The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “You call the Sermon on the Mount nothing?”

  “You can find the same principles among the Essenes. There’s nothing in the least original about them.” He shrugged impatiently and continued to pace about, his voice rising sharply as his argument became more violent. “What I cannot stomach, at least in the founder of my faith, are the miracles. As the work of God, they are awe-inspiring. As the work of a mortal, they reduce themselves to the slickest kind of sleight of hand. ‘Go thou to the sea and cast an hook and take up the fish that first cometh up, and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money.’ ‘Go your way into the village over against you: and as soon as ye be entered into it, ye shall find a colt tied, whereupon never man sat; loose him and bring him.’ No, I tell you, Horace, it won’t do. Even the miracle of the loaves and fishes becomes a cheap catering trick.”

  At last he had shocked me. I have always thought it the worst possible taste to depreciate religious values. One certainly did not have to swallow the Bible, but a great many reputable people had, and out of respect for them, if nothing else, one should maintain a discreet silence. When it came to heresy, I found that I could, after all, be a Havistock.

  “You should have more respect,” I reproved him. “After all, even if he was mortal, might he not have been divinely inspired?”

  “Divinely inspired to say he was something he wasn’t? How could that be?”

  We kept reverting to the subject again and again, all that winter and spring, until, alas, I was fearfully bored with the whole topic. I finally suggested that he take his problem to our master at Balliol, the famous Dr. Jowett. Frank was at first reluctant to do so; he did not share in the popular cult of the “Jowler.” I pointed out that at least the master was an acknowledged theologian, and I eventually pushed him through that door out of which, like Omar, after “great argument about it and about,” he eventually emerged—with the same doubts. But in his case, unlike Omar’s, an important practical decision had been taken. He was bright-eyed and feverishly cheerful, and he discussed his faithlessness no more.

  Jowett was certainly never Frank’s idea of a great man. The Master’s plump, soft figure, his silvery white smooth hair, his pink, clear countenance and treble voice, his cerebral, epicene manner and the intellectual (and at times social) snobbishness of his conversation struck the young American athlete as the epitome of all that was worst in English education, of all that his school, if he ever founded one, was not going to be.

  I, on the other hand, delighted in Jowett’s dry wit and worldly anecdotes and in the great names which so frequently adorned his discourse. I knew that I could qualify under none of the three headings to which his intimates were supposedly limited: peers, paupers and scholars, but I was determined that I would nonetheless attract his notice. He liked funny stories and he liked gossip, and the first time that Frank and I were asked to dine at the Master’s House I was full of both.

  “Havistock is a bit of an ass,” Jowett later told a blunt Yorkshire lad who bluntly repeated it to me. “And an American ass at that. But a dinner party is pleasanter for his company, and how many men can you say that about?”

  How many indeed? I should like his encomium on my tombstone.

  Jowett took Frank more seriously, as an aggressive and possibly dangerous Red Indian. During that same first dinner Frank actually suggested a correction in our host’s famed translation of Plato. Had he been wrong, it would have been the end of their relationship. But he was right, and, as I have said, Jowett liked scholars.

  “And to think that such illumination should come to us from the antipodes!” the Master exclaimed, raising his hands. “The Old World can only bow its head.” The tone may have been bantering, but he took out a notebook to record Frank’s correction.

  Did that wise old man feel a tremor of satisfaction when the brash younger one came to him with his doubts? I think not. Jowett was fundamentally kind. Frank’s problems, at least in their initial form, were elementary enough, and the Master was about to suggest a dozen explanations of what Christ had meant by the day of judgment. But he soon discovered that his Yankee pupil had a flare for theological disputation that would have made him at home in the Byzantine Court. Jowett’s arguments simply stimulated Frank to deeper research, in Latin, Greek and even Hebrew texts, until he was able to challenge the Master on equal ground.

  “If you’re the kind of man to lose sleep over whether Jonah was actually swallowed by the whale,” Jowett retorted at last, “the church is no place for you. You’d better go back to the fresh breeze of your western prairies.”

