The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel

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by Lionel Trilling


  demonstratively clutched his throat and then struck his solar plexus with

  the flat of his palm, “the feet and legs” and Mr. Rykstrom tapped his

  shoes and his trouser-legs, “it is with these that we think quite as much

  as with the mind,” and Mr. Rykstrom struck his forehead with the tips

  of four fingers. “Indeed, can we differentiate what we call the mind from

  the soma, the body, the whole organism? Yet our civilization has put all

  emphasis on the mind that thinks—that thinks in concepts, ideas. Too

  much Plato,” said Mr. Rykstrorn with a smile. “We wish to put the em-

  phasis the other way. The hand, the eye, the thorax and diaphragm, the

  feet and legs—we wish to bring these into play.”

  “And the section in between?” said Outram.

  “I beg your pardon?” Mr. Rykstrom leaned politely forward.

  “I said, the important section between the legs and the diaphragm.”

  And Outram looked hard at Rykstrom. He was sorry he had started this.

  He did not want to pursue the matter. But he had certain privileges and

  he was glad that Rykstrom looked uncomfortable.

  “You are Freudian?” Mr. Rykstrom asked in an objective voice.

  “No. Go on—I’m sorry I interrupted.”

  “So then: not the intellect but the whole being. It was that conception

  that made Mr. Walter not give his money to the university. He was,” said

  Mr. Rykstrom judicially, “in many ways a very deep thinker. Eccentric but

  deep. And so Meadowfield was conceived. But inevitably the civic duty

  arises. The Women’s Guild wants this, the Junior League asks if we can

  do that. The Round Table Club wants a course. The Fellowship of Recon-

  ciliation wants some lectures. In what? In current events, in Russia, in

  psychology, in short-story writing. It is not our program, but you can see

  how we must serve the community, so we arrange courses. These we call

  our Organizational courses.”

  “I see,” Outram said. He had found something of interest in the

  catalogue and he said, “I see you have a young man giving a course in

  short-story writing—Hammell, Vincent Hammell.”

  “Hammell?” said Rykstrom, but the name meant nothing and he

  reached out to take the catalogue from Outram.

  “Oh yes—gives the course for the Junior League. Such people are not

  on our faculty—they are hired for the occasion. But wait!” and Rykstrom

  was struck by a recollection. “I have a letter!” and he opened a desk file.

  “Just yesterday it came. A lady from the Junior League class writes to say

  that Mr. Hammell is—what is the expression—‘giving me nothing.’ It is

  nothing to his discredit. It is a group of wealthy ladies, not junior, and ev-

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  ery year they need a new man to teach them to be literary artists. I assure

  you, if they began with finger-paints they would make more progress and

  more satisfaction. You are interested in this young man Hammell?”

  “I’m going now to have lunch with him.”

  “And not lunch here? I am disappointed.”

  “I’m sorry.” Outram was disposed suddenly to be quite polite. “I have

  so little time and this is important.”

  “If you are interested in the young man—” Mr. Rykstrom indicated

  possibilities.

  “I don’t know, I’ve yet to meet him,” Outram said in a voice intended

  to make the director feel venal.

  “It is not to his discredit that the ladies are not satisfied. Every year

  they find out they are not satisfied.” And Mr. Rykstrom smiled in refer-

  ence to the remark Outram had made that had caused Mr. Rykstrom to

  ask him if he was Freudian.

  “But he will lose the job?”

  “The indication is yes.”

  The knowledge that the young man, all unknown to himself, was to

  be deprived of his job made him appear to Harold Outram in a new and

  more attractive light. As he was driven back to the city in Mr. Rykstrom’s

  car, having first made the telephone call to warn Vincent of his lateness,

  he thought of the young man as being alone in the world and therefore

  the readier to give and receive friendship. At that time in his life Harold

  Outram thought often of friendship and was conscious of his need for

  it.

  He identified Vincent Hammell almost at once. The great dark lobby

  of the Club had cleared and the young man was easily to be picked out.

  Outram took in at once the quality that he saw in Vincent’s face, the

  handsomeness that was made not so much by the features as by the in-

  telligence that organized them, the quality that Outram thought of as

  “breeding,” or so he named the quality of the face that had been put there

  by some solicitude, no doubt parental, the appearance of someone set

  apart as special. What Harold Outram was not aware of was that young

  Hammell’s face attracted him because it matched one of the several, one

  of the more forgivable, ideas he had of his own appearance.

  At almost the same moment, Vincent became sure that this tall man

  entering the lobby was Harold Outram. He was struck with a poignant

  dismay. It was a response he often had to men of Outram’s age. Old men

  or men who had crystallized into true middle age did not disturb him.

