THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
THE WRITER, an old man with a white mustache, had
some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of
the house in which he lived were high and he
wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the
morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it
would be on a level with the window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War,
came into the writer's room and sat down to talk of
building a platform for the purpose of raising the
bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of
the bed and then they talked of other things. The
soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer, in
fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once
been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost
a brother. The brother had died of starvation, and
whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he
cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache,
and when he cried he puckered up his lips and the
mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old
man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The
plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was
forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his own
way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help
himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and
lay quite still. For years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker
and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his
mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and
always when he got into bed he thought of that. It
did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a
special thing and not easily explained. It made him
more alive, there in bed, than at any other time.
Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not
of much use any more, but something inside him
was altogether young. He was like a pregnant
woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby
but a youth. No, it wasn't a youth, it was a woman,
young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It
is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the
old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to
the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what
the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was
thinking about.
The old writer, like all of the people in the world,
had got, during his long fife, a great many notions
in his head. He had once been quite handsome and
a number of women had been in love with him.
And then, of course, he had known people, many
people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way
that was different from the way in which you and I
know people. At least that is what the writer
thought and the thought pleased him. Why quarrel
with an old man concerning his thoughts?
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a
dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still
conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes.
He imagined the young indescribable thing within
himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures
that went before the eyes of the writer. They were
all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer
had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were
amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman
all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her
grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise
like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into
the room you might have supposed the old man had
unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed
before the eyes of the old man, and then, although
it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and
began to write. Some one of the grotesques had
made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted
to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the
end he wrote a book which he called "The Book of
the Grotesque." It was never published, but I saw
it once and it made an indelible impression on my
mind. The book had one central thought that is very
strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many
people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple
statement of it would be something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young
there were a great many thoughts but no such thing
as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each
truth was a composite of a great many vague
thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and
they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in
his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them.
There was the truth of virginity and the truth of
passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift
and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.
Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they
were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who
were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques.
The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one
of the people took one of the truths to himself, called
it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became
a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a
falsehood.
You can see for yourself how the old man, who
had spent all of his life writing and was filled with
words, would write hundreds of pages concerning
this matter. The subject would become so big in his
mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn't, I suppose, for the same
reason that he never published the book. It was the
young thing inside him that saved the old man.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed
for the writer, I only mentioned him because he,
like many of what are called very common people,
became the nearest thing to what is understandable
and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer's
book.
The Tales and the Persons