His battered mailbox was just inside the door. Dim electric light filtered down the rotting staircase. There was a letter in his box. With fingers that felt half paralyzed, he pulled out the letter. Probably something from his mother, filled with complaints. He did not care. Nothing mattered now. He was free. Something had shifted, moved with tremendous sound about him.
The letter was long and narrow and thin. A greenish color shone through the glassine window. He tore it open. And then he stared, dumfounded, down at a check for three hundred and fifty dollars, drawn to his order by the editor of the magazine to which he had sent his story: “We Were Not Afraid.”
Now he felt violently sick. He dropped his case. He did not feel the impact as it struck his foot. Everything swam before him. There was a slip of paper attached. He could hardly focus his eyes to read it; he did not know that the hoarse and broken sound he heard was his own hysterical laughter.
“We are pleased to send you three hundred and fifty dollars for your story ‘We Were Not Afraid.’ If you care to send us further stories, and we find them satisfactory and suitable for our publication, we will pay you at the customary rates. Would you, for our information, please send us a short autobiography, so that we may introduce you to our readers? Our subscribers usually like to know something about our authors—”
Frank leaned against the dusty wall of the hallway. He looked at the check. He laughed again, hoarsely, over and over. He could not stop. He had received money for his writing! This was money for his writing! His first money! He sat down on the lower step and laughed and laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks.
CHAPTER 63
Once Frank Clair had read a saying by a man, who was very wise, to the effect that if you invent something which the people need you will make a living, but if you invent something which they want you will make a fortune.
He remembered that. It was very simple. The people did not really “need” good books, splendid music or heroic statesmanship, in the true sense of necessity. They could get on in more or less comfort without these things, and certainly with dismaying peace of mind. They did not give their finest and most lucrative awards to the inventors of their necessities, but to the mountebanks who offered them gaudy luxuries, melodramatic politics, or raucous entertainment. Buffoonery was their pleasure and their joy.
Frank investigated the situation thoroughly. He found that there was a small public who awaited, and read, a few excellent books, but that this public was either very frugal or in poor circumstances, and usually borrowed these books from the lending and free libraries or filched them from friends. They rarely bought any, and so the author was usually compelled to earn his living in some other way. Frank remembered that very pertinent remark in the Bible: “Wisdom with an inheritance is good.” But few authors were blessed with an inheritance. If one wished to make a good living, and have a few garish luxuries oneself, one must give the public what it wanted.
He found that the reading public preferred two themes: Love (or Sex) and the American Success Story, if one combined both—and it was always clever to do so—the combination was irresistible.
After all, was it not an impertinence to insist that the public should like what it was offered, whether it wanted it or not? Was it not impudent to set up an individual standard, and denounce those who rejected it? If the law of the survival of the fittest was valid at all, what the people rewarded and allowed to survive must be “good.” Had not the Greeks said “that which survives is good”? Of course, there was an ambiguous cynicism there, if one wished to study the matter.
Frank now had a very comfortable little apartment in a “private home” on Lafayette Avenue, near Delaware. He had come a considerable distance in the past two years. The apartment was in no wise the garret in which artists are traditionally expected to starve. It was exceedingly comfortable, consisting of a pleasant bedroom-sitting-room, with the bed capable of assuming the bland aspect of a sofa during the day, a private tiled bathroom, and a tiny kitchenette. The family from whom he rented this agreeable little apartment were what Maybelle would have called “shabby genteel.” There was an elderly man, with an aristocratic and desiccated face, and his wife, equally aristocratic and desiccated. Their home was filled with antiques, very dark and gloomy, but someone, certainly not themselves, had taken a hand in furnishing the apartment, so that it was cheerful, inviting and quite bright with color. Frank rarely saw them, as he had a private entrance. Relations between himself and the old people were on a grave and ceremonious footing, which he preferred, and when they discovered that he was “a writer” they treated him with dignified respect. He paid them fifty dollars a month for his apartment.
