Now, that may seem strange, but every bit of it,
it just happened, was true.
My opium lady used to say that there
were two moralities, one for the kitchen and one for the parlor.
She was once a hostess to-- at the service of a lady who had
some beautiful--
she and her husband loved to walk about stark
naked in the house.
And that was fine for the poetess,
but not for the kitchen, because he different morality
for the kitchen.
Also, she did believe that she had gone to bed, because
of a birthmark.
She always had stood in the shadow, but the shadow fell.
And always kept one part of her face turned towards a shadow.
Actually there was no birthmark, it was imaginary.
And she also believed that she was both living and dead.
But it was the theme of death in the midst of life,
which Coleridge felt is an opium addict.
And she did not imitate Coleridge, for she knew him.
It does happen in this way in opium.
That you get the sense of being both living and dead.
And I can say that this was a medical fact of her life.
Every other thing that she seemed--
that when her eyes were wide open, she was fast asleep
or that when her eyes were closed, she was wide awake.
This gave her a tremendous sense of--
gave all the people around her a feeling of her omniscience.
That if she were--
that if her eyes were--
they could never adjust themselves to these signals
to the eyes.
When her eyes were open, they naturally
thought that she was awake.
And when her eyes were closed, that she was asleep,
but it was just the other way.
And so she had a wonderful way of knowing things
she thought she couldn't possibly know,
and confusing everybody in this book
as in the reality of the case.
One of her bedside callers is the hero
of my novel, Mr. Spitzer, who is one of twins
and doesn't know which one died, because his sympathies are
so great.
His guilt is so great, and he was an identical twin.
He says, he's the only man that ever went to his own funeral,
so to speak.
And he seems to be suffering from mistaken identity
all his life.
He's supposed to be a musical composer,
but no one's heard a word of his--
note of his music since his brother's death.
His brother was a horseplayer, an impresario
in the world of sport.
He knew everything about the underworld, the under life.
Whereas Mr. Spitzer was a graduate
of the Boston Conservatory of Music,
and I think Harvard also.
He had his degrees from Harvard.
There are continual confusions in the minds of all people,
as to which brother it is.
Some had never heard that the sportsman had died,
so when they see Mr. Spitzer on the streets of Boston,
they ask him for a tip on the horses.
Sometimes he finds it simpler to give it to them than not,
to explain look, I'm dead.
It's my brother.
They didn't even know he had a brother, you see.
And so he gets into continual confusions in which,
they'll open before him realms of adventure and reality,
and sympathy with other men and their confusions
of identity, which he had never known before.
The opium lady loved that gambler,
and hated the musician who always wanted to marry her.
And she has to spend all these years in bed,
talking to the musician about his dead brother,
the sportsman.
But of course, toward the end of the book, when
she is a prisoner from her bed and turns
into an old hag, she--
Mr. Spitzer confesses to her that he is really
the sportsman, the one she loved.
And unfortunately, she dies at the beginning of his speech,
so that she never hears his explanation.
And he says, foiled again.
She'll go over there now, and she'll
meet that musician on the other side, the one she was so bored
with in life.
He plays the role of the gambler for about three or four days
after her death.
And then he reverts them to being a musician again.
And someone asked him why and he said, the powers of habit
are very strong.
The truth is that he is both brothers, that he's not only
as a twin, but this is his schizophrenia.
His duality.
Well, I got there.
I think you as an educated audience,
will be interested to know my opium lady also arose
from her bed, and died as a-- suddenly withered
into an old hag and died.
But I got the idea of the confessional
from the death of Eleanor Wylie.
I have heard this may be just a tale,
but it's been told many times in New York.
That William Rose Benét was talking to Eleanor,
and he said, Eleanor, I have always loved you.
Why are you so suspicious, so cold and withdrawn?
Now I want to tell you a few things,
the way they really are.
And he confessed his great love, and all the--
ironed out all the misunderstandings
which might have arisen.
And she had been dead for an hour,
sitting at the dining room table.
He didn't know that she was dead,
and never heard the explanation.
That always fascinated me.
The confessional to the beautiful lady
who no longer hears, that's why she was so cold and withdrawn.
One of the greatest loves of mine, it's true.