No Soap Radio, Part I

My name is Endicott Quincy Holmes. I am, I suppose, agoraphobic. That word holds a large number of meanings, all of which relate to a fear of largeness and intensity; it can be a fear of wide skies, large crowds of people, or the outdoors as a whole.

It is irrelevant now. There are no people.

Many people with my condition existed in the past, in one way or another, and most were quite capable of living perfectly ordinary everyday lives, only being troubled by large markets and the like. In a similar way, there were in the past many invalids - unfortunate persons inhibited by polio, cataract, birth-defect, or any one of hundreds of complaints - who lived full, rich lives, with only the slightest restrictions on their activities. Yet while there were many who lived ordinary lives, there were many - not just severely crippled types, but men whose physical misfortunes were minor indeed - who were confined to bedrooms and sanatoria out of necessity or out of sheer cowardice of what the outside might bring. I am such a creature.

For the longest time my world has been a few meagre acres; this may seem strange, but man must always inhabit a finite space, this limitation being essentially the same no matter what its specific dimensions. The difference between my world and the world of those who have passed before me is the difference between their and the abiding darkness of space: shelter, comfort and ultimately gaol, the inescapability and limited resources of which I am only all too aware.

I have been rather wanting in company for some considerable time – well, indeed, I am really very alone. I have always been something of a loner, of course – why, I spent many of my youthful years alone, reading. My abiding memory of my college life is that of staring down from my dorm room back in old Miskatonic, watching my fellow college boys – walking out with their girl-friends, studying on the green, playing baseball. I used to long to do what they did, and live a normal life. I once spent an entire morning staring down out of the window, staring at the green, watching a group of young people; I watched the group accrete and disperse, four, maybe five hours – and then one young woman in the group, an Asenath Waite, I believe, turned and looked at me. I quickly pulled down the blind and made my way to Professor Upman’s lecture, which if memory serves concerned the axiom of choice.

In those days my fear, perhaps, was not of the outside; that was to come later. In those days I was frightened of my fellow man, which makes my current situation altogether more ironic, and perhaps a fitting punishment for my disregarding Terentius’ motto, ‘nothing human is alien to me.’

It was the summer of 1930 and my father had just died, leaving me heir to his private fortune. My father was a fine, upstanding Massachusetts man, of old New England Protestant stock. His family – I suppose I should say my family, being the only scion of it now – was rather prestigious and prominent, one of those called the ‘Boston Brahmins’ back in that time. He had studied at Miskatonic University, his father had studied at Miskatonic University, and so on, and I had been expected to do the same. I must have been deeply affected by his death, as my mother had died some years before. I say that I must have been, but I really do not recall any great outpouring of emotion. By that time, my father was to me a walking conglomeration of facial hair, all mutton-chop whiskers, sideburns, and moustache; I spoke to him little, as I only spoke when prompted, and his favored method of communication was shouting.

No doubt many of my college boy colleagues would have taken this opportunity to become what I believe are called play boys; you will no doubt know of them, men who dress in the most ill-cut yet fashionable suits and drink copious quantities of liquor every night, and who associate with women of ill-repute. My father, while he lived, regularly suspected me of becoming one of such men; he was wrong. I disapprove of such men and always have, having sworn off extravagance and strong drink, and having little interest in women and such nonsense. There are, nonetheless, a great number of young men who waste their time on such fripperies – I was not one of them. I elected to finish my education at Miskatonic.

After majoring in philosophy, and leaving Miskatonic University, I found myself somewhat at a loose end. My father, not being by any means a self-made man, had no business to carry on save that of banking, and I was somewhat loathe to build a business in trade. I did not want to stay immediately in my father’s house, to face the people whom I feared the most, the Bostonians; I wanted to live for a little while in blissful obscurity and anonymity that I might build up some form of moral strength to face the world.

As a result, I opted to spend a year or so traveling in Europe, and consider the question of how to continue my life from there. Having no close relatives – indeed, having no relatives save for some elderly spinster great-aunts, and the like – there were few obstacles to my taking off. The city fathers, of course, objected to my liquidating most of my father’s assets, but they had little recourse to stop me. I did not answer their objections – I coped by pretending that they did not exist, and disconnected the telephone and refused to answer the door. Once I left I found that things were substantially easier, as the people who passed by did not speak to me unless they were first spoken to.

