The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel

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by Lionel Trilling


  regard for each other.

  “Do you remember,” Toss said, “when your cousin Francis looked

  like God Almighty to us because he was a newspaperman? He was a

  reporter then, a leg-man.”

  Toss used the professional phrase with the relish they had shared

  when, making their plans to be correspondents together, they had admit-

  ted that it might be necessary and even useful to begin as leg-men, learn-

  ing the municipal secrets before they learned the secrets of chancellories.

  “That was ten years ago,” Vincent said in a large easy way.

  “Yes, a good ten years.”

  They got a common pleasure, at their age, from being able to express

  their past in so full a figure. Vincent took a swallow of his drink and so

  did Toss.

  the unfinished novel

  “We used to think Francis was romantic,” Vincent said. But the hu-

  mor of putting their juvenile misconception in this particular way won

  no response from Toss.

  “You’re pretty friendly with him now, aren’t you?” Toss asked.

  “Friendly? Well …” Vincent let his voice trail into dubiety. “Francis

  doesn’t like me and I don’t care for him, but he’s a very proper fellow and he

  has a sense of family obligation, as he would call it, so he throws little things

  my way. Like his just asking me to fill in at the copy desk tomorrow.”

  Toss’s face brightened as the secret transaction of the tennis court

  was explained. Vincent saw the relief he had given his friend and it made

  him feel friendly. He wanted to have back again the old relationship in

  which he and Toss shared every detail of their lives. He told Toss the

  momentous fact.

  “I’ve had a letter from Harold Outram,” he said. “He’s in town and

  he’s asked me to come to see him.”

  Toss responded well enough to the importance which the fact seemed

  to have for Vincent. He could not be entirely impressed because he did

  not know who Outram was. But he was genially willing to be told.

  “Who’s Outram?” he asked.

  The question was frankly asked, without any of the sulky irony which

  lately touched Toss’s questions. Vincent made up his mind to answer just

  as openly. He was aware of the risk. What he felt about Outram was the

  kind of thing he now found hard to tell Toss. It was part of the ethical

  certitude that had grown to dominate his life in the last few years. His

  consciousness of what Harold Outram’s fate meant was exactly the kind

  of thing that was cutting him off from Toss. Yet this time he was deter-

  mined that he would keep back none of his actual feeling. He would give

  Toss the story of Outram’s career just as he really saw it.

  In every large American city at that time there were certain young

  men who took great interest in such stories as the one Vincent Hammell

  told Toss Dodge. These were the precarious few, their talents unknown

  or untried, for whom art and intellect were salvation. Some taught in the

  high schools, some in universities, some served as librarians, or worked

  in department stores. A few held jobs from WPA but that was coming to

  an end. Whatever they did was only by the way—their gaze was fixed on

  what they would do. It had, that gaze of theirs, not merely a spiritual but

  a geographical direction. It was turned East, Europe in the hazy ultimate

  distance, New York closer in possibility but still far off. Time was of the

  essence of their deep anxiety. They cherished their youth, for they sup-

  posed their gifts to be bound up with it. They saw each unfruitful year as

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  a loss not only of opportunity but of integrity. Hawk-eyed and with apoca-

  lyptic imaginations, they watched over the integrity of certain heroes and

  demi-heroes whose fates, as they felt, were a portent of their own. They

  had their martyrs; some cherished Scott Fitzgerald, some Hart Crane.

  For many of them, the new ethical fierceness of radical politics made

  their morality of art the more merciless.

  Such young men would be well-versed in an American story like Har-

  old Outram’s. They believed they could trace it back in variant versions

  for some decades. They would certainly not find Outram’s version excep-

  tional. Still, it had a more than usually brilliant appeal to their imagina-

  tions because of the rumored vastness of the salary and the extent of the

  power for which Outram had, as they said, “sold out.”

  It did not take Vincent long to tell the story. He told it in a quiet

  voice, looking now and then into the glass he was holding. With every

  few sentences he renewed his determination to tell it as he really saw

  it, to believe that Toss would see its sad and perplexing meaning. He

  told first how Outram, a poor boy, had worked his way through college,

  winning unusual honors and a graduate fellowship. Of Outram’s doc-

  torate at twenty-three he spoke lightly, as if it were nothing more than

  an indication of the native power of Outram’s mind and of his skill in

  using it. But he gave more weight to the critical essays which made the

  next stage of Outram’s career. They had been very simple and unassum-

  ing yet they were marked by a degree of perception and personal feeling

  which were surprising in a man so young. A novel came next, not all it

  should have been, but so startlingly good that for a small group Outram

  became one of the legends of new American promise. Not long after

  this, however, Outram had had a sudden experience of political convic-

  tion. His work had always been to some degree “socially aware,” as peo-

  ple then said, and he even had the literary socialism of the time, mild

  and taken for granted. But now he moved far to the left. He became

  the pet of a hundred committees, clubs, leagues and guilds. He wrote

  very little and that little was of an “agitational” nature. Yet within a year

  he had descended to apostasy as dramatic as his conversion, and from

  that into a year of mental depression which quite incapacitated him.

  But his health had come back and within an amazingly short time he

  had made an almost legendary rise in magazine journalism. The climax

  of his career had come only recently. It was an event which beautifully

  completed his moral interest for the watchful young men. To the ac-

  companiment of a brisk ruffle of newspaper drums, Outram had been

  appointed director of the great new Peck Foundation with power to dis-

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  pense at discretion those incalculable millions for the advancement of

  American culture.

  Vincent held to his resolve as he told this story. He told it to Toss just

  as he would tell it to that little group of his literary friends Toss so jeal-

  ously hated. As he went on, he saw the sullenness set harder and harder

  on Toss’s face. Yet he did not relax his determination. His effort was his

  last offering to his dying friendship with Toss.

  “Well?” Toss said when Vincent finished. The blankness of his voice

  was heavily contrived. It was the trick of saying “Go on” to the man whose

  joke has been fully told.


  Vincent was angrier with himself for giving the advantage than with

  Toss for taking it. “Silence and cunning,” he warned himself, “silence

  and cunning!” It was a motto which, when he had been rather more

  flamboyant in his notion of himself, he had adopted from a once-favorite

  book. But he was no Stephen Dedalus. He could not aspire to the ar-

  rogance of the motto of the artist as a young man. Some generosity of

  his imagination made him see the subtle unhappiness which his large

  and stern considerations introduced into the mind of Toss Dodge. A rec-

  ollection of their old boyhood creed of fairness, the code by which the

  shared candy-bar was bisected to the micro-millimeter, made him see

  that he was refuting Toss’s life as much as Toss was denying his. And so

  he made his reply gentle.

  “You have to think,” he said, “of how great his talents were and what

  it means for a man like that to be made into an official, a stuffed shirt.”

  And he even went on to say, “You have to see, Toss, what it means to

  our cultural situation that a man should throw away so much talent, just

  for money.”

  Never before had he used with Toss the tone of forbearance. It was

  fatal.

  “I don’ t see it,” Toss said, making his voice as coarse and practical as

  he could. “I suppose I’m crass and dumb, but I just don’t see it. The man

  was free to do what he wanted. He took a flier at being a writer, and he

  took a flier at being a radical. I have respect for both and you know it. I

  have respect for a sincere radical. All right, he didn’t like either one. Now

  he’s got a job where he can do some good to mankind at large and you

  talk as if he had committed the—the unpardonable sin. No, I don’t see it.

  He has my respect.”

  Toss got up. In the movement, the edge of his jacket brushed against

  his glass and swept it off the table. The sound of its shattering gave to

  their difference of opinion a retrospective confusion and intensity. It

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  made them feel that they had been even more deeply involved in passion

  than they had supposed.

  Vincent knelt to pick up the fragments, expecting Toss to do the

  same. So often in the past they had knelt in guilty cooperation to gather

  the shards of their mothers’ glassware or crockery. But Toss said, “Leave

  it, the houseman will sweep it up.”

  There was nothing at all unfriendly in Toss’s voice. He had spoken,

  indeed, with a notable simplicity, as of an older man to a younger. Rich

  young people acquire certain of the manners of authority. In some ways

  they seem older than their years. But Vincent had never before heard

  from Toss the easy voice of a man who knows exactly how things are

  done and what is to be left to the servants. But neither had Toss ever

  heard from Vincent, as he had a moment before, the checked, consider-

  ate tone of one who conveys instruction. For the first time in their twelve

  years together they had condescended to each other.

  As they walked to Toss’s car, Toss said, “How do you know so much

  about this Outram?”

  “Teddy Kramer knew him at college. They were friends.”

  As always, Toss kept a sour silence at the mention of Kramer’s name.

  He had never met this former professor and present friend of Vincent’s

  but he felt toward Kramer a deep antagonism. He said, “You say he wrote

  to you? What made him do that?”

  “Well,” said Vincent, “he answered a letter I wrote him.”

  “You wrote to him?” Toss was really surprised, but he made his sur-

  prise seem greater than it was. “You wrote to him? What did you write to

  him about?”

  “I happened to read his collected essays and I liked them. So I wrote

  to tell him that I did.”

