AGAINST THIS AGE

AGAINST THIS AGE

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

BONI AND LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS   :   :   NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To
FEDYA AND MINNA
FOUR EYES WITHIN A BLIND WORLD

Some of the poems in this book have appeared in
The Century, The Bookman, The Nation, The Dial,
The Menorah Journal, Broom, The Double Dealer,
Shadowland, and Harper’s Magazine.

[8]

[9]

AGAINST THIS AGE

[10]

A Sonnet Dedicated to T. S. Eliot

He knew that he was dead because his fingers had forgotten the art of touching and were trying to regain their ability. They were no longer able to separate different textures and surfaces, and everything held to them a preposterous smoothness that suggested an urbane, impenetrable sophistry. With a methodical despair they gripped one object after another, disputing the integrity of their condition, and when at last they capitulated he accepted the verity of his death. So far he had not sought to use his eyes or ears—he had existed only as a limited intensity of thought and emotion that directed his hands in a fight for variations in feeling. Now he discovered his sight, and in that moment avalanches of metaphors and similes—the detailed disguises and comparisons with which two eyes arbitrarily brand a comforting distinctness upon a mystery—rushed from his head and arranged themselves to form a world. This was a reversal of life, since in life the human eye detects and reflects the objects around it, as all good scientists will testify, and does not first project these objects and afterwards reflect them. But this man, being dead, found that his eyes had thrown myriads of determinations upon a shapeless mass and changed it to an equal number of still and animated forms. The desires within his eyes were continually altering the objects around them, so that a tree became shifting plausibilities of design and a red rose was merely an obedient chameleon. Of course, this could never have happened in life, since in life different shapes hold a fixed contour, appearance, and meaning, but this man was fortunate enough to be dead, so his eyes meddled incorrigibly with the shapes and colors which they imagined that they had made.

[64]He sat in a room constructed by himself, and after he had become conscious of the result he saw that it was a hotel-room located in Detroit, Michigan. He examined the furniture, walls, and floor, and they were to him the firmness of his imagination divided into forms that sheltered the different needs within him. If he had still been alive he would have accepted the reality of shapes made by the majority-imaginations of other men, regardless of whether they pleased him or not, but death had given him a more audacious vigor and the room in which he was sitting did not resemble to his eyes the same chamber in which he had once reclined during his living hours. He knew that the power of his desire had returned him to a hotel-room in Detroit, Michigan, and had disarranged everything except its location and exact position. The floor was an incandescent white and suggested a proudly prostrate expanse—it did not have the supine appearance that pine and oak floors hold to the eyes of life. The furniture had lost its guise of being too economically pinned down by curves and angles, and its lines were more relaxed and disordered. The chairs were comfortable without relinquishing an aesthetic sincerity of line—a semblance scarcely ever held by chairs that figure in life—and the top of the table was not flat but depressed and elevated in different places, since the imagination of this dead man had dared to become more unobstructed. The bed had an air of counseling as well as supporting, and its posters were high and curved in above the center of a gently sloping bowl that formed the bottom. Also, the walls of the room stood with a lighter erectness in place of the rooted, martinet aspect that walls present to living eyes, while the ceiling gave an impression of cloth that could be easily flung aside and had not been spread by a passion for flat concealment.

[65]As the dead man sat in this room which he had revised, his memory began to distribute pains throughout his brain, and he realized that the room had dominated the last third of his life. The room had been the scene of his final meeting with a woman whom he loved, for a week later she had died after being thrown from a horse. Within this room they had spoken and touched for the last time on earth, and afterwards the room had become to him a square world isolated in a possibly round world—a continent in quality and not in size, where he could disrupt the imaginative lines fashioned by other men, changing a rose to an intellectual face if he so desired. Every visual detail and remembered word of the woman had merged to a guardian silence, enclosing this separate world with alert sentinels of understanding. He recollected these affirmations with the satisfaction of a transforming creator, for his experiences had become fantasies which his memory strove to make real. This was, however, the result of his death for, as all good men will tell you, the memory of living beings is entirely different and often adds inaccurate touches to the reality of experience, making this reality fantastic and untrue.

