BLOOM HAD 2 CHOICES. He could try to unwrap the purloined parcel so carefully its rewrapping would conceal the fact it had been tampered with. Or, he could simply cut the literary twine, break the author's seal and later repackage the manuscript with ordinary brown paper and common kitchen string. Reasoning that only he and the author knew about the unique way in which the manuscript was originally mailed—and that in any event Jayne would no doubt trash its wrappings as she did all the envelopes she ripped from what would be her "daily supply of literary junkmail"—Bloom elected to "burn his bridges" by severing the literary twine with his trusty penknife. The first thing he saw after removing the kunstler- kraft was a handwritten note on a fullsized sheet of paper clipped to the manuscript's title page—or what he presumed would be its title page when and if the note was turned and/or unclipped. It read as follows:
WARNING:
Don't Remove This Note—Or Even Take A Peek At What Lies Behind It—Before Reading It At Least Twice!
Dear Publisher's Reader—
Please excuse my impertinence re that obviously fake (and corny) alias I used when addressing this parcel. The reasons for this little "cloak & dagger" intrigue of mine will become apparent when you read the enclosed manu- script. Before doing that, however, I must caution you: There is an intergovernmental conspiracy of global dimen- sions at work to prevent the publication of my book. While I can't go into the details surrounding this dastardly plot against me (and, more importantly, the sociocultural Wakeup Call I've been chosen by fate to trumpet) once again; they will all become crystal clear when you read the first few pages of this manuscript. Suffice it to say now that: By simply reading the title page hiding behind this note your name may very well be added to mine on a secret Hit List drawn up by the ruthless members of the aforementioned global conspiracy!
Accordingly, if you decide to proceed any further with this perilous undertaking you should do so only if you are fully prepared to treat it as if it were nothing less than a matter of life & death—which, I can assure you from my personal experiences during the past five years as The Man Most Wanted by the CIA, FBI, Mossad, MI-5, Interpol, KGB (and God knows how many other supersecret security agencies) it definitely is!
In the event you choose not to embark on such a risky enterprise I won't blame you. After all, the average Pub- lisher's Reader has every right to shrink in the face of a task so obviously above & beyond the unheroic duties of her "humble" calling. Moreover, if you are indeed only an average publisher's reader it's extremely improbable you have the intellectual wherewithall, imaginative capacity and/or sheer courage to pass judgment on the manuscript for a book that is anything but average.
If then, for the reasons set forth above you decide not to take "the fatal plunge" of lifting this "figleaf" for a peek at what lies hidden behind it all I ask is this: That you destroy every unread page (preferably by shredding and/or incinerating them) of what—alas!—might have been the prologue to a legendary "artistic loveaffair" in which you played Sylvia Beach, Anais Nin, Baroness Dudevant, Aline Bernstein, Cosima von Bulow, Gertrude Stein, Roxanne, Beatrice, Dulcinea, Leonard Bernstein, Mona Lisa, Turandot, Queen Isabella, Marilyn Monroe and (no "/ors " about it!) Eve to my James Joyce, Henry Miller, Chopin, Thomas Wolfe, Wagner, Picasso, Cyrano, Dante, Quixote, Stephen Sondheim, Leonardo Da Vinci, Calaf, Columbus, Arthur Miller and Adam in order to avoid compromising my safety —and/or that of the publisher's reader who is destined to immortalize herself by helping me to complete my history making mission.
Whatever you decide I will always remain,
Faithfully & Affectionately Yours,
(XXX)
"C. P."
