Fairchild — Aw, he ain’t drowned. I tell you I saw —
The Niece — Sure. Cheer up, Aunt Pat. Well get him back, even if he is. It’s not like losing him altogether, you know.
If you send his body back, maybe his folks won’t even claim your boat or anything.
Eva — Shut up, you children.
Fairchild — But I tell you I saw —
NINE O’CLOCK
Forward, Jenny, the niece, her brother come temporarily out of his scientific shell, and Pete stood in a group; Pete in his straw hat and the nephew with his lean young body and the two girls in their little scanty dresses and awkward with a sort of terrible grace. So flagrantly young they were that it served as a barrier between them and the others, causing even Mr. Talliaferro to lurk nearby without the courage to join them.
“These young girls,” Fairchild said. He watched the group, watched the niece and Jenny as they clung to the rail and swung aimlessly back and forth, pivoting on their heels, in a sheer wantonness of young muscles. “They scare me,” he admitted. “Not as a possible or probable chastity, you know. Chastity ain’t..
“A bodiless illusion multiplied by lack of opportunity,” Mark Frost said.
“What?” he asked, looking at the poet. “Well, maybe so.” He resumed his own tenuous thought. “Maybe we all have different ideas of sex, like all races do.... Maybe us three sitting here are racially unrelated to each other, as regards sex. Like a Frenchman and an Anglo-Saxon and a Mongol, for instance.”
“Sex,” said the Semitic man, “to an Italian is something like a firecracker at a children’s party; to a Frenchman, a business the relaxation from which is making money; to an Englishman, it is a nuisance; to an American, a horserace. Now, which are you?”
Fairchild laughed. He watched the group forward a while. “Their strange sexless shapes, you know,” he went on. “We, you and I, grew up expecting something beneath a woman’s dress. Something satisfying in the way of breasts and hips and such. But now...
“Do you remember the pictures you used to get in packages of cigarettes, or that you saw in magazines in barber shops? Anna Held and Eva Tanguay with shapes like elegant parlor lamp chimneys? Where are they now? Now, on the street, what do you see? Creatures with the uncomplex awkwardness of calves or colts, with two little knobs for breasts and indicated buttocks that, except for their soft look, might well belong to a boy of fifteen. Not satisfying any more; just exciting and monotonous. And mostly monotonous.
“Where,” he continued, “are the soft bulging rabbitlike things women used to have inside their clothes? Gone, with the poor Indian and ten cent beer and cambric drawers. But still, they are kind of nice, these young girls: kind of like a thin monotonous flute music or something.”
“Shrill and stupid,” the Semitic man agreed. He, too, gazed at the group forward for a time. “Who was the fool who said that our clothing, our custom in dress, does not affect the shape of our bodies and our behavior?”
“Not stupid,” the other objected. “Women are never stupid. Their mental equipment is too sublimely sufficient to do what little directing their bodies require. And when your mentality Is sufficient to your bodily needs, where there is such a perfect mating of capability and necessity, there can’t be any stupidity. When women have more intelligence than that, they become nuisances sooner or later. All they need is enough intelligence to move and eat and observe the cardinal precautions of existence—”
“And recognize the current mode in time to standardize themselves,” Mark Frost put in.
“Well, yes. And I don’t object to that, either,” Fairchild said. “As a purely lay brother to the human race, I mean. After ail they are merely articulated genital organs with a kind of aptitude for spending whatever money you have; so when they get themselves up to look exactly like all the other ones, you can give all your attention to their bodies.”
“How about the exceptions?” Mark Frost asked. “The ones that don’t paint or bob their hair?”
“Poor things,” Fairchild answered, and the Semitic man said:
“Perhaps there is a heaven, after all.”
“You believe they have souls, then?” Fairchild asked. “Certainly. If they are not born with them, it’s a poor creature indeed who can’t get one from some man by the time she’s eleven years old.”
