The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  Mr. Folger looked up as Laskell came out of the house. Then he went back to his conversation with the hounds, although he somehow managed to carry it on with a recognition of Laskell’s presence. But the hounds were divided in their interest now, looking with mild shifting glances at the stranger and back to their master. “I’m John Laskell,” he said, with the sense that the hounds had made the introduction.

  “How are you?” said Folger, not as a question but as a greeting. He was a large man with a mild firm face touched with irony. “Glad to know you,” he said. He did not offer to shake hands but there was acceptance in his manner and Laskell sat down beside him on the edge of the low porch. Folger suddenly shot out a hand and caught one of the hounds by its dewlap and drew it gently toward him. He looked into its eyes.

  “Wurra marra, huh?” he demanded peremptorily.

  The hound wriggled its rump and tried to disengage its head to avoid the human gaze. He was divided between happiness and unhappiness, caught and held, yet loving the game that was being played with him. “Wurra marra?” Folger repeated, pressing the point.

  Already Laskell felt comfortable sitting there and listening. The two other hounds watched their captive comrade half with pleasure, half with apprehension, mouths open, tongues out, seeming to grin. Laskell lit a cigarette. The old man in the rocker behind him said something that he could not understand, something in reference to the hounds, and Mr. Folger turned to his father and nodded a notice of the remark and smiled. Laskell saw the fading light over the low hills. He shivered comfortably in the cool of the early evening. All the fears and tensions of the day, all the ideas and all the fantasies, were laid at rest.

  2

  JOHN LASKELL’S friends understood very well a certain course of action and they had a name for it. They called it “the mechanism of escape”—when the going got rough, one was tempted to turn from the hard reality to some pleasant illusion. Under some circumstances even illness could be an escape, and if Laskell’s friends had known how happy Laskell was in his illness, they could not have failed to understand that he was evading something. In the middle thirties people watched each other very closely for signs of weakness.

  To be sure, Laskell had never given any indications of a tendency toward evasion. When it came to reality, he seemed to be able to face it as well as the next one, perhaps even better than most. Nothing could be more real, for example, than his profession. An expert in public housing deals with the basic needs of poor people. He deals with the shape of houses, with steel and brick and with what is even more impenetrable and resistant, the interests of owners of land, of real property, as it is called. And so far as politics went, his friends knew that Laskell was quite as “conscious” as they were. Many of Laskell’s friends were connected with one or another of the radical political parties, either as members or as sympathizers—such was the name then used. Laskell himself was committed to no party, but he nevertheless faced reality in the busy life of committees. He was what was then known by radicals as a “sincere liberal”—the phrase was at least in part meant to be kind—and he had gained for himself a good deal of respect by hard work. Certainly he did not give the impression of a man inclined to run away from anything.

  And it would have been hard for his friends to name anything he might be running away from. For, as lives go, John Laskell’s life was most fortunate. Certainly its material aspect was very lucky: Laskell had an income. It was not a large income. It was of the size that financial people call a backlog, but in those cheap and rather frugal days of the thirties, it made, for an unmarried man of modest tastes, a comfortable little financial glow all by itself.

  The times being what they were and the social world in which he moved being what it was, Laskell often had occasion to feel ashamed of his income. For although among his friends there were many intelligent people who were financially very well fixed, there were also many who were either quite poor, or, if they were well off, put to the necessity of making money by means they despised. They worked in advertising agencies or publishing houses by day and did what they could in the evening. And yet the income may well have had a good effect on Laskell. It preserved him from the very beginning from the brunt of those problems of “integrity” which, although they had always been of importance in American careers, were just now of more importance to men of talent than ever before. Laskell, with only a little caution and not much sacrifice, could manage to live without a salary. The alternatives to doing what he thought right did not present themselves, as they did to many of his friends, as “selling out” or as “corruption.” He did not have to think of himself in such heroic and tragic language and this suited his reasonable temperament.

  He was thirty-three years old, he was getting rather better looking as he got older, his dark hair had not thinned at all, and until this juvenile disease of scarlet fever struck him, he had never in his adult life been ill.

  Laskell had come to his profession rather late and perhaps for that reason was the more attached to it. Until he was twenty-four he had planned a literary career. He wrote quite well and he had been in revolt against the culture of his affectionate and comfortable Larchmont family. He had wanted what young men of spirit usually want, freedom and experience, and literature was the way to get them. Literature was the means by which one became sentient and free. But the literary career somehow did not develop. Perhaps it was a kind of modesty that kept Laskell from writing, a diffidence about imposing himself or about looking into himself. From literature to the study of philosophy had been an easy step, scarcely looking like a retreat. But the change did not settle him, and it might have seemed that having an income was going to mean that he would fritter away what talent he had.

