This Side of Paradise
or political leader—and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo
de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world.
Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it
can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an
important finger—”
“I don’t agree with you,” Tom interrupted. “There never were men
placed in such egotistic positions since—oh, since the French
Revolution.”
Amory disagreed violently.
“You’re mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist
for a period of individualism. Wilson has only been powerful when
he has represented; he’s had to compromise over and over again.
Just as soon as Trotsky and Lenin take a definite, consistent
stand they’ll become merely two-minute figures like Kerensky.
Even Foch hasn’t half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War
used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the
popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor
responsibility: Guynemer and Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy
make a hero of Pershing? A big man has no time really to do
anything but just sit and be big.”
“Then you don’t think there will be any more permanent world
heroes?”
“Yes—in history—not in life. Carlyle would have difficulty
getting material for a new chapter on ‘The Hero as a Big Man.’”
“Go on. I’m a good listener to-day.”
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard.
But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier
or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw,
a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away.
My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest
path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over
and over.”
“Then you blame it on the press?”
“Absolutely. Look at you; you’re on The New Democracy, considered
the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do
things and all that. What’s your business? Why, to be as clever,
as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about
every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal
with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can
throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the
people buy the issue. You, Tom d’Invilliers, a blighted Shelley,
changing, shifting, clever, unscrupulous, represent the critical
consciousness of the race—Oh, don’t protest, I know the stuff. I
used to write book reviews in college; I considered it rare sport
to refer to the latest honest, conscientious effort to propound a
theory or a remedy as a ‘welcome addition to our light summer
reading.’ Come on now, admit it.”
Tom laughed, and Amory continued triumphantly.
“We _want_ to believe. Young students try to believe in older
authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen,
countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they _can’t_.
Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered
criticism. It’s worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich,
unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping,
acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a
paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of
tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern
living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents
the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year
later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper’s
ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a
sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation,
the reaction against them—”
He paused only to get his breath.
“And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my
ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins
on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into
people’s heads; I might cause a poor, inoffensive capitalist to
have a vulgar liaison with a bomb, or get some innocent little
Bolshevik tangled up with a machine-gun bullet—”
Tom was growing restless under this lampooning of his connection
with The New Democracy.
“What’s all this got to do with your being bored?”
Amory considered that it had much to do with it.
“How’ll I fit in?” he demanded. “What am I for? To propagate the
race? According to the American novels we are led to believe that
the ‘healthy American boy’ from nineteen to twenty-five is an
entirely sexless animal. As a matter of fact, the healthier he is
the less that’s true. The only alternative to letting it get you
is some violent interest. Well, the war is over; I believe too
much in the responsibilities of authorship to write just now; and
business, well, business speaks for itself. It has no connection
with anything in the world that I’ve ever been interested in,
except a slim, utilitarian connection with economics. What I’d
see of it, lost in a clerkship, for the next and best ten years
of my life would have the intellectual content of an industrial
movie.”
“Try fiction,” suggested Tom.
“Trouble is I get distracted when I start to write stories—get
afraid I’m doing it instead of living—get thinking maybe life is
waiting for me in the Japanese gardens at the Ritz or at Atlantic
City or on the lower East Side.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I haven’t the vital urge. I wanted to be
a regular human being but the girl couldn’t see it that way.”
“You’ll find another.”
“God! Banish the thought. Why don’t you tell me that ‘if the girl
had been worth having she’d have waited for you’? No, sir, the
girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody. If I thought
there’d be another I’d lose my remaining faith in human nature.
Maybe I’ll play—but Rosalind was the only girl in the wide world
that could have held me.”
“Well,” yawned Tom, “I’ve played confidant a good hour by the
clock. Still, I’m glad to see you’re beginning to have violent
views again on something.”
“I am,” agreed Amory reluctantly. “Yet when I see a happy family
it makes me sick at my stomach—”
“Happy families try to make people feel that way,” said Tom
cynically.
TOM THE CENSOR
There were days when Amory listened. These were when Tom,
wreathed in smoke, indulged in the slaughter of American
literature. Words failed him.
