I am living atthe Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere,
nor a chairmisplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
    Last night Borisdiscovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits
and even thenthe itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful
placelike this? But no matter- We might never have known each other so
intimately.Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.
    Boris has justgiven me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet.
The weatherwill continue bad. he says. There will be more calamities, more
death,more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere.
Thecancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves,or
are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time. but Timelessness.We
must get in step, a lock step. toward the prison of death. Thereis no escape.
The weather will not change.
    It is now thefall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a
reason I havenot yet been able to fathom.
    I have no money,no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A
year ago, sixmonths ago. I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think
aboutit. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me.There are
no more books to be written, thank God.
    This then? Thisis not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of
character. Thisis not a book. in the ordinary sense of the word. No. this is
a prolonged"insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art. a kick in the pants to
God,Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty. . . what you will. I am going to
singfor you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing whileyou
croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse. . . .
    To sing you mustfirst open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs,
and a little knowledgeof music. It is not necessary to  have an accordion,
or a guitar.The essential thing is to -want to sing. This then is a song.I
am singing.
    It is to you,Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better,
more melodiously,but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen
to me. Youhave heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang
toobeautifully, or not beautifully enough.
    It is the twenty-somethingthof October. I no longer keep track of the
date. Would you say _ my dreamof the th November last? There are intervals,
but they are between dreams,and there is no consciousness of them left. The
world around me is dissolving,leaving here and there spots of time. The
world is a cancer eating itselfaway. ... I am thinking that when the great
silence descends upon alland everywhere music will at last triumph. When
into the womb of timeeverything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored
and chaos is thescore upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos.
It iswhy I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the
skinof time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to writeupon.
    Dozing off. Thephysiology of love. The whale with his six-foot penis, in
repose. Thebat _ penis libre. Animals with a bone in the penis. Hence, abone
on.. . . "Happily, " says Gourmont, "the bony structure islost in man. "
Happily? Yes. happily. Think of the human race walkingaround with a bone on.
The kangaroo has a double penis _ one for weekdaysand one for holidays.
Dozing. A letter from a female asking if I havefound a title for my book.
Title? To be sure: "Lovely Lesbians. "
    Your anecdotallife! A phrase of M. Borowski's. It is on Wednesdays that
I havelunch with Borowski. His wife, who is a dried-up cow, officiates.
Sheis studying English now _ her favorite word is "filthy. " You can
seeimmediately what a pain in the ass the Borowskis are. But wait. . ..
    Borowski wearscorduroy suits and plays the accordion. An invincible
combination, especiallywhen you consider that he is not a bad artist. He
puts on that he isa Pole, but he is not, of course. He is a Jew. Borowski,
and his fatherwas a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is Jewish,
or half-Jewish,which is worse.
    There's Carland Paula, and Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester,
and Moldorfand Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned out
tobe a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden and Cherie areJewish.
Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jewsthen are
snowing me under. I am writing this for my friend Carl whosefather is a Jew.
All this is important to understand.
    Of them all theloveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would
become a Jew. Whynot? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew.
Besides,who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
    Twilight hour.Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and
liquescent. The railsfall away into the canal at Jaures. The long
caterpillar with lacqueredsides dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris.
It is not Coney Island.It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of
Europe and CentralAmerica. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black,
webby, not orderedby the engineer but cataclysmic in design, like those
gaunt fissuresin the polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.
    Food is one ofthe things I enjoy tremendously. And in this beautiful
Villa Borghesethere is scarcely ever any evidence of food. It is positively
appallingat times. I have asked Boris time and again to order bread for
breakfast,but he always forgets. He goes out for breakfast, it seems. And
whenhe comes back he is picking his teeth and there is a little egg
hangingfrom his goatee. He eats in the restaurant out of consideration forme.
He says it hurts to eat a big meal and have me watch him.
    I like Van Nordenbut I do not share his opinion of himself. I do not
agree, for instance,that he is a philosopher, or a thinker. He is cunt-struck,
that's all.And he will never be a writer. Nor will Sylvester ever be a
writer,though his name blaze in ,-candle-power red lights. The only
writersabout me for whom I have any respect, at present, are Carl and
Boris.They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a white flame. They aremad
and tone deaf. They are sufferers.
    Moldorf. on theother hand. who suffers too in his peculiar way. is not
mad. Moldorfis word drunk. He has no veins or blood vessels,no heart or
kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerabledrawers and in the
drawers are labels written out in white ink, brownink, red ink, blue ink,
vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot,turquoise, onyx, Anjou, herring.
Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola.. . .
    I have movedthe typewriter into the next room where I can see myself in
the mirroras I write.
    Tania is likeIrene. She expects fat letters. But there is another Tania,
a Tanialike a big seed, who scatters pollen everywhere _ or, let us say,
alittle bit of Tolstoy, a stable scene in which the fetus is dug up.Tania is
a fever, too _ les voies urinaires. Cafe de la Liberte,Place des Vosges,
bright neckties on the Boulevard Mont-parnasse, darkbathrooms, Porto Sec.
Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata Pathetique,aural amplificators,
anecdotal seances. burnt sienna breasts, heavygarters, what time is it,
golden pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffetafingers, vaporish twilights
turning to ilex, acromegaly, cancer anddelirium, warm veils, poker chips,
carpets of blood and soft thighs.Tania says so that every one may hear: "I
love him! " And while Borisscalds himself with whisky she says; "Sit down
here! Boris. . . Russia.. . what I do? I'm bursting with it! "
    At night whenI look at Boris' goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical.
Tania,where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters,
thosesoft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long.
Iwill ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I willsend
you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and yourwomb turned
inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes. he knows how to build afire. but I know how
to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you,Tania, I make your o-varies
incandescent. Your Sylvester is a littlejealous now? He feels something,
does he? He feels the remnantsof my big prick. I have set the shores a
little wider, I have ironedout the wrinkles. After me you can take on
stallions, bulls, rams, drakes,St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats.
lizards up your rectum. Youcan shit arpeggios if you like, or string a
zither across your navel.I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked.
And if you areafraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I
will tearoft a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin. I
willbite into your clitorisand spit out two franc pieces. . . .
    Indigo sky sweptclear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended,
their blackboughs gesticulating like a sleepwalker. Somber, spectral trees,
theirtrunks pale as cigar ash. A silence supreme and altogether
European.Shutters drawn, shops barred. A red glow here and there to mark a
tryst.Brusque the facades, almost forbidding; immaculate except for the
splotchesof shadow cast by the trees. Passing by the Orangerie I am
remindedof another Paris, the Paris of Maugham, of Gauguin, Paris of
GeorgeMoore. I think of that terrible Spaniard who was then startling
theworld with his acrobatic leaps from style to style. I think of
Spenglerand of his terrible pronunciamentos, and I wonder if style, style
inthe grand manner, is done for. I say that my mind is occupied with
thesethoughts, but it is not true; it is only later, after I have crossedthe
Seine, after I have put behind me the carnival of lights. that Iallow my
mind to play with these ideas. For the moment I can think ofnothing _ except
that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle ofthese waters that
reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks thetrees lean heavily over
the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises andfills them with a rustling
murmur they will shed a few tears and shiveras the water swirls by. I am
suffocated by it. No one to whom I cancommunicate even a fraction of my
feelings. . . .
    The trouble withIrene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She
wants fat lettersto shove in her valise. Immense, avec des chases inouies.
Llonanow. she had a cunt. I know because she sent us some hairs from
downbelow. Llona _ a wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On
everyhigh hill she played the harlot _ and sometimes in telephone boothsand
toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol and a shaving mug withhis initials
on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road with her dress pulledup and fingered
herself. She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs.Not a prick in the
land big enough for her. . . not one. Menwent inside her and curled up. She
wanted extension pricks, self-explodingrockets, hot boiling oil made of wax
and creosote. She would cut offyour prick and keep it inside her forever, if
you gave her permission.One cunt out of a million, Llona! A laboratory cunt
and no
    litmus paperthat could take her color. She was a liar. too. this Llona.
She neverbought a bed for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whisky
bottleand her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Poor Carol, he
couldonly curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath and he fell out
_like a dead clam.
    Enormous, fatletters, avec des choses inouies. A valise without straps.
Ahole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass.Cunt
international. When the flag waved it was red all the way backto the throat.
You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came outat the Porte de la
Villette. You dropped your sweetbreads into the tumbrils_ red tumbrils with
two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of theOurcq and Marne. where the
water sluices through the dikes and lieslike glass under the bridges. Llona
is lying there now and the canalis full of glass and splinters; the mimosas
weep, and there is a wet,foggy fart on the windowpanes. One cunt out of a
million Llona! Allcunt and a glass ass in which you can read the history of
the MiddleAges.
    It is the caricatureof a man which Moldorf first presents. Thyroid eyes.
Michelin lips.Voice like pea soup. Under his vest he carries a little pear.
Howeveryou look at him it is always the same panorama: netsuke snuffbox,
ivoryhandle, chess piece, fan. temple motif. He has fermented so long
nowthat he is amorphous. Yeast despoiled of its vitamins. Vase withouta
rubber plant.
    The females weresired twice in the ninth century, and again during the
Renaissance.He was carried through the great dispersions under yellow
bellies andwhite. Long before the Exodus a Tatar spat in his blood.
    His dilemma isthat of the dwarf. With his pineal eye he sees his
silhouette projectedon a screen of incommensurable size. His voice,
synchronized to theshadow of a pinhead, intoxicates him. He hears a roar
where othershear only a squeak.
    There is hismind. It is an amphitheater in which the actor gives a
protean performance.Moldorf, multiform and unerring, goes through his roles
_ clown, juggler,contortionist, priest, lecher, mountebank. The amphitheater
is too small.He puts dynamite to it. The audience is drugged. He scotchesit.
    I am trying ineffectuallyto approach Moldorf. It is like trying
toapproach God, for Moldorf is God _ he has never been anythingelse. I am
merely putting down words. . . .  I have had opinions about himwhich I have
discarded; I have had other opinions which I amrevising. I have pinned him
down only to find that it was not a dungbeetleI had in my hands, but a
dragonfly. He has offended me by his coarsenessand then overwhelmed me with
his delicacy. He has been voluble to thepoint of suffocation, then quiet as
the Jordan.  When I see him trotting forwardto greet me, his little paws
outstretched, his eyes perspiring, I feelthat I am meeting. . . . No. this
is not the way to go about it!  "Comme un aeuf dansant surun jet d'eau.

    He has only onecane _ a mediocre one. In his pocket scraps of paper
containing prescriptionsfor Weltschmerz. He is cured now, and the little
German girlwho washed his feet is breaking her heart. It is like Mr.
Nonentitytoting his Gujarati dictionary everywhere. "Inevitable for
everyone"_meaning, no doubt, indispe-nensable. Borowski would find allthis
incomprehensible. Borowski has a different cane for each day inthe week. and
one for Easter.
    We have so manypoints in common that it is like looking at myself in a
cracked mirror.
    I have been lookingover my manuscripts, pages scrawled with revisions.
Pages of literature.This frightens me a little. It is so much like Moldorf.
Only I am aGentile, and Gentiles have a different way of suffering. They
sufferwithout neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a man who has never been
afflictedwith a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering.
    I recall distinctlyhow I enjoyed my suffering. It was like taking a cub
to bed with you.Once in a while he clawed you _ and then you really were
frightened.Ordinarily you had no fear _ you could always turn him loose, or
chophis head off.
    There are peoplewho cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with
wild beasts andbe mangled. They go in even without revolver or whip. Fear
makes themfearless. . . . For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild
beasts.The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His
courageis so great that he does not
    even smell thedung in the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not
hear. Thedrama, he thinks, is going on inside the cage. The cage, he
thinks,is the world. Standing there alone and helpless, the door locked,
hefinds that the lions do not understand his language. Not one lion hasever
heard of Spinoza. Spinoza? Why they can't even get their teethinto him.
"Give us meat! " they roar, while he stands there petrified,his ideas frozen,
his Weltanschau-ung a trapeze out of reach.A single blow of the lion's paw
and his cosmogony is smashed.
    The lions, too,are disappointed. They expected blood, bones, gristle,
sinews. Theychew and chew. but the words are chicle and chicle is
indigestible.Chicle is a base over which you sprinkle sugar. pepsin, thyme,
licorice.Chicle, when it is gathered by chicleros. is . K. The chicleroscame
over on the ridge of a sunken continent. They brought with theman algebraic
language. In the Arizona desert they met the Mongols ofthe North, glazed
like eggplants. Time shortly after the earth had takenits gyroscopic lean _
when the Gulf Stream was parting ways with theJapanese current. In the heart
of the soil they found tufa rock. Theyembroidered the very bowels of the
earth with their language. They ateone another's entrails and the forest
closed in on them, on their bonesand skulls, on their lace tufa. Their
language was lost. Here and thereone still finds the remnants of a menagerie,
a brain plate covered withfigures.