His sense of hearing revived almost simultaneously with his memory, for hearing is the foremost aid in a capture of past happenings since its productions do not fade from the mind as rapidly as those of other senses. He found that his hearing was inextricably a part of thought and signified, indeed, the fragmentary release of thought, and this alteration drove from him every vestige of disbelief in his death, for he knew that in life hearing is almost always the sense used by men to divert the fatigue of their minds (the servant of meaningless ecstasies). Then his sense of smell, changed from an unseen drug to a floating search, collided with[66] the odor of a woman—an odor that was less smooth and more candid than the natural ones held by women who are alive. Turning his head to the left, for the first time, he saw that the woman whom he loved was seated near him. Her naked body still gave the appearance of flesh curved as it had been during her life, but it was no longer a slyly prisoned invitation to his sense of touch. It aroused within him a feeling of thinly langourous intimacy and became a visible grave into which his thoughts could sink for future resurrection. It was as though a desire, once coarse and reeking with a defeated violence, had been transmuted to a longing for less fleeting and frantic pressures, while one former thrill became more diffused and deliberately sensitive, finding a possession to which the sense of touch was incidental, and not inevitable. The hemispheres of her breasts, imperfect and firm, and the long taperings of her limbs were to him forms which he wanted to envelope carefully with earnest refinements of motion, gaining in this way a less explanatory medium for his mind, and anything resembling an invasion would have seemed to him an abruptly senseless blunder. He saw that her face was still a gathering of boyish bewilderments beneath a mass of hair that had grown more cloudy, but these expressions were hugged by a light that made them unnecessary survivals of experience. He secured the impression that death was amusing itself with the trivialities of her features, while they held a perfect comprehension of the jest without abandoning their outward shapes. At this moment he became aware of the nakedness of his own body and felt the loss of that snug assurance which his skin had once given him. In its place there was a sheath that seemed hardly more than a visual flutter.

He looked up at the woman and their smiles were[67] adeptly synchronized. Living people are apt to smile when they have hidden too little and weep when there is nothing left to hide, but the smiles of this dead man and woman were informal exercises of candour—thought adopting more perceptible and less evasive signals.

“Have you been sitting here since your death?” he asked. “No, I’ve also been creating on the streets of Detroit,” she said. “You manage it in this way. First you drive all of the alertness out of your senses and your mind, and everything around you becomes a vibrating, shapeless substance, a little thicker than mist and hued with a gray that is almost colorless. Then you give a moderate vigor to your senses and your mind, and the substance breaks into hosts of shapes. You have attained the perceptions of an ordinary, living person and you find that you are walking on a street. During all of this time you have held back the strength of your imagination, which is alone real, but now you release it and it shoots from you and follows the commands of your desires. An old man’s whiskers change to a weedy sprouting of thought, and each hair is the dangling of a different idea. You can see the decay of an empire crowding itself into a young girl’s green and mean hat, and different events emerge and group themselves to seize or obliterate the color. A woman’s leg becomes a fat blasphemy and within its shaking famous jelly you can spy a saint, writhing in the effort to free himself. A young man’s shoulders are two, dead, delicate thoughts caught in a bulging tomb, with their ghosts speaking through each unconscious movement of his arms. The street-pavement lives and is a hard, detached hatred, sapping the strength of those who have enslaved it.... Sometimes I’ve returned to this room, not to rest, for weariness springs only from that thick weakness of imagination known as flesh, but to find you here before the final emphasis of your death.”

[68]“Since I’m not accustomed to being dead I must ask questions whose answers are obvious to you,” he said. “Why are living beings unable to see you? How do you avoid their jostling and the rolling devices that they have made? How can we sit in a hotel-room, which must at the same time be occupied by living beings, without seeing or hearing them? Treat me as an earthly school-boy for a moment.”

“Living beings dwell in realms made by their imaginations,” she said. “We do not fit into these realms and consequently we are not forms that can be detected by the senses and imaginations of people who are alive. The desires of these people have created a world of objects and substantiations which does not match our own, and so our world is an independent one placed over the world of living men. With different intensities and designs of imagination we invade a shapeless substance and give it the elaborate distinctness of our longings. This substance is inert imagination, and when we make our senses and minds blank we become a part of it. Of course, I use the word imagination because death has not yet taught me a better one. Beyond the earth there are stars and space which are not controlled and shaped by our individual imaginations, and when the feet of our imaginations become light enough to rise beyond the shapeless mass which gave birth to them, we shall discover what greater imaginations in turn gave birth to the feeble beginning which formed us. And so we shall be able to discard this word, imagination, which only represents the boundaries of our desire and its attendant senses and thoughts, and gain the words of greater explanations. But before we depart from these boundaries we must make ourselves entirely clear and untroubled, and it will be necessary for us to reconstruct the last meeting that we had during our lifetimes. This meeting[69] troubles us with an unfulfillment of imagination, and if we do not alter it the strength of our imaginations will be hampered by a recollection of former weakness. All men and women who die must return to the most swiftly vivid scene that their imaginations were able to attain during the period known as life. In this way the scene is gradually made perfect by understanding, and the imagination, shaking off the terror of past weakness and indecision, is able to float away from the substance that created it. Because our imaginations were much stronger than the ones surrounding them, we can achieve this task immediately, while other dead people must slowly grapple for this emancipation, visiting their scene in those guises which living people call ghosts.”

