Annan was in a way of being rather pleased with himself. Nobody can
remain entirely unshaken by the impact of the sort of flattery hurled
in hunks by the Great American Ass.
For with him it is all or nothing, repletion or starvation.
Also, unlike his French and British brothers, he is a disloyal ass.
Also a capricious one. There is no respect in him for past performance
once lauded. The established favourite grown old in service sooner or
later becomes a target for his heels.
This is not heartlessness; it is ignorance of what has been done for
him and of those who have done it.
For he really is the most sentimental of asses. Sentiment and temper
are the two outlets for the uneducated. They are his. Convince the
Great American Ass that his behaviour is callous, capricious, cruel,
and he’d asphyxiate his victim in sentimental saliva.
For this secretion foams up from the Centre of Population and oozes
in all directions. It is the solvent for the repulsive, the ugly, the
sordid, offered in the pill of Art by Modernism.
But what, exactly, this pill is going to do to the Great American Ass
is still a social and pathological problem.
* * * * *
Annan was up to his neck in saliva. That great army of slight
acquaintances with which the average man is afflicted became old
friends over night.
Annan was running the whole gamut from these, and from readers utterly
unknown to him. Every mail brought requests for loans, autographs,
and for personal assistance of various sorts; and there were endless
charitable appeals, offers to lecture, offers of election to clubs,
guilds, associations, societies he never heard of; requests for his
patronage, his endorsement of saleable articles; requests for criticism
upon the myriad efforts of unsuccessful writers; demands that he should
“place” their effusions; personal calls from agents, publishers, cranks.
And there was, of course, a great influx of silliness--flirtatious
letters, passionate love letters, sentimental requests for signed
photographs. And among these, as always, were offensive letters,
repulsive letters, sinister and usually anonymous. The entire gamut.
Toward him there was a new and flattering attitude, even in old
friends, and no matter how honest and sincere, even in those who
disapproved his work, this unconscious attitude toward a publicly
successful man was noticeable.
Otherwise, in public, his face and name were becoming sufficiently well
known to attract curiosity.
In shops clerks would smirk and inquire, “Mr. Annan, the novelist?”
Proprietors and underlings in his accustomed haunts were likely to
point him out to other customers. He was becoming accustomed to being
stared at.
Now, some of these phenomena are anything but agreeable to the newly
successful; but, _en masse_, these manifestations are not calculated to
inculcate steadiness and modesty in anybody.
A thousand times Annan had told himself that no success could ever
unbalance him a fraction of one degree. But success is an insidious
fever. One walks with it without suspecting the infection. Without
knowing that three-quarters of the people who shake one’s hand are
carriers of this same and subtle fever.
However, Barry Annan appeared to thrive. All was well with him. All was
going “according to plan.”
His newest novel, scarcely begun, promised dazzlingly. He was eager,
always, to get at it. That was a most excellent sign. He even preferred
writing it to doing anything else. Another good sign.
Otherwise all was well with him, and going well.
His love affairs, always verbal ones, distracted him agreeably and were
useful professionally. Easily, as always, he slipped out of one into
another with no discomfort to himself and only a brief but deeper pang
for the girl.
Few of these mildly amourous episodes resulted in anything except a
rather more agreeable and care-free friendship,--as in the cases of
Betsy Blythe and Rosalind Shore. Disillusioned they liked him better
but in a different way.
Probably Eris would, too, when she returned from the Coast,--if ever
she did return.
Thus, without effort, he reassured himself concerning her three
unanswered letters. His was the gayest and most optimistic of
consciences,--a little gem of altruism. Per se it functioned
beautifully. He never meddled. It ran like a watch ticking cheerily.
But it never had had anything serious to deal with. How heavy a weight
it might sustain there was no knowing.
In light marching order his conscience had guided him very nicely, so
far. How would it steer him when it carried weight?
* * * * *
It was early in June that he encountered Coltfoot by chance. They had
not met in months.
Coltfoot did not look shabby nor even wilted, but he wore last year’s
summer clothes and straw hat, and his dark, rather grim features seemed
thinner.
Annan insisted that they lunch together at the Province Club. They did.
Their respective reports revealed their situations since they last had
met; Annan had only success to recapitulate,--Coltfoot a cordial and
sincerely happy listener.
But it had gone otherwise with Coltfoot. When he resigned from the
_Planet_ because his self-respect couldn’t tolerate its policy, the
business situation was not such as to make job hunting easy.
“Outside of any salary I’ve income enough to live on rather rottenly,”
he remarked, “but I don’t want to.”
“You mean you haven’t a job, Mike?”
“Oh, I’ve got one--one of those stinking magazines which can be bought
any day and which always are being ‘revived’ by ‘new blood.’
“I’m supposed to be that fresh and sanguinary reservoir. We may file a
petition in bankruptcy or continue. There’s no telling.”
“What an outrage! A man of your calibre----”
“Don’t worry. Somewhere in dusty perspective the job I’m destined to
nab is lumbering along the highway of life. I’ll hold it up when it
tries to pass by me.”
