"And of course you have written so many books that--You see, I
naturally read them, on account of our similarity in names--"
"You liked them, I hope?"
Very rarely have I seen any young man counterfeit enthusiasm less
convincingly. "Why, how can you ask that, I wonder! when everybody
knows that your books, sir--!"
"Come, come!" I heartened him, "I have been reviewed a great deal,
remember! The production of articles as to my plagiarisms and
obscenities ranks as a national industry. Very lately Judge Leonard
Doughty[14] exposed me to all Texas as a chancre-laden rat whose
ancestry had mixed and simmered in the devil's cauldron of Middle
Europe. And, besides, since Professor Fred L. Pattee[15] let the
news get out, in perfectly public print, that I am dead and my soul
is already in hell, there does not seem much left for any moderately
optimistic person to be afraid of."
"Well, but," the young man pointed out, "I'm not unbiased. There is so
much about me in your books, you see, sir; and you do make me seem sort
of funny. You sort of keep poking fun at me."
"I know. But I cannot help it. For you appear to me, I confess, the
most ridiculous person save one that I have ever known. I am the other
person."
"Well, I am afraid I don't entirely like your books, sir," he conceded.
And I sat looking at him, both amused and saddened. For never until
to-night had it occurred to me how unutterably would this especial
young man dislike my books if ever he could know of them. And he was
trying so hard, too, to be polite about it.
§ 95
"Why do you do it, sir?" the boy asked now, almost reproachfully. "You
get a plenty of pleasure out of life, don't you? and what did you
want, anyhow, that you never got?"
"Yes: and I don't know," I admitted, seriatim.
"Well, then, why don't you write some books that will make people see
the world is a pretty good sort of place after all?"
"But surely it does not require two persons to point out such an
obvious geographical feature? Cannot posterity rely upon you, by and
by, to diffuse that truism single-handed?"
"I certainly do hope so," he replied. Now his voice changed. "For
I would like to write the very nicest sort of books,--like Henry
Harland's and Justus Miles Forman's and Anthony Hope's. They would
be about beautiful fine girls and really splendid young men, and
everything would come out all right in the end, so they could get
married, and not be sort of bitter and smart-alecky and depress people
the way"--he coughed,--"the way some people do."
"Young man," I started out severely, "it is quite evident you are not
married--"
To which he countered, now I think of it, rather staggeringly. "But
you, sir, are not in love. You never will be, sir, not ever any more."
I said: "Yes; that does make a difference. I remember." Then I
said: "Stop talking bosh! and stop calling me 'sir'! I'm not your
grandfather. It is rather the other way round. And, besides, we were
talking about books. Well, you may try, if you like, to write the
blithering kind of novel you describe. But, somehow, I don't think you
will ever succeed at it."
"You ought to know best, sir, of course, about my abilities. And so, if
you would really and truly advise me--Still, I would certainly like to
be a real author--"
He was looking at me now, across that remarkable blue tie and shiny
sword-hilt, with very touching deference, and with, of all conceivable
emotions, envy. I understood, with the most quaint of shocks, that
I possessed every one of the things which this preposterous young
fellow wanted. I had written and published, sometimes even with
commercial extenuation, at least as many magazine stories and books
as he hoped by and by to have to his credit: I could imagine how my
comfortable-looking large home, and my ownership of actual stocks and
bonds, and my acquaintance with a number of more or less distinguished
persons, would figure in his callow mild eyes: and I had tasted, too,
if not of fame, most certainly of all the notoriety he ever aspired
to. Why, but what does it not seem to this pathetic boy, I reflected,
actually to have one's picture in the papers! For I could well remember
certain ancient glancings toward that awesome pinnacle of being a
celebrity.
I was, in fine, by this boy's standards, a success. I had to-day each
one of the things he had ever consciously desired. That really was a
rather terrible reflection....
§ 96
But he was speaking. "Then you would honestly advise me, sir, not to
take up writing as a regular thing?"
"I don't see how I can advise you that,--not honestly, at least. For
you will get out of the writing all--heaven help you!--that you hope to
get."
"Why, then--" He was abeam.
"You simply wait until you have got it! You can attend to your grinning
then, if you feel like it. For you will get every one of the things you
think you want. Only, you will get them by the, upon the whole, most
philanthropic process of not ever writing any of the mush which you now
plan to write."
"But I don't understand--"
"Nor do I, either, quite. But from the start will be tugging at your
pen a pig-headed imp that will be guiding it his way instead of the way
you intended. And with each book he will be growing stronger and more
importunate and more cunning, and he will be stealing the pen away from
you for longer and longer intervals. And by and by that imp, full grown
now and the very devil of a taskmaster, will be dictating your books
from beginning to end,--not to speak here of his making you sweat blood
when you revise, at his orders, all the earlier ones."
"Come, now,"--and the young fellow was looking at me rather like a
troubled cow,--"come, now, sir, but you don't really mean I am going to
be possessed by a devil?"
"Some people will put it that way, only a bit less politely. But I
would say, by a dæmon. Socrates had one, you may remember."
