Dying Inside Read online

  Here you can observe the full range of David Selig’s intellectual development. This is his record collection, about a hundred well-worn disks, some of them purchased as far back as 1951. (Archaic monophonic records!) Almost entirely classical music, although you will note two intrusive deposits: five or six jazz records dating from 1959 and five or six rock records dating from 1969, both groups acquired in vague, abortive efforts at expanding the horizons of his taste. Otherwise, what you will find here, in the main, is pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you’d be likely to whistle after one hearing. He doesn’t know a lot about music, but he knows what he likes; you wouldn’t much care for it.

  And these are his books, accumulated since the age of ten and hauled lovingly about with him from place to place. The archaeological strata of his reading can readily be isolated and examined. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Dashiell Hammett at the bottom. Sabatini. Kipling. Sir Walter Scott. Van Loon, The Story of Mankind. Verrill, Great Conquerors of South and Central America. The books of a sober, earnest, alienated little boy. Suddenly, with adolescence, a quantum leap: Orwell, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hardy, the easier Faulkner. Look at these rare paperbacks of the 1940’s and early 1950’s, in odd off-sized formats, with laminated plastic covers! See what you could buy then for only 25¢! Look at the prurient paintings, the garish lettering! These science-fiction books date from that era too. I gobbled the stuff whole, hoping to find some clues to my own dislocated self’s nature in the fantasies of Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, Clarke. Look, here’s Stapledon’s Odd John, here’s Beresford’s Hampdenshire Wonder, here’s a whole book called Outsiders: Children of Wonder, full of stories of little superbrats with freaky powers. I’ve underlined a lot of passages in that last one, usually places where I quarreled with the writers. Outsiders? Those writers, gifted as they were, were the outsiders, trying to imagine powers they’d never had; and I, who was on the inside, I the youthful mind-prowler (the book is dated 1954), had bones to pick with them. They stressed the angst of being supernormal, forgot about the ecstasy. Although, thinking about angst vs. ecstasy now, I have to admit they knew whereof they writ. Fellows, I have fewer bones to pick these days. This is rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones.

  Observe how Selig’s reading becomes more rarefied as we reach the college years. Joyce, Proust, Mann, Eliot, Pound, the old avant-garde hierarchy. The French period: Zola, Balzac, Montaigne, Celine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire. This thick slug of Dostoevsky occupying half a shelf. Lawrence. Woolf. The mystical era: Augustine, Aquinas, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita. The psychological era: Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, Reik. The philosophical era. The Marxist era. All that Koestler. Back to literature: Conrad, Forster, Beckett. Moving onward toward the fractured ’60’s: Bellow, Pynchon, Malamud, Mailer, Burroughs, Barth. Catch-22 and The Politics of Experience. Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of a well-read man!