“You must direct me,” he said. “I was never much in harmony with the imaginative semblances and rituals of most living people, and now that I am dead I can scarcely remember them.”

“Make your senses heavy and tight,” she said. “Reduce them to a condition that approaches a stupor—a hopeful stupor such as prevails among those living men known as mystics and priests. When you have accomplished this, make little rows of imaginative objects and force your mind to squeeze itself within them, adoring some and hating others. Then try to arouse your senses by concentrating them upon a thickly plotting form that once was flesh, while still making them retain a disturbing trace of their former coma. You remember this form—separated into hairsbreadths of worship and laceration by stunted men?”

“Your description of living imagination is perfect,” he said. “It will be minutely disagreeable to follow your orders, but let us complete the task quickly.”

They looked away from each other, immersed in the[70] strain of their inner labours. The room disappeared in large pieces that receded to the background of a gray substance, and consciousness left their bodies. Her body faded out while his solidified to flesh draped by the clumsy fears of clothes. Then the gray substance slowly adopted the shapes, colours, and details of a railroad station. Once more he was a suffering and encumbered poet, standing in the battling race of people and waiting for the train that would bring her to Detroit, Michigan. He paced up and down the cement platform, erasing his thoughts with the long strokes of his limbs and obsessed only by the belief that he was walking nearer to her in this fashion, since he was weary of being over-awed by distance. Because he did not associate her qualities and thoughts with those of other people he could never convince himself that she was real unless she stood beside him and spoke, and when her body was absent she became the unreal confirmation of his desires—a dream to which he had given the plausible tricks of flesh and voice. Only the return of these two things could reassure him, for she was to him far too delicately exact and mentally unperturbed to exist actually in the sweating, dense, malaria-saturated revolutions of a world.

The train arrived and he stood near the gate. People streamed out—a regiment disbanded after a lonely and forced conflict with thought in uncomfortable seats, or with diluted chatter that fascinated their inner emptiness. They were the people whose vast insistence and blundering control of the earth made him doubt the reality of the woman whom he loved. Oh, to feel once more certain that she was human—that her incredibly tenuous aloofness could stoop to the shields of flesh! Yes, she would come now, an alien straggler passively submitting to the momentum of a regiment of people. When she failed[71] to appear he still lingered near the gate, inventing practical reasons for her absence—the packing of baggage, a delayed toilette. The iron gates shut with a thud that was to him the boot-sound of reality against his head.

He bought a newspaper; sat down in the waiting-room; and sought to submerge his distress in the hasty and distorted versions of murders, robberies, scandals, controversies, and machinations that defiled white sheets of paper. But he could see nothing save a hazy host of men fighting against or accepting the complexly sinister fever that made them mutilate each other, and weary of this often-repeated vision he dropped the paper. His mind gathered itself to that tight and aching lunge known as emotion, and morbidly he involved her in disasters—train-wrecks, suicide, the assault of another person. He began to feel that melodrama was the only overwhelming sincerity in a tangle of crafty or poorly adjusted disguises, and his emotional activity fed eagerly upon this belief. All of the paraphernalia of fatalism rose before his eyes—the small, lit stage with its puppets; the myriads of strings extending into a frame of darkness and pulled by invisible hands; the sudden and prearranged descent of catastrophe; the laughter of an audience of gods, examining the spectacle with a mixture of sardonic and bored moments. But abruptly he felt that these were merely the devices of a self-pity that sought to raise its stature by imagining itself the victim of a sublime conspiracy. He whistled some bars of a popular song, deliberately snatching at an inane relief from the industries of his mind. Then he walked back to the gates and waited for the next train, which was about to arrive. Once more the importantly fatigued stream of people; once more her absence. He had turned away from the gate when her hand questioned his shoulder.

[72]“And so you are real and I have not been deceived,” he said.

“I am as real as you care to make me,” she answered. “I was hunting for a comb in my valise when the train came in. Combs always elude me.”

She mentioned the name of a hotel and they walked to it in silence, for speech to them demanded an impregnable privacy that was violated by even the swiftly passing eyes and ears of other people. When they were alone in the hotel-room he watched her remove outer garments and don a kimono, with a pleasure that coerced sensual longing into an enslaved contemplation—a fire that glowed without burning.