  They were of another race. But when youth still lingered, when the jaw

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  had still a clean line and the expression still retained boyishness and

  good looks, he was often frightened and repelled. Nothing else gave him

  the same sense of life in process, the process being one of decay and

  disintegration. It was the loss, he felt, of the vital and moral strength. It

  seemed to Vincent that upon men in their thirties life had worked only

  to their shame. His first emotions upon sight of Harold Outram were of

  fear and pity.

  chapter 7

  The two men sat in the great bright dining-room of the Club. They had

  still scarcely spoken, yet it seemed that by merely leading Vincent to the

  dining-room, by choosing a table and ordering lunch, Harold Outram

  had established a connection, even an intimacy. Vincent looked back to

  his first impression with wonder, so vivid, so charming, so beautifully

  organized did Harold Outram now seem to him. Decay and disintegra-

  tion were words most precisely inappropriate to his presence. By his air,

  in every detail of his manner, he confirmed to Vincent the promise of

  life that his letter had made. Outram was tall and well set up and held

  himself straight, especially when he walked through the dining-room,

  as if he were resisting the glances that might be directed his way. His

  close-cropped hair was light in color, but not so light as to seem less than

  masculine. If there was a hint of the late Greek in the full mouth and

  the rounded chin, this was contradicted by the solidity of the skull, the

  expanse of the forehead and the restless, repressed energy of the eyes.

  Outram had made no apology for his lateness until they were seated

  and their cocktails and lunch ordered. His apology, when it came, was

  charged with personal meaning for Vincent. “I’m sorry I was late,” he

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r />   said, “I was held up at Meadowfield. That Rykstrom! What a bastard he

  is.” To hear so great a power as Outram handle so great a power as Ryk-

  strom made Vincent’s current of life flow faster. It suddenly came to him

  that the still greater powers of the world, the presidents and the premiers,

  the marshalls and the millionaires, talked about each other in just such

  a way. The veil of anonymity fell away from government. He saw into its

  very heart. He felt like the efficient young agent or secretary of a cabinet

  minister, he with his clear vision and heightened pulse.

  “What a reactionary bastard he is,” said Outram.

  Vincent had now to understand that he was secretary to a political

  personage of the liberal persuasion. It was a point necessary to have clear

  after those political wanderings of Outram’s.

  “Am I right?” Outram asked.

  “Yes, you’re right,” Vincent said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Firings?” Outram’s voice was professional, precisely to the point.

  “Well—forced resignations. Petty persecutions, that sort of thing.”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Well, yes—close acquaintances.” Vincent had the sense of being

  brilliantly succinct.

  “What’s their story?”

  Vincent told what he knew about Meadowfield and Rykstrom. Yet he

  did not speak as he would have expected to. For the first time in his life

  he had a relation to a reality of money and tangibilities. To himself and

  his friends Meadowfield was a whited sepulchre of culture and Rykstrom

  was a byword, a man at once sinister and ridiculous. But as he talked

  now he had clearly in mind the solid existence of the Meadowfield build-

  ings, the hundreds of students and the scores of teachers who daily used

  them, the details of kitchens and furnaces, gardens and repairs, all the

  manifestations of existence that an institution makes. The power that

  Outram represented made him aware of Meadowfield’s solid, bulking,

  corporate life, its existence not merely in the mind but on the earth. It

  was the first time that Vincent had ever been in connection with such an

  existence. All that he and his friends had ever owned or dealt with existed

  only in the mind. He found that the scandalous, sour gossip that he and

  his friends exchanged about Meadowfield was no longer so relevant as it

  had once seemed. It had to be strained through the sieve of a new sobri-

  ety and responsibility.

  He thought about this later and with a little dismay. His sudden new

  conception of Meadowfield seemed to him a defection from the purity

  of his idealism. It was to be for him a measure of Outram’s quality that

  the unfinished novel

  in so brief a time in Outram’s company he had learned so much about

  politics. For the second time that day he had occasion to be aware that his

  youth was over.

  The conversation about Meadowfield drew to an end. Outram had

  the sense that they were now at the close of a prelude. Outram smiled

  and said, “It was kind of you to write that letter to me.”

  And then he added, “But also, of course, it was cruel.”

  The second remark, casually flung out, might have been made sim-

  ply for the purpose of seeing how the young man would handle it. At any

  rate, the young man felt it to be in the nature of an emergency and a test.

  He did not handle it badly. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I thought of that, but I

  took a chance that you would feel the other more.”

  At this a silence fell. They both contributed to it as if it were a conver-

  sation. Then Outram said, “Tell me—do you believe in fate? in destiny?”