“You know, Mike, that if ever you’re short----”
“Thanks.... No fear. What sort of fodder do you next hand out to your
famishing public?”
“I’m preparing it.... You won’t like it, Mike.”
“Same graft?”
“What do you mean, graft----”
“You poor fish, are you touchy already?”
Annan reddened very slightly, then laughed:
“Kick my pants hard if ever I’m _that_, Mike. May the Lord defend me
from solemnity and smugness!... Mike, I wish we could see more of each
other.... Things worry me a lot sometimes. A fellow has got to believe
in himself, yet complacency is destruction.... All this--you know what
I mean--disconcerts a man.... I admit it. It’s come to a point where
actually I don’t know whether my stuff is worth immortality, or a
tinker’s dam, or zero.
“Yet I feel I _can_ deliver the hootch.”
“It’s hootch all right.”
“Well--God knows.... Like the Mad Hatter--or was it the Rabbit?--I’ve
used the best ingredient.”
“There were crumbs in it,” said Coltfoot. “Besides, wood-alcohol isn’t
a lubricant.”
Thus from simile to allegory, to inference via insinuation--discourse
in terms possible only between old friends of different species born in
the same culture among fellow bacilli of their period.
“Hang it all,” insisted Annan, “the world isn’t swimming in syrup!”
“Nor in vinegar, Barry.”
“I can’t see the sugar-candy aspect of a story,” said Annan. “All that
lovey-lovey-sweetie-sweetie goo is as dead as Cleopatra.”
“There _was_ a Cleopatra. And she loved. There _was_ beauty,
brilliancy, ardour, wit, gaiety, pleasure----”
“--_And_ the asp!”
“Yes, but why star the asp? It bit only once. Why devote the whole
story to ominous apprehension, the relentless approach of horror from
beyond vast horizons? There were long intervals of sunlight and song
in Cleopatra’s day. Why make of your book a monograph on poisons? Why
turn it into a history of the asp? Why minutely construct a treatise on
serpents?
“Good Lord, Barry, when you’ve a good dinner served you at home, why
slink to the nearest ash-can and rummage for putrid bones?”
“After all, there _are_ a few million garbage cans in the world.”
“Their contents are not nourishing. Why not leave such scraps to the
degenerates so well known to the medical gentlemen who specialize
in them?--to the Gauguins, Cezannes, Matisses among professors and
students in that ghastly clinic where subject, operator and onlooker
are scarcely distinguishable to the normal eye?”
“Good heavens, what bitterness!”
“Good God, what insanity!”
“I must hew out my own way----” insisted Annan hotly.
“Hew on! But follow the standard! Don’t lose sight of the standard----”
“Standards change----”
“Not The Cross!”
There was a silence; then Barry said: “Is it the function of art to
make people better by lying to them?”
“It is not its function to make them worse by offering distorted
truths.”
“Does it hurt people to know the truer and less pleasant side of life?”
“No; but it hurts them to dwell on it. That’s what modernism makes them
do.”
“Life is nine-tenths unpleasant.”
“Then say so in a line. And in the rest of your story try to help
people to endure those nine-tenths by forgetting them while they read
about the other tenth.”
“I’m not going to mutilate truth,” retorted Annan.
“You _do_ mutilate it. The school that influences you mutilates truth
as was mutilated the body of Osiris! The school that stains you with
its shadow is a school of mutilators. I’m not squeamish, Barry. I’m
for plain writing. The truths leered at or slurred over or ignored by
convention can be decently presented in proportion to their importance
in any story.
“But satyrism in art, the satanism that worships ugliness, the
perversion that twists, distorts, mutilates the human body, the human
mind, nature, the only flawless masterpiece,--no, I’m not for these. I
tell you that the entire modernist movement is but a celebration of The
Black Mass. Crazy and sane, _that_ is what the leaders in this school
are doing. Their god is Anti-Christ; their ritual destruction. And I
do not believe that Christ, all merciful, will ever say to the least
guilty among these--‘Absolvo te.’”
There was a long silence. Finally Annan said: “On your side you are
more savage than I on mine. I am no missionary----”
“_I_ am. The human being who is not is negligible. I tell you that
beauty is good and right. It is salvation. It is the goal. And I tell
you that the use of evil is to throw beauty in brighter, more perfect
relief. That is its _only_ use in art.
“And it never should be the theme, nor bask in the spotlight,
nor centre the composition. All its arrows point inward to
that one divine and ultimate spot--the touch of highest value
in Rembrandt’s canvasses--the supreme pinpoint of clarity and
glory--Beauty--symmetrical, flawless, eternal.”
* * * * *
As they left the club together: “Almost thou persuadest me,” said Annan
lightly.
Parting, they shook hands: “No, not I,” said Coltfoot. “Some sorrow
will do that.... Or some woman.”
Annan turned down Fifth Avenue much amused.