Of Time and the River (29 page)

Yes, for the most part, the members of Professor Hatcher’s class belonged to this great colony of the lost Americans. They belonged to that huge tribe of all the damned and lost who feel that everything is going to be all right with them if they can only take a trip, or learn a rule, or meet a person. They belonged to that futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and the dark damnation of man’s soul can magically be healed if only they eat bran for breakfast, secure an introduction to a celebrated actress, get a reading for their manuscript by a friend of Sinclair Lewis, or win admission to Professor Hatcher’s celebrated class of dramatists.

And, in a curious way, the plays written by the people in Professor Hatcher’s class illustrated, in one form or another, this desire. Few of the plays had any intrinsic reality, for most of these people were lacking in the first, the last, the foremost quality of the artist, without which he is lost: the ability to get out of his own life the power to live and work by, to derive from his own experience—as a fruit of all his seeing, feeling, living, joy and bitter anguish—the palpable and living substance of his art.

Few of the people in Professor Hatcher’s class possessed this power. Few of them had anything of their own to say. Their lives seemed to have grown from a stony and a fruitless soil and, as a consequence, the plays they wrote did not reflect that life, save by a curious and yet illuminating indirection.

Thus, in an extraordinary way, their plays—unreal, sterile, imitative, and derivative as most of them indubitably were—often revealed more about the lives of the people who wrote them than better and more living work could do. For, although few of the plays showed any contact with reality—with that passionate integument of blood and sweat and pain and fear and grief and joy and laughter of which this world is made—most of them did show, in one way or another, what was perhaps the basic impulse in the lives of most of these people—the impulse which had brought them here to Professor Hatcher’s class.

The impulse of the people in the class was not to embrace life and devour it, but rather to escape from it. And in one way or another most of the plays these people wrote were illustrative of this desire. For in these plays—unnatural, false, and imitative, as they were—one could discern, in however pale and feeble a design, a picture of the world not as its author had seen and lived and known it, but rather as he wished to find it or believe in it. And, in all their several forms—whether sad, gay, comic, tragic, or fantastical—these plays gave evidence of the denial and the fear of life.

The wealthy young dawdler from Philadelphia, for example, wrote plays which had their setting in a charming little French café. Here one was introduced to all the gay, quaint, charming Frenchmen— to Papa Duval, the jolly proprietor, and Mamma Duval, his rotund and no less jolly spouse, as well as to all the quaint and curious habitués that are so prolific in theatrical establishments of this order. One met, as well, that fixture of these places: old Monsieur Vernet, the crusty, crotchety, but kindly old gentleman who is the café‘s oldest customer and has had the same table in the corner by the window for more than thirty years. One saw again the familiar development of the comic situation—the day when Monsieur Vernet enters at his appointed time and finds at his table a total stranger. Sacrilege! Imprecations! Tears, prayers, and entreaties on the part of Papa Duval and his wife, together with the stubborn refusal of the imperious stranger to move! Climax: old Monsieur Vernet storming out of the café, swearing that he will never return. Resolution of conflict: the efforts of Papa and Mamma Duval to bring their most prized customer back into the fold again, and their final success, the pacification and return of Monsieur Vernet amid great rejoicing, thanks to a cunning stratagem on the part of Henri, the young waiter, who wins a reward for all these efforts, the hand of Mimi, Papa Duval’s charming daughter, from whom he has been separated by Papa Duval’s stern decree.

Thus custom is restored and true love reunited by one brilliant comic stroke!

And all this pretty little world, the contribution of a rich young man who came from Philadelphia! How perfectly God-damn delightful it all was, to be sure!

The plays of old Seth Flint, the sour and withered ex-reporter, were, if of a different colouring, cut from the same gaudy cloth of theatrical unreality. For forty years old Seth had pounded precincts as a newsman, and had known city-rooms across the nation. He had seen every crime, ruin, and incongruity of which man’s life is capable. He was familiar with every trait of graft, with every accursed smell and smear of the old red murder which ineradicably fouled the ancient soul of man, and the stench of man’s falseness, treachery, cruelty, hypocrisy, cowardice, and injustice, together with the look of brains and blood upon the pavements of the nation, was no new thing to old Seth Flint.