  Here we have his files. A treasure-trove of personalia, awaiting a biographer yet unknown. Report cards, always with low marks for conduct. (“David shows little interest in his work and frequently disrupts the class.”) Crudely crayoned birthday cards for his mother and father. Old photographs: can this fat freckled boy be the gaunt individual who stands before you now? This man with the high forehead and the forced rigid smile is the late Paul Selig, father of our subject, deceased (olav hasholom!) 11 August 1971 of complications following surgery for a perforated ulcer. This gray-haired woman with the hyperthyroid eyes is the late Martha Selig, wife of Paul, mother of David, deceased (oy, veh, mama!) 15 March 1973 of mysterious rot of internal organs, probably cancerous. This grim young lady with cold knifeblade face is Judith Hannah Selig, adopted child of P. and M., unloving sister of D. Date on back of photo: July 1963. Judith is therefore 18 years old and in the summertime of her hate for me. How much she looks like Toni in this picture! I never noticed the resemblance before, but they’ve got the same dusky Yemenite look, the same long black hair. But Toni’s eyes were always warm and loving, except right at the very end, and Jude’s eyes never held anything for me other than ice, ice, Plutonian ice. Let us continue with the examination of David Selig’s private effects. This is his collection of essays and term papers, written during his college years. (“Carew is a courtly and elegant poet, whose work reflects influences both of Jonson’s precise classicism and Donne’s grotesque fancy—an interesting synthesis. His poems are neatly constructed and sharp of diction; in a poem such as ‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows,’ he captures Jonson’s harmonious austerity perfectly, while in others, such as ‘Mediocrity in Love Rejected’ or ‘Ingrateful Beauty Threatened,’ his wit is akin to that of Donne.”) How fortunate for D. Selig that he kept all this literary twaddle: here in his later years these papers have become the capital on which he lives, for you know, of course, how the central figure of our investigations earns his livelihood nowadays. What else do we find in these archives? The carbon copies of innumerable letters. Some of them are quite impersonal missives. Dear President Eisenhower. Dear Pope John. Dear Secretary-General Hammarskjold. Quite often, once, though rarely in recent years, he launched these letters to far corners of the globe. His fitful unilateral efforts at making contact with a deaf world. His troubled futile attempts at restoring order in a universe plainly tumbling toward the ultimate thermodynamic doom. Shall we look at a few of these documents? You say, Governor Rockefeller, that “with nuclear weapons multiplying, our security is dependent on the credibility of our willingness to resort to our deterrent. It is our heavy responsibility as public officials and as citizens to save the lives and to protect the health of our people. A lagging civil-defense effort cannot be excused by our conviction that nuclear war is a tragedy and that we must strive by all honorable means to assure peace.” Permit me to disagree. Your bomb-shelter program, Governor, is the project of a morally impoverished mind. To divert energy and resources from the search for a lasting peace to this ostrich-in-the-sand scheme is, I think, a foolish and dangerous policy that…The Governor, by way of replying, sent his thanks and an offprint of the very speech which Selig was protesting. Can one expect more? Mr. Nixon, your entire campaign is pitched to the theory that America never had it so good under President Eisenhower, and so let’s have four more years of the same. To me you sound like Faust, crying out to the passing moment, Verweile doch, du bist so schoen! (Am I too literate for you, Mr. Vice-President?) Please bear in mind that when Faust utters those words, Mephistopheles arrives to collect his soul. Does it honestly seem to you that this instant in history is so sweet that you would stop the clocks forever? Listen to the anguish in the land. Listen to the voices of Mississippi’s Negroes, listen to the cries of the hungry children of factory workers thrown out of work by a Republican recession, listen to…Dear Mrs. Hemingway: Please allow me to add my words to the thousands expressing sorrow at the death of your husband. The bravery he showed in the face of a life-situation that had become unendurable and intolerable is indeed an example for those of us who…Dear Dr. Buber…Dear Professor Toynbee…Dear President Nehru…Dear Mr. Pound: The whole civilized world rejoices with you upon your liberation from the cruel and unnatural confinement which…Dear Lord Russell…Dear Chairman Khrushchev…Dear M. Malraux…dear…dear…dear…A remarkable collection of correspondence, you must agree. With equally remarkable replies. See, this answer says, You may be right, and this one says, I am grateful for your interest, and this one says, Of course time does not permit individual replies to all letters received, but nevertheless please be assured that your thoughts will receive careful consideration, and this one says, Send this bastard the bedbug letter.

  Unfortunately we do not have the imaginary letters which he dictates constantly to himself but never sends. Dear Mr. Kierkegaard: I agree entirely with your celebrated dictum equating “the absurd” with “the fact that with God all things are possible,” and
declaring, “The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.” In my own experiences with the absurd…Dear Mr. Shakespeare: How aptly you put it when you say, “Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.” Your sonnet, however, begs the question: If love is not love, what then is it, that feeling of closeness which can be so absurdly and unexpectedly destroyed by a trifle? If you could suggest some alternate existential mode of relating to others that…Since they are transient, the product of vagrant impulses, and often incomprehensible, we have no satisfactory access to such communications, which Selig sometimes produces at a rate of hundreds per hour. Dear Mr. Justice Holmes: In Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205, 221 [1917], you ruled, “I recognize without hesitation that judges do and must legislate, but they can do so only interstitially; they are confined from molar to molecular motions.” This splendid metaphor is not entirely clear to me, I must confess, and…

  * * *

  Dear Mr. Selig:

  The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, “Create silence.”