  Vincent that morning had made a wager with his fate on the ten-

  nis court, yet to him the question seemed a bizarre one and he looked

  embarrassed for his companion. He groped for an answer and, as he

  hesitated, Outram looked at him with an impatient glance, as if he were

  being excessively dull. “It will interest you,” Outram said. “One evening

  a friend of mine, name of Philip Dyas, walked over to my house—I live

  in the country—and he brought with him a copy of a magazine, The Prairie Review. He wanted me to read an essay by a young man, name of Hammell. The next morning a letter came to me from the same young

  man. It sounds like fate, doesn’t it?”

  And then Outram said sharply, “You don’t know Philip Dyas, do

  you?”

  Outram’s sudden question seemed to suggest that his friend Philip

  Dyas had been conspiring with Vincent. It was an odd enough notion to

  make Vincent laugh as he said, “Never heard of him.” But it also made

  his heart beat faster. What end could Outram have supposed the con-

  spiracy to have?

  “No, of course you never have,” Outram said. “So you can see why

  I asked you if you believed in fate?” But of course Outram had not ex-

  plained anything about “fate.” He had only related a coincidence. Fate

  surely meant that the coincidence would yield a great and presumably

  desirable event. The blood beat in Vincent’s ears like the hooves of ap-

  proaching horses. The explanation of “fate” was clearly still to come.

  “It’s really remarkable,” Outram said. He was not referring to the

  coincidence, for to Vincent’s astonishment he drew from his breast-

  pocket the very article itself, cut from The Prairie Review and neatly

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  stapled into a little pamphlet. He laid it on the table as if it were a docu-

  ment in the case, the papers of some transaction that was in negotia-

  tion between them.

  The essay was the same that Kramer had spoken of, the one pre-

  tentiously entitled “The Sociology of the Written Word.” It began with

  the statement that in every age society provides certain means by which

  the young man of the lower middle class, sometimes the actually poor

  man, can rise to honor and power. Such a means is the law, the church,

  the army in time of war. Another means is the arts, of which literature

  calls most often to the young man of good gifts and generous ambitions,

  for literature seems to need not much more equipment than a firm will

  and a good intelligence. But for that very reason, Vincent had gone on to

  point out, literature is the most treacherous of all the artistic professions.

  The young writer has no such demonstrable seal upon his calling as the

  manual skill of the young painter, or the technical dexterity of the musi-

  cian. He cannot be disciplined in his craft by elementary teachers, there

  are no masters to judge for him the proficiency of his technique at an

  early age, no finger exercises by which he can show his first mechanical

  skill. His is the art in which technique is least specific, least commu-

  nicable, seems to depend largely on a condition of inner life. He dares

  trust no one to say where he has gone wrong. He needs a courage which

  amounts to arrogance, and, if he lacks this, he can become so panic-

  stricken that he cannot work.

  Following this, Vincent had sketched the moral dilemma the young

  man faces. For the choice of the literary career bestows upon him a

  moral status which is of considerable, if
ambiguous, interest to those

  around him. He sets himself up, by his choice, in a moral superiority, he

  is moved by an impulse of protest and separation. Yet at the same time

  that he sets himself apart, he files his application for praise and fame.

  Now follows, Vincent had said, a game with almost impossible rules.

  Moral superiority consists in being indifferent to society’s demands and

  even hostile to them. Yet praise and fame are being sought—what else

  can bestow them save this rejected society itself? And if praise and fame

  come, is it because the writer has been morally convincing or because he

  has surrendered his moral integrity? In short, the rule that the solitary

  player establishes for himself is that he must make a goal at both ends of

  the field and simultaneously.

  Outram leafed through the stapled pages as if refreshing his memo-

  ry of them. “How old are you?” he said.

  “Twenty-three.”

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  “You know a great deal. It’s the kind of situation that they set up to

  drive rats crazy in psychological laboratories. And you’re very clever with

  your ‘Ways.’”

  He was referring to Vincent’s enumeration of the ways the writer

  may be tempted to take through the stony land. There was what he called

  The Way of Tom Sawyer, in which the writer lives by his joyful presence

  at his own funeral—he settles for present intransigence and misunder-

  standing with praise and fame to come after death. The Way of the Virgin

  was the surrender of the dedicated talents to the wealth which is nowa-

  days so lavishly ready for them—a youthful dedication has the effect of

  raising a writer’s value and of stimulating the interest of money, pre-

  cisely as did a fresh virginity in the old comic plays. The Way of the Pillar

  of Salt was the writer’s choice of integrity together with sterility—he be-

  comes a writer in name but not in deed, and he makes this choice on an

  historical principle which holds that creation has ceased to be possible in

  the modern world.

  “You’re a very mordant fellow,” Outram said, “yes, quite a mordant

  fellow.” There was a harsh and challenging note in his voice.

  It was by way of being a kind of compliment, but Vincent’s heart

 

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