His skin had been withered, his eyes deadened, his heart and spirit burdened wearily, his faith made cynical, and his temper soured by the black picture of mankind which he had seen as a reporter—and because of this, in spite of this, he had remained or become—how, why, in what miraculous fashion no one knew—a curiously honest, sweet, and generous person, whose life had been the record of a selfless loyalty. He had known poverty, hardship, and self- sacrifice, and endured all willingly without complaint: he had taken the savings of a lifetime to send the two sons of his widowed sister to college; he had supported this woman and her family for years, and now, when his own life was coming to its close, he was yielding to the only self-indulgence he had ever known—a year away from the city-room of a Denver newspaper, a year away in the rare ether, among the precious and ćsthetic intellects of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course, a year in which to realize the dream of a lifetime, the vision of his youth—a year in which to write the plays he had always dreamed of writing. And what kind of plays did he write?

Alas! Old Seth did exactly what he set out to do; he succeeded perfectly in fulfilling his desire—and, by a tragic irony, his failure lay in just this fact. The plays which he produced with an astounding and prolific ease—(“Three days is enough to write a play,” the old man said in his sour voice. “You guys who take a year to write a play give me a pain. If you can’t write a play a week, you can’t write anything; the play’s no good”)—these plays were just the plays which he had dreamed of writing as a young man, and therein was evident their irremediable fault.

For Seth’s plays—so neat, brisk, glib, and smartly done—would have been good plays in a commercial way, as well, if he had only done them twenty years before. He wrote, without effort and with unerring accuracy, a kind of play which had been immensely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, but which people had grown tired of twenty years before. He wrote plays in which the babies got mixed up in the maternity ward of a great hospital, in which the rich man’s child goes to the family of the little grocer, and the grocer’s child grows up as the heir to an enormous fortune, with all the luxuries and securities of wealth around him. And he brought about the final resolution of this tangled scheme, the meeting of these scrambled children and their bewildered parents, with a skill of complication, a design of plot, a dexterity that was astonishing. His characters—all well-known types of the theatre, as of nurse tough-spoken, shop-girl slangy, reporter cynical, and so on—were well conceived to fret their purpose, their lives well-timed and apt and deftly made. He had mastered the formula of an older type of “well-made play” with astonishing success. Only, the type was dead, the interest of the public in such plays had vanished twenty years before.

So here he was, a live man, writing, with amazing skill, dead plays for a theatre that was dead, and for a public that did not exist.

“Chekhov! Ibsen!” old Seth would whine sourly with a dismissing gesture of his parched old hand, and a scornful contortion of his bitter mouth in his old mummy of a face. “You guys all make me tired the way you worship them!” he would whine out at some of the exquisite young temperaments in Professor Hatcher’s class. “Those guys can’t write a play! Take Chekhov, now!” whined Seth. “That guy never wrote a real play in his life! He never knew how to write a play! He couldn’t have written a play if he tried! He never learned the rules for writing a play!—That Cherry Orchard now,” whined old Seth with a sour sneering laugh, “—that Cherry Orchard that you guys are always raving about! That’s not a play!” he cried indignantly. “Whatever made you think it was a play? I was trying to read it just the other day,” he rasped, “and there’s nothing there to hold your interest! It’s got no PLOT! There’s no story in it! There’s no suspense! Nothing happens in it. All you got is a lot of people who do nothing but talk all the time. You never get anywhere,” said Seth scornfully. “And yet to hear you guys rave about it, you’d think it was a great play.”

“Well, what do you call a great play, then, if The Cherry Orchard isn’t one?” one of the young men said acidly. “Who wrote the great plays that you talk about?”

“Why, George M. Cohan wrote some,” whined Seth instantly. “That’s who. Avery Hopwood wrote some great plays. We’ve had plenty of guys in this country who wrote great plays. If they’d come from Russia you’d get down and worship ‘em,” he said bitterly; “but just because they came out of this country they’re no good!”