He was averaging three thousand dollars a year, now from his short stories for the various magazines. He wrote everything. He did not disdain the Western type of tale, and his experiences in Kentucky helped him there. For the “slick” magazines he wrote endless stories of girls with burnished hair and slim figures, and their male counterparts. For the “little magazines” he wrote “smart” modern poetry, epigrams and tales with a naughty twist or an abrupt, brutal ending. He tried his hand at an article or two proving that a criminal was not really a criminal, but only a victim of his defective glands, that prosperity was really a state of mind, that Hitler and Mussolini were not really menaces but only amusing mountebanks who ought to be ignored by sensible men, that the companionship of a dog was the supreme satisfaction any man could desire, and other articles proving that American women, men, children, bathrooms, movies, restaurants, morals, automobiles, suburban homes, literature libraries, and cities were well-nigh perfect, and an example for all the world.
In short, he gave the people what they wanted, and told them what they wanted to hear. In return, he made a pleasant living, and each check he received was larger than the one he had received before. When a pocket digest magazine reprinted one of his articles which insisted that the rising horror in Europe was none of America’s business, that Europe’s agony was only a form of “propaganda” to excite the sentimentalists among the American people, he chuckled with gratification.
And now he had the theme for a novel, which he firmly believed would make him both rich and famous. Despite the soothing syrup which was being so sedulously fed to the American people in 1936, there was a poisonous wind of fear abroad, greater than the fear of the Depression. It was rationalized as the fear of war. But Frank intuitively suspected that it was not really the fear of being involved in a major conflict, for he knew that men had never truly despised or rejected war. It was something else. It was tenuous, ghostly, indefinable, but it was there. It was the fear of a people, the fear of a whole world which had lost God, and had not been able to replace Him with any satisfactory substitute. Modern inventions, the ubiquitous machine, had increased man’s comfort of body, but had emasculated his imagination, left barren his soul. Mysticism had been discarded, except in the Roman Catholic theology, to which even most Catholics paid lip service only. How was it possible to reconcile supematuralism with concrete streets, roaring automobiles, screaming airplanes, modern laboratories, movies, electricity? Supernaturalism belonged to the Middle Ages, before astrologers had become astronomers, before alchemists had respectably been converted into chemists, before brooding incantations had taken on the language of psychiatry, and before mystifying phenomena had surrendered to “natural” scientific explanation. In this welter of machines, books, laboratories, observatories and cyclotrons, God was only a dusty litter which had been swept into oblivion.
The suggestion that man had a soul had become much more indecent than had the subject of homosexuality and unnatural eroticism. It was a mark of sophistication to discourse gravely on libidos, sexual suppressions and libidinous dreams, but it was a mark of imbecility to discuss the possibility of the existence of God. In fact, it was actually a faux pas, not to be indulged in by the enlightened and the rational. At the charitable least, it evoked a faint, amused smile, or a quick averting o
f the eyes, as if the speaker had introduced a lewd theme not fit for the ears of the civilized.
Man, left alone among his machines, amid his howling wilderness of science, was terrified. His soul was convulsed with fear. He had found that he was not enough for himself, and that realism was a poor substitute for mystical faith. Perhaps, thought Frank, it is because man is still a primitive barbarian who must be given amulets and incantations against the horror of his instinctive consciousness of infinity and of the unknowableness of the universe which surrounds him. These could only be explained by God, who had been ignominiously banished from the universities and the calculations of scientists.
It was this fear, this godlessness, which now so afflicted the world of men, inspired them to such frenzies of hatred and murder and fury. A strange madness blew among the nations. It blew in America. And as, in these days, everything must be “explained,” it was asserted that the fear which so blanched the faces of men was the fear of war.
Americans did not want “war.” The country began to be flooded with anti-war propaganda, though, as yet, neither Hitler nor Mussolini had been so bold as to demand or openly threaten it. In an effort to “discover” the causes of war, all the peoples set themselves out to find culprits for past wars and plotters of future wars. They decided that the munitions makers and “international bankers” were really the villains. So, in America, there were feverish “exposures” of munitions magnates and many others.
