CHAPTER IX.
One Sunday morning, Carl sat at home, lightly wandering through a newspaper. On the previous night he had met Petersen and had yielded to an invitation to accompany “two swell brunettes who don’t object to a gay time,” and the recollection of his violent, drunken contortions came to him like a weirdly teasing dream of no particular significance but leaving the temptation of nausea behind it. He had released a desecrating ghost of himself from the sneering recesses of his self-despair. Yes, you could burn away the sensual rubbish, with derisive gestures, but your emptiness and weariness always returned for their slow revenge. He sought to put his thoughts to sleep with the hasty versions of loves, catastrophes, and law-suits that winked maliciously at him from the newspaper.
In the middle of one page he came upon a rectangle of gossip concerning a poetry magazine of whose existence he had never known, and darting from his insensitive trance he lingered greedily over the news. Through the efforts of an elderly poetess several society people had agreed to endow a small magazine that would be entirely devoted to verse, and the newspaper item was heralding the fact that one of these people had contributed a sonnet to a recent issue of the magazine. “Mr. Robert Endicott, the well-known clubman and member of fashionable sets, appears with a delicate contribution in this month’s issue of The Poetry Review, our aristocratic little magazine of the muse. This will be a surprise to those who know Mr. Endicott only in his role of business-man and society leader.” Carl strove to be properly impressed by the surprise, decorating it with the Order of the Nasty Chuckle.
He felt that it might be consoling to receive a rejection slip from an upper-world magazine of this kind—a dab of caviar on the empty plate—and so he sent them three poems. The paper oblong came, but its blank side held the following note: “Dear Mr. Felman: Your work interests me. Won’t you drop into the office some time? Clara Messenger.”
What men call triumph is a fanciful exaltation that may fall alike upon atoms and temples—a grandiose child of hope, whose mother is egoism and whose father is pain. Men, whose life is but a sensitive or oblivious second—a fleeting stampede within mist—seek the absurd consolation of believing that their work will become immortal, and this phantom lie has induced many a soldier to writhe upon some trivial battlefield and many a minor poet to fight with threats of the gutter. Carl Felman, obscure, gasping struggler, communing with the marks left by endless whips, felt foolishly thrilled at this first glimpse of personal attention from a magazine and became like a swain to whom a glove has been thrown from an enticingly high balcony. He stood peering up with a timid excitement.
On the following afternoon he managed to leave the plumbing shop, with a plea of illness, and raced to the office of the magazine. A feathery swirl of quickly purchased emotions—fragments of a youth that had been shattered—revolved within his heart. As he closed the door of the large office he saw two women seated at different desks and poised over the rustle of papers. One was elderly and sedate, and her sober clothes were reprimanding a substantial body. Beneath a survival of greyish-brown hair, plainly gathered, the narrow oval of her face looked at life with a politely questioning air. It was the mellowly distorted expression of one who has arrived at final convictions regarding the major parts of life, and is patiently and inflexibly regarding the lesser perceptions surrounding her. Her slightly wrinkled face was dominated by a long, thin nose and thin, tightly expectant lips, and it seemed that her tired emotions had gone to sleep and were staring out from a dream of suave wakefulness. The other woman was hovering near the last climax of her youth, and her slender body rose unobtrusively to the pale repressions of her face. Small and round, her face carried a well-trimmed self-satisfaction—the reward of one whose dreams have lived inwardly, with only an occasional sip of forbidden cordials. Her loosely parted lips guarded a receding chin and her barely curved nose ascended to large brown eyes and a high forehead.
Carl walked to her desk and stood for a moment like a child in a cumbersome robe who is waiting for some inevitable rebuke. The harshly weary assurance which he was able to display to other people vanished in this imagined shrine of an unattained art. The young woman looked up with courteous blankness.
“My name is Carl Felman. You wrote me a note last week,” said Carl, delicately groping for the inconsequential words.
“Oh, yes, I remember”—her face attained a careful smile, tempered by a modest curiosity. “I’m so glad that you came down.”
She turned to the other woman.
“Mary, this is Mr. Felman, the gentleman that I spoke to you about. He sent us a rather interesting group of poems, you know.”
Carl winced at the word “rather”—it was associated to him with “more or less,” “somewhat,” “somehow,” and “to some extent,” those words and phrases with which cultured people manage to say nothing and yet preserve the faint appearance of saying something. His breathless attention disappeared and was replaced by the old morose aloofness. If this woman had asserted that his poems were trivial or stifled, he would have respected her, but now he spat contemptuously at the smooth veil of her words.
Mary Aldridge, editor of The Poetry Review, moved her lips into an attitude that came within a hair’s breadth of being a smile—an expression of slightly amused and restrained condescension. She lifted a pencil as though it were an age-old scepter held by practiced fingers.