While not altogether unimpressed by this stillanonymousbutmanifestlyamateurish author's skill in arousing a modest degree of prurient curiosity with this "figleaf" business of his, Bloom wasn't "fooled for a minute by what he knew would turn out to be another of those fruitless ploys unknown writers frequently perpetrate on a publisher's reader whom they (alltoo astutely in most cases) presume will be vulnerable to such a blatant flimflam for calling her attention to their needle in a haystack manuscripts." During his lifelong career as a mailboy he had seen and/or heard about numerous examples of unsolicited manuscripts being Specially Delivered along with "modest tokens of the author's advance gratitude" which included flowers, jewelry, chocolates, lingerie, furs, perfume, record albums, hardtoget theatre tickets and, in some particularly desperate situations, hard cash! He recalled how even the late, great, Thomas Wolfe tried (without success) to literally "softsoap" his way into the good graces of the first reader to whom he submitted the draft for (what eventually became) Look Homeward, Angel by sending her a giftbox of fancy French bubblebath. And hadn't he—Bloom—filled several notebooks with "seduction stratagems" for enticing some selfstyled Sleeping Beauty into thinking her dormant lovelife might be magically revived by delving into his own Magnum Opus (when he finally got around to writing it)? Oh, no. Old Leopold Bloom wasn't about to swallow any of those artfully crafted words "warning" a witless wallflower about the "life & death" dangers of taking so much as the tiniest peek at the page hidden by the author's "cautionary figleaf." It was all very clever, but nowhere near slick enough to deceive someone with his publishinghouse savvy into believing it was anything more than just another trick of the unsolicited manuscript trade.
As he casually removed the author's note from its paperclip, however, his composure was obliterated by what he saw written in bold letters on the page exposed as a result of this ostensibly inconsequential act. The words—
MORONS AWAKE!
—leapt from the paper like a pair of vipers and simultaneously sank their fangs into each of his jugulars. In a flash Bloom felt himself reeling from the sting of a venom made from equal parts of boundless admiration and unbridled envy. "Could any exhortation" he managed to ask himself while in the very throes of extremis, "express more cogently the words of wisdom humanity needs so urgently to hear spoken—or shouted!—as it continues sleepwalking its way toward the cliff's edge of sociocultural oblivion? Moreover," he continued ruminating despite the paralytic toll the venom was taking on him from the neck down, "with its manifestly biblical resonance, doesn't the choice of Morons Awake! as the title for a bestselling jeremiad on the somnambulistic consequences of America's blind faith in the blissfulness of ignorance represent a feat of artistic virtuosity that is nothing short of miraculous in the way the author also establishes his personal claim to everlasting literary fame?"
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS EXTRAVAGANT praise there was something about that "Biblical resonance" Bloom found bothersome. The more he repeated those ringing words—Morons Awake! Morons Awake! Morons Awake!—the surer he became they rerang a bell he had first rung years ago in searching for a title whose perfection would unleash the torrent of seminal ideas waiting inside his head to fling themselves onto the blank sheets of 100% cotton rag watermarked bond he was saving for the final draft of his one and only Magnum Opus. Before he could even think about confirming this suspicion by perusing the dozens of notebooks he had filled with possible titles for his own "Biblelike screed on the sins of sociocultural egalitarianism," however, his attention was drawn to the (relatively) smaller print under what he suddenly realized was only meant to be the short title of that mysterious manuscript—not a single one of whose pages, incidentally (and if we exempt the author's "figleaf"), Bloom had gotten around to turning in the solid hour or so since he first unwrapped it! Ironically it was this "chance" reading of Moron Awake!'s long title which removed any doubts he had concerning the reasons for that "nagging sense of déjà vu" engendered in him by the short title of an unpublished novel presumptively written by someone with whom he was completely unacquainted (and vice versa)! Bloom's own intensive experimentation with the "Literary Properties & Potentialities of Long and/or Super long Titles" made it perfectly plain that: Whoever this "Mordecai Goldberg (PhD & Former American Ambassador to Moronia)" really was he had—at least longtitlewise—managed to pick Bloom's literary brains cleaner than a proverbial whistle!
