CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

On our journey south to save Ignatius Roundtower from the stone prison a magical lizard had shut him in, we stumbled across a pair of ogres who must have been out looking for an easy meal. It was my first experience with real combat and, probably because of that, both Nog and Roystnof told me to stay out of the way. This I did and, after I saw Roystnof strike one down with a lightning bolt, I thought it was all I was going to have to do. But the second ogre surprised us with its ferocity and in an instant I found myself standing between it and the death of my two friends. I had two weapons at my disposal, the shocking grasp spell Roystnof had taught me and the short sword Nog had given me. In all the time I have spent thinking about that one event in my life, I have yet been able to discern exactly what it was that made me choose the sword over the spell.

+ + +

Brisbane spent most of the next day, as usual, with Ternosh in the small chamber where the Grumak had originally conducted the test to see if Brisbane’s blood contained the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye. However, they did not spend most of this time going over the practices and lessons of orkish magic, as they had been doing since Brisbane had been inducted into the klatru. Instead, they spent the time discussing Brisbane’s current position in the clan and what was going to happen after that night’s draknel.

They had two very different opinions. Ternosh, who had alluded to his the night before and reasserted it in the morning, felt Gruumsh One-Eye had truly sent Brisbane to become the clan’s new Sumak, to show them a new kind of battle tactic, and to guide them on the path of victory over their enemies. Because he believed this, he did not think Brisbane had anything to worry about in the upcoming battle with Tornestor. After all, Gruumsh wouldn’t very well send someone to become the new Sumak who could not defeat the old one.

Ternosh had this belief so well burned into him that Brisbane, in his anxiety over facing Tornestor in the pug-trolang, felt safe enough to reveal some of his misgivings about the situation. In effect, for Brisbane, it was time to come clean. He told the Grumak he was firmly convinced Gruumsh One-Eye had not sent him here. He told the Grumak he had no idea what his mission, as spoken of by the Demosk, was and that he had no intention of carrying it out whatever it happened to be. He told the Grumak he did not believe an entity named Gruumsh One-Eye existed. He even told the Grumak the only reason he had spent so much time among them was because he was buying time until he could get his sword back.

Ternosh listened to each of Brisbane’s assertions carefully and, when the human was finished, he passed them all off with a wave of his hand.

“It does not matter what you believe,” the Grumak said. “My Demosk has confirmed Gruumsh has sent you here for some hidden purpose. This information cannot be in error. Your belief is not necessary in the matter. Gruumsh sent you here and here you are. Do you really think we would have left you alive for any other reason?”

“The only reason I’m still alive,” Brisbane said, “is because I can work magic. If I couldn’t, you would have killed me for wearing this symbol.” He pulled his pentacle medallion out from behind his robes.

“This is true,” Ternosh said, “and it only further proves my point. Your magic is a gift from Gruumsh One-Eye, as all magic is. Although you do not have red eyes and as yet have been unable to perform respectable magic, the Demosk has confirmed the taste in your blood and I have seen you work small tricks of your own. Again, your belief of where your power comes from is immaterial. It comes from Gruumsh, and he gave it to you to keep us from accidentally killing you. The logic is inescapable.”

Brisbane listened to the Grumak’s explanation. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”

“Oh yes? When was that?”

“A long time ago,” Brisbane said.

But it was true. For a moment, Ternosh had reminded Brisbane almost painfully of Roystnof. His friend had often talked like that, invoking the almost mystical powers of logic to explain certain situations or policies. Except that when Roystnof had used logic, it had sounded truthful and irrefutable. When Ternosh used it, it sounded crazy. The Grumak said his magic came from Gruumsh One-Eye as if it was a logical fact, and he had no proof to support it. Roystnof said his magic came from within himself as if it was a logical fact, but he too really had no proof to support it. So why did Roystnof’s view seem so much more sensible to Brisbane? Why did he believe Roystnof and not Ternosh? They had both used perfect logic, but each of them had started with a different supposition. Brisbane realized logic could only go so far, that it could be used to argue any point of view at all, and that if you followed it back far enough, eventually you would find a pre-conceived idea or, even worse, a declaration of faith.

Brisbane didn’t know. Did this mean the only use logic had was to prove the unprovable?

He knocked heads with Ternosh for most of the day, not really coming away with anything concrete. Brisbane did not get into any kind of conversation about his reasons for wanting his sword back, afraid of getting too deep into it for many of the same reasons he didn’t discuss it with Smurch. Thankfully, Ternosh did not press the matter, evidently understanding to some degree the commitment he felt to the blade. It was obviously something special, for no one in the clan could draw it from its scabbard. The Grumak did ask Brisbane if, before he had been captured, he had been able to free the weapon.

Brisbane was hesitant in answering but finally told Ternosh he was.

Ternosh shrugged. “Perhaps it is another signal from Gruumsh. A warning to us that you are something special and not to be tampered with. It really doesn’t matter now. The sword belongs to Gruumsh One-Eye, and you will never get it back.”

“I won’t?”

Ternosh shook his head. “I don’t see how you could. The weapon was given in tribute to Gruumsh One-Eye, and every grugan in the clan will defend that to their death. Theft is, at this point, impossible.”

This was much like what Smurch had said to him, yet Angelika was certain, had been certain since this fiasco had begun, that Brisbane would eventually get her back. The problem suddenly was Brisbane wasn’t too sure if he wanted her back. Or, perhaps closer to the truth, he wasn’t too sure what he was ready to do to get her back. He still wanted her back, she was too much a part of him to let go, but her messages to him were souring each time she spoke.

Vengeance, she had said countless time, we must wreak our vengeance for what they have done to you and Amanda. Assuredly, the orks deserved some sort of justice for what they had done, but more and more, Brisbane didn’t feel like he was accomplishing anything. What had he done? He had killed two orks so far, and he had killed them in ways socially acceptable to the rest of the clan. The clan was not suffering for what they had done. The deaths of Wister and Bronsop really meant very little to them. Death was so much a part of life to them that Brisbane could get no sense of revenge out of what he had done. They believed when a warrior was killed in the pug-trolang, it was because he was weak and it had been his time to go.

He was almost tempted to try and discuss this new development with Angelika but, even though he had some time to himself before the evening’s draknel, he decided against it. It didn’t matter much now anyway. He was committed. He couldn’t get out of fighting Tornestor now even if he wanted to. The masokom had been issued. In the customs of the clan, it was in fact Tornestor who was being forced to fight him and not the other way around. Angelika had said if Brisbane could defeat Tornestor in the pug-trolang, the clan would be destroyed and he would get her back. The second promise was motivation enough. Brisbane could only hope her promise was not an empty one.

An hour or so before the draknel, Ternosh wished him well and sent him back to his chamber. At first, Brisbane was thankful for the time alone, thinking it would give him a chance to clear his head, but as it turned out, the time was more detrimental than calming to his state of mind. He tried to relax, laying down on his bed and breathing deeply, but he was just too worked up to get anywhere. There were too many possibilities and open questions. If he had been sure about Angelika’s promises, as he always had been before, then perhaps he could have been calm enough to concentrate on his battle with Tornestor. But as he felt now, he found himself worrying more about what was going to happen after the combat than what was going to happen during it.

He called Smurch into his chamber, to give him someone to talk to and to hopefully take his mind off some of his troubles. But the half-ork was of little help, being full of excitement over the upcoming battle. He was very supportive, wanting only the best for his master, but it wasn’t what Brisbane wanted to discuss. He tried to sidetrack Smurch onto other subjects but either the half-ork was unchangeable or Brisbane’s own mind was too much on the combat, because they always seemed to come back to the fight with Tornestor.

Eventually, Brisbane’s time was up.

Smurch got to his feet. “It is time, Gil. You must now attend this evening’s draknel.”

Brisbane nodded. “I know.”

Smurch helped his master to his feet. “Good luck. The next time I serve you, I hope I will be serving the clan’s new Sumak.”

“Either that or you’ll be burying me,” Brisbane said.

The half-ork gave him a queer look. “Well, that’s true, but I don’t think one in your position should be thinking like that.”

“Why not?”

“Confidence,” Smurch said. “You must have confidence. How do you expect to defeat Tornestor if you cannot win such a simple battle with yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Brisbane said. “I used to have confidence. I don’t know what has happened.”

“Well,” Smurch said. “Best of luck.”

Brisbane looked into the half-ork’s eyes. “Thank you, Jack.”

Smurch nodded. “I’ll see you soon.”

Brisbane slowly left his room and made his way to the banquet chamber. Most of the klatru had already gathered and they were sitting around the table, drinking ale and talking loudly. When Brisbane entered the chamber, a silence fell among them.

Brisbane self-consciously looked at himself when all the orkish eyes stared at him. He was wearing his tunic and trousers, the ones he had been wearing when captured, now freshly cleaned and soft to the skin, under the red and white robes that designated his position in the clan as Grum because, frankly, one way or the other, he was getting out of here tonight. He also saw that his pentacle medallion was lying on the outside of his garments.

When he looked back up at the table, the orks quickly turned their heads away. Brisbane cautiously made his way over to his bench and sat down on the right side of Ternosh. Slowly and quietly, orkish conversation resumed around the stone table.

Ternosh leaned over and spoke softly to Brisbane. “Hello.”

“Hello,” Brisbane said.

