Confessions of a Spent Youth: A Novel

I

Confession of Intentions

1

Confession of Intentions

Like most men, I tell a hundred lies a day. Yet in the pages which follow I have tried to tell only truths, with the exception common to all works of confession, the exception which Rousseau described this way:

If I have occasionally made use of some immaterial embellishments, this has been only in order to fill a gap caused by lack of memory.

The gap seems larger to me than it did to Rousseau, and my use of embellishments—some of them fairly material—is not occasional but constant. I do not often know what is memory and what invention in the ordinary detail of my narratives. But for all extraordinary detail I vouch, and for all circumstance and outcome, all turns, sequence, coincidence, and surprise. The things which are logical and undramatic, which have the trivial ring of small facts, may very well be fiction; those which are violent and improbable, which have the brassy sound of uninhibited fiction, are all fact.

Some of the trivial things are genuine too, of course, but will not be dwelt on much—like the matter of my birth which took place, unaccompanied by portents, on September 17, 1922, making me the second of my parents’ three sons. That is all, perhaps more than all, that you will need to know about my birth and infancy.

There is another exception to the kind of truth I tell. I mean to make here no man’s confession but my own, nor any woman’s. I have put into disguise the girls and the companions who shared my youth. You could recognize none of them from my description, should you meet one now; I have no wish that they should recognize themselves.

Shall I recognize myself? Yes, but with the acknowledgment that the I in any sort of autobiography, whether ten-volume memoir or barside anecdote, is any man’s chief and continuing work of fiction. It is one of the hundred lies. We look in mirrors with fools’ eyes, and the person we see there is always merrier or more melancholy, more loathsome or appealing, shorter or taller, even, than the poser whom a stranger would see if the stranger stood in the mirror’s place.

I am aware, then, that I recognize myself in what follows only as I would recognize my younger image in a mirror, never as the stranger standing in its place. Yet what a pleasure to come on such a mirror, to see looking out at me the youth I imagine myself to have been fifteen years ago, with the hair restored to the front of the skull and the skin smooth, with the beard lightened, trunk slimmed …

What might he say to me?

You’re looking kind of fat, chief.

I eat better than you did, I might reply.

Big sybarite, huh?

No, it’s …

Isn’t that dandy? Boy, go on cramming in that creamed chicken and steak. They’ll probably make you president of the food society or something.

Look, I live a pretty regular life, that’s all. I have to, to get my work done.

Oh, big worker, too.

Sure.

How do you manage to have any nose left, keeping it to the grindstone that way?

I decide to smile instead of answering.

Boy, I’ll bet you wear out six or seven grindstones a year that way; probably get them from Abercrombie and Fitch. Have all kinds of fun too, don’t you?

Some kinds.

Look at him. Look at the big, fat, life-is-worth-living man. Hot damn, General, I think I’ll go get Hal and MacCalibre, and you can line the three of us up, and we’ll stand here smartly at attention for about half an hour saluting you and puking.

He’s overexcited; probably it’s because he’s just back from the war. I am fond of him and will make whatever excuses he needs, for, without meaning to claim that he is reckless and open and, in spite of his jeering, gentle, as absolute characteristics, yet how far he exceeds my present self in all three qualities. If I am tolerant, avoid awkwardness, and am less a victim of my sensitivities it is a poor trade, nevertheless. In making it I tell another of my hundred daily lies: I allow myself to believe that I have gained some sort of wisdom in exchange for silliness. This is simply not true, unless wisdom is no more than a kind word for learning to make do; it is, of course, that I have learned to make do with some degree of personal happiness that makes young Quincy scoff so. For it was on a perverse quest, the intense but often exuberant pursuit of unhappiness, that my youth was spent. This you will begin to see in the second half of the book; in the first I have no such goal. I have merely a boy’s goal: to be esteemed, to be liked, to be loved.

I made an error; I ought to have gone farther back in that mirror to see myself younger still, seven years younger, just out of high school (the point at which these confessions will begin). The hair is even bushier, and I read in the emerging face a goodness of nature, sweetness of temper, and a hunger to get involved with this excitement called life which were not there in the older youth.

Since I am an adult, an established man, and even somewhat prominent in an inconspicuous field which he and I both value (the nature of which is no concern of this book), this seventeen-year-old is waiting for me to speak first. He will be relieved to learn from my tone that I am well-disposed towards him.

Hello, Quince.

Hi.

I thought there might be some things you’d like to ask me.

Well yes. Sure, everything. Everything.

I begin to tell him about myself lately; he seems an easy boy to talk to, attentive, full of response. Or does he smile or crease his brow, lift an eyebrow only at changes in my tone, only to appear responsive? To test him I stop in the middle of an anecdote.

Gee, that was very interesting, says the little fraud, politely.

Shall I tell you some more?

