The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel

by Lionel Trilling

  the unfinished novel

  great beast from the sea? A kind of metaphor within a metaphor? Well,

  in some odd way Buxton reminded me of that. And do you remember

  how what the old man says to the poet gets rid of the depression and fear

  he experiences?—really an excellent description of the neurotic state. I

  understand how that could happen now and that it wasn’t any particu-

  lar thing that the old man said that cheered poor Wm. up, but just his

  existence in wonderful everlastingness.” That was truer, that came very

  close to the truth. The reduction of the incident that Vincent had made

  to bring it into the range of Kramer’s temperament led him to see it in a

  new fullness of meaning.

  But neither the notebook nor the letter recorded the end of the meet-

  ing. Suddenly up the driveway that led to the garage a girl appeared on

  a bicycle. She cycled halfway up the drive and then, seeing the group on

  the lawn, she dismounted, leaned her bicycle against a tree and walked

  toward them, or, rather, as it turned out, toward Buxton. The suddenness

  of her being there was the notable thing. Another person’s coming might

  have seemed more gradual. But she was immediately all there. And this

  sense of her being on the scene all at once gave Vincent no chance to

  ask the young man’s question of whether or not she was a pretty girl. Yet

  the definiteness and concreteness of her appearance was certainly not

  mystical essence. Whatever it was, it expressed itself as a physical fact.

  There was, for example, the definiteness of her breasts under the jersey

  she wore. Vincent took note of that with a young man’s tallying eye. It

  was not sexual directness that made him do that but rather an impulse

  of self-protection. The girl’s appearance seemed sudden to him because

  his response to her was so sudden, so wholly in advance of conscious-

  ness and judgment. Exactly because it was the wholeness of her appear-

  ance that had its effect, he tried to protect himself by taking note of her

  breasts, an act of insensitivity, even of vulgarity. For the same reason he

  looked to see if she was pretty. As she came nearer, he saw that the ques-

  tion had no meaning for him. This frightened him.

  The girl had eyes only for Buxton, and Buxton was very glad to see

  her. He held out two hands glowingly and she placed hers in his. Vincent

  noticed the color of her voice before that of her hair. Both were dark. “It’s

  so nice to see you,” she said to the old man, and Vincent heard the true

  timbre of gladness in her voice. They were smiling at each other as they

  held hands and the affection shone from one face to the other. Suddenly,

  on the perception of this free sunny interchange, Vincent felt bleak at

  his heart. He had, he felt, never given, never seen given, and could never

  give what was now going from one to the other.

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  the unfinished novel

  He had risen and stood there silent and supernumerary. Brooks Bar-

  rett had risen too and was smiling benevolently on the meeting. Barrett

  cleared his throat officiously as if about to take over the social necessities

  of the moment. He inclined his body and began to make a gesture of

  indication. But Buxton released one of the girl’s hands so that she could

  face Vincent and he said, “Marry, this is Vincent Hammell.” He said it

  with a kind of enthusiasm for both the names, as if he were surprising

  each of them with the gift of the other and calling attention, with a naïve

  benevolence, to the youth and charm they each had. He was quietly but

  wonderfully aware of them.

  Vincent said, “How do you do,” and hated himself for the lifted, re-

  mote intonation he heard, the affectation of accent. Barrett murmured,

  filling out the informality of Buxton’s introduction, “Miss Cathcart, Miss

  Marion Cathcart.” And Miss Cathcart looked at Vincent and said with a

  coolness that was as great as his own and much more calculated, “How

  do you do.” It seemed to him that she was looking at him with a mor-

  al curiosity and he resented it. He passionately noticed that not possi-

  bly could she be called pretty, and that he did not like her voice. All the

  fierceness of his claim on life presented itself to him at that moment, un-

  der that curious gaze, as guilt. Had he been a Jew meeting another Jew

  where another Jew was not expected, or a homosexual person introduced

  to another of his kind, he could not have felt more the anger of guilt than

  he did upon meeting this person who matched his youth with her own

  and made him conscious of the fierceness of the claims that his youth

  made upon life.

  This, then, was the “Marry” he had heard of from the children. In the

  face of the authority they seemed to attribute to her, their “Marry does it

  this way,” their “Marry says we mustn’t,” he had still supposed that “the

  girl who takes care of the children” was a high school girl of the neigh-

  borhood. He had no expectation of a person who would look at him with

  so arrogant an assumption of moral competence.