“You will have to reissue your masokom to Tornestor tonight. Everyone knows it is still binding and Tornestor will not be able to refuse it or require Riltik to fight for him, but it is a ceremonial requirement. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Brisbane said, watching the portal Tornestor would eventually emerge from.

“Good. Would you like some ale?”

Brisbane nodded, keeping his eyes on the arch. “One mug.”

Ternosh poured and set it before him. Brisbane took a sip. It was cold and delicious.

“Ternosh?”

“Yes, Brisbane?”

“How do you feel about it? I mean, with Tornestor being your brother and all?”

Ternosh looked at the portal with Brisbane, as if the Sumak had just appeared. “Tornestor is my brother. I can remember a time when we were just Tor and Ter, living on the surface with the females and the children. But when I became old enough, my red eyes demanded that I be taken into the cave and trained as a Grum. There was a time when I was much like you, an innocent in a strange world, doing my best to get along in my new environment. I remember what it was like then. I remember what it was like when I had both of my eyes.”

Brisbane turned to look at Ternosh’s profile, seeing his healthy right eye and the strap that held the black patch over what remained of his left, plucked out by his own hand when he became Grumak in honor of the single orb of Gruumsh One-Eye.

“I think Tornestor saw the special treatment I received,” Ternosh went on softly, “and was jealous that his younger brother was suddenly so far above him. He wanted the benefits of the klatru, too, but his eyes were black and, as such, he had only one route open to him. As Tor, he collected as much fame and conquest as he could until he was a leader on the surface and, eventually, the members of the klatru voted him to become one of their elite group. This is the only way it is ever done, and it happens only when one grugan separates himself so much from his peers. In fact, the last grugan to be considered for this honor was Kras, the man you strangled on the river bank when you were captured. Even when you were being held in your cage, news of what you had done to Kras was sending ripples up and down the klatru.”

Brisbane thought about it. He had been insane when he had strangled Kras, mad with rage at being disarmed of Angelika. He barely remembered the incident.

Ternosh continued. “As Tornes, my brother was content for a while, but when I became Grumak, a position of higher rank than the regular klatru, I think the tide of jealousy welled up within him again. His course was then set. The only position in the clan higher than my own is Sumak, and Tornes quickly began his successful quest for it.”

Ternosh turned and looked at Brisbane. “What I’m trying to say is that my brother and I are no longer two nameless whelps, suckling at our mother’s breast. We are now Sumak Tornestor and Grumak Ternosh, the two most powerful members of the Red Eye. Our lives are very different now and we have responsibilities undreamed of by the children on the surface. Even if you were not a human sent by Gruumsh One-Eye, I would not interfere with the masokom you have issued. Tornestor has met and defeated several power-hungry grugan before you. It is his duty to meet and destroy all resistance to his authority. If he cannot do this, then he does not deserve to be our Sumak.”

“Yes,” Brisbane said. “But you think I’m going to win, don’t you?”

“If Gruumsh sent you, you must win.”

“Then your brother will be killed.”

“Yes,” Ternosh said. “My brother will be killed. But he has been a great Sumak. Gruumsh will surely make him a general in his army.”

Conversation around the table was cut off at that moment as Tornestor entered the banquet chamber. The huge ork was dressed as he normally was, all in black with the red sash draped over his shoulder. Behind him and to his right stood Riltik, his right arm ringed with a red stripe. There was no one else with them.

From the time the Sumak entered the room until the time he sat down in his great stone chair, Tornestor did not take his black eyes off Brisbane. He was seated in silence for several moments before Ternosh poked Brisbane in the ribs.

“Stand and issue the challenge,” Ternosh whispered.

Brisbane rose to his feet with everyone’s attention fixed on him. He did his best to ignore them all, concentrating on the furrowed brow and the glowing eyes of Tornestor.

Wow, is he ugly, Brisbane thought. Most orks look like humans with some pig features, and that’s ugly enough, but he’s downright hideous. It’s as if he’s not human at all. He’s all ork. He’s a grugan.

“You wish to invoke your right of statement, Grum Brisbane?” Tornestor’s tone was an angrier version of hostile.

Brisbane took a deep breath. “I formally reissue my masokom to you, Sumak Tornestor. I challenge you to battle in the pug-trolang for mastery of this clan.” He remained standing.

Tornestor did not hesitate. “I, Sumak Tornestor, accept your challenge.” He clapped his hands twice and servants were carrying food into the room before Brisbane had retaken his seat.

Brisbane leaned closer to Ternosh. “Angry, isn’t he?”

Ternosh nodded as the servants put food in front of him and all around the table. “It is his authority you have challenged,” the Grumak said softly. “The last masokom he had was nearly two months ago. He accepted that one directly, not passing it off to one of his Sums. He killed the grugan in twenty-eight seconds. I don’t think he expected another challenge so soon. Of course, you are a special case.”

Brisbane began to pile meat and potatoes onto his plate. “Why is there only Riltik? Doesn’t he replace his Sums when they are killed?”

“He will replace Bronsop tomorrow if he survives. It is a show of respect to your combat skills not to replace him right away. Everyone here knows why Bronsop’s place is empty. When you win, it will be your duty to name another Sum from among the klatru. You will inherit Riltik.”

Inherit. Brisbane thought that was a strange way of putting it.

The draknel continued as it always did, but it was oddly quiet that night. There were conversations among small groups of orks, but there were no stories to be told or songs to be sung. Brisbane ate carefully, not eating too much too quickly, and he held himself to only one tankard of ale. He was used to one meal a day and the only time he ever seemed to be hungry now was an hour or so before draknel. His meals had grown in size, too, due to their infrequency. The meal he ate that night was large enough to fill him but not to stuff him, even though that amount of food would have burst him had he tried to eat it three months ago.

Throughout the draknel, Brisbane found himself in an angry staring match with Tornestor. It seemed every time he lifted his face out of his plate, he saw Tornestor glaring at him, his large hands resting on either side of his platter and his jaw immobile. Brisbane did his best to not let the Sumak’s stare ruin his appetite, but it was not easy.

Finally, the meal was finished and it was time for battle. After the servants had cleared away the large mess and the few leftovers, Tornestor quickly rose from his stone chair and rushed out of the chamber and down the short corridor that led to the pug-trolang. Riltik and the rest of the klatru had to scramble in an attempt to preserve the march-like precision they usually used in going to the battle chamber. Brisbane was not interested in preserving any tradition. He took his time getting up and leaving the chamber. Ternosh stayed with him.

“Well,” Brisbane said to the Grumak. “This is it.”

Ternosh nodded. “This is it.”

Brisbane went down the short tunnel and emerged into the chamber of the pug-trolang. The klatru had already taken their positions around the pit and Tornestor stood a quarter of the way around the circle on his right, arming himself with the armor and weapons that ringed the chamber walls. Brisbane watched him carefully. The ork was so huge Brisbane didn’t think he would be able to find any armor to fit him. The orks made none of their armor or weapons themselves. They stole them all from human craftsmen and warriors. Brisbane himself was one of the tallest humans he had ever met and, at seven feet, Tornestor was a good six inches taller than him.

But the Sumak was able to find something to fit him. With a revelation of shock, Brisbane saw Tornestor was donning the same chainmail poncho Shortwhiskers had bought for Brisbane in Queensburg before they had set out that spring. The same one Vrak had taken from Brisbane when he had been captured on the banks of the Mystic River. The mail had hung down to Brisbane’s knees. On Tornestor, it stopped just below the waist. The Sumak also chose a huge, diamond-shaped shield and a double-edged sword that appeared too heavy for even Brisbane to lift.

Fully outfitted, Tornestor gave Brisbane a final angry look and dropped himself into the pit of the pug-trolang.

Ternosh patted Brisbane twice on the back and then went over to take his place beside the pedestal and Angelika. Brisbane looked longingly at his sword and, at once, her seductive presence made itself comfortable among his thought patterns.

—The time has arrived, young Brisbane. The time of our vengeance is upon us. We shall kill their demon leader and destroy their whole wicked band.—

Brisbane was not sure if he welcomed her input, but then realized there was little he could do about it. He went over to the wall, trying to ignore Angelika’s influence and began to choose his armor and weapons.

—Yes, Brisbane. Arm yourself well. This will be the gravest challenge you have faced yet. But you will prevail. You will be triumphant because I am with you and soon I will be returned to your side. Yes.—

Brisbane first thought to wear a heavy breastplate like Bronsop had chosen yesterday, but decided against it. He didn’t want to be weighed down too much, hoping quickness could win out over an ork as large as Tornestor. But he also did not want to go unprotected. At last, he chose a light chainmail shirt, painted black, and a pair of black shin guards to offer some protection to his legs. He fitted the black helmet he had used in the battle against Bronsop on top of his head and chose a black crest-shaped shield with a great red eye painted sloppily in the middle. For his sword, he picked the same, perfectly-balanced weapon he had used twice before.

It really is a fine sword, he thought.

—Don’t get too attached to it, Brisbane. This is the last time you will ever have to use it.—

I will get you back, won’t I, Angelika?

—Yes. Kill this pig and you and I will be reunited.—

How? How will I get you back.

—You will.—

Armed properly, Brisbane walked over to the edge of the pug-trolang. All around the room the klatru were staring at him and, down in the pit, Tornestor was looking up at him. Brisbane’s eyes passed over them all one by one and finally came to rest on Ternosh. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the Grumak nodded his head.

Brisbane dropped himself into the pit.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

This is a complicated novel. But, in fairness, Roth really lays it all out in his opening paragraphs.

