Saint Jack by Paul Theroux Page A

difficulty is that unchallenged, squatting like trepanned demons in the padded privacy of an idle mind, one’s lunatic thoughts seem tame and reasonable, while spoken aloud in broad daylight to a stranger or written before one’s own eyes they are the extravagant ravings of a crackpot.
You know what I want?
I said to Leigh, and told him, and was made a fool by his look of shock; I should have kept my mouth shut, but how was I to know that he was not the stranger who would say, “I’ve got some good news for you, Flowers.” He might have thought I was mad. Madness is not believing quietly that you’re Napoleon; it is demonstrating it, slipping your hand inside your jacket and striking a military pose. He might have thought I was crude. But the beginner’s utterance is always wrong: I used to stand in Singapore doorways and hiss, “Hey bud” at passers-by.
    Crude I may have been, but mad never; and I would like to emphasize my sanity by stating that even though I dreamed of getting one of those letters (
It gives me great pleasure
. . . ) I could not understand how I would ever receive one, for I imagined thousands, paragraph by glorious paragraph, but I never mentally signed them, and none, not even the one beginning
My darling
, bore a signature. Who was supposed to be writing me those letters? I hadn’t the faintest idea.
    The letters were fantasy, but the impulse was real: a visceral longing for success, comfort, renown, the gift that could be handled, tangible grace. That momentary daydream which flits into every reflective man’s mind and makes him say his name with a tide,
Sir
or
President
or
His Highness
—everyone does it sometimes: the clerk wants a kingship, it’s only natural—this dubbing was a feature of my every waking moment. I wasn’t kidding; even the most rational soul has at least one moment of pleasurable reflection when he hears a small voice addressing him as
Your Radiance.
I had a litany which began
Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John
, and so forth. And why stop at king?
Saint Jack!
It was my yearning, though success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. If the rich were correct, I reasoned, what choice had they made? Really, was disappointment virtue and comfort vice and poverty like the medicine that was good because it stung? The President of the United States, in a sense the king of the world, said he had the loneliest job on earth; where did that leave a feller like me?
    The theatrically convulsed agony of the successful is the failure’s single comfort. “Look how similar we are,” both will exclaim: “We’re each lonely!” But one is rich; he can choose his poison. So strictly off my own bat I gave myself a chance to choose—I would take the tycoon’s agony and forego the salesman’s. I said I wanted to be rich, famous if possible, drink myself silly and sleep till noon. I might have put it more tactfully: I wanted the wealth to make a free choice. I was not pleading to be irresponsible; if I was rich and vicious I would have to accept blame. The poor were blameless; they could not help it, and if they were middle-aged they were doubly poor, for no one could see their aches and no one knew that the middle-aged man at that corner table, purple with indigestion, thought he was having a heart seizure. That man will not look back to reflect unless he has had a terrible fright that twists his head around. Characteristically, he will look back once, see nothing, and never look back again. But Leigh and his hopeless last words gave me such an awful shock that driving out of the crematorium with Gladys I took a long look back—with the recent memory of imagining what my own last words might be,
Is this all?
mumbled in a hot room—and thought of nothing but what had brought me to Singapore, and the sinking ships I