"Yes, but this one--?"
"You," I replied, "will call him the desire to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings. Other persons will call him quite different
things. Anyhow, with time, you will fall into a sort of bedrugging
dæmon-worship, and you will go the way he commands you, without
resisting any longer. It will be most deplorable. So Professor Henry A.
Beers[16] will have, after all, to dismiss your literary claims from
the pale of serious consideration, because you are not of Colonial
stock--"
The boy viewed this as urgent. "But, sir, my father's people came in
1727, and my mother's in 1619--"
"That will not matter. Facts are but reeds in the wind of moral
indignation. And Maurice Hewlett must become very cuttingly sarcastic
about your being a Jew brought up on the Talmud--"
"Me, sir?"
"Most certainly, you. And a transfigured Richard Le Gallienne,[17]
purified by his intellectual death and descent into the helotage of
reviewing, will be compelled to unmask you as a moral and spiritual
hooligan with a diminutive and unkempt and unsavory ego. And an
enterprising young person named Bierstadt[18] will, on the strength
of having twice had luncheon with you, write out for The Bookman
a remarkably intimate account of how partial you are to provoking
tragedies and throwing flesh-pots at people's heads. And there will
be others,--oh, quite a number of others.... So that, altogether, you
perceive, you will get, through this dæmon-worship, into some trouble."
Very rarely have I seen any young man more unaffectedly appalled. "But
look here, sir! I don't want to get into any trouble. I simply want to
contribute to the best magazines, and write some wholesome and nice
entertaining books, that will sell like _The Cardinal's Snuff-Box_
and _The Prisoner of Zenda_."
"I know. It is rather funny that you should begin with just those
goals in view. You will not ever attain them. That will not matter
so much--after a while. But what will very vitally matter--to you,
anyhow,--is that, having once meddled with the desire to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings, you will not ever be able to
forswear your dæmon. And such folly is, of course, enough to set every
really well-thought-of person in America braying. So that in time--who
knows--you too may come to be a chancre-laden rat, and a German Jew
with a soul in hell and simmered ancestors and a notoriously unkempt
ego, and may otherwise help out with the week's literary gossip."
Whereon the young man rose; and he remarked, with a perhaps not wholly
unwarranted uncertainty, "Then you advise me, sir--?"
"I cannot advise you the one way or the other. I am merely forewarning
you that, if you insist upon writing books, you will get what you
wanted."
He smiled now, brightly, intimately, strangely. "I see: but isn't that
also in the one way which matters," he demanded of me, "true?"
And I smiled back at him. "Yes," I admitted, "it seems true in the one
way which matters, also."
"Why, then," said he, "I reckon I had better keep right on with _The
Eagle's Shadow_."
And after that he went quite suddenly away. He returned, I imagine, to
1902 or thereabouts.
I hope he did, for his sake. There was a rather nice girl awaiting
him, back there in 1902. Then, in addition to her, he would have the
facile, false inspirations of _The Eagle's Shadow_ to play with, I
reflected, as I went back, a little saddened somehow, to concocting the
needed epilogue for the long Biography of Dom Manuel's life....
§ 97
But that queer boy's brief visit had quite broken my train of thought.
His passing seemed, indeed, to have disproved my train of thought.
For the instant I had proved, to my own satisfaction, that what I, in
common with all creative writers, got out of writing was, exactly,
nothing,--at that same moment he had appeared with his mild, bleated,
so respectful question, "Would you advise me, sir, to become a
writer--now?"
And I had answered his question. I had failed, at least, to advise
him not to become "a regular writer." I had, virtually, admitted that
were my youth restored to me, as Jurgen's was, and had I my life to
muddle through all over again, I would, still somewhat in the Jurgenic
manner, repeat its unprofitable dedication. I could not deny to him, I
could not truthfully deny to anybody, that, in the one way which really
seemed to count, I had in the end got what I wanted.
§ 98
No doubt it had been intermixed with a great deal which nobody could
conceivably enjoy. From the beginning my books had been strong
irritants to many of their readers,--it might be that their manner was
annoying, indeed, as Dr. Canby put it, "to all warm-hearted people." In
any event there were my scrapbooks bulging with "reviews" by persons
who appeared to have written in seizures of incoherent rage, without
ever having discovered precisely what they were angry about. These
chattered denunciations had begun with _The Eagle's Shadow_: and
no book by me had since failed to evoke them in respectable volume....
_The Cords of Vanity_, in fact, had seemed to unhinge all power
of self-control and self-expression in well-nigh everybody who wrote
about it: the scrapbooks which contained the press clippings relative
to this novel suggested just the corybantics and mowings of a madhouse.
The people who had at most length and most bitterly denounced "such a
book as _Jurgen_" did at least base upon understandable ground
their claims to be heard with respect,--this ground, of course, being
that their judgment had been kept healthily uncontaminated by their
abstention from reading _Jurgen_.
