The Mirror Thief(135)

Sure, Stanley says. I guess. I guess anybody who ever kills anybody thinks he’s defending himself from something. Last year I threw a guy off a roof. That’s the two I know about. There’s other guys I hurt real bad in fights who maybe died and I don’t know. Last year I was on this burglary where this cop got shot, so according to the law I killed him too. That’s mostly the reason I had to leave New York.

Welles steps over the little table, then sits on it, facing Stanley. Stanley doesn’t look up. Why do you want me to know these things? Welles says. Why are you telling me this?

You probably think, Stanley says, that I’m just a smart kid who liked your book, and who maybe got some funny ideas from it. I don’t blame you for thinking that. In your shoes, it’s what I’d think, too. But what I want you to understand, I guess, is that I have seen and done some pretty f*cked-up stuff in my life, excuse me, and I have been through a hell of a lot to get out here, and there are some questions that I would really like to get some answers to, Mister Welles. Now, maybe you don’t know the answers. Or maybe you knew ’em once, and then you forgot. But I been thinking a lot about something you said the other night, about how a book can know more than whoever wrote it. Because I think your book knows, Mister Welles. I think it knows that this kind of magic is really possible.

Welles looks at him for a long time, leaning close. For a while Stanley thinks Welles is going to touch him, put a hand on his leg, and he wonders how he’ll handle that. Then Welles speaks.

That book, he says, is now entirely perplexing to me. It took me ten years to write it. Did I tell you that? I started it in Italy, during the war, when I was still relatively young. At the time I had—or I thought I had—a clear sense of how to proceed, of what form it would take. I felt as though I were standing on a mountaintop, looking down on the valleys and forests through which I would pass in the days to come. Straightforward enough, it seemed. But of course it’s very different when you’re inside the dark wood, beset by briars and quicksand, distracted by meanders, fearful of wolves and brigands and god knows what else, unable at any given moment to see more than a few feet ahead. By the time I finished it I had forgotten largely why I’d begun, what I had wanted it to be in the first place, why I’d been interested in it at all. I don’t mean to be evasive, or to flatter you, when I say that you have a better sense than I do of what it’s about.

Stanley opens his mouth to reply, but Welles is off again, speaking in a torrent, rising from his seat, leaving his empty beerbottle on the table. He seems eager to forget what Stanley just confessed. The whole house shifts and groans as he crosses the deck.

It wasn’t just my conception of the book that changed, he says. It was my belief about writing itself, about what it means to write. As I said before, I abandoned early on the notion of poem-as-incantation. I adopted instead a scarcely less romantic theory that poetry is a sort of lovemaking—a series of gestures designed to produce in another a release, an orgasm, an egoless rapture—and hopefully also some corresponding pleasure in oneself. But I eventually came to realize that this analogy is not apt. Because the pleasure of the other is deferred, you see. And because it happens at a distance. The experience is not shared. You evidently derived some pleasure from my book, and I am gratified by that. But by the time it found you, I had moved on to other concerns. So I am forced to conclude, with Flaubert, that the urge to write is essentially masturbatory. Onanistic. These are hardly new metaphors, of course, but they are rich, and worthy of contemplation.

Welles is at the rail again, leaning on his elbows. His slippered foot taps the base of the woodstained slats. Stanley can tell that he’s not done yet, so he waits, drying his face with the yellow sleeve of his new shirt.

For me, Welles says, it’s like shitting. It really is. To pretend otherwise is stupid. Shit is fertilizer, of course. And shit is prima materia. But to the shitter, it is simply shit. Properly construed, the distance of which I spoke between the writer and the reader—the deferred pleasure—is no impediment to the success of a poem. The poem depends on it, in fact. I imagine, to my great chagrin, that you are learning this even now. You read my book, and in some way it excited your imagination. But when you found its author, you discovered him to be a fat bourgeois, a pompous blowhard, and you realized that he is—as the expression goes—full of shit. The book cannot help but be diminished by this encounter. How much happier for you if I had remained a mystery! How much better if the book could go on existing only as you’d imagined it! Isn’t it the case that the works which most move and inspire us are the most formless—the most irredeemably fecal—that we stumble upon? Because they leave to us the task of completing them, of wringing meaning from them. Because, in so doing, we always encounter ourselves. Their degraded chaos resolves gradually into our own image, projected and made strange. It is ever thus. The reader—not the poet—is the alchemist.

Stanley’s nose and throat are clear now. The night smells sweeter and sharper. He can’t remember the last time he cried like that. Not when his father died, or his grandfather. Maybe when his dad left for Korea. Even then it was only later, alone, when nobody could see. What I want, Stanley says, is to get inside your book. All the way in. I want to tear it apart. I want to know everything Crivano knows, whether you know it yourself or not. I want you to tell me how to figure it out. Where to get started.