The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel

by Lionel Trilling

  with the ancient hero; the developing scandal; the complex responses of

  the community to the scandal; his own feelings and action in the case;

  the formal resolution of the story in the death of the ruined old man; the

  resolution of the young hero’s own life.

  The young hero, then, is to be the carrier of the thread of the story;

  he is not, however, to be perfectly the center of the interest—clearly the

  old man will dispute that with him, not to mention X, the headmaster,

  the several women, the Yescombe-and-Geraldine characters, and others

  that are knocking for admission.

  From this point further detail isn’t possible. But I can say a few things

  about the quality of the story as I want it to be.

  First, it is to be above all a story. The fable, I think, is of a kind that

  will inevitably throw off ideas; and the characters are articulate, intel-

  ligent and embody certain moralities. But this is not to be a “novel of

  ideas.” The fable was chosen because it is inherently dramatic, and the

  characters are shaping themselves toward size and the ability to act.

  As for the manner of the novel, that will be as simple as possible. I

  will attempt no “devices,” have no foreshortenings, no tricky flashbacks;

  it will move from scene to scene in the old-fashioned way. The prose is

  to be equally simple, as unobtrusive as possible and not “internal” to any

  one of the characters. A great deal in this narrative will depend on the

  nature of the prose; it must create the right attitude to the characters—it

  must be at once objective and warm, something like the prose of the

  story of mine I referred to.

  The time of the story will be what, since the war, we can call the recent

  past—that is, the late thirties: the period when the intense consciousness

  of the Depression had faded and when the war had not yet become a per-

  fect certainty. The novel will have, I hope, political—that is to say, moral,

  cultural—reverberations, but no specific political content. The length of

  the story I of course cannot estimate, but 400 pages seems a desirable

  length; the nature of the story suggests at least this much expansiveness.

  lii

  chapter 1

  The Tennis Club was a modest affair of six good courts and a small frame

  clubhouse. It was not far from the heart of the city but it had a pleasant

  little lawn and a fine large tree shading the verandah. On the farthest

  court two elderly members were playing their daily game. They were ad-

  mirable players, quite the pride of the club. Their trousers were of the

  whitest flannel and they stroked with so grave and rhythmic a skill and

  they kept the ball so long in play that their game was like a figure in a

  ballet. A rather noisy game of doubles occupied the court nearest the

  clubhouse. Two young men, Toss Dodge and Vincent Hammell, were

  playing on the third court.

  Vincent Hammell could usually beat Toss Dodge, but not always.

  Dodge was really the better player but he was in a relation to Hammell

  that hurt his game. He could play very well against an opponent who

  did not make him feel stupid. Even with Hammell he sometimes forgot

  about himself and then his real game came through. When that hap-

  pened, Vincent Hammell played far below his own real game because he

  felt unhappy at having up to then beaten a better man by what amounted

  to guile.

  the unfinished novel

  Tennis was always important to Vincent Hammell and the bad days

  and the good ones were alike significant. There were certain days when

  some newly-gained sense told him just where the ball was going to be.

  On these days it was as if a small brain had established itself in his

  wrist—without any conscious intention, his racket sent the ball where,

  if there had been time, reason would have suggested. Usually such days

  were also the ones when he had before his eyes the correct pattern of the

  service and could make his body conform to it.

  Today he had been granted all the magics. He kept very much to

  himself on his side of the court, protecting the mystery of his skill from

  any interruption by his opponent. He also had to protect it from any in-

  terruption by himself. If he became too conscious and interfered with it,

  the favor of this beautiful coordination would vanish.

  The first set had gone to Vincent, then Toss Dodge had won the sec-

  ond set, and in the third set Vincent was ahead, three-two. He was get-

  ting ready to serve when the doubles game on the first court ended and

  one of the players, Francis Hammell, his distant cousin, walked over to

  him. Francis was the night city editor of the Advertiser. Vincent held his

  service and waited for his cousin to come up.

  Francis said, “Can you give us a day to-morrow? Malcolm is sick.”

  Vincent was glad to have the work but he said nothing more than

  “Sure.” Usually he was careful with Francis. The cousinship was vague

  and there were a few small things that Francis could do for him. But

  today he handled himself carelessly. He found that being a guest at the

  club made a difference. So did being flushed and physical and playing

  well. He was less anxious to be pleasant to Francis than to have Francis

  leave the court before the pattern of the service should get uncertain in

  his mind. And Francis, who never treated him with quite enough re-

  spect, had now to understand the rights of a man in action. He said, “I’ll

  be seeing you then,” and turned to go.

