I felt tired of it all, past and present; perhaps of this country; or tired of myself as part and parcel of the tiresome things I was tired of.

We ordered ice cream sodas to pass the time; and I carried mine to a table as far from the fountain as possible, to prevent Hawthorn’s conversation with and getting me involved in conversation with the soda-jerker, a friend of his. He nudged me when a certain other young man came in and made a purchase and went out: one whose loveliness a year or two ago had preoccupied him. I could imagine it; but he had lost a number of his teeth; also his complexion bore witness to overindulgence in perhaps ice cream sodas. But now my interest in the not exactly imaginable things Hawthorn had to say about him was a bit forced.

My attention turned back to Hawthorn himself. Whether by night or day, whether on the seashore or in bed or in a restaurant or this drugstore, there was not the least sign of our intimacy’s having had an effect on him. He was an inconsequential, that is, a nonsequential fellow, I thought; therefore he was incorrigible. And the incorrigible is practically the eternal. So then and there—in the drugstore, where there was no magic, no charm of scenery or uplifting interest of art or architecture; after lunch, when my desire had expired, and my wish to get away from him was as pronounced as a physical condition—he seemed more important to me than he had seemed before.

Proteus, Priapus: yes, I had thought of those great names, but only descriptively, with no sense of effect upon myself, no awe. Proteus the unknowable, old man of the sea, fish blooded; personification of indecision and delusion and fraud. Great exciting unpleasant Priapus, embodiment of sex as it may have been set up eternally to intimidate us and to punish us with not pleasurable, no indeed, unendurable club … Religious I am, in a way; religious enough to respect and fear such concepts as those two when they come to mind—religious in the sense of a profound persuasion that everything must be significant, anything may matter. In which sense I fancied, as it were to pass the time, but with a great grave cold emotion, with a genuflection of all my intellect and every nerve from head to foot—there in the stuffy shadowy drugstore, amid the candy boxes and the patent medicines and the movie magazines—I fancied that those two divinities, oddly two-in-one in the priapic person and protean personality of my odd Hawthorn, perhaps had appeared in my life and come to my mind to show me something or do something to me.

The god of the orchard and the garden perhaps, according to Mediterranean tradition, to remind me to keep what little virginity I have left; to frighten me out of this particular orchard and garden, realm of pornographic imagining and make-believe love and substitute sex; to discourage any further thievery of this kind of exorbitant fruit, this not necessarily unwholesome and not unnatural and in my opinion not immoral but forbidden—somehow, in the long run, by the nature of things, forbidden—fruit …