It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk -- who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty -- confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. Twice a week she also cleaned the rural post office, a small gray clapboard shack that looked as if it might have sheltered an Okie family from the winds of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s and that, sitting alone and forlorn across from the gas station and the general store, flies its America flag at the junction of the two roads that mark the commercial center of this mountainside town.

Coleman had first seen the woman mopping the post office floor when he went around late one day, a few minutes before closing time, to get his mail -- a thin, tall, angular woman with graying blond hair yanked back into a ponytail and the kind of severely sculpted features customarily associated with the church-ruled, handworking goodwives who suffered through New England’s harsh beginnings, stern colonial women locked up within the reigning morality and obedient to it. Her name was Faunia Farley, and whatever miseries she endured she kept concealed behind one of those inexpressive bone faces that hide nothing and bespeak an immense loneliness. Faunia lived in a room at a local dairy farm where she helped with the milking in order to pay her rent. She’d had two years of high school education.

So that is Coleman and Faunia, both of whom have flaws and secrets that will slowly come out over the course of the novel. But it is not insignificant that next Roth goes on to describe the most unusual of American moments in which their drama will take place.

The summer that Coleman took me into his confidence about Faunia Farley and their secret was the summer, fittingly enough, that Bill Clinton’s secret emerged in every last mortifying detail -- every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data. We hadn’t a season like it since somebody stumbled upon the new Miss America nude in an old issue of Penthouse, pictures of her elegantly posed on her knees and on her back that forced the shamed young woman to relinquish her crown and go on to become a huge pop star. Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism -- which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security -- was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful, middle-aged president and a brash, smitten, twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthrone (who, in the 1860s, lived not many miles from my door) identified in the incipient country of long ago as “the persecuting spirit”; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification what would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman’s ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again. No, if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is. The syndicated conservative newspaper columnist William Buckley wrote, “When Abelard did it, it was possible to prevent its happening again,” insinuating that the president’s malfeasance -- what Buckley elsewhere called Clinton’s “incontinent carnality” -- might best be remedied with nothing so bloodless as impeachment but, rather, by the twelfth-century punishment meted out to Canon Abelard by the knife-wielding associates of Abelard’s ecclesiastical colleague, Canon Fulbert, for Abelard’s secret seduction of and marriage to Fulbert’s niece, the virgin Heloise. Unlike Khomeini’s fatwa condemning to death Salman Rushdie, Buckley’s wistful longing for the corrective retribution of castration carried with it no financial incentive for any prospective perpetrator. It was prompted by a spirit no less exacting than the ayatollah’s, however, and in belief of no less exalted ideals.

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn’t stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn’t stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one’s children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered, “Why are we so crazy?,” when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. It was the summer when -- for the billionth time -- the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one’s ideology and that one’s morality. It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.

Coleman and Faunia. Bill and Monica. The two stories are linked in Roth’s mind and in Roth’s narrative -- the outlines of Coleman and Faunia shaped not just by that epochal moment in American history but by the very mindsets that gave it its own controlling shape.

Coleman, an intellectual painfully aware of his own bestial appetites, suffers under these largely hypocritical “coercions of propriety.”

The tyranny of propriety. It was hard, halfway through 1998, for even him to believe in American propriety’s enduring power, and he was the one who considered himself tyrannized: the bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that H. L. Mencken identified with boobism, that Philip Wylie thought of as Momism, that the Europeans unhistorically call American puritanism, that the likes of Ronald Reagan call America’s core values, and that maintains widespread jurisdiction by masquerading itself as something else -- as everything else. As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women’s rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It’s not as though Marx or Freund or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened -- it’s as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It’s, he thought, as though Babbitt had never been written. It’s as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race -- scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day … all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. Here in America either it’s Faunia Farley or it’s Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk! This, in 1998, is the wickedness they have to put up with. This, in 1998, is their torture, their torment, and their spiritual death. Their source of greatest moral despair, Faunia blowing me and me fucking Faunia.

And perhaps he suffers too much -- going on and on like this in soliloquy after soliloquy, deriding the culture of the times, the one he thinks of himself as above but, of course, in his flaws and his secrets, the one that has shaped him and everything that he is.

And Faunia, a proletariat owning her class while hopelessly nursing her own inner fire to somehow transcend it.

“That’s what comes of being hand-raised,” said Faunia. “That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,” she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. That’s how it is -- in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen -- there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it was inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia’s take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection. She’s like the Greeks, like Coleman’s Greeks. Like their gods. They’re petty. They quarrell. They fight. They hate. They murder. They fuck. All their Zeus ever wants to do is to fuck -- goddesses, mortals, heifers, she-bears -- and not merely in his own form but, even more excitingly, as himself made manifest as beast. To hugely mount a woman as a bull. To enter her bizarrely as a flailing white swan. There is never enough flesh for the king of the gods or enough perversity. All the craziness desire brings. The dissoluteness. The depravity. The crudest pleasures. And the fury from the all-seeing wife. Not the Hebrew God, infinitely alone, infinitely obscure, monomaniacally the only god there is, was, and always will be, with nothing better to do than worry about Jews. And not the perfectly desexualized Christian man-god and his uncontaminated mother and all the guilt and shame that an exquisite unearthliness inspires. Instead the Greek Zeus, entangled in adventure, vividly expressive, capricious, sensual, exuberantly wedded to his own rich existence, anything but alone and anything but hidden. Instead the divine stain. A great reality-reflecting religion for Faunia Farley if, through Coleman, she’d known anything about it. As the hubristic fantasy has it, made in the image of God, all right, but not ours -- theirs. God debauched. God corrupted. A god of life if ever there was one. God in the image of man.

She is both human and divine -- or at least divine in the ineradicable stain of her humanity -- with no possible way of ever walking away from the very thing that she is.

And it is these two characters -- these two archetypes -- that entangle and intertwine both is sexual congress and in narrative exploration that helps make The Human Stain such an interesting read. 

In some ways they stand separate from us.

It was strange to think, while seated there with all his colleagues, that people so well educated and professionally civil should have fallen so willingly for the venerable human dream of a situation in which one man can embody evil. Yet there is this need, and it is undying and it is profound.

But in the end, they are us. Or we are they. As humans, we have to be.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Herzog by Saul Bellow

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

+ + + 

This one was an interesting journey. I’ve read some Bellow before, and seemed to have kind of a mixed reaction to him. Henderson the Rain King was memorable, but neither Dangling Man or The Adventures of Augie March were. Looking back on Herzog, I think it’s going to wind up in the same category as Catch-22. I wasn’t sure I was enjoying it while I was reading it, but now that it’s done I sure am glad I read it. And I sure dog-eared enough of the pages. It started with stumbling across passages like this one:

Not everyone threatened with a crackup can manage to go to Europe for relief. Most people have to keep on working; they report daily, they still ride the subway. Or else they drink, they go to the movies and sit there suffering.

And this one:

He saw twenty paces away the white soft face and independent look of a woman in a shining black straw hat which held her head in depth and eyes that even in the signal-dotted obscurity reached him with a force she could never be aware of. Those eyes might be blue, perhaps green, even gray—he would never know. But they were bitch eyes, that was certain. They expressed a sort of female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him; he experienced it again that very moment—a round face, the clear gaze of pale bitch eyes, a pair of proud legs.

And I think to myself, this guy has been inside my head. These are thoughts I’ve had myself, and here they are printed in this forty-year old book. So I keep reading, suddenly interested in this guy Herzog, this guy whose thoughts are revealed in scribbled letters to people, living and dead. What does Herzog think of Nietzsche’s theories of God and man? We don’t have to ask because Herzog writes Nietzsche a letter explaining his thoughts in great detail. And what about the way his ex-wife played him for a patsy, or the way his psychiatrist seemed to be in on the deal. Same answers there, letters to both of them that never get sent.

But we mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler’s “Prussian Socialism,” the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness.

This in a letter to one of his fellow professors, and the following in a letter to the Monsignor who had helped shepherd his ex-wife towards Catholicism:

One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance, and this (fantasy?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.

It’s an interesting device, putting the narrative very close to Herzog’s inner voice, so close that the slips from the narrator’s third person to Herzog’s first person are sometimes jarring, sometimes unnoticed. It was also interesting to see Herzog’s backstory unfold through a series of interactions and letters with other characters in the story—his new love interest, the woman he cheated on his first wife with, the man and best friend with whom his second wife cheated on him. In fact, the book is mostly backstory, character development and philosophical rambling until about two-thirds through when the plot actually begins.

And shortly after the plot does begin, Herzog finds himself a spectator in a courtroom where the following trial is going on.

A young couple, a woman and the man she had been living with in a slum hotel, uptown, were being tried for the murder of her son, a child of three. She had had the boy by another man who deserted her, said the lawyer in his presentation. Herzog observed how gray and elderly all these lawyers were, people of another generation and a different circle of life—tolerant, comfortable people. The defendants could be identified by their looks and clothing. The man wore a stained and frayed zipper jacket and she, a redheaded woman, with a wide ruddy face, had on a brown print house dress. Both sat stolid, to all appearances unmoved by the testimony, he with his low sideburns and blond mustache, she with blunt freckled cheekbones and long, hidden eyes.

I’m going to quote this passage at length, because I find it fascinating on multiple levels, and also because I think it has a lot to say about what Herzog the novel is all about. This section is mentioned kind of in passing in some of the critical reviews of the novel that I’ve read, which probably means that I’m off base, but I think it is significant.

She came from Trenton, born lame. Her father was a garage mechanic. She had a fourth-grade education, I.Q. 94. An older brother was the favorite; she was neglected. Unattractive, sullen, clumsy, wearing an orthopedic boot, she became delinquent at an early age. Her record was before the court, the lawyer went on, even, mild and pleasant. An angry uncontrollable girl, from first grade. There were affidavits from teachers. There were also medical and psychiatric records, and a neurological report to which the lawyer particularly wished to call the court’s attention. This showed his client had been diagnosed by encephalogram as having a brain lesion capable of altering her behavior radically. She was known to have violent epileptoid fits of rage; her tolerance for emotions controlled from the affected lobe was known to be very low. Because she was a poor crippled creature, she had often been molested, later sexually abused by adolescent boys. Indeed, her file in children’s court was very thick. Her mother loathed her, had refused to attend the trial, was quoted as saying, “This is no kid of mine. We wash our hands of her.” The defendant was made pregnant at nineteen by a married man who lived with her several months, then went back to his wife and family. She refused to give the child for adoption, lived for a while in Trenton with it, and then moved to Flushing, where she met the other defendant, at the time employed as porter in a lunchroom on Columbus Avenue, and decided to live with him at the Montcalme Hotel on 103rd street—Herzog had often passed the place. You could smell the misery of it from the street; its black stink flowed out through open windows—bedding, garbage, disinfectant, roach killer. His mouth was dry and he sat forward, straining to hear.

This is an unpleasant story, start to finish. But who is to blame? Interesting that the scene is a court of law, where such concepts like liability and justice are supposed to have meaning. And notice how Herzog is consumed by the story, when everyone else, even the defendants, seem unaffected.

The medical examiner was on the stand. Had he seen the dead child? Yes. Did he have a report to make? He did. He gave the date and circumstances of the examination. A hefty, bald, solemn man with fleshy and deliberate lips, he held his notes in both hands like a singer—the experienced, professional witness. The child, he said, was normally formed but seemed to have suffered from malnutrition. There were signs of incipient rickets, the teeth were already quite carious, but this was sometimes a symptom that the mother had had toxemia in pregnancy. Were any unusual marks visible on the child’s body? Yes, the little boy had apparently been beaten. Once, or repeatedly? In his opinion, often beaten. The scalp was torn. There were unusually heavy bruises on the back and legs. The shins were discolored. Where were the bruises heaviest? On the belly, and especially in the region of the genitals, where the boy seemed to have been beaten with something capable of breaking the skin, perhaps a metal buckle or the heel of a woman’s shoe. “And what internal findings did you make?” the prosecutor went on. There were two broken ribs, one an older break. The more recent one had done some damage to the lung. The boy’s liver had been ruptured. The hemorrhage caused by this may have been the immediate cause of death. There was also a brain injury. “In your opinion, then, the child died violently?” “This is my opinion. The liver injury would have been enough.”

All this seemed to Herzog exceptionally low-pitched. All—the lawyers, the jury, the mother, her tough friend, the judge—behaved with much restraint, extremely well controlled and quiet-spoken. Such calm—inversely proportionate to the murder? he was thinking. Judge, jury, lawyers and the accused, all looked utterly unemotional. And he himself? He sat in his new madras coat and held his hard straw hat. He gripped his hat strongly and felt sick at heart. The ragged edge of the straw made marks on his fingers.

Why does this speak to me so? Because I’m a father with a three-year old child? That’s certainly part of it, but I think I would see the horror in this simple tale even if I wasn’t. Like Herzog, I’m on the edge of my seat, dreading to hear any more. And it is simple, the story, simple in its construction and simple in its telling. Having the abbreviated facts revealed in the style of a court drama is an effective way to pack a lot of information into a relatively few words. It’s also a good way to accentuate the things that are missing—the passions, emotions and frustrations of the lives being described. They are, of course, the real story here, the complicated side of this simple recitation of facts—and they are, of course, ultimately more difficult to write about.

A witness was sworn, a solid-looking man of thirty-five or so, in a stylish oxford gray summer suit, of Madison Avenue cut. His face was round, full, jowly, but his head had little height above the ears and was further flattened by his butch haircut. He made very good gestures, pulling up his trouser legs as he sat, freeing his shirt cuffs and leaning forward to answer questions with measured, earnest, masculine politeness. His eyes were dark. You could see his scalp furrow as he frowned, weighing his answers. He identified himself as a salesman in the storm-window business, screens and storm windows. Herzog knew what he meant—aluminum sashes with triple tracks: he had read the ads. The witness lived in Flushing. Did he know the accused woman? She was asked to stand, and she did, a short hobbling figure, dark-red hair frizzy, the long eyes recessed, skin freckled, lips thick and dun-colored. Yes, he knew her, she had lived in his house eight months ago, not exactly employed by him, no, she was a distant cousin of his wife, who felt sorry for her and gave her a room—he had built a small apartment in the attic; separate bathroom, air-conditioner. She was asked to help with housework, naturally, but she also took off and left the boy for days at a time. Did he ever know her to mistreat the child? The kid was never clean. You never wanted to hold him on your lap. He had a cold sore, and his wife at last put salve on it, as the mother would not. The child was quiet, undemanding, clung to its mother, a frightened little boy, and he had a bad smell. Could the witness further describe the mother’s attitude? Well, on the road, they were driving to visit the grandmother and stopped at Howard Johnson’s. Everyone ordered. She had a barbecued beef sandwich and when it came began to eat and fed the child nothing. Then he himself (indignant) gave the boy some of his meat and gravy.

I fail to understand! thought Herzog, as this good man, jowls silently moving, got off the stand. I fail to…but this is the difficulty with people who spend their lives in humane studies and therefore imagine once cruelty has been described in books it is ended. Of course he really knew better—understood that human beings would not live so as to be understood by the Herzogs. Why should they?

And there it is. Human beings would not live so as to be understood by the Herzogs. That’s the essence of writing, isn’t it? That last, uncrossable chasm between fiction and reality. Obscure it as much as you like with your scintillating prose, there are certain things about real life that you will never be able to portray accurately in your fiction, because they are not the kind of things you will ever be able to understand.

But he had not time to think of this. The next witness was already sworn, the clerk at the Montcalme; a bachelor in his fifties; slack lips, large creases, damaged cheeks, hair that looked touched up, voice deep and melancholy, with a sinking rhythm to every sentence. The sentences sank down, down, until the last words were lost in rumbling syllables. An alcoholic once, judged Herzog from the look of his skin, and there was a certain faggotty prissiness in his speech, too. He said he had kept and eye on this “unfortunate pair.” They rented a housekeeping room. The woman drew Relief money. The man had no occupation. The police came a few times to ask about him. And the boy, could he tell the court anything about him? Mostly that the child cried a lot. Tenants complained, and when he investigated he found the kid was kept shut in a closet. For discipline, was what the defendant told him. But towards the end the boy cried less. On the day of his death, however, there was a lot of noise. He heard something falling, and shrieks from the third floor. Both the mother and the boy were screaming. Someone was fooling with the elevator, so he ran upstairs. Knocked at the door, but she was screaming too loud to hear. So he opened and stepped in. Would he tell the court what he saw? He saw the woman with the boy in her arms. He thought she was hugging him, but to his astonishment she threw him from her with both arms. He was hurled against the wall. This made the noise he had been hearing below. Was anyone else present? Yes, the other defendant was lying on the bed, smoking. And was the child now screaming? No, at this time he was lying silently on the floor. Did the clerk then speak? He said he was frightened by the look of the woman, her swollen face. She turned red, crimson, and screamed with all her might, and she stamped her foot, the one with the built-up heel, he noticed, and he was afraid she would go for his eyes with her nails. He then went to call the police. Soon the man came downstairs. He explained that her boy was a problem child. She could not toilet-train him. He drove her wild sometimes the way he dirtied himself. And the crying all night! So they were talking when the squad car came. And found the child dead? Yes, he was dead when they arrived.

“Cross-examination?” said the bench. The defense lawyer waived examination with a movement of long white fingers, and the judge said, “You may step down. That will be all.”

When the witness stood, Herzog stood up, too. He had to move, had to go. Again he wondered whether he was going to come down with sickness. Or was it the terror of the child that had gotten into him? Anyway, he felt stifled, as if the valves of his heart were not closing and the blood were going back into his lungs. He walked heavily and quickly. Turning once in the aisle, he saw only the lean gray head of the judge, whose lips silently moved as he read one of his documents.

Or was it the terror of the child that had gotten into him? Can you imagine the terror that child must have felt? Can I? Can Herzog? Can anyone? He was three, raised from infancy by a mentally retarded woman, and kept in a closet. What kind of world is it in which the person you feel the most instinctual love for—your mother—is also the person that most represents fear, terror, shame and pain? What could he understand at three? What could he understand but what Bellow will soon describe as the monstrousness of life, and understand it better than any author ever could. And in spite of all that, he is not real. He is a fictional character in a quickly sketched anecdote.