Now, it may perhaps seem that I, being frightened of so much in the world, would have been somewhat intimidated by leaving for Europe alone, having never before left the north-easterly part of the United States, indeed, never having left New England, save to visit New York and Philadelphia. I was born, as matter of fact, in 1912, not long after the sinking of the RMS Titanic, and the perils of trans-Atlantic traveling have always been etched upon my memory; so perhaps a great deal of trepidation would be expected. I found it – not exactly calming, as few experiences in life have a calming influence upon my nerves – I found it not too taxing.

It took nearly a week to come to Europe; I sailed on the RMS Majestic, a terrifically opulent craft, the full advantages of which I of course did not explore. I have said that I did not find it too taxing – the only unease I experienced came when an invitation was extended to me, as a member of a well known family, to dine at the Captain’s table. I claimed to be ill with neurasthenia, and spent the rest of the journey holed up in my cabin, reading and writing. I had elected, at this time, to become a poet, a contributor to magazines and an illustrator, as a way of earning myself a small living to supplement my ancestral wealth and to stave off madness. I know, and knew, that the most merciful thing in the world was the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents, and that a certain amount of artistic expression would allow me to rid myself of some of my more pernicious demons.

I set to work reading some of my favored writers – Emily Dickinson, the English writer Walter de la Mare, and our very own Edgar Allen Poe – in order that I might, as an exercise, take their prose and render it differently; usually, as is my wont, as a prose poem. I took sketches from Chambers’ King in Yellow and rendered them in unrhymed free verse, and rendered the versified works of de la Mare in prose form. I particularly relished – I shall not say enjoyed, for although I found it most stimulating, I also found it a quite oppressive and intense experience - working on one particular short story which I had found in an old back-issue of the New England Magazine, the work of a young lady that seemed quite so intense to me that it must surely have been autobiographical. It concerned a woman suffering from some quite trifling melancholia, until the point at which her husband, a forceful and oppressive man, and a physician and apparent ‘man of science’ decided that the finest course of action in dealing with her would be to confine her within a small bedroom decorated with unpleasant yellow wall-paper. I rather sympathized with the young woman, as her husband reminded me of my father, overbearing and tyrannical, the variety of man whose blustering white moustache against a background of lobster-red gives the overall impression of a crustacean wearing a spiked helmet.

Oh, I lived her life that week, at sea, in my cabin; I lived her life, her decline as the yellow wallpaper danced in front of her eyes, as surely a cause of her decline as the ghastly green wallpaper at Saint Helena was the cause of Napoleon Bonaparte’s. My walrus-like father was the cause of my decline just as this young lady’s husband the cause of hers, just as martial Wellington the cause of Bonaparte’s decline. I lived her life, and the lives of many others, throughout that week – I lived through the Masque of the Red Death, not as the revelers and debutantes of the ball, but as the Red Death, the creeping, encroaching darkness against the bright, gay, foolishness of modern society. I lived through Chambers’ King in Yellow; I was the sculptor, whose creation destroyed him, the insane but yet brilliant aspirant to the ancient throne of Carcosa, a usurper of my cousin and a murderer of my dreadful relatives. I was the man in the Room Around, the man obsessed with the city beneath the sea, while I lay in the city above and upon it. I even contemplated the possibility that I had lived all of these lives, and that I would live these lives.

I also considered my intentions in coming to Europe. Of course, they were quite plain to me – I wanted to avoid my spinster great-aunts, my childhood ‘friends’, all those who would interfere with me and pester me to the grave. I wanted to go someplace no-one knew me, someplace I could live unseen. England would be the most suitable place to go, as I could easily disguise my Brahmin accent as an educated English accent, and therefore not stand out as a foreigner.

