regard for each other.
“Do you remember,” Toss said, “when your cousin Francis looked
like God Almighty to us because he was a newspaperman? He was a
reporter then, a leg-man.”
Toss used the professional phrase with the relish they had shared
when, making their plans to be correspondents together, they had admit-
ted that it might be necessary and even useful to begin as leg-men, learn-
ing the municipal secrets before they learned the secrets of chancellories.
“That was ten years ago,” Vincent said in a large easy way.
“Yes, a good ten years.”
They got a common pleasure, at their age, from being able to express
their past in so full a figure. Vincent took a swallow of his drink and so
did Toss.
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“We used to think Francis was romantic,” Vincent said. But the hu-
mor of putting their juvenile misconception in this particular way won
no response from Toss.
“You’re pretty friendly with him now, aren’t you?” Toss asked.
“Friendly? Well …” Vincent let his voice trail into dubiety. “Francis
doesn’t like me and I don’t care for him, but he’s a very proper fellow and he
has a sense of family obligation, as he would call it, so he throws little things
my way. Like his just asking me to fill in at the copy desk tomorrow.”
Toss’s face brightened as the secret transaction of the tennis court
was explained. Vincent saw the relief he had given his friend and it made
him feel friendly. He wanted to have back again the old relationship in
which he and Toss shared every detail of their lives. He told Toss the
momentous fact.
“I’ve had a letter from Harold Outram,” he said. “He’s in town and
he’s asked me to come to see him.”
Toss responded well enough to the importance which the fact seemed
to have for Vincent. He could not be entirely impressed because he did
not know who Outram was. But he was genially willing to be told.
“Who’s Outram?” he asked.
The question was frankly asked, without any of the sulky irony which
lately touched Toss’s questions. Vincent made up his mind to answer just
as openly. He was aware of the risk. What he felt about Outram was the
kind of thing he now found hard to tell Toss. It was part of the ethical
certitude that had grown to dominate his life in the last few years. His
consciousness of what Harold Outram’s fate meant was exactly the kind
of thing that was cutting him off from Toss. Yet this time he was deter-
mined that he would keep back none of his actual feeling. He would give
Toss the story of Outram’s career just as he really saw it.
In every large American city at that time there were certain young
men who took great interest in such stories as the one Vincent Hammell
told Toss Dodge. These were the precarious few, their talents unknown
or untried, for whom art and intellect were salvation. Some taught in the
high schools, some in universities, some served as librarians, or worked
in department stores. A few held jobs from WPA but that was coming to
an end. Whatever they did was only by the way—their gaze was fixed on
what they would do. It had, that gaze of theirs, not merely a spiritual but
a geographical direction. It was turned East, Europe in the hazy ultimate
distance, New York closer in possibility but still far off. Time was of the
essence of their deep anxiety. They cherished their youth, for they sup-
posed their gifts to be bound up with it. They saw each unfruitful year as
15
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a loss not only of opportunity but of integrity. Hawk-eyed and with apoca-
lyptic imaginations, they watched over the integrity of certain heroes and
demi-heroes whose fates, as they felt, were a portent of their own. They
had their martyrs; some cherished Scott Fitzgerald, some Hart Crane.
For many of them, the new ethical fierceness of radical politics made
their morality of art the more merciless.
Such young men would be well-versed in an American story like Har-
old Outram’s. They believed they could trace it back in variant versions
for some decades. They would certainly not find Outram’s version excep-
tional. Still, it had a more than usually brilliant appeal to their imagina-
tions because of the rumored vastness of the salary and the extent of the
power for which Outram had, as they said, “sold out.”
It did not take Vincent long to tell the story. He told it in a quiet
voice, looking now and then into the glass he was holding. With every
few sentences he renewed his determination to tell it as he really saw
it, to believe that Toss would see its sad and perplexing meaning. He
told first how Outram, a poor boy, had worked his way through college,
winning unusual honors and a graduate fellowship. Of Outram’s doc-
torate at twenty-three he spoke lightly, as if it were nothing more than
an indication of the native power of Outram’s mind and of his skill in
using it. But he gave more weight to the critical essays which made the
next stage of Outram’s career. They had been very simple and unassum-
ing yet they were marked by a degree of perception and personal feeling
which were surprising in a man so young. A novel came next, not all it
should have been, but so startlingly good that for a small group Outram
became one of the legends of new American promise. Not long after
this, however, Outram had had a sudden experience of political convic-
tion. His work had always been to some degree “socially aware,” as peo-
ple then said, and he even had the literary socialism of the time, mild
and taken for granted. But now he moved far to the left. He became
the pet of a hundred committees, clubs, leagues and guilds. He wrote
very little and that little was of an “agitational” nature. Yet within a year
he had descended to apostasy as dramatic as his conversion, and from
that into a year of mental depression which quite incapacitated him.