In the relation of the class towards old Seth Flint, it was possible to see the basic falseness of their relation towards life everywhere around them. For here was a man—whatever his defects as a playwright might have been—who had lived incomparably the richest, most varied and dangerous, and eventful life among them; as he was himself far more interesting than any of the plays they wrote, and as dramatists they should have recognized and understood his quality. But they saw none of this. For their relation towards life and people such as old Seth Flint was not one of understanding. It was not even one of burning indignation—of that indignation which is one of the dynamic forces in the artist’s life. It was rather one of supercilious scorn and ridicule.

They felt that they were “above” old Seth, and most of the other people in the world, and for this reason they were in Professor Hatcher’s class. Of Seth they said:

“He’s really a misfit, terribly out of place here. I wonder why he came.”

And they would listen to an account of one of Seth’s latest errors in good taste with the expression of astounded disbelief, the tones of stunned incredulity which were coming into fashion about that time among elegant young men.

“Not really! . . . But he never really said THAT. . . . You CAN’T mean it.”

“Oh, but I assure you, he did!”

“. . . It’s simply past belief! . . . I can’t believe he’s as bad as THAT.”

“Oh, but he IS! It’s incredible, I know, but you’ve no idea what he’s capable of.” And so on.

And yet old Seth Flint was badly needed in that class: his bitter and unvarnished tongue caused Professor Hatcher many painful moments, but it had its use—oh, it had its use, particularly when the play was of this nature:

Irene (slowly, with scorn and contempt in her voice). So—it has come to this! This is all your love amounts to—a little petty selfish thing! I had thought you were bigger than that, John.

John (desperately). But—but, my God, Irene—what am I to think? I found you in bed with him—my best friend! (with difficulty). You know—that looks suspicious, to say the least!

Irene (softly—with amused contempt in her voice). You poor little man! And to think I thought your love was SO BIG.

John (wildly). But I do love you, Irene. That’s just the point.

Irene (with passionate scorn). Love! You don’t know what love means! Love is bigger than that! Love is big enough for all things, all people. (She extends her arms in an all-embracing gesture.) My love takes in the world—it embraces all mankind! It is glamorous, wild, free as the wind, John.

John (slowly). Then you have had other lovers?

Irene: Lovers come, lovers go. (She makes an impatient gesture.) What is that? Nothing! Only love endures—my love, which is greater than all.

Eugene would writhe in his seat, and clench his hands convulsively. Then he would turn almost prayerfully to the bitter, mummied face of old Seth Flint for that barbed but cleansing vulgarity that always followed such a scene:

“Well?” Professor Hatcher would say, putting down the manuscript he had been reading, taking off his eye-glasses (which were attached to a ribbon of black silk) and looking around with a quizzical smile, an impassive expression on his fine, distinguished face. “Well?” he would say again urbanely, as no one answered. “Is there any comment?”

“What is she?” Seth would break the nervous silence with his rasping snarl. “Another of these society whores? You know,” he continued, “you can find plenty of her kind for three dollars a throw without any of that fancy palaver.”

Some of the class smiled faintly, painfully, and glanced at each other with slight shrugs of horror; others were grateful, felt pleasure well in them and said underneath their breath exultantly:

“Good old Seth! Good old Seth!”

“Her love is big enough for all things, is it?” said Seth. “I know a truck driver out in Denver I’ll match against her any day.”

Eugene and Ed Horton, a large and robust aspirant from the Iowa cornlands, roared with happy laughter, poking each other sharply in the ribs.

“Do you think the play will act?” someone said. “It seems to me that it comes pretty close to closet drama.”

“If you ask me,” said Seth, “it comes pretty close to water-closet drama. . . . No,” he said sourly. “What that boy needs is a little experience. He ought to go out and get him a woman and get all this stuff off his mind. After that, he might sit down and write a play.”

For a moment there was a very awkward silence, and Professor Hatcher smiled a trifle palely. Then, taking his eye-glasses with a distinguished movement, he looked around and said: