“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