“Fifty thousand dollars a year,” he would cry. “My God! Look at
them, look at them—Edna Ferber, Gouverneur Morris, Fanny Hurst,
Mary Roberts Rinehart—not producing among ’em one story or novel
that will last ten years. This man Cobb—I don’t tink he’s either
clever or amusing—and what’s more, I don’t think very many people
do, except the editors. He’s just groggy with advertising. And—oh
Harold Bell Wright oh Zane Grey—”
“They try.”
“No, they don’t even try. Some of them _can_ write, but they
won’t sit down and do one honest novel. Most of them _can’t_
write, I’ll admit. I believe Rupert Hughes tries to give a real,
comprehensive picture of American life, but his style and
perspective are barbarous. Ernest Poole and Dorothy Canfield try
but they’re hindered by their absolute lack of any sense of
humor; but at least they crowd their work instead of spreading it
thin. Every author ought to write every book as if he were going
to be beheaded the day he finished it.”
“Is that double entente?”
“Don’t slow me up! Now there’s a few of ’em that seem to have
some cultural background, some intelligence and a good deal of
literary felicity but they just simply won’t write honestly;
they’d all claim there was no public for good stuff. Then why the
devil is it that Wells, Conrad, Galsworthy, Shaw, Bennett, and
the rest depend on America for over half their sales?”
“How does little Tommy like the poets?”
Tom was overcome. He dropped his arms until they swung loosely
beside the chair and emitted faint grunts.
“I’m writing a satire on ’em now, calling it ‘Boston Bards and
Hearst Reviewers.’”
“Let’s hear it,” said Amory eagerly.
“I’ve only got the last few lines done.”
“That’s very modern. Let’s hear ’em, if they’re funny.”
Tom produced a folded paper from his pocket and read aloud,
pausing at intervals so that Amory could see that it was free
verse:
“So Walter Arensberg, Alfred Kreymborg, Carl Sandburg, Louis
Untermeyer, Eunice Tietjens, Clara Shanafelt, James Oppenheim,
Maxwell Bodenheim, Richard Glaenzer, Scharmel Iris, Conrad Aiken, I
place your names here So that you may live If only as names,
Sinuous, mauve-colored names, In the Juvenalia Of my collected
editions.”
Amory roared.
“You win the iron pansy. I’ll buy you a meal on the arrogance of
the last two lines.”
Amory did not entirely agree with Tom’s sweeping damnation of
American novelists and poets. He enjoyed both Vachel Lindsay and
Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious, if slender,
artistry of Edgar Lee Masters.
“What I hate is this idiotic drivel about ‘I am God—I am man—I
ride the winds—I look through the smoke—I am the life sense.’”
“It’s ghastly!”
“And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make
business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it,
unless it’s crooked business. If it was an entertaining subject
they’d buy the life of James J. Hill and not one of these long
office tragedies that harp along on the significance of smoke—”
“And gloom,” said Tom. “That’s another favorite, though I’ll
admit the Russians have the monopoly. Our specialty is stories
about little girls who break their spines and get adopted by
grouchy old men because they smile so much. You’d think we were a
race of cheerful cripples and that the common end of the Russian
peasant was suicide—”
“Six o’clock,” said Amory, glancing at his wrist-watch. “I’ll buy
you a grea’ big dinner on the strength of the Juvenalia of your
collected editions.”
LOOKING BACKWARD
July sweltered out with a last hot week, and Amory in another
surge of unrest realized that it was just five months since he
and Rosalind had met. Yet it was already hard for him to
visualize the heart-whole boy who had stepped off the transport,
passionately desiring the adventure of life. One night while the
heat, overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his
room he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to
immortalize the poignancy of that time.
The February streets, wind-washed by night, blow full of strange
half-intermittent damps, bearing on wasted walks in shining sight wet
snow plashed into gleams under the lamps, like golden oil from some
divine machine, in an hour of thaw and stars.
Strange damps—full of the eyes of many men, crowded with life borne
in upon a lull.... Oh, I was young, for I could turn again to you,
most finite and most beautiful, and taste the stuff of