God the Novelist (original) (raw)

The Home Relief investigator called on Thursday: a dark-complexioned, middle-aged woman, Jewish, wearing glasses. As soon as she entered my room, having climbed three flights of stairs to get there, she made for a chair and, panting, ensconced herself. She asked me about my writing—information she had evidently obtained from my Home Relief dossier. Was I close to completing anything I could sell? According to statements made when I first applied, I had said I expected to sell my first short story by June of 1939. It was now May, she pointed out. I was in a psychological jam, I explained, and that was one of the reasons I had moved uptown: to be near my agent—to consult with her. “I don’t like this room,” I said. “It’s small and without ventilation. I’d like to move if I could find a better one.”

She said that my landlords were among the worst on her list. They had seized a young woman’s clothes when she couldn’t pay.

“I’ve told them about the bedbugs I find in the bed,” I said. “They haven’t done a thing about them. There’re a couple of fresh ones I’ve got on a pin on the curtain.”

She flinched. “That’s awful.”

“I’d like to move out.”

“I don’t blame you. But please don’t mention that I said so.”

“I certainly won’t. Point is, I’m trying desperately to get off relief. And a decent place to write in would help.”

“I’ll leave you a note admitting you to my office. This coming Tuesday.” She began writing on a pale-green slip of paper. “I’ve got a list of available rooms, much better than these.”

“Thanks. Tuesday?”

“Yes, I’m in the office all day.” And, with eyes rigidly averted from the window curtains, she left.

Later in the day, when I dropped in on my friend Frank Green, he asked me whether I had obtained my new Home Relief identification card, now being issued because of widespread chicanery. I hadn’t. “She never mentioned it,” I said.

He produced his own glistening new card to show me. “Your story about the bedbugs must have thrown the woman off,” he hypothesized. “You’ll have to get one.”

“Oh, shit,” I lamented. “Why do these things happen to me?”

“You don’t want to overdo things,” Frank counselled. “Let people go about their jobs. That makes them feel better. Just sit back. That’s what I do.”

“Oh, nuts. To be like you. To let”—I gesticulated—“to let experience flow by you.”

“What’s the use of fightin’ it?” Frank herded a bit of tobacco behind his upper lip. “Where does it get you? Things’ll happen when they’re ready.”

“That’s the difference between us.”

Frank smiled speculatively, and wiped errant strands of tobacco from the corners of his lips. He looked so much like James Joyce: gray mustache, eyeglasses, distinguished, sensitive features. Irishmen both. “Don’t forget to ask her for the new card when you see her Tuesday,” he advised.

“I may go there tomorrow.”

“There’s no hurry,” Frank said. “Next Tuesday’s soon enough.”

“I’d like to get it over with.”

“Well, don’t tell ’em about the bedbugs. It distracts ’em. That’s the landlord’s business.”

“Bedboogs,” I mocked. “There’s no such word.”

“You are gettin’ a case o’ the nerves,” he said.

“I gotta get outta that goddam room. It’s stifling.”

From Frank’s place I went to visit my agent, Virginia N, to get her reaction to a sketch I had slaved over for the past several nights: about my crucial encounter with Vivian, when I had proposed marriage to her. She had been typing somebody’s master’s thesis on a portable—to earn extra cash. And when I said I was in love with her, and asked her to marry me, she replied, “I’m sorry. You’re out of luck,” and, apparently agitated over a typing error, she slapped at the portable. To her horror, the light machine bounced from the card table to the carpeted floor, and she sprang up, pale with fright, to retrieve it.

I thought the incident made for a good short piece of prose, suitable perhaps for The New Yorker. But Virginia was dissatisfied. I internalized too much. My feelings were like a lead coffin, she said.

“Well, how are you going to tell what the character feels if you’re not inside him,” I demurred.

“Oh, no” was her riposte. “God the Novelist knows, the narrator knows.”

So, today, God the Novelist thought He’d better go over to the Home Relief Bureau and get His new identification card, which His investigator had failed to give Him. But He thought He’d wait until the Chinese woman who cleaned His room arrived, and perhaps ask her if she had something with which to exterminate bedbugs. Instead, the landlord himself arrived bearing a clean sheet, two towels, and a spray can, and apologized for creating a disturbance.