  Vincent found that with the racket in his hand and the heavy sweat on

  his face he did not have to make any answer. He took his position at the

  baseline. It was not often that all the parts of his young mind and body

  made so perfect a whole as they did at this moment. Suddenly he felt the

  impulse to put the inspired moment to some larger use. He decided to

  believe that if he beat Toss Dodge he would gain something momentous

  from his interview with Harold Outram. The letter from Outram, suffi-

  ciently momentous in itself, was safe in his jacket in the locker room.

  He did not know what he could possibly gain from Outram, but

  he needed help and perhaps Outram was the man to give it. There was

  the unfinished novel

  enough chance of Toss’s beating him to make the game a true hazard.

  Toss was really the better player but Vincent knew that he could beat

  Toss if he went about it right. If he allowed Toss to beat him, it could only

  mean that his intention was not strong.

  This wager that Vincent Hammell made with himself was partly fan-

  ciful but also partly serious. Young men who consciously thirst for great-

  ness often keep the superstitions of their boyhood and are sometimes

  impelled to test the power of their stars.

  Toss Dodge had not been able to overhear the brief conversation be-

  tween the Hammell cousins. The world was depressingly full of secrets

  for Toss and he lost the next game at love. But with the set going his way

  at four-two, Vincent grew cautious. He began to think about his strokes

  and Toss took the next game and then the next. Vincent told himself that

 
winning or losing the set could make no real difference. Yet he did not

  believe this and he was right not to, the wager having once been made.

  Early in the next game Vincent had Toss well out of position and the

  point seemed inevitably his. But he drove the ball wide and lost the point.

  Toss called out in a large and genial way, “Thank you ever so much.”

  Vincent was about to make some reply, such as “You’re quite wel-

  come, I’m sure,” but he checked himself and said nothing. He walked

  in silence from the net to the baseline. An answer was called for by the

  tradition of the game’s banter, by the habit of his old friendship with

  Toss, by his conscious desire to be kind, by the very air of mid-western

  America that he breathed. But he kept silent. He could plainly see Toss’s

  hurt perplexity, but he did not relent. He was able to win the last game

  easily and take the set.

  In the locker room Vincent Hammell shucked off his shorts and

  shirt and stood before the mirror for a view of himself. He was pleased

  enough with what he saw. At twenty-three he was just weighty and hairy

  enough for maturity, yet he was slim enough to make chiefly the impres-

  sion of youth.

  “Narcissismus,” he said aloud.

  “What did you say?” Toss called from his locker down the aisle.

  “Narcissismus!” Vincent called back, not explaining and knowing

  that Toss would not ask again.

  He was in a good humor with himself. He began to sing the grotesque

  clinical German word to the music of Leporello’s aria in Don Giovanni.

  Where Leporello sings “La piccina, la piccina, la piccina,” informing us

  that his master prefers young girls to all other sorts of women, Vincent

  Hammell sang, “Narcissismus, Narcissismus, Narcissismus,” mocking

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  himself. But in Spain, in Spain alone, said the song, there had been a

  thousand and three—peasant girls and chambermaids, citizenesses and

  countesses, marchionesses and princesses, femininity of every degree. It

  was a song not only about women but also about scope and possibility,

  about a superabundance that never sated, although the joy was in the

  mind of the servant who counted up the delights, not in the mind of the

  master who had had them.

  When they had showered and dressed, Toss Dodge invited Vincent

  to a drink. Vincent liked sitting on the club verandah. The club had a

  good tone although it was not snobbish—he could belong any time he

  could spare the fifty dollars a year, but that was a long way off.

  chapter 2

  The friendship between Toss Dodge and Vincent Hammell was nearing

  its end. They had known each other for twelve years and there was a

  good chance that neither of them would ever again have a relation with

  a member of his own sex that would be so pervasive and so pleasurable.

  They had met when Toss was twelve and Vincent eleven, two mannerly

  boys and very grave, approaching each other on a sidewalk not so much

  warily as shyly. They had their manners in common, for the Dodges had

  come down a little in the world at the time of their meeting and the

  Hammells had always been rather superior to their own financial posi-

  tion, which, as a matter or fact, was then not too bad.

  Mrs. Dodge, who was from the East, with Southern connections,

  and who did not like or trust this great, “new,” shambling city, had spied

  young Vincent Hammell the day she moved in. She was struck by the ad-

  mirable shape of his head and the dark handsomeness of his intelligent

  look. She called him to the attention of her son, who was roving bored

  and restless amid the moving-in, prowling among the furniture that was

  being so shamelessly exposed on the sidewalk. “That looks like a nice

  boy,” Mrs. Dodge said, “Why don’t you get to know him?”

  the unfinished novel

  It was summer and Vincent Hammell had less to do with his days

  than he needed. There were very few children in the neighborhood and

  Mrs. Hammell did not like him to wander far from home. Mrs. Ham-

  mell was a lonely woman[;] she had become reconciled to her loneliness,

  believing it to be inevitable at her age, but she was touched by her son’s

  lost fidgeting through the long summer afternoon. Having observed the

  furniture of the new family with approval of its quality, she saw young

  Toss Dodge with pleasure and relief.