I did not have any plans for my time in England; I knew that many Miskatonic graduates toured Europe for what they considered a grand tour but what might be better couched in terms of a grand sneer – they would return with many tales of the rustic, quaint villages and of the ignorance of the country bumpkins, and they would keep the rapt attention of large Bostonian audiences while I, examining a plant in the corner of whichever function they were entertaining, thought to myself that much of these United States outside of New England and the commercial north-east must be equally, if not more, rustic, quaint, and bucolic. As their tales consisted largely of serial anecdotes, and were quite scant on detail, I did not know, and still do not know, what they actually did to occupy themselves during these journeys. I did not imagine their activities to be particularly productive or edifying, but rather to be a protracted smirk at the perceived foolishness of not being Bostonian. I decided, then, to make a productive life of my time in England, learning as much as I could – without risking too much preaching and other needless types of oppressive interaction – about the country and its history, studying the contents of the British Library and the Bodleian Library and other useful repositories of information, and producing a book or two along the way.

My first goal, therefore, was to take the rail-road from Liverpool, where I disembarked, to Oxford, wherein lay colleges and vast libraries of books. It was a long journey, and I saw a great deal of the countryside within it. I worked along the way, producing a number of prose poems I adjudged to be most moving and beautiful. I observed the countryside and thought how I might capture the beauty of the surroundings in text – and I wondered if all human life could be captured in text. Perhaps the entirety of human striving could be replaced by text and text alone, releasing the body from the slavery of having to be a body, having to wake, wipe sleep from the eyes, to excrete and defecate (which are not the same– excretion is the expelling of synthesized substances such as urine, as opposed to defecation, which is the movement of undigested foodstuffs through the colon), to eat, and to associate with other bodies. I dozed, and dreamed a world of books, side by side, forever, unspeaking, still. A paradise, indeed! No forceful oppression, no need to account for oneself, no need to go out and speak to those who might mock, no need to be mocked and to be harassed and be instructed on the errors of one’s ways. I dreamed of such a thing.

When I woke, I blushed in embarrassment and my mind was cast back to other embarrassments and other humiliations. I shied away.

It was some months into my time in England. I had stayed in Oxford, seeing little else, and had rented a small house without the city limits. I had lived alone for a while, without any butlers or servants; for the first few weeks it was surely paradise indeed! I had craved solitude for so long, freedom for so long, and I was finally granted it. My tie and my shoes did not have to be precisely selected for the occasion, I did not have to feign interest in the coming out of a new debutante, and I did not have to submit to the instructions of my elderly relatives. I learned many things for the first time, so many that are so trivial to most of you that I am afraid that you will laugh at me for saying them. Ha, how strange that I said ‘you’, when I have no idea who you are, and do not know whether you exist or whether you do not. I sincerely hope, for once in my life, that there is someone to read my secrets – at least I will have lived for something.

Enough of such self-indulgence; I shall return to my former train of thought, about living away from Bostonian life. I learned the simple pleasures of small, intimate bedrooms with warm furnishings, of sitting by the fire on quiet evenings alone. I learned to drink beer and porter, the latter a beverage rarely seen these days, but which was quite popular in British working-class society. I learned to build a fire, a strangely comforting pleasure that the presence of servants has always denied me. I learned to read the types of literature intended for popular consumption. I learned the pleasures of rustic foodstuffs such as pickled-cabbage and rusty bacon. And… and, although I was, and remain, a virgin, I learned the nature of sexuality.

I heard the strange, animal noises of those who would use my grounds for carnal pleasures many nights, and I learned to discern them, as if discerning the activities of birds from their calls. I hope you will trust that my listening activities were not prurience, nor perverted interest; they were purely scientific in nature. I wished to understand how the other part of society lived… and, I must confess, on one occasion as I listened to the grunting and moaning of a man and a woman, I felt a strange sinking feeling in my breast, as if a craving, perhaps a craving for meat. As their cries became more intense, my image and craving for meat took on a more concrete form – I envisioned a primitive meal as I had heard described by the more gauche of those students at Miskatonic, which would have been considered rather ghastly by my fellow Brahmins but which seemed to me to gain a status rather akin to ambrosia in my cravings: a thick fried beefsteak, surmounted with a horse-radish sauce and potatoes mashed in their skins. I closed my eyes, and inhaled deeply. I could feel the warmth of it on my face, I could scent the meat; I opened my eyes sharply upon realizing that I could indeed scent meat. I could scent something salty, meaty, base, animal – I could scent the issue of the man.