  “A fan letter,” Toss said. His voice was friendly and even encourag-

  ing, so that his use of the phrase to summarize what Vincent had done

  had perhaps the look of a tentative amend. But then Vincent saw that

  Toss’s handsome boyish face was taking on the air of archness which it

  assumed for one of those moments of finesse in which Toss sometimes

  indulged.

  It was a trick of Toss’s, acquired in the last few years, that Vincent

  hated. It always broke, if only for a moment, the connection between

  the two young men. Toss looked contemplatively into the far distance

  and drawled in a high juvenile irony, “Well, I hope it won’t corrupt you, I

  hope it won’t rot your soul that you picked such an influential sell-out to

  write a fan letter to.”

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  And Toss laughed as if the old bond were now again in force. No

  doubt he wanted it to be. But the bond was not between them. What a

  year ago would have still been kidding, now reverberated as malice. They

  would meet again, but the friendship was finished. Vincent did not reply.

  He was too concerned with the meaning of this moment. He understood

  it fully and he marked it to himself by thinking in clear, articulate words,

  “My youth is over.”

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  chapter 4

  On the chiffonier in Vincent Hammell’s room there stood four books,

  held upright by a pair of bronze bookends in the once familiar form of

  the straining elephants. The books were the yellowish white volumes of

  the Collection Nelson, the little French classics that are printed in Edin-

  burgh. The sentimental whiteness of their binding and the limp festoons

  of violet and green which drooped down their spines belied their stern

  contents, for one volume was Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, one was

  Balzac’s Père Goriot and the others were the two volumes of Stendhal’s

  The Red and the Black. They were soiled with much handling; within,

  their narrow margins were filled with vocabulary notes.

  The carpentered bookcase against the opposite wall was not full—

  these books had not been placed on the chiffonier for lack of space but

  for a ritual purpose. They were here before the mirror to remind Vincent

  Hammell of the several fates which might destroy a young man. From the

  histories of Frederic Moreau, Rastignac and Julien Sorel, this young man

  of the American middle west had learned what he must be careful of.

  The ritual position of these books was the key to the room, for every-

  thing here had a meaning for its occupant. Only two pictures hung on

  the unfinished novel

  the walls. One was a reproduction of the Dürer engraving of the Prodigal

  Son. It represented a young man of strongly marked features kneeling in

  prayer among the swine. The other picture was a color print of the Henri

  Rousseau in the Hermitage at Moscow and it showed a large-bodied, big-

  faced allegorical figure, robed in purple, her hand raised in announce-

  ment or admonition, the other arm thrown about the shoulders of a man

  who wore a velvet jacket and under it an ugly brown sweater; he carried

  a very white quill pen in one hand and in the other a roll of manuscript

  and his heavy countenance was reflective and sour. Behind the figures

  was a tangled jungle
and before them a lawn neatly set with flowers, and

  the picture seemed to mean that the Muse was leading a literary man out

  of the woods.

  A small radio-phonograph stood on a carpentered stand of stained

  pine and beneath it were a few albums of records. On the desk was a por-

  table typewriter and a pottery jar full of sharpened pencils. Among the

  books in the bookcase—there were about two hundred—were a Greek

  grammar, a French and a German dictionary, a college-text anthology of

  Latin poetry. Most of the volumes were the cheap books that a student

  buys, Everyman’s Library, Modern Library or the Oxford Standard Au-

  thors, but there were also copies of Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot and the two

  volumes of Rilke that had at that time been translated.

  Everything in this room was sparse and neatly arranged, for it was a

  fortress provisioned against siege. It was a matter of satisfaction to Vincent

  Hammell that two unopened reams of paper and a carton of cigarettes lay

  in a drawer and that an electric plate and a jar of coffee made him, in the

  solitary hours of the night, independent of his mother’s kitchen.

  The only discordant object in the room was the chiffonier on which

  the shrine of books was set. Its mahogany veneer had bubbled and had

  fallen away in a few places, exposing the soft white wood beneath. Its

  curves spoke of a defeated, and hopeless gentility. The chiffonier was an

  irritation in the military or monastic neatness of the room, yet Vincent

  Hammell felt that for this very reason it had its place here—it served to

  remind him of the everlasting enemy.

  Vincent was laying his tennis things over the back of a chair when

  his mother looked in at the door. She was a handsome woman of fifty-six,

  lonely but always alert to her son. Vincent’s room usually daunted her a

  little. She imagined it as the scene of intellectual mysteries from which

  she was unjustly barred. But now she saw what Vincent was doing and

  she entered boldly and snatched up the clothes into a moist bundle. “I’ll

  take these,” she said, “and hang them on the line.”

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  the unfinished novel

  She stood there, holding the damp clothes which momentarily gave

  her the license to be again his mother, in function as well as in fact. “My

  goodness!” she said. The clothes were very damp and they were begin-

 

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