Miss Lonelyhearts Read Online Free

the lots one night. About eight of
them. They ganged her proper..."
    "That's like the one they tell
about another female writer. When this hard-boiled stuff first came in, she
dropped the trick English accent and went in for scram and lam. She got to
hanging around with a lot of mugs in a speak ,
gathering material for a novel. Well, the mugs didn't know they were
picturesque and thought she was regular until the barkeep put them wise. They
got her into the back room to teach her a new word and put the boots to her.
They didn't let her out for three days. On the last day they sold tickets to
niggers..."
    Miss Lonelyhearts stopped listening. His friends would go on telling these stories until they
were too drunk to talk. They were aware of their childishness, but did not know
how else to revenge themselves. At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards,
they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal
expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost
everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.
    Miss Lonelyhearts drank steadily. He was smiling an innocent, amused smile, the smile of an
anarchist sitting in the movies with a bomb in his pocket. If the people around
him only knew what was in his pocket. In a little while he would leave to kill
the President.
    Not until he heard his own name
mentioned did he stop smiling and again begin to listen.
    "He's a leper licker. Shrike
says he wants to lick lepers. Barkeep, a leper for the
gent."
    "If you haven't got a leper,
give him a Hungarian."
    "Well, that's the trouble with
his approach to God. It's too damn literary--plain song, Latin poetry, medieval
painting, Huysmans, stained-glass windows and crap like that."
    "Even if he were to have a
genuine religious experience, it would be personal and so meaningless, except
to a psychologist."
    "The trouble with him, the
trouble with all of us, is that we have no outer life, only an inner one, and
that by necessity."
    "He's an escapist. He wants to
cultivate his interior garden. But you can't escape, and where is he going to
find a market for the fruits of his personality? The Farm Board is a
failure."
    "What I say is, after all one
has to earn a living. We can't all believe in Christ, and what does the farmer
care about art? He takes his shoes off to get the warm feel of the rich earth
between his toes. You can't take your shoes off in church."
    Miss Lonelyhearts had again begun to smile. Like Shrike, the man they imitated, they were
machines for making jokes. A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the
power used, foot, steam or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating
force, death, love or God, made jokes.
    "Was their nonsense the only
barrier?" he asked himself. "Had he been thwarted by such a low
hurdle?"
    The whisky was good and he felt warm
and sure. Through the light-blue tobacco smoke, the mahogany bar shone like wet
gold. The glasses and bottles, their high lights exploding, rang like a battery
of little bells when the bartender touched them together. He forgot that his
heart was a bomb to remember an incident of his childhood. One winter evening,
he had been waiting with his little sister for their father to come home from
church. She was eight years old then, and he was twelve. Made sad by the pause
between playing and eating, he had gone to the piano and had begun a piece by
Mozart. It was the first time he had ever voluntarily gone to the piano. His
sister left her picture book to dance to his music. She had never danced
before. She danced gravely and carefully, a simple dance yet formal...As Miss Lonelyhearts stood at the bar, swaying slightly to the
remembered music, he thought of children dancing.
Square replacing oblong and being replaced by circle. Every child, everywhere;
in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly
dancing.
    He stepped away from the bar and
accidentally collided with a man holding a glass