Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  To us at Kenyon he left his car. It was a car given to him by an elderly benefactor in Cambridge, but a car that had been finally and quite suddenly rendered worthless in his eyes by a publisher’s advance, which sent him flying out of our world by the first plane he could get passage on. He left us the car without any regret, left it in the same spirit that American tourists left their cars on the docks at European ports when war broke out that same year. In effect, he tossed us his keys from the first-class deck of the giant ship he had boarded at the end of his plane trip, glad to know that he would never need the old rattletrap again and glad to be out of the mess that all of us were in for life.

  I have said that I somehow felt obliged to include everything I have about our car’s last real owner. And now I know why I felt so. Without that digression it would have been impossible to explain what the other boys were thinking—or what we thought they were thinking—when we left them hanging about the front stoop that afternoon. They were thinking that there was a chance Jim and I had had an “offer” of some kind, that we had “sold out” and were headed in the same direction that our repudiated brother had taken last spring. Perhaps they did not actually think that, but that was how we interpreted the sullen and brooding expressions on their faces when we were preparing to leave that afternoon.

  Of course, what their brooding expressions meant made no difference to Jim or me. And we said so to each other as, with Jim at the wheel, we backed out of the little alleyway beside the house and turned into the village street. We cared not a hoot in hell for what they thought of us or of our trip to New York. Further, we cared no more—Jim and I—for each other’s approval or disapproval, and we reminded each other of this then and there.

  We were all independents in Douglass House. There was no spirit of camaraderie among us. We were not the kind of students who cared about such things as camaraderie. Besides, we felt that there was more than enough of that spirit abroad at Kenyon, among the students who lived in the regular dormitories and whose fraternity lodges were scattered about the wooded hillside beyond the village. In those days, the student body at Kenyon was almost as picturesque as the old vine-clad buildings and the rolling countryside itself. So it seemed to us, at least. We used to sit on the front stoop or in the upstairs windows of Douglass House and watch the fops and dandies of the campus go strolling and strutting by on their way to the post office or the bank, or to Jean Val Dean’s short-order joint. Those three establishments, along with Dicky Doolittle’s filling station, Jim Lynch’s barber shop, Jim Hayes’s grocery store, Tom Wilson’s Home Market, and Mrs. Titus’s lunchroom and bakery (the Kokosing Restaurant), constituted the business district of Gambier. And it was in their midst that Douglass House was situated. Actually, those places of business were strung along just one block of the village’s main thoroughfare. Each was housed in its separate little store building or in a converted dwelling house, and in the spring and in the fall, while the leaves were still on the low hanging branches of the trees, a stranger in town would hardly notice that they were places of business at all.

  From the windows of Douglass House, between the bakery and the barber shop, we could look down on the dormitory students who passed along the sidewalk, and could make our comment on what we considered their silly affectations—on their provincial manners and their foppish, collegiate clothing. In midwinter, when all the leaves were off the trees, we could see out into the parkway that divided the street into two lanes—and in the center of the parkway was the Middle Path. For us, the Middle Path was the epitome of everything about Kenyon that we wanted no part of. It was a broad gravel walkway extending not merely the length of the village green; it had its beginning, rather, at the far end of the campus, at the worn doorstep of the dormitory known as Old Kenyon, and ran the length of the campus, on through the village, then through the wooded area where most of the faculty houses were, and ended at the door of Bexley Hall, Kenyon’s Episcopal seminary. In the late afternoon, boys on horseback rode along it as they returned from the polo field. At noon, sometimes, boys who had just come up from Kenyon’s private airfield appeared on the Middle Path still wearing their helmets and goggles. And after dinner every Tuesday night the fraternity boys marched up and down the path singing their fraternity songs and singing fine old songs about early days at Kenyon and about its founder, Bishop Philander Chase:

  The first of Kenyon’s goodly race

  Was that great man Philander Chase.

  He climbed the hill and said a prayer

  And founded Kenyon College there.

  He dug up stones, he chopped down trees,

  He sailed across the stormy seas,

  And begged at ev’ry noble’s door,

  And also that of Hannah More.

  He built the college, built the dam,

  He milked the cow, he smoked the ham;

  He taught the classes, rang the bell,

  And spanked the naughty freshmen well.

  At Douglass House we wanted none of that. We had all come to Kenyon because we were bent upon becoming writers of some kind or other and the new president of the college had just appointed a famous and distinguished poet to the staff of the English Department. Kenyon was, in our opinion, an obscure little college that had for more than a hundred years slept the sweet, sound sleep that only a small Episcopal college can ever afford to sleep. It was a quaint and pretty spot. We recognized that, but we held that against it. That was not what we were looking for. We even collected stories about other people who had resisted the beauties of the campus and the surrounding countryside. A famous English critic had stopped here on his way home from a long stay in the Orient, and when asked if he did not admire our landscape he replied, “No. It’s too rich for my blood.” We all felt it was too rich for ours, too. Another English visitor was asked if the college buildings did not remind him of Oxford, and by way of reply he permitted his mouth to fall open while he stared in blank amazement at his questioner.