“How do you do, Mr. Felman,” she said.
Some people are able to say “how do you do” in a way that makes it sound like “why are you here?” and Carl inwardly complimented her on this minor ability and said his repetition in a voice that made it mean “slip down, fathead.” After this exchange of vocal inflections, part of the general vacuity with which human beings greet each other for the first or last time, he seated himself and clutched a roll of manuscripts in the manner of a father who is frantically shielding his child from some invisible danger.
“I sent you some poems which were returned, but I have some others here,” he said. “Perhaps you will do me the favor of reading them. I am, of course, anxious to know what may be wrong with my work, and also what faint virtues it may hold. Sometimes I feel sure that I am not a poet and I allow myself the luxury of becoming angry at the persistent longing that makes me run after futilities. Will you read some of these poems and tell me whether I am a fool, or a faltering pilgrim, or anything definite?”
The abashed and yet softly incisive candor would have unloosened or entertained the emotions of anyone except Mary Aldridge. She regarded him with a coldly amused impatience.
“We-ell, I’m very busy just now,” she said, “but I’ll glance through some of your things. As I recall, your work had a rather promising line here and there.”
He handed her his roll and she scanned the poems, thrusting each one aside with a quick frown. She lingered a bit over the last one, in which he had extracted a sleeping Homer from the soiled and cowering figure of a blind Greek peddler.
“M-m, this one isn’t so bad,” she said, “though I think that the last lines are a little forced.”
“If I decide to alter them, will you take the poem?” asked Carl, bluntly.
“Oh, no, no, Mr. Felman; your work is by no means good enough for publication,” she answered. “I merely meant that this poem in particular had an element of interest.”
Accustomed to blows of all kinds, Carl felt relieved that her frigid shroud had been finally lifted, and with a smile he reached for his cap. Conversation is merely a tenuous or sturdy protection given to an instinctive like or dislike, and with their first words people unconsciously reveal the attitude toward each other which they will afterward try to excuse and defend with great deliberation. Carl hated the woman in front of him, not because she had slighted his work, but because she held to him an attenuated and brightly burnished hypocrisy that was like a shriveled mask incessantly polished by her words. He could have imagined her stamping upon a hyacinth as though she were conferring a careful favor upon the petals and calyx. Mary Aldridge, on her part, disliked the straight lines of intent which she could sense beneath his terse questions and missed the bland insincerities of those smoothly adjusted postures known as good manners. Life to her was a series of stiffly draped and modulated curves, violated only by rare moments of guarded exasperation and anger.
“Would you advise me to stop writing?” asked Carl.
“No, indeed,” she answered, with her first small smile. “Your work is rather promising and you seem to be quite young. Some of it reminds me of Arthur Symons. Of course, I don’t think that you will ever become a great poet, but we need lesser voices as well as greater ones, you know.”
“Would you mind if I asked you to stop using that word ra-ather and try a little spontaneous directness?” asked Carl, blithely.
She rose suddenly and addressed the other woman, ignoring his words as though they had been a trivial insult.
“I’ve just remembered that I must meet Mr. Seeman at three,” she said. “I’m afraid that I shall have to leave you with this impulsive gentleman.”
Carl stood up, but the other woman revealed with an unrestrained smile that she was actually aware of his presence.
“Won’t you stay awhile?” she asked. “We can talk a bit over your work, if you care.”
Carl looked at her with suspicion and interest—a trace of gracious attention in this place. He resolved to explore the seeming phenomenon and settled back in his chair, while Mary Aldridge, with a barely audible farewell, walked out of the office.
“Don’t you think you were a little crudely sarcastic in your last remark to Miss Aldridge?” asked Clara Messenger.
“I like an axe sometimes,” said Carl, “although I don’t worship it monotonously. For certain purposes it works far better than the swifter exuberance of a stiletto. Unless a person is unassumingly frank to me I don’t feel that he has earned a delicate retort.”
“Why, it’s impossible to live in the world with a code like that. One would have to become a hermit.”
“No, even hermits are never absolutely isolated. Living on another planet would be the only remedy, I guess.”
“What a curious, lunging person you are! But you shouldn’t have minded Miss Aldridge so much. She’s always afraid that if she openly encourages a young poet he’ll imagine that he’s a genius.”
“That’s a harmless trick of imagination and it doesn’t need any encouragement or censure. It’s a shade better, perhaps, than imagining that you are a fool.”
“What an old-young person you are. When you talk I feel that I’m listening to an insolent essay. I’m not so sure that a poet doesn’t need praise. It’s part of his task to change the polite praise around him to an understanding appreciation, and that can be very necessary and exciting.”