  But when Laskell was twenty-four a chance encounter resolved his uncertainties. He was visiting one of his liberal, well-to-do friends, and among the company there was a man who insisted on talking about public housing. Between this man and John Laskell there flared an immediate hostility. It was one of those antagonisms that give great moral satisfaction to both parties. Laskell was willing to have the man talk about anything that could be contradicted. And contradict he did, with a kind of cool persistence that surprised him, for he had never been a contentious person. He did not know where he got the ideas he used for his arguments. No doubt they came from his opponent’s own laboriously acquired store, needing only to be turned upside down. He was pleased when the man became abusive and denounced not only Laskell, but what he called Laskell’s “whole school of thought.” Suddenly there he was, a member of a school of thought in a profession he had never before considered. It was, the man said, a brilliant but unsound school. The ideas that Laskell had produced only to be contrary seemed to him to be suddenly right and important.

  The chance debate made up Laskell’s mind. Through his years of study in America and Europe, the interest so fortuitously aroused that evening never flagged. Laskell discovered in himself gifts for practicality and detail which, in his dream of literature, he had never suspected. He could deal he found, not only with social theories, but also, as was necessary, with rents and rules and washing machines.

  Now and then Laskell remembered with a kind of regret he had once dreamed of fame, even of immortality, where now he was concerned only with a sound professional reputation. But his willing sacrifice of his young ambitions—which, after all, could never have been fulfilled—made the work he had chosen all the more valuable to him. Now that he had lost the vague rebelliousness which he had once attached to his notion of the life of the mind, he found that he enjoyed his mind far more and used it much better. He discovered that nothing was irrelevant to his profession. Every aspect of culture bore upon it, economics, sociology, history, technics, art. Now when he wrote—for technical journals and occasionally for the liberal magazines—it was with none of the self-doubt that had impeded his early literary efforts. His book, Theories of Housing, was much respected. One reviewer even called it “a little classic.” He
was taking great pleasure in the collection of material for his book on the planned cities of antiquity. He knew that he would never be great, he was reconciled to being useful.

  Despite the nature of his profession and despite his hard work on semi-political committees, Laskell was not really a political person. The picture of the world that presented itself to his mind was of a great sea of misery, actual or to come. He did not think of it as forces in struggle. And the sea of misery often washed around the feet of his own existence. There were days when he was meaninglessly depressed, when there seemed no point to his busy life. Such days had been frequent in Laskell’s youth. They had seemed proper to the literary temperament. They did not seem proper to the life of useful activity he now led. But they always passed and Laskell did not attach much significance to them. He understood that they were part of the difficulty of being a modern man. It was a difficulty he heard much discussed among his friends.

  Although John Laskell’s life was fortunate, it had been touched, once, by tragedy. There was no ascertainable reason why Elizabeth Fuess should have died. She was a very healthy girl and she had had in her illness the best doctors, the best pneumonia nurses, the best equipment that had been with her when she took the chill with which her illness began. They were playing tennis on an east-side court. It was a Sunday late in September, a hot day that had suddenly, toward the end of their last set, become cloudy and windy. They had been playing well, in the way they usually played—they considered that they were playing well when their rallies were long and they gave each other the opportunity for well-stroked shots; they said that this spoiled them for playing with anyone else and they often resolved to change their ways and really to try to keep the ball out of reach. Laskell came off the court that day and went to the bench where Elizabeth was putting on her sweater. He was always aroused by Elizabeth after tennis—he liked her dampness and the way she smelled, her disheveled hair, the redness of her face, the moist clay-dust on her legs and forehead. She liked the same things about him, and so they usually came off the court in an erotic glow, tired as they might be. But that day he saw that she was not as usual, not happily fatigued and consciously physical, but pinched and white in the face and shivering violently. She looked almost frightened, the chill had been so sudden. He took her back to her apartment in a cab, got her into a hot bath, lighted a fire, and gave her whisky. She felt better, the chill passed, but she was so very far from wanting to make love that she asked him to leave. When he telephoned the next day, it was her married sister who answered. She had been called in the night by Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth had died ten days later in a hospital. No one in grief could have been more civilized to Laskell than were Elizabeth’s parents and her sister. They liked Laskell and they had always shown only a little edge of disapproval of the affair, if affair was the word for it—Laskell himself knew enough of affairs to believe that the relation of Elizabeth and himself was something much more. They tried to suggest to him that their feelings toward him were good, and they were able to do so with only a little awkwardness. They had rather supposed that some day John and Elizabeth would marry and that it was only some modern way of doing things that had kept them from marrying at once. Elizabeth was the spirited daughter and she was taken to be modern even though she did not write or paint or hold a job. She lived alone in an apartment in Greenwich Village and spent much of her time reading books that her parents were not interested in, but the apartment itself was very decorous and neat and Elizabeth dressed in a way that her mother admired and they had good hopes that she would soon marry and settle down. They were encouraged in these hopes when they met John Laskell and guessed the relationship between him and their daughter.