Well yeah. I wish you would sometime. I mean, when you have time.

Look, Quince, I’m not saying I’ve run out of discontent. I still hate authority. It’s just, I have responsibilities … But I stop myself. This is the line I ought to have taken in the last interview; it will be seven years before this kid knows what I’m talking about. So instead of finishing, I say: Listen. Remember a list you made? Of things you wanted to do, experiences you hoped to have … don’t be embarrassed that I bring it up.

Oh, I’m not.

Don’t you see, what I’m trying to tell you? I did those things. Nearly all of them. Now it’s over and I have these responsibilities.

Well, sure. Thank you for explaining to me about all that. It’s been very interesting.

I tell you I’ve done the things. I’ve done them.

It doesn’t sound like what I meant exactly, he says, carefully, and then, less carefully, but in a lower voice, fading away: It isn’t what I meant.

Now the mirror changes and what the young images have left me of themselves is within me and inseparable. The mirror has lost its magic, and merely shows what mirrors show: how I look. Since you are going to read about me as a lover my appearance is probably relevant; I will treat it as a permanent thing. For so it is, really—aging is the treatment our looks receive, once we are grown, not a real revision of them.

I am five feet six and a half inches tall; do not believe my driver’s license which reads five feet seven. I have never developed the erect and bristling carriage with which many short men manage to disguise their lack of height and am, in fact, a sloucher and not tidy. My hair is a very ordinary shade of brown and very ordinarily in need of cutting, but seldom to the point of defiant unconventionality; as I approach that point I often have it all chopped down army style. I am, at this moment, while writing, wearing a mustache, but those I have raised in the past have never been of lasting satisfaction to me, and I doubt that this one will; safer to think of me as clean-shaven.

I am neither ill-co-ordinated nor am I graceful, quite strong in the legs and back, limber, able to catch most kinds of ball if they aren’t thrown too fast, so that I am inclined to ascribe my lack of notable athletic achievement to mental rather than physical characteristics. I have insufficient drive to win at games, but enjoy playing; I like to fish small streams alone, and I shoot well enough with a shotgun but in streaks, sometimes missing every easy shot for a month. I mention these activities because I want you to see my movements as neither quick nor slow, deteriorating under pressure, but not always without skill.

My weight varies a good deal; once, four or five years ago, I did enough neurotic eating, in reaction to some problems I couldn’t seem to solve, to get up close to 170 pounds, and at that weight I looked bloated. Normally, though, I stay within a few pounds of 150 and am not fat, whatever young Quincy says. However, along with the strong back I mentioned I have the hips, trunk, and shoulders of a slightly larger man set on my somewhat stubby legs; smile, enemies. Friends, regard my face.

At times I recall having had the notion that I could identify with those secondary creatures in detective stories one of whose assets is the ability to appear entirely usual, to blend with crowds and so on—perhaps that is my type in terms of features in repose, but I do not have the inexpressiveness that must complete the type unless I remember to compose it. Most of the time I suspect I am quite transparent, and that you would like or dislike my appearance on the basis of what showed through the face at the time we met, well-being or weariness, or sullenness or joy. Suspect this? Boast. When there were no lines, when the flesh upon the face was young, wasn’t transparency my most effective, because least conscious, charm?

About the flesh itself, it is sallow, a word more precise than pleasant; the dark, Levantine skin of my father, the fair English of my mother, are, whatever a geneticist might say of the possibility, too exactly met halfway in me. But it isn’t really that bad, being sallow, except towards the end of a city winter when an overlying pallor gives me the skin tone of a scaled fish. I avoid city winters and in summer tan well enough, and my beard shows less.

The rest is fretting: sometimes I think my nose too heavy, my teeth crooked, and my chin too slight. At other times they look normal enough, and I grant myself that I have a decent set of brows and lashes and that the general modelling of my face and forehead will do, though they are nothing exceptional.

When I lived in the South, where girls are taught the value of flirtation by physical compliment, the feature they always spoke of, when one happened to find herself flirting with me, was my eyes; these are blue and fairly bright.

That will do to sum up; if you are complimented on your eyes by a Southern girl, it’s a giveaway that she has looked you over, considered all she comprehends about you, and found nothing in particular worth mentioning. Anyone can be made to believe that he or she has lovely eyes for, in fact, everyone does.

I have said that these confessions begin in my seventeenth year, and implied, at least, that they will end about my twenty-fourth; I have also given as much account as seems needful of my unremembered infancy. I am not sure what to do with my childhood, but my impulse is to leave it out, too, except to say that it seems to me to have been a reasonably happy one, if somewhat unrooted; like many American families in the twenties and thirties—and very likely the forties, fifties, sixties, and forever—mine moved around a good deal; from Cleveland, to New Haven, to Long Island, to Connecticut, to New York and Virginia—the two last are the heads of separate columns, with my father’s subsequent homes under the first and my mother’s under the second; for in my eleventh year they divorced and each remarried and continued moving about, but from one dwelling to another within the same city or state.