  Despite our feeling that the countryside was too rich for our blood, we came to know it a great deal better—or at least in more detail—than did the polo players or the fliers or the members of the champion tennis team. For we were nearly all of us walkers. We walked the country roads for miles in every direction, talking every step of the way about ourselves or about our writing, or if we exhausted those two dearer subjects, we talked about whatever we were reading at the time. We read W. H. Auden and Yvor Winters and Wyndham Lewis and Joyce and Christopher Dawson. We read The Wings of the Dove (aloud!) and The Cosmological Eye and The Last Puritan and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. (Of course, I am speaking only of books that didn’t come within the range of the formal courses we were taking in the college.) On our walks through the country—never more than two or three of us together—we talked and talked, but I think none of us ever listened to anyone’s talk but his own. Our talk seemed always to come to nothing. But our walking took us past the sheep farms and orchards and past some of the old stone farmhouses that are scattered throughout that township. It brought us to the old quarry from which most of the stone for the college buildings and for the farmhouses had been taken, and brought us to Quarry Chapel, a long since deserted and “deconsecrated” chapel, standing on a hill two miles from the college and symbolizing there the failure of Episcopalianism to take root among the Ohio country people. Sometimes we walked along the railroad track through the valley at the foot of the college hill, and I remember more than once coming upon two or three tramps warming themselves by a little fire they had built or even cooking a meal over it. We would see them maybe a hundred yards ahead, and we would get close enough to hear them laughing and talking together. But as soon as they noticed us we would turn back and walk in the other direction, for we pitied them and felt that our presence was an intrusion. And yet, looking back on it, I remember how happy those tramps always seemed. And how sad and serious we were.

  Jim and I headed due East from Gambier on the road to Coshocton and Pittsb
urgh. Darkness overtook us long before we ever reached the Pennsylvania state line. We were in Pittsburgh by about 9 P.M., and then there lay ahead of us the whole long night of driving. Nothing could have better suited our mood than the prospect of this ride through the dark, wooded countryside of Pennsylvania on that autumn night. This being before the days of the turnpike—or at least before its completion—the roads wound about the great domelike hills of that region and through the deep valleys in a way that answered some need we both felt. We spoke of it many times during the night, and Jim said he felt he knew for the first time the meaning of “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.” The two of us were setting out on this trip not in search of the kind of quick success in the world that had so degraded our former friend in our eyes; we sought, rather, a taste—or foretaste—of “life’s deeper and more real experience,” the kind that dormitory life seemed to deprive us of. We expressed these yearnings in just those words that I have put in quotation marks, not feeling the need for any show of delicate restraint. We, at twenty, had no abhorrence of raw ideas or explicit statement. We didn’t hesitate to say what we wanted to be and what we felt we must have in order to become that. We wanted to be writers, and we knew well enough that before we could write we had to have “mature and adult experience.” And, by God, we said so to each other, there in the car as we sped through towns like Turtle Creek and Greensburg and Acme.

  I have observed in recent years that boys the age we were then and with our inclinations tend to value ideas of this sort above all else. They are apt to find their own crude obsession with mere ideas the greatest barrier to producing the works of art they are after. I have observed this from the vantage ground of the college professor’s desk, behind which the irony of fate has placed me from time to time. From there, I have also had the chance to observe something about girls of an artistic bent or temperament, and for that reason I am able to tell you more about the two girls we were going to see in New York than I could possibly have known then.

  At the time—that is, during the dark hours of the drive East—each of us carried in his mind an image of the girl who had inspired him to make this journey. In each case, the image of the girl’s face and form was more or less accurate. In my mind was the image of a brunette with dark eyes and a heart-shaped face. In Jim’s was that of a blonde, somewhat above average height, with green eyes and perhaps a few freckles on her nose. That, in general, was how we pictured them, but neither of us would have been dogmatic about the accuracy of his picture. Perhaps Carol Crawford didn’t have any freckles. Jim wasn’t sure. And maybe her eyes were more blue than green. As for me, I wouldn’t have contradicted anyone who said Nancy Gibault’s face was actually slightly elongated, rather than heart-shaped, or that her hair had a decided reddish cast to it. Our impressions of this kind were only more or less accurate, and we would have been the first to admit it.

  But as to the talent and the character and the original mind of the two glorious girls, we would have brooked no questioning of our concepts. Just after we passed through Acme, Pennsylvania, our talk turned from ourselves to these girls—from our inner yearnings for mature and adult experience to the particular objects toward which we were being led by these yearnings. We agreed that the quality we most valued in Nancy and Carol was their “critical” and “objective” view of life, their unwillingness to accept the standards of “the world.” I remember telling Jim that Nancy Gibault could always take a genuinely “disinterested” view of any matter—“disinterested in the best sense of the word.” And Jim assured me that, whatever else I might perceive about Carol, I would sense at once the originality of her mind and “the absence of anything commonplace or banal in her intellectual make-up.”

