'Sure. I don't mean anything when I curse him.'
'What about staying in the blind all day?'
'The damned wind started to go round in a circle. It blew our scent
every direction. No use to sit there broadcasting it. If the damn wind would
hold. Abdullah took an ash can to-day.'
'I saw him starting off with it.'
'There wasn't a bit of wind when we stalked the salt and there was just
light to shoot. He tried the wind with the ashes all the way. I went alone
with Abdullah and left the others behind and we went quietly. I had on these
crepe-soled boots and it's soft cotton dirt. The bastard spooked at fifty
yards.
'Did you ever see their ears?'
'Did I ever see their ears? If I can see his ears, the skinner can work
on him.'
'They're bastards,' Pop said. 'I hate this salt-lick business. They're
not as smart as we think. The trouble is you're working on them where they
are smart. They've been shot at there ever since there's been salt.'
'That's what makes it fun,' I said. 'I'd be glad to do it for a month.
I like to hunt sitting on my tail. No sweat. No nothing. Sit there and catch
flies and feed them to the ant lions in the dust. I like it. But what about
the time?'
'That's it. The time.'
'So,' Kandisky was saying to my wife. 'That is what you should see. The
big {ngomas}. The big native dance festivals. The real ones.'
'Listen,' I said to Pop. 'The other lick, the one I was at last night,
is fool-proof except for being near that {bloody} road.'
'The trackers say it is really the property of the lesser kudu. It's a
long way too. It's eighty miles there and back.'
'I know. But there were four {big} bull tracks. It's certain. If it
wasn't for that lorry last night. What about staying there to-night! Then
I'd get the night and the early morning and give this lick a rest. There's a
big rhino there too. Big track, anyway.'
'Good,' Pop said. 'Shoot the rhino too.' He hated to have anything
killed except what we were after, no killing on the side, no ornamental
killing, no killing to kill, only when you wanted it more than you wanted
not to kill it, only when getting it was necessary to his being first in his
trade, and I saw he was offering up the rhino to please me.
'I won't kill him unless he's good,' I promised.
'Shoot the bastard,' Pop said, making a gift of him.
'Ah, Pop,' I said.
'Shoot him,' said Pop. 'You'll enjoy it, being by yourself. You can
sell the horn if you don't want it. You've still one on your licence. '
'So,' said Kandisky. 'You have arranged a plan of campaign? You have
decided on how to outwit the poor animals?'
'Yes,' I said. 'How is the lorry?'
'That lorry is finished,' the Austrian said. 'In a way I am glad. It
was too much of a symbol. It was all that remained of my {shamba}. Now
everything is gone and it is much simpler.'
'What is a shamba?' asked P.O.M., my wife. 'I've been hearing about
them for months. I'm afraid to ask about those words every one uses.'
'A plantation,' he said. 'It is all gone except that lorry. With the
lorry I carry labourers to the shamba of an Indian. It is a very rich Indian
who raises sisal. I am a manager for this Indian. An Indian can make a
profit from a sisal shamba.'
'From anything,' Pop said.
'Yes. Where we fail, where we would starve, he makes money. This Indian
is very intelligent, however. He values me. I represent European
organization. I come now from organizing recruitment of the natives. This
takes time. It is impressive. I have been away from my family for three
months. The organization is organized. You do it in a week as easily, but it
is not so impressive.'
'And your wife?' asked mine.
'She waits at my house, the house of the manager, with my daughter.'
'Does she love you very much?' my wife asked.
'She must, or she would be gone long ago.'
'How old is the daughter?'
'She is thirteen now.'
'It must be very nice to have a daughter.'
'You cannot know how nice it is. It is like a second wife. My wife
knows now all I think, all I say, all I believe, all I can do, all that I
cannot do and cannot be. I know also about my wife -- completely. But now
there is always someone you do not know, who does not know you, who loves
you in ignorance and is strange to you both. Some one very attractive that
is yours and not yours and that makes the conversation more -- how shall I
say? Yes, it is like -- what do you call -- having here with you -- with the
two of you -- yes there -- it is the Heinz Tomato Ketchup on the daily
food.'
'That's very good,' I said.
'We have books,' he said. 'I cannot buy new books now but we can always
talk. Ideas and conversation are very interesting. We discuss all things.
Everything. We have a very interesting mental life. Formerly, with the
shamba, we had the {Querschnitt}. That gave you a feeling of belonging, of
being made a part of, to a very brilliant group of people. The people one
would see if one saw whom one wished to see. You know all of those people?
You must know them.'
'Some of them.' I said. 'Some in Paris. Some in Berlin.'
I did not wish to destroy anything this man had, and so I did not go
into those brilliant people in detail.
'They're marvellous,' I said, lying.
'I envy you to know them,' he said. 'And tell me, who is the greatest
writer in America?'
'My husband,' said my wife.
'No. I do not mean for you to speak from family pride. I mean who
really? Certainly not Upton Sinclair. Certainly not Sinclair Lewis. Who is
your Thomas Mann? Who is your Valery?'
'We do not have great writers,' I said. 'Something happens to our good
writers at a certain age. I can explain but it is quite long and may bore
you.'
'Please explain,' he said. 'This is what I enjoy. This is the best part
of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu.'
'You haven't heard it yet,' I said.
'Ah, but I can see it coming. You must take more beer to loosen your
tongue.'
'It's loose,' I told him. 'It's always too loose. But {you} don't drink
anything.'
'No, I never drink. It is not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But
tell me. Please tell me.'