  May Outram came over the lawn to them and at her approach Barrett

  receded a little into the background, abdicated any claim he had to being

  of the company. “Marry,” she called from a distance, “I’m so glad you’re

  back.” And she said, “It’s been such a trial to have you gone. You’ve

  met Vincent Hammell? Vincent, you’ve met Marry Cathcart? She went

  away by herself for a few days to cool off. She and Harold had a tiff. Oh,

  more than that—quite a blow-up. Wasn’t it? It was about you, Vincent

  Hammell, you made all the trouble. Are you cooled off, Marry? You look

  cooled off inside but hurry and get dressed dear and look lovely. You too

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  the unfinished novel

  Vincent, both of you do hurry. And Marry, tell Emma you’re here so she’ll

  set another place for you. Do hurry.”

  They were both young enough to be ignorant of how to evade her

  commands and so together they walked toward the house. Something

  had to be said. Vincent did not lack the courage to ask the question, but

  he could not find the words that would not belittle the situation between

  them. He could not say, “Did you really quarrel about me? Why?” And so

  they walked on together across the broad lawn, silent until Marry said,

  “I’m sorry she said that,” and turned dark miserable eyes toward him.

  “Of course it wasn’t really you.” He saw that the miserableness in her

  eyes was not for herself at being put into an awkward position, it was for

  him. Rather impersonally for him, however—there was much reserve in

  her look. It was open to Vincent to be obtuse and to ask the cause of the

  quarrel. But he knew as clearly as if he had been present at the “blow-up”

  why this girl had quarreled with Harold Outram about him.

  “I know it wasn’t,” he said, “I know what it was.”

  She stood and faced him. “You do?” she said, and the surprise robbed

  her of the moral competence that made Vincent so stiff against her. “You

  do? Did they tell you?”

  “No,” he said. “They’ve tol
d me nothing. Or,” and he now faced her,

  “very nearly nothing.”

  She dropped her eyes. His speculations of the morning had been

  correct. But now that they were proved, they did not affect him with the

  sense of betrayal and dissolution he had had when he had first thought of

  them. He felt that he had simply discovered the conditions of his work.

  He did not like this girl, who was the kind of person who needed bicycle

  trips to cool off her anger, but he wanted to reassure her.

  “It was generous of you,” he said, “but I wouldn’t worry—”

  In his new clarity he said it too lightly and loftily, and she undertook

  to shatter his vanity. “Worry?” she said. “I’m afraid you take it too person-

  ally.” And they parted as sternly as they had met.

  10

  chapter 17

  Between Philip Dyas and the Hollowells there was a joke. Or rather,

  there was a matter which now, on this occasion, had all the appearance

  of a joke. At another time and in another setting it might have had a dif-

  ferent meaning. The joke was that the Hollowells, or more particularly

  Linda Hollowell, wished to buy the school of which Philip Dyas was

  head master.

  “He is so stubborn, Mr. Hammell,” Linda Hollowell said after the

  joke had established itself for the newcomer. “He knows my heart is set

  on it and he will not even give it a thought. He refuses me point blank,

  absolutely. Don’t you, Philip?”

  “Oh, point blank. Absolutely,” Philip Dyas answered. He was a thick

  set man and not tall. His hair was rather thin and his face was round. It

  was not a fleshy face yet it gave the impression that fleshy faces some-

  times do give, of there being an inner face, the essential one, within the

  outer one. This face was sad and even in some lights rather stern. But

  when Dyas smiled in friendliness or amusement, the mouth was tender

  and the meditative eyes were heartily responsive. Vincent liked him from

  the moment of his warm greeting and firm handclasp. He had never

  the unfinished novel

  given much thought to the man who had had so important a part in his

  destiny by bringing him to the attention of Harold Outram, but now that

  he had met Dyas he felt proud that so impressive a person should have

  had so personal a hand in his life.

  Dyas’s reply to Linda Hollowell made it quite clear that he too took

  the matter as a joke. Yet Vincent had the impression that when it came to

  jokes, Philip Dyas would have taken part in some other joke with more

  pleasure. There was just a trace of sourness in his amusement.

  Linda Hollowell shook her head in reproof at Philip Dyas. “Stub-

  born,” she said.

  Mrs. Hollowell was not beautiful and she was not constructed on a

  scale large enough to let her be called handsome. Nor was she pretty. But

  she was remarkably good looking. The mere femininity of her appear-

  ance was modified by the signs of intelligence and virtue. These gave the

  effect of a boyish plainness, although the modelling of her face, with its

  strong delicate cheekbones, was firmer than any boy’s could be. Vincent

  found the interesting contradiction of her face repeated in her name.

