The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel
Page 12
typewriter. He knew that Kramer was having a vision of his young friend
“wrestling” with his work, for only in this way could Kramer imagine the
process of thought and creation.
At this moment Kramer would have liked to say that no idea of ma-
terial gain, no glimpse of mere popular success must intrude to spoil
the purity of the work. He wanted to utter his belief that Vincent’s long
months of sterility and despair were the marks of the virtue of his enter-
prise. He did not say what he believed, but his feminine solicitude shone
from his face. All he said was, “I’m glad you’ve broken through again.
That’s bound to happen—the ideas find their place.”
Then, shy of what he was about to say and making his manner objec-
tive to the point of dullness, Kramer said, “I’ve been thinking, Vincent.
Now that you’re in the clear—I didn’t want to interfere before—it oc-
curs to me to suggest that sometimes such difficulties are not entirely
intellectual. Often they are emotional—psychological, you know. They
are often—”
And Kramer looked straight and brave into Vincent’s eyes. “They are
often sexual. You used to have a kind of affair, as I remember, with a little
undergraduate girl. But I gather that lately—. What I mean, of course, is
not marriage. I shouldn’t like that for you just yet, but a civilized—. You
know, a boy like you should have many triumphs in his campaigns.”
The old diction of love with its metaphors of warfare came easily to
Kramer. He knew the long account of Goethe’s amours, which, to ac-
count for genius, the scholars have told over so often, and he could con-
scientiously suggest to Vincent a line of action which would have been
the unfinished novel
[as] impossible to himself as cannibalism. But it was part of the tradition
of his youth to war on puritanism.
Vincent smiled, feeling a tender amusement at his awkward friend.
He thought he was unperturbed by Kramer’s advice, yet he chose this
moment to say, “I’m going to meet an old friend of yours.”
Kramer noted that Vincent had refused the opening. He was of two
minds about the sexual conduct of the Gentile world. On the one hand,
he believed it licentious. On the other hand, he believed it hopelessly and
symptomatically puritanical.
“An old friend?” and Kramer’s eyebrows went up in genuine sur-
prise. “Who could that be?”
“Harold Outram,” Vincent said and heard in his voice not only the
intention of surprising but also a certain readiness to be stubborn.
He had supposed that the name would have a considerable effect on
Theodore Kramer, but he had not imagined so deep a stirring as actually
took place. Kramer’s little face went white and his eyes opened in an al-
most wild consternation. He seemed on the point of repeating the name
incredulously. But then he said with a notable calm, almost a haughtiness,
as if Vincent had committed a breach of etiquette which could be dealt
with only by the grand manner, “And how, Vincent, did this come about?”
“Well,” Vincent said and knew at once that that “well” had spoiled his
reply, “I wrote him a letter.”
“You wrote him a letter.”
There was no question in Kramer’s voice. But the question came
now, the more accusingly for the delay.
“Why?” Kramer asked.
Why indeed? He had, he thought, written on an impulse, on gener-
ous impulse. He had liked some essays written when the author had been
not much older than he himself now was. He had sent a letter, really a
very graceful letter, to tell the author of his admiration. It was a common
enough thing to do, people did it every day. To be sure, one does not often
write in appreciation of work done ten years ago. Still, even that was not
so strange. What was perhaps worthy of remark in his action was that the
author was no longer a fine writer but a man who had been a fine writer,
ten years before. That could, of course, bring his letter into something
like ambiguity, making its impulse at least not an ordinary impulse.
“‘Why?’” said Vincent, questioning the question.
But of course it was useless to pursue this line. He knew the answer.
Apparently everyone else knew it before he did. He said, “I wrote to him
because I read him and liked him. But you mean that I wrote for more
0
the unfinished novel
reason than that. You mean that that ‘more reason’ wasn’t entirely inno-
cent. That I had—‘an ulterior motive.’ I think you’re right.”
He could not have said it with more simplicity. The moral fire in
Kramer’s eye banked itself. It occurred to Vincent that, to account for so
complete a confession, there must be, beneath his affectionate superior-
ity to Kramer, a stronger trust than he had ever supposed.
“An ulterior motive,” said Kramer. He said it gently and sadly. He
tasted each word drily, “Motive. Ulterior,” and shrugged as if he found
them without any savor of meaning at all.
“Go see him, Vincent. You will learn something from him, I can as-
sure you. You will see a man utterly corrupt. A handsome man, a charm-
ing man, and—I can guarantee—a man utterly untouched by life.”
Vincent said, “Untouched? I thought from what you’ve told me that
he had a hard enough time.”
