The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel
Page 11
ning to smell strong. Vincent saw her face become happy as she deplored
his being a man and a nuisance.
“You were working late last night,” she said, “I heard your typewriter.
It must have been nearly three o’clock.”
Vincent said, “I’m sorry if I kept you up.”
“Oh, you didn’t. It was company for me, I couldn’t sleep. I’d hear you
get over the false starts and go along as if nothing could stop you and that
made me very happy. What was it?”
He did not answer, for the knowledge that he had not been alone
in the night made him feel unaccountably deprived. His moment of af-
fectionate understanding of his mother passed. He felt caught and dull.
Down upon his mind there descended the dark impotence, the marshy
boredom that for so many months had been the chief condition of his
life. The tennis court coherence left his body and all possibility and fu-
turity passed from his world. What he felt is often felt by young men
between their earliest youth and their maturity, when the college connec-
tions are broken and the world has not yet received them, not even badly,
and especially by young men of a literary turn of mind, poor young men
or those of the lower middle class. On spring nights that echo with the
unheard whistles of transcontinental trains, or in the sunny emptiness
of great summer afternoons, or in the large false brightness of thaw-
ing February days, these young men experience their respectable shabby
neighborhoods as the localities of nightmare enchantment. It is they who
can best understand the intention of certain pictures of Chirico, feeling
the long shadows and the desperate emptiness like an inverse sensuality.
“Life” presents itself to them not as an abstraction but as a simple great
object to be seized by everyone else, only not by them. In their impotence
they live with images of flight and death, and they can scarcely contem-
plate the great plans that had formerly given pleasure to their imagina-
tions. Sometimes, in order to touch, to receive a response, to be able to
influence, to do, to create, they turn to some love affair, finding the world
made almost real again by a girl’s quickened breath, and they even begin
to think that the process of realization can be carried further by the very
hardships and responsibilities of marriage, although only recently these
very things had seemed the enemies of all their hopes.
To Vincent Hammell, the letter from Harold Outram had been a
breath from the great world that really existed, from “life” itself. The let-
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ter had come the day before and last night, for the first time in many
months, Vincent had been able to work. But now, suddenly, the letter had
lost all its talismanic power.
When Mrs. Hammell did not receive an answer to her question, she
asked encouragingly, “I suppose it’s the book?—I’m glad you’ve started
again,” she said. She partly believed what Vincent had told her, that he
might establish himself in the world by means of literature. It was be-
yond her knowledge of literature and of the world to be astonished at the
project her son had undertaken. For at twenty-three Vincent Hammell
was staking his life upon nothing less grandiose than a history of Ameri-
can literature in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Mrs. Hammell,
having accepted this project as a somewhat unusual way of rising in the
world, but one it was not for her to judge, gave it all her loyalty and was
concerned only when it no longer seemed to be advancing. And for a
good while now Vincent had met all questions and all questioning looks
with silence and a shrug. As the weeks and months went by, she had
learned to say nothing and even to look nothing. But now that the work
seemed to have begun again, she thought that it could not be amiss to
speak of it. “I’m glad you’ve started again,” she said. “It sounded as if you
were doing well.”
“It’s a flash in the pan,” Vincent said with bitter energy. “Tomorrow
I’ll be as dry as a bone.”
It was far easier, it was somehow even preferable, to recall the hostile,
splenetic energies that had so long kept his mind immobile than to re-
member the bright sober emotions of the night. He turned sullenly from
his mother and looked out of the window, holding aside the faded chintz
curtains. He stared down at the narrow driveway between their house
and the house next door. He saw with intentional literary sharpness the
parallel tracks of concrete that led to their neighbor’s garage, saw the
ashes and weeds between the tracks. He spoke without turning, his eyes
fixed on these saddening things. “I can’t go on like this,” he said.
His mother came up to him and touched him. “You’re so young,”
she said, “and in a way you’re successful already.”
But his self-torture was stubborn. “Not so young any more,” he said.
“We can’t go on forever thinking I’m young. I’m not so young any more.”
He was being as cruel to his mother as to himself.
“I’m twenty-three and my fine success consists of a quarter-time job
at the university, a couple of days a month for the Advertiser, oh yes, and
the pleasure of instructing the ladies at Meadowfield in creative writing.
Quite a success.”
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“There are your pieces in The Prairie Review.”
“Who reads that except Kramer?”
