I'll skip school and college. When I was twenty-four and living in Cleveland I invested fifty thousand dollars of the money Grandmother left me in a publishing house run by a man I'd known in college. We were both inexperienced and the business went poorly. At the end of a year we mortgaged our firm to a larger publishing house who, six months later, foreclosed the mortgage and copped my investment. I don't think there was any connection-I still had an adequate income-but at about this time I began to suffer from melancholy-a cafard-a form of despair that sometimes seemed to have a tangible approach. Once or twice, I think, I seemed to glimpse some of its physical attributes. It was covered with hair-it was the classical bête noire-but it was as a rule no more visible than a moving column of thin air. I decided then to move to New York and translate the poetry of Eugenio Montale. I took a furnished apartment, but I seemed to know almost no one in the city and this left me alone much of the time and much of the time with my cafard.
It overtook me on trains and planes. I would wake feeling healthy and full of plans, to be crushed by the cafard while I shaved or drank my first cup of coffee. It was most powerful and I was most vulnerable when the noise of traffic woke me at dawn. My best defense, my only defense, was to cover my head with a pillow and summon up those images mat represented for me the excellence and beauty I had lost. The first of these was a mountain-it was obviously Kilimanjaro. The summit was a perfect, snow-covered cone, lighted by a passing glow. I saw the mountain a thousand times -I begged to see it-and as I grew more familiar with it I saw the fire of a primitive village at its base. The vision dated, I guess, from the bronze or the iron age. Next in frequency I saw a fortified medieval town. It could have been Mont-St-Michel or Orvieto or the grand lamasery in Tibet but the image of the walled town, like the snow-covered mountain, seemed to represent beauty, enthusiasm and love. I also saw less frequently and less successfully a river with grassy banks. I guessed these were the Elysian Fields although I found them difficult to arrive at and at one point it seemed to me that a railroad track or a thruway had destroyed the beauty of the place.
I had begun to drink heavily to lick the cafard and one morning-I had been in New York for about a month-I took a hooker of gin while I shaved. I then went back to bed again, covered my head with a pillow and tried to evoke the mountain, the fortified town or the green fields, but I saw instead a pale woman wearing a shirt with light-blue stripes. I seemed to feel for her deeply and clearly during the moment or two that I saw her but then she vanished.
I stayed in bed that day until eleven or later, when I went out to the corner drugstore and ordered some breakfast. The place had begun to fill up with the lunch-hour crowd and the noise and the smells nauseated me. I drank some coffee and orange juice and went back to my apartment and had another drink. I was drinking straight gin. This made me feel better and I had a third drink and went out once more to see if I couldn't eat something. This time I went to a French restaurant where my alcoholic fastidiousness would not be offended. I ordered a martini, some pâte and a plate of scrambled eggs and was able to get this down. Then I returned to my apartment, undressed and got back into bed again, pulling the covers over my face. I hated the light of day, it seemed to be the essence of my cafard, as if darkness would lessen my frustrations, as if the night were a guise of forgetfulness. I stayed in bed, neither sleeping nor waking. When I dressed again and went out onto the street it was beginning to get dark. I went back to the French restaurant, where I had some snails and a beef filet, and then went to a movie. It was a spy movie and seemed so old-fashioned that it undermined my already feeble sense of time and reality. I left halfway through the movie and went back to bed again. It must have been about ten. I took a couple of sleeping pills and stayed in bed until two the next afternoon, when I dressed and went out to the restaurant and had another plate of scrambled eggs. I then returned to bed and stayed there until ten the next morning. What I wanted then was a long, long, long sleep and I had enough pills to accomplish this. I flushed the pills down the toilet and called one of my few friends and asked for the name of his doctor. I then called the doctor and asked him for the name of a psychiatrist. He recommended a man named Doheny.
Doheny saw me that afternoon. His waiting room had a large collection of magazines but the ashtrays were clean, the cushions were unrumpled and I had the feeling that perhaps I was his first customer in a long time. Was he, I wondered, an unemployed psychiatrist, an unsuccessful psychiatrist, an unpopular psychiatrist, did he while away the time in an empty office like an idle lawyer, barber or antique dealer? He presently appeared and led me into a consultation room that was furnished with antiques. I wondered then if some part of a psychiatrist's education was the furnishing of his consultation room. Did they do it themselves? Did their wives do it? Was it done by a professional? Doheny had large brown eyes in a long face. When I sat in the patient's chair he turned the beam of his brown eye onto me exactly as a dentist turns on the light above his drills and for the next fifty minutes I basked in his gaze and returned his looks earnestly to prove that I was truthful and manly. He seemed, like some illusion of drunkenness, to have two faces and I found it fascinating to watch one swallow up the other. He charged a dollar a minute.
After our fourth or fifth consultation he asked me to masturbate when I got home and report my reactions to him. I did as he asked and reported that I had felt ashamed of myself. He was delighted with this news and said that it proved that sexual guilt was the source of my cafard. I was a repressed.transvestite homosexual. I had told him about Daddy posing for Fledspar and he told me that this image of a naked man supporting hotels, palaces of justice and opera houses had intimidated me and forced me into an unnatural way of life. I told him to go to hell and said that I was through. I said that he was a charlatan and that I was going to report him to the American Psychiatric Society. If he wasn't a charlatan why didn't he have diplomas hung on his wall like other doctors? He got very angry at this, threw open his desk drawer and pulled out a pile of diplomas. He had diplomas from Yale, Columbia and the Neurological Hospital. Then I noticed that all these documents were made out to a man named Howard Shitz and I asked if he hadn't picked them up in a secondhand bookstore. He said he had changed his name when he went into practice for reasons that any dunce would understand. I left.
I was no better after Doheny-I was worse-and I began to wonder seriously if the ubiquity of my father's head and shoulders carved in limestone had not been crippling; but if it had been what could I do? The opera house in Malsburg and the Prinz-Regenten had been demolished but I couldn't remove him from his position on upper Broadway and he was still holding up the Mercedes in Frankfurt. I went on drinking-more than a quart a day-and my hands had begun to shake terribly. When I went into a bar I would wait until the bartender turned his back before I tried to get the glass up to my mouth. I sometimes spilled gin all over the bar. This amused the other customers. I went out to Pennsylvania one weekend with some heavy-drinking friends and came back on a social train that got me into Penn Station at about eleven Sunday night. The station was then being razed and reconstructed and it was such a complex of ruins that it seemed like a frightening projection of my own confusions and I stepped out into the street, looking for a bar. The bars around the station were too brightly lighted for a man whose hands were shaking and I started walking east, looking for some dark saloon where my infirmity would not be so noticeable. Walking down a side street I saw two lighted windows and a room with yellow walls. The windows were uncurtained. All I could see were the yellow walls. I put down my suitcase to stare at the windows. I was convinced that whoever lived there lived a useful and illustrious life. It would be a single man like myself but a man with a continent nature, a ruling intelligence, an efficient disposition. The pair of windows filled me with shame. I wanted my life to be not merely decent but exemplary. I wanted to be useful, continent and at peace. If I could not change my habits I could at least change my environment and I thought that if I found such a room with yellow walls I would cure my cafard and my drunkenness.