  Of course, they had totally opposite religious temperaments. Jowett admired philosophy; Frank cultivated burning zeal. To one Christianity had been better stated by Plato than by Christ; to the other Christ was all. Frank belonged among the disciples of Phillips Brooks and A. V. G. Allen who gave to Jesus the supreme position in the Trinity which, according to Henry Adams, the thirteenth century had given the Virgin. To Jowett such Christology had a distasteful smack of evangelicism and American exaggeration. To him the life and death of Christ was the life and death of Christ in the soul, the imitation of Christ. As a Platonist he saw everything on earth as broken arcs which merely suggested the perfect rounds above. Christ was essentially a larger segment of arc. To insist that he had to be either all God or all man must have struck Jowett as a crudity of youth.

  Nonetheless he might have enjoyed indefinitely his theological debates with a mind as keen as Frank’s had it not been for bitter memories of the conflict which had torn the Church of England, years before, on the publication of his own views of biblical interpretation. Jowett had come out all right in the end, but the memory of that fuss and feathers over the exercise of a harmless bit of rationalism had given him an abiding distaste for religious controversy. He had little respect for the clergy and barely regarded himself as one of them.

  “I wonder if any really great men are ever clergymen,” he speculated one afternoon at tea in my rooms. It was his first visit, and I was very proud.

  Frank, of course, picked him right up. “Hildebrand? Ximenes? Richelieu?”

  “I’m not talking of statesmen in cassocks, Prescott, but of clergymen. Why would a great man want to shackle himself with the gêne of a creed?”

  “Luther was a great man and a clergyman, and he did.”

  “Ah, Luther. I should have anticipated the name or a rebel from the citizen of a separated arm of the Queen’s realm.”

  “But surely, Master,” Frank retorted, “a martyr like yourself should sympathize with rebels.”

  Jowett’s face was inscrutable, and I was breathless. I had never heard anyone twit him before with his ancient heresy. But Frank, it seemed, got away with everything. The Master gave him a long, shrewd stare and said: “It’s a pity you weren’t a young man in 1776, Prescott. I’m sure you would have greatly enjoyed it.”

  “Would you, Master, have enjoyed the reign of Mary Tudor?”

  Jowett grunted. “Perhaps the bar should be your profession. I’m told that lawyers and judges occupy a unique position in your great nation. Can your courts not invalidate laws of congress? Fancy. I propose, then, that you make your fortune at the bar and secure an early appointment to the bench. The judge in this commercial era is the only person who can enjoy the esteem of the worldly with the detachment of the philosopher. Even the proudest burghers dare not yawn when he quotes Latin.”

  “At home our judgeships are the spoils of politics.”

  “Be a politician, then!”

  “You are full of alternatives, Master.”

  “They are all the old can offer.”

  Frank was repelled by this, and though he remained on friendly terms with the Master he did not again seek his advice in personal matters. He had a young man’s distaste for compromise; it seemed to him that one must make a clean choice between God and Mammon. At the time it was Mammon, and there was no further talk of his being a minister or a schoolmaster.
r />   What surprised me most was how much I minded. One might have thought that the new, more secular Frank would have been closer to the easygoing and worldly Horace. Yet such was not the case. We remained the closest of friends, but something had gone out of the relationship. In my own odd way, if I could get along without God, I could not seem to get on without God in Frank. I felt that he was turning into someone he was not meant to be—a good person, no doubt, but not the person I had visualized. In brief, I suppose I thought myself let down. After all, I, too, had had a stake in that school. I had hitched my modest but well-appointed wagon to a star, and now, looking ahead, I saw it was only another wagon. I could have done as well on my own.

  7

  From Horace Havistock’s “The Art of Friendship”

  FRANK and I came back to America in the fall of 1881, and he visited with my family for several weeks. He had little idea of what to do or where to live and was disconcertingly open to suggestions. My brother Archie, who had always liked him and found unaccountable his intimacy with me, advised him strongly to stay in New York and go into business. He persuaded Father to give him a letter of introduction to Chauncey Depew, and Frank went off to call at the New York Central offices. He came back, dazzled, to tell us that he had been offered a job in his first interview.