Mrs. Hammell looked at her son with troubled eyes. He was mak-
ing her unhappy, as he intended, but beneath her unhappiness she felt a
flicker of warmth and animation. She was stirred by the impatient frus-
trated energy that filled him, even though it expressed itself in anger. She
felt that it held promise and hope for him and for her.
She said, “This Mr. Outram who wrote you that letter. You’re going
to see him. Do you think that maybe?—” And she stopped, transparently
diplomatic.
Vincent looked at her haughtily. She did not go on and he said, “May-
be what?” His tone was icily neutral, daring her to say what she meant.
She chose to defy him. “Maybe he could help you in some way.” She
knew this would bring them to a quarrel. But she had had the fantasy
and now she clung to it.
“In what way, for example?” His voice was dangerously polite, exces-
sively interested.
But she saw his young absurdity and it was she who spoke angrily
first. “How do I know?” she said in exasperation. “How do I know what
way? People help each other. A big man helps a young man to get a start
in life. It happens all the time. What’s wrong with it? And God knows we
need it.”
He said, “I suppose you think I wrote to him to get his help. I sup-
pose you think that.”
“I don’t think anything. But suppose you did, suppose you did? What
would be so terrible?”
“I don’t need any help—I don’t need his help or anyone’s help. I’ll
get along all right.”
“Yes, you’ll get along.” There was a simple admission in Mrs. Ham-
mell’s answer but also a touch of bitter irony—he would get along, being
young, but who else in the house would, who else?
“Well, ‘help’ won’t do it. ‘Help’ never helped him and God knows
he asked for enough of it.” Vincent, in his hatred of himself, threw into
the battle with his mother the whole of his father’s failure. Not until he
had uttered the sentence did he know that he was accusing his mother
of having chosen the wrong father for him, of having diluted with her
husband’s weakness the strength she had had to give him. She looked
away, moved by what he implied but not daring to accept it. And as she
turned away her head, like a young heroine in a romantic novel of her
youth, there passed over her face a look of sadness at the failure of her
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life. Vincent, seeing it, knew it for what it was, and his anger dissolved
into compassion. “Ah, don’t let’s fight,” he said and put out his hand
gently. His mother turned to him with a piteous look and embraced him.
The antagonism of their deep connection was gone and its place was
taken by a sad and chastened peace which made the quarrel quite worth
having had.
“Don’t worry, dear,” Mrs. Hammell said. “You’ll come out fine,
I know it, Mother knows it. I’m very proud of you,” she said and she
stroked his back as she embraced him, renewing the old blessing of ur-
gency and mission which had been her first and strongest gift to him,
earlier even than love.
The avenue down which Vincent walked when he left his house was
shabby. In a few years it would surely become sordid, but now it still
held the memory of days when it was substantial, even fashionable. The
new generation of the well-to-do lived in ample new suburbs and could
scarcely imagine that these close-set heavy houses had ever represented
comfort and standing. Manilla Boulevard had become a street of apart-
ments and rented rooms, and, lately, of improvised stores, little hat shops
and dress shops in which business was conducted with a confidential air.
It was becoming too a street of specialists in certain technical services to
the body, masseurs, podiatrists, electrolysis experts, beauty operators and
undertakers. A few lawyers combined home and office and declared their
existence by signs which represented them as Counsellors at Law.1
Yet the Boulevard still had its trees and its small lawns. Among its
houses were some that kept a strict respectability of trim hedges and
flower borders and a few of the very oldest families of the city stubbornly
held their place. The freshness of the spring air, the trees, the few houses
that still resisted degradation allowed Vincent to find a kind of beauty in
the scene. He had trained himself to find beauty in American things not
usually loved.
The City University toward which Vincent was walking had been
founded in the era of America’s strongest and naïvest faith in educa-
tion. Richardson himself had designed its first building in 1883 and
Beading Hall stood darkly red and squatly romanesque in the little
plaza that had preserved it from the encroaching city. But the halls of
the next ten years were now enclosed by the business district and the
university had been forced to expand into offices and lofts, creating
1 This description of Vincent’s neighborhood will be repeated in chapter 11.
5
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bright and cheerless classrooms by means of steel partitions on con-
crete floors. Vincent was glad that his work at the university, what little
there was of it, kept him to Beading Hall. Richardson had built darkly
but honestly, there was something sturdy and sullen about the place. It
looked defeated and isolated, but proud.
