Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration

CAMP CONCENTRATION

by Thomas M. Disch

Copyright 1968, copyright renewed 1996 by Thomas M. Disch

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York, in 1969. Vintage Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1999

ISBN 0-375-70545-7

This book is dedicated, with thanks,

to John Sladek and Thomas Mann,

two good writers.

Now, reader, I have told my dream to thee;

See if thou canst interpret it to me,

Or to thyself, or neighbor. But take heed

Of misinterpreting; for that, instead

Of doing good, wifi but thyself abuse.

By misinterpreting evil issues.

Take heed, also, that thou be not extreme,

In playing with the outside of my dream.

Nor let my figure, or similitude,

Put thee into a laughter or a feud;

Leave this for boys and fools; but as for thee,

Do thou the substance of my matter see.

Put by the curtains; look within my veil;

Turn up my metaphors and do not fail.

There, if thou seekst them, such things to find,

As will be helpful to an honest mind.

What of my dross thou findest there, be bold

To throw away, but yet preserve the gold.

What if my gold be wrapped in ore?

None throws away the apple for the core.

But if thou shalt cast all away as vain,

I know not but 'twill make me dream again.

John Bunyan,

The Pilgrim's Progress

BOOK ONE

May 11

Young R.M., my Mormon guard, has brought me a supply of paper at last. It is three months to the day since I first asked him for some. Inexplicable, this change of heart. Perhaps Andrea has been able to get a bribe to him. Rigor Mortis denies it, but then he would deny it. We talked politics, and I was able to gather from hints R.M. let drop that President McNamara has decided to use "tactical" nuclear weapons. Perhaps, therefore, it is to McNamara, not to Andrea, that I am indebted for this paper, since R.M. has been fretting these many weeks that General Sherman, poor General Sherman, had been denied adequate hitting power. When, as today, R.M. is happy, his fearful smile, those thin lips pulled back tightly across the perfect deathshead teeth, ifickers into being at the slightest pretense of humor. Why do all the Mormons I have known have that same constipated smile? Is their toilet training exceptionally severe?

This is my journal. I can be candid here. Candidly, I could not be more miserable.

May 12

Journals, such as I have erewhile attempted, have a way of becoming merely exhortatory. I must remember, here, to be circumstantial from the start, taking as model that sublime record of prison existence, The House of the Dead . It should be easy to be circumstantial here: not since childhood has mere circumstance so tyrannized me. The two hours each day before dinner are spent in a Gethsemane of dread and hope. Dread lest we be served that vile spaghetti once again. Hope that there may be a good hunk of meat in my ladle of stew, or an apple for dessert. Worse than "chow" is each morning's mad spate of scrubbing and polishing to prepare our cells for inspection. The cells are as bony-clean as a dream of Philip Johnson (Grand Central Bathroom), while we, the prisoners, carry about with us the incredible, ineradicable smell of our stale, wasted flesh.

However, we lead here no worse a life than we would be leading now outside these walls had we answered our draft calls. Nasty as this prison is, there is this advantage to it -that it will not lead so promptly, so probably, to death. Not to mention the inestimable advantage of righteousness.

Ah, but who is this "we"? Besides myself there are not more than a dozen other conchies here, and we are kept carefully apart, to prevent the possibility of esprit. The prisoners -the real prisoners -hold us in contempt. They have that more sustaining advantage than righteousness -guilt. So our isolation, my isolation, becomes ever more absolute. And, I fear, my self-pity. There are evenings when I sit here hoping that R.M. will come by to argue with me.

Four months! And my sentence is for five years.... That is the Gorgon of all my thoughts.

May 13

I must speak of Smede. Warden Smede, my arch enemy. Smede the arbitrary, who still refuses me library privileges, allows me only a New Testament and a prayer book. It is as though I had been left, as was so often threatened, for my summer vacation with the loathed Uncle Morris of my childhood (who counseled my parents that I would "lose my eyes" by reading too much). Bald, booming, fat with the fatness of a ruined athelete: Smede. One might despise him only for having such a name. Today I learned from the small portion of my monthly letter from Andrea that the censor (Smede?) had not blacked out that the proofs of The Hills of Switzerland , which had been sent to me here, were returned to the publisher with a note explaining the rules for correspondents with prisoners. That was three months ago. The book is in print now. It has been reviewed! (I suspect the publisher hurried so in the hope of getting a little free publicity from the trial.)

The censor, naturally, removed the review Andrea had enclosed. Agonies of vanity. For ten years I could lay claim to no book but my wretched doctor's thesis on Winstanley; now my poems are in print -and it may be another five years before I'm allowed to see them. May Smede's eyes rot like potatoes in spring! May he convulse with the Malaysian palsies!

Have tried to go on with the cycle of "Ceremonies." Can't. The wells are dry, dry.

May 14

Spaghetti.

On nights like this (I write these notes after lights-out, by the glow of the perpetual twenty-watter above the toilet bowl) I wonder if I have done the right thing in electing to come here, if I'm not being a fool. Is this the stuff of heroism? or of masochism? In private life my conscience was never so conscientious. But, damn it, this war is wrong!

I had thought (I had convinced myself) that coming here voluntarily would be little different from joining a Trappist monastery, that my deprivations would easily be bearable if freely chosen. One of my regrets as a married man has always been that the contemplative life, in its more rarefied aspects, has been denied me. I fancied asceticism some rare luxury, a spiritual truffle. Ha!

On the bunk beneath mine a Mafia petit bourgeois (snared on tax evasion charges) snores his content. Bedsprings squeak in the visible darkness. I try to think of Andrea. In high school Brother Wilfred counseled that when lustful thoughts arose we should pray to the Blessed Virgin. Perhaps it worked for him.

May 15

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita indeed! My thirty-fifth birthday, and a slight case of the horrors. For a few moments this morning, before the metal shaving mirror, my double, Louie II, was in the ascendant. He mocked and raged and muddied the banner of faith, not to mention hope (already quite muddy these days), with his scurrilities. I remembered the dismal summer of my fifteenth year, the summer that Louie II was in sole possession of my soul. Dismal? Actually, there was a good deal of exhilaration in saying Non serviam , an exhilaration that is still confused with my first memories of sex.

Is my present situation so very much different? Except that now, prudently, I say Non serviam to Caesar rather than to God.

When the chaplain came by to hear my confession I didn't speak of these scruples. In his innocence he would have been apt to take the side of the cynical Louie II. But he has learned by now not to employ the meager resources of his casuistry against me (another retrograde Irish Thomist, he) and pretends to accept me at my own moral valuation. "But beware, Louis," he counseled, before absolving me, "beware of intellectual pride." Meaning, I have always supposed, beware of intellect.