The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  Thus speaking, Smire left the abashed All-Highest.

  XXIII. LOST LOVES RETURN

  Now the public at large were before Smire. And the butcher wiped his hands on his white blood-spotted apron in the time he was crying out,—

  “You blaspheme handsomely.”

  “We adore blasphemy. It is sophisticated,” said the baker.

  Then the candlestick maker said, “We think that for too long a while the subtly poisoned honey of your sophistication has been denied to the hunger of our intelligence.”

  “It is not right,” said Tom, Dick and Harry, all speaking in unison, “for you to be wandering about in the lands beyond common-sense when our need of you is very great.”

  “But what, gentlemen—and you also, my dear ladies,” says Smire,—“just what is your need of me?”

  Lady Ampersand replied, “You must return to our bosoms.”

  “Eh?” says Smire.

  “That is a figure of speech,” Senora Etcetera explained, “which alludes likewise to our mental devotion. It means you must write for us another novel.”

  “Hoh!” says Smire.

  And Madame Quelquechose cooed, “Something in your own inimitable style.”

  “Aha!” says Smire; and then, smiling quite affably, he continued to talk, saying:

  “Come now, but I have not ever written for your pleasuring—or, to speak more strictly, for my own pleasuring—a novel. To do that is very far from my métier.”

  “It is yet farther from truth-telling,” Anon answered him, “for you to say anything of the sort.”

  “The world knows you are one of our leading writers of fiction,” cried Ibid.

  And to that pronouncement, the world nodded in unqualified, benign assent.

  “Indeed, it is a circumstance so notorious,” said the world, in grave confidence, to his wife, “that Smire’s picture has been printed in the newspapers, not less than three times.”

  “I think his books are perfectly wonderful,” declared Mrs. Murgatroyd, “and the more I see of Smire, the more I wonder what it was that I ever saw in Murgatroyd.”

  “I thank you, one and all,” replied Smire, “for the general drift of your remarks. Nevertheless, it remains true I do not write novels. And so, ladies and gentlemen, this most gratifying demonstration now prompts me to urge a distinction through not making which a lax horde of us are beguiled into prattling a vast deal of nonsense when we discuss fiction. In approaching fiction, it is needful, I would suggest, to distinguish between the novel and the romance.”

  “Why, but yes. Yes, of course,” they replied to him, vaguely.

  —Whereupon Smire asked: “Does my proposal seem trite? Then your verdict (as I cannot but gently assure you, O readers more or less gentle) is a by-product of ignorance. You cannot possibly know what I am talking about, for the distinction which I suggest has not ever yet been put into practice. None the less does it seem to me the part of rationality to distinguish with precision between the novel and the romance.”

  Thus speaking, Smire seated himself upon a semicircular stone bench carved everywhere in high relief with small fishes. He lighted a cigarette. And with that never-failing savoir faire which aforetime had so very often enabled Smire to bear the palm and to gain laurels and to play the first fiddle, in circumstances of extreme variousness, he now continued the instructive onflow of Smire’s remarks.

  XXIV. TO THE PUBLIC AT LARGE

  I take it (Smire began) that a novel is a fictitious narrative, by ordinary in prose, aiming to present the life of human beings among circumstances such as actually exist or else once existed. And a romance is a fictitious narrative, either in prose or in verse, aiming to present the life of human beings—or at any rate, of one human being—in a world contrived by the author of that narrative.

  The distinction (Smire remarked, yet furthermore) appears obvious; beyond question, it is as simple as it is fundamental. Yet this distinction has not been faithfully observed by literary critics or—so far as that goes—by authors. Any number of quite so-so romance writers have died under the delusion that they, who had not ever produced a novel, had given over a reasonably long lifetime to the writing of novels. To the other side, one grieves to think of how many dozens upon dozens of similarly so-so reviewers, at this very instant, must be dismissing this or the other lately-published romance as a negligible novel so deeply tainted with frivolousness (with the frivolousness, let us say, of Æschylus or of Dante) as to present no grave consideration of lower-class life in the more uncourtly corners of America,—to do which, as every properly cultured American well knows, is the sole end of ponderable fiction.

  So does this widespread confusion of two different forms of art force me to suggest that all fiction should be divided, rigorously, into two classes: the fiction of the novelist, who, almost always in prose, reproduces human life as it is, or as it has been, lived in some actual era; and the fiction of the romancer, who, whether it be in prose or in verse, reproduces human life in a cosmos invented—or, to speak more strictly, “compiled,” or it may be merely “rearranged”—by the author of this fiction. In other words, the affair of the novelist is to copy human life; and of the romancer to create for human life conditions among which (to his finding, at all events) human life may be conducted more satisfactorily from his art’s standpoint. In brief, it is the business of the novelist to copy, just as it is the business of the romancer to create, the surroundings among which it is the business of both to place human beings. Thus is the romancer’s method, all-comprehensively, the method of Homer and Shakespeare, of Walter Scott and the elder Dumas, and as I might add likewise, of Ouida and of Shelley and of Conan Doyle and of Milton.

