“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.”
“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.
“Somebody, some drug clerk or something, has shredded the tender — and do you know what I believe? I believe that he’s always writing it for some woman, that he fondly believes he’s stealing a march on some brute bigger or richer or handsomer than he is; I believe that every word a writing man writes is put down with the ultimate intention of impressing some woman that probably don’t care anything at all for literature, as is the nature of women. Well, maybe she ain’t always a flesh and blood creature. She may be only the symbol of a desire. But she is feminine. Fame is only a by-product…, Do you remember, the old boys never even bothered to sign their things…. But, I don’t know. I suppose nobody ever knows a man’s reasons for what he does: you can only generalize from results.”
“He very seldom knows his reasons, himself,” the other said. “And by the time he has recovered from his astonishment at the unforeseen result he got, he has forgotten what reason he once believed he had…. But how can you generalize from a poem?
What result does a poem have? You say that substance doesn’t matter, has no proper place in a poem. You have,” the Semitic man continued with curious speculation, “the strangest habit of contradicting yourself, of fumbling around and then turning tail and beating your listener to the refutation….
But God knows, there is plenty of room for speculation in modern verse. Fumbling, too, though the poets themselves do most of this. Don’t you agree, Eva?”
His sister answered “What?” turning upon him her dark, preoccupied gaze. He repeated the question. Fairchild interrupted in full career:
“The trouble with modern verse is, that to comprehend it you must have recently passed through an emotional experience identical with that through which the poet himself has recently passed. The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose feet are shaped like the cobbler’s feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear—”
“Like overshoes,” the other suggested.
“Like overshoes,” Fairchild agreed. “But, then, I ain’t disparaging. Perhaps the few that the shoes fit can go a lot further than a whole herd of people shod alike could go.”
“Interesting, anyway,” the Semitic man said, “to reduce the spiritual progress of the race to terms of an emotional migration; esthetic Israelites crossing unwetted a pink sea of dullness and security. What about it, Eva?”
Mrs. Wiseman, thinking of Jenny’s soft body, came out of her dream. “I think you are both not only silly, but dull.” She rose. “I want to burn another cigarette, Dawson.”
He gave her one, and a match, and she left them. Fairchild turned a few pages. “It’s kind of difficult for me to reconcile her with this book,” he said slowly. “Does it strike you that way?”
“Not so much that she wrote this,” the other answered, “but that she wrote anything at all. That anybody should. But there’s no puzzle about the book itself. Not to me, that is. But you, straying trustfully about this park of dark and rootless trees which Dr. Ellis and your Germans have recently thrown open to the public… You’ll always be a babe in that wood, you know. Bewildered, and slightly annoyed; restive,
