That left Allen Blake, Foley’s publisher. There was a time when Foley called Allen Blake fairly regularly. Just about as regularly, Blake took him to lunch. They usually went to Cherio’s, where they would see other editors and authors, including Max Perkins, who might be sitting on a stool at the bar, alone. Blake was something of a kidder and liked to say that he had brought Foley there at a certain risk, what with Perkins and the boys on the look for new talent and that sort of thing. That was pure baloney, but Foley loved the smell of it. He often saw some of the big shots of the literary world, heard the latest gossip that was being circulated, and came away with raw material that he could polish up for the faculty teas. Foley was the only man on the campus with a book that anybody had a corner on, or could give you the impression of how a certain author struck him, personally. But after several years of this it began to taper off. Foley went on calling, of course, and Blake was always simply dying to see him, but right at the moment, as a rule, he was all sewed up. So Foley stopped calling, and in the past few years Blake stopped sending him that Christmas book, or special Christmas card, that the house mailed to their authors every year.
Foley hadn’t called Blake in four or five years, but he had never forgotten the number, and he seldom came to town without its crossing his mind that he might give him a ring. He had even gone so far as to work put in advance what he would say. He had gone even farther—he had worked out what he thought Blake would say. He would call, get Blake’s secretary, and casually tell her that Peter Foley was calling.
Then he would hear Blake’s voice, and he would say, “Allen, this Foley.”
“Well!” Blake would say. “Well, well, Foley. Speaking of the devil, I was just talking with Lewis here about you. You remember Lewis?”
“That a fact?” he would say, not remembering Lewis.
“Lewis was saying good deal nostalgia right now. Good deal fresh interest in the twenties. Said we ought to get busy and set a fire under you.”
“Well!” Foley would say, then he would clear his throat and say, “As a matter of fact, Allen, started a sort of little fire of my own several weeks ago. May be part of this feeling. Some sort of spontaneous combustion. Anyhow, I’d say it was going along pretty well right now—”
“Well, I’ve never heard sweeter music,” Blake would say. “I’d say that’s the best news I’ve heard in weeks.”
“Ought to have it in hand next month or so. Last chapter pretty important. Whole goddam book sort of hangs on it. Without the right summing up might wonder what the hell the book’s all about.”
“I remember your pointing that out,” Blake would say.
“Well, I think I’m on the right track now,” he would answer.
“That’s the greatest goddam news I’ve heard in months,” Blake would say. Then he would add, “Just glancing here at my schedule. See that I’m sewed up as hell right at this point. Big Fall List conference coming up this week. You picked a hell of a week.”
“Understand that,” Foley would say. “Just thought I’d give you a buzz and tell you how things were going.”
“Best goddam news I’ve heard in years,” Blake would say.
“Well, be seeing you, Allen,” Foley would say, then hang up quick before something spoiled it, or Blake might ask him just what day the ms. would come in.
This conversation often seemed so real—if he was sitting in a bar or at the back of a movie—that Foley sometimes thought it had actually taken place. He might take the train back with the idea that he was all set to get to work. On that last chapter. The one, that is, that would sew the book up. A book that would go down in literary history as the one that really threw light on the twenties, on the forces, that is, that gave the life and art of the twenties their form. The force behind Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Lawrence, behind Lou Baker, Proctor, and even Dickie, and behind—perhaps a little far behind—Peter Foley himself. The flickering rites of spring that sputtered in Foley but burned with a gemlike flame in Lawrence. The buttered Danish on his lips, Foley paused, murmured:
“Young men are a corn dance, a rite of spring, and every generation must write its own music, and if these notes have a sequence the age has a style.”
Who said that?
Peter Nielson Foley.
Where could it be found?
Near top of last, or next to last, page of manuscript now lying in grate of his fireplace, unpublished, unfinished, and tentatively titled “The Strange Captivity.”