I think that will do for the childhood. From then on my brothers and I were away in school a good deal, but references to that time, my early adolescence, appear when necessary in the text of the confessions. Only one is very extensive; it comes in the middle of the book. And that will do for early life.

Yet I seem to have something left over, after all that disposing. I think I had better include it on the chance that it will mean more to you than it does to me; it is a psychoanalytic fragment, and will tell you as much more about that early life as you are disposed to accept from such items.

To begin with, I haven’t been analysed and am not likely to be. I haven’t the time, the money, or, whatever my symptoms, much personal inclination towards that kind of sanitation. Yet I am no disbeliever in its general theory, and hardly could be, in view of the way this fragment of mine turned up and proved out.

The turning up took place a month or two after I got back from the war. I was staying, at the time, in a shack in Virginia, not far from the town in which my mother lived.

I was alone in the shack. I had bought myself a second-hand trumpet, and a book on how to play it, and spent an hour or two a day trying. I spent some of the other hours reading—poetry, mostly; a lot of it tedious, which suited my mood—and others yet walking in the woods with the single-shot twenty-two rifle I’d carried as a boy. I had some vague thought of shooting a squirrel to cook, or a rabbit, but actually I never bought shells for the gun; I only carried it. Failing squirrels and rabbits, I got my food in town once a week, walking the four miles in, riding a taxi back to the woods with my bags of supplies. Cooking them, and sleeping, took a few more hours of the day and night, but there were still hours left for my chief pursuit, the one I had gone there to follow.

If I may use the word loosely enough, I might describe what I did with those other hours as thinking. Thinking about the war, about time, about love, about myself; but I need not be so loose. There was really nothing to think. It seems to me that what I was trying to do then was feeling, rather than thinking, or more exactly re-feeling—letting my old experience happen to me again wordlessly, even without image, over and over, with, perhaps, at each repetition, a bit less tension, less rawness, less force, less strain.

I had tried to set up, as you will see shortly, an environment of seven years earlier and within it I was groping for a sort of healing. The experiment was not particularly successful; the stuff of this book, for example, is the same material I was reviewing then, and it is proof of how much longer than a few weeks the easing took that it is only now, fifteen years later, that I can handle some of it freely. Moreover, even if my method had been calculated to succeed completely—it did a little—there was a certain Cynthia Ann who showed up to interrupt it; she is part of the material of later confessions, too.

But for the fragment: I am in my shack and have not met her yet. See me in mid-experiment, and in midweek too, with my groceries correctly reduced to three days’ supply, stacked in the kitchen. I have been here two weeks already, and because there are no other voices to speak (nor ears to overhear) I listen to my own; I talk to myself aloud without self-consciousness.

Go in the other room and close the trumpet case, I command. Or did I? Go see, jerk. I wonder if I could get some water colors in town? Probably not. Too small. School supplies—colored ink. Be good to try to paint something. Crayons, even. Why not the corned beef, cook some potatoes and onions with it? Hash, boy.

The week goes by; I go to town at the end of it, pay a brief call on my mother, get my supplies and return to the cabin. In this new week my talking aloud moves one degree closer to the fantastical: I imagine someone to talk to. It is a girl, of course, for I am twenty-three.

She is no particular girl I know or have known, neither do I give her a name nor try to imagine an appearance for her; this indulgence never ceases to be conscious fantasy, never quite becomes real delusion. But once I have established her, I invoke her pretty casually, seldom pausing to register who it is I am speaking to, calling out to her anything that happens across my mind:

There’s frost again this morning; pretty stuff. Ever step into it in bare feet?

Or, I might write Hal today. But what about? Any suggestions?

Her presence, when I address her so, is always within earshot but just out of sight. If I am in the yard, she is around the corner of the shack; if I am in the kitchen, she is on the porch or in the living room.

I’ll be out in a minute, I say. I’m going to wash the grey and golden dishes. Don’t get up. Then, to myself, lowering my voice so that she won’t hear me: Why in hell ‘grey and golden’?

It is connection I want, someone to live with; I have known too much of the company of men in the armies of the years just past; I want a different and a closer closeness; familiarity; when I give in to making pictures of her in my mind, for example, they are not of a naked body waiting for me in the bed so often as of a dress thrown carelessly over the back of a chair, a bright square of figured silk lighting the rough board floor of my shack where she shook it from her head, the sweet disorders of intimacy.

One morning as I get up—she has apparently wakened just before me and gone outdoors into the morning sun—I call to her out the window:

Hey! I’ve just had the damnedest dream.

