This Side of Paradise
“Don’t worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest
pose of all. Pose—”
“Yes?”
“But do the next thing.”
After Amory returned to college he received several letters from
Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.
I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable
safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in your
springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive
without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have to take
for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in confessing
them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable of
affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud.
Don’t let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really
be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t
worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it;
at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will
begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are
my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.
If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your last,
that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful— so “highbrow”
that I picture you living in an intellectual and emotional vacuum;
and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types;
you will find that all through their youth they will persist
annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a
supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a
Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to
come into really antagonistic contact with the world. An
idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more
valuable beacon to you at present.
You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do
keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise
don’t blame yourself too much.
You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this
“woman proposition”; but it’s more than that, Amory; it’s the fear
that what you begin you can’t stop; you would run amuck, and I know
whereof I speak; it’s that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you
detect evil, it’s the half-realized fear of God in your heart.
Whatever your metier proves to be—religion, architecture,
literature—I’m sure you would be much safer anchored to the Church,
but I won’t risk my influence by arguing with you even though I am
secretly sure that the “black chasm of Romanism” yawns beneath you.
Do write me soon.
With affectionate regards, THAYER DARCY.
Even Amory’s reading paled during this period; he delved further
into the misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter
Pater, Theophile Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais,
Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonius. One week, through general
curiosity, he inspected the private libraries of his classmates
and found Sloane’s as typical as any: sets of Kipling, O. Henry,
John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis; “What Every Middle-Aged
Woman Ought to Know,” “The Spell of the Yukon”; a “gift” copy of
James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered, annotated
schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own late
discoveries, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.
Together with Tom D’Invilliers, he sought among the lights of
Princeton for some one who might found the Great American Poetic
Tradition.
The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that
year than had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years
before. Things had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice
of much of the spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old
Princeton they would never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie.
Tanaduke was a sophomore, with tremendous ears and a way of
saying, “The earth swirls down through the ominous moons of
preconsidered generations!” that made them vaguely wonder why it
did not sound quite clear, but never question that it was the
utterance of a supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took him.
They told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like
Shelley’s, and featured his ultrafree free verse and prose poetry
in the Nassau Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke’s genius absorbed
the many colors of the age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to
their great disappointment. He talked of Greenwich Village now
instead of “noon-swirled moons,” and met winter muses,
unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway,
instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had regaled
their expectant appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to the
futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better
there. Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing
for two years and read the complete works of Alexander Pope four
times, but on Amory’s suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like
foot-ease for stomach trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and
called it a coin’s toss whether this genius was too big or too
petty for them.
Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who
dispensed easy epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups
of admirers every night. He was disappointed, too, at the air of
general uncertainty on every subject that seemed linked with the
pedantic temperament; his opinions took shape in a miniature
satire called “In a Lecture-Room,” which he persuaded Tom to
print in the Nassau Lit.
“Good-morning, Fool... Three times a week You hold us helpless while
you speak, Teasing our thirsty souls with the Sleek ‘yeas’ of your
philosophy... Well, here we are, your hundred sheep, Tune up, play
on, pour forth... we sleep... You are a student, so they say; You
hammered out the other day A syllabus, from what we know Of some
forgotten folio; You’d sniffled through an era’s must, Filling your
nostrils up with dust, And then, arising from your knees, Published,
in one gigantic sneeze... But here’s a neighbor on my right, An
Eager Ass, considered bright; Asker of questions.... How he’ll
stand, With earnest air and fidgy hand, After this hour, telling you
He sat all night and burrowed through Your book.... Oh, you’ll be
coy and he Will simulate precosity, And pedants both, you’ll smile
and smirk, And leer, and hasten back to work....
’Twas this day week, sir, you returned A theme of mine, from which
I learned (Through various comment on the side Which you had
scrawled) that I defied The _highest rules of criticism_ For
_cheap_ and _careless_ witticism.... ‘Are you quite sure that this
could be?’ And ‘Shaw is no authority!’ But Eager Ass, with what
he’s sent, Plays havoc with your best per cent.
Still—still I meet you here and there... When Shakespeare’s played
you hold a chair, And some defunct, moth-eaten star Enchants the
mental prig you are... A radical comes down and shocks The
atheistic orthodox? You’re representing Common Sense, Mouth open,
in the audience. And, sometimes, even chapel lures That conscious
tolerance of yours, That broad and beaming view of truth (Including
Kant and General Booth...) And so from shock to shock you live, A
hollow, pale affirmative...
The hour’s up... and roused from rest One hundred children of the
blest Cheat you a word or two with feet That down the noisy
aisle-ways beat... Forget on _narrow-minded earth_ The Mighty Yawn
that gave you birth.”
In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to
enroll in the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory’s envy and admiration
of this step was drowned in an experience of his own to which he
never succeeded in giving an appropriate value, but which,
nevertheless, haunted him for three years afterward.
THE DEVIL
Healy’s they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary’s. There were
Axia Marlowe and Phoebe Column, from the Summer Garden show, Fred
Sloane and Amory. The evening was so very young that they felt
ridiculous with surplus energy, and burst into the cafe like
Dionysian revellers.
“Table for four in the middle of the floor,” yelled Phoebe.
“Hurry, old dear, tell ’em we’re here!”
“Tell ’em to play ‘Admiration’!” shouted Sloane. “You two order;
Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf,” and they sailed
off in the muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an
hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage;
there they took seats and watched.
“There’s Findle Margotson, from New Haven!” she cried above the
uproar. “’Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!”
“Oh, Axia!” he shouted in salutation. “C’mon over to our table.”
“No!” Amory whispered.
“Can’t do it, Findle; I’m with somebody else! Call me up
to-morrow about one o’clock!”
Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty’s, answered incoherently
and turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring
to steer around the room.
“There’s a natural damn fool,” commented Amory.
“Oh, he’s all right. Here’s the old jitney waiter. If you ask me,
I want a double Daiquiri.”
“Make it four.”
The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from
the colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway,
and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl.
On the whole it was a typical crowd, and their party as typical
as any. About three-fourths of the whole business was for effect
and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafe, soon
enough for the five-o’clock train back to Yale or Princeton;
about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered
strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled to be
one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old
friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared
even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in
the cafe, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to
spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was
so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he
never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a
misty tragedy, played far behind the veil, and that it meant
something definite he knew.
About one o’clock they moved to Maxim’s, and two found them in
Deviniere’s. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a
state of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely
sober; they had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers
of champagne who usually assisted their New York parties. They
were just through dancing and were making their way back to their
chairs when Amory became aware that some one at a near-by table
was looking at him. He turned and glanced casually... a
middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a
little apart at a table by himself and watching their party
intently. At Amory’s glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to
Fred, who was just sitting down.
“Who’s that pale fool watching us?” he complained indignantly.