The days that followed marked a significant change in my demeanor. I had lived for weeks alone, relishing my solitude and self-discovery, burning leaves that I had purchased in a market in a small dish and enjoying their scent, smoking tobacco from a small pipe, reading and writing, and enjoying the manner of life-style that a Holmes – or an Endicott, or a Quincy, or a Cabot, or a Peabody – could never hope to enjoy or even appreciate the existence of. Yet, I felt a strange hunger. I had lived in company for all my life, in supervision, and I craved solitude, valuing every small moment of it. Yet… yet then, with unlimited amounts of solitude, and with absolute freedom from the oppressive nature of New England life, I found myself altogether lacking in something. Lacking in company.

Over the next few days I made some soul-searching, and decided that what I needed was a companion. I do not really know much about my own carnal or romantic inclinations. Nonetheless, I felt that it was good and right for me to have a female companion. I possessed, of course, several volumes of pulp mysteries, and several books regarding the science of the psyche, and so I had sufficient information to formulate my plan. I would find the right woman to enter my house, and my life, and I would talk to her and charm her, and find her own ideas and opinions and inclinations similar to mine, and we would become friends, and then later lovers, and we would be married. She would be a safe person to me, not a forceful or oppressive type like my father, and she would be like having another one of me to hand. I would find her in the library, or in a book-store, so that she would be a cultivated and civilized person – perhaps a female student of Oxford University, of whom I am told there are a few! - and she would be entranced by Boston’s own Edgar Allen Poe, and so I would regale her with anecdotes of Boston. I would not conceal my Massachusetts roots from her, for they would beguile her and endear me to her. I would have company, but company I need not fear.

That, at least, was my plan. I made some forays out into the world, or, at least, the world of Oxford. One day in my life may be detailed and let stand as example; it is not, I must offer as a disclaimer, a particular day, but it combines a number of days – I think this may be three days – into one single day, that I might exemplify better. Let us say that this day was a Friday; I rose, after my usual fashion, at six o’clock in the morning, performed my ablutions, dressed, and went for a long walk in order that I might better acclimatize myself to leaving the home. When one is not engaged in employment, and when one rather does fear company, tasks do tend to take rather longer than usual to accomplish, and so I elected rather to complete my tasks sooner than later.

Two hours later, having doused myself in cologne purchased from a druggist in the town and having rehearsed my speech in advance, I presented myself in a library, and spoke to a delightful young lady. Her name was Cassilda, I seem to recall. She was most charming, and by this time, I had accosted several other ladies of appropriate breeding, spoken to them, and embarrassed myself by my locutions; I therefore had a much better idea of how to speak to her. After what seemed like several hours – but which must only have been twenty minutes or thereabouts – I had learned a great deal about her. I had learned about her fascination for those authors, particularly Chambers, who I considered the greats, and I had learned of new authors, such as a Jewish gentleman from the Argentine, whose name I have now forgotten. I found her most entrancing, and although the prospect of sexual contact with her I found really rather revolting, I decided to pursue a relationship with her.

She deduced rather quickly that I was no Oxford scholar, and so it seemed logical to explain my position with as much truthfulness as I could venture. I was quite frank regarding my education and origins, but rather than expressing the true extent of my loneliness I decided that I should pose as one interested in the activities of the English and conducting research. She offered rather to help me in this research, aiding me in the deception that I was an Oxonian. With her assistance, I attended some lectures, posing as a fellow student – it is important to conduct such activities in mornings, as the brain is fresh and not tired, as it may be later on when it is engaged in frivolities. At lunchtime, we sat in a coffee-house, I continuing my regular occupation of writing and illustrating whilst regaling her with anecdotes. I must confess, in her presence, I found myself increasingly confident, quite apart from my hermit self that I had come to know. The prospect, indeed, of carnal relations with her held no dread for me.

In the afternoon, I would go to the bookstore, Blackwell’s, and I would then return to the coffee-houses before attending a college ball in the evenings. I doused myself freely in a variety of cologne I purchased from a druggist in the town, hoping to make myself into the kind of gentleman who might make an appropriate suitor. I attended all the functions and insinuated myself into the kinds of places that I believed would find me meeting the appropriate girl, and I for a time swallowed my trepidation and approached a number of them.