Although Bloom couldn't claim with absolute certitude it was he who first coined every last word of "A MANIFESTO TO REVERSE THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION Written in the Form of a Novellength Answer to the Burning Question of Whether Jack F. Klutz Lived & Died as a Martyr for the Cause of Human Mediocrity or was Simply an Exception to the Rule that All Men Are Created Equal"—for all practical purposes it didn't matter if "Goldberg" had stolen his innovative thunder verbatim or on some paraphrasticd basis. Bloom was confident a search through of all his notes, memoranda, index cards, critiques, commentaries, papers, treatises, monographs, theses, outlines, studies, and/or dissertations on the subject of "Titular Elongation" would establish his paternity in substance if not by the dotting of every "i" and/or crossing of every "t." Given the already chaotic state of his mind resulting from the cavalcade of bizarre events which had transpired on that momentous morning it took several minutes for all the ramifications raised by this stupendous discovery to fully register. When they did Bloom found himself facetoface with the astounding prospect that: Like its short and long titles, the "mysterious" manuscript he was about to read would also turn out to be (more or less) the one he himself had been on the very cusp of writing for at least the last 25 years!
Hence it was that when, at long last, Bloom finally turned to the first page of Morons Awake! he did so with a motion which couldn't have been slower for the consummate nature of its climactic expectancy.
LIKE SO MANY OF HIS EXPECTATIONS this one proved to be less than climactic in its consummation. As a matter of fact he was more than "a little disappointed" by reading a first sentence for which he had entertained "the highest hopes for its (and his) unqualified success." As the preamble to a Revolutionary Manifesto (and/or Artistic Masterpiece) the "opening salvo" of Morons Awake! seemed woefully—if not fatally!—lacking in the solemnity one would anticipate from its (to put it mildly) ambitious title. Even as the prurient sales pitch for a trashy bestseller it was mediocre at best and, at worst, teetered on the brink of a banality so lacking in literary luster it was almost beyond the pale of a modern publishing mentality whose tolerance for insipid prose was practically limitless. Moreover, in a society jaded by the kind of fullyfrontalized political sleaze, corporate corruption, institutional decay and sexual perversity undreamt of in the pornographic philosophies of Petronius, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais and de Sade, the "word picture" of some voluptuous young platinumblonde sitting starknaked in a Cadillac convertible at the corner of Hollywood & Vine was hardly the stuff that would induce an average housewife to buy a supermarket tabloid—let alone the hardcover copy of some softcore "sex" novel. Not that Bloom didn't recognize several elements in this fiascoed first sentence similar to some he had at one time or another thought seriously about using as that Sentence Of Sentences which would launch his bid for messianic immortality. In dealing with the problem of how to deceive that "average housewife" into believing the book she was tempted to purchase didn't belong in that most high browed of genres known as "literary fiction" Bloom (rightly!) concluded: A serious author must deliberately downplay those artistic techniques with which he expresses what, by definition, is his essentially antiEgalitarian message.
"The trick in writing the first sentence of a truly Great American Novel," he reasoned, "was to do so in such a devious way a sophisticated reader would instantly recognize the artistry of its 'symphonic motifs'-while simultaneously creating just the opposite impression on all those 'mainstream' readers epitomized by Holden Caulfield's description of himself as being 'quite illiterate, but I read a lot.'" The paradigm in Bloom's perfect scheme of things first sentencewise was, of course, those most famous of all four notes-
with which Beethoven opens his Fifth Symphony.214 No matter how nonsensical most of his novelwriting "theories" might seem to us, can we really argue with the world's oldest unpublished "author" on this point? Could any leitmotif be briefer, simpler and/or more deceptive in concealing the blitzkrieg of virtuosic variations on it that ensue almost immediately thereafter than those three G naturals followed by that single E flat? [Before answering this question, dear reader, consider these facts: (1) When his Symphony No. 5 was given its British premier in 1809 by the London Philharmonic the members of that august ensemble were so flummoxed by "the brevity of it's opening theme" they really thought "Beethoven was playing some sort of musical and/or German joke" on them; (2) The illustrious critic, Louis Spohr, described the "socalled 'theme' of the Fifth's first movement as shamefully lacking in dignity."]