  Yours very sincerely,

  Sören Kierkegaard

  (1813-1855)

  * * *

  And then there are these three folders here, thick beige cardboard. They are not available for public inspection, since they contain letters of a rather more personal kind. Under the terms of our agreement with the David Selig Foundation, I am forbidden to quote, though I may paraphrase. These are his letters to and occasionally from the girls he has loved or has wanted to love. The earliest is dated 1950 and bears the notation at the top in large red letters, NEVER SENT. Dear Beverly it begins, and it is full of embarrassingly graphic sexual imagery. What can you tell us about this Beverly, Selig? Well, she was short and cute and freckled, with big headlights and a sunny disposition, and sat in front of me in my biology class, and had a creepy twin sister, Estelle, who scowled a lot and through some fluke of genetics was as flat as Beverly was bosomy. Maybe that was why she scowled so much. Estelle liked me in her bitter murky way and I think might eventually have slept with me, which would have done my 15-year-old ego a lot of good, but I despised her. She seemed like a blotchy, badly done imitation of Beverly, whom I loved. I used to wander barefoot in Beverly’s mind while the teacher, Miss Mueller, droned on about mitosis and chromosomes. She had just yielded her cherry to Victor Schlitz, the big rawboned green-eyed red-haired boy who sat next to her, and I learned a lot about sex from her at one remove, with a 12-hour time-lag, as she radiated every morning her adventure of the night before with Victor. I wasn’t jealous of him. He was handsome and self-confident and deserved her, and I was too shy and insecure to lay anybody anyway, then. So I rode secretly piggyback on their romance and fantasized doing with Beverly the gaudy things Victor was doing with her, until I desperately wanted to get into her myself, but my explorations of her head told me that to her I was just an amusing gnomish child, an oddity, a jester. How then to score? I wrote her this letter describing in vivid sweaty detail everything that she and Victor had been up to, and said, Don’t you wonder how I know all this, heh heh heh? The implication being that I’m some kind of superman with the power to penetrate the intimacies of a woman’s mind. I figured that would topple her right into my arms in a swoon of awe, but some second thoughts led me to see that she’d either think I was crazy or a peeping tom, and would in either case be wholly turned off me, so I filed the letter away undelivered. My mother found it one night but she didn’t dare say anything about it to me, hopelessly blocked as she was on the entire subject of sexuality; she just put it back in my notebook. I picked her thoughts that night and discovered she’d sneaked a look. Was she shocked and disturbed? Yes, she was, but also she felt very proud that her boy was a man at last, writing smutty stuff to pretty girls. My son the pornographer.

  Most of the letters in this file date between 1954 and 1968. The most recent was written in the autumn of 1974, after which time Selig began to feel less and less in touch with the rest of the human race and stopped writing letters, except in his head. I don’t know how many girls are represented here, but there must have been quite a few. Generally these were all superficial affairs, for Selig, as you know, never married or even had many serious involvements with women. As in the case of Beverly, the ones he loved most deeply he usually never had actual relationships with, though he was capable of pretending he felt love for someone who was in fact a casual pickup. At times he made use of his special gifts knowingly to exploit women sexually, especially about the age of 25. He is not proud of that period. Wouldn’t you like to read these letters, you stinking voyeurs? But you won’t. You won’t get your paws on them. Why have I invited you in here, anyway? Why do I let you peer at my books and my photographs and my unwashed dishes and my stained bathtub? It must be that my sense of self is slipping. Isolation is choking me; the windows are closed but at least I’ve opened the door. I need you to bolster my grip on reality by looking into my life, by incorporating parts of it into your own experience, by discovering that I’m real, I exist, I suffer, I have a past if not a future. So that you can go away from here saying, Yes, I know David Selig, actually I know him quite well. But that doesn’t mean I have to show you everything. Hey, here’s a letter to Amy! Amy who relieved me of my festering virginity in the spring of 1953. Wouldn’t you like to know the story of how that happened? Anybody’s first time has an irresistible fascination. Well, fuck you: I don’t feel like discussing it. It isn’t much of a story anyway. I put it in her and I came and she didn’t, that’s how it was, and if you want to know the rest, who she was, how I seduced her, make up the details yourself. Where’s Amy now? Amy’s dead. How do you like that? His first lay, and he’s outlived her already. She died in an auto accident at the age of 23 and her husband, who knew me vaguely, phoned me to tell me, since I had once been a friend of hers. He was still in trauma because the police had made him come down to identify the body, and she had really been destroyed, mangled, mutilated. Like something from another planet, that’s how she looked, he told me. Catapulted through the windshield and into a tree. And I told him, “Amy was the first girl I ever slept with,” and he started consoling me. He, consoling me, and I had only been trying to be sadistic.

