OPUS 21 by Philip Wylie Read Free Book Online Page B

sometimes, joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along.

    I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then, and all its other meanings. And that was that.

    I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea. That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as usual.

    Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea.

    My shoulder was disjointed and full of slime. Certainly. My left leg was also paralyzed. I was ankylosed and calcified and atrophied. But of course. Agony-- sic . What was left of me might be a stumblebum but the outside part could somewhat swim still and the inside part could fly.

    My brother was dead.

    There was work to do.

    To hell with Dr. Jerkski, great man of the Institute.

    I would frustrate every specialist in Poland.

    Take up your bed and totter, Wylie.

    It required a year for the doing--in Warsaw and Paris, Manhattan, Connecticut, and California. Then I had entirely recovered. Trauma excepted. Now that is what I thought of in the space of time it took to smoke a cigarette on my divan at the Astolat--
    that, and several thousand more items. That is why, so to speak, I had nodded courteously at the Ghoul.

    He is always hanging around.

    One has only to turn one's head fast enough-and there he is. Most people, by the cortico-schizoid mechanism I have described a few pages back, partition him off.

    He is not behind me, they convince themselves.

    But he is.

    There are always exactly enough Ghouls to go round.

    Billions of people apply the blindfold technique in another way: He is not a Ghoul, they say, but the God of Heaven.

    The Eternal Grocer, who will dole out milk and honey forever. The Great Conductor whose baton will direct my Everlasting Harp. The Keeper on the Inexhaustible Preserves who will set infinite game before my arrow in the Happy Hunting. Chairman of the Greens Committee of the Elysian Fields. The Sublime Pander who will fit an houri to me on the hour, each hour, and I shall be the Paramour of Paradise. The Universal Usher who will take the stub of my ticket and lead me to my seat in the Reserved Section at the Right Hand. What asinine measurements of man are furnished by his Heavens!

    My own opinion of the Functions of the Ghoul is different, as I am gradually trying to imply here. And I am certain, furthermore, no one really believes, in his heart, that such heavens be. His mouth says it, his cortex confirms it, and his heart gives him the lie; so he has his Hell.

    For how could Nature come to as tawdry an end as Heaven?

    Even human nature?

    I told the Ghoul, after this sweating, to get behind me, like Satan, while I cut my serial.

    4

    This is the way of it.

    You take out an adjective here, an adverb there, a prepositional phrase yonder--
    and so gain a line.

    You make the first mark on a tally sheet. When you have four marks set parallel, you cross them with the fifth. When you have a row of twenty-eight marks, you have removed one page. When you have forty of these, you have completed the task--provided they are distributed through the installments in such a fashion that each part will be tailored to the desired length.

    It was a story of manners--a light thing, with a plot.

    I had enjoyed writing it.

    I did not enjoy the cutting.

    Every syllable scratched out is likely to take away some quality of a character upon which a subsequent event will turn. It is necessary to remember to the last detail what is removed and what remains. The elimination of a noun in the first installment may reduce the impact of a scene in the last. The contraction of a scenic description may ruin the comprehensibility of the hero's actions later on in the tale. And, when the