Among Bloom's nonsymphonic first sentence exemplars were: the Bible—"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth;" The Declaration of Independence—"We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness;" Lincoln's Gettysburg Address—"Four Score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal;" Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities—"It was the best of times and the worst of times," and (his own "improved" version of) Kafka's The Metamorphosis—"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning he found [he had been changed during the night into a gigantic insect.]"
SO STARK WAS THIS DISCREPANCY between the "Biblical resonance" of Moron Awake!'s title and the "lead balloon effect" of its first sentence Bloom had to assume the fault for his failure to be duly impressed might very well have been his own. Perhaps the extraordinary state of suspense he was in over what he would find when he turned that pregnant title page caused his judgment of the first sentence to be rushed? Consequently he felt "morally obligated" to give the author of Morons Awake! the benefit of his initial doubts by rereading that sentence with the serious scrutiny it deserved. Besides which—after all the trouble he'd been put through in arriving at what was supposed to be the turning point in his exceedingly long (and depressingly rectilinear) journey toward Absolute Nowhere—he wasn't about to admit defeat without putting up "one hell of a fight!" Before doing so, however, he went to the kitchen sink and splashed his face with cold water and brewed himself an extra strong cup of instantcoffee which he carried back to his desk where he took a few "stimulating sips" to steel himself for the task ahead. And, as he slowly scrutinized each of the words comprising the first sentence his earlier negative impressions did indeed undergo a series of changes—all of them favorable to the author!
"For instance," Bloom asked himself, "couldn't that starknaked blonde represent not only an Edenesque metaphor in keeping with the novel's Biblicality but—even more brilliantly imbued with allegorical overtones—her Evelike yin to the narrator's Adamlike yang?" Similarly: If he remembered rightly, that '59 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz was regarded by those who knew about such things as "manifesting (in automotive terms) nothing less than the pinnacle of American civilization with its profligate use of steel, glass, leather, chrome and raw horsepower—along with such 'futuristic' design features as a fully wrappedaround windshield, quad head- and taillights, selfleveling air suspension, cruise control, signalseeking radio and, of course, those superextravagant tailfins." And if that weren't enough, the Cadillac "Eldorado" marque alone—[El Dorado n (Sp, lit., "the gilded one") 1: a city or country of fabulous riches held by 16thcentury explorers to exist in So. America 2: a place of fabulous wealth, abundance and/or opportunity] conjured up visions of utopian bliss more than adequate to put its "illiterate" readers on notice (at least subliminally) that something decidedly allegorical was about to unfold!
There was also the author's inspired choice of that most mythological of modern crossroads—Hollywood & Vine—as the setting for this dreamiest of AllAmerican scenarios wherein a starknaked (or seminude) sexgoddess suddenly descends from Mount Olympus in the kind of supercharged chariot seldom (if ever) seen on Tinseltown's palmlined streets and boulevards since the legendary likes of Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Nita Naldi, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield drove their custommade Auburns, Stutzes, Duesenbergs, Lasalles, Cords, Packards and Cadillacs to and from such fabled studios as MGM, Fox, RKO, Universal, Columbia, Twentieth Century, United Artists, Paramount; and Warner Brothers. Indeed! By slyly slipping that simplest of LA's roadmapping facts—the intersection of Hollywood Blvd. and Vine St.—into his first sentence the author was reawakening memories nothing less than Homeric in their evocation of America as it was before Vietnam, the Kennedy, King, Evers and Kennedy assassinations, Watergate, the Iranian Hostage Humiliation, Zippergate, Annual Budget Deficits in the hundreds of billions and a $5,000,000,000,000 national debt. Not to mention Flag- & Braburning, the Rust Belt, Corporate Downsizing, ABSCAM, the Sexual Revolution, Unwed Motherhood;, Political Correctness, Innercity Blight, Multicultural Meltdown, Affirmative Discrimination, Abortion On Demand, a Shrinking Middleclass, an Expanding Underclass, and that Plague Of Plagues—AIDS.
