"WILD-CATS"

And "Tristan," and the Need for Shock-Absorbers For the Soul

Simeon Strunsky

HE SAID: "Now shock-absorbers. I've been thinking about them a good deal and wishing they weren't so expensive. You've seen them in the trade-catalogues, haven't you? A powerful spring encased in a cylinder and attached to the rear axle of a motor car, say: and when you go to hear 'Tristan,' and traffic is congested, they are useful. Of course, most of us don't go in motor cars and that's a pity. But suppose you don't go to 'Tristan,' what then? You stay at home and pick up a new book, any new book, and when you have finished you probably can't go to sleep for a couple of hours."

E COGITATED: "You stay at home and pick up a book and it harrows you so you can't go to sleep. I mean a book like 'Wild-Cats.' I picked it up the other night. It's about a good young man who is caught in the toils of a wicked woman. So he goes home and murders his mother, and when he searches through her private papers he finds that she had been a faithless wife. On the paper jacket of the book the publishers have printed what the reviewers said about the book. One reviewer said: 'It grips like a dead man's fingers, it cuts to the bone.' Another reviewer said that 'it hews to the line and cuts to the quick.' The figure is rather mixed, but powerful. Another reviewer said that 'it plunges the scalpel into the festering sores of our fly-blown moralities.' Another reviewer said, 'Don't read it if you are afraid of shocks.' Several reviewers used the word shock. Well, I'm not afraid of being shocked. I don't want my literature and drama in the form of a charlotte russe. I read the little book through."

"And had the reviewers lied about it?"

"NOT at all," he said. "The book took the heart out of me. I couldn't think of going to bed. I sat up and smoked, but it seemed a crime. I thought: Good God, there are things like this going on and I sit here and smoke. Life is agonizing and I sit here and smoke. A world of passion, of secret sins, of shame, of suffering, and here am I smoking and getting ready for a cold shower with some idea of peeping into the ice-box and another pipe before I go to bed. What sort of brute beast am I? So I picked up the book again—it fascinated me—and I turned to the dreadful pages where the young man, with averted eyes, is hammering at his mother's skull with a carpenter's hammer. The pain was unendurable. I went to bed. Is that fair, do you think? Take an impressionable man like myself: I work hard, I love my family, I mean to do well. But is it really life? And on the other hand what can one do?"

"I believe you did well in going to bed," I said.

"'M'OT at all," he said. "I got up late the next day—it was Sunday—and the book was still on my soul. I couldn't eat my breakfast. That is, I was hungry, strange to say. But think of eating your breakfast with society what it is! So I said I wouldn't have any bacon with my eggs, which I do only on Sundays. Every other day I only take a cup of coffee and a roll. I can't work after a heavy breakfast; why, I don't know; most of the people in the office are the other way. They feel restless unless they have meat. But I take a roll and a cup of coffee. But I look forward to Sunday because I am very fond of bacon with eggs, and sometimes, when the cook forgets—our cooks seldom stay long enough to learn my habits—I am terribly disappointed.

"BUT that morning it seemed monstrous to think of bacon. I took rolls and coffee and I kept thinking of that poor old mother and the hammer.

I said to myself, 'Can this be life that I am living?

I get up in the morning: I shave; I bathe; I play with the baby for a minute or two; I glance through the papers; I go out to catch my train, and elsewhere people are being enticed by vampire women, people are murdering their mothers, people are culling the red flowers of passion and sin, and only when a book like "Wild-Cats" happens to get written am I gripped as with a dead man's fingers.' Is it fair?"

"Who is unfair to whom?" I said.

"THE author of that book to me," he said. "I told you it was Sunday. If I had any intention of doing a bit of work, the book took all the spirit out of me. So I picked up the picture section. And they had several pictures of the author of 'Wild-Cats.' One picture showed him an extremely lady-like young man, at the recent costume ball of the Painters' Society at the Hotel SavoyMaurice. He appears as Little Bo Peep and he is doing the tango with a Moro head-hunter. Another picture shows him playing the part of Faun in a little out-of-doors masque given by the Society for the Preservation of Squirrel Life. Another picture shows him in the company of two ladies, fishing for tarpon in Florida just after correcting the final proofs of 'Wild-Cats.' I could not tear myself away from the pictures. I thought: Here is the man who has shown me the raw of life, who made it impossible for me to kiss the baby this morning because I remembered babies of the poor who never get kissed but grow up in filth and crime and get themselves abducted by agents of the Vice Trust. I thought: Is it right that the man whose books shock me into a cowardly consciousness of my own comfortable existence, is it right that he should be taking part in amateur theatricals and enjoying himself like the very deuce? I studied the picture about tarpon fishing and I recalled the bacon to which I had been looking forward since Monday, and a wave of resentment and self-pity swept over me. Do you think it's fair?"

SUGGESTED that it was a question of temperament. Some people looked the facts of life bravely in the eye. Some could not bear to stand up to the facts of life.

"But see how hard it is upon my kind," he said. "When I finished reading 'Wild-Cats' I wanted to run away and live in the desert. When he finished writing the book he went out fishing. Apparently he enjoys being in the grip of a dead man's fingers and being cut clear to the bone. Either that or else he doesn't relate his work to his life. I have sat next to charming women at Socialist dinners who have told me that in another twenty-five years every one will recognize that marriage is only legalized vice; and while I was trying to visualize the momentous change, the lady would ask me if I ever tried eggs àla Dijon, prepared in a chafing dish. Good God! In view of the immediate reconstruction of the Family, what does it matter how you prepare chafed eggs? That is why 'Tristan' puzzles me so."

I, too, was puzzled and said so.

"I SELDOM go to hear 'Tristan' because it shakes me up too much, and that is just why my friend Williams goes so very often. He likes to be shaken. He says the tumult and woe of the thing gives a new meaning to life. Now what does he mean by a new meaning? I sometimes consent and go with Williams to hear 'Tristan,' and when we come out thfe world is empty. Of course I am happy at home, but is any kind of happiness worth while for which you don't pay the ultimate price, the price Tristan paid, and Isolde? So I feel unhappy. I feel that nothing can lift the weight of the gloom in my soul. But when Williams comes out from 'Tristan' he looks up to see whether it will rain, and suggests that we go over to Brown's and have something to eat. Under the circumstances do you think it fair in Williams to insist on making me go to hear 'Tristan' and then asking me to step across to Brown's and eat a short Welsh rarebit?"

I told him he suffered from an excess of logic in the conscience.

"If only shock-absorbers weren't so expensive," he said, half to himself.