Nothing but the Night Read online

  JOHN WILLIAMS (1922–1994) was born and raised in northeast Texas. Despite a talent for writing and acting, Williams flunked out of a local junior college after his first year. He reluctantly joined the war effort, enlisting in the Army Air Corps, and managed to write a draft of Nothing But the Night, his first novel, while there. Once home, Williams found a small publisher for the novel and enrolled at the University of Denver, where he was eventually to receive both his BA and MA, and where he was to return as an instructor in 1954. He remained on the staff of the creative writing program at the University of Denver until his retirement in 1985. During these years, he was an active guest lecturer and writer, editing an anthology of English Renaissance poetry and publishing two volumes of his own poems, as well as three novels, Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner, and the National Book Award–winning Augustus.

  OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN WILLIAMS

  PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  Augustus

  Introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Butcher’s Crossing

  Introduction by Michelle Latiolais

  English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson, Selected by John Williams

  Introduction by Robert Pinsky

  Stoner

  Introduction by John McGahern

  NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT

  JOHN WILLIAMS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1948 by John Williams

  Interview with Nancy Gardner Williams copyright © 2016 by Nancy Gardner Williams and Patricia Reimann

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: George Tooker, Sleepers III, 1975–76; courtesy of DC Moore Gallery

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Williams, John, 1922–1994, author.

  Title: Nothing but the night / by John Williams.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018024727| ISBN 9781681373072 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681373089 (epub)

  Classification: LCC PS3545.I5286 N68 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024727

  ISBN 978-1-68137-308-9

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT

  Jungle of the Soul: John Williams, a Portrait

  An Interview with Nancy Gardner Williams

  Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,

  Look not left nor right:

  In all the endless road you tread

  There’s nothing but the night.

  —A. E. Housman

  In this dream where he was weightless and unalive, where he was a pervading mist of consciousness that seethed and trembled in a vast stretch of dark, there was at first no feeling, only a dim sort of apperception, eyeless, brainless, and remote, whose singular ability was to differentiate between himself and the darkness.

  Then a more positive awareness began to grow inside him, a kind of gratitude for the insensible thing he was in dream. Wordlessly and thoughtlessly, he cherished it so that, had he any choice, he would have elected to remain forever in that sightless womb of nothingness.

  But the peculiar circumstance of dreaming is that the dreamer is bereft of power. Although it often appears he is gifted with tremendous abilities, faculties inconceivable in waking, could the dreamer but examine his dreaming mind, explore his dreaming world, he must know that the only power he possesses is that convenient to the dream, the state in which he exists. He is the tool of a dark prankster, a grim little joker who creates worlds within world, lives within life, brains within brain. All of his illusionary power comes from this gleeful scenarist whose whim it is to bestow and withdraw.

  Thus, he began to feel somewhat less secure in his suspension; and as awareness grew, his gratitude lessened, and feeling thrust itself boldly upon him and suddenly, in an illogical transition, he found that he was no longer perfect in the vast of dark, but a something, an identity, imperfect and alive, in a miasmic world of light that was rising from the void.

  For an instant he did not recognize the place where he found himself as he hovered invisibly about the room, still buoyed upon a wave of unearthly detachment. It was a large, subtly illuminated room, chattering with people, dense and hot. The walls stretched endlessly about him. They were a light beige in color, tastefully trimmed in brown, decked with hundreds of garish and meaningless paintings. There was an atmosphere, an aura that hung about it which was quite familiar to him, yet which he could not name. Had he been able, he might have mingled with those people scattered about the floor, he might have talked to them and questioned them. But he knew he could not act from his own will. He was still at the mercy of the dream intelligence, and until that intelligence willed a thing it could not be.

  Yet from his separate dimension he was allowed to observe this gathered party; and he saw them as if they writhed and postured on a glass slide beneath an incredible microscope. He saw the party mask, the false, redundant smile which was a brief display of the oral cavity, showing moist pink gums, freshly scrubbed, the bluish enamel of dentifriced teeth—the grim, muscular retraction that screwed the face into a network of grimace and wrinkle, an anatomical experiment designed for charm.

  And he saw the portly gentlemen, bulkily arrayed in the bulges and unexciting protuberances of tuxedos, puffing their words through clouds of cigar smoke and the fine aroma of gin and vermouth; and the endless array of similar women, lengths of breast and thigh monotonously revealed by clinging gowns, blurred, unrecognizable faces, flute-like and empty voices.

  And suddenly the dreamer remembered where he was. Without warning, the knowledge came upon him and without surprise he accepted it. This was Max Evartz’s place. He knew it well. He paused in his casual scrutiny of the party members and looked about the room for Max, looked and knew before looking that he would not see him. One never saw Max at his own parties. The huge bulk of him obligingly disappeared when the party was launched and he was not seen thereafter. He was a wise and successful host.