"Whether we like it or not," mused Bloom (and he for one certainly didn't), "with all its warts—the earthquakes, smog, firestorms, flashflooding, mudslides, riots, suburban sprawl, ubiquitous glitzism, traffic jams, rampant multi culturalism and rampant airheadedness—the socalled "City of Angels" clings with a tenacity that isn't entirely unheroic (or unendearing) to its claim for being the closest any American megalopolis comes to fulfilling the aforementioned Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary definition of a veritable El Dorado."
AFTER
HIS 9th READING Bloom's mind was made
up. He pronounced Moron Awake!'s initial sentence to be "as perfect
as the beginning of any book can be!" Try as he might he couldn't find a
single fault with any of its 33 words. And why should he even consider engaging
in such a counterproductive exercise when a credible case could be made that:
The seeds for every one of those 33 pregnant words would be found scattered
throughout the notebooks he had filled with his own ideas for the Perfect
First Sentence? But Bloom was prevented from definitively answering this
"$64 question" by the annoying asterisk (appended to the word "novel") which
kept calling his attention to what looked (from the corner of his eye) like
an entire page of exceedingly fine print! The argument that technically
this footnote constituted an extension of the first sentence was one Bloom
found difficult to refute. Accordingly he had to admit that: Until it was
scrutinized with the same assiduity he had exercised in critiquing (what
he erroneously thought was) the completed first sentence, the "authorship
issue" would have to remain temporarily suspended in a state of analytical
limbo.
As he soon discovered from his preliminary scanning,
the footnote following the first sentence occupied considerably more than
just the remainder of that page. And so it transpired that not until he had
read his way to the very end of the first chapter, could Bloom even begin
parsing the footnote's first sentence implications. By that time, fortunately,
he needed no more persuading. When it came to the larger question of why
this "mystery manuscript" found its perplexing way into his hands the answer
was crystal clear:
IF HE—LEOPOLD BLOOM—HAD BENEFITED FROM THE KIND OF DEUS EX MACHINA FEATURING A STARKNAKED BLONDE SITTING IN HER CADILLAC CONVERTIBLE AT THE CORNER OF HOLLYWOOD & VINE (WITHOUT WHICH THIS "MORDECAI GOLDBERG" CONCEDES HE COULDN'T HAVE WRITTEN HIS "GREAT AMERICAN MANIFESTO") WOULDN'T MORONS AWAKE! (GIVE OR TAKE SOME JUDICIOUS CUTS AND/OR REWRITING) BE THE "BOOK OF BOOKS" HE—LEOPOLD BLOOM—WAS DESTINED FROM BIRTH TO AUTHOR?
"Moreover," Bloom continued speculating, "by delivering the Morons Awake! manuscript to me on what amounts to a silver platter wasn't God being quintessentially enigmatic by performing this tardiest of His Divine Interventions on an ex post facto basis? After all, from a cosmic point of view does it make any difference if I actually go through the laborious process of putting those 2, 3 or 4 hundred thousand words on paper—or whether they are 'transcribed' from my extensive notes by some 'Former American Ambassador to Moronia' whose role in the Grand Design For Reversing The Decline Of Western Civilization is (more or less) 'secretarial' in nature?"215
Driven by both his "desire to leave no hypothetical stone unturned" and a "certain amount of curiosity" aroused by the reading of a first chapter that didn't quite coincide with the way he would have written it, Bloom spent several hours "browsing" through the manuscript until he reached its final "climactic" page. As a result of which he concluded that: (1) What should have been his novelistic thunder had indeed been stolen while he was waiting for it to be unleashed in that Blinding Moment of Epiphanal Truth when his Magnum Opus would suddenly begin writing itself, or; (2) By virtue of having intercepted a plagiarized version of his own Greatest of All American Novels prior to its publication this was actually the Moment of Truth for which he had been hoping and praying most of his life.