“Oh, no,” God the Novelist said, “that’s all right. Spray all you like.” And He left the room.

Down on the ground floor, a blue bandanna around her head, her eyes heavily mascaraed, the landlady was dusting the walls with a feather duster.

“Ah, I see General Housecleaning is calling on us today,” He jested.

“Oh, yes.” She perceived His allusion, and laughed.

God the Novelist stepped forth into the radiance of noon. Let’s see, He thought. What was that address the investigator gave me? Not wanting to go back upstairs to retrieve the note, He tried to visualize the figures written on the slip of paper she had tendered Him. Oh, yes, 249 East Forty-eighth Street. He walked toward Forty-ninth Street. At Forty-ninth Street, He looked up at the street sign. It read “Forty-ninth Street.” What the hell are you doing on Forty-ninth Street? He reproached himself. You should be on Forty-eighth Street. He was on the point of turning back— “Why, you goddam fool,” God the Novelist muttered wrathfully. “That’s your own street. That can’t be right.”

He saw a postman emptying a letter box into a canvas pouch. “Say, where’s the Home Relief Bureau around here, Mister?” God the Novelist asked.

“You got me,” the postman said. “There’s none around here.”

He headed back toward the house again to look for the address. After He had made such a clever remark to the landlady about General Housecleaning, returning would spoil the effect. Try Major General Housecleaning as a fillip, as a refreshing alteration. Bah.

He saw a man crossing Second Avenue. The man had long blond hair—not long blond hair that might go with a violin, but long blond hair as slick as ice on the back of his head and at the nape of his neck, as ragged as ice against a stream bank. In short, he needed a haircut. He had a puffy face, too—probably he tippled, and tippling, quarrelled, and quarrelling, got beaten, though he bore no scars to show for an affray, only puffiness. Got plastered and got pasted, God the Novelist thought. Got huffy and got puffy. But in what book could He put that?

“Hey, listen, Mac,” He said, assuming the role of a character in one of His own new stories. “Where’s the Home Relief Bureau around here?”

“It’s on Thirty-eighth Street,” the puffy blond man said. “Wait a minute. I’ll have a look.” He drew out of his shirt pocket a folded sheet of paper, unfolded it, and presented it to view. It was a notice from the Placement Division of the Home Relief Bureau, and somewhere in the middle of the page of print was the address: 325 East Thirty-eighth Street.

Just then a car’s brakes screeched, rubber caterwauling as a vehicle slid on asphalt. And just then a man jumped out of the way of a black Packard limousine, and just then the uniformed chauffeur lost his composure and bawled at the pedestrian: “Get the hell outta the way, you rummy bastard!”

And just then the puffy blond man cried out, “Jesus!”

“Jesus Christ,” God the Novelist exclaimed. The two watched the drunk lurch off the sidewalk.

“It’s on Thirty-eighth Street,” the puffy blond man said.

“I’ll just walk over, I guess.”

“O.K.”

He crossed the street, and then remembered something else He’d forgotten: His old Home Relief identification card. Oh, God, He thought, now I have to go back. To His great relief, there was no landlady in the hall, and so His witticism remained inviolate.

He climbed the three flights of stairs. The landlord was making the bed. God the Novelist searched among His papers on the table.

“Did you forget a book?” the landlord asked.

“Yeah, I forgot a book.” God the Novelist ransacked His jacket pockets. And, just as He found His wallet, the landlady came in; and that made three of them in the little room. And He was very embarrassed, for it was a very tiny room indeed; and once, when a deliveryman had brought a typewriter, he had said, “Holy smoke, what a room! You gotta go outside to turn around.” So God the Novelist was very much embarrassed now, because He was being gypped, overpaying for the room, and He didn’t want His landlord to be embarrassed because he was gypping his tenant. So He avoided looking at His landlord and landlady in order not to distress them. Still, He felt a tension in the air, as of something pent up and impending, and He thought, Well, they are ill at ease, and hastily withdrew.

He went downstairs again, and into the radiance of a half hour past noon, and began walking downtown. He hadn’t bothered to search for the pale-green slip of paper, because He now knew the address of the place where He wanted to go. What was that number again, 325 East Thirty-eighth Street? Or 328 East Thirty-fifth Street? Well, He could always ask some other working stiff in the neighborhood.