  When he at last recognized his surroundings, other things swung into the orbit of his recollection. He knew these people, all of them. His mind was allowed to sort and consider the many faces, to remember them and classify them. And as memory encroached, his state of abstraction slipped off him like an oversized cloak and he felt himself drawn irresistibly down into the whirl and rush of reality, felt himself become a subtle fraction of this throng.

  Then he saw the young man; and while some part of his mind marveled at the insistent familiarity of his face, another part was sponged and saturated with a heavy knowledge, an inescapable and unsayable awareness of why he had been posited here, why he stood now looking, and what was to happen.

  This young man sat alone in a large chair in a corner of the room. His hair fell in lank blond ropes about his head and occasionally a slender hand lifted absently and made ineffective gestures to flick them into place. He was built slightly and his stature was made more noticeable by a small stoop that could be seen even when he was seated. He was pale; but his pallidness suggested something more than a mere lack of sunshine. There seemed to be a doughy cushion beneath his skin; one
had the impression that if the flesh of his face were touched by an inquisitive finger it would stay the way it was pushed, as if it lacked the normal resiliency of healthy skin and muscle. Set against this unusual pallidness was a surprising pair of blood-red lips. It was not exactly a sensual red, nor an unhealthy red. On the contrary, it seemed to be the only healthy feature of an otherwise sick countenance.

  One saw him frequently at Max’s parties, but even to an observer unblessed with the supernal acuteness of the dreamer, it was obvious that he did not belong. He seemed involved in an inner restlessness which neither allowed him to be at ease with himself nor with others. He sat forward in his chair, tensely, as if on the verge of leaping to his feet and fleeing in sheer panic. Yet he was seen frequently here and at other similar gatherings, always a bedeviled alien, a misfit. Always and without fail each of these functions hung about him like an ill-fitting suit.

  And the dreamer asked himself, Who knew this man? Who knew his real identity? Who knew from whence he came, who knew his destination? Here is your real stranger, thought the dreamer: not the man you have never seen, not the man you have never known, not the face you glimpsed briefly on the teeming street: not the dark, once-heard voice: not the foreign face you have read on pages: not these. But here—here in this man you know too well to know, whom you have seen too often ever to see. Here is your real stranger on the streets: this huddled, blond, tense figure who sits in a chair in the corner of a room, unnoticed and alone.

  For he was unnoticed and alone, and no one knew him. His name could be spoken by a few . . . and that was all. The bare, essential facts of his life were included in the knowledge of no person here. They were not deemed important enough to consider, much less to investigate.

  To these people he was a noise without meaning, an explosion without disruption.

  The dreamer remembered a particular instance. He remembered him as he stood once nervously in the middle of Max Evartz’s floor, blinking rapidly at all about him, his restless fingers caressing the stem of a cocktail glass, absorbing all that was going on with the concentrated intensity of a near-sighted owl. That was his usual stance and his usual attitude. Sometimes he would stand so for fully half an hour, hardly moving, saying nothing, listening to the incomprehensible chatter flowing around him. Then a chance remark might find its way into his hearing, and he would suddenly stamp his foot and scream out violent, meaningless words of deprecation and abuse into blank, surprised faces. His own face would concentrate into a petty grimace of displeasure, his thin red lips would writhe damply, and a touch of exasperated pink would tinge the unhealthy dough of his cheeks. Nor was he content to cease his irascible harangue as people moved away from him, as they alarmedly and invariably did. He followed them about the room, his abuse changing so subtly into desperation and pleading that no one ever noticed.

  Then, as abruptly as he had started, he would stop. He would stare dully at the person or persons to whom he had been talking as if they were unwanted, intruding strangers. He would thereupon wheel about, leaving them bewildered, frightened, somewhat ashamed, and retire to his corner of the room. There he would lapse into a comatose silence that lasted sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for an hour, and more often for the remainder of the evening. During this time, it was useless to try to rouse him. He seemed unaware of any existence save his own unspeaking self.

  So now the dreamer watched the small pale figure in the too-large chair. And as he watched, the sense of impending disaster grew stronger in him. Wanting to flee, to leave this place, he found himself totally immobilized, the smallest power of movement taken away by the imp of dreaming. He stood in panic as suddenly, more suddenly than he had imagined possible, the dream went awry. There was a great blinding explosion of light which left an impenetrable void of darkness; then from the darkness, magnified many times, came the voice of the crowd. They were screaming wildly, lustily, in concentrated hate, and he knew why they were screaming.

