It is quite possible, perhaps even probable, that one of the dedicated martyrs-to-be performed precisely the same hidden act — Allah notwithstanding — that the dead infidel salesman did, save, of course, for the heart attack. Let’s place the intense youth in a Great Western motel during, oh, his fifth or sixth week in the land of the Great Satan. He is standing in front of the mirror in his black sateen panties. Black panties! Evil and foul and cursed underwear made for depraved American women who, half-naked, are everywhere before one’s eyes. This young warrior had never even seen a picture of these sinful garments before he arrived in Duluth, he could not even imagine them, and here they were, by the hundreds, the thousands, in black, white, and colors, colors. They hang in plain view in Target and Sears, Penney’s and Wal-Mart, Macy’s and Ward’s, there, right there, so that anyone, even this young unsmiling zealot may buy them. Even this gloomy, rigid, sincere man, purified of all desire save the desire for a martyr’s death, may buy them. He thinks that he might buy a pair or two so as to have before his eyes a proof of American corruption and evil. His mind goes black, the truth of his apostate lust is therein buried, and, flushed, holding two pairs of these impossible wisps before him, he says to the salesgirclass="underline" “I like to buy this pretty things for my wife now please.” He takes the plastic bag, turns and leaves, burning, his closeted scenario forming in his mind, dark and silent and obscure, hidden from the decrees of the stern faithful, peace be upon them. The flesh is weak, weak, the mind a sequestered vault, airless and without light.
The young man is standing in front of the mirror in his degenerate garment, dizzy with pleasure, trembling, half-mad with fear of God’s wrath; but God, in whatever mournful guise, is, as always, nowhere to be discovered.
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Even in healthy persons, egotistic, jealous and hostile feelings and impulses, burdened by the pressure of moral education, often utilize the path of faulty actions to express in some way their undeniably existing force.… The manifold sexual currents play no insignificant part in these repressed feelings.
I knew some of the minor details of the following narrative — if I may so distinguish the somewhat rickety account that follows — but its basic elements were told me, casually and indifferently, by three or four people, no one of whom knew the whole story. This did not prevent them from attempting to fill in its sudden blanks, so as to make the story cohere, so to say, or, at any rate, achieve a sort of balance — despite the fact that there seems little balance to its particulars. And although its meanderings, its often sad climaxes and anticlimaxes, are often banal, there is a pathos, I think, at the story’s center, that attracted me, so much so that I found myself also manipulating its events by elaborating its lapses, clarifying its obscurities. I flatter myself that I have somewhat improved the tale, which may be another way of saying that I think I have made it representatively “American,” although I’d be hard put to define what I mean by that. There are scenes in this account that may strike the reader as fantastic or melodramatic, or, more often, absurdly convenient to the unfolding needs or desires of the people involved. These incidents are sometimes, but by no means always, my inventions; many are details given me by my “witnesses.” Which is not to say that they are not their inventions. At one point, I considered employing a simple gimmick whereby I could differentiate, for the reader, those elements of the story given me by others from those I invented or adorned. But this, or so I thought, would needlessly clutter the narrative with literary impedimenta.
It may be useful to remark that these events occurred in 1960, and while the specific nuances of feeling manifested by the “characters,” let me call them, might well manifest themselves in our postmodern era of knowingness, of amateurish license, it’s unlikely. Our time seems too overtly self-congratulatory, righteous and fretful and worriedly concerned not only that “hip” things must be known, but that the responses to knowing these “hip” things be the correct ones. So: 1960, March, to be precise.
Let’s put the center of events in a publishing house or advertising agency or public-relations company. Some business on the East Side in the Forties or Fifties. We have, working in this business, two young men, Campbell and Nick. Both are just short of thirty, both married about five or six years (although Nick and his wife are newly separated), both waiting, although they of course do not know this, for the sixties to take up and complete the bloody job begun in 1936 in Spain. They were living, that is, in the odd social somnambulism that was later thought, perhaps predictably, to be a cultural “ferment.”
Nick worked for Campbell in a small but important department of the firm, but after a time, since they were both given to and comfortable with collaboration, they began to function as equals, and so they thought of themselves. They were wholly different — in family, background, education, upbringing, class, and in their tastes in music and clothes, in their speech, in everything that is established by family and background and class, etc., etc., or by opposition — of the right sort — to them. Campbell was a “child of privilege,” a faded phrase, of course, much like the genteel but spent “man of slender means,” which latter he also nicely was. That is to say that Campbell’s family at this point had little of the wealth it had once enjoyed, and that their name was its gallant but inadequate substitute. Things had become even harder when his mother and father divorced, soon after Campbell’s twelfth birthday, for his apparently scatterbrain mother had no money of her own, and his father’s generous settlement on her had been squandered on clothes and jewelry and many ga-ga trips to God knows where; and his alimony payments were far less than what his mother needed to live as she wished — or, as she thought of it, deserved — to live. Campbell’s expenses had been “taken care of,” he’d gone from Andover to Princeton, after which his father’s finances became unaccountably arcane and subterranean, almost, so his attorney argued, nonexistent. Soon after Princeton, Campbell had married a young Englishwoman, Faith, who was, supposedly, an heiress to a huge ale-and-stout fortune, that of a company old and profitable enough to have had presented to its founding Welsh family the trappings, raiment, and decorations of the elite. This fortune turned out to be a fable, but at the time of the story I relate, Campbell didn’t know this; nor, for that matter, did Faith. How hopeful and wistful they must have been in their fresh young marriage, thinking but not daring to think of the wonderfully corrupting fortune that awaited them. It occurs to me that these fantasy monies might have influenced, in some tangential, “mysterious” way, Campbell’s — and perhaps Faith’s — behavior in the events that were soon to develop; but there’s no way of knowing, of course.