Sexus by Henry Miller — Read

The following evening my old friend Stanley drops in to see me. Maude detests Stanley, and with good reason, because every time he looks her way he blows her down with a silent curse. His look says very clearly-If I had that bitch in my place I'd take the axe to her and hew her down. Stanley is full of submerged hatreds. He looks as gaunt and wiry now as he did when he came out of the cavalry at Fort Oglethorpe years ago. What he's looking for is something to murder. He'd murder me, his best friend, if he could get away with it. He's foul on the world, green all the way back to the bile with accumulated hatred and vengeance. What he comes around for is to make sure that I am not making any progress, that I'm sinking deeper and deeper. You'll never get anywhere, he says. You're like me-you're weak, you have no ambition. We have one ambition in common, which we make light of: to write. There was more hope for us fifteen years ago, when we were writing letters to one another.

Fort Oglethorpe was a good place for Stanley; it made him a drunkard, a gambler, a thief. It made his letters interesting. They were never about the army life but about exotic, romantic writers whom he tried to imitate when he wrote. Stanley should never have come back North; he should have gotten off the train at Chickamauga, wrapped himself in tobacco leaves and cowdung, and taken himself a squaw. Instead he came back North to the funeral parlor, found himself a fat Polish wench with fertile ovaries, saddled himself with a brood of little Poles, and tried in vain to write standing up over the kitchen tubs. Stanley rarely talked about anything in the present; he preferred to spin incredible yarns about the men he loved and admired in the army.