Now Frank had a theme for a novel which would be eagerly accepted by the American people. He would create a family of “international bankers,” men of long, sober American backgrounds, who, from the time of the War of 1812, had cunningly and sedulously plotted wars for their own profit. This was what the American people wanted. Insecure, frightened, mysteriously terrified, they wished a scapegoat for their fear. He, Frank Clair, would give it to them. He would not exhort them to cry “mea culpa!” He would put into their mouths the hateful shout: “Lynch him!”
It would not be proper to tell them, in 1936, that if they did not want war they had, even now, only to lift their hands warningly and their voices sternly, to stop both Mussolini and Hitler at once, without the firing of a single gun. The American people were not in a mood to stop anyone, nor to “involve” themselves in “international entanglements.” They smelled danger and madness in Europe, and they were afraid. They preferred to find a sacrifice upon which to heap their frightened wrath.
Frank began to write his novel “The Golden Swords.” He wrote it at night, and devoted his days to the burnished girls and their handsome males. He invented a whole vicious family, a family of scapegoats, of murderers, of profiteers, of plotters, of sadists and monsters.
Strangely enough, he infused them with life. And now, as he wrote, a kind of hating madness rose in him, too, so that he forgot that he was rationalizing cynically. Out onto the pages he poured the hatreds and pains and sufferings and despairs of his own life, his own disillusionment, his own fear, his own loathing. The story rose, chapter by chapter, into a grotesque but powerful edifice, peopled with Frankenstein monsters, echoing with insane voices, rattling with the sound of counted money.
There was Sex aplenty, and plots to satisfy the most captious.
Never had Frank worked so feverishly, with so much engrossment and passion. He was making a comfortable living with his pen, though he was well aware that he was writing pure trash. He dedicated the days to the magazines; he worked at night on his novel. A frenzy was upon him, a kind of purging of disease. His main character, John Ainsworth, was his mouthpiece, his alter ego, a ruthless and malignant creation who expressed Frank Clair’s disgust for man, loathing for man, rejection of man. John Ainsworth was the moving spirit of his family, the inexorable beast who manipulated the fools and destroyed the blameless weaklings. Each chapter found him more invincible, more powerful, advancing more firmly toward the control of nations. He became, not a character in a novel, but a living being, endowed with Frank’s own thoughts, his own desires, his own hatreds, his own will to survive and to conquer. And because he was so alive, so vivid, the novel took on a kind of horrible magic and verity.
Sometimes, when at dawn Frank had to halt from sheer exhaustion, he would press his hand down convulsively upon the pages he had written and would look before him with wild, bright eyes. Here was his fortune! Here was his hope of deliverance! It was good. It was powerful. It was strong. It was full of rage and revulsion. Turgid, perhaps. Melodramatic, most surely. But—it was what the people wanted. And the people would make him free.
Frank lived for his novel. He wrote the magazine stories in a kind of abstracted trance. He forgot everything but the novel. At intervals, he forgot Jessica Bailey. Sometimes he forgot the day, the week, the month, and when he discovered it was Sunday, or July or November, he was dazed and disoriented like one emerging from an anesthetic. In a way, the novel was, for him, a release. In disguised and larger form, he wrote down his lifelong frustrations and miseries. John Ainsworth overcame them, prevailed over them, with massive will, by the manipulation of those about him.
Sound and fury, rage and excess, anger and despair, defeated dreams, filled every page of the novel. In rereading portions of it, Frank was sometimes faintly embarrassed by the wealth of adjectives and by some of the more thunderous passages. It was not dull. Critical though he was (with an eye to publishing), he admitted to himself that the writing had passion and verve, even if there was a sort of evilness about it, a kind of corruption, a deliberate twisting of phrase to gain a dubious point.
The novel had engrossed him. He had lived it. He could not understand why he felt weak and sick and somehow polluted when he had written the last long page. When he fastened on the covers, he was conscious of a kind of deflation in which there was no triumph, no satisfaction, no fulfillment. I am tired; it’s exhausted me, he thought, pressing his hands hard against his throbbing temples. He wrapped up the manuscript and carefully considered a publisher. No third-rate ones this time! He must have the best. He sent it to Thomas Ingham’s Sons.