  “But I daresay it’s not very adventurous to start right off in the biggest company,” he concluded.

  Archie rebutted vigorously what he called the “vulgar” American fallacy that the big fortunes were all made in new ventures. “Stay with the tried and true,” he warned Frank. “That’s what the big boys understand. The profit is never ‘out’ of a good business. Central will double again.”

  So Frank went to work for the Vanderbilts, the “brown-stone Medici,” as he called them. His heart was certainly never in railroads, but his shrewd intuition and his quick grasp of detail made him a useful assistant to Depew who was later to be the first chairman of the board of trustees of Justin Martyr. Frank’s irreverent amusement at the pomp and power of the railway great was manifested in a series of witty monologues that he used to perform for his intimates and, years later, for the boys at school. His best was of William H. Vanderbilt, interviewed by the press on board his Wagner palace car, shifting in his plush chair, coughing, snapping his eyes, playing with his watch fob, mumbling, shy and miserable, and ending finally with a high squeak: “The public be damned!” The companion piece was of the same gentleman in his art gallery bargaining with a dealer for a gory Meissonier battle scene. Frank would stand, his hands behind his back, his nose two inches from the purported canvas, studying the detail of a helmet. But there must have been a dose of admiration in so exact an observance. Frank all his life had a grudging, half-concealed fascination for big business. He used to say that if you sold out to Mammon, you might as well get a seat in the Inner Temple.

  In his two years at Central he lived in a small room in a boardinghouse on lower Madison Avenue and spent his salary on his clothes and pleasures. He continued the habit that he had acquired in England of being a bit of a dandy, and on Sundays he hired a horse to ride in Central Park. With his looks, his name, his confidence, his ease of manner and his amazing general knowledge, he soon became a popular extra man in society. New York was worldly and Frank was poor, but this is always forgiven a bachelor, and was he not a Boston Prescott? Even the mothers of heiresses did not frown at Frank’s brown eyes and broad shoulders.

  He and I once again played reversed roles in that period, for I found (as I always have since) New York society distinctly tiresome. There was opulence, but it was a heavy, tawdry opulence, blinking out at one from heavily laden dinner tables where sour, sleepy-eyed magnates and their stertorous, big-busted wives overate. There were no artists, no philosophers, no men of science in that bourgeois world. And worst of all, there were none of those wonderful, worldly-wise, sympathetic older women, in whom London and Paris abounded, former beauties or demimondaines, who could talk to a young man of love and art and politics and give him a sense of the continuity of charm in the history of civilized men and women.

  My health was bad again; I had constant colds and was beginning already to show symptoms of the arthritis that has nagged me all my life. I spent my days in the comfortable fire-warmed third floor sitting room in which I had lived as a child with Sister Sue at 310 Fifth Avenue. All my brothers were married and had moved away, and Father, turning senile, thought only of dinner invitations which were becoming so rare that I had the mortification of having to solicit them from his old friends. There was little to tempt me away from the manuscript of a novel that I was writing about Newport in the Revolutionary War. It was not a good novel, and it was never published, but it was better than many of the novels that were published in those days.

  Inevitably, with my sedentary life and Frank’s active one, we saw less of each other. He never let a week go by without calling at the house, but the daily intimacy of our English years was gone, and I found that I wanted another confidant, perhaps even a confidant who was more interested in me and in the things I cared about than Frank, for all his kindness, ever could be. Even in his Mammon days, he always leaned to the general while I tumbled head over heels into the particular; he loved ideas and I personalities; he was all for argument and I yearned for gossip. Neither of us, obviously, could be all in all to the other.

  It came as a bit of a shock to me, as it undoubtedly will to the reader of these pages, that my new friend should have materialized at last in the shape of a beautiful and popular young woman, a scant year older than myself. I met Eliza Dean at a small dinner given by Ward McAllister, a foolish fellow but a very kind one, who, when not pursuing the old and grand, like Mrs. Astor, could give charming parties where, over the best of food and wine, something not too far from conversation was occasionally born.

