You Can't Go Home Again (95 page)

My father, John Webber, had been all of his life a working man. He had done hard labour with his hands since the time he was twelve years old. As I have often told you, he was a man of great natural ability and intelligence. But, like many other men who have been deprived of the advantages of formal education, he was ambitious for his son: he wanted more than anything else in the world to see me go to college. He died just before I was prepared to enter, but it was on the money he left me that I went. It is only natural that people like my father should endow formal education with a degree of practicality which it does not and should not posssess. College seemed to him a kind of magic door which not only opened to a man all the reserves of learning, but also admitted him to free passage along any high road to material success which he might choose to follow after he had passed through the pleasant academic groves. It was only natural, too, that such a man as my father should believe that this success could be most easily arrived at along one of the more familiar and more generally approved roads.

The road he had chosen for me before his death was a branch of engineering. He stubbornly opposed the Joyner choice, which was the law. The old man had small use for the law as a profession, and very little respect for the lawyer as a man; his usual description of lawyers was “a gang of shysters”. When I went to see him as he lay dying, his last advice to me was:

“Learn to
do
something, learn to
make
something—that’s what college should be for.”

His bitterest regret was that the poverty of his early years had prevented him from learning any skill beyond that of a carpenter and a mason. He was a good carpenter, a good mason—in his last days he liked to call himself a builder, which indeed he was—but I think he felt in himself, like a kind of dumb and inarticulate suffering, the unachieved ability to
design
and
shape
. Certainly he would have been profoundly disappointed if he could have known what strange forms his own desires for “doing” and for “making” were to achieve in me. I cannot say what extremity—law or writing—would have filled him with the most disgust.

But by the time I left college it was already apparent that whatever talents I might have, they were neither for engineering nor the law. I had not the technical ability for the one, and, in view of what I was to discover for myself in later years, I think I was too honest for the other. But what to do? My academic career, with the crowning disgrace of complicity in the Pine Rock case and temporary expulsion from college, had not been distinguished by any very glittering records in scholarship except that One in Logic. I had failed both my father and the Joyner side of the house in any ambitions they had had for me. My father was dead, and the Joyners were now done with me.

For all these reasons, it was difficult to admit, even to myself, the stirrings of an urge so fantastic and impractical as the desire to write. It would only have confirmed the worst suspicions that my people had of me—suspicions, I fear, which had begun to eat into my own opinion of myself. Consequently, the first admission I made to myself was evasive. I told myself that I wanted to go into journalism. Now, looking back at it, I can see the reason for this decision clearly enough. I doubt very much that I had, at the age of twenty, the burning enthusiasm for newspaper work which I thought I had, but I managed to convince myself of it because newspaper work would provide me with the only means I knew whereby I could, in some fashion, write, and also earn a living, and thus prove to the world and to myself that I was not wasting my time.

To have confessed openly to my family that I wanted to be a writer would have been impossible. To be a writer was, in modern phrase, “nice work if you could get it”. In the Joyner consciousness, as well as in my own, “a writer” was a very remote kind of person. He was a romantic figure like Lord Byron, or Longfellow, or—or—Irvin S. Cobb—who in some magical way was gifted with the power to put words together into poems or stories or novels which got printed in books or in the pages of magazines like the
Saturday Evening Post
. He was therefore, quite obviously, a very strange, mysterious sort of creature who lived a very strange, mysterious, and glittering sort of life, and who came from some strange and mysterious and glittering world very far away from the life and world
we
knew. For a boy who had grown up in the town of Libya Hill to assert openly that he wanted to be a writer would have seemed to everyone at that time to border on lunacy. It would have harked back to the days of Uncle Rance Joyner, who wasted his youth learning to play the violin, and who in later life borrowed fifty dollars from Uncle Mark to take a course in phrenology. I had always been told that there was a strong resemblance between myself and Uncle Rance, and now I knew that if I confessed my secret desires, everyone would have thought the likeness more pronounced than ever.

It was a painful situation, and one which is now amusing to look back on. But it was also very human—and very American. Even today I don’t think the Joyners have altogether recovered from their own astonishment at the fact that I have actually become “a writer”. This attitude, which was also my own at the age of twenty, was to shape the course of my life for years.

So, fresh from college, I took what remained of the small inheritance my father had left me, and, with an exultant sense that I had packed my secret into my suitcase along with my extra pants, I started out, boy and baggage, on the road to fame and glory. That is to say, I came to New York to look for a job on a newspaper.

I did look for the job, but not too hard, and I didn’t find it. Meanwhile I had enough money to live on and I began to write. Later, when the money ran out, I condescended to become an instructor in one of the great educational factories of the city. This was another compromise, but it had one virtue—it enabled me to live and go on writing.

During the first year in New York I shared an apartment with a group of boys, transplanted Southerners like myself, whom I had known in college. Through one of them I made the acquaintance of some artistic young fellows who were living in what I swiftly learned to call “The Village”. Here, for the first time, I was thrown into the company of sophisticated young men of my own age—at least they seemed very sophisticated to me. For instead of being like me, an uncouth yokel from the backwoods, all rough edges, who felt within himself the timid but unspoken flutterings of a desire to write, these young gentlemen had come down from Harvard, they had the easy manner of men of the world, and they casually but quite openly told me that they
were
writers. And so they were. They wrote, and were published, in some of the little experimental magazines which were springing up on all sides during that period. How I envied them!