Reaching the corridor, he said to himself, “Oh my God!” and in trying to speak discovered an acrid fluid in his mouth that had to be swallowed. Then stepping away from the door he stumbled into a woman with a cane. Black-browed, her hair very black though she was middle-aged, she pointed downward with the cane, instead of speaking. He saw that she wore a cast with metal clogs on the foot and that her toenails were painted. Then getting down the loathsome taste, he said, “I’m sorry.” He had a sick repulsive headache, piercing and ugly. He felt as if he had gotten too close to a fire and scalded his lungs. She did not speak at all but was not ready to let him off. Her eyes, prominent, severe, still kept him standing, identifying him thoroughly, fully, deeply, as a fool. Again—silently—Thou fool! In the red-striped jacket, the hat tucked under his arm, hair uncombed, eyes swollen, he waited for her to go. When she left at last, going, cane, cast, clogs, down the speckled corridor, he concentrated. With all his might—mind and heart—he tried to obtain something for the murdered child. But what? How? He pressed himself with intensity, but “all his might” could get nothing for the buried boy. Herzog experienced nothing but his own human feelings, in which he found nothing of use. What if he felt moved to cry? Or pray? He pressed hand to hand. And what did he feel? Why he felt himself—his own trembling hands, and eyes that stung. And what was there in modern, post…post-Christian America to pray for? Justice—justice and mercy? And pray away the monstrousness of life, the wicked dream it was? He opened his mouth to relieve the pressure he felt. He was wrung, and wrung again, and wrung again, again.

The child screamed, clung, but with both arms the girl hurled it against the wall. On her legs was ruddy hair. And her lover, too, with long jaws and zooty sideburns, watching on the bed. Lying down to copulate, and standing up to kill. Some kill, then cry. Others, not even that.

I think Bellow packed a lot into this little tale to help him illustrate that kind of world he saw and the difficulty he had as an intellectual in dealing with it in his fiction. Herzog is tormented by the existentialism of life, the need to derive meaning from one’s own circumstances and on one’s own terms. He struggles mightily with this, and is intimidated by the ease with which others seem to master themselves and their surroundings.

A man may say, ‘From now on I’m going to speak the truth.’ But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s even done speaking. There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas.

“A man” is, of course, Herzog, who wants there to be absolute truth in the universe but is becoming more and more convinced that there isn’t.

It all goes back to those German existentialists who tell you how good dread is for you, how it saves you from distraction and gives you your freedom and makes you authentic. God is no more. But Death is. That’s their story. And we live in a hedonistic world in which happiness is set up on a mechanical model. All you have to do is open your fly and grasp happiness. And so these other theorists introduce the tension of guilt and dread as a corrective. But human life is far subtler than any of its models, even these ingenious German models. Do we need to study theories of fear and anguish?

In the world Bellow describes in his courtroom story, theories of fear and anguish are superfluous. With such horror in the world, why is anyone postulating on its intrinsic meaning? And this final thought from very late in the book, about the pursuit of absolute truth and its role in shaping our society.

In the seventeenth century the passionate search for absolute truth stopped so that mankind might transform the world. Something practical was done with thought. The mental became also the real. Relief from the pursuit of absolutes made life pleasant. Only a small class of fanatical intellectuals, professionals, still chased after these absolutes. But our revolutions, including nuclear terror, return the metaphysical dimension to us. All practical activity has reached this culmination: everything may go now, civilization, history, meaning, nature. Everything!

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The first real spell Roystnof taught me was called shocking grasp, and I learned it on the day of the Festival of Whiteshine. Roystnof called it a potent but simple spell and, even though I had been studying magic on and off for six years, it took me the entire morning and some of the afternoon to master it. I remember how exhausted I was after I had finally cast it correctly on a wooden chair, how exhausted and triumphant I felt. It was a powerful spell and for the first time in my life I felt like a real wizard, like I deserved to be Roystnof’s apprentice. When I think about it, it was really one of the happiest times of my life, feeling closer to Roystnof than perhaps ever before or since.

+ + +

Brisbane went right to bed when he got back to his chamber, tired even though he had slept most of the day. In the morning he told Smurch he did intend to challenge Tornestor in the pug-trolang. The half-ork was overjoyed at the news and it took Brisbane several minutes to calm him down enough to get some useful information out of him. Brisbane wanted to know how he was expected to go about it, what rituals he was supposed to follow, and what manners he needed to observe.

He found out it was relatively simple. All he had to was issue his masokom before the evening draknel, as Wister had done to him, and if the Sumak accepted his challenge, battle to decide the chief of the clan would follow the meal. Technically, Tornestor could not refuse the masokom—to do so would be a sign of weakness, but he could name one of his Sums—which were what the orks with the red stripes on their sleeves were called—to fight in his place. This was allowed and it was meant to prevent daily challenges against a Sumak until he lost a fluke contest to an ork with lesser combat skills.

Smurch seemed to think this was what Tornestor would do in response to Brisbane’s challenge. If Brisbane defeated one of Tornestor’s Sums—who were named Bronsop and Riltik—then Tornestor would be forced to face Brisbane the next day in the pug-trolang. Of course, if the Sumak was sure he could defeat Brisbane, he just might accept the challenge outright.

Brisbane spent the day, as usual, with Ternosh, trying to master the use of orkish magic. He still had had no success and was beginning to wonder if he would ever get the hang of it. Ternosh was a good and patient teacher, but there seemed to be something missing from Brisbane’s internal makeup, something that kept him from channeling his inner force of magic into these strange orkish paths.

It no longer mattered to Brisbane, however. He was getting out of here in one or two days, depending on Tornestor’s decision about his masokom. Angelika had more or less promised him that. But he could not let Ternosh catch onto his plan, so he worked as hard as ever on the orkish spells. He wanted to keep it secret from the Grumak mainly because he wasn’t sure how Ternosh would react. Brisbane supposed there was the chance Ternosh would accept it, figuring this mad try for domination of the clan was the mission Gruumsh had sent him here for, but Brisbane thought the chances of that were slim. If Ternosh believed Gruumsh One-Eye had sent him here to become the new Sumak of the clan, why had the Grumak put up such a fuss when Wister had challenged him? If Brisbane was destined to become the clan’s first human Sumak, then surely no ork with the combat skills of Wister could have stood in his way.

No, Brisbane didn’t want Ternosh to know about his plan because he was afraid the Grumak would be able to stop it somehow, like he had tried to do with Wister. Brisbane thought the best policy would be to keep it secret from everyone until that night’s draknel, when he would announce his intentions to everyone present as he issued the masokom to Tornestor, and that was just what he did.

The day passed and when evening arrived, Brisbane calmly went to the banquet chamber as he had done every other night. Every other night except the night before, when he had been too sick on incense smoke to attend. He took his usual seat, now on the right of Ternosh since the death of Grum Wister, and said a pleasant good evening to the Grumak. He poured himself a tankard of ale and, sipping it slowly, listened to the conversations running around the table and waited for Sumak Tornestor to enter the chamber.

Brisbane did not have to wait long. Tornestor soon arrived with his faithful Sums walking behind him. Brisbane watched him carefully as he strode into the chamber and took his seat at the banquet table. He was again struck by the sheer size of the ork, and he could not deny the swirling of fear in his bowels when he thought about what he was going to do. Defeating Wister had been easy. It had taken him a while to decide to strike the Grum down, but there had been no real test in the area of combat. Brisbane was sure Tornestor would be a much different story. He was the leader of the clan, by definition, the best warrior they had. Whereas Wister had spent most of his time in his work chamber honing his magical skills, Tornestor had been fighting his way up through the ranks of orkish society, sharpening his skills with his blade.

Tornestor, after taking his seat, addressed the crowd at the table. “Welcome, klatru of the Red Eye Clan, to this evening’s draknel. Before the meal is served, does anyone have anything to say?”

Silence ran around the table as Brisbane slowly rose to his feet.

Angelika, help me.

—Strength, Brisbane. You have the strength to persevere.—

“Grum Brisbane,” Tornestor said in his scratchy voice. “You wish to invoke your right of statement?”

Brisbane quietly cleared his throat. “I do.” All eyes around the table were on him.

“You may speak, Grum Brisbane.”

Here goes. “I wish to issue a masokom, Sumak Tornestor.”

This caused a certain amount of mumbling to murmur around the table. Ternosh looked up at him with a glaring red eye but Brisbane did his best to ignore the Grumak.

Tornestor held up his hands to bring silence back to the chamber. “It is your right to do so. Who do you wish to challenge?”

There was a moment when Brisbane seemed to feel the air crystallize around him and the others in the chamber, freezing the scene like a diorama in the collection of some observing god. In this moment he saw the detail of his surroundings to an almost impossible degree. The folds in the black garments of the orks, the beads of moisture on the tankards of cold ale, the chipped and rough edges on Tornestor’s claw-like fingernails—it was all preserved in Brisbane’s memory as if he had been standing at the table, waiting to issue his challenge, for all time.

“You, Sumak Tornestor.”

The uproar that followed was comprised mostly of cries of shock and surprise, but mixed in were a few unmistakable guffaws of laughter. Ternosh leapt to his feet and stood impatiently, waiting for Tornestor to notice him. There was no change in expression on the face of the Sumak, but both Bronsop and Riltik began to study Brisbane with a pair of nearly carnivorous stares.

Tornestor again raised his hands for silence. “Brother,” he said to the Grumak. “Sit down.”

“But Tornestor—”

“Ternosh, sit down!” The voice echoed through the chamber, repeating the order over and over again.

At the outpouring of his brother’s anger, Ternosh slowly sat down.