“That’s right,” Fairchild agreed. He watched the group forward for a time. Then he rose. “I think I’ll go over and hear what they’re talking about.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Wiseman came up and borrowed a cigarette of Mark Frost, and they watched Fairchild’s burly retreating back. The Semitic man said: “There’s a man of undoubted talent, despite his fumbling bewilderment in the presence of sophisticated emotions.”
“Despite his lack of self-assurance, you mean,” Mark Frost corrected.
“No, it isn’t that,” Mrs. Wiseman put in. “You mean the same thing that Julius does: that having been born an American of a provincial midwestern lower middle class family, he has inherited all the lower middle class’s awe of Education with a capital E, an awe which the very fact of his difficulty in getting to college and staying there, has increased.”
“Yes,” her brother agreed. “And the reaction which sheer accumulated years and human experience has brought about in him has swung him to the opposite extreme without destroying that ingrained awe or offering him anything to replace it with, at all. His writing seems fumbling, not because life is unclear to him, but because of his innate humorless belief that, though it bewilder him at times, life at bottom is sound and admirable and fine; and because hovering over this American scene into which he has been thrust, the ghosts of the Emersons and Lowells and other exemplifiers of Education with a capital E who, ‘seated on chairs in handsomely carpeted parlors’ and surrounded by an atmosphere of half calf and security, dominated American letters in its most healthy American phase ‘without heat or vulgarity,’ simper yet in a sort of ubiquitous watchfulness. A sort of puerile bravado in flouting while he fears,” he explained.
“But,” his sister said, “for a man like Dawson there is no better American tradition than theirs — if he but knew it. They may have sat among their objects, transcribing their Greek and Latin and holding correspondences across the Atlantic, but they still found time to put out of their New England ports with the Word of God in one hand and a belaying pin in the other and all sails drawing aloft; and whatever they fell foul of was American. And it was American. And is yet.”
“Yes,” her brother agreed again. “But he lacks what they had at command among their shelves of discrete books and their dearth of heat and vulgarity — a standard of literature that is international. No, not a standard, exactly: a belief, a conviction that his talent need not be restricted to delineating things which his conscious mind assures him are America? reactions.”
“Freedom?” suggested Mark Frost hollowly.
“No. No one needs freedom. We cannot bear it. He need only let himself go, let himself forget all this fetich of culture and education which his upbringing and the ghosts of those whom circumstance permitted to reside longer at college than himself, and whom despite himself he regards with awe, assure him that he lacks. For by getting himself and his own bewilderment and inhibitions out of the way by describing, in a manner that even translation cannot injure (as Balzac did) American life as American life is, it will become eternal and timeless despite him.
“Life everywhere is the same, you know. Manners of living it may be different — are they not different between adjoining villages? family names, profits on a single field or orchard, work influences — but man’s old compulsions, duty and inclination: the axis and the circumference of his squirrel cage, they do not change. Details don’t matter, details only entertain us. And nothing that merely entertains us can matter, because the things that entertain us are purely speculative: prospective pleasures which we probably will not achieve. The other things only surprise us. And he who has stood
the surprise of birth can stand anything.”
TEN O’CLOCK
“Gabriel’s pants,” the nephew said, raising his head. “I’ve already told you once what I’m making, haven’t I?” He had repaired to his retreat in the lee of the wheelhouse, where he would be less liable to interruption. Or so he thought.
Jenny stood beside his chair and looked at him placidly. “I wasn’t going to ask you again,” she replied without rancor, “I just happened to be walking by here.” Then she examined the visible deck space with a brief comprehensive glance. “This is a fine place for courting,” she remarked.
“Is, huh?” the nephew said. “What’s the matter with Pete?” His knife ceased and he raised his head again. Jenny-answered something vaguely. She moved her head again and stood without exactly looking at him, placid and rife, giving him to think of himself surrounded enclosed by the sweet cloudy fire of her thighs, as young girls do. The nephew laid his pipe and his knife aside.