There were for Vincent two ways of reaching Beading Hall. They
were of almost equal length and convenience; the difference between
them was that one went by his father’s optometrical sho[p] and the other
did not. Most days Vincent chose the way which did not take him by the
place: in the language of the Hammell family it was always the place,
never the store, and this was the latest and least of the many places—the
word derived from the old genteel phrase, “place of business”—that Mr.
Hammell had attempted since the days of prosperity had unaccountably
passed. Today Vincent chose the unaccustomed route.
He looked in as he passed without much slowing his step and saw
his father seated at the counter in which the spectacle frames were kept.
As usual, Mr. Hammell was reading. The book, Vincent knew, was the
Ethics of Spinoza. Mr. Hammell felt that the optical trade made a con-
nection between him and Spinoza, though of course he did not grind
his own lenses. When he read the Ethics he skipped the proofs of the
propositions, but he believed that the propositions themselves calmed
and ennobled him. Within the last few years he had lost the simple and
militant agnosticism which a student of physics would have easily picked
up in the early years of the century. He was beginning to look for what he
called an “answer.” He never stated clearly what the question was.
In the shop window were two framed colored pictures, the advertise-
ments of a large optometrical company. One of them represented _____
discovering the _____, the other represented _____ inventing the _____
[blanks in original]. Vincent knew the pictures well. The sunlight of the
seventeenth century was less gay than that of the eighteenth, though
more significant, but both lights were historical and each illuminated
its scene in a way to suggest a contrast with the sunken twilight of his
father’s place.
He felt a chill of the spirit. Year by year his father’s income grew
smaller. Already his father was beginning to treat him, not without re-
sentment, as a partner in the failing family enterprise, beginning to look
to him for strength and guidance.
Vincent said grimly to himself, “The child is father of the man.”
Then it occurred to him to say, “The father is father of the man,”
and this heavy joke struck him as a heavy truth. He remembered that
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on the tennis court he had, half in jest, made a wager with fate. But “My
fate sits there reading Spinoza,” he said now. He said it almost aloud.
There seemed no connection between himself and the young man who,
invigorated by the breath from the great world, had been so whole on the
tennis court. He hurried on to Beading Hall, eager to lose himself. As a
community the university was not adequate, but it was better than being
alone. Yet when he stood at the door of Kramer’s office and knocked, his
heart sank again and when Kramer called for him to come in, he entered
elaborately surrounded by a joke.
“Professor Kramer, sir,” he said, mimicking the politic voice of a grad-
uate student, “Professor Kramer, sir, I’ve run into what might be called
a little snag in my seminar paper and I thought you could straighten me
out, sir.”
chapter 5
how much Kramer loved to be teased and how much he loved to be
reminded that life might be careless. As best he could, Kramer broke
through his magisterial gravity to meet the joke. He nodded his head in
an owlish parody of himself. “Well, now, we must try to straighten this
out, Mr. Hammell,” he said elaborately, “we must look into this.” He was
being Professor Kramer, the careful, sympathetic teacher. An unkind ob-
server would have found matter for satire even in his self-mockery.
Vincent was a little restored by Kramer’s pleasure in the joke. To-
day or any day, Kramer too would be working his own way through
darkness. But with how slim a chance for success. In a few minutes he
would stalk into his classroom, a small man, stiffly and meticulously
dressed, timid, suspicious, but resistant. He would lecture on the lit-
erature of modern Europe as he had learned to love it in his rebellious
youth, arranging into careful categories the lessons of rebellion to be
found in Ibsen, Sudermann, Schnitzler, Wassermann and Pirandello,
referring to his careful notes in many languages, which actually in-
cluded the Scandinavian. As he talked, his stature would grow and he
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would forget his old-fashioned Jewish pride, which Vincent had come
to see as consisting of the belief that being Jewish meant being a physi-
cally small man of such scrupulous intellectual honesty that he could
bring no work to a satisfactory conclusion. Before his mind Kramer
kept forever the martyrdom of the artist and the seeker for truth. “Dedi-
cation” was the word he thought, “integrity” and “compromise” were
the words he used.
Kramer, said, “Vincent, you look tired.” His tone was admonitory,
even querulous, and Vincent knew that in this way he expressed and
masked the affection he was feeling.
“Do I?” The interest of his friend and former teacher made Vincent
feel young and heroic. “I was working late last night.”
“On the book?” Kramer asked. “Is it going again?” He spoke in an
almost hushed voice and Vincent knew that Kramer was seeing the lone-
ly light in the little room and was hearing the intermitted rattle of the