Then I frown and correct myself: It’s funny. No I haven’t. It’s more that I’ve remembered a dream. Or dreamed I had a dream, is that possible? The actual dream is one I had when I was about twelve, I guess.

I move to the kitchen and start to make coffee. I stop talking to rinse myself a cup; I do not play my game so hard as to rinse out two. After a time I go on: "I’d forgotten that dream till now. In it, I’d stolen some diamonds, I guess. I was running away with them and I came to a little bridge in the road, one of those humped up little stone bridges they have in story book illustrations, and I decided to hide under it.

"So I left the road and scrambled under the bridge, and when I got there, I realized that the diamonds I’d stolen were sticky, like chewing gum; so I stuck them to the underside of the bridge for concealment and went back up on the road again.

"Don’t bother about the bed; I’ll, make it later. Let’s take a walk after coffee. Don’t you hate people who tell dreams?

"Anyway, I was lounging on the roadway, on top of the bridge once more, feeling pretty confident, when Pursuit caught up. I don’t think Pursuit actually appeared, I only heard its voice, a loud, shrill, awful voice shrieking at me:

"‘You splattered those diamonds under the bridge.’"

The coffee was ready. I was teaching myself to make omelets, and I practiced one which turned out pretty well. It may have been half an hour later, after I’d eaten, that I added:

That’s the dream I had when I was twelve, and I remember waking from it in terror, with the sheets soaked in sweat; and just now I woke up feeling a little bit the same way, and remembered the dream. What do you suppose it means?

That was all at first. But I kept turning the thing over in my mind, looking for meaning, as the week went on; I was under no illusion that if I solved it it would contribute anything useful to what I was doing. I felt, and still feel, that my achieving its recall was nothing more than a by-product of being alone so much and fantasizing freely. Almost more than wanting to know what it meant I wanted to know if it was genuine, for I’d been reading some books about psychoanalysis; I wanted to know if I’d really flung up some meaningful repressed material from my unconscious memory.

Splattered was the key word, I decided; one doesn’t splatter diamonds. Having no particular reason to try to invent some further technique of self-analysis, which an analyst might have considered fairer play, I did the direct thing. When Saturday came, and I walked into town for supplies, I stopped off at my mother’s house and asked her.

She’d offered me lunch, and it was as I was collecting a forkful of peas that I said, depending pretty heavily on how I’d decided to interpret splattered:

Mother, when I was around four, did I ever kill anything?

She turned quite pale at the question, and laid down her utensils.

Well, she said finally. Yes. Yes, you did.

That forkful of peas never reached my mouth, for as she started to speak again, I dropped it. I felt a sudden and desolate sense of panic and emptiness, and I’d have done anything to keep her from speaking, but all I could manage was to look stupidly at the green peas, rolling on the tablecloth, dropping onto the floor, as she answered.

We were living in New Haven then. You were just four. You were being punished for something, I don’t remember what, and I left you at home while I took your brothers downtown to your father’s office for a treat. The laundress was there and was supposed to watch you, but she didn’t, and when we got back you had killed the canary and torn it into bits. I’ll never forget walking onto the sunporch and seeing the blood and the little gold feathers splattered around the room, even on the walls.

That’s all. I have no doubt but what the reference of my dream is there explained and, for myself, can take the matter no further. If you have a taste for such puzzles perhaps you can interpret this fragment to fit in with all the unconscious revelation which is, I suppose, bound to follow, and thus you may become that stranger in the mirror through whose eyes I shall never see myself.

It is the conscious revelation which interests me more. I can control that, and it needs controlling. For frank though these confessions are I must disclaim that they are also full. I hope that they are as full as they need to be, and even so I know that there are those who will find them excessive. To say it bluntly, they will find the preoccupation with Quincy’s sexual experience too strong and too detailed.

(Chief, come on. It is the voice of the postwar Quincy, of course, but a bit more sympathetic now. If you’re going to be blunt, be blunt. Say it: There are people who are going to hate this book. Good. Stick ’em, rack ’em up. What do you care? Remember Melville’s preacher: ‘Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall’? That’s it, isn’t it?) No, Quincy. No, Melville, for that matter. I do care; I would forestall that hate (they are not all fools who may feel it) with some quiet, persuasive reply.

But how can I make it? There is none, really. I can only say, rather harshly, that in the span of years represented by this work, sex probably preoccupied me even more greatly than these memoirs will show. Sex, friendships, the war which became my world—these were the things on which, in the seven years, my life and effort focused, and in about that order of importance, though at times the first two were reversed.