And at Forty-fourth Street, where there was a construction job for a new building going on, He stopped to lean against a low barrier made of the battered doors of the old razed tenements that had once stood there. He rolled a cigarette out of Bull Durham and admired the excavation that opened below: the wall of rock had just recently been blasted out for foundation, rock in which the long drill grooves still remained. Mica schist, He thought, Manhattan mica schist. Ah, the pristine, naked, sparkling purity of it, come to light after aeons, as if awakening. Where could He put that in a book? And soon a brand-spanking-new skyscraper would be standing there, all steel girders and concrete, rearing aloft.

A construction worker, perhaps a foreman or superintendent, with fingers as stubby as the ends of bricks, and of the same color, came over and glanced at the cigarette that God the Novelist was rolling, and then he glanced at God the Novelist. I’ve got that professional air, God the Novelist told Himself. No. He thinks I’m a Westerner come to visit the World’s Fair; I’ve got the negligence of the gun-toting Westerner.

The construction man walked away—without spitting down into the huge pit or doing anything else significant. He just walked away.

Brand-spanking-new rock, God the Novelist thought. I mean a brand-spanking-new rock, mortise, for the skyscraper. Or an apartment house. Ah, to live in a brand-spanking-new apartment house, instead of— Oh, I know, it suddenly occurred to God the Novelist, I know why they were embarrassed, my landlord and landlady, why, of course. It was the two bedbugs I impaled on that hatpin they use to hold the closet curtains together. No, there is no closet; the curtains merely serve as an enclosure. Well, how would you describe that to a reader? They serve as an enclosure in lieu of a closet. Oh, the hell with it. It was the two bedbugs—that’s what it was—that I had impaled for evidence that were the cause of the embarrassment.

Why, you damned fool! God the Novelist thought, now thoroughly nettled with Himself. It wasn’t that at all. That’s not what the tension was about, that constraint you felt in your room. You haven’t paid them this week’s rent. And today’s the day it’s due. Why, you horse’s neck.

He walked into the Home Relief Bureau. Thirty-eighth Street was the right street. The henna-haired woman at the receptionist’s desk asked Him His business. He explained: He had failed to get His new identification card.

“Oh, this isn’t the right place,” she said.

“No? Where should I have gone?”

“You should have gone to Twenty-ninth Street. Wait, I’ll call up.” She did. “They want to know why you didn’t ask your investigator for the card,” she said, lowering the telephone.

“I didn’t know. I only found out afterward.”

“He just didn’t ask her,” the woman with the henna hair said, and listened to the reply. And finally: “All right. They said come down to Twenty-ninth Street tomorrow morning and ask for your investigator.”

He went out into the radiance of one o’clock. The whole trip had been for naught. Oh, my God, thought God the Novelist.

He walked to His sweetheart’s house. She lived in the basement. He knocked on her window and crowed like a rooster. This morning, when He had called on her at breakfast, He had barked like a dog. She laughed as she opened the iron-grille gate.

“Coffee?” she asked when He came into her room.

“Yes, thanks,” He said, and looked at her: her face was extraordinary, a loveliness set against time’s ebb and flow. She was such a rare fusion of the disparate, at once unpretentious and sovereign, a gaucherie of limb bonded to finest perception, to finest breeding, pianist’s slack wrists combined with noble brow. “You know, darling,” He said, “the difference between the average man and the artist is the difference between apprehension and sensibility. The average man apprehends. The artist senses. The average man would have noticed that his landlords were silent, and would have addressed the question to himself: Now, why are they silent? And rationally, in a logical fashion, he would have arrived at the correct conclusion that it was because he owed them a week’s rent.” God the Novelist felt the glow of His own lucidity shed all about Him.

“Yes,” His love said, spreading grape jelly on a slice of bread.

“But I, without even the aid of thought, by direct intuition alone, sensed that I owed them a week’s rent. And that most precious thing, my intuition, my sensibility, my agent wants me to discard.”

“Not to change the subject, dear.” His love set the plate in front of Him. “Do you have the room rent?”

“No. Not yet,” God the Novelist said, munching. “She says there’s only one way out for me. I’ve got to become God the Novelist, and I’m rehearsing the role.” ♦

(The above is adapted from the almost two-thousand-page unedited novel manuscript that Roth was working on in the early nineteen-nineties.)