  Eliza was a bit in advance of the Gibson girl, but to some extent she anticipated her. She had thick rich auburn hair, a high ivory forehead, hazel eyes that gazed at one unflinchingly, the straightest of noses and a chin that would have been almost too resolute had it not suggested the proud princess of fairy tale. Eliza moved, too, like a princess, but I think she may have done so to offer an effective contrast to her free candor of manner and a laugh that was as hearty as the West from which she came. She was the only child of a widowered father, a gnarled old leathery ’forty-niner who had once purchased a senate seat and who had now come to New York to retire on Fifth Avenue and launch his beautiful daughter in society. People suspected the most terrible things about his past and something worse about his present, namely that his reputed fortune was largely fictional, but it helped that he, a morose old bird, did not want to go out, and everyone was charmed by his daughter.

  Eliza was far too clever to try to compete with New York girls in their own specialties; she knew that the out-of-the-ordinary, properly handled, could be an asset, and she introduced into her conversation a directness, a forthrightness, a kind of high honesty that seemed designed to fill the stuffy interiors of Manhattan with a fresh wind from over the Rockies. Instead of playing the mincing little thing who wanted to be shielded—from nothing—by a masculine arm, she appeared to offer herself as a brave, free companion to a man, the kind of woman who could fire her rifle alongside him in the Indian-besieged stockade, an Elizabeth Zane with an apron full of gunpowder.

  But there was a pointed difference. Elizabeth Zane had not been playing a role, and Eliza Dean most decidedly was. Nobody smelled the paint or saw that the cardboard fortress trembled in the breeze but Horace Havistock, and nobody guessed that he smelled or saw such things but Eliza Dean. It was our recognition of each other’s skill that formed the rock, albeit a slippery one, on which our friendship was based.

  Like myself, she needed a friend and confidant, and he had to be not only a man, for she was one of those women who had little use for her own sex, but a man who would not spoil their special intimacy by falling in love with her. Had it not been for this latter qualifica
tion, so firmly set forth at the beginning, I think I might have. Certainly I came as near to falling in love with Eliza as I ever came to falling in love. But I knew that I would have repelled her, awkward reedy creature that I was, and I was glad to settle for friendship and to content myself with being fussed over, like a doll in the hands of a very determined little girl.

  Eliza had a pale blue open Landau with red leather upholstery and a coachman in red livery. She used to pick me up twice a week at Number 310 and take me driving in Central Park as far north as the terrace and the Bethesda Fountain and sometimes all the way to Cleopatra’s Needle. If it was a good day, we would get out at the Mall and stroll. It was part of her act of independence to be always unchaperoned.

  “You shouldn’t be writing a novel about the Revolution,” she told me on one of those excursions. “What’s happening today is far more exciting, right here in Manhattan. Why, you could fit all of revolutionary New York into five or six blocks of the city today!”

  “I’ll take those five or six blocks, thank you. And I’ll leave you that.” I pointed down to the Angel on the Bethesda Fountain that we were passing. “In fact I’ll make you a present of everything north of Union Square.”

  “You’d make me the richest and most powerful woman on earth!”

  “Why do you care so much about power, Eliza? Is it so important to be able to order your fellow men about? Of course, they’re all your slaves, anyway.”

  “Not Horace Havistock. He’s safe.” There was a tiny glint in her eyes as she folded her hands in her muff. “You see, we’re utterly different, you and I. You can be perfectly happy just watching the pageant of power. And occasionally sneering at it. But I have to be involved. Oh, don’t think that I have a mere vulgar craving for money and preferment.” Her hazel eyes were turned on me now, full of a fine scorn at such a concept. “When I speak of power, I mean involvement in all the wonderful things that are going to happen here. Politically and artistically and scientifically. Big business is only a precursor. A herald of the Athenian age. And I want to be in the center of that age!”