    What has allthis to do with you. Moldorf? The word in your mouth is
anarchy. Sayit, Moldorf, I am waiting for it. Nobody knows, when we shake
hands,the rivers that pour through our sweat. Whilst you are framing
yourwords, your lips half parted, the saliva gurgling in your cheeks, Ihave
jumped halfway across A-sia. Were I to take your cane, mediocreas it is. and
poke a little hole in your side, I could collect enoughmaterial to fill the
British Museum. We stand on five minutes and devourcenturies. You are the
sieve through which my anarchy strains, resolvesitself into words. Behind
the word is chaos. Each word a stripe, a bar,but there are not and never
will be enough bars to make the mesh.
    In my absencethe window curtains have been hung. They have the
appearance of Tyroleantablecloths dipped in lysol. The roomsparkles. I sit
on the bed in a daze, thinking about man before hisbirth. Suddenly bells
begin to toll, a weird, unearthly music, as ifI had been translated to the
steppes of Central Asia. Some ring outwith a long, lingering roll, some
erupt drunkenly, maudlinly. And nowit is quiet again, except for a last note
that barely grazes the silenceof the night _ just a faint, high gong snuffed
out like a flame.
    I have made asilent compact with myself not to change a line of what I
write. I amnot interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside
theperfection of Turgenev I put the perfection of Dostoevski. (Is
thereanything more perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then.in one and
the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But inVan Gogh's letters
there is a perfection beyond either of these. Itis the triumph of the
individual over art.
    There is onlyone thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the
recordingof all that which is omitted in books. Nobody. so far as I can
see,is making use of those elements in the air which give direction
andmotivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting fromlife
some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. Theage demands
violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutionsare nipped
in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quicklyexhausted. Men
fall back on ideas, comme d'habittide. Nothingis proposed that can last more
than twenty-four hours. We are livinga million lives in the space of a
generation. In the study of entomology,or of deep sea life. or cellular
activity, we derive more. . .
    The telephoneinterrupts this thought which I should never have been able
to complete.Someone is coming to rent the apartment. . . .
    It looks as thoughit were finished, my life at the Villa Borgh-ese. Well.
Ill take upthese pages and move on. Things will happen elsewhere. Things are
alwayshappening. It seems wherever I go there is drama" People are like
lice_ they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch
andscratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently
deloused.Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone
hashis private tragedy. It'sin the blood now _ misfortune, ennui, grief,
suicide. The atmosphereis saturated with disaster, frustration, futility.
Scratch and scratch_ until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me
is exhilarating.Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am
cryingfor more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander
failures.I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to
scratchhimself to death.
    So fast and furiouslyam I compelled to live now that there is scarcely
time to record eventhese fragmentary notes. After the telephone call, a
gentleman and hiswife arrived. I went upstairs to lie down during the
transaction. Laythere wondering what my next move would be. Surely not to go
back tothe fairy's bed and toss about all night flicking bread crumbs withmy
toes. That puking little bastard! If there's anything worse thanbeing a
fairy it's being a miser. A timid, quaking little bugger wholived in
constant fear of going broke some day _ the th of March perhaps,or the th of
May precisely. Coffee without milk or sugar. Bread withoutbutter. Meat
without gravy, or no meat at all. Without this and withoutthat! That dirty
little miser! Open the bureau drawer one day and findmoney hidden away in a
sock. Over two thousand francs _ and checks thathe hadn't even cashed. Even
that I wouldn't have minded so much if thereweren't always coffee grounds in
my beret and garbage on the floor,to say nothing of the cold cream jars and
the greasy towels and thesink always stopped up. I tell you, the little
bastard he smelled bad_ except when he doused himself with cologne. His ears
were dirty, hiseyes were dirty, his ass was dirty. He was double-jointed,
asthmatic,lousy, picayune, morbid. I could have forgiven him everything if
onlyhe had handed me a decent breakfast! But a man who has two
thousandfrancs hidden away in a dirty sock and refuses to wear a clean
shirtor smear a little butter over his bread, such a man is not just a
fairy,nor even just a miser _ he's an imbecile!
    But that's neitherhere nor there, about the fairy. I'm keeping an ear
open as to what'sgoing on downstairs. It's a Mr. Wren and his wife who have
called tolook at the apartment. They're talking about taking it. Only
talkingabout it, thank God. Mrs. Wren has a loose laugh complications
ahead.Now Mister Wren is talking.