  For this distinction applies, as I have said, “to all fiction.” Every avowed poet of any fair consequence has been a romancer who, with more or less frankness, has labored to place human beings among surroundings which were not ever familiar to mankind in any era, but among which human beings might live more adequately more movingly, and more interestingly, from his art’s high and unhuman standpoint. In passing, we touch here, it may be, the reason of that unexplained homage, or in any case that lip-service, which is paid to poetry. We tend, I believe, to assume that a poet labors in the most lofty fields of literature, not, I submit, because his medium is the most nearly perfect (since, indeed, verse is quite obviously not anything of the sort), but because the poet’s attempt—as we feel, if but cloudily—is creative.

  Toward no true novelist can we harbor this feeling, this shadow of awe. The copyist, it matters not what he copies, nor how noteworthy may be his original—even though his copying embrace all mortal life, in its highest aspirations, its most serviceable lies, its beauty, its hopeless heroisms, its carnalities, and its hemorrhoids,—remains none the less a copyist. His work may be useful, edifying, entertaining, lovely, or what you will; one virtue alone it may not display: it is not creative. He pursues an art which, if he respects it with sincerity, will at no time pretend to create anything. Through the attempt it can but become perjury; for it is an art which, in its honest and most satisfying exercise, remains sturdily reportorial, as indeed its name assures you. So the best novelist brings to us des nouvelles, the “news,” unaffectedly, very well content to be a journalist who is about the beneficent work of increasing our knowledge. But the poet—the poietes, the “maker”—when his toil prospers, then makes for us a new world, evoking the implied claim upon reverence such as we grant always to the divine task of creation. And to do this is the attempt, still of the poietes, the “maker,” when he far more ambitiously elects to write, hot in verse, but in the more variously-faceted, the less fettered, the more copious, and the more highly civilized medium of prose. That is my point.

  (Smire paused. He regarded the perplexed amiable faces of the public at large. He reflected that here were the true rulers of that which was called—as it seemed to him, a bit unaccountably—a more rational world than Smire’s dreaming invented. Here were the all
-powerful folk who, in a day-lit era of enlightened democracy, determined what special evincements of wit and fancy and erudition should be applauded forever and ever, and even beyond the end of the current publishing season, because the voice of the people was, after all, the voice of posterity. And Smire sighed.)

  In brief (Smire continued, after just one more reflective puff at his cigarette), the prose artist who is also a poet will continue actually to create,—as in my next book, ladies and gentleman, should I ever come to record my adventures in the lands beyond common-sense, I would create for you, at the very least, an entire planet diversified with its own nations, its own geography, its own unterrestrial laws of dream logic, and its own special atmosphere of dream magic. But I return to Branlon. I shall write no more books. Your loss is very great, ladies and gentlemen; I condole with you; for my next romance, if I ever wrote it upon a scale at all commensurate with my ideals—the ideals which not even I may hope to approach—would be beautiful and double-edged and wholly glorious.

  Yet with life, as our public journals depict life, and as our better-thought-of books of reference appraise life, this romance would have no concern; and the demands laid upon any reader who reveres “facts” would be, in consequence, huge. For you, O public at large, to encounter any such romance among the novels which you read because other persons are reading them, must seem not unlike finding a unicorn stabled in a public garage. You would not know quite what to make of the phenomenon; and you would sidle away from it unobtrusively.

  So do not weep, O public at large! Take heart, O patrons of informative magazines and of landing libraries! Be consoled, O very docile art critics, who have been so far broken in spirit by your high-school education as to be capable of reading the sociologic, dull, bawdy, “photographic” novels which you demonstrably do read, by thousands upon thousands of copies every year, with a conscience glowingly plauditory, and even with a bland sense of acquiring culture!

  For it is not permitted you to perceive that these books are untrue to life. You are doomed to regard physical happenings with entire seriousness, and to believe their importance is vital. You cannot see that no man lives in the external truth—“among salts and acids,” says Stevenson,—but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted walls and the storied windows, regaling himself at every moment with his own vainglorious, superb, false notion about his existence. You cannot see that every human life is a never-ending dream, a work of unadulterated romance.

  So the wit and the fancy and the erudition of Smire—such as they may or may not be, let me append—are hors d’oeuvres not for your palate, O public at large. Do you remain blessed and contentedly blinded by that delusion which yet makes of your reading-matter an incredibly fantastic and unveracious form of journalism. I mean, of course, the delusion that the contemporaneous happening, the material accident, supremely and only, is of importance. So may the dreams of Smire seem to you unremunerative nonsense; and your bereavement will be made more endurable, now that the God of Branlon returns to his kingdom, forsaking you forever.

  Thus spoke sublime Smire; and having ceased his relation, rested. He coughed. He inclined statelily his divine head, in a dismissory gesture. He put by his finished cigarette.

  Well, and at this point Smire noted that the public at large were all sound asleep.

  Yet they stirred in their sleeping; and even in their sleeping they questioned him because of their unflagging interest in literary matters. They spoke severally, saying:

  “Which one of your books do you like best?”

  “Do you consider alcohol injurious? Is capitalism doomed? Is newspaper work a good training?”

  “Do you compose on the typewriter? Do you dictate? Does your secretary open all your letters?”

