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.Dying or not, this witty old man was sassing everybody about the circle of love that protects you.His skinny chest went up and down with the respiration of the deep-sea stink of the hot shore and its smell of explosions and fires.The war had gone north not so long before.The Neapolitan passersby grinned and smarted, longing and ironical as they read this ingenious challenge.You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever.The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.1 see this now.At that time not.Well, I went back to books, to reading not stealing them, while I wed on the money Mimi repaid, and on what she loaned me when she was on her feet and working once more.Through with Frazer, Mimi had met Arthur Einhorn and had taken up with him.She was still waiting on tables.I got my meals at the joint where she worked.And I lay down and finished the Five-Foot Shelf Einhorn had given me, the fire- and water-spotted books I had kept in the original cardboard box.They had a somewhat choky smell.So if Ulysses went down to hell or there were conflagrations in Rome or London or men and women lusted as they did in St.Paul, I could breathe an odor that supplemented the reading.Kayo Obermark lent me volumes of poets and took me to lectures now and then.This improved his attendance.He didn't like to go alone.I can't be sure it isn't sour grapes that the university didn't move me much--I say that because according to the agreement I had made with Simon I was to have gone back in the spring--but it didn't.I wasn't convinced about the stony solemnity, that you couldn't get into the higher branches of thought without it or had to sit down inside these old-world-imitated walls.I felt they were too idolatrous and monumental.After all, when the breeze turned south and west and blew from the stockyards with dust from the fertilizer plants through the handsome ivy some of the stages from the brute creation to the sublime mind seemed to have been bypassed, and it was too much of a detour.That winter I had a spell of the WPA.Mimi urged me to go and be certified.She said it would be simple, which it certainly was.I had the two requirements, being indigent and a citizen.The trouble was that I didn't care to be put on one of the street details I'd see picking up bricks and laying them down, and with that shame of purposelessness you smelled as the gang moved a little, just enough to satisfy the minimum demand of the job.However, she said I could always quit if too proud to be assigned to this; she thought it wasn't a good sign in me that I had to have a clerical job; I'd be in better shape in the open ah- among simpler people.It wasn't the people that I complained of, but the clinking on a brick and that melancholy percussion of fifty hammers at a time.But I went to apply because she felt obliged to take care of me, making me her responsibility, giving me money, and as we weren't lovers this would be unfair.Anyhow, I was certified and got a strolling kind of job that was about as good as I could expect.I was with a housing survey, checking on rooms and plumbing back-of-the-yards.I could fix up my own time card and soldier considerably, as everyone expected me to do; in bitter weather I could pass the time in the back booth of a coffeepot until the check-out hour.Also, the going into houses satisfied my curiosity.It was finding ten people to a room and the toilets in excavations under the street, or the rat-bitten kids.That was what I didn't like too much.The stockyard reek clung to me worse than the smell of the dogs at Guillaume's.And even to me, as accustomed to slums as Indians are 1 to elephants, it was terra incognita.The different smells of flesh in all 1 degrees from desire to sickness followed me.And all the imagination, passion, or even murder you could conceive were wrapped up in apparent simplicity or staleness, with elementary coarseness of a housewife feeling cabbages in a Polack store, or a guy who lifted a glass of beer to his white, flat-appearing face, or a merchant hanging ladies' bloomers and elastics in the drygoods window.I stayed with this deal until the end of winter, and then Mimi, who was always up on these things, had an idea that there might be something for me in the CIO drive that had just started.This was soon after the first sitdown strikes.Mimi was an early member of the restaurant workers' union CIO.Not that she had any special grievance where she worked, but she believed in unions and she was on fine terms with her organizer, a man named Grammick.She brought us together.This Grammick was no rough-and-tumble type but had points of similarity with Frazer and also Sylvester.He was "a college man, softspoken, somewhat of a settlement-house minister doing his best, meek with the punks but used to them, and causing you a sense of regret.He ^1 had a long chest but his legs were relatively short; he walked quickly, ^^ toes in, slovenly in his double-breasted long jacket, a densely hairy,.mild, even delicate person.But he wasn't an easy man for opponents to deal with.He couldn't be caught off balance, he clung hard, he was ^clever, and he knew a thing or two about deceit himself, Grammick did.^* I produced a pretty favorable impression, and he agreed I might make an organizer.In fact his behavior toward me was very sweet [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]