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PRAISE FOR AN HONEST GHOST

“He has put the force back into tour de force.“

— John Ashbery

“Whitaker proves that fiction is better than life—more interesting, much more thrilling”

— Edmund White

“Sheer genius…a uniquely gripping read.”

— Jenny McPhee

“An Honest Ghost is brilliantly conceived and brilliantly performed.”

— Adam Phillips

“Whitaker has performed such a work of genius and pushed it ad absurdum”

— Filip Noterdaeme

About the Author

Rick Whitaker is the bestselling author of Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling and The First Time I Met Frank O’Hara: Reading Gay American Writers. He is Concerts and Theatre Manager of The Italian Academy at Columbia University, New York.

An Honest Ghost is also available in full-color illustrated print, black-and-white print, and interactive iBook.

For more information visit

jadedibisproductions.com

NOTE: An Honest Ghost, consists entirely of sentences appropriated from over 500 books. Whitaker limited himself to using 300 words per book (in accordance with Fair Use); never taking two sentences together; and never making any changes, even to punctuation. In the iBook version, touching a sentence brings up its original source: a book’s title, author, and page number. The complete list of attributions may be found at the end of the book.

COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL

ISBN: 978-1-937543-51-8

Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information please email: questions@jadedibisproductions.com

Published by Jaded Ibis Press, sustainable literature by digital means™ An imprint of Jaded Ibis Productions, LLC, Seattle, Washington USA

Cover and art by Debra Di Blasi.

This book is available in multiple editions and formats. Visit our website for more information: http://jadedibisproductions.com

for

David Whitaker

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

I am unpacking my library. I have been able to start work again on my novel. It is growing very slowly. There are limits to what can be said. Life lived by quotations.

You go back into your mind. The subjective universe.

There was an overflow of books on the floor, and on the coffee table I noticed a copy of Simone Weil’s essays. It seemed neither appropriate nor necessary to David that he should get out of bed. “How can you do all that before coffee?” he asked through a yawn. He was twenty-four, and handsome in the way that makes young Englishmen, when they are handsome at all, the handsomest young men in the world.

At the moment, this romance is happy.

David said, “I keep reading about tribes or hordes of peoples who came sweeping out of Central Asia.” My splendid David! My daily recreational activity. “What color were the Huns?” David said.

Our little love affair began one Monday afternoon when I received a telegram from Paris signed, so help me, Madame Marquis.

“Oh! How long shall we have to wait for the resolution of the chord?”

Well! I was dealing with a dangerous man who at any moment might burst into a selection from “The Paul McCartney Songbook.” He was really sexy though; he was like a vast swimming pool I wanted to dive right into. I wrote in my notebook that meeting him I felt like Hazlitt meeting Coleridge for the first time: bowled over by his warmth and energy. There was something rather “doggy,” rather smart, rather ‘cute and shrewd, and something warm, and something slightly contemptible about him. To be in his company, to hold his hand, to feel his large fingers tighten round my own, made me feel very humble, very fortunate, very chosen. Sometimes he purred. He often pretended he was eating me. The action signaled his love of the illicit, his need to infect the scene with the fumes of a mésaliance.

I could spare him the time as my affairs were, surprisingly, rather stagnant at the moment. I would lie in bed every morning reading Cicero. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. A few years ago I was a lawyer in Paris and, indeed, a rather well-known lawyer. I lived in the most serene, most chaste of surroundings. It was very agreeable in the springtime, with the chestnuts in the Champs Élysées in bloom and the light in the streets so gay. These arrangements turned me into a penniless dandy. Few men have the divine grace of cosmopolitanism in its entirety; but all can acquire it in different degrees. Occasionally I had nightmares, but in those days just about everybody had nightmares from time to time, though some more often than others.

David frowned. He was not well: he was a walking horror. It had been a difficult summer. When his friends asked what was going on, he remained silent or replied with some quote from his beloved Oscar Wilde, but even his characteristic wit had grown sluggish, and those quips, delivered so despondently, provoked only puzzlement and pity. His irony, intended to arouse sympathy, backfired. Prodded by his conscience, he began to generalize. Once, when I asked him how he was doing, he said he was always terrified. His rage had no one cause, not that he could discover, but bubbled up, a poisonous vapour, out of a mess of boiling emotions. The most innocent-seeming stranger, or even someone he thought he knew, might suddenly by a look, a word, deliver the secret message: beware. Cops always questioned him, though he never did anything wrong.

His early childhood was happy, but when he was six his parents separated and three years later his mother married a man whom her son would come to loathe. He was a balding, somewhat overweight, nervous man in his early forties. He died of a brain tumor in 1999. He lived a brief, passionate, unhappy life. Shall I describe the arrangements of their home life at this time? I found it hard at first to disguise the contempt which they inspired in me, but gradually I became accustomed to their way of life.

His mother had mental problems. After one first disappointment she had taken leave of the major emotions. She attended to the nearest matter at hand, no matter how trivial it was. The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She could be mistaken for a drag queen. She drank, she aged, she suffered terribly from her dissipations. Her clothes seemed to be all darts and buttons fastened mostly to show what they could not entirely contain. She had a fancy for tiny ivory or jade elephants; she said they were luck; she left a trail of tiny elephants wherever she went; and she went hurriedly and gasping. Her family, her husbands, her son, would have crushed any other woman I have ever known. David admires her prodigiously; he thinks her so good that she will be able to get him into heaven, however naughty he is.

How tender people are towards oppressors and how inexorable towards the oppressed!

“I’m rough and tough,” she said.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

“What a sweet pair of fairies you guys are,” she said. Her voice was as hypnotic as a tom-tom, and as monotonous. I will not be commanded, she thought.

David leaned my way to fix me with a sad-eyed look. He was stretched out on his little mattress, and I noticed he had exchanged his dinner jacket for an embroidered kimono and was displaying the affected ease of the opium smoker. He puts on a queer smile. If there is mésalliance, as for the purists there must be, it was there from the start.

Though he was both rich and young, he knew how to control his passions. Even more commendable was his attitude to women, for he never pretended to scorn them and never boasted of his conquests. Very quickly, he discovered all the tricks of love: but being such a natural at them, he became entangled in the very love that caused them.

He talked incessantly about himself, yet was such good company that one could listen to the story of his ague forever. He was adequately vicious to stand apart from the rest of the world without being aggressive or disagreeable, save on rare occasions. Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. I’ve been told so often that I would be helpless without him that I am slightly inclined to believe it, but only slightly.

David recalled dimly that he was getting drunk again, as usual, he reasoned, to escape. Not that there was much happiness in a life of pleasure. That is how it is: life, tight-buttoned life, fits him ill, making him too much aware of himself and what he glumly takes to be his unalterable littleness of spirit. He spent his life fleeing boredom, and he had no real goal beyond that.

A bell beat faintly very far away.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them. I am interested in wisdom. But it could hardly be otherwise. Some of my best friends are pedants.

It is impossible to return to the state of mind in which these sentences originated. Today is not like yesterday.

I swear I have rarely felt saner. But what kind of soundness is sanity? We long for a little weakness, darkness, and fiction, for the crowded, the smut, the closeness and malice of things. Life and death and death and life.

I believe in doing what I can, in crying when I must, in laughing when I choose. My life is all downhill. I live in my mind. (Like Holden Caulfield, I don’t know exactly what I mean, but I mean it.)

All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. The Zen masters have the saying, “Examine the living words and not the dead ones.”

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

Shall we make war or shall we make peace?

The story that I am about to tell, a story born in doubt and perplexity, has only the misfortune (some call it the fortune) of being true: it was recorded by the hands of honorable people and reliable witnesses. To say that the story is true is by now a convention of every fantastic tale; mine, nevertheless, is true.

This is my own story, told in different voices. Not my usual method of composition.

Day before yesterday was my birthday and I spent most of the evening sitting outdoors in the half moonlight informing two Brazilian intellectuals why they really should read Edmund Wilson, say, instead of Henry Miller, to get an adequate idea of U.S. letters. I got drunk, for the first time in ages I was really drunk again. I wasn’t good for much at the age of forty, but I could drink bourbon and I knew which bourbon I liked and how I liked it. That was about it. Soon I’d be too old to attract anyone.

I took a terrace walk and saw the most brilliant falling star—I always make the same wish: Love. A black man was waving his arms and vociferating. The world to us was a perverse bestial and perverse philosophical plague and repulsive operetta. A part of drunkenness is the thinking that oneself is not sober. I didn’t want to know what I was doing. I was amazed and confused. I was lost. Loneliness rose to the surface.

When I got home that night, I mean barely inside the door of my apartment, I heard these horrendous clunk-clunk-clunk footsteps coming up the stairs. A sound of hobnailed boots? Who comes here? Sometimes a venturesome sailor would stumble in, scary but irresistible. (O the weakness of human reason!) Still, the only thing worse than not getting it any more would be not wanting it any more.

Ding-dong.

A minute later, a little kid appeared dragging behind him a small sailboat on wheels. I blushed intensely. Moving, as I do, in what would kindly be called artistic circles, children are an infrequent occurrence.

The child was small, a boy, and sad.

We shook hands, he looked at me with bright round black eyes that reminded me of someone I knew well. He seemed bloodless.

I was all ears.

Silence.

The uncertainty lasted only seconds.

I would not change the beginning for anything.

There are only a few shimmering moments in a man’s life; all the rest is a dull gray.

A shiver ran down my spine.

It was a pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face. He looked extremely well fed and sane and clean.

“Joe, how are you, Joe?”

The visitor glided in and the door closed.

He gives me an odd little squeeze around the neck, his face turning away from me. “I haf someding vich it is to ask you.” He looked at me quickly and laughed, but so good-naturedly that I could not help smiling back at him. “Please answer me quite frankly. How can I live without you, wretched and unhappy as I am?” The question was asked with melancholy irony.

I do not know what to do.

I don’t want to be one of those people weighed down by the suffering of humanity.

Absolute silence.

“And besides, don’t be excruciating.”

This is a strange outburst. “Well well well well well well well. Unconditional surrender. Is that right?”

“You bet!” Joe said. “No harm in trying,” he said. “I guess some people can’t help doing the wrong thing.” He noticed then that an internal obstacle, overcome, had passed away.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Daddy was talking nonsense,” I said with my brain whirling. “Your father is a fool, darling, and an idiot.” This was all I said, though I was abundantly aware I needed to elaborate. “I am the opposite of you,” I said.

“I like your simplicity,” he said. “De bargain it is struck?”

It was the end of the first act of my life.

One is always somewhat in the dark in these matters; as much about one’s own feelings as the other person’s, and a certain amount of trial and error is inevitable.

All was greyness, without direction, with no above or below, nature in a process of dissolution, in a state of pure dementia.

“I haven’t figured out what I want to be,” he told me. “But you really must have a haircut, Father.”

And so we find ourselves contemplating the future.

Phew!

That night, after finally falling asleep, I had a really sad dream. The twilight desert in my dream was thoroughly arid, and my tears dried even before they welled up in my eyes. What does this mean?

The rain beat against the window panes all night.

All night long, bad dreams sweep through me like water through a fish’s gills.

The dream is incomparably stronger than the dreamer. The lamp is more important than the lamp-lighter.

But whirligig Time restores gaudy Aurora. I awoke, yet I dreamed still. Lost in darkness and confusion. Living with a precocious son is a father’s worst nightmare. The first three days are the worst, they say, but it’s been two weeks, and I’m still waiting for those first three days to be over. My artistic nature is going to degenerate, and my entire self with it. It was my nervousness, my very anxiety to know for sure what life meant, that made me rush through life in a perpetual state of worry. Suspense is fascinating—when it concerns what is happening to someone else. It is fear that I am most afraid of.

I regret sometimes not allowing the woman within me to express herself enough. The taboo gives us pause. But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. Fear tweaks the vagus nerve. So David tells me. Naturally.

Though blue, the sky had a dull sheen that was softening as the light declined. Very strange. To look at something which is “empty” is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.

“I suppose my thoughts are nothing to be proud of,” said Eleanor Sullivan. “I know you like poetry.”

From the first moment ours was a spiritual friendship.

“I wonder why people say that in such a contented tone,” said Eleanor. She sounded slightly bitter, almost irritated. Few emotions are harder to repress than resentment. Her voice softened, almost singing. She was capable of drinking too much. “Oh, well-behaved—that’s a whole way of life, isn’t it?” A hard-bitten cruel-mouthed adventuress. She’s insane and insatiable. At this very moment, no doubt, she is pondering with regret decisions made in the far-off past that have now left her, deep in middle age, so alone and desolate. Poor Eleanor, how frightened she must have been.

When we reflect on what we are doing in our everyday life, we are always ashamed of ourselves.

In a flurry of belatedness and apology, I kissed her. Her beauty seemed to me as tragic as the flowers that no one bothered even to cut or put in a vase: nature’s superfluity. “In this heat,” she observed, “champagne is so much more refreshing than tea.” She was on her best behavior. It was a pleasure to be in France again—a light-of-love country which, making no claims on her esteem, was the more likeable and refreshing. New York on the other hand is in a constant state of mutation. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

She was silent for a while, inhaling, exhaling, wrapping herself in a veil of smoke. Her unassailable assumption of conquest. She often refers to herself as “the poor man’s Kitty Carlisle Hart.” But her beauty was the fragile kind that would fade or turn gaunt with age, and marred by lines around her mouth and faint shadows under her eyes.

Her feelings came down to me now in just dwindlements of the original. She stressed her words in unusual places, making them interesting and quite new-sounding. Naturally she is very nervous. “David,” she said, “is only doing with you what he does with me.”

Brava! She stood there, her fingers clenched, and the awful look of malevolence gathered and deepened on her face. I am but a man, and she was more than a woman.

In any case, I was now interested only in reading and writing and anonymous sex.

Anxiety like a distant ship, very far off. Anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence, as somebody once said, or unquestionably should have. I expected sympathy, if only feigned; after all, my life was about to change, and not for the better.

The weather had begun behaving in the most peculiar fashion. It was hot, yet with a sweet languor about it all.

I spent that morning in a mood of taut neutrality. I was lying on the back verandah trying to get interested in one of those contemporary overintrospective novels which I knew I ought to read but didn’t really want to. I read it but couldn’t understand it. The only fact one could deduce from it about the author is that he liked opera. I like to read novels in which the heroine has a costume rustling discreetly over her breasts, or discreet breasts rustling under her costume; in any case there must be a costume, some breasts, some rustling, and, over all, discretion.

There is no language without deceit.

Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. Here we are, alone again. Take a few breaths.

I felt naked in a strange world.

So I enter upon a new and decisive phase in my life. In many respects, this is a grim prospect. What stumps me about myself is how—even now, midway through a season of trying to prick up my powers of attention—how oblivious I am. Everything was becoming confused. I kept having dreams of such terrible things happening. Why do we dream at all?

I used to be at peace with myself. But gay men—like straight women—always feel they’re too old.

We always worry about the wrong things, don’t we?

I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts.

The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

My decision to change my life was not all that easy to act upon. I lacked both genius and talent. I am forty years old. Beneath everything else I smelled (or rather heard) the melancholy of an old, waterlogged industrial building, a sound as virile but at the same time as sexless as a Russian basso descending liturgically from low G to F to E, on and on down on narrow steps below the stave into a resonant deep C. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. The problem is much more serious than that. I opened the window, and the air entered in a single gust, as though it had been waiting for admission.