Whether this is normal or not, old reader, you can say better than I; but I do not think my concern in writing about sex (nor yours in reading of it) should be defended any longer, as it ordinarily is, simply on the basis that to present it is realistic. The problem, in our time, in our culture, is far more than one of what scenes, what words, we may be allowed to read and write for the sake of accuracy. When I think of the lives of my friends, of other lives I’m told about, of yet others the hard beginnings or grim ends of which I read in the newspapers, and of my own life, too, I am inclined to say in all gravity that sex should have more, not less, attention in our literature. The best comedies in the lives of any century are sexual, but in our twentieth, in America, something further seems to me to be true: that many of our serious triumphs and failures, and almost all the personal tragedies I know, are sexual as well.

I have no solutions to advocate nor attitudes to recommend, as to how man should confront his sexual nature, and the works of fiction which propagandize in the area I find tiresome, when they are not merely callow and self-serving. But I feel that there is a great deal of truthful description, honest examination, scrupulous rendering of the emotional detail, of these experiences, which needs our best and most urgent attention, and where I could in this book, I have tried to give it mine. Agreed, it is not the adventures of the flesh, but the confusions of the heart that matter, but I do not find them extricable.

Feeling the need, as I do, to see this matter of sexuality given light and air, it is difficult to defend my lies of omission which, as I say, occur. There are at least two episodes important enough to tell which I omit, though I concede that what I include will not quite stand for all. Yet if it will not, there is no present remedy. One of the tales is simply not mine to tell, for I was the lesser agonist in it; and the other, I think, might too much degrade me in your eyes. It would need a good deal more context than the telling is worth for me to do it and maintain your sympathy; and, Melville’s preacher to the contrary, I care about your sympathy. I will strain it quite enough without adding this further irritant.

But why strain it at all? Why do I expose myself either to sympathy or irritation? Why should a man write confessions, after all? Or not, why should a man, but why should I?

The classic motives do not apply here and, as a matter of fact, there is at least one of them which I can never quite believe applies anywhere. This is the one which I will quote from the original De Quincey, noting that I have seen the same thought in other works:

… I trust that it will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, instructive … that must be my apology for breaking through those restraints of delicate reserve which, for the most part, intercept the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities … it is possible that the benefit resulting to others … might compensate, by a vast overbalance, any violence done to the feelings.…

No. I cannot believe the man who says he exposes himself as a public service. The one I do not doubt, on the other hand, is the one who confesses in the full, old-fashioned meaning of confession—to detail his sins, express remorse, promise improvement and ask forgiveness.

But that too is among the classic motives which have nothing much to do with me. For to confess in such a manner would require a confessor—some religion, some system of judgement in a fixed society, to which to confess, whose precepts were uniformly established and universally accepted and had been trespassed, whose forgiveness mattered. In the fluid society through which I move there is no such community of moral belief; it cannot hold itself, nor me its child, to any comprehensive and unquestioned single code. And though there are many groups within this society which guard separate if often overlapping codes, I am in no very unusual position when I say that I belong to none of them—I am more or less without class or national origin or locality or regular intellectual persuasion, as is true of many men of my time. Such standards as I have are personal, or so they seem to me, and my allegiances are chiefly to individuals; what measure of forgiveness I am to have from them has long since been extended or withheld, nor is it likely to be affected by their reading these pages.

Another possible motive is gone, and there are more to dismiss. I find in some works of confession a tone of complaint. Listen, say the authors, to my misfortunes and my sorrows; and here the motive seems to be plain bitching. I hope that there is little enough of that here; I should not like to appear in these pages as one who cries: Look. Look at all the milk I spilled, and here are the tears for it.

Then if not to instruct or in apology or to ask pity and forgiveness, what worth can I conceive my confessions to have? Are they merely reporting, or, worse, a peculiar and luxurious form of boasting, as confessions unrooted in serious motive sometimes seem to be? Again I hope not. For I do have a motive; two motives. Three. Four.

The least, and least serious, is like that look in the mirror at one’s young self one cannot have—to recall is a pleasure, if not an unmixed one. And the next is a motive I acknowledge as possible without actually feeling: there may be shreds of that remorse in me which breeds confession without my knowing it, manifesting itself to my conscious mind as feelings of faint embarrassment over this or that disclosure.

Here is a somewhat more interesting one: I confess because in so doing, I learn. Let me illustrate:

I am quite a small boy, ten or eleven perhaps, and have been brought with my brothers to the Museum of Natural History in New York. I am looking at the cross-section of a redwood tree, and a man beside me says, Those trees grow in California and are very tall.

He is a furtive, somewhat frightened-looking man, but with a rather appealing voice, wearing a grey suit; I decide to feel sorry for him.

He makes some more of his sparkling remarks about redwood trees and, a polite child, I listen, though I am eager to leave here and go to see the whale which I haven’t yet visited today. I am only half-attending to him, when I realize that he is asking if he may kiss me.

It seems a peculiar thing for him to want to do, but it also occurs to me that he probably has in mind a sentimental gesture of farewell, and that therein lies my chance to see the whale, which I wouldn’t care to share with him. So I say all right; he kisses me rather wetly on the cheek, which I wipe off, and puts his hand inside my pants.

