I don’t know what your politics are, but they don’t matter in what I’m
talking about—I’m talking beyond politics. In nearly twenty years, out
of those millions of people, not one young man has forced his way for-
ward with his creative talent. They groom that one composer, What’s-his-
name. Advertising, just advertising. He lives off Beethoven, via Brahms
and he makes it look like a cultural continuity—very useful, as the real
people there of course know. At the beginning of the revolution, there was
some real work done, when you would least expect it, in the midst of a
civil war, in the midst of starvation. But it’s done with now. And the fact
is that Russia is right. Literature—art—it was a phase of man’s develop-
ment and Russia is showing the way to the new phase. And you know as
well as I do that the arts cannot survive. Let me put it this way—”
At this moment the waiter appeared to remove their plates and serve
their coffee. Outram waited to resume his speech until the waiter was at
some distance. It was as if what he had to communicate was a secret.
5
the unfinished novel
“Let me put it this way: that Russia has perceived before any of us
that the arts, about which we are so politically sentimental, are one of the
great barriers in the way of human freedom and decency.”
Vincent wanted to object, but his mind was not responding to his
will. It was not possible to answer a statement so extreme—it was not
merely that it was wrong, but that in the extremity of its wrongness it
carried him outside the borders of known discourse. If Outram had said
to him, “You, Hammell, are a liar, a pimp and a traitor,” he would not
have been able to argue it. He could only wonder if it were true, else why
should Outram have said it. He had his second political insight of the
luncheon, he understood the power of the accusatory lie. He saw that it
was not Outram’s ideas that he had to meet. The ideas of this man whose
intelligence was so beautifully stamped on his face were so foolish and
shallow that it was almost as if Outram were saying aloud, desperately,
“Pay no attention to my ideas—look only at the impulse behind them.
Look there!”
And it was exactly the impulse behind them that Vincent knew he
had to meet, the pain, the wild sense of loss and the consequent desire
to destroy. And it was exactly that impulse that was too strong for him.
It numbed his mind and made his will impotent. He had no response
to make, neither to defend himself nor to help Outram. He had checked
Outram once and saved them both. But he could not do it again. He sat
silent, passive to whatever Outram might go on to say in development of
his wild theme.
“But all that doesn’t matter,” Outram said with a dismissive and con-
cluding sweep of his hand. “The fact is that they are dead, and putres-
cent. Tell me, what does the name ‘Jorris Buxton’ mean to you?”
5
chapter 9
The change of subject was bewildering and irritating. He of course knew
who Buxton was. But he could see no reason why the capricious intro-
duction of even a very adequate minor poet and novelist of thirty years
before should shunt him off from the answer he must make. What Out-
ram had been saying had a quality of conviction beyond what it should
have had. It made Vincent’s spirit sink down toward the despair which
was all too ready for it. Outram seemed to have some wish to depress
him. He was responding to that wish against his will, yet willingly. But
he managed to resist. He ignored Outram’s question about Buxton and
said, “I think you’re wrong. I think you’re looking at it over too short a
span of time. The human spirit does not change its needs so easily as you
seem to think.”
The slight tremor with which he uttered these words was really the
expression of the misery which had invaded his mind. But it gave to what
he said a great intensity, the color of a high conviction. To Vincent him-
self the words sounded insincere, but in Outram’s face he saw a flicker
of response, an almost childlike heed, and he perceived the ambiguity
of Outram’s intention. In all his twenty-three years he had not learned
the unfinished novel
so much about human conduct as he was learning in this brief hour.
And on this latest piece of knowledge, the awareness that Outram want-
ed his guest to fight his despair—or at least wanted that as much as he
wanted to impose his despair—he was able to act, although Outram’s
dominance of face, its strength and beauty and bitterness, seemed to for-
bid manipulation. “No,” Vincent said and shook his head fiercely, “the
human spirit doesn’t willingly diminish itself, even if it contracts mo-
mentarily at times.”
The phrase which he had already used twice, “the human spirit,”
would ordinarily have disgusted him, but on this occasion he clung to it
and used it again.
“Do you see so much that supports that fine idea? Christ, look around
you,” Outram said.
His matter was the same, but his manner had changed. He said,
“We’re all dead men, walking dead men. Even you, Hammell, young as
you are—you’re a walking dead man with the rest of us.” But now it was
as if he were making a genial joke, stating a comfortable absurdity.
He said very levelly and quietly, “There is only one man I’ve ever met
whom I respect, and pretty soon he’ll be really dead. I asked you about
Jorris Buxton. He’ll soon be eighty. For me he is the last manifestation
of heroism in the human race. Men were like that once. Or maybe they
were. But he is the last. But for me he also points the way to the new race.