But his health had come back and within an amazingly short time he
had made an almost legendary rise in magazine journalism. The climax
of his career had come only recently. It was an event which beautifully
completed his moral interest for the watchful young men. To the ac-
companiment of a brisk ruffle of newspaper drums, Outram had been
appointed director of the great new Peck Foundation with power to dis-
1
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pense at discretion those incalculable millions for the advancement of
American culture.
Vincent held to his resolve as he told this story. He told it to Toss just
as he would tell it to that little group of his literary friends Toss so jeal-
ously hated. As he went on, he saw the sullenness set harder and harder
on Toss’s face. Yet he did not relax his determination. His effort was his
last offering to his dying friendship with Toss.
“Well?” Toss said when Vincent finished. The blankness of his voice
was heavily contrived. It was the trick of saying “Go on” to the man whose
joke has been fully told.
Vincent was angrier with himself for giving the advantage than with
Toss for taking it. “Silence and cunning,” he warned himself, “silence
and cunning!” It was a motto which, when he had been rather more
flamboyant in his notion of himself, he had adopted from a once-favorite
book. But he was no Stephen Dedalus. He could not aspire to the ar-
rogance of the motto of the artist as a young man. Some generosity of
his imagination made him see the subtle unhappiness which his large
and stern considerations introduced into the mind of Toss Dodge. A rec-
ollection of their old boyhood creed of fairness, the code by which the
shared candy-bar was bisected to the micro-millimeter, made him see
that he was refuting Toss’s life as much as Toss was denying his. And so
he made his reply gentle.
“You have to think,” he said, “of how great his talents were and what
it means for a man like that to be made into an official, a stuffed shirt.”
And he even went on to say, “You have to see, Toss, what it means to
our cultural situation that a man should throw away so much talent, just
for money.”
Never before had he used with Toss the tone of forbearance. It was
fatal.
“I don’ t see it,” Toss said, making his voice as coarse and practical as
he could. “I suppose I’m crass and dumb, but I just don’t see it. The man
was free to do what he wanted. He took a flier at being a writer, and he
took a flier at being a radical. I have respect for both and you know it. I
have respect for a sincere radical. All right, he didn’t like either one. Now
he’s got a job where he can do some good to mankind at large and you
talk as if he had committed the—the unpardonable sin. No, I don’t see it.
He has my respect.”
Toss got up. In the movement, the edge of his jacket brushed against
his glass and swept it off the table. The sound of its shattering gave to
their difference of opinion a retrospective confusion and intensity. It
1
the unfinished novel
made them feel that they had been even more deeply involved in passion
than they had supposed.
Vincent knelt to pick up the fragments, expecting Toss to do the
same. So often in the past they had knelt in guilty cooperation to gather
the shards of their mothers’ glassware or crockery. But Toss said, “Leave
it, the houseman will sweep it up.”
There was nothing at all unfriendly in Toss’s voice. He had spoken,
indeed, with a notable simplicity, as of an older man to a younger. Rich
young people acquire certain of the manners of authority. In some ways
they seem older than their years. But Vincent had never before heard
from Toss the easy voice of a man who knows exactly how things are
done and what is to be left to the servants. But neither had Toss ever
heard from Vincent, as he had a moment before, the checked, consider-
ate tone of one who conveys instruction. For the first time in their twelve
years together they had condescended to each other.
As they walked to Toss’s car, Toss said, “How do you know so much
about this Outram?”
“Teddy Kramer knew him at college. They were friends.”
As always, Toss kept a sour silence at the mention of Kramer’s name.
He had never met this former professor and present friend of Vincent’s
but he felt toward Kramer a deep antagonism. He said, “You say he wrote
to you? What made him do that?”
“Well,” said Vincent, “he answered a letter I wrote him.”
“You wrote to him?” Toss was really surprised, but he made his sur-
prise seem greater than it was. “You wrote to him? What did you write to
him about?”
“I happened to read his collected essays and I liked them. So I wrote
to tell him that I did.”