Nor was time outmoding this frenzy. _The High Place_ seemed to
have aroused in sundry quarters much the same quality of inexplicable
or, in any event, of unexplained fury. There was no doubt about it: the
instinctive reaction of many, many persons everywhere to each one of my
books--even, as it seemed, without reading them,--had been the instant,
unreasoning response of a reputable business-man or of a bull to the
Soviet flag.... And that had not been pleasant.
Apart from those who went about thus incommunicatively raging, had been
the pitilessly explicit. These had, indeed, been tirelessly explicit
in their exposure of my auctorial crimes and defects. Nobody could
pretend to remember all the literary vices which I had practised nor
all the contagions in which I had been detected, but every one of these
infamies had, as I recalled it, been competently exposed, over and
over again. I was both knave and imbecile, whose "mannered" writing
was mere kleptomania; I had, indeed, no sort of natural endowments
once you excepted the singular nastiness of my feeble mind: such were
the facts that had been quite regularly deplored, now I thought of it,
for the fifth part of a whole century. And when the press clippings
came in next week, somebody would, I knew, still be regretting these
facts. I could have little doubt that for the rest of my life I would
be continually encountering these regrets.... And that, too, was not
pleasant.
What the reviewers had said did not, especially and eventually,
matter. They were, in fact, to-day united in their abuse nowhere
except in my scrapbooks: I alone had--now for some twenty years,
and rather charitably, I thought,--been at pains to preserve their
utterances. Otherwise, all of yesterday's Olympians had loosed their
thunderbolts and had passed sonorously; and each demolishing of me
was to-day as little remembered as was any other of that year's
thunderstorms. To-day--if with a lessened frequency, from even loftier
altitudes,--still now and then descended peltingly the onslaughts of
young godlings. Yet to-day I still clung, somehow, to the belief that
my intelligence and morals were not so markedly below the average as
I was constantly assured. And, in the manner of those elder tempests,
so likewise, I knew, must pass away the reverberant condescensions
of the young, who were condemned as yet to appraise my book, and all
books, in the light of their contrast with that masterpiece which youth
is immemorially about to dash off on some vacant Saturday afternoon.
For presently these godlings too would turn from the serious work of
reviewing creative literature to the diversion of writing it....
And whatever any other formally empowered or free-lance commentator
might futurely say, whether in print or conversation, about my
stupidity and crass plagiarisms and self-conceit and futile
pruriencies, would not, I knew, matter either, in itself. The one
trouble was that all this maintained a clouded and sulphuric atmosphere
in which I dubiously moved, so far as went the thoughts of so many
dear, dull persons.... Meanwhile I had got the hearing which throughout
eighteen years of unreason I had hoped to get, and had always believed
to be imminent; and the book which I had written, in the Biography, was
finished, more or less, and would for its allotted season remain. With
the length, or, if you will, with the extreme brevity of that season, I
had no concern: it was enough to know that the Biography was finished,
and would outlast me.
§ 99
For that infernal boy had drawn from me the truth: I really had got
out of life what I most wanted. I had wanted to make the Biography:
and I had made it, in just the way which seemed good to me. To do that
had been, no doubt, my play and my diversion, in the corridors where
men must find diversion, whether in trifling with bank notes or women,
whether in clutching at straws or prayer-books, or else go mad: and
my enlinked deductions held as far as the chain stretched. But one
link more was needed. For it seemed to me, too, that I had somehow
fulfilled, without unduly shirking, an obligation which had been
laid upon me to make the Biography. I was not, heaven knew, claiming
for myself any heavenly inspiration or even any heavenly countenance.
Rather, it seemed to me that the ability and the body and the life
which transiently were at my disposal had been really used: with these
lent implements which were not ever properly speaking mine, and which
presently would be taken away from me, I had made something which was
actually mine. That something was the Biography....
§ 100
And still,--with all the bright day gone, and with the deepest gloom of
midnight also an affair of the past,--still, I seem not quite to have
found that final link, not wholly to have completed my epilogue. Some
word, as yet unthought of, stays needed to round off all....
Here then, upon this shelf, in these brown volumes which make up the
Biography, I can lay hand and eye upon just what precisely my life has
amounted to: the upshot of my existence is here before me, a tangible
and visible and entirely complete summing up, within humiliatingly
few inches. And yet, as I consider these inadequate brown volumes,
I suspect that the word I am looking for is "gratitude." It most
certainly is not "pride": and, as I hastily admit, nobody else is
called on to share in my suspicion.
But I at least, who have found human living and this world not wholly
admirable, and who have here and there made formal admission of the
fact, feel that in honor one ought to acknowledge all courtesies too.
With life, then, I, upon the whole, have no personal quarrel: she has
mauled, scratched and banged, she has in all ways damaged me: but she
has permitted me to do that which I most wanted. So that I must be, I
suppose, grateful.
--With which decision I very lightly pass my finger-tips across these
fifteen book-backs; and touch in this small gesture, so didactically
small, the whole of that to which, for good or ill, I have amounted.
And thereafter (with a continuing sense of wholesome allegory) I go
quietly to bed.
_Dumbarton Grange,
30 April, 1924._