What do you know about him?”
“Well, I must confess that I didn’t know he was alive—”
“That’s not surprising,” Outram said drily and morally. “Very few of
his countrymen know that he’s alive. But what do you know about him?”
“Not much, really. It seems to me that back in the ’eighties he taught
Greek in a little college in New England. He published a volume of lyr-
ics in the Greek manner. Then he seems to have given up teaching and
to have travelled a good deal. There were, I think, a couple of books of
travel. Then he took up painting and then he wrote three novels. The
novels were never popular, though every now and then someone discov-
ers them and writes a little essay. I read one of them quite a while ago.
After the turn of the century he seems to have stopped writing and to
have dropped from sight. I’m afraid that’s all I know.”
Outram was nodding to each of the facts of Vincent’s recitation.
“Yes,” he said, “dropped from sight.” And he sat there as if musing ele-
giacally, his fine eyes focussed into the distance.
“Now I’ll tell you a little more,” he said. “When Buxton was forty, he
gave up the arts. Like that! He just gave them up. America didn’t want
5
the unfinished novel
him as a writer or a painter. Perhaps if he had been wan
ted he would have
been better. He knew he was good, but not really of the first rank, and I
suppose that that helped him make up his mind. But don’t think he made
his decision in a fit of pique. It was an act of free will, or as nearly an act
of free will as we can imagine. At any rate, it was an act of self-understand-
ing. He knew he had simply outgrown the arts. Outgrown them. Can you
understand that? He never had to worry about money—when he was still
a young man he came into a sizeable legacy. And at forty he felt that he
had grown up. Do you know what he did?—evidently you don’t. He be-
came a physicist. He engaged a tutor and in a year he had learned every-
thing that a brilliant student learns in four years of college. I asked him
once if he had found it difficult and he shook his head and said that every-
thing he had learned seemed to be there inside him ready to be unfolded.
That is, he was a genius. He went to M.I.T. and his doctoral thesis is still
famous. That was thirty-odd years ago. He took jobs in several of the great
physical laboratories. He went to Europe and studied mathematics. A few
years ago he retired to the country. He’s a neighbor of mine.”
Harold Outram took a cigarette and lighted it slowly. “Do you know
what mathematical physics is?” he said. His voice became suddenly very
quiet as if a large peace had been imposed upon him. “Do you know
that there are men who with paper and pencil construct the plan of the
universe down to its subtlest, most secret aspects, sitting alone, with no
tools but their minds?” Out of the raptness of his voice there came a
note of accusation, as if Vincent had been unconsciously persecuting the
mathematical physicists of the world.
“Buxton is one of the leading mathematical physicists of the country.
Of course you wouldn’t know that, being a literary man. You’re surprised
to know he’s alive. And I didn’t know it myself until a year ago because
I’m a kind of literary man myself, a vulgar cheapjack journalist. Or was.
Did you know that?—I mean Buxton’s position as a scientist?”
“No,” said Vincent, consenting to admit again the admitted fact. “I
didn’t know it. It’s a fine story.”
“Fine story. It’s the story of our time.” And again there was accusa-
tion in the voice.
“I’ve recently come to know him. He lives near me at Essex where I
have my place. Naturally I don’t talk much to him—what would I have
to say to a man like that? But whenever I speak to him—well, nothing in
my life has ever meant so much to me. Can you understand that?”
“Yes, I think I can understand it,” Vincent said in a neutral voice.
But his heart was beating with presentiment. Something in Outram’s
0
the unfinished novel
manner suggested that something was still to come for which all that
had been said, with its passion and confusion, was but a preparation.
Outram took a long breath and put out his cigarette with delicate care.
He seemed to relax as if he had at last reached level ground after an ex-
hausting ascent. He leaned back in his chair, regarding Vincent as from
a distance.
“Perhaps you can begin to see where I’ve been leading. Buxton, after
all, can’t last very long. We want his story told. He ought, I suppose, [to]
tell it himself. He won’t. But we’ve got him to promise to help a biogra-
pher. Buxton will talk, he will answer questions, he’ll supply documents.
What we are looking for is the man to write the book.”
Vincent had the sensation of being able to reach out and touch it, so
firm and certain did the great opportunity seem, so impossibly material-
ized out of the fantastic but passionate hope of his tennis court bet with
himself. As solid and real as a hunk of mineral placed on the table, the
opportunity was before him.