“A fan letter,” Toss said. His voice was friendly and even encourag-
ing, so that his use of the phrase to summarize what Vincent had done
had perhaps the look of a tentative amend. But then Vincent saw that
Toss’s handsome boyish face was taking on the air of archness which it
assumed for one of those moments of finesse in which Toss sometimes
indulged.
It was a trick of Toss’s, acquired in the last few years, that Vincent
hated. It always broke, if only for a moment, the connection between
the two young men. Toss looked contemplatively into the far distance
and drawled in a high juvenile irony, “Well, I hope it won’t corrupt you, I
hope it won’t rot your soul that you picked such an influential sell-out to
write a fan letter to.”
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And Toss laughed as if the old bond were now again in force. No
doubt he wanted it to be. But the bond was not between them. What a
year ago would have still been kidding, now reverberated as malice. They
would meet again, but the friendship was finished. Vincent did not reply.
He was too concerned with the meaning of this moment. He understood
it fully and he marked it to himself by thinking in clear, articulate words,
“My youth is over.”
1
chapter 4
On the chiffonier in Vincent Hammell’s room there stood four books,
held upright by a pair of bronze bookends in the once familiar form of
the straining elephants. The books were the yellowish white volumes of
the Collection Nelson, the little French classics that are printed in Edin-
burgh. The sentimental whiteness of their binding and the limp festoons
of violet and green which drooped down their spines belied their stern
contents, for one volume was Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, one was
Balzac’s Père Goriot and the others were the two volumes of Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black. They were soiled with much handling; within,
their narrow margins were filled with vocabulary notes.
The carpentered bookcase against the opposite wall was not full—
these books had not been placed on the chiffonier for lack of space but
for a ritual purpose. They were here before the mirror to remind Vincent
Hammell of the several fates which might destroy a young man. From the
histories of Frederic Moreau, Rastignac and Julien Sorel, this young man
of the American middle west had learned what he must be careful of.
The ritual position of these books was the key to the room, for every-
thing here had a meaning for its occupant. Only two pictures hung on
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the walls. One was a reproduction of the Dürer engraving of the Prodigal
Son. It represented a young man of strongly marked features kneeling in
prayer among the swine. The other picture was a color print of the Henri
Rousseau in the Hermitage at Moscow and it showed a large-bodied, big-
faced allegorical figure, robed in purple, her hand raised in announce-
ment or admonition, the other arm thrown about the shoulders of a man
who wore a velvet jacket and under it an ugly brown sweater; he carried
a very white quill pen in one hand and in the other a roll of manuscript
and his heavy countenance was reflective and sour. Behind the figures
was a tangled jungle
and before them a lawn neatly set with flowers, and
the picture seemed to mean that the Muse was leading a literary man out
of the woods.
A small radio-phonograph stood on a carpentered stand of stained
pine and beneath it were a few albums of records. On the desk was a por-
table typewriter and a pottery jar full of sharpened pencils. Among the
books in the bookcase—there were about two hundred—were a Greek
grammar, a French and a German dictionary, a college-text anthology of
Latin poetry. Most of the volumes were the cheap books that a student
buys, Everyman’s Library, Modern Library or the Oxford Standard Au-
thors, but there were also copies of Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot and the two
volumes of Rilke that had at that time been translated.
Everything in this room was sparse and neatly arranged, for it was a
fortress provisioned against siege. It was a matter of satisfaction to Vincent
Hammell that two unopened reams of paper and a carton of cigarettes lay
in a drawer and that an electric plate and a jar of coffee made him, in the
solitary hours of the night, independent of his mother’s kitchen.
The only discordant object in the room was the chiffonier on which
the shrine of books was set. Its mahogany veneer had bubbled and had
fallen away in a few places, exposing the soft white wood beneath. Its
curves spoke of a defeated, and hopeless gentility. The chiffonier was an
irritation in the military or monastic neatness of the room, yet Vincent
Hammell felt that for this very reason it had its place here—it served to
remind him of the everlasting enemy.
Vincent was laying his tennis things over the back of a chair when
his mother looked in at the door. She was a handsome woman of fifty-six,
lonely but always alert to her son. Vincent’s room usually daunted her a
little. She imagined it as the scene of intellectual mysteries from which
she was unjustly barred. But now she saw what Vincent was doing and
she entered boldly and snatched up the clothes into a moist bundle. “I’ll
take these,” she said, “and hang them on the line.”
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She stood there, holding the damp clothes which momentarily gave
her the license to be again his mother, in function as well as in fact. “My
goodness!” she said. The clothes were very damp and they were begin-
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 10