quotations

from My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell

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While I never drink anything stronger than Moxie, I often go to Dick’s to observe life, a subject in which I have been deeply interested since childhood. This place is down a narrow street near the Brooklyn Bridge; it is one of those places with a twitchy neon sign, a bar which sags here and there, possibly because it was moved in and out of several speakeasies during prohibition, and a grimy window on which are stuck greasy cardboard signs advertising specials, such as “Special Today. Chicken Pot Pie. Bread & Butter. 35C.” There are a large bowl of fresh roasted peanuts and a bottle of mulligan on the bar, and the tile floor is littered with peanut hulls and cigarette ends and bologna rinds from the free lunch. The cook uses olive oil for frying, and he burns a lot of it during the day. On damp days the place smells like a stable, and there is a legend in the neighborhood that truck-drivers in the street outside have to restrain their horses from entering.

The proprietor, Dick, is a sad-eyed and broad beamed Italian who often shakes his fat, hairy fists at the fly-specked ceiling and screams, “I am being crucified.” He hates all his customers, but he is liberal with credit and has a cigar box under the bar full of tabs. If he is feeling good, he slides the bottle toward the customer every third drink and says, “This is on me.”

One time Dorothy Hall, a society reporter, took Dick with her to the Beaux Arts Ball. The costumes were supposed to be Oriental, and she got him a eunuch costume. She told him to speak nothing but Italian and introduced him as a big Italian nobleman from Naples. He danced with Elsa Maxwell, who was dressed as a Grand Eunuch.

“She sure did have good manners,” he said later.

When he buys a newspaper, he spreads it out on the bar and looks for girls in bathing suits. When he finds one he likes, he says, “My God! Look at this baby. My God! This baby has everything. My God! I would die for her.”

The customers hardly ever call him by his name. He is called “The House.” For example, a customer will say to a bartender, “Go see if The House will cash a check for me.” When he is shaking dice, he always sings. He believes he has a good voice, and his favorite song is “Love in Bloom.” When he comes to work, he ties on his apron and looks down the bar at his customers. Then he shakes his head and says, “They must have forgot to lock the doors at the asylum.”

However, he believes he runs a classy place. “The last time Mr. Heywood Broun was in here, he said I make the best gin rickey he ever tasted.” One time someone stole a sign from one of the chain nut stores, the Chock Full o’ Nuts Company, and hung it on his door, and he was angry for days.

Walt Whitman speaks of tyranny

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“There is no week nor day nor hour, when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves–and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance–Tyranny may always enter–there is no charm, no bar against it–the only bar against it is a large resolute breed of men.”

and women, too

John Gardner on moral art

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The premise of moral art is that life is better than death; art hunts for avenues to life. The book succeeds if we’re powerfully persuaded that the focal characters, in their fight for life, have won honestly or, if they lose, are tragic in their loss, not just tiresome and pitiful.

from Small Memories by Jose Saramago #2

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The rain is pouring down, the wind is shaking the leafless trees, and from times past comes an image, that of a tall, thin man, an old man, I realise, now that he draws nearer along the sodden track. He is carrying a crook over his shoulder and wears an ancient, muddy cape from which drip all the rains of heaven. Before him go the pigs, heads down, snouts to the ground. The man approaching, blurred amongst the teeming rain, is my grandfather. He looks weary. He bears on his back seventy years of a hard life full of privations and ignorance. And yet he is a wise man, taciturn, one who opens his mouth to speak when necessary. Indeed he speaks so little that we all fall silent to hear him when a kind of warning light illuminates his face. He has a strange way of gazing into the distance, even if the distance is only the wall in front of him. His face, fixed but expressive, seems to have been carved out by an adze, and his small, sharp eyes shine sometimes as if something he had long been pondering had finally been understood. He is a man like many others on this earth, in this world, perhaps an Einstein crushed beneath a mountain of impossibilities, a philosopher, a great illiterate writer. Something he could never be. I remember those warm summer nights, when we slept under the big fig tree, I can hear him talking about the life he’s led, about the Milky Way, or the Road to Santiago as we villagers still called it, that glowed above our heads, about the livestock he reared, about stories and legends from his remote childhood. We would fall asleep late, well wrapped up in our blankets against the dawn chill. But this image I can’t shake off at this melancholy hour is of that old man advancing beneath the rain, stubborn, silent, like someone fulfilling a destiny nothing can change, except death. This old man, whom I can almost touch with my hand, doesn’t know how he will die. He doesn’t know yet that a few days before his final day, he will have a presentiment that the end has come and will go from tree to tree in his garden, embracing their trunks and saying goodbye to them, to their friendly shade, to the fruits he will never eat again. Because the great shadow will have arrived, until memory brings him back to life and finds him walking along that sodden path or lying beneath the dome of the sky and the eternally questioning stars. What word would he utter then?

translated by Margaret Jull Costa