Above statement led up to the following:
The great style, the habit of perfection, united George Herman Ruth and Charles A. Lindbergh, Albie Booth and Jack Dempsey, Juan Belmonte and Jay Gatsby, and every man, anywhere, who stood alone with his own symbolic bull. He had his gesture, his moment of truth, or his early death in the afternoon.
Foley his own matador. The graduate seminar his arena. The yellow pages in the fireplace his moment of truth.
Into his Schrafft’s paper napkin, folded, he blew his nose. He stuffed the napkin into his cup, placed a dime on the counter, and as his right hand fumbled for the check his left hand snitched five more sugar cubes from the bowl beside his water glass. Easy did it. Dropped cubes into left-hand pocket of his jacket as he asked cashier for paper matches. Outside, in the basket near curbing, he tossed cellophane wrapper of his second panatella on the face of J. Lasky Proctor, smiling up at him. Times photo. Deeply eroded profile, dialectical gaze. An elderly man, in torn seersucker jacket, casual as a dog passing fire hydrant, reached into trash bin and swished paper from beneath his gaze. Folded it neatly, like train conductor, and slipped it into his pocket for later perusal. Clock at the front of the station read 10:49. Foley turned, without lighting his cigar, and walked to the north.
On Fifth Avenue, near Lord Taylor, spirit of the city of New York touched Foley, and he walked against the windstream of oncoming traffic with long strides. Sky soft cobalt blue through filter of traffic gas, slight smarting of the eyes. Often walked into people, friends and enemies, hadn’t seen for years. Girl from Vienna, big, strong kid with piano legs, cornhusker’s hands, callused from pulling the weights and the parallel bars; hadn’t seen her since the days of his exchange conversations at the Studenten Klub, on Schottengasse. One day Colonel Lundgren—high on a double-decker bus, wearing transparent raincoat over his chest of medals, firm, set expression of man who was beaten but would not give up. Cropped, sunburned hair, pocked, windburned face, with fingers of brown hand drumming on lid of his hat. Another day Jill Rote, girl at Phipps, who had dated Proctor but talked about Lawrence, name on masthead of Life, hoped that he was doing something interesting. She meant also. Air of Girl Scout leader with ink-stained finger on pulse of the world. Every day some Tom Buchanan, modern version, man whose last big moment had been in the backfield, shoulders hunched from invisible goalposts he had never put down.
One’s own kind. Other animals strangely invisible. According to Lou Baker, world was an ark with all the animals on their proper levels, and these were the specimens, naturally, that one met. Any day now, soon, the youngsters he had spoon-fed the culture-pabulum. See in their eyes, stronger than their own shame, pity for Foley and his unpublished future.
Very thought of that made him pull into a lobby, stare at the ranks of shoes. Hand-crafted, hand-boned, hand-oiled and polished, urban-suburban casuals, masculine loafers, for indoor-outdoor athlete who did not read the seed catalogues. Bench-made by old cobbler in mural-size photo, flashbulb shining on his mussy white hair, honest sweat on his forehead from honest toil, tight-lipped smile due to nails in his mouth, and frank, folksy glint in his steel-rimmed eyes, old Yankee stock, sleeves rolled on white arms showing sailing ship, a clipper, leaving ever-snug harbor, thumbnail black on hand holding leather laces, craft-soiled apron with two pockets for nails, loops and hooks for tools of his craft, but on his own tired, arch-cracked feet machine-made shoes, made very poorly, with hand-crafted egg-shaped hole to exhibit homegrown corn.
Attached
to photograph blown-up statement from Paid Advertisement in Life. Foley tipped forward, as if bidden by guide, to note eight cardinal points of bench-made shoe. Sacred-profane power of printed word. Thou shalt not kill nor live through the winter without enriched bread, homogenized milk, and new scientific filter that took out of smoking everything but the cost. Through shoe-store window, looking north, Foley saw Allen Blake, hatless and hope-borne, crossing street against light with his hand on the shoulder of up-and-coming author featured in last week’s Sunday Times. Flight. He went out side entrance, back from where he had come.