  “If I send you one of your books will you autograph it for a young friend of my wife’s second cousin, who is a great admirer of yours?”

  “Do you write in the morning or in the evening?”

  Thus did these sleepers question sublime Smire, and yet further did they question him, because of their enthusiasm for fine literature and their regard for the seven great virtues which are called distinction and clarity and beauty and symmetry and tenderness and truth and urbanity.

  Smire shrugged.

  Then he went onward, being already a bit beyond the public at large. He advanced affably into the vague cool twilight of the House of Moera.

  PART SIX. WHICH ARRANGES EVERYTHING

  “In the Iliad, with the exception of one passage (xx, 49), Moera is regarded as a singular person, but in the Odyssey becomes a common substantive. Yet she is likewise called Æsa in both productions; and since the general Etruscan term for a god was Æsar, the connection of Smire (as being perhaps an Etruscan god at one period, but afterward confounded with Tina or Vertumnus) does not demand any explaining, and in fact remains baffling to the imagination. It is upon this firm ground that Schellauer defends the Tarban text.”

  XXV. HOW MOERA WAS MANAGED

  Now the place in which Smire finds himself was a great dim corridor, with yet other corridors opening into it, and with closed black doors trimmed in silver upon all sides of Smire in every direction. He finds also in this place a fine-looking severe woman, past her first youthfulness, who sat knitting behind a sort of counter, with a large book upon it, beneath a sign that said “Public Accountant.”

  To the rear of this woman you noted open bookshelves; and upon these shelves, bound in old gilded leather, were ranged complete sets of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, including all their destroyed works. This woman was dressed very soberly, in a vaguely golden, brown dress, open at the neck, with a Medici collar made of fine stiffened coffee-colored lace. She wore likewise a pair of rather large spectacles.

  Nobody else was in sight; and so it was to her that Smire addressed himself politely, asking his way.

  “But with whom, Smire, have you an appointment?” she inquires, looking at him unbenignly, over her steel-rimmed spectacles.

  “I have no appointment, Madame Moera. Now but, to be sure, it is an odd thing that, even though you have the exact look of another superb woman, of a most adorable woman, who is called Jane, yet I must be calling you Moera, for no reason at all.”

  She laid down the shroud she was knitting for a god in the great pantheon of reviewers. She said,—

  “You have the sound reason, Smire, that I am Moera.”

  “Come now,” he cried out, with a deal more of jauntiness in his voice than he found in his heart, “but this is a most pleasant surprise! So I confront at long last that power which is above all gods. Well, and I cannot but wonder if you are that which, in our bungling way, we call justice, or loving-kindness, or perhaps chance, or it may be a mere cosmic chemistry?”

  She inquires coldly, “Shall I tell you, Smire?”

  And he answers: “Not for worlds, my dear lady. The affairs of your management, if you indeed be Moera, do not concern me. My interests have been made more parochial through a monarch’s loyalty to the welfare of his own kingdom. My official status, I must tell you, compels me to attend only to the doings of the God of Branlon, and to worship no other deity. So is it permitted me to remain frankly an egoist where all other persons are compelled to tell lies about their altruism.”

  She coughed. She consulted the large book which lay open before her.

  “I note, Smire, that you wish to see Branlon once more; and that the trouble is with your eyes. They need treatment.”

  “That is it, no doubt,” says Smire,—“so that my appointment must be with an oculist. Yet how could it come to be written down in that book?”

  “There is no truth of any sort, Smire, but is written down in the book of Moera.”

  “The urbane person,” replied Smire, “will not ever dispute, or accept unreservedly, the word of a gentlewoman. Yet your statement is sweeping. It is perhaps even a bit excessive. Do you find written in your book, for example, how much money is earned annually by
the newsboys of the United States, and through what cause, or just when, Gypsies first appeared in Europe?”

  She looked in the great volume. Astoundingly, she read out the correct answers.

  And when Smire tried her with yet other questions—asking who was the Chief Traffic Manager of the Norwegian State Railways, and what it meant when an army officer was blued, and into how many stones the Cullinan diamond was cut, and why a barber’s pole revolves downward, and what were the four different noises made by the seventeen-year locust,—then the result was the same. She answered every question correctly, and she even imitated the seventeen-year locust, with an exactness which Smire himself could not have improved on, out-of-hand.

  “Now do I perceive,” said Smire, reverently, “that you are indeed Madame Moera, the great Doom above every god, in these lands beyond common-sense. Hail, therefore, thou player with celestial ruin, thou deviser of divine nothingness! thou who dost bring to naught all that which faith begets, and who dost remake what made thee! Deliver me from the two Gray Ones who sit forever in the East and the West of the Sky, as the Wardens of Heaven and as the Wardens of Earth, and who make firm the secret places of death! for thy names are Eternity and Inevitableness.”

  “No, Smire; for my name is Moera.”

  “I would not willingly argue any question so personal,” says Smire; “but in point of fact, it is also Æsa, whereas your other name—your nickname, as it were, among your more intimate friends, during the levities of light social chitchat—is Aupeh-nef-naaem-tauat-apu. That was a circumstance quite generally known to the more cultured prelates of the ancient Egyptians.”