They were not only able to assert openly that they were writers, but they also asserted openly that a great many other people that I had thought were writers—most dismally were not. When I made hesitant efforts to take part in the brilliant conversation that flashed around me, I began to discover that I would have to be prepared for some very rude shocks. It was decidedly disconcerting, for example, to ask one of these most superior young men, so carelessly correct in their rough tweeds and pink cheeks: “Have you ever read Gals-worthy’s
Strife?
“—and to have him raise his eyebrows slowly, exhale a slow column of cigarette smoke, slowly shake his head, and then say in an accent of resigned regret: “I can’t read him. I simply can’t read him. Sorry----” with a rising inflection as if to say that it was too bad, but that it couldn’t be helped.

They were sorry about a great many things and people. The theatre was one of their most passionate concerns, but it seemed that there was hardly a dramatist writing in those days who escaped their censure. Shaw was amusing, but he was not a dramatist—he had never really learned how to write a play. O’Neill’s reputation was grossly exaggerated: his dialogue was clumsy, and his characters stock types. Barrie was insufferable on account of his sentimentality. As for Pinero and others of that ilk, their productions were already so dated that they were laughable.

In a way, this super-criticality was a very good thing for me. It taught me to be more questioning about some of the most venerated names and reputations whose authority had been handed down to me by my preceptors and accepted by me with too little thought. But the trouble with it was that I soon became involved, along with the others, in a niggling and over-refined aestheticism which was not only pallid and precious, but too detached from life to provide the substance and the inspiration for high creative work.

It is interesting to look back now and see just what it was we believed fifteen years ago—those of us who were the bright young people of the time and wanted to produce something of value in the arts. We talked a great deal about “art” and “beauty”—a great deal about “the artist”. A great deal too much, in fact. For the artist as we conceived him was a kind of aesthetic monster. Certainly he was not a living man. And if the artist is not first and foremost a living man—and by this I mean a man of life, a man who belongs to life, who is connected with it so intimately that he draws his strength from it—then what manner of man is he?

The artist we talked about was not such a man at all. Indeed, if he had any existence outside of our imagination he must have been one of the most extraordinary and inhuman freaks that nature ever created. Instead of loving life and believing in life, our “artist” hated life and fled from it. That, in fact, was the basic theme of most of the stories, plays, and novels we wrote. We were forever portraying the sensitive man of talent, the young genius, crucified by life, misunderstood and scorned of men, pilloried and driven out by the narrow bigotry and mean provincialism of the town or village, betrayed and humiliated by the cheapness of his wife, and finally crushed, silenced, torn to pieces by the organised power of the mob. So conceived, the artist that we talked about so much, instead of being in union with life, was in perpetual conflict with it. Instead of belonging to the world he lived in, he was constantly in a state of flight from it. The world itself was like a beast of prey, and the artist, like some wounded faun, was for ever trying to escape from it.

It seems to me now, as I look back on it, that the total deposit of all this was bad. It gave to young people who were deficient in the vital materials and experiences of life, and in the living contacts which the artist ought to have with life, the language and formulas of an unwholesome preciosity. It armed them with a philosophy, an aesthetic, of escapism. It tended to create in those of us who were later to become artists not only a special but a privileged character: each of us tended to think of himself as a person who was exempt from the human laws that govern other men, who was not subject to the same desires, the same feelings, the same passions—who was, in short, a kind of beautiful disease in nature, like a pearl in an oyster.

The effect of all this upon such a person as myself may easily be deduced. Now, for the first time, I was provided with a protective armour, a glittering and sophisticated defence to shield my own self-doubts, my inner misgivings, my lack of confidence in my power and ability to accomplish what I wanted to do. The result was to make me arrogantly truculent where my own desires and purposes were concerned. I began to talk the jargon just as the others did, to prate about “the artist”, and to refer scornfully and contemptuously to the bourgeoisie, the Babbitts, and the Philistines—by which all of us meant anyone who did not belong to the very small and precious province we had fashioned for ourselves.

Looking back, in an effort to see myself as I was in those days, I am afraid I was not a very friendly or agreeable young man. I was carrying a chip on my shoulder, and daring the whole world to knock it off. And the reason I so often took a high tone with people who, it seemed to me, doubted my ability to do the thing I wanted to do, was that, inwardly, I was by no means sure that I could do it myself. It was a form of whistling to keep one’s courage up.

That was the kind of man I was when you first knew me, Fox. Ah, yes, I spoke about the work I wished to do in phrases of devotion and humility, but there was not much of either in me. Inside, I was full of the disdainful scorn of the small and precious mob. I felt superior to other people and thought I belonged to a rare breed. I had not yet learned that one cannot really be superior without humility and tolerance and human understanding. I did not yet know that in order to belong to a rare and higher breed one must first develop the true power and talent of selfless immolation.

46. Even Two Angels Not Enough

Since childhood [George wrote to Fox] I had wanted what all men want in youth: to be famous, to be loved. These two desires went back through all the steps, degrees, and shadings of my education; they represented what we younglings of the time had been taught to believe in and to want.

Love and Fame. Well, I have had them both.

You told me once, Fox, that I did not want them, that I only thought I did. You were right. I wanted them desperately before I had them, but once they were mine, I found that they were not enough. And I think, if we speak truth, the same thing holds for every man who ever lived and had the spark of growth in him.

It has never been dangerous to admit that Fame is not enough—one of the world’s greatest poets called it “that last infirmity of Noble mind”—but it is dangerous, for reasons which everybody understands, to admit the infirmity of Love. Perhaps Love’s image may suffice some men. Perhaps, as in a drop of shining water, Love may hold in microcosm the reflection of the sun and the stars and the ‘heavens and the whole universe of man. Mighty poets dead and gone have said that this was true, and people have professed it ever since. As for that, I can only say that I do not think a frog pond or a Walden Pond contains the image of the ocean, even though there be water in both of them.