Walked south on Sixth Avenue to Fortieth Street, headed back toward Fifth. Morning sun was warm and pleasant on freshly sand-blasted front of the library and on walnut-stained head of old man with a white beard. Venerable, high-domed, bum and sage, cane crossed on lap, right leg crossed on left, brown cotton sock showing through hole in sole of the shoe. Out of cradle endlessly rocking, comradely and phony sage of the open road. Pigeon feeder and urban conscience of passing captains of industry, wondering what he knew, wondering what he read, wondering, by God, if the old fool was right. Old man’s flabby body tolerably nourished by Salvation Army and Sisters of Mercy, but his soul powerfully sustained by envious, troubled glances of passers-by. Age could not wither nor custom stale time-honored mask of venerable senility. Bearded saints over curtain in high-school auditorium, haill Longfellow, Whittier, Smith Brothers Cough Drops, and Father Time, all haill Take that story of Lou Baker, a child in Billings, Montana, taken by mother to Salt Lake City, where she saw, near Mormon Tabernacle, old man with long beard.
“Mother, there’s God!” she cried. And no joke. Any old white beard, in rags, meditating, is where He sits. Eye of heavenly needle has leakproof valve to keep out beardless giants like Hearst and Baruch.
Patriarchs, circuit riders, wagon trains headed westward, tablets of the Law broken and unbroken, Founding Fathers, Old Granddad, Socrates and Moses, liceridden old men with thatches of white hair, socks that do not match, bird-dappled shoulders, hair growing from ears like Old Saint Stieglitz, all procreant spiritual heirs of Ouspensky, Blavatsky, and Mary Baker Eddy, Kahlil Gibran and the United Nations, deductible but ineluctable modality of the visible.
Coldness of the stone where he sat made Foley think of piles. He arose. Had been warned by his mother not to sit on curbing, never doubted its truth. He watched a southbound bus, panting at the curb, take on a boy and girl in for a day in the city. The boy’s flannel trousers wrinkled from the long morning ride with the girl in his lap. While the boy paid the fare the girl went to upper deck and took a seat at the front, hat in her lap, hair blowing, plain face and brown freckled arms. As boy. dropped into the seat at her side he slipped an arm along the back of it. Plain freckled face, but not in his eyes, and no matter that her lips were chapped when he kissed her.
No matter? No, not in such eyes. It was Peter Foley who had laid down the law for it. Known as Foley’s Mystical Law. When the world went up in smoke, the smoke would have this peculiar property. It would not, because of such eyes, be what it seemed. According to Foley’s Law, what had been loved or created would be part of it.
He had told them. He had told them when they asked for it. They had asked the usual question, and, gazing at their pleasant, vacant faces, he had told them that nothing of any importance was decided by a vote. A judgment. On their goddam majority attitude. Their eyes had bugged, baiting him, and one had said, wasn’t it by a vote that works of art were judged? Wasn’t it by a vote of informed opinion that they were kept alive? Foley had taken out his father’s watch, gazed at its face. They waited. They knew that he would now make a fool of himself. Then, in a luminous calm, he had told them that one hundred million votes, or five hundred million votes, or a solid vote of all the voters in the world, would not change, by a comma, the nature of a work of art. One man alone, the artist, determined that. Whether it was good or bad, mortal or immortal, was up to him. Artists, not votes, were responsible for works of art.
That was all very well, one had replied, that was all very well in the world of art, but what about the world in which they lived? What if the voters decided to burn all these immortal works? As they had in the past. As they well might decide again.
