William Faulkner - Mosquitoes

“Life everywhere is the same, you know. Manners of living it may be different — are they not different between adjoining villages? family names, profits on a single field or orchard, work influences — but man’s old compulsions, duty and inclination: the axis and the circumference of his squirrel cage, they do not change. Details don’t matter, details only entertain us. And nothing that merely entertains us can matter, because the things that entertain us are purely speculative: prospective pleasures which we probably will not achieve. The other things only surprise us. And he who has stood the surprise of birth can stand anything.”

TEN O’CLOCK

“Gabriel’s pants,” the nephew said, raising his head. “I’ve already told you once what I’m making, haven’t I?” He had repaired to his retreat in the lee of the wheelhouse, where he would be less liable to interruption. Or so he thought.

Jenny stood beside his chair and looked at him placidly. “I wasn’t going to ask you again,” she replied without rancor, “I just happened to be walking by here.” Then she examined the visible deck space with a brief comprehensive glance. “This is a fine place for courting,” she remarked.

“Is, huh?” the nephew said. “What’s the matter with Pete?” His knife ceased and he raised his head again. Jenny answered something vaguely. She moved her head again and stood without exactly looking at him, placid and rife, giving him to think of himself surrounded enclosed by the sweet cloudy fire of her thighs, as young girls do. The nephew laid his pipe and his knife aside.

“Where’m I going to sit?” Jenny asked, so he moved over in his canvas chair, making room, and she came with slow unreluctance and squirmed into the sagging chair. “It’s a kind of tight fit,” she remarked. .

Presently the nephew raised his head. “You don’t put much pep into your petting,” he remarked. So Jenny placidly put more pep into it. . After a time the nephew raised his head and gazed out over the water. “Gabriel’s pants,” he murmured in a tone of hushed detachment, stroking his hand slowly over the placid points of Jenny’s thighs, “Gabriel’s pants.”. . After a while he raised his head.

“Say,” he said abruptly, “where’s Pete?”

“Back yonder, somewheres,” Jenny answered. “I saw him just before you stopped me.”

The nephew craned his neck, looking aft along the deck. Then he uncraned it, and after a while he raised his head. “I guess that’s enough,” he said. He pushed at Jenny’s blond abandon. “Get up, now. I got my work to do. Beat it, now.”

“Gimme time to,” Jenny said placidly, struggling out of the chair. It was a kind of tight fit, but she stood erect finally, smoothing at her clothes. The nephew resumed his tools, and so after a while Jenny went away.

ELEVEN O’CLOCK

It was a thin volume bound in dark blue boards and a narrow orange arabesque of esoteric design unbroken across front and back near the top, and the title, in orange, Satyricon in Starlight.

“Now, here,” said Fairchild, flattening a page under his hand, his heavy hornrimmed spectacles riding his blobby benign face jauntily, “is the Major’s syphilis poem. After all, poetry has accomplished something when it causes a man like the Major to mull over it for a while. Poets lack business judgment. Now, if I—”

“Perhaps that’s what makes one a poet,” the Semitic man suggested, “being able to sustain a fine obliviousness of the world and its compulsions.”

“You’re thinking of oyster fishermen,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Being a successful poet is being just glittering and obscure and imminent enough in your public life to excuse whatever you might do privately.”

“If I were a poet—” Fairchild attempted.

“That’s right,” the Semitic man said. “Nowadays the gentle art has attained that state of perfection where you don’t have to know anything about literature at all to be a poet; and the time is coming when you won’t even have to write to be one. But that day hasn’t quite arrived yet: you still have to write something occasionally; not very often, of course, but still occasionally. And if it’s obscure enough everyone is satisfied and you have vindicated yourself and are immediately forgotten and are again at perfect liberty to dine with whoever will invite you.”

“But listen,” repeated Fairchild, “if I were a poet, you know what I’d do? I’d—”

“You’d capture an unattached but ardent wealthy female. Or, lacking that, some other and more fortunate poet would divide a weekend or so with you: there seems to be a noblesse oblige among them,” the other answered. “Gentleman poets, that is,” he added.

“No,” said Fairchild, indefatigable, “I’d intersperse my book with photographs and art studies of ineffable morons in bathing suits or clutching imitation lace window curtains across their middles. That’s what I’d do.”

“That would damn it as Art,” Mark Frost objected.

“You’re confusing Art with Studio Life, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman told him. She forestalled him and accepted a cigarette. “I’m all out, myself. Sorry. Thanks.”

“Why not?” Mark Frost responded. “If studio life costs you enough, it becomes art. You have to have a good reason to give to your people back home in Ohio or Indiana or somewhere.”

“But everybody wasn’t born in the Ohio valley, thank God,” the Semitic man said. Fairchild stared at him, kind and puzzled, a trifle belligerent. “I speak for those of us who read books instead of write them,” he explained. “It’s bad enough to grow into the conviction after you reach the age of discretion that you are to spend the rest of your life writing books, but to have your very infancy darkened by the possibility that you may have to write the Great American Novel. .”

“Oh,” Fairchild said. “Well, maybe you are like me, and prefer a live poet to the writings of any man.”

“Make it a dead poet, and I’ll agree.”

“Well. .” He settled his spectacles. “Listen to this.” Mark Frost groaned, rising, and departed. Fairchild read implacably:

“On rose and peach their droppings bled,

Love a sacrifice has lain,

Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,

Beneath his hand his mouth is dead—

“No: wait.” He skipped back up the page. Mrs. Wiseman listened restively, her brother with his customary quizzical phlegm.

“The Raven bleak and Philomel

Amid the bleeding trees were fixed,

His hoarse cry and hers were mixed

And through the dark their droppings fell

“Upon the red erupted rose,

Upon the broken branch of peach

Blurred with scented mouths, that each

To another sing, and close—”

He read the entire poem through. “What do you make of it?” he asked.

“Mostly words,” the Semitic man answered promptly, “a sort of cocktail of words. I imagine you get quite a jolt from it, if your taste is educated to cocktails.”

“Well, why not?” Mrs. Wiseman said with fierce protectiveness. “Only fools require ideas in verse.”

“Perhaps so,” her brother admitted. “But there’s no nourishment in electricity, as you poets nowadays seem to believe.”

“Well, what would you have them write about, then?” she demanded. “There’s only one possible subject to write anything about. What is there worth the effort and despair of writing about, except love and death?”

“That’s the feminine of it. You’d better let art alone and stick to artists, as is your nature.”

“But women have done some good things,” Fairchild objected. “I’ve read—”