“When I see your flesh then you are most unreal,” he said. “It becomes a last garment that you have neglected to unfasten because you wish to pretend that you belong to the earth. The cupped appeal of your breasts is the subtle lie with which something infinitely abstract evades the weight of a world. There is a surprised element attached to your legs and they never seem assured in their task of supporting your torso. And yet, when your body is beyond my actual sight your reality is still doubtful, for then I lack even the uncertain evidence of your flesh. I am helpless—I cannot mingle you with cities and men, and even country roads seem heavily unwilling to hold you.”

“And is it impossible for you to accept this body as a necessary, insincere contrast to my thoughts and emotions?” she asked, with lightness. “You are tensely morbid, Max. Now I shall sit on your knee. The scene is prearranged. You must promptly clutch me, in that involved manner that has made novelists famous and blurred the integrity of poets. The earth has anointed and pointed riots waiting for you!”

His fingers studied the short brown curls on her head[73] and his lips touched the less obvious parts of her face—her chin, the tip of her inwardly curving nose, her temples, the meeting-place of forehead and hair.

“I can see two men looking at me now,” he said. “To one I am an emasculated fool who places a dainty overtone upon his weakness, and to the other I am chaining strong desires with the lies of vain and pretty gestures. Olga, the earth is bulky and profane, and dreads anything that delicately, aloofly disputes its size!”

She carefully fitted her head between his shoulder and neck.

“This listening peace that you bring me, and the softer intentions of your hands, they are more important than the lunges of men,” she said. “We are spontaneous in ways whose breathlike intensity has not been corrupted by the screaming of nerves, and Oh, we must prepare ourselves for the indifference and ridicules of a coarser audience. They cannot peer into this room, yet afterwards something within the buoyant removal of our bodies tells them to punish us with poverty and little food.”

He grinned, and crowded flights of defiance were on his face.

“I’ve been eating onions and bread for the last week,” he said. “I cut the onions into various shapes, making them resemble different articles of food. With an imaginative seriousness one can almost overcome the sense of taste. Almost.”

“It is only that word that keeps us here,” she said. “We are almost free illusions.”

She walked to the bureau and brushed her hair, for she did not want him to see an expression on her face. He guessed it and became repentantly merry.

“Sold a poem two weeks ago,” he said. “The editor wrote something about ‘great originality but rather tenuous’ and ‘this is not a spiritual age.’ It isn’t.”

[74]“Let me hear it,” she said.

It concerned a circle of men dumped into chairs in the lobby of a cheap lodging-house—rag-dolls twitching now and then, as though an outside hand were poking them with curiosity. Then the spirit of the lodging-house, sallow and indecently shallow, sidled into the lobby, correctly aimed its tobacco at a spitoon, and gave the dolls snores to create a false appearance of life, whereupon one of them rose and cursed the invisible intruder in his sleep. The spirit of the lodging-house, frightened and angry at the appearance of a soul whose existence it had not imagined, whisked them all off to the torture of their beds. The poem had spoken to Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky but within it a stunned hatred of the world was experimenting with appropriate symbols.

“Irrelevantly, perhaps, I’m thinking of a time when I washed dishes in a lunch-room in St. Louis,” she said. “I was hunting in my mind for something that could deceive the greasy monotone of defiled chinaware. Suddenly the brown and turbid dish-water became a heavy wine, spiced with the aftermaths of earthly pleasures—decay to which a spiritual release had given a liquid significance. I became obsessed by the verity of this idea, and finally, quite entranced, I raised the pan of dirty water to my lips and was about to drink it when, at that moment, the proprietor came in. He squawked ‘crazee-e,’ ‘crazee-e,’ and discharged me. I wrote an excellent poem about it, though.”

“Let’s see, what would they say about this,” he muttered. “Neurasthenia, insanity, exalted paranoia, minor conceit, trivial pose, empty fantasy—they have so many putrid labels to hide the inner rage, damn them!”

They swayed together in the chair, like two babies in a trap, taking the small amount of room possible in the cramped abode.

[75]“Tomorrow we’ll look for work,” she said. “The breath-tablets that you bought to hide the scent of onions have not been able to eradicate a last melodramatic trace of their enemy. We must move our arms to ward off such meaningless intrusions.”

“With an excellent verbosity you mock the concentration of your thoughts,” he said.

They closed their eyes and grew still in the chair. When at last they stirred, each one looked first at the room and then at the other person, with a gradually slain disbelief.

“We are not dead after all,” he cried. “The room does not fade away!”

They sat without moving, while happiness and sadness sprang into combat within them.