I am embarrassed for him, disinterested in what he is trying to do, and above all, sincerely tired of his company; so I say I have to leave now, the lady who brought us is looking for me, and walk away. He seems alarmed by my mentioning someone looking for me, and does not attempt to follow as I amble off whalewards.

So I fantasize; I decide that he is some poor father who hasn’t seen his children in a long time, and his children look like me; maybe he has a daughter I could play with. I grin over that. Young as I am, I am interested in daughters my age and have been for several years, but it doesn’t occur to me to connect his interest in me with my interest in girls. In general, I congratulate myself on having been kind to an unfortunate adult, so when I find the lady who brought us—she is going to become my stepmother but hasn’t yet—I describe what happened, expecting to get credit for having been a nice, considerate boy.…

She was upset of course; called a guard, though the man, to my relief, had got away. It didn’t seem fair to me that he should be chased when he’d just been sad and sentimental. A few days later I was taken around to a doctor my father knew, who fancied himself a psychologist, and who explained to me about how some men and some women and so on—it didn’t mean a great deal to me at the time. But gradually I absorbed the information, and my point is that if I hadn’t decided to confess the incident in the first place—something I probably wouldn’t have troubled to do if I hadn’t imagined I’d be admired for my kind behavior—I would not have known that the story I was telling was a confession.

If there are lessons of experience, then, they sometimes come by way of confession—yet this is not so very strong a motive either, no stronger than that of pleasure in recall, or possible unconscious remorse. For such evidence as I have suggests that the things we learn by experience, while interesting enough, are never really clear until they no longer apply to the lives we are living.

And with that I come to my final motive, the one which is unambiguous and real, and to state it returns us to the beginning: I confess because I want to tell some truths.

You see, I am sure of this, that truth has value, even if I am not altogether sure just what value and why.

II

Confessions of an Apprentice Lover

1

The Poozle Dreamers

Two men are sitting on the porch of an isolated farmhouse in the Virginia hills, looking off towards Bailey’s Mountain. One is Cowboy Harris and the other is me.

I call myself a man, but it is only one of the courtesies with which an adolescent soothes himself, for I fail in every test of manhood used in this locality. The test of age—I am just seventeen. Of taste—I like watered whiskey and store cigarettes. Of purpose—I am avoiding, in this rosy autumn of 1939, both college and hard work. Of size and development—I am small, thin of chest and fat of rear, and but lightly haired.

And, finally, of experience—for I have never fought a man nor lain down with a woman.

These matters are a wonder to Cowboy Harris, and especially the very last, for though I invent earnestly on these lovely, slow, October afternoons, tale after bumptious tale of high school conquest, Cowboy has the wisdom to disbelieve them all, though with it the grace to conceal his disbelief.

Wisdom and grace, thirty-one years of age, the respect of many men and the love of many women—these things Cowboy has, or has known, but perhaps he is not a man either, for he has run short of capacity. A harsh life has robbed him of it, though he would not acknowledge this as so; his condition seems to him a matter of bad luck. Unembittered, he is in a time now of perpetual convalescence; he minds a great deal, but he does not say so.

We are dreaming. At about four each afternoon Cowboy’s reminiscences trail off and I run out of lies. If his dreams, like mine, follow from the conversation then they too are dreams of lechery. Cowboy, a dreamer after the fact, fantasizes gently, I think, ruefully anyway … about some bold teasin’ little kitten he never could quite get around … or some sweet old little thing he did get next to, but he was awful drunk … or interrupted … or she cried and made him feel mean after, and he meant to get back …

I am a dreamer before the fact. My wishful lecheries are inaccurate and animal. They are like the single-minded misconceptions implied by the behavior of untrained young male dogs.

Cowboy slumps, fastens his eyes on distance, and smiles a haunted smile. I slouch, hitch, and see nothing; a grim, half-conscious panting proceeds through my tensed nostrils and passes into the thin, cool mountain air.

I was about as well prepared for sex as Don Quixote was for knighthood, and my methods of preparation resembled his quite a little; both of us tried to learn from books. We made the same mistake too, of course, thinking that life and literature would be alike.

My texts were realistic novels, and, in the connection I am writing of, that particular scene which seems to be a set-piece in American fiction, the scene of sexual initiation. Certain books were exceptions but, as I deduced it from the majority of my reading, the scene took a form so stereotyped as to be almost mythic: the boy seeks out a slut, a prostitute or servant girl; the encounter is physically disappointing; it is followed by a sense of great sadness or guilt or of having been cheated. Sometimes the thing even fails physically because of psychic inability on the part of the seeker, but in every case the emphases are sordidness and loss.