'Well,' I said, 'we have had, in America, skilful writers. Poe is a
skilful writer. It is skilful, marvellously constructed, and it is dead. We
have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a
chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things,
can be, whales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric
like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone, unwrapped in
pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it,
praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in
which is not there.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I see. But it is the mind working, its ability to
work, which makes the rhetoric. Rhetoric is the blue sparks from the
dynamo.'
'Sometimes. And sometimes it is only blue sparks, and what is the
dynamo driving?'
'So. Go on.'
'I've forgotten.'
'No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid.'
'Did you ever get up before daylight...'
'Every morning,' he said. 'Go on.'
'All right. There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials
from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they
were making. Very good men with the small, dried, and excellent wisdom of
Unitarians; men of letters, Quakers with a sense of humour.'
'Who were these?'
'Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who
did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the
classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better
than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are
only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive
from or resemble a previous classic. Also all these men were gentlemen, or
wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words
that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language.
Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice,
dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that
you ask for it.'
'Go on.'
'There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau.
I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But
that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are
being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone
and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should
work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and
not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All
angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from
their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art,
sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the
bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not
woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their
lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her
that makes the rest unimportant.'
'But what about Thoreau?'
'You'll have to read him. Maybe I'll be able to later. I can do nearly
everything later.'
'Better have some more beer, Papa.'
'All right.'
'What about the good writers?'
'The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain.
That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.'
'Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.'
'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain
called {Huckleberry Finn}. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim
is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.
But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.'
'What about the others?'
'Crane wrote two fine stories. {The Open Boat} and {The --Blue Hotel}.
The last one is the better.'
'And what happened to him?'
'He died. That's simple. He was dying from the start.'
'But the other two?'
'They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they
got older. I don't know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers
into something very strange.'
'I do not understand.'
'We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It
is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make
money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase
their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up
their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is
slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there
is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then,
once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop.
Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say
they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and
they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write
because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote,
sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would
be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and
they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote.
They weren't masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So
now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.'
'Who are these writers?'
'Their names would mean nothing to you and by now they may have
written, become frightened, and be impotent again.'
'But what is it that happens to American writers? Be definite.'
'I was not here in the old days so I cannot tell you about them, but
now there are various things. At a certain age the men writers change into
Old Mother Hubbard. The women writers become Joan of Arc without the
fighting. They become leaders. It doesn't matter who they lead. If they do
not have followers they invent them. It is useless for those selected as
followers to protest. They are accused of disloyalty. Oh, hell. There are
too many things happen to them. That is one thing. The others try to save
their souls with what they write. That is an easy way out. Others are ruined
by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they
find they cannot write, or the first time they cannot do anything else, or
else they get frightened and join organizations that do their thinking for
them. Or they do not know what they want. Henry James wanted to make money.
He never did, of course.'
'And you?'
'I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write
because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my
life.'
'And what do you want?'
'To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I
have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned
good life.'
'Hunting kudu?'
'Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things.'
'What other things?'
'Plenty of other things.'
'And you know what you want?'
'Yes.'
'You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?'
'Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.'
'One is not better than the other?'
'One is as necessary as the other. There are other things, too.'
'Naturally. There must be. But this sort of thing means something to
you, really?'
'Truly.'
'And you know what you want?'
'Absolutely, and I get it all the time.'
'But it takes money.'
'I could always make money, and besides I have been very lucky.'
'Then you are happy?'
'Except when I think of other people.'
'Then you think of other people?'
'Oh, yes.'
'But you do nothing for them?'
'No.'
'Nothing?'
'Maybe a little.'
'Do you think your writing is worth doing -- as an end in itself?'
'Oh, yes.'
'You are sure?'
'Very sure.'
'That must be very pleasant.'
'It is,' I said. 'It is the one altogether pleasant thing about it.'
'This is getting awfully serious,' my wife said.
'It's a damned serious subject.'
'You see, he is really serious about something,'
Kandisky said. 'I knew he must be serious on something besides kudu.'
'The reason everyone now tries to avoid it, to deny that it is
important, to make it seem. vain to try to do it, is because it is so
difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible.'
'What is this now?'
'The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if
anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension
that can be gotten.'
'You believe it?'
'I know it.'
'And if a writer can get this?'
'Then nothing else matters. It is more important than anything he can
do. The chances are, of course, that he will fail. But there is a chance
that he succeeds.'
'But that is poetry you are talking about.'
'No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has
never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without
cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.'
'And why has it not been written?'
'Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much
talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The
discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be
and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to
prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and
above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him
come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing,
because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. But I
would like us to have such a writer and to read what he would write. What do
you say? Should we talk about something else?'
'It is interesting what you say. Naturally I do not agree with
everything.'
'Naturally.'
'What about a gimlet?' Pop asked. 'Don't you think a gimlet might
help?'
'Tell me first what are the things, the actual, concrete things that
harm a writer?'
I was tired of the conversation which was becoming an interview. So I
would make it an interview and finish it. The necessity to put a thousand
intangibles into a sentence, now, before lunch, was too bloody.
'Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics,
women, drink, money and ambition,' I said profoundly.
'He's getting much too easy now,' Pop said.
'But drink. I do not understand about that. That has always seemed
silly to me. I understand it as a weakness.'
'It is a way of ending a day. It has great benefits. Don't you ever
want to change your ideas?'
'Let's have one,' Pop said. 'M'Wendi!'
Pop never drank before lunch except as a mistake and I knew he was