Generally, even then, I was lonely. A lost soul is one lost in the size and complexity of life. That’s me.

The psychological feeling of dependence seems to be on the increase.

I dropped David a hint of what was going on. “Did you know that I have a son?”

Several times he made as though to speak, but sighed instead.

David extended his hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said impulsively; “but you are among friends here, you know.”

The things one tardily becomes aware of.

“I am glad you’ve come,” he said, kissing me absently, “because you, unlike many others I could name, occasionally understand what I am talking about.”

The irony of this observation never seemed to occur to him.

“How are you getting on with your shrink?” he asked, somewhat irritated. He does not know that the passage from irritated love to black anger is short and swift, while the passage from anger to love is long, slow, and difficult.

“I am the father of an illegitimate son.”

There was a short, smiling silence. But soon this spirit of confidence was followed by a feeling of blank pessimism. What, if anything, does he still want? What was the meaning of it all? Who will speak—who will fill the silence with whatever comes to mind?—and by so doing declare himself the loser, the bitch; the one willing to devise some conversation gambit so that everything can be okay.

“Which cathedral do you like best?” I asked in a strangled voice, trying hard to be natural.

A moan burst from David’s lips. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. His broad shoulders made him come off as a big man, though when he turned sideways his waist was breathtakingly slender. “But you have to settle in to looking at these things. You are too intellectual, my dear. It’s too serious a question to decide at this late hour.”

Amused, I nodded in agreement.
“I may be back late tonight,” he said.

We will see. “Fortunately, I know you don’t mean that.”

“I’m interested in a lot of things,” he bragged.

“Ah.”

His leisure hours were often drunkenly aimless. There is, of course, in some young men, a certain drive to try to seduce everybody. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature bade him. And so on. He was a poet himself.

Take care of yourself, I love you so desperately. Do you love me?

The cuckoo came out of its clock, surveyed the scene and retreated, having remarked on the half hour. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Summer was a hot blanket we got under.

Inwardness, calm, solitude make us less miserable.

No, that’s too easy.

Silence.

At one point I snuck a glance at Joe. I must photograph those well-lashed eyes. Little ineffectual unquenchable flames! It was the expression of his face as a whole, however, that was disquieting. He was looking at the corn-cob which, because I like it, I had lying on my window ledge. He is not yet fully awake but in a state between sleep and waking in which everything appears unreally real. Solitude had acted on his brain like a narcotic, first exciting and stimulating him, then inducing a languor haunted by vague reveries, vitiating his plans, nullifying his intentions, leading a whole cavalcade of dreams to which he passively submitted, without even trying to get away. At school, he manifested a vindictiveness of disposition which made him feared and disliked. The other children noticed something dandified and ‘Parisian’ in him, although he had been raised exactly as they were. In the meantime he had become the most sharp-witted fool around. There was an air of desperation and possible violence around him like a rank perfume. He’s a beautiful child, a little solemn sometimes, which I guess is allowable under the circumstances. It hurts to be this pure.

I have often wondered what it would have been like to have been born into a family that read books or liked any of the arts.

I admit I feel ill at ease with a great deal of literature. (In Wilde’s phrase: “A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true.”)

Similarly, I sometimes wonder what life would have been like had I grown up in a world where being gay was accepted and understood.

We can only try day by day to seem to be someone else.

By Thanksgiving, Joe was back for a visit, sharing my room in the absence of my roommate. He stayed at home for several days feeling desolate and listening to a recording of countertenor David Daniels singing Handel arias. He asked me what I thought Eternity was like, and all I could offer was a guess—an Olivia de Havilland movie on television. “Even if there were rebirth,” I said, “if you remember nothing of your previous existence, it’s the same as turning into nothing, isn’t it? I don’t want the responsibility. I am like everyone else.”

We’re going to die.

Salvation lies in paying full attention to nature.