He had orders for three new stories, one a serial. But he could not write again, not just now. He was inexplicably stunned. He felt as if some virtue, some substance, had gone from him, and that he was a veritable ghost of a man.
But as the days passed, his strange misery lifted, his sense of enormous guilt paled. Then he could not remember either the misery or the guilt, and he awaited each day’s mail with rising excitement.
The memory of Jessica Bailey came back to him, full-bodied, alive and warm. He gave himself up to dreams of fame, of meeting Jessica again, on equal terms, on an equal level. He saw himself standing near her, in that faint, dim room, looking down into her large, dark eyes, which smiled so gravely and gently. He knew that she had not married. From time to time, interrupting his stupefied engrossment with his novel, he read of her comings and goings, in the newspapers. He learned that she was the orphaned daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. James Harvard Bailey, and that she “resided” with her uncle, Wentworth Bailey, who was president of the most important bank in Bison. Once or twice, he saw her face in the newspapers, and he cut out the photographs.
She became, for him, a greater reality than he had remembered. In a way, he worked for her. She was the personification of all that he desired, she and that great quiet house among its secluded trees. He did not know how he knew this, but, with a queer and strong conviction, he believed that she was waiting for him, as he was waiting for her.
He had, so far, seen her only on the day when he had sold her some stockings, when he had learned of Mr. Farley’s bequest, when he had received the first money for his writing. A month after that he had had a short note from her, asking him to return with his samples. He had written her stiffly in reply: “I am no longer with that company. I have returned to my profession as a writer.”
His first story had been published, and she wrote him, congratulating him, and hinted that she would be delighted to have him call. He he
ld the letter in his hand and engaged in an agonized struggle with himself. Then he went to his closet and looked at his clothes. There were more of them now, but they were cheap. She was accustomed to easy, rough tweeds, exquisitely tailored, on the backs of her friends. These twenty-five-fifty suits would affront her. He thought of buying one expensive suit, but some stern lesson from his parents not to “make a show when you can’t afford it, and put on side,” restrained him. Some meritorious pride made him shut the closet door firmly, and set his lips as firmly. No. He would wear such suits, and go to see her, when he was in a position to buy not one but several of the coveted garments and not anxiously count the cost.
Twice again, she wrote to tell him that she had seen another of his stories in a magazine. She never explained her interest in him, and he never wondered. It was all inevitable. She would wait, he was certain.
His life was the life of a recluse. He spent hours in the library doing research for his next book, another American Success Story. He ate in good restaurants, and sometimes he bought a steak and cooked a meal for himself in his kitchenette. He walked the hot summer streets of Bison in a dream. It was not the dream of his youth. It was a darker and a stronger dream, and corrupt. From time to time, a sick depression and wretchedness fell upon him, an emptiness. He bought vitamins and iron tonics for his lassitude. He began to suffer from nightmares and vague aches and pains. Sometimes he felt that he was squeezed dry, attenuated. Once or twice a huge pain struck at his heart. He had no friends, no recreations. He was shut in himself, and breathed his own breath.
He was not accustomed to inactivity. More and more he took to wandering the streets restlessly. He tried to begin his new book. But all at once he found himself impotent again, blank, full of nauseous malaise. From his earliest youth he had been familiar with this sensation, but now it took on an ominous and frightening intensity, a physical apathy, a mental emptiness filled only with a sense of calamity and nameless apprehension. Out of the dim memories of his childhood floated the dream, or reality, of the vision he had had on the hearth of his grandmother’s home in Leeds. But now the Hand which had launched the opalescent ball into space remained suspended in his mind, incapable of receding, lifting, dropping or disappearing. It hung there in the misty darkness, enormously and cosmically weary, rigid with exhaustion, desiring only nothingness, impelled by some horrible circumstance to remain, to be, never to die. Frank could see that Hand before him when awake or when asleep, and he felt in himself, as an echo, the terrible weariness of God, the desire for death, the desire not to be, the inability to expire and be at peace.
There Was a Time Page 57
