Writing and reading, like male and female, pain and pleasure, are close but divergent. Although writing itself may be a partial substitute for sexual expression (during adolescence, at any rate), sexual curiosity propelled my reading like a rocket. Over how many dry pages did I pass in search of water? Beyond the next paragraph, around the turn of the page, an oasis of sensuality would materialize, fuzzy in the desert light at first, but then clear, precise, and detailed as a dirty drawing. My sexual puzzles would undo like bras, mysteries would fall away like underpants passing the knees. Alas! such a hot breath blew upon the page that every oasis withered. What did I learn from Pierre Louÿs? Balzac? Jules Romain?… their puzzles and their mysteries, their confusions and their lies. I didn’t understand. I didn’t realize. I wanted dirt or purity, innocence or cynicism, never the muddy mix, the flat balance, the even tones of truth. I carried a critic with me everywhere who rose to applaud the passionate passages with a shameless lack of discrimination, and during the throbbing din it made I couldn’t honestly feel or sharply sense or clearly think. Of course, sexual curiosity remains the third lure of reading, yet what an enormous amount of the body’s beautiful blushing is wasted on the silliest puerilities when writers write for the reasons readers read.
He wondered how her breasts were really formed. Guess, she said. Did the nipple rise like a rainspot on a pond, and were the hollows of her thighs like cups which would contain his kisses? Imagine what will pleasure you, she said. Her clothing always fought him off. His fingers could not construct the rest of what they touched, even when one, slipping beneath the boundary of her underwear, traversed a sacred edge. She would permit him every liberty so long as cloth was wrapped like a bandage between them, but his hands or his lips or his eyes on anything but customary flesh caused her to stiffen, sucking at her breath until it drew like a bubbly straw. He realized he was as much ice water as a wound. One day, indeed, she had taken all her upper garments off but a soft thin blouse of greenish Celanese, and through its yielding threads he had compressed her. His protests were useless. Guess, she always said. And finally when he had with sufficient and extraordinary bitterness complained how hard her teasing was on him, she’d firmly ordered his phallus from its trousers as you might order a dog from a tree. Dear thing, she said; I’ll free you of me. Ultimately, this became their love, like shaking hands, and he had eventually accepted the procedure because, as he explained, it was so like the world. She smiled at this and slowly shook her head: you still have your dream, she said, and I have my surprise.
The material that makes up a story must be placed under terrible compression, but it cannot simply release its meaning like a joke does. It must be epiphanous, yet remain an enigma. Its shortness must have a formal function: the deepening of the understanding, the darkening of the design.
In a sense, ‘Mrs. Mean’ is a story of sexual curiosity translated, again, into the epistemological, although it had its beginning in an observation I never used.
3 August ’54. The following tableau at the House of Many Children: father is going to work and is standing by the car talking with his wife. He is tall, thin, dark, heavily bearded so that, though he shaves, he always has a heavy shadow, almost blue, across the sides of his face and chin. She is large, great breasted, fat, pig-eyed, fair. The children annoy father who yells at them in a deep carrying voice, cuffs one hard and shoos the rest away with a vigorous outward motion of his arms (like chickens). The children flee, crying and screaming and carrying on. Then father departs. Mama waves and when he’s gunned the car furiously away (it stalls twice), she turns to the house; the children’s heads pop into place. She makes her voice deep and gruff like his and shouts at them. She swings at one or two (missing widely), and makes his shooing motion with her arms. The children roar delightedly. She goes in and they all troupe gaily behind her.
I was to observe this scene, played with only slight variations, many times, and what interested me about it, finally, was the triangle formed by mother, children, and private-public me; but I didn’t begin to invent a narrative Eye, my journal tells me, until July 12, 1955, when the first words of the story appear in an unwhelped form. Empty of any persuasive detail, the focus wrong, order inept, rhythms lame, these initial early sentences are aimless, toneless, figureless, thin.
We call her Mrs. Mean, my wife and I. Our view of her, as our view of her husband and each of all her children, is a porch view. We can only surmise what her life is like inside her little house, but on warm, close Sunday afternoons, while we try the porch to stay cool and watch her hobbling in the hot sun, stick in hand to beat her children, we think a lot about it.
I notice that by November I have begun writing little encouraging notes to myself: buck up, old boy, and so on. It has become a drab affair, like the writing of all my fictions. Imagine an adultery as full of false starts, procrastination, indecision, poor excuses, impotence, and, above all, plans.
The idea I must keep in mind is how I can (a) tell the story of the public Mr. & Mrs. Mean, as seen by the ‘I’ of the story, (b) make ‘I’ more than a pronoun — rather a pronounced personality, (c) slowly, imperceptibly shift from the factual reporting of it to the imaginative projections of ‘I.’ The problem is as knotty as PK, and as nice. The ending will be, of course, unsatisfactory, as it will end in the imagination, not in the fact, as if the imagination had filled in the gaps between facts with more facts, whereas only fancies are there. All stories ought to end unsatisfactorily.
A month later I had a page, and I completed the piece at some unspecified time in 1957.
I write down these dates, now, and gaze across these temporal gaps with a kind of dumb wonder, because I am compelled to acknowledge again the absurd manner in which my stories have been shovelled together: hodge against podge, like those cathedrals which have Baroque porches, Gothic naves, and Romanesque crypts; since the work on them always went slowly; time passed, then passed again, bishops and princes lost interest; funds ran out; men died; shells shattered their radiant windows; they became victims of theft, fire, priests, architects, wind; and because they were put in service while they were still being built, the pavement was gone, the pillars in a state of lurch, by the time the dome was ready for its gilt or the tower for its tolling bell; so the difficulty for me was plain enough: as an author I naturally desired to change, develop, grow, while each story in its turn wanted the writer who’d begun it to stick around like a faithful father to the end. This dilemma, like drink, nearly destroyed the work of Malcolm Lowry. The absurdity enlarges like the nose of a clown, too, when one realizes that the structure which eventually gets mortared and plastered and hammered together more nearly resembles some maison de convenence than even the most modest church. Still, needs are served as much by the humble and ridiculous as by the lordly and sublime.
In any event, it became necessary (it is always necessary) to rewrite earlier sections of whatever I found myself finally trapped in, according to the standards and style of the part presently underway; because, though time may appear to pass within a story, the story itself must seem to have leaked like a blot from a single shake of the pen.