I girded myself to play this scene, panting for bathos no less than beastliness, as eager for the suffering as for the wreath of sacrifice, knowing but not acknowledging that my high school colleagues found sexual initiation a quite different experience—found it, with pleasure and anxiety, in parked cars while going steady, or, in the special case of athletes, found it less anxiously from among those occasional courageous girls who were willing to demonstrate their dedication to entire basketball and even football teams. Not I. In high school I had won neither athletic recognition nor quasi-wife. My striving, like Quixote’s, was to imitate myth and so, of course, when I succeeded, the result had to be inverted. But the direction of inversion was different for me; the Don tried to achieve gallantry, and was ludicrous. I tried to achieve sordidness and loss and was instead pleased, self-satisfied—if there was loss it was not my own.

The story, aggravatingly enough, is hardly my own either—only the initiation was. The story is Cowboy Harris’s first, and probably Uncle George’s second; I come third, talking too much, making the easy difficult, and grinning like an idiot.

The girls in the story, I must note apologetically, are not characters so much as means, like the jars of whiskey, like politics; this reduction of girls to means-creatures, whose self-consciousness is barely considered, is mostly the fault of my own obtuseness, but it is partly a geographic consequence for my quest took place, as I have noted, in the South.

Southwestern Virginia, the mountains, 1939. Scrubby country, doubly barren, now, in the late depression; the metal soft-drink signs sag on their grey posts, the people live by shooting small game, sometimes deer, out of season; by cutting and peeling second-growth pine to haul, in old Ford trucks, to the pulp mills across the West Virginia line. This is not elegant, fox-hunting, whipcord-breeches Virginia; here they wear galluses and work shoes, flour-sack dresses, and the wealthy family is the one that owns a cow. There are about four thousand people in this pauper county, and among them they share no more than fifty family names: Greenway, Caldwell, Huffman, Tatum, Looney, Helms.… I come from outside, from beyond Catawba Mountain, even beyond Roanoke.

When I was eight years old, my father bought quite a large tract of mountain land down here on which, for a few years, before it broke up, my family spent summers. On this land, back along dirt roads, up Barbour’s Creek and into the woods, there were a few cleared fields and a lonely farmhouse. At the time of my story the old man I mentioned, Uncle George, had left his wife of fifty years for the last of countless times. He had become my family’s pensioner with this hill farm as his pension.

As far as I know he was nobody’s uncle. He had two brothers, mountain men like himself, living in wifeless cabins nearly impossible to find—Nelson out on the far side of Bailey’s Mountain, Danforth somewhere along the forested rim of Breckinridge Cove, where he was sometimes seen by bear hunters. Uncle George had been enough more sociable than his brothers to get married, and even to raise some children—though the kids were not his own; but I’ll get to that. The trouble between him and his wife was simple enough: she liked to live in town.

Uncle George was not the object of our charity, for my family by then was no longer prosperous enough to support him easily, but the object of its love which is to say that he was supported whether it could be afforded or not. He returned the love; in my earlier boyhood, when he worked for us, summer after summer, he commonly used Elizabethan endearments like darling in speaking to my brothers and me. It was he who taught us to chop wood and shoot rifles and do rough carpentry. He had come, once, as far North as Pennsylvania for a winter, to help my mother raise us before her remarriage.

That fall of 1939, I decided to go see Uncle George. I had graduated from high school in the northern part of the State and then spent the summer working in New York; the college scholarship I wanted had been refused and it seemed to me that I didn’t really need to go to college that year. I bought a car with my summer earnings; I went through my father’s bookshelves and, assuming his permission, removed from them every volume that looked like something I ought to read. I loaded these into the car. I spent several afternoons in the bookstores along Fourth Avenue, buying a few books and stealing a few others; the method seemed slow and perilous so I drove to where my mother and stepfather lived, and stripped their shelves as I had my father’s. It was my intention, wryly applauded by both parents, to haul all these books down to the farm and to spend the fall with Uncle George, reading them … I have today, in my bookshelves, a copy of Arabia Deserta, whose inscription shows it to have come into my possession at that time, for that purpose, but I haven’t read it yet. To whom should I return it if I did?

I arrived at the farm on a sunny September morning, after a squawking bounce over the dirt roads in my light and overloaded coupé. Looking up the steep bank to where the frame farmhouse stood, I saw someone sitting on the porch.

I jumped out of the car, grabbed a few books, and scrambled, yelling:

Hey. Hi. I’m here.

I thought it odd that Uncle George didn’t get up and come to meet me, and I went on up the bank wondering if he might have been taken lame.

The man on the porch waved, still without rising. I waved back and lowered my head to complete my uphill charge. When I arrived at the porch edge it wasn’t Uncle George at all, of course, but a thin stranger, a pale, lugubriously humorous-looking man with incongruous, glossy black hair and a face that looked as if its underflesh had been blasted away, leaving the outer skin folded but mysteriously unbroken.