There it was, but it had not yet been offered and Outram had fallen
silent. For a moment Vincent said nothing. Then he said, “Why don’t you
do it?”
“For Christ’s sake!” said Outram. He spoke not with anger but with
a kind of intense exasperation, as if some old friend had made an error
about him after every chance of knowing better. He said with large kind-
ness, “Hammell—Vincent—get this straight in your relations with me.
I’m finished, I’m through. Get it straight, Vincent, so that it doesn’t make
trouble between us. I know what I am. I know all about myself.”
“And besides,” he went on, “we want to give a young man this
chance.”
But having gone this far, Outram still did not say what every nerve in
Vincent’s body wanted him to say.
“You say ‘we’—‘we want,’” Vincent said.
“‘We’ is several people, but chiefly Garda Thorne and myself. She
lives near me and she has very strong feelings about Buxton too.”
If the mineral had been wonderful in its solid reality, it now began
to glow with light. And with a gentle and reassuring light at that. For if
ever anyone stood as a negation of all the desperate denials that Harold
Outram had been making, it was surely Garda Thorne with her wholly
enviable career. In the perfection of everything she did, in the quiet, deli-
cate integrity of her life, she, though a woman, stood to many young men
like Vincent as an assurance that virtue was possible. And as the mineral
glowed, “Do you want it?” Harold Outram said at last.
1
the unfinished novel
To keep his gravity, for he was in danger of smiling foolishly, Vincent
carefully moved his water-tumbler from one place on the table to an-
other. Then he was able to look up at Outram and say, “Yes.”
“Good,” Outram said with decision. “You’ll be hearing from me
about the details. I’m sure they’ll be satisfactory.” He put out his hand
across the table and they shook hands with seriousness.
chapter 10
Nine women sat awaiting the arrival of Vincent Hammell. The room they
sat in was beautiful and bright; its broad windows looked out on the lit-
tle lake around which the buildings of Meadowfield were disposed. The
women sat around a table of plate-glass and their nine handbags lay in
an archipelago upon its great lucid surface.
Of the nine women, all were very wealthy. They made Vincent’s first
experience of wealth and nothing he had learned from books or even
from the gradual growth of the fortune of Toss Dodge’s family had pre-
pared him for what he found. It seemed to Vincent that only in the case
of one of them, Miss Anderson, the chairman of the group, had wealth
been a true condition of life, shaping and marking her as nothing else
could have done. She alone bore something of the imagined appearance
of wealth, the serenity and disinterestedness to which wealth is supposed
ideally to aspire.
Vincent supposed that either the size or the age or the nature of
Miss Anderson’s fortune had led her—as fortunes of a kind sometimes
do—into an historical lapse, an aberration of her sense of time. For Miss
Anderson, althou
gh not “old-fashioned” nor long past her youth, seemed
the unfinished novel
not to inhabit quite the same present in which her friends lived. She
seemed, indeed, to live in reference to certain delicate points of honor
such as Edith Wharton, but few after her, would have been concerned
with. It might be assumed, for example, that some high moral deci-
sion, its meaning now obscured, accounted for the unmarried state of
a woman _____ [blank in original] so pleasant as Miss Anderson. It was
surely to be laid to some sacrifice of herself, some service of an idea. The
idea which she served would not have to be very complex or important,
but still it was an idea. Perhaps this explained the “historical” impression
she made, for to many people the present consists of things, while the
past consists of ideas. Like the past, Miss Anderson was a failure, yet in
some way she continued to exist with a gentle unsought authority which
perhaps came from her friends’ dim response to the power of the idea
and their recognition of the magical, if limited, potency of the past.
Now and then Miss Anderson submitted to Vincent’s criticism the
stories she wrote. They were elaborate and literate—well written, the class
called them—but they had no relation to any reality Vincent could iden-
tify. In the world of Miss Anderson’s stories, servants were old and loyal,
wives hid nameless diseases from their husbands or silently bore the
most torturing infidelities, or found themselves hideously in the power
of depraved lovers; memories played a great part, the memories of single
passionate nights or of single significant phrases, and it sometimes hap-
pened that flowers or white gloves were forever cherished. When Vincent
discussed these stories with Miss Anderson, he was always surprised at
the small conviction with which he spoke about their lack of reality—he
almost believed as he spoke to her, that there might actually be such a
world beyond his strict modern knowledge.
The distinction which Miss Anderson had was perhaps but a weak
one, yet it gave Vincent Hammell a standard by which he could fairly mea-
sure the inadequacy of her classmates. If she did not carry the power of
her position, she at least seemed to carry its tragic consciousness. Wealth
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 16