“Where’m I going to sit?” Jenny asked, so he moved over in his canvas chair, making room, and she came with slow unreluctance and squirmed into the sagging chair. “It’s a kind of tight fit,” she remarked.
.. Presently the nephew raised his head. “You don’t put much pep into your petting,” he remarked. So Jenny placidly put more pep into it.... After a time the nephew raised his head and gazed out over the water. “Gabriel’s pants,” he murmured in a tone of hushed detachment, stroking his hand slowly over the placid points of Jenny’s thighs, “Gabriel’s pants.”... After a while he raised his head.
“Say,” he said abruptly, “where’s Pete?”
“Back yonder, somewheres,” Jenny answered. “I saw him just before you stopped me.”
The nephew craned his neck, looking aft along the deck. Then he uncraned it, and after a while he raised his head. “I guess that’s enough,” he said. He pushed at Jenny’s blonde abandon. “Get up, now. I got my work to do. Beat it, now.”
“Gimme time to,” Jenny said placidly, struggling out of the chair. It was a kind of tight fit, but she stood erect finally, smoothing at her clothes. The nephew resumed his tools, and so after a while Jenny went away.
ELEVEN O’CLOCK
It was a thin volume bound in dark blue boards and a narrow orange arabesque of esoteric design unbroken across front and back near the top, and the title, in orange, Satyricon in Starlight.
“Now, here,” said Fairchild, flattening a page under his hand, his heavy hornrimmed spectacles riding his blobby benign face jauntily, “is the Major’s syphilis poem. After all, poetry has accomplished something when it causes a man like the Major to mull over it for a while. Poets lack business judgment. Now, if I—”
“Perhaps that’s what makes one a poet,” the Semitic man suggested, “being able to sustain a fine obliviousness of the world and its compulsions.”
“You’re thinking of oyster fishermen,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Being a successful poet is being just glittering and obscure and imminent enough in your public life to excuse whatever you might do privately.”
“If I were a poet—” Fairchild attempted.
“That’s right,” the Semitic man said. “Nowadays the gentle art has attained that state of perfection where you don’t have to know anything about literature at all to be a poet; and the time is coming when you won’t even have to write to be one. But that day hasn’t quite arrived yet: you still have to write something occasionally; not very often, of course, but still occasionally. And if it’s obscure enough every one is satisfied and you have vindicated yourself and are immediately forgotten and are again at perfect liberty to dine with whoever will invite you.”
“But listen,” repeated Fairchild, “if I were a poet, you know what I’d do? I’d—”
“You’d capture an unattached but ardent wealthy female.
Or, lacking that, some other and more fortunate poet would divide a weekend or so with you: there seems to be a noblesse oblige among them,” the other answered. “Gentleman poets, that is,” he added.
“No,” said Fairchild, indefatigable, “Pd intersperse my book with photographs and art studies on ineffable morons in bathing suits or clutching imitation lace window curtains across their middies. That’s what I’d do.”
“That would damn it as Art,” Mark Frost objected.
“You’re confusing Art with Studio Life, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman told him. She forestalled him and accepted a cigarette. “I’m all out, myself. Sorry. Thanks.”
“Why not?” Mark Frost responded. “If studio life costs you enough, it becomes art. You have to have a good reason to give to your people back home in Ohio or Indiana or somewhere.”
“But everybody wasn’t born in the Ohio valley, thank God,” the Semitic man said. Fairchild stared at him, kind and puzzled, a trifle belligerent. “I speak for those of us who read books instead of write them,” he explained. “It’s bad enough to grow into the conviction after you reach the age of discretion that you are to spend the rest of your life writing books, but to have your very infancy darkened by the possibility that you may have to write the Great American Novel..,”
“Oh,” Fairchild said. “Well, maybe you are like me, and prefer a live poet to the writings of any man.”
“Make it a dead poet, and I’ll agree.”
