I had just completed my task, in fact, had found the right coat and the right pocket and had the Luckies in my hand, when the light came on. I’d been in there long enough by then for my eyes to have adjusted to the gloom, and the sudden glare of the overhead light made me squint like a mole. I also jumped like the guiltiest footpad of all time, which for some reason is what I felt like. I turned around, squinting and blinking, my heart thumping, and it was Kay again.
She was squinting, too, and I saw that her makeup was smeary and that the flesh of her face was sagging a trifle, from tiredness or drink or both. She made an indefinite sort of gesture with one hand and said, with artificial brightness, “I forgot to get what I came for.”
Of course, that was a perfect straight line, but I knew she hadn’t intended it as such and I also saw she was terribly embarrassed and ill at ease, and then I realized I felt the same way. We were like two strangers who, having met and together done something despicable, never expecting to see each other again, suddenly come face to face in the street.
It was one of the most acutely embarrassing moments of my life, I’m still not sure why. Holding up the pack of Luckies like a spieler on television, I said, my brightness as artificial as hers, “Well, I finally got mine. See you.”
“See you,” she said, and her smile was so painful it made me notice her lipstick, which made me think I might be wearing some of that lipstick myself right now. So I waved the cigarettes again, and stumbled hurriedly from the room, and stopped off in the john on the way back and checked myself in the mirror. Yes, there it was, the scarlet evidence. It was very difficult to remove, a faint pink layer of it seemed to have settled into my skin, but finally I rubbed and scrubbed my face so much that the rest of it was the same pink shade and it could no longer be noticed. With which, I went back to the living room, where I found Betsy talking with Dick, the husband of Kay, a circumstance that gave me a start until I realized that symbols are things that happen in novels. So I joined them, and I too talked with Dick, and a while later I saw Kay on the other side of the room talking with another group of people.
I think Dick was working on The Captain’s Pearls then. I think that’s the night he was discussing his theories of literature, which I find sort of boring. I’ll grant you the result is fine, The Captain’s Pearls was a funny book, but the theories behind it strike me as unnecessary. It seems to me Dick could have written that book without ever dreaming up a theory for it at all.
All right, I’ve mentioned the theory, I might as well explain something about it. I won’t go into the sort of detail that Dick does, because I’m not here to bore me either, but I’ll give it a skim.
What Dick says is, the conventional artifices are breaking down between the work of art and its audience. He says it’s most apparent in the movies, where the moviemakers are increasingly acknowledging within the movie that what you’re seeing is a movie, but that it’s happening in the other arts too. His examples are mostly movie examples, though. Like a movie called The Troublemaker, where, when Buck Henry goes to see this Chinese prostitute, the camera starts to follow him into the room, in fact he can’t close the door because the camera’s in the way, and he finally turns and looks at the audience in an exasperated way and tells them to go away. The camera backs up, and he shuts the door. Or in Tom Jones, where the characters stop every once in a while and talk to the audience. Or in the Bob Dylan movie Don’t Look Back, and the other movies using the cinéma vérité technique, where the camera frankly exists as an eavesdropper. He has examples from the theater, too, in fact he has examples from all over, but those are the ones I remember.
Anyway, he says the same thing can be done with novels. You have a novel that claims to be a novel. His own book The Captain’s Pearls is a perfect example. The lead character is this submarine captain on a two-month cruise under the North Pole, and what his big fantasy is, this captain, is that actually he’s a giant in belles lettres, like Carlyle or somebody like that. His big dream is that three hundred years from now one of the main literary things from the twentieth century to be treasured and remembered is his log, so he fills the log with literary criticism and free verse and political essays and all sorts of stuff, all intermixed with the regular notations that are supposed to be in the log, and even those things, latitude and longitude and speed and who was on sick call and like that, even those things are done in very flowery sentences, as though with a quill pen. In fact, the captain’s name is Captain Quill. And what he writes, his log, is the book The Captain’s Pearls. So what Dick has done is, he’s written a book that doesn’t claim to be actions in a submarine, he’s written a book that claims to be a book.
His second book is the same way. He’s still working on it, I guess he got enough money from the movie sale of The Captain’s Pearls so he can really take his time. He told me about this new one, and it’s even nuttier. It’s about this Negro junkie and this psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist has gotten interested in the junkie and wants to try out a lot of new theories on him, and the junkie is going along with it because the psychiatrist is keeping him out of jail and supplied with dope. And the basic thing in the psychiatrist’s theory is self-understanding, so what he’s having this illiterate Negro junkie do is write his autobiography. So the book is the autobiography.
Except there’s more to it than that. The junkie turns out to be this total put-on type, whose whole purpose in the book is to put on the psychiatrist. He doesn’t want the psychiatrist to know one true thing about him, not even his name, so he weaves all these falsehoods, lies inside lies, then sticking the truth away in one little corner, or other times putting part of the truth right out in the open where it looks like a lie, or telling a lie the psychiatrist will be sure to catch but doing it in order to lead the psychiatrist to believe a different lie, doing all these things chapter by chapter, and of course after every chapter the junkie and the psychiatrist have a talk, and what they say gets mentioned in the next chapter. Also, the psychiatrist has footnotes throughout the book telling what he thinks is the truth and what he thinks is lies, or explaining other things the junkie left out, or defending himself when the junkie has made remarks about him and like that. I read the first couple of chapters a few months ago and it was very funny stuff, even funnier than The Captain’s Pearls, but it was also weird stuff, too, and I think after a while it might turn out to be hard reading.
About the title for this one, Dick says it’s time for another legal breakthrough. He says it’s been established in the courts you can put anything you want inside a novel, now it’s time to establish you can have the same leeway in your title, so he wants to call the book Adios, Motherfucker. But his editor told him there was one big trouble with calling a book Adios, Motherfucker, and that is, he won’t get any reviews. The editor says nobody can possibly review a book if they can’t mention what book they’re reviewing, and Dick says he understands that, he can see the problem, but worrying about reviews to the point of changing your book for them is the tail wagging the dog, and the absolutely best and right and perfect title for his book is Adios, Motherfucker. So the editor suggested he call the book A. M. and inside on the title page there would be an explanation of the title in parentheses, but Dick says that’s an awful cheat and a cop-out, and if he’s going to cop out he wants to go all the way and use his alternate title, which is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.