“Hard time? You mean he was a poor boy? Yes, technically I suppose
he was. But when you have his looks and charm, you’re not poor, no,
you’re by no means poor.” Vincent knew that Kramer was saying that
Outram had not been a Jewish poor boy. “He worked his way through
college but people took care that the path should be smooth for him. I
am sure you will see a man still young, untroubled. But let me tell you,
Vincent, you will see a man utterly corrupt.”
Kramer’s voice rang with the passion of his bitterness. “Let it be a
lesson to you, Vincent,” he said.
Embarrassed by the nakedness of his friend’s feeling, Vincent said
in a worldly way, “It’s quite a lesson—at thirty thousand a year.” For that
was the sum which, according to rumor, Outram received as director of
the Peck Foundation.
But his irony did not lighten the situation at all. Kramer was fighting
for souls, Vincent’s and his own. He was defending the dark castle of six
small rooms which housed his virtuous wife, his two unruly children
and the book that must never be finished.
He was defending something else as well. How many cups of coffee
or glasses of beer he had drunk with Harold Outram at college was hard
to calculate, because each cup of coffee or glass of beer provided Kramer
with more than one memory and had been seen by him from more than
one point of view. Kramer’s accounts of the early friendship varied ac-
cording as he was bitterly proud or proudly bitter. Vincent, in his mind’s
eye, saw the young Harold Outram bending his brilliant head toward
the young Theodore Kramer, in the companionship, or its simulacrum,
from which Kramer had not recovered. But never until t
his moment had
1
the unfinished novel
Vincent understood how intense that variable memory was to his friend,
how involving, passionate and enduring it was, or how torturing.
Kramer rebuked Vincent’s frivolity. “Quite a lesson,” he said with
a large homiletic sadness, “yes, Vincent, quite a lesson. To have been
Harold Outram, to have had his gifts, to take a doctorate at twenty-three,
to write essays and a book like his—quite a lesson indeed. All right, Vin-
cent, I am very intelligent, a good scholar, a very exact skeptical mind.
And you are a very intelligent young man. I’ll say it: the best student
I ever had, and you know the kind of hopes I have for you, the kind of
work I expect you to do. But Vincent, let me tell you that the two of us
together couldn’t touch Harold Outram when he was young.”
The pulpit tradition of Kramer’s childhood was not a good one, but
the unconscious memory of all the rabbinical sermons he had once de-
spised came to Kramer’s aid now. “The biggest lesson of all, I assure you,
Vincent,” he said, wagging his head with sad wisdom, “the biggest les-
son of all is what a few years can do, what life can do to a man. To give up
such talents, to pervert and prostitute them! For what? For a contempt-
ible few thousand dollars a year. Our money economy knows what it
wants, believe me. It knows what it wants and it gets it. Our profit system
knows how to buy the best. If the Peck Foundation wants a commissar
of culture it buys itself a Harold Outram— after he is corrupted by that
magazine he worked for! Such a magazine! At fifty thousand a year—is
that what he gets?—he coordinates culture in America. A grant here, a
grant there, could such an artist and scholar go wrong?”
Then, getting down to business, he said briskly, “You think he can
help you, Vincent? You think one of those grants could be for you?”
“Oh, come on now, Ted,” Vincent said, with an expansive and world-
ly note of protest, “aren’t you letting this thing run away with you? After
all, I only wrote the man a letter. He invited me to come to see him—I
never suggested it. And you know that the Peck Foundation only puts its
money into institutions.”
Kramer dismissed the practical objection. “A man like that has the
power to help anybody. You ought to know that money isn’t everything in
things like that. He has what’s better than money—he has power.” Then
he said as if standing back from the situation, as if he understood that
in this world there are many things one must do to survive, “Vincent,
I don’t blame you. Maybe you are wise.” But he could not play the part
for long. “For God’s sake, Vincent—you are trying to act as if you didn’t
understand. After all, I am talking to the man who wrote ‘The Sociology
of the Written Word.’”
the unfinished novel
Kramer was appealing to the best of Vincent, appealing from young
Vincent Hammell caught in the dream of the great world to young Vin-
cent Hammell seeing deep and clear, with all his wits about him, into the
modern situation. He was conjuring his young friend by recalling to him
his own true words. Vincent’s essay with the pretentious title had ap-
peared in The Prairie Review and nothing that Vincent had ever done had
won Kramer’s blessing so completely. And indeed it was the best thing
that Vincent had ever written, the most elaborate and the most mature,
and quite the freest, for it had been touched with wit, a long and rather
desperate examination of the various perils which beset the young man
who gives himself to the life of the mind.