Foley had been aware that a froth had formed on his dry lips. Like a madman. Very likely how he had looked. Like a madman, nothing would shut him up. Once a work of art existed, he had told them, once it had been imagined, truly created, it was beyond the reach of vandalism. They were not, he was not, the uncreated world itself was not, but what had been hammered out on the forge of art could be hammered to pieces, burned, bombed, or ignored, but it could not be destroyed. The outward form could be shattered, become smoke and ashes, but the inward form was radioactive, and the act of disappearance was the transformation of the dark into the light. Metamorphosis. The divine power of art. So it was meaningless for them to talk, as they did, of the lost plays of this man or that, because whatever art had touched, and made quick, was never truly lost. In the order that mattered, their order, they were there with those that had survived. Out of their reach, but not out of their lives. When the world went up in smoke, as everyone predicted, the creations of the human imagination would be in that smoke and give it a peculiar property. Light. Bombstrewn seeds of immortality.
Foley looked up to see the light change, the bus jerk forward, the girl rock to the east, the boy to the west, as if something had suddenly gone wrong with gravity. The girl’s brown hair swept the boy’s flushed face, and he pointed, with a wagging finger, at the old fool seated on the bench in front of the library. Sun gleaming on the book lying open in his lap, shimmering halo of white hair. Struck the boy as funny, the girl as sad. A swirl of traffic gas and wind combed her hair over her face, and the boy tipped her head back, as if he would kiss her, and her eyes were closed, her lips parted—but no—no, not yet, and with her head resting on his arm she opened her eyes and saw his finger pointing at the Empire State.
THE CAPTIVITY: V
The day after Thanks-giving we had a blow with a sleetlike rain that slapped on the windows, and when the sky cleared there was snow on the mountains to the north. All the frosh on the campus who had never seen snow took the day off. But it was gone before they got up to it, unless they drove all the way to Baldy, where the Cucamonga range cast a shadow that kept the sun off the slopes. We had all seen snow, in our suite, and smiled with good humor at those who hadn’t, or who had seen it but couldn’t wait to get their hands in it.
As a matter of fact, the snow looked different up there on the mountains than it did in Chicago, and some of those who knew snow went along just to check up on it. In the afternoon it got hot, we all took sunbaths on the football field, and watched the snow line on the mountains edge up toward the top. With Lawrence’s glasses, which Proctor had borrowed, we could see the dark spots where the snow had melted and the steam, rising like smoke, where the rocks were hot. We didn’t see any frosh, but we saw some wheel tracks along the ice-house road.
I was taking a shower back in the dorm when the phone rang. When I answered, the voice asked for me. Would I be able to stop by the dean’s office immediately? I said yes, yes, I would, then stood in my room, facing the window, wondering which mid-semester exam I had failed. On my way over to the dean’s office I tried to think of the best way, if there was a best way, to let my mother in on the bad news.
The dean had two doors to his office, one at the front where he let you in and one at the back, a sort of arbor, where he let you out. Nobody going in wanted to face those coming out. He came to the door himself and asked me in. The dean was a short, businesslike man, with nearly white hair at the temples, but so black on top the story went around that he wore a wig. He was very kind, asked me about Chicago, said how much he had personally liked my father, and how pleased they all were that I was preparing to take his place. Then he took off his glasses and placed his fingers on the bruised bridge of his nose. He was obliged, he said, to tak
e me into his confidence. He didn’t at all like to do this, it placed a great strain on the incoming student, but in the circumstances he felt it was unavoidable. He would have to pledge me, of course, to the utmost secrecy.
He looked to see if I agreed to that, then said that he had selected me, rather than my other roommates, because my record, so far, was impeccable. All of my teachers had spoken of this fact. But one of my roommates, unhappily, seemed to be having considerable trouble, which was probably due to the newness of college life.
The dean stopped there, and I waited for him to mention Proctor’s name. I had often wondered when he found the time to do his work. He never missed a dance, and he washed dishes four hours a day. It was a very serious matter, the dean continued. Charles Lawrence came from a distinguished family, and it was well known that he had a very unusual mind. But he seemed to find it hard to put it to work. There was tennis, of course, but it seemed to be more than that. There was also the fact that Raymond Gans, an uncle of Charles, was a trustee of the college and personally responsible for the sprinkler system and the night lights around the football field. The problem needed to be handled, the dean said, with a great deal of tact.
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