Although spending most of my time with Suzanne, once in a while I ran into Jim Cannon. He was always more curious than I thought he had any right to be about what was going on with Suzanne and her associates from minute to minute. The Commission’s Report was getting put together, it was going to clear Trotsky and indict the Stalinists, that was all Cannon had any call to be concerned about, but his questions didn’t end there. I sensed he was irked that a group of brainy people working on matters vital to him were beyond his control.
At one point he cornered me to insist that a certain formulation in the Report be worded in a certain way. There was no world-shaking principle involved, it really didn’t matter one way or the other, but I saw he was dead serious about this, meant it as a test of strength. When I next saw Suzanne LaFollette I passed on Cannon’s views without comment. Suzanne was smart enough to see that the issue was trivial in itself and that Cannon was simply trying to flex his bureaucratic muscles a bit with the heavy heads. She gave me a message for Cannon which I took some pleasure in delivering: under no circumstances would the passage in the Report be worded his way, further, he was to lay off, the Commission was in no sense an arm of the Trotsky party and did not intend to let itself be so used.
Cannon’s craggy face clouded over when I repeated Suzanne’s words. His cheeks got very red. His tight lips moved just enough to say, “Those pigfuckers.”
I thought of a man capable of calling literary people pigfuckers because they didn’t accept total dictation from him, of such a man rising to the top position in a new workers’ state. I thought of how intellectuals might fare under his short-tempered regime. (Workers too.) I was very sure I’d be in bad trouble if I were among those intellectuals. This was not speculation. We’d had 10 years of Stalinism in Russia. We’d seen a lot of valuable writers disappear into Siberia, from Victor Serge to Isaac Babel. (Serge was to appear again but not Babel.) And many others of no proven value, many not even visible, like me.
So—I was ashamed of the incipient writer in me on several interlocking grounds. On the one hand, because he wasn’t getting anything done, he was being carefully sat on. On the other, because such an inner man, if he could get out, would not be an object of admiration in my circle of activists. I couldn’t get him in the open, I was afraid of the hoots and catcalls he’d be greeted with if I did. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
But he wasn’t to be sat on entirely. It was too damned cold in that dining room in Coyoacán. I huddled there in the small hours with my detriggered Luger and began to write a short story. A young fellow is opening his eyes in a bare room. As they focus he begins to study the cracks and flakes on the ceiling. Lying on his cot, he traces all sorts of significant items on that dingy, crumbing rectangle.
As I remember I did a stunning job of bringing that decaying ceiling all the way to life. Cosmic overtones were discovered in the expanse of sooty plaster, proliferating symbols in each irregularity, each flyspeck. I wrote the opening pages of this story, then wrote them over, then recast them a third time, and that was just warm-up. The trouble was I couldn’t get past that ceiling.
I know exactly why I lingered so. Once I’d exhausted the potential of that ceiling, milked it of all its meaning, I would have to go on to other matters, look into my main people, get a situation set up and some sort of story going, initiate some action—and I didn’t have the least idea where to go once I left the ceiling and came down to earth.
The writing was more or less matchless. I think I’m safe in saying that the literature of the Western world contains few passages about ceilings so impactful. Writers know that some of their best writing gets done in this static mood, this kind of endless lingering over a trifle, inspired by a dread, really, of moving along, of plunging in. Far easier to stay put, meander, blow trivia up into larger—and more inert—than life elements.
This sort of writing is the literary equivalent of jogging in one place. Its source, I will insist, is a serious blockage, an inability to carry a project through to the end, see the people, grasp their situations, develop an interactive dynamic between them, get them into motion toward some culminative finale or at least some turning-point. The incapacity to move forward can generate a lot of sideways crawling.
I’m saying, in short, that a great deal of eloquent prose, at times extremely effective, is triggered by a massive writing block. So much for the simple souls who are undialectical enough to think that the writer who’s dammed up doesn’t produce words. Look at Hemingway. He made a whole new kind of literature, think of it what you will, out of the minimality that comes from chronic clogging. He made stoppage into a style. That’s not to say that Thomas Wolfe was not a torrential bore.
So there were my endlessly rewritten pages about the forever disintegrating ceiling as observed inch by inch by the permanently immovable young man, all of them buried under piles of newspaper clippings and press releases about the Moscow Dials. And Eleanor Clark came visiting.
Eleanor (now, and for many years past, Robert Penn Warren’s wife) was very young but already beginning to be known as a writer of talent. She was aside from that an editor at Macmillan’s—all in all a figure from the literary world. She and the Czech were rummaging in the papers on the work table one afternoon when I was off in town trying to find out how many limonadas con tequila I could wash down with limonada con tequila. They found those pages about the ceiling and were struck by their lack of connection with the Moscow Trials or anything else this household was concerned with.
Thinking it over today, I suspect they liked the writing, though it gave no indication of going anywhere. Chiefly what impressed them was the painstaking evocation of a moribund ceiling. It was a whole new note in literature. Recent fiction had tended to slight ceilings, being fixated on sidewalks and gutters. When I met them later for a drink they asked a natural question—had I written those pages?
With the rapidity of a tic, a reflex, hand flying from hot stove, I said—no, what pages were they talking about? They described the pages. I said I’d never heard of them and had no idea where they might have come from.
When a grown man is accused of unzipping his fly in a kindergarten playground, if even the thought of so doing has crossed his mind once or twice, he will loudly and hastily deny it. It was in similar spirit that I washed my hands of any responsibility for those pages. The thing about furtive writers is that it is hard for them to make a clean breast of it in public, they being addicts of the dirty breast.
It was slashingly clear from the circumstances in our household that nobody else with access to our premises could have written those pages and deposited them on the dining-room table. A fair number of people in our circles, no doubt, had spent time in close proximity to ceilings of this order of decrepitude, but I was the only one who might be trying to recapture them on paper.
Eleanor was a sensitive and sensible girl. She understood without more being said that it was of burning importance to me to disown my words, though she couldn’t have guessed at all the complicated emotions that led me to it. She changed the subject.
The minute I got back to the house that night I burned the pages. It’s really too bad. That was a most superior rendition of a decomposing ceiling; I’ve never seen it equaled. I’m sure I could make good use of it in this or that book, now that I’m putting my name on my words. No matter what kind of story you’re writing there’s bound to be a ceiling in it somewhere, or room to work one in.
You’re probably confused about the time element here. That would be because I am. This has been coming out in a jumble for the simple reason that that’s how it came in, that’s how the years happened and looked. I’m