“Well..,” He settled his spectacles. “Listen to this”: Mark Frost groaned, rising, and departed. Fairchild read implacably:
“On rose and peach their droppings bled, Love a sacrifice has lain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is dead—’
“No: wait.” He skipped back up the page. Mrs. Wiseman listened restively, her brother with his customary quizzical phlegm.
“‘The Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed,
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed
And through the dark their droppings fell
“‘Upon the red erupted rose,
Upon the broken branch of peach
Blurred with scented mouths, that each
To another sing, and close—’”
He read the entire poem through. “What do you make of it?” he asked.
“Mostly words,” the Semitic man answered promptly, “a sort of cocktail of words. I imagine you get quite a jolt from it, if your taste is educated to cocktails.”
“Well, why not?” Mrs. Wiseman said with fierce protectiveness. “Only fools require ideas in verse.”
“Perhaps so,” her brother admitted. “But there’s no nourishment in electricity, as you poets nowadays seem to believe.”
“Well, what would you have them write about, then?” she demanded. “There’s only one possible subject to write anything about. What is there worth the effort and despair of writing about, except love and death?”
“That’s the feminine of it. You’d better let art alone and stick to artists, as is your nature.”
“But women have done some good things,” Fairchild objected. “I’ve read—”
“They bear geniuses. But do you think they care anything about the pictures and music their children produce? That they have any other emotion than a fierce tolerance of the vagaries of the child? Do you think Shakespeare’s mother was any prouder of him than, say, Tom o’ Bedlam’s?”
“Certainly she was,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Shakespeare made money.”
“You made a bad choice for comparison,” Fairchild said. “All artists are kind of insane. Don’t you think so?” he asked Mrs. Wiseman.
“Yes,” she snapped. “Almost as insane as the ones that sit around and talk about them.”
“Well—” Fairchild stared again at the page under his hand. He said slowly: “It’s a kind of dark thing. It’s kind of like somebody brings you to a dark door. Will you enter that room, or not?”
“But the old fellows got you into the room first,” the Semitic man said. “Then they asked you if you wanted to go out or not.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t know. There are rooms, dark rooms, that they didn’t know anything about at all. Freud and these other—”
“Discovered them just in time to supply our shelterless literati with free sleeping quarters. But you and Eva just agreed that subject, substance, doesn’t signify in verse, that the best poetry is just words.”
“Yes... infatuation with words,” Fairchild agreed. “That’s when you hammer out good poetry, great poetry. A kind of singing rhythm in the world that you get into without knowing it, like a swimmer gets into a current. Words.... I had it once.”
“Shut up, Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Julius can afford to be a fool.”
“Words,” repeated Fairchild. “But it’s gone out of me, now. That first infatuation, I mean; that sheer infatuation with and marveling over the beauty and power of words. That has gone out of me. Used up, I guess. So I can’t write poetry any more. It takes me too long to say things, now.”
“We all wrote poetry, when we were young,” the Semitic man said. “Some of us even put it down on paper. But all of us wrote it.”
“Yes,” repeated Fairchild, turning slowly onward through the volume. “Listen:
“‘... O spring O wanton O cruel baring to the curved and hungry hand of march your white unsubtle thighs..
And listen.” He turned onward. Mrs. Wiseman was gazing aft where Jenny and Mr. Talliaferro had come into view and now leaned together upon the rail. The Semitic man listened with weary courtesy.
“‘... above unsapped convolvulæ of hills april a bee sipping perplexed with pleasure..’
“It’s a kind of childlike faith in the efficacy of words, you see, a kind of belief that circumstance somehow will invest the veriest platitude with magic. And, darn it, it does happen at times, let it be historically or grammatically incorrect or physically impossible; let it even be trite: there comes a time when it will be invested with a something not of this life, this world, at all. It’s a kind of fire, you know... He fumbled himself among words, staring at them, at the Semitic man’s sad quizzical eyes and Mrs. Wiseman’s averted face.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 51
