Nonconformity Read Free

that anyone will read a second time either. “The artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed,” Degas agreed in essence with Durocher.
    In the more meaningful writing, as in the defter sort of jack-rolling, this is either candid or concealed. Candid as in Céline, Genet or Dorothy Parker, concealed as in Koestler, Richard Wright or Mickey Spillane. And in the very best writing the one becomes a complete sublimation of the other.
    “Even then,” Dostoevsky’s underground man recalls, “I carried this hole in the floor of my heart. I was terribly afraid to be seen and recognized.” 38
    The great paradox of Dostoevsky lies in the vitality he drew from degradation. American writing, it is this observer’s notion, will remain without vigor until it draws upon the enormous reservoir of sick, vindictive life that moves like an underground river beneath all our boulevards. When the sewers back up we call it a “crime wave;” when after a while the waters subside a little we are content until the waters begin to lap the curb again. Then the pumps come out, and we’re in for another wave of reforms, from press, pulpit and politician, which serve to increase newspaper circulation, fill up the pews for a few Sundays and pump up the local payrolls.
    The stranger from Mars who spent a day in the public library came away knowing that a few Americans possessed wealth that was virtually incalculable, that a hundred-odd million others had more than just enough. But gained barely an inkling into the lives of those who live out their hand-to-mouth hours without friendship or love.They belong to no particular street in no particular city. They pass from furnished room to furnished room, and belong not even to their own time; not even to themselves. They are the ones who are displaced in time, and again displaced in the heart.…
    “I read the smooth journals but they gave no news of this.”
    Not until he walked the unswept streets in the hundred-storied evening and saw the legend in the first-floor-front—ROOM FOR TRANSIENT—did he begin to understand. Or was advised by a clerk, across an ancestral register, “Give a phony, mister.” He wanted to say who he was, but the clerk didn’t want to know.
    Not until he saw them sleeping in the all-night restaurants and the all-night movies and the night-blue bars of the whiskey wilderness did he understand at last that he was on the ancient unswept street where most of humanity has always lived.
    And had he asked them, they would not have been able to say who they were. Belonging nowhere, no one can tell who he really is. Who one really is depends on what world he belongs to. The secret multitudes who belong to no world, no way of life, no particular time and place, are the truly displaced persons: displaced from their true selves. They are not the disinherited: they are those who have disinherited their own selves.
    Out of the furnished rooms and into a cheap hoteland back to the furnished room before the room is out: the “unemployed bartender,” “unemployed short-order cook,” “unemployed salesman,” “unemployed model,” “unemployed hostess;” “self-styled actor,” “self-styled artist,” “self-styled musician,” “self-styled author,” as the self-styled reporters conveniently file them. Their names are the names of certain dreams from which the light has gone out.
    The clerk at the third-rate hotel is always half-pleased to see the “unemployed hostess” or “self-styled actress” come in to register, wearing nylon hose and carrying all she owns in the handbag slung over her shoulder. “A room with a private bath,” she instructs him. “I don’t want to be disturbed.” You don’t have to tell
her
to give a phony.
    He isn’t even half-pleased to see her, two decades further along, in black ribbed-wool stockings and a shopping bag. But her manner is more humble. “I’ll pay in advance,” she