  John Laskell and Elizabeth Fuess knew that they were going to marry. They took their relationship now as seriously as a marriage, did they not? They lived close to each other in the Village and they were always in and out of each other’s apartment, each taking possession of the other’s, moving around in it with a complete sense of ownership. They went on long week ends together. They had no reasoned objection to marriage, they talked of “When we’re married.” But the idea just seemed superfluous at the moment. Both of them were sufficiently of the middle class to be unable to think of marriage as an impossibility, but both were sufficiently of their time to be astonished at their being in love. It went against many of the things that their culture held were possible to fully conscious people. They were very fully conscious and they regarded with wonder and uncertainty the devotion they had for each other. But they spoke of marrying in the spring. When they talked of marriage, it was as if they had invented the institution for their own special purpose.

  Laskell found Elizabeth’s death beyond the powers of his thought. He believed that this was because it was impossible to judge the event, and without judgment there was no way of thinking about it. She had been, simply, alive at one moment, twenty-six years old, a young woman of more than usual intensity of life, and then she was dead. No fact, no segment of reality, could be more definite, more self-defining. To think about it at all meant to be involved in questions such as that of the injustice of the event. But that would have implied the idea of justice, and Laskell knew that that question was an impossible one. There was nothing to think about, he found, except the picture that somehow stayed with him of Elizabeth shivering on the tennis court. He saw how much they had been right in feeling that their love had been a kind of exception, a lucky chance snatched from the way things were in the stern modern world, a piece of feeling fortunately left over from the gentler past. He saw that the more clearly when he knew that he could not act as lovers had once acted, he could not weep and curse, but only feel a kind of hard empty sternness to meet the sternness of the world. When, at the suggestion of Elizabeth’s sister, he went to Elizabeth’s apartment to take something of hers to keep, he took two or three of her favorite books with her name in them. He considered taking something more personal, but when he thought of taking the Monet pastel of which she had been fond, he realized it was too valuable, that everything in the apartment, which he once felt he possessed together with her, belonged legally to Elizabeth’s parents. He looked into the box where she had kept her careless jewelry, to take perhaps a pin or ring she had often worn, but he took nothing as a keepsake.

  His friends had the good sense or the good taste not to try to say anything to him. There was, of course, nothing to say. Perhaps if Elizabeth had been his wife they would have had some form of words, some way of philosophizing or offering comfort. But Elizabeth was not his wife, no matter how close they had been, and that fact was borne in on him whenever he remembered, with no resentment at all, that it was her sister whom Elizabeth had called in the night, not him. At that time he knew the Crooms only slightly; their warm friendship had not yet begun and it was Gifford Maxim who gave him what companionship he looked for. This was odd, when one thought of Maxim’s philosophy, of the views he would naturally have about death and personal sorrow. But Maxim, though always enormously busy with his Party activities, would drop in almost every day in the early evening and take Laskell to dinner in the neighborhood and come back to sit with him for an hour or so. Maxim had been strangely fond of Elizabeth, although she had always regarded him with friendly irony. Laskell found that Maxim’s presence, his great, scarred, silent face, gave him fortitude and comfort.

  But if grief had touched Laskell’s life, after all it sooner or later touches every life and Laskell’s had scarcely been shattered. Laskell had met Elizabeth’s death with mature courage, as his friends all agreed. He had a considerable amount of good sense about himself. He believed it wrong to let the present be shadowed by the past and he tried in a sincere and simple way to enjoy his life and to make it useful. And for the most part he had succeeded. He could not honestly have said that these last three years had been unhappy. Yet here he was in bed with scarlet fever—an absurd disease at thirty-three—taking a profound pleasure in being ill.

&nb
sp; But that did not put it accurately. His pleasure was not in being ill but in being well, in his wonderful clarity, in his sense of lightness and grace, his feeling of perfect order.

  It had begun as soon as the delirium had passed. He had opened his eyes and seen the woman sitting in the armchair by the window. The lamp beside the chair was the only light in the room and it shone down full upon her white lap, but he could not see her face.

  “I am pain,” she said.

  John Laskell heard it clearly, but he lay still, thinking it best not to say anything at all.

  She had spoken, making that astonishing remark, as soon as Laskell had opened his eyes. She said it again, “I am Paine, Miss Paine. Isn’t that a dreadful name for a nurse?”

  Her voice was English. She said “nuhss” with a mere little breath of sound where the r should be. It made Laskell feel safe.

  She had not been occupied with anything as she sat there, not reading or sewing or knitting but wholly engaged in watching her patient. She had introduced herself without getting up. Now she came and stood by the bed.

  “But you have a nice name,” she said quietly. “‘John Laskell.’”

  It was as if she were telling him his own name. It was a thing one often did with children, make conversation about their names. The sound of his name, the substantial mystery of identity, gave Laskell all the pleasure he could as yet feel. Later he remembered her cleverness in giving him something to hold on to.