  It seems hard to believe now, but that was how we spoke to each other about our girls. That was what we thought we believed and felt about them then. And despite our change of opinions by the time we headed back to Kenyon, despite our complete and permanent disenchantment, despite their unkind treatment of us—as worldly and as commonplace as could be—I know now that those two girls were as near the concepts we had of them to begin with as any two girls their age might be, or should be. And I believe now that the decisions they made about us were the right decisions for them to make. I have only the vaguest notion of how Nancy Gibault has fared in later life. I know only that she went back to St. Louis the following spring and was married that summer to Lon Havemeyer. But as for Carol Crawford, everybody with any interest in literary matters knows what became of her. Her novels are read everywhere. They have even been translated into Javanese. She is, in her way, even more successful than the boy who made the long pull from Harvard College to Hollywood.

  Probably I seem to be saying too much about things that I understood only long after the events of my story. But the need for the above digression seemed no less urgent to me than did that concerning the former owner of our car. In his case, the digression dealt mostly with events of a slightly earlier time. Here it has dealt with a wisdom acquired at a much later time. And now I find that I am still not quite finished with speaking of that later time and wisdom. Before seeing me again in the car that November night in 1939, picture me for just a moment—much changed in appearance and looking at you through gold-rimmed spectacles—behind the lectern in a classroom. I stand before the class as a kind of journeyman writer, a type of whom Trollope might have approved, but one who has known neither the financial success of the facile Harvard boy nor the reputation of Carol Crawford. Yet this man behind the lectern is a man who seems happy in the knowledge that he knows—or thinks he knows—what he is about. And from behind his lectern he is saying that any story that is written in the form of a memoir should give offense to no one, because before a writer can make a person he has known fit into such a story—or any story, for that matter—he must do more than change the real name of that person. He must inevitably do such violence to that person’s character that the so-called original is forever lost to the story.

  The last lap of Jim’s and my all-night drive was the toughest. The night had begun as an unseasonably warm one. I recall that there were even a good many insects splattered on our windshield in the hours just after dark. But by the time we had got through Pittsburgh the sky was overcast and the temperature had begun to drop. Soon after 1 A.M. we noticed the first big, soft flakes of snow. I was driving at the time, and Jim was doing most of the talking. I raised one finger from the steering wheel to point out the snow to Jim, and he shook his head unhappily. But he went on talking. We had maintained our steady stream of talk during the first hours of the night partly to keep whoever was at the wheel from going to sleep, but from this point on it was more for the purpose of making us forget the threatening weather. We knew that a really heavy snowstorm could throw our holiday schedule completely out of gear. All night long we talked. Sometimes the snow fell thick and fast, but there were times, too, when it stopped altogether. There was a short period just before dawn when the snow turned to rain—a cold rain, worse than the snow, since it began to freeze on our windshield. By this time, however, we had passed through Philadelphia and we knew that somehow or other we would make it on to New York.

  We had left Kenyon at four o’clock in the afternoon, and at eight the next morning we came to the first traffic rotary outside New York, in New Jersey. Half an hour later we saw the skyline of the city, and at the sight of it we both fell silent. I think we were both conscious at that moment not so much of having arrived at our destination as of having only then put Kenyon College behind us. I remember feeling that if I glanced over my shoulder I might still see on the horizon the tower of Peirce Hall and the spires of Old Kenyon Dormitory. And in my mind’s eye I saw the other Douglass House boys—all seven of them—still lingering on the stone steps of the front stoop, leaning against the iron railing and against one another, staring after us. But more than that, after the image had gone I realized suddenly that I had pictured not seven but nine figures there before the house, a
nd that among the other faces I had glimpsed my own face and that of Jim Prewitt. It seemed to me that we had been staring after ourselves with the same fixed, brooding expression in our eyes that I saw in the eyes of the other boys.

  Nancy Gibault was staying in a sort of girls’ hotel, or rooming house, on 114th Street. Before she came down from her room that Thanksgiving morning, she kept me waiting in the lobby for nearly forty-five minutes. No doubt she had planned this as a way of preparing me for worse things to come. As I sat there, I had ample time to reflect upon various dire possibilities. I wondered if she had been out terribly late the night before and, if so, with whom. I thought of the possibility that she was angry with me for not letting her know what day I would get there. (I had had to wait on my check from home, and there had not been time to let her know exactly when we would arrive.) I reflected, even, that there was a remote chance she had not wanted me to come at all. What didn’t occur to me was the possibility that all of these things were true. I sat in that dreary, overheated waiting room, still wearing my overcoat and holding my hat in my lap. When Nancy finally came down, she burst into laughter at the sight of me. I rose slowly from my chair and said angrily, “What are you laughing at? At how long I’ve waited?”