IN EITHER CASE THE RESULT WAS THE SAME. Bloom had no choice but to "fight fire with fire" by substituting his name for that of the "author" who had plagiarized him in the first place. Although this could be done by simply forging a new title page, Bloom knew by doing so he would be embarking on an enterprise fraught with the perils of scandal, vilification, calumny, opprobrium, disgrace, strife, controversy, discord, martyrdom and, above all else, the trials—literally!—of endless litigation. These daunting prospects were to some (not inconsiderable) extent ameliorated by the boost their publicity would give to the selling of a book that would need all the help it could get in making it to the bottom of a New York Times bestseller list—let alone the exalted level of a timeless literary masterpiece. Unfortunately these same perils were just as likely to prove fatal for a man of Bloom's 90plusyears. "On the other hand," he asked himself, "could there be any cause worthier of sacrificing himself for than to vindicate his Failure Philosophy by climaxing what had so far been a long and perfectly fruitless life with a single artistic success which would establish him as the Greatest of All American Writers, living and/or dead?"
"OF COURSE THERE IS, YOU OLD GOAT!"
Bloom had no trouble recognizing this booming basso profundo as The Voice Of God. It was one of his more notoriously grandiose delusions that, since the age of 13, he and his "Maker were on speaking terms of an intimate and (more or less) regular basis;" especially when his thoughts turned to the topic of that Literary Masterpiece, Magnum Opus, Great American Novel and/or Book of Books he was destined one day to write. And dear reader, as you will learn later, Leopold Bloom wasn't the only participant in the publication of this historymaking Wakeup Call who suffered from "hallucinations" that were "Biblical" in their Evangelical Grandeur! In addition to the author's "documented" claim (his socalled "Mt. Olympus Tape") of a chapterlong conversation he had with The Universal Mastermind there were several occasions during the darkest hours of my despair over editing what seemed like the absolutely uneditable manuscript of Morons Awake! when my prayers for divine guidance were in fact answered by that "Robesonesque bass baritone resonating in the cosmic void" heard by those other Luckiest of Ladies—Eve, the Virgin Mary and Jean d'Arc—when they were granted the rare (for a female) privilege of chatting with their Creator!
Furthermore, ladies, whatever your religious convictions (or lack thereof), can any thinking woman doubt for a moment the runaway bestsellerdom of a neoBaroque antiEgalitarian diatribe entitled Morons Awake! could have come about without the miraculous machinations of some celestial entity? So, before you leap to any conclusions (as I did) concerning the state of Bloom's, the author's and my sanity—or the "absurd proposition" that a single work of art might actually alter the entire course of human history, perhaps you should ponder these Words Of Moronic Wisdom:
"It is better to spend 10 minutes perusing a novel's title before wasting several days, weeks or even months reading every one of its pages only to discover that all books can be judged by (what's written on) their covers!"
While the Morons may be guilty of overstating their case (as they have a habit of doing) the plain truth of the matter is this: The (long) title "Morons Awake!" alone couldn't express more perfectly than it does what its author takes hundreds of (finely printed!) pages to say about the average woman's (and/or man's) Godgiven capacity to rise above her (and/or his) congenital mediocrity. [Paradoxically; most of you will have to read Morons Awake! from cover to cover before fully appreciating this timesaving fact.] And, since the subject of saving time has been raised, let us now return to Bloom's Dialogue With God, which, for brevity's sake, I've condensed by putting it into the following (more or less) narrative form—
Intro Part 17 Return to Index
Footnotes
214 Mahler, on the other hand, began his Fifth with—
215 If you find this argument hard to follow, blame Bloom, not me. I'm only telling you his story as he told it to me.