  Her feeling was for Vincent’s sake, for the new boy looked like a

  promising friend. But she was pleased for another reason. Although the

  new people were moving into a newer and more desirable house than

  the one the Hammells had, and although their furniture was clearly

  more elegant than the Hammells’, she saw at once that their superiority

  ended there. When it came to sons, the new family could not equal the

  Hammells. The new boy was undoubtedly a nice-looking boy, but as he

  stood watching the van-men, it was clear to Mrs. Hammell that he did

  not have Vincent’s distinction.

  And when Mrs. Hammell met Mrs. Dodge, she understood how the

  difference had originated. Although the boys were almost of the same

  age, something more than a decade separated the mothers. Mrs. Ham-

  mell was in her forties, Mrs. Dodge in her thirties. The decade between

  them was more than a difference in age. It was part of a difference in

  culture. Even at Mrs. Dodge’s age, Mrs. Hammell had thought of herself

  as no longer young. But Mrs. Dodge was clearly a young woman. This

  was apparent not only in her nice figure and pretty legs but also in her

  bright, cropped hair, her perfume and her way of speech. Mrs. Hammell

  knew that it was not only because Mrs. Dodge had been born into a more

  generous time which allowed women to be young longer. It was also be-

  cause her social class was more fortunate. “Fortunate” was the word, not

  “better,” for Mrs. Hammell thought of her own family as plain but good.

  Her father had, for a short time, served as a city magistrate and she took

  pride in her own training and service as a school teacher. But certainly

  more fortunate, and that accounted for Mrs. Dodge’s early marriage and

  motherhood, as well as her present youth. They were all part of the so-

  cial establishment that Mrs. Dodge had had in her youth and expected

  to have again. The two women never became really friends but they re-

  spected each other and learned something about each other’s past. And

  the difference in their pasts, far more than any difference in character,

  accounted to Mrs. Hammell for the difference between their two sons.

  For Mrs. Hammell saw how relatively little a son meant to Mrs. Dodge.

  the unfinished novel

  She had to envy, a little, the advantages Mrs. Dodge had had, but she

  could also see how much Mrs. Dodge had lost by them. For Mrs. Dodge’s

  Toss was but a casual person, a person like any other. But into Vincent

  had gone the desire, the tension of Mrs. Hammell’s own life, the delayed

  marriage, the delayed and difficult pregnancy, all her will in overcoming

  difficulties. And the result was to be seen, she felt, in the fineness of her

  own son’s appea
rance, the alertness and demand of his whole being.

  Mrs. Dodge might drink cocktails with her husband before dinner—

  thus forcing Mrs. Hammell to modify her views, derived only from the

  newspapers, of the sordidness of illegal liquors—or be playfully spanked

  by Mr. Dodge in greeting or farewell, or kiss certain men friends who

  came to visit. And Mr. Dodge, with his long legs, his white shirts with

  buttoned-down collars and his suits that, as Toss told Vincent, came

  from “Brooks,” with his schemes and his trips and his rolls of blueprints,

  he might be very different from Mr. Hammell, so quiet a man, who lived

  his life as an optometrist with so scholarly a reserve. Yet all that fine and

  rather enviable flair of the Dodge parents had not been able to produce

  what Mrs. Hammell saw in her own son.

  It was not merely motherly pride that made her judgment of Vin-

  cent, of that Mrs. Hammell was convinced. She was rather short sighted

  and a little absent-minded and more than once she had seen the figure of

  a boy on the street which would strike her with its distinction, so much,

  indeed, that in her admiration she would feel a pang of jealousy for her

  own son, until suddenly as the boy came nearer, she would see with grat-

  itude and relief that it was Vincent himself. She was as confirmed as she

  needed to be in the objectivity of her opinion.

  The two boys, Toss and Vincent, when their attention was called to

  each other, naturally did not directly accept their mothers’ suggestion to

  make acquaintance. Vincent stood on his part of the sidewalk and looked

  at the newcomer, who looked back and then turned his attention to the

  moving-men. Vincent kicked his way over to the curb and examined some-

  thing at the edge of the road. He looked at it with a deep, rather amused

  curiosity. He touched it with the toe of his shoe. The object, whatever it

  was, engaged his attention as a Naturalist, a person to whom all things

  were significant. Actually he was examining nothing at all. But to justify

  his attention, he picked up a fallen seed-pod, peered at it a moment with

  a discerning eye, then threw it away, shaking his head in mild disappoint-

  ment—nothing, after all, out of the ordinary. Meanwhile Toss had taken