Vincent had been proud of this essay and Kramer and his younger
friends had quite justified his pride by their praise. But now the piece
seemed youthful and priggish and Kramer’s appeal to it was not effec-
tive. “I’ve got to get away from here,” he said. He felt dull and miser-
able and confused. All the sprightliness that Kramer so often aroused
in him was gone. He used the sentence he had earlier spoken to his
mother. “I can’t go on like this,” he said. He made a gesture to indicate
the environment as far as the mind could reach, and Kramer needed
no explanation beyond this to understand that Vincent was referring to
this great rich city with its busy life and its great emptiness. For Kramer
himself this had become the right—or the inevitable—setting for all
the things of his life, his family, his home, his work and his fears. But
he was a scholar of rebellion, of the free and developing spirit, and he
knew what Vincent felt.
Kramer looked at his young friend with intent shrewdness. “Vin-
cent,” he said, “if you were appointed to a full-time instructorship, would
you stay?”
The question, which implied that the instructorship was actually
available, was shocking to Vincent. Perhaps it was the more shocking
because it was crammed full of attractions, even temptations, all the pro-
saic charms of a settled position, not notable but surely comfortable, and
of a settled salary, not large but regular. It meant to him the giving up
of all his hopes and that was its charm. He saw the gentle sad pleasure
of acquiescence to the family wish. His parents could scarcely be so de-
ceived as to be overjoyed by such a position, yet a son with two thousand
dollars a year would make the difference between worry and comfort.
Vincent saw stretching before him, and not with the usual horror, the
long days of serviceable piety. Everything that he feared for himself and
that Kramer had feared for him had a sudden strange lure.
the unfinished novel
But he saved himself. He thought of what was implied about Kramer
by Kramer’s offer. He said coldly, “I thought you didn’t approve of my
taking a job at the university. When I wanted one two years ago, you
talked me out of it. I thought you couldn’t do anything for me in the
department beyond my assistantship. You’ve told me that often enough,
and now you seem to be making me an offer.”
Under this almost direct accusation of insincerity, Kramer did not
flinch. “As for doing anything for you in the department,” he said, “any-
thing I do for you, Vincent, will be done at a certain cost to myself. You
know what my position is. It is not good. But I am willing to put what
position I have to the test. I am ready to endanger myself.”
Vincent found that he was suddenly impatient of Kramer’s extrava-
gant sense of vulnerability. He had accepted it at Kramer’s own estimate
and it had been a kind of bond between them. Kramer and he shared the
sense of danger that made heroes. But now he saw that the good Kramer,
although by no means the most powerful of professors, was no more
insecure in his position than anyone else. It was the insight of anger. He
checked himself—he had felt anger too often that day.
“I have always,” Kramer said, “I have always been opposed to an
academic career for you. It is not in your temperament. I am one of
those who teach, you are
one of those who can do.” And as Kramer
made the old stale antithesis that had been so fresh when Bernard
Shaw had made it in Kramer’s boyhood, Vincent had a moment of sad-
ness for his teacher. “But, Vincent, I am even ready to see you make a
possible sacrifice of your talents by taking a regular appointment here.
Maybe you even can make a future. I am ready for anything rather
than see you involve yourself with Harold Outram. You say you can’t
go on like this. All right. Admitted. Granted. But when you go on to
something different by the help of Harold Outram then—no! Any-
thing else.”
Kramer kept his eyes fixed on Vincent’s face. He was very stern and
direct. It seemed to Vincent that his friend had never had so much dig-
nity as was now lent him by his passion. “Anything,” Kramer said. And
again, “Anything.”
He went on. “Vincent, I know you do not want to become what I am.
I know—” He held up his hand to check Vincent’s stricken protestations.
“And why should you? I’m stuck—I’m a Jew, I’m a married man, with
children. I’m stuck. But leaving money out of account, you have every ad-
vantage. You can be something and not be corrupt. But that man, if you
let him, that man will corrupt you—corrupt you to Hell.”
the unfinished novel
It was nonsense. Yet whatever in Kramer was ridiculous had quite van-
ished. Vincent heard him almost with awe and wholly without an answer.
At that moment the bell rang for the beginning of the next hour.
Kramer selected three books from the row across his desk. He piled them
neatly on the folder that contained his lecture notes. He rose. When he
was at the door, he smiled a wan and intelligent smile which was very
charming, for his teeth were fine and white. He said, “Perhaps, Vincent
I am only jealous.” He smiled again, almost with a touch of saving mis-
chievousness, and then he was gone, leaving in the air a large reverbera-
tion of meaning.
For a moment it seemed to Vincent that something had been ex-
plained. But then he found that he was not at all clear about the object
of Kramer’s confessed jealousy. Was it Outram that Kramer was jealous
of? Was it perhaps Vincent himself? Was it conceivably Vincent in his
connection with Outram? Or Outram in his connection with Vincent?