Fothergil Finch, Hermione's friend, the
vers libre poet, dodges through life harried
and hunted by one pursuing Fear.
"Some day," he said to me --
(It is Hermione's Boswell who is speaking in this
sketch, in the first person, and not Hermione, the
incomparable.) --
"Some day," Fothergil finch said to me, the
other night, in a tone of intense, bitter conviction,
"some day It will get me! Some day I will overtake
me. The great Beat, Popularity, which pursues me!
Some day It will clutch me and tear me
and devour my Soul! Some day I will be a
Popular Writer!"
It is my own impression that Fothergil's fears
are exaggerated; but they are very real to him. He
visualizes his own soul as a fugitive climbing higher
and higher, running faster and faster, to escape
this Beast. Perhaps Fothergil secretly hopes that
the speed of his gong will induce combustion, and
he will leap from the topmost hills of Art, flaming,
directly into the heavens, there to burn and shine
immortality, an authentic star. Well, well, we all
have our little plane, our little vanities!
"Fothergil," I said, cheerily, "Popularity has not
overtaken you yet. Cheer up -- perhaps it never
will."
We were in Fothergil's studio in Greenwich Village,
where I had gone to see how his poem on
Moonlight was getting along. He strode to the
window. Fothergil is not tall, and he is slightly
pigeon-toed -- the fleshly toes of Fothergil symbolize
the toes of his ever-fleecing soul -- but he strides.
Female poets undulate. Erotic male poets saunter.
Tramp poets lurch and swagger. Fothergil, being
a vers libre poet, a Prophet of the Virile, a Little
Brother of the Cosmic Urge, is compelled by what
his verse is to stride vigorously across rooms as if
they were vast desert places, in spite of what
his toes are. He strode magnificently, triumphantly,
to the window and flung the shade up and looked
out at the amorphous mist creeping
in across the roofs. The crawling fog must
have suggested his great, gray Dread, for presently
he turned away with a shudder and sank upon a
couch and moaned.
'Ah, Heaven! Popularity! The disgrace of it --
the horror of it! Popularity! Ignominy! When it
catches me -- when it happens ----"
He plucked from his pocket a small phial and held
it up toward the light and gazed upon it desperately
and raptly.
"I am never without this!" he said. "It is my
means of escape. I will not be taken unawares!
I carry it always. At night it is beneath my pillow.
The day it happens -- the moment I feel myself in
the grip of Popularity----"
I caught his hand; in his excitement he was
raising the poison to his lips.
"What I cannot understand, Fothergil," I said,
"is why a Poet of the Virile, a Reincarnation of the
Cave Man -- excuse me, but that is what you are
being this year, is it not ? -- should give way to Fear.
Is it not more in character to meet this Beast and
slay It? Is there not a certain contradiction between
your profession and your practice?"
"More than a contradiction," he said eagerly. "It
is more than contradictory! It is paradoxical!"
I eliminate much that followed. When Fothergil
gets started on the paradox, time passes. He is
never really interested in things until he has dis-
covered the paradoxical quality in them. Sometimes
I think that his enthusiasm over himself is
due to the fact that he discovered early in life that
he himself was a paradox -- and sometimes I think
that discovery is the explanation of his enthusiasm
for the paradox.
"What," said Fothergil, "is the most paradoxical
thing in the world? The Human Snore! It seems
Ugly-yet it is Beautiful! It seems a trivial function
of the body -- and yet it is the Key to the
Soul ----"
"The Key to the Soul?"
"Man sleeps," he said, "and his Conscious Mind
is in abeyance. But his Subconscious Mind is still
awake. It functions. It has its opportunity to utter
itself. The Snore is the Voice of the Soul! And
not only the Soul of the individual but of the Soul
of the race. All the experiences of man, in his
ascent from the mire to his present altitude, are
retained in the Subconscious Mind-his fights, his
struggles, his falls, his recoveries. And his dreams
and nightmares are racial memories of these things.
Snores are the language in which he expresses them.
Interpret the Snore, and you have the psychic history
of the ascent of man from Caliban to Shakespeare!
"And I can interpret it! I have listened to a
million Snores, and learned the language of the
Soul! Night after night, for years, I harked to
the Human Snore -- in summer, hastening from
park bench to beach and back again; in winter,
haunting the missions and lodging houses. Ah,
Heavens! with what devotion, with what passion
of the discoverer, have I not pursued the Human
Snore! I have gone miles to listen to some snore
that was reported to be peculiar; I have denied my
self luxuries, pleasures, and at times even food, in
order to hire reluctant persons to Snore for me!
"And I have written the Epic of the Snore in
vers libre. You shall hear the prelude!"
And this is Fothergil's prelude:
Snore me a song of the soul,
Oh, sleeper, snore!
Whistle me, wheeze me, grunkle and grunt, gurgle
and snort me a Virile stave!
Snore till the Cosmos shakes!
On the wings of a snore I fly backward a billion
years, and grasp the mastodon and I tear him
limb from limb,
And with his thigh hone I heat the dinosaur to
death, for I am Virile!
Snore! Snore! Snore!
Snore, O struggling and troubled and squirming
and suffering and choking and purple-faced
sleeper, snore!
Snore me the sound of the brutal struggle when the
big bull planets bellowed and fought with one
another. in the bloody dawn of time for the
love of little yellow-haired moons,
Snore!
Snore till Chaos raps with his boot on the walls of
Cosmos and kicks to the landlord!
Turn, choke, twist and struggle, sleeper, and snore
me the song of life in the making,
Sneeze me a universe full of star-dust,
Snore me back to the days when I was a Cave Man,
and with my bare hands slew the walrus, for
I am Virile!
Snore the death-rattle of the walrus, O struggling
sleeper, snore!
Snore me ----
But I was compelled to leave. There is a great
deal of it, Fothergil says. If you know Fothergil
you are aware that when he declaims his Virile
verses he becomes excited; he swells physically;
sometimes he looks quite five feet tall in his moments
of expansion; all this is very bad for him.
More than once the declamation of his poem,
"Myself and the Cosmic Urge," has sent him shaking
to the tea urn.
Before I left I was able to calm him somewhat.
But with calm came reflection. And with reflection
came his great, gray Dread again.
When I left,. Fothergil was looking out of the
window and shuddering, as if the Monster
Popularity might be hiding behind the neighboring
chimneys. One hand clasped the phial caressingly.
But somehow I doubt that Fothergil will ever be
compelled to drink the poison.