Tornestor turned to face Brisbane. “Grum Brisbane,” he said in a tone under his control. “Normally I would ask the reason for the issuing of a masokom, but as you have challenged the Sumak, there can only be one reason for it. You intend to rule this clan. Before I decide to accept the masokom myself or to defer it to one of my Sums, tell me one thing. Is this why Gruumsh One-Eye has sent you among us? To depose me? Have I displeased him in some manner?”

Brisbane was tempted to say yes, to say that was just what he had been sent here for. Yes, Tornestor. Gruumsh One-Eye himself has sent me here to kill you and when you are dead your god will squash out your existence under the heel of his massive boot. Yes, Tornestor, I am your death. Brisbane was tempted to say this, but in the end, he did not.

“Who do I fight today?” was all Brisbane did say, deliberately ignoring the Sumak’s question. “You or one of your Sums?”

Tornestor’s lips snarled, exposing his sharp teeth. “You are wise, Grum Brisbane. Wise, or foolish. After the draknel is finished, you will meet Bronsop in the pug-trolang.” He clapped his hands twice and immediately servants carrying food entered the chamber.

Brisbane sat down as the personal conversations resumed around the table and the draknel was served.

“Is it true?” Ternosh asked him quietly. “Is this indeed why Gruumsh sent you here?”

Brisbane looked the Grumak right in the eye. “Eat your meal, Ternosh. Eat your meal and leave me alone.

Ternosh let out a harumph and turned back to his plate, being heaped with food by a servant. “Well,” the Grumak said to himself. “I guess I’ll find out soon enough, won’t I?”

The draknel passed very slowly for Brisbane. After everyone’s plate had been filled, he waited with them all for Tornestor to dig in so they could eat. The chief seemed to wait an unusually long period of time that night, probably in a token attempt to further show his dominance in the wake of Brisbane’s masokom. Brisbane didn’t care. Let him milk it for as much as he could. He would not be milking it for much longer.

As he had done before his battle with Wister, Brisbane did not overstuff himself with food and limited himself to only one tankard of ale. He wasn’t sure which of the orks on either side of Tornestor was Bronsop, but throughout the draknel, the one on the Sumak’s right kept staring at him, so he assumed that was the one. Whenever he caught the red-striped ork looking at him, Brisbane forced the most vicious glare he could to his face. He wasn’t going to let the ork intimidate him.

—He is not your match, Brisbane. You can defeat him.—

I know I can, Angelika. I have to.

When the meal was finally finished, and the servants had cleared the table, Tornestor rose to his feet.

“Gentlemen,” he said formally. “In the tradition handed down through generations, a tradition begun in the time Gruumsh One-Eye himself walked the earth, a challenge, a masokom, has been issued by one of us against another. The reason for this masokom is clear. Are there any here who would deny my right to name Sum Bronsop to accept the challenge in my stead?”

The table experienced an uneasy silence.

“Then let us move to the pug-trolang, the pit of combat, to settle this masokom before our own eyes.”

Then they were all up and moving out of the banquet chamber. Tornestor and his two Sums led the way and Ternosh and Brisbane brought up the rear. The procession made its way down the short, dark corridor and emerged into the chamber of the pug-trolang. The klatru quickly took their places around the pit, all except Brisbane and the red-striped Bronsop, who began to arm themselves with pieces of the armory that was the outer wall of the chamber.

Brisbane watched Bronsop for a little while. The ork was about his size and extremely hairy. He chose a metal breastplate from the wall, as well as a crest-shaped shield and a thick, heavy scimitar. He saw Brisbane watching him suit up, but ignored the human completely. When he was finished, Bronsop marched to the edge of the pit and dropped himself down.

Brisbane turned his attention to the armor and weapons. He chose a black chainmail shirt that hung down to his knees and a large circular shield, as usual, black and emblazoned with a great red eye. He searched for the same sword he had used against Wister and, eventually, he found it. He twirled it around in his right hand, marveling again at its perfect balance, and prepared to set off for the pug-trolang.

But just before he walked away from the wall, his eyes caught sight of a single black helmet, propped up on the end of a spear. He took it immediately and placed it on his head. It had a metal faceguard, with two wide slits to see through. Brisbane could not imagine the orks getting much use out of it; the orkish head being generally larger than the human one. Fully armed and protected, Brisbane then made his way to the pug-trolang and dropped himself down.

He took his place opposite and facing Bronsop and actively engaged in the staring match that seemed to be a ritual at this stage of the game. He did not watch Ternosh over by the pedestal—

and Angelika

—conjure up the Demosk and he did not watch Tornestor rise to his feet when the time came to start the battle. He watched Bronsop. And Bronsop watched him.

The incense smoke again stayed mostly above the floor of the pug-trolang. Brisbane could still smell the pungent orange odor of it, and it brought back unpleasant memories of the sacrifice of Amanda. But he pushed these thoughts aside, he had to, and concentrated solely on how to defeat Bronsop.

—Yes. That’s right, Brisbane. For Amanda. He deserves to die for what happened to Amanda.—

Angelika, stay out if it.

—But our vengeance, what about our vengeance? We must make them pay.—

I’m doing it, aren’t I?

—Yes. Yes, Brisbane, you are.—

The Demosk made its appearance, ghostly and eyeless, but Brisbane did not look at it. He heard Ternosh inform it of the reason it had been summoned and he heard the Demosk say it was ready to witness to masokom.

“Then we are ready,” Tornestor said to the smoke-filled room. “Bronsop?”

The ork did not take his eyes off Brisbane. “Yes, Lord?”

“Kill him.”

Bronsop smiled. “That I will, Lord.”

“Begin!” Tornestor called out.

The klatru roared in support and excitement as Bronsop charged at Brisbane. The charge was quick and strong, and when Brisbane tried to push it aside like he had done so easily to Wister, Bronsop fought it, pivoting back against Brisbane’s thrust and scored a strike on Brisbane’s chainmail. Brisbane brought his shield down to protect himself as he found himself toe to toe with a warrior of considerable skill.

—Careful, Brisbane. Do not leave yourself foolishly open.—

Brisbane traded a few ineffectual blows against their shields with the ork, each gauging the comparative skill of the other. Brisbane did not know what Bronsop thought of him, but Brisbane could not help but be impressed with the Sum. Unlike Wister, his blows were quick and powerful, his balance was perfect, and his use of his shield was near expert. For a moment, Brisbane experienced a sinking feeling that perhaps he would not be able to defeat Bronsop.

—Brisbane! Do not poison your mind so. Of course you can defeat him. If you do not destroy this monster, you will never win me back. Remember that.—

If I can’t defeat him, Angelika, I’ll be dead.

—Yes, and dead you cannot wield me. You must win.—

Bronsop tried a swipe at his legs, but Brisbane had read it in the ork’s movements and skipped over the blade as it passed by. Stooped over like he was, Brisbane tried to bring his sword down on top of Bronsop’s head, but the ork’s shield came up and caught the blow.

He’s good, Angelika. He’s good.

—He is skilled, Brisbane, but you are better.—

But he is good.

—Fine. Perhaps there will be no nonsense this time.—

What do you mean by that?

The crowd roared as Bronsop unleashed a savage blow on Brisbane’s upraised shield that drove the human down onto one knee. Brisbane quickly rolled across the ground and struck out at the ork’s unprotected legs. He hit with a shallow cut along one of Bronsop’s shins and bounced up again to his feet. The crowd let out a cry of displeasure and the Sum, bloodied, backed out of combat.

—You refused to fight the one called Wister for so long because he was no warrior. Since this creature is much better, perhaps you won’t have the same reluctance.—

We’ll see, Angelika.

Bronsop stood away, looking at Brisbane with a shocked look of amazement. The wound certainly was hurting him and was bleeding quite a bit, but it was only superficial. Brisbane had not yet won. The ork charged back into combat with a cry of rage.

But now Brisbane had the advantage. It was the right leg he had hit and Bronsop was obviously favoring it. Brisbane concentrated his attack so the Sum had to pivot on his wounded leg in order to repel him. It also happened to be Bronsop’s weaker side, his shield being in his left hand, and that gave Brisbane yet another advantage.

—Good. We’ve got him now. Don’t rush it. Wait for him to open up.—

Angelika, leave me alone.

—Vengeance, Brisbane. It must be your constant objective. You must destroy this evil.—

Bronsop was getting desperate. The loss of blood was beginning to affect him. If he did not end this battle soon he would pass out. Brisbane saw this, and he stayed on the defensive, waiting for Bronsop to get sloppy. They parried for a while, Brisbane attacking the Sum’s weak side just enough to keep him from launching an all-out attack. Once, Brisbane hit him on the breastplate, nearly hard enough to knock the Sum off his feet.

—Now, Brisbane. End this creature’s life. Destroy him and only Tornestor stands between you and me.—

Not yet, Angelika.

Brisbane was watching Bronsop carefully. He knew the ork was going to have to go for everything sooner or later. That was what he was waiting for.

Eventually, it happened. After patiently waiting through the growing dissatisfaction in the crowd and the constant urgings of Angelika to hurry up and end the battle, Bronsop finally swung out in his final move of desperation. It almost worked. It was a high, quick-moving swipe to the head that, had it hit where it had been aimed, might have shattered Brisbane’s skull inside his helmet and certainly knocked him unconscious. But Brisbane had seen it coming and, at the last second, was able to duck just enough to turn the smashing blow to the side of his head into a glancing blow off the top of his helmet. The swing turned Bronsop halfway around and, for a moment, he tottered on the edge of losing his balance.