  Then the darkness lifted. And as it did, he saw the entire party, all of previously sedate inhabitants of the room, crowded about that over-large chair in one corner, beating down their senseless rage upon a huddled, ignoring creature. The dreamer was inside this human circle, quite near the pale young man, and as the crowd pressed inward and he felt himself pushed with them, toward the occupant of the chair, he suddenly found the power to scream, suddenly regained the power to move and fight. But he could not break out of that circle; the crowd pressed him inexorably, and his strength could not prevail against the weight of their contracting bodies. Inward, inward the dreamer was pressed until he was so close that he could see the texture of the young man’s skin, until he could see the thin veins that laced the lids of his resigned, closed eyes. He tried to shrink back once more in a last despairing effort to avoid a fatal contact with that body; but it was no use. With a mighty, common heave he was pushed in and he felt some part of him touch the youth, and then he knew: in a final burst of knowledge, his mind syllabled what he had sensed all along. Subtly, easily, soundlessly, as if he were an intangible atmosphere, he merged with the resting body, became one with it in a sudden and inexplicable chemistry, realized in a brief flash of agony that this was his real identity, that this was himself; and just before the curtain of dark fell, he looked up out of the young man’s abruptly opened eyes, saw the endless sea of the crowd’s face, heard again the animal scream of its hatred, felt their brutal hands upon his body, saw their fists upraised to smash bloodily downward, felt an instant shock of pain, and then the sea of blood darkened and he swam in utter blackness and knew no more.

  Morning rays of sunlight poked inquisitive fingers through the half-opened shutters of the venetian blinds and touched his face softly, warmly, impersonally. He stirred a little and turned away from them. Then the telephone beside his bed jangled and he snapped upright, startled, his eyes open but unseeing. He blinked and shook his head to drive away the lingering remnants of his dream. He picked up the phone.

  ‘Yes?’ he mumbled sleepily.

  The voice sang. ‘Good morning, Mr Maxley. Nine o’clock.’

  He grunted and replaced the phone on its cradle. He sat on the edge of his bed for a few moments, his legs crossed, staring straight in front of him, slowly, laboriously adjusting himself to day. His mind threw sleep away, layer by warm layer, and steeled itself against the cold onslaught of consciousness.

  Arthur Maxley looked about the room, blinking his eyes with the imperturbable and rhythmic frequency of a bland turtle. His head throbbed dully. His mouth was cottony with the stale aftertaste of the liquor he had drunk last night, here, alone in his apartment.

  I must find something else to do at night, he thought. It is not good for me to sit here alone and drink.

  He looked about him distastefully. A bureau drawer sagged open; used handkerchiefs, soiled ties and socks rose above its sides. In the center of the floor an ashtray had been upset, scattering the rug with ashes and cigarette butts.

  The room is like my soul, he thought. Dirty and disarranged.

  He smiled. The hell it is, he told himself. It is a room and the maid will clean it up this morning, as she cannot clean up your soul. Who is there to clean up your soul?

  But he could arouse no real interest in his soul this morning. Last night, he remembered, he had been deeply concerned with his soul. He had sat here in this room, he had drunk a little, he had read a book, and he had thought about his soul. But that was last night. Now it was morning, and his mind veered sharply from introspection.

  I will take a nice walk in the park, he said silently. A little later, I will put on my clothes and take a nice long walk in the park.

  He sighed deeply and threw the covers away from him and padded on bare feet into the bathroom. He brushed his teeth until his gums smarted painfully, slapped cold water on his face, rubbed himself briskly with a rough towel. He peered into his bathroom mirror. He decided that he could get by without shaving.

  Then, looking into the mirr
or, he again became conscious of his face. He studied it slowly, impersonally. He did not like his face. Up to a point, he could dislike it without passion, emotionlessly, as if it belonged to someone else. But he could never retain his detachment. Always, there began to smolder the resentment against whatever was responsible for this outward misrepresentation of his inner self. It was not fair. With one finger, he poked at the flesh of his face, noticing the curious contrast between his fine, sinuous hands and the pale, quite ordinary, unlined skin of his face which should, but did not, bloom with the glow of youth. He laughed at his image in the mirror. He drew his red lips back and showed his teeth and laughed defiantly. Then he sobered and stared at himself for a moment longer, absently, as if he had lost all interest. He turned on his heel and went back into his bedroom.

  While dressing, he reminded himself again that he must take that walk in the park. Sitting in his rooms all morning with the shutters drawn was bad for him. He thought of things that he should not think of, he remembered things that he should not remember. Like a doctor who watches disease creep upon him, and who does nothing to forestall it, he sometimes saw himself as he sat alone and remembered. They had told him that there were things he must put out of his mind, that he must forget; and he had listened to them, and he had agreed. Yet when he was faced with the necessity of following their advice, he became curiously helpless.

  But last night, while sitting alone, he had made himself an emphatic promise. He would map each day in front of him, filling in the moments as he would plot a chart, so that there would not be one vacant instant for him to nestle in and remember. And even though the thought of facing the morning filled him with a quiet dread, he had decided that the first thing he must do, each day, was to take a walk, a nice long walk, in the park.