  Time passes. Amy’s dead and Beverly’s a pudgy middle-aged housewife, I bet. Here’s a letter to Jackie Newhouse, telling her I can’t sleep for thinking about her. Jackie New-house? Who that? Oh, yes. Five feet two and a pair of boobs that would have made Marilyn Monroe feel topheavy. Sweet. Dumb. Puckered lips, baby-blue eyes. Jackie had nothing going for her at all except her bosom, but that was enough for me, 17 years old and hung up on breasts, God knows why. I loved her for her mammaries, so globular and conspicuous in the tight white polo shirts she liked to wear. Summer of 1952. She loved Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, and had FRANKIE written in lipstick down the left thigh of her jeans and PERRY on the right. She also loved her history teacher, whose name, I think, was Leon Sissinger or Zippinger or something like that, and she had LEON on her jeans too, from hip to hip. I kissed her twice but that was all, not even my tongue in her mouth; she was even more shy than I, terrified that some hideous male hand would violate the purity of those mighty knockers. I followed her around, trying not to get into her head because it depressed me to see how empty it was. How did it end? Oh, yes: her kid brother Arnie was telling me how he sees her naked at home all the time, and I, desperate for a vicarious glimpse of her bare breasts, plunged into his skull and stole a second-hand peek. I hadn’t realized until then how important a bra can be. Unbound, they hung to her plump little belly, two mounds of dangling meat crisscrossed by bulging blue veins. Cured me of my fixation. So long ago, so unreal to me now, Jackie.

  Here. Look. Spy on me. My fervid frenzied outpourings of love. Read them all
, what do I care? Donna, Elsie, Magda, Mona, Sue, Lois, Karen. Did you think I was sexually deprived? Did you think my lame adolescence sent me stumbling into manhood incapable of finding women? I quarried for my life between their thighs. Dear Connie, what a wild night that was! Dear Chiquita, your perfume still lingers in the air. Dear Elaine, when I woke this morning the taste of you was on my lips. Dear Kitty, I—

  Oh, God. Kitty. Dear Kitty, I have so much to explain to you that I don’t know where to begin. You never understood me, and I never understood you, and so the love I had for you was fated to bring us to a bad pass sooner or later. Which it now has. The failures of communication extended all up and down our relationship, but because you were different from any person I had ever known, truly and qualitatively different, I made you the center of my fantasies and could not accept you as you were, but had to keep hammering and hammering and hammering away at you, until—Oh, God. This one’s too painful. What the hell are you doing reading someone else’s mail? Don’t you have any decency? I can’t show you this. The tour’s over. Out!

  Out! Everybody out! For Christ’s sake, get out!

  TWENTY.

  There was always the danger of being found out. He knew he had to be on his guard. This was an era of witch-hunters, when anyone who departed from community norms was ferreted out and burned at the stake. Spies were everywhere, probing for young Selig’s secret, fishing for the awful truth about him. Even Miss Mueller, his biology teacher. She was a pudgy little poodle of a woman, about 40, with a glum face and dark arcs under her eyes; like a cryptodyke of some sort she wore her hair cut brutally short, the back of her neck always showing the stubble of a recent shave, and came to class every day in a gray laboratory smock. Miss Mueller was very deep into the realm of extrasensory and occult phenomena. Of course they didn’t use phrases like “very deep into” in 1949, when David Selig was in her class, but let the anachronism stand: she was ahead of her time, a hippie born too soon. She really grooved behind the irrational, the unknown. She knew her way around the high-school bio curriculum in her sleep, which was more or less the way she taught it. What turned her on, really, were things like telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, astrology, the whole parapsychological bag. The most slender provocation was enough to nudge her away from the day’s assignment, the study of metabolism or the circulatory system or whatever, and onto one of her hobbyhorses. She was the first on her block to own the I Ching. She had done time inside orgone boxes. She believed that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh held divine revelations for mankind. She had sought deeper truths by way of Zen, General Semantics, the Bates eyesight exercises, and the readings of Edgar Cayce. (How easily I can extend her quest past the year of my own exposure to her! She must have gone on to dianetics, Velikovsky, Bridey Murphy, and Timothy Leary, and ended up, in her old age, as a lady guru in some Los Angeles eyrie, heavy into psilocybin and peyote. Poor silly gullible pitiful old bitch.)