—Now, Brisbane!—

The breastplate still hung on the ork, protecting his body from any sword thrust, but his sword arm, circled by the red stripe on his sleeve, hovered in front of Brisbane’s sight, completely open and unshielded. Dazed a little from the glancing blow to his head, Brisbane brought his sword down hard on the exposed arm, between the elbow and the shoulder, and cleanly severed it from Bronsop’s body. The arm, with the scimitar still clenched in its claw-like hand, fell to the floor of the pug-trolang with a spurt of blood.

The crowd of orks let out a shocked gasp as Bronsop dropped to his knees in front of Brisbane, his shield hanging limply on his left side and a river of red running down his right. The ork looked up at Brisbane with a grimace of pain on his face so twisted it seemed like a grin. Silence fell over the pit of combat as Brisbane locked eyes with his dying adversary.

—Finish him, Brisbane. Send him back to his evil maker. Vengeance is ours!—

Brisbane looked closely at Bronsop as the ork’s mouth began to work in a silent imitation of speech. His lips formed two words over and over again, but it wasn’t until the ork was able to force some air through his vocal chords that Brisbane could make them out.

“…kill…me…”

Brisbane nodded. Swiftly, he brought his sword across and struck Bronsop’s neck, removing his head from his body. The head bounced off to the side and the body slumped lifelessly forward.

—It is done. Praise Grecolus for his wisdom and Brisbane for his courage.—

“Grum Brisbane has defeated Sum Bronsop,” the Demosk said. “Do you require anything else of me, Grumak Ternosh?”

Ternosh was slow in responding. “No.”

Brisbane looked up at the orks around the edges of the pit after the Demosk had vanished and the smoke had begun to dissipate. They all wore looks of muted surprise on their faces and they were all frozen as if they had been turned to stone. Brisbane’s gaze fell upon Ternosh and then slowly swept around the ring until he was looking at Tornestor. The Sumak was looking at him as well, but the look on his face was not one of surprise. It was one of hatred.

“Tomorrow,” Brisbane said, giving life to the scene. “Prepare yourself, Tornestor, for tomorrow we meet in the pug-trolang.”

The Sumak said nothing. He slowly got out of his stone chair and, after giving Brisbane another long and measured glare, turned and stalked quickly from the chamber.

Brisbane looked down at the remains of Bronsop as the others filed out of the cave. In three separate parts, the body lay there like a bloody tribute to an angry god. It occurred to Brisbane that to the orks and to Angelika, that was exactly what it was. In fact, only Brisbane, who was the one who had actually performed the sacrifice, didn’t believe the event was related to any god in any way. The orks had just seen one of their own be sent onto his ultimate reward, the eternal battlefield of Gruumsh One-Eye. Angelika had just seen another monster destroyed in Grecolus’ holy mission for the destruction of evil. Brisbane had just killed an intelligent being to get his sword back. And tomorrow, he was going to have to do it again. He had trouble deciding which one of them was the craziest.

“Brisbane?”

Brisbane looked up at the edge of the pug-trolang and saw Ternosh standing there. “What?”

“Is this why Gruumsh sent you here? To become our new Sumak?”

Brisbane shook his head in slow frustration. “What do you think, Ternosh?”

“I think he did,” Ternosh said without hesitation. “After what I just saw, I think he must have.”

“Help me out of this pit.”

Ternosh did.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Work of Art by Sinclair Lewis

The title of this lesser-known Sinclair Lewis novel is an invitation into the theme it seems determined to explore -- namely…

What is an art, what is a profession, what is a business, what is a job? Is a man who runs a great grocery store like Park & Tilford, Acker, Charles, or the gr. dept of Macy’s just a business man, while anybody who makes smart pictures of girls is artist, and doc or lawyer who thinks about nothing but making money a professional and cranky old prof who goes on handing out same lectures yr after yr a scholar and not just a white collar job?

These words are written by our protagonist, Myron Weagle, in a notebook he keeps to help him work out the details of his life’s work and vision. It’s a telling entry, since Myron very much views his life and profession -- that of a hotelier -- as every bit a “work of art” as those products of sensuality and indulgence to which his society more commonly applies that term.

Using this as his narrative frame, Lewis digs deep into the world of hotel management, showing both its beauty and its vulgarity in turn.

The Hotel Westward Ho!, to the eyes of Myron Weagle, was a palace. The Westward, as its habitues called it, had six hundred and fifty bedrooms, and in 1905 was one of the six largest hotels in the world. It was new, built in 1900, and had the benefit not only of Byzantine, Moorish, and Gothic architecture, but also of the room telephones, elevators, and telautographs of America.

Before Myron reported to Mark Elphinstone -- the offices of the whole Elphinstone chain were in the Westward -- he stopped to adore the facade of the new cathedral in which he was to serve altar. There were fifteen stories of brown sandstone, pleasingly diversified with balconies, gray marble plaques, and small pink marble pillars, all rising to minarets of corroded green copper and huge Moorish brick turrets shaped like hexagonal pears. The building’s glory was its main entrance: the golden archway above authentic red porphyry pilasters from Syria, shadowed by the carriage awning of glass and gilded iron. The lobby was two stories high, floored with pink marble, wainscoted with yellow marble, supported with pillars of marble pink and yellow and green and black. Above the wainscoting was a frieze (painted by one of the best firms of commercial painters in New York) showing the development of New York from the Dutch, through the English, Irish, and Jews, to the Italians: a fine and lively incitement to American patriotism. The elevator doors were of bronze -- rather like the doors of St. Peter’s in miniature. The cafe and barroom at one side of the lobby was lined with green marble, and full of tapestries, silver medallions, carved oak cabinets, carved ivory chessmen under glass, a carved oak ceiling, onyx-topped tables, teak tables, Flemish oak tables, English oak tables, French iron tables from the boulevards, sporting prints, a gilded harp draped with a silken scarf, a portrait of Mark Elphinstone draped with a Shriner’s sash, a photograph of Oscar of the Waldorf inscribed “To my friend M.E.,” tufted leather chairs, curved oak chairs, gilded bamboo chairs, and lights -- a glory and miracle of lights -- ceiling clusters of lights, lights peeping out of mauve glass lilies, lights in a large horseshoe formation on the wall, lights and lights and lights behind the glass ware that upreared like fairy stalagmites behind the bar,

“Good gracious, what a room! Why it’s like -- it’s like King Edward’s own palace!” said Myron.

That’s the beauty -- the outward face. But behind it, always, is the meager and vulgar commonness that makes the beauty possible.

But Myron had seen, as yet, only what a guest might see. The inner shrine was the world behind the green baize doors at the ends of corridors; the world of the real hotel makers -- the engine room, large enough to heat and light a city, the shops of upholsterers and carpenters and plumbers, thousands of sheets, tablecloths, and sets of silver and glass and china, mounds of stationary and report blanks, detectives, paymasters, tailors, printers, musicians, florists, cooks, girls who did nothing all day save prepare salads, men who did nothing but open oysters and clams, gardes manger who did nothing but prepare cold meat and find use for scraps, assistant storekeepers who received (and save on written order would not issue to the clamorous cooks) everything from five hundredweight of sugar to a single vial of rosewater; and all the office world: bookkeepers, auditors, telephone girls, telautograph operators, and all the other workers rarely seen by the guest, to whom the personnel of a hotel if composed only of clerks, bellboys, elevator operators, waiters, and the affable cigar-stand clerk.

The whole great hotel was to be torn down, as antiquated, by 1929.

It reminds me in some ways of my own fiction in Dragons -- about the colossal waste that must occur behind the scenes to present the wondrous illusion to the hotel guest -- but more than that it is, of course, a reflection of art itself -- or at least the process of making art. To create the thing of beauty there must be a whole lot of sordid messiness, essential, but often scrubbed away and kept out of the pristine halls and corridors of the art museum.

And in that regard we are also given the foil of Myron’s brother Ora. Ora is a writer -- although admittedly a bit of a dilettante -- who, here, cooks up a story to give him an excuse to shack up with a woman he meets and impetuously admires at one of Myron’s hotels.

The day after that Ora saw Tansy Quill.

She was bustling down a corridor, fresh in a new linen uniform, inspecting rooms. The pile of towels on her arm did not seem to belong to a servant, for they were of the shining new linen which Myron had purchased to replace the wormy old towels provided by Fred Barrow.

“Lord, what a picture! Swell-looking dinge. Who is she?” Ora demanded of Myron.

“Assistant housekeeper -- Miss Quill, Miss Tansy Quill.”

“Introduce me!”

“I will not! You keep away from Tansy!”

But that night Myron saw his brother ambling through the grounds with Tansy, and heard from him, from a distance, wailing “---yes, a hard-working poet, just an impractical poet---” and “---agree with you; old Myron, the finest, keenest mind I’ve ever---”

Worry about Ora’s intentions towards Tansy quenched half Myron’s pleasure in receiving from Mark Elphinstone, early in April, the letter for which he had prayed:

“Dear Weagle: When you close up the Tippecanoe, come see me in New York. I’ll have something for you to do, don’t know just what yet, depends on our talk, come see me as soon as you arrive.”

He tried to get Ora to go north with him, but Ora announced, “No, I think I’ll stay here awhile -- maybe till June. I’ve found a cabin on the Island that I can rent for ten dollars a month. Swell place to write. I have an idea for a long story about the big swamp here -- it’s full of atmosphere -- thousands of square miles of gloomy cypresses and wild orange trees, and secret waterways and moccasins and panthers and a hidden refuge for niggers escaped from the chain gang, and their Queen -- a marvelous colored wench. By golly, I’ll give the world the first real psychology of the Negro in love and in trouble! To say nothing of the grand atmosphere. And of course right here is the place to get all the dope!”

“But there isn’t any thousand miles of swamp here! The biggest one within fifteen miles is about four acres. And I doubt if there’s a panther within two hundred miles. And you don’t know a thing about the psychology of Negroes.”

“Oh, hell, that just goes to show you don’t understand! If you’ve got a trained eye for observation, you can see all you want in four acres -- or half an acre. And Tansy Quill has promised to help me with the psychology. She’s quite a bright girl, for a chambermaid. Now don’t go scowling. You’ve got a dirty mind! Typical Puritan, you are -- always seeing wrong where there ain’t any! Tansy and I are just friends. Oh, say, could you possibly let me have a hundred dollars to see me through till I finish my big story? Send it back the minute I get my check. You know how I am: I always pay my debts.”

This leads us into the novel’s Chapter 14, which I’m going to transcribe here in its entirety, both because it struck me powerfully when I read it and because it is ultimately about what it actually is like to write something -- not on a lark, like Ora at first intends, but as a compulsive matter to determines either one’s madness or one’s sanity.

When Myron left for New York and Ora had moved to his little cracker cottage, with its scant table, bed, and two chairs, the theory was that Tansy was merely coming in to cook for him. She was an orphan, living with an indifferent uncle who let her drift as she would, and one night of relaxed indolence, it was too much trouble to go home, and she rested content beside him on the corn-husk bed, and was glad in the morning when he (for he did have that genius) was neither ashamed nor irritable.

She worshipped him, then, and Myron in him.

And he was happy in her, till he felt that he had explored her soul and come out on the other side, through the jungle to a shore facing new lands which he must enter. No staid settler was he, he meditated, but an explorer always.

Despair was sickening him, for he could not write, nor could Tansy give him wherewith to write.

The story of swamp and crouching Negroes among the rotting cypresses which he had seen, definite as rock, when he had boasted of it to Myron, had crumbled day by day. He had nothing there, he realized, save one flaring chromo in his mind -- no fable, no people, no truth.

Tansy gave him nothing new for his story. She knew no more about the voodoo or the slavery of the dark quarter of her ancestors than Ora knew about the history of Jonathan Edwards and Israel Putnam of Connecticut; she knew no more about swamps and poisonous moccasins and fevers and hidden cabins of refuge than he did about tobacco-curing in the Connecticut Valley. Both of them, the white hackwriter and the part-white chambermaid, had about the same hash of American public-school knowledge: a little memory of Longfellow and Whittier and Poe; the opinion that Lee and Grant had, in vague forgotten ways, shown themselves to be excellent generals; the facts that the square root of four was two, that the chemical symbol of water was H2O, that Beethoven was a widely esteemed musician, and that the United States was (1) the greatest nation in the world and (2) as a residence for sensitive souls like theirs, the most inferior nation in the world.

Out of this knowledge she picked items for the cultured chatter for which, all her life, while she had made beds and scrubbed out toilets and washed dishes, she had longed. She said excitedly, “Boy, dear, don’t you think that Justice is the most important thing we all have to work for -- even more than Beauty?” and “Doesn’t it just frighten you, how real Stephen Crane makes things when he writes?”

And he was bored. Her talk was just near enough to that of the more nearly literate of the Happy Hearts group to make him lonely for them. Had he been quite alone, he might have survived and been content, listening uninterrupted to the voices of his own self-praise, but she only tantalized him with memories.

He was so lonely for his fellow hack writers. And a familiar, dependable saloon around the corner! And a jolly burlekew show on the Bowery!

Here, in the evening, you could stay home, or go watch the Holy Rollers, shouting in their tabernacle roofed with palm leaves, and that was all you could do.

He hated the view from his cabin door, though it had been utter enchantment, at first: fishing-boats on the pewter surface of Pontevedra Inlet, poinsettias seen through the veil of Spanish moss, a log cabin set in arching cypresses.

It was so still -- and the stillness was insulted by Tansy’s loquacity as she stirred a hateful pot of beans.

He did not hear her. He was in despair. He could not write. The hundred dollars from Myron would be gone. He was in disgrace with that old devil, the editor of ‘Yankee Doodle,’ jumping his neck for just doing a little plagiarism like everybody else. He was marooned ‘way off here,’ a million miles from New York. And he could not write. What the devil would he do?

“Boy dear, do you like Frank Norris’s ‘The Octopus?’ Such a time I had borrowing it. I was just dreadfully broken then -- I was washing dishes at an orphanage! Did you like it?”

Ora drawled evenly, quite clearly, “Like hell! I only like decent Northern beefsteak -- and a little silence. Even you might occasionally note that I’m trying to plan a story, and keep your mouth shut!”

She stood so helplessly hurt, a hurt child, with idiotic quivering mouth and beseeching eyes, that he hated her. He stamped out and did not return for the lunch she had been cooking. She was gone, when he came back at five, after a wretched afternoon of planless crawling through the heat, and he was a little distressed. But that evening she crept back again, crawling to him like a bewildered dog which does not know why it has been beaten, and he hated her for her meekness. He was a man who merited tall proud women!

“Oh, for God’s sake don’t act like a slave -- like your damn ancestors!” he snarled, assuring himself that he didn’t really mean it, that he was much kinder than he sounded. “Or if you have got to show up the nigger in you, why the hell don’t you go out and get me some dope for my escaped slave in the swamp story, like I’ve asked you?”

He could scarcely hear her wail as she fled from the cabin. It was less a sound than a vibration in air.

He was ashamed -- also hungry. He would apologize handsomely when she came back. Nobody could ever say that he failed to own up when he had been in the wrong, even just a little in the wrong!

She did not come back, all night, nor all the next day. Toward evening he was slightly anxious and skulked about the log quarters where she lived with her uncle. He would have seen her if she had been there, easily enough, her uncle’s dwelling had but two shallow rooms.

He was worried now, and bilious with his own cooking. He could not sleep, and he flung up from his pallet when, after midnight, he heard a long moaning outside.

He huddled in his doorway to watch a procession of Negroes, lighted by pitch-pine torches and kerosene lanterns that threw maniac shadows on the writhing moss hanging from the live-oaks, on cypress trunks and the metallic leaves of scrub palmettos. They were bearing an old pine door, sticky with dry manure, on which, draped in the earthy jacket of a field hand, was the body of a woman whose long black hair dripped water.

He burst out, to demand, “My God, what is it?”

The foremost Negro, powerful as Hercules and humble as a slave, his molded black muscles shining greasily in the torchlight, muttered, “It’s dat culled gal, Tansy, dat cook for you, boss. She’s done got drowned. Reckon she must of caught her ankle in a cypress root and fell in de swamp. Get you another cook, boss? Ah got a smart sister.”

It was dreadful that none of them blamed him, none of them were interested enough in him to consider that he might be to blame. He must go unshriven, ignored or despised by these primitive people whom he had made his brothers.

He tramped the floor in horror. He stopped. His eyes bulged. “Saints above!” he whispered, in awe at the wings of inspiration. He charged on his typewriter, and banged it from one in the morning till dawn, when he arose, staggering, to make coffee.

Thus he began his novel ‘Black Slumber.’

He finished it in two and a half weeks, in first draft. He was so absorbed that no life existed beyond the edge of his vision. He wrote all afternoon, all night, living on coffee, bread on a smeary plate, cigarettes, and white mule; unbathed, unshaven, his shirt collar gray-black. He roused from his frenzy only to telegraph Myron, in New York: “For heaven’s sake send me hundred fifty dollars at once really writing nearly finished novel been lazy before but not come across gloriously bless you old brother.”

He got the money. He finished the tale.

It was the story of Tansy Quill -- told from the side of Tansy, and relentlessly punishing her swine of a white lover. Ora gave her the grandeur of an ocean wave. He wept real tears, the while his ceaseless clattering fingers brought to life her sitting amid hog-slop, longing for the simple culture that was the birthright of any white girl, the cowardly sneering of her lover, and the torchlight among the live-oaks as they bore her home dead.

“How wonderfully impersonal a real genius can be!” he breathed.

He shaved, got very drunk, and took the manuscript to New York, revising it all the way up in a day coach.

It was published and had enormous critical success and no sale. He became a hackwriter again, and never again did he write anything so honest, or financially so unnecessary, as ‘Black Slumber.’

Within six months he had almost forgotten there was such a place as Tippecanoe, such a person as Tansy, and he was more or less contentedly ghostwriting the memoirs of a rich dowager, and mocking at Myron for his simple-hearted glee in being on the staff of that gaudy New York hotel, the Westward Ho! Only when he was drunk, and his friend, Wilson Ketch, the author of Westerns, had left him to himself, did he again rise to such impersonality as to mutter something about dogs and their vomit.

Black Slumber is Ora’s Work of Art, painfully birthed out of meanness and desperation, the way all such works of art must ever be. The story of its creation reveals a deep and disturbing truth about the nature of inspiration and genius, and provides a stark contrast to the Work of Art that is Myron’s life and its dedicated sense of sublime success. 

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.