“To a poet the appreciation of other people must be like a glass of lukewarm wine taken after work,” said Carl.
“Well, I know that it means a great deal to me,” said Clara Messenger. “It reassures me that I’m speaking to the hearts and minds of the people around me and I’d feel very unimportant if at least a few people didn’t like my work. One can’t live in a vacuum, after all.”
“No? I’ve done it for five years or so. I think that all of us secretly live in vacuums, but we use our imaginations to conceal that fact. Words were really invented to hide this essential emptiness.”
“You’re a massive pessimist! The strangest man of twenty-three that I’ve ever seen! If things are so utterly hollow to you, why do you live?”
“In order to persuade myself that I have a reason for living—a defiant entertainment in the presence of an empty theater.... But it’s always futile to defend your reason for living. Tell me, instead, what do you think of your associate, Miss Aldridge?”
“I really think that she treated you a little heartlessly, but at the same time I don’t think that she meant to,” said Clara. “Mary is a woman who grew into the habit of hiding herself from people because so many of those who looked at her youth, at one time, failed to understand it.”
“I can understand that process, though I don’t believe that it applies in her case. It’s a slow and sullen withdrawing from the jibing strangers around you—a wounded desire to meet their walls of misunderstanding with even harder walls of your own. As you grow older, I suppose, the sullenness may change to a well-mannered and hopeless aloofness. Age softens the attitude and, still self-immersed, it seeks the distraction of words.”
“What has happened to make you say this?” asked Clara, with a mistily maternal impulse.
“Just now I’m working in a plumber’s shop, helping the sewers with their sluggish germs of future turbulence,” said Carl, “and that, of course, can play its part in the making of a pessimist.... But tell me what you think of my work?”
“Plumbing or poetry?”
“Both of them are interwoven.”
“Your poems are stiff and dimly tinted, like a row of plaster-of-paris dolls standing on a dusty and venerated shelf. Don’t you see? You talk about twenty times better than you write, and I can’t understand this peculiar incongruity. Perhaps you’ve been taught that poetry is something that must be ethereal and noble at all costs, and perhaps you’ve been inarticulate because the rest of you has been at war with this one illusion. I don’t feel that you’ve looked upon poetry as a place where you could express your actual thoughts and feelings.”
When a man has been intangibly blind for a long time, he usually stumbles at last, accidentally, upon an incident or challenge that makes him totter on the edge of vision, and in that moment it is revealed whether this blindness has been innate or not. If he wavers, then his lack of sight has been an artificial ailment, and if his first reaction after the stumble is one of stubborn irritation his tightly-shut eyes are not apt to open. Carl felt, without quite being able to shape the picture, that he was walking out of a sublime bric-a-brac shop, and yet the contact of him, left behind in the shop, continued to speak with his words. As he discussed poetry with Clara he began slowly to feel that he had been a minute and prisoned fool, although his words writhed in an effort to escape an absolute admission. She gave him practical scoldings, also, concerning the exact way in which manuscripts should be submitted to editors, and he listened with the amusement that a man feels when he suddenly sees that he has been walking along a street with his shoes unlaced. She gave him, again and again, her hazily maternal smile in which sensual desires selfishly clothed themselves in an ancient and soothing dress known as kindness.
“I do hope that I’ve helped you,” she said. “I’d like to feel that I’ve aided someone to discover his real self.”
When he returned to his room he applied a match to everything that he had ever written and watched the flaming pile of papers with an emotion in which dread, tenderness, and elation were oddly contending against each other. These bits of paper, with their symbols of shimmering confusion, had been decorated by the sweat of his body, the brittle despair of his heart, and the anger of his soul, and their death brought him a helpless and jumbled sadness; but gradually another reaction began to possess him. The naked quivers of a fighter, crouched in the plan of his first blow, centered around his heart, and all of the thoughts within his mind gave one shout in unison—a meaningless hurrah just before the first leap of a creative battle. During the next two months he wrote with an insane speed, and all of his thoughts and emotions rushed out in an irresistible, nondescript mob scene—a French Revolution swinging its torches and howls against every repression and constraint within him. Good, bad, and mediocre, they rain in the circles of a celebrated revenge, and his main purpose was expressed in these first four lines of one of his poems:
You have escaped the comedyOf swift, pretentious praise and blame,And smashed a tavern where they sellThe harlot’s wine that men call fame.
You have escaped the comedyOf swift, pretentious praise and blame,And smashed a tavern where they sellThe harlot’s wine that men call fame.
You have escaped the comedyOf swift, pretentious praise and blame,And smashed a tavern where they sellThe harlot’s wine that men call fame.
You have escaped the comedy
Of swift, pretentious praise and blame,
And smashed a tavern where they sell
The harlot’s wine that men call fame.