I was dismayed. Where’s … Mr. Craft? I asked.

Old Man George? He’s down cuttin’ corn in the hot sun, the stranger said, in a slow, regretful bass, irresistibly likable if I hadn’t insisted on my dismay. You must be Quince.

Yes, I said. Which field’s he working in?

The man pointed. The far bottom, he said. He’ll be up after a whiles. Then he smiled, as if I’d been trying to amuse him and succeeded well. My name’s Harris, he said, slower than ever. Call me Cowboy if you want.

Cowboy Harris—I had heard the name, but from whom? From Sleepy, maybe, or from Baby Ray, or from Uncle George himself? Sleepy and Baby Ray were two of a dozen orphan boys whom Uncle George and his wife had raised when he still lived in town; they had taken these boys on, a new one every two or three years, as boarders, wards of the city government of Roanoke whose orphanage was too small. Three dollars a week per boy was the pay, not too small a sum in those parts in those days to be a form of patronage, though I cannot say what mountain voters Uncle George had held in line to earn it. Baby Ray and Sleepy had been the final two—it was Baby Ray, that’s who, six foot three and the county’s baseball hero, who had named Cowboy Harris to me in summer conversations, summers ago.

Sure. Cowboy Harris, the fastball pitcher from Roanoke.

You know Baby Ray? I asked. I’ve heard him talk about you. You were the pitcher he couldn’t hit.

Baby Ray … He looked out across our little valley to the great receding slope of the mountain going away into clouds.

I couldn’t tell whether he meant he knew Baby Ray or didn’t. He was one of Uncle George’s orphan kids, I said. He played first base.

That Ray, Cowboy nodded. Now on his good days, he’d a gone four for four on Dizzy Dean. I must of always got old Ray on his bad days. The smile, which was only in his voice to start with, was by now visible on his face as well. Take those bad days, throw a little dinky slow curve. Ray couldn’t of hit a beach ball with a tennee racker. A pause. The smile endured. I know’d Baby Ray all right … sure didn’t know he was like me, though.

How do you mean? I asked.

Why now, I’m one of Old Man George’s orphan boys too, Cowboy said. It’s just I can’t figure out what he’s raising me to be.

I couldn’t comprehend it then; in a day or two it had come together. Cowboy Harris, himself brought up in the Roanoke orphanage, after a brief career in which he had moved from baseball player through various classifications on the city payroll, was now again its ward at thirty-one and an incurable consumptive. The patronage had stretched again to Uncle George, in whose care Cowboy was to rest, avoid excitement, eat well, and breathe pure air. The price was twenty-five dollars a month, though, as Uncle George often said, Cowboy didn’t eat as much as some of the four-year-olds he’d had.

I will tell you about a photograph Cowboy carried; it was of himself and a car, and had been taken eight years earlier. He carried it in his wallet and he looked at it from time to time, or so I suspect, when he was alone. I caught him doing that when I walked onto the porch in the middle of a morning one day, departing from routine. He looked up from the photograph, which was lying in his lap, and smiled. I realized that he wanted to put the picture away but couldn’t easily. Ease was a quality in Cowboy close to what graciousness is in nice women.

Never guess this was me, would you, Quince? He let me look as long as I liked; it was a picture of a strapping, exuberant young man by a polished Buick sedan, one of those tall, square cars that were made early in the thirties. The man was tall and square, too; only by the bright black hair might you have guessed, glancing at it, that this was the same man—that and the slight bow in his legs which had given him his nickname and which probably indicated poor food in the orphanage childhood, a frame already flawed, when the picture was taken, under the athletic flesh. Two hundred and ten pounds of me, he said. That sure was a big pile of Cowboy.

What do you weigh now? I asked.

He shook his head, putting the photograph away; I don’t know whether he knew the answer, but I’d guess his weight then at a hundred and thirty.

Yet he’d have been several inches more than six feet tall, straightened up; was he strong enough to have stood straight? His was a terrible thinness. From him, from Uncle George, from Baby Ray with whom I had a beer in town now and then, even from Sleepy, the youngest of Uncle George’s orphan boys, who spent a weekend with us once, home from the CCC, I was able eventually to trace the whole story of Cowboy’s decline. He was a regional character of whom nearly everybody in that small corner of the state had heard.

At twenty he had been the protégé of a certain group in the city of Roanoke, a grimy, lazy city which was important then in the days when railroads were important. The group which had informally adopted Cowboy Harris is best described, perhaps, as the lawyers’, but lawyers in the State of Virginia have a broader function than elsewhere: they are the men who run things. And run, in the State of Virginia, is an inaccurate word: things drift, and the lawyers, by a series of half-permissions and implied arrangements, and always unobtrusively, guide the drift. It is unwise for men who