  He knew that in Spanish Linda means pretty, yet it seemed to him that

  no name in sound or appearance could be cooler or more modest, even

  ascetic. And so the play of contradictions went on. Her eyes were so dark

  and fine and yet they were almost blank with earnestness. Her unrouged

  mouth was tenderly shaped, but compressed in thought. Her body was

  well made, yet it seemed to hold itself to a mere adequacy of female grace.

  Vincent found her stiffness and even her quaint didacticism attractive.

  Through the early part of the dinner Linda Hollowell had been si-

  lent. The table was so well appointed, the silver gleamed so perfectly in

  the candlelight, the whole occasion of Vincent’s first dinner-party was

  going off with such an air that Vincent found it easy to imagine that

  there could be such an abstraction as a “perfect dinner guest” and that

  Linda Hollowell was it. He had at first identified her only as the young

  wife of a wealthy man, better dressed—he became aware of that quite

  soon—more carefully turned out than the other women. She had an

  air of fully and consciously listening to whoever was speaking, turning

  her whole attention on and even calling attention to her attention in a

  wonderfully “social” way. But as dinner went on, scraps of information

  made him modify this picture. Linda Hollowell had been to Russia and

  to Spain. There were plans for a publishing house. There were commit-

  tees. She was a young woman of active and useful life. And the desire

  she expressed for Philip Dyas’s school, though of course a joke, was not

  entirely a joke.

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  the unfinished novel

  “I find it odd—” Vincent said, and felt the quality of his new life, for

  at this rather ponderous opening, everyone turned to listen to him. “I

  find it odd, the idea of anyone buying a school.”

  Philip Dyas lifted his head and looked at him and Garda Thorne at

  the other end of the table leaned out to see him and to smile at him.

  “But why should it be odder, Mr. Hammell, to buy a school than to

  own one?” It was Arthur Hollowell’s question. It was asked with a hum-

  ble neutrality. Hollowell waited respectfully for Vincent to answer. Vin-

  cent’s impression of Hollowell had been obscured by his knowledge that

  Hollowell was “so rich” and he always supposed wealth to be brutal. The

  intellectual humility of all this money rather confused him. His answer

  did not come very firmly. “I don’t know—somehow a school—I suppose

  because it has a life of its own.” And he felt himself blushing.

  “True,” Arthur Hollowell said and his agreement was charged with

  the most respectful enthusiasm. “True. A school is, as you say, a living

  organism, an organic entity, having its own development and its own

  laws of development, having its own integrity. And in an ideal society,

  your point would be not only ideally and theoretically right but practi-

  cally right. But in our society,”—and although he said “our,” he said it

  with a little movement of his head and an inflection of his voice that

  seemed to throw Society into the possession of everyone at the table

  except himself: only out of politeness did he consent to share the owner-

  ship of the messy property of our Society. “In our society with its mo-

  rality of profit and loss, we have to recognize that things are for sale. It

  is a dreadful fact, of course. It seems to deny the moral potentiality of

  the human race. But it is the fact with which we have to live. We can’t,

  after all—can we?—escape the necessities of our historical period. Indi-

  vidually we can do nothing about it. We must act within the pattern of

  culture if we are going to affect [ sic] any change in that pattern. We can

  scarcely be effective if we escape from the realities into a morality of

  saintly perfectionisticism.”

  This was indeed a kind of rich man that Vincent had never imagined.
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  As he spoke the veil of crude wealth that had obscured him fell away and

  for the first time Vincent saw his human appearance and was surprised

  by it. He saw that Hollowell was a young man and that his [blank half-

  line in original]

  And this strange rich man went on. “We have to recognize the fact

  and work with it—that in our culture even spiritual values are for sale,

  like everything else. Even living organisms, as you so well point out,

  Mr. Hammell.”

  11

  the unfinished novel

  It came to Vincent that he had only said that a school has a life of its

  own. He had said nothing about a living organism or an organic entity,

  or laws of development.

  “And so,” Hollowell went on, “although the state should certainly

  have the control of all education, in our culture it is still possible to buy

  a school.”

  And Arthur Hollowell shrugged and smiled—at whatever cost to his

  own feeling he accepted the way of the world.

  “As things now are, Mr. Hammell,” he concluded, “There is a month-

  ly periodical devoted to the interests of head masters in which quite as

  a matter of course, schools are advertised for sale. So much is it the ac-

  cepted fact.”

  At this he retired from the conversation. He had entered it with no

  personal interest, but only with the intention of bringing his objective

  intelligence to the aid of clarity. Having finished, he smiled boyishly first

  to Dyas then to Vincent. And although Vincent was not quite satisfied, he

  felt that he had encountered an irrefutable logic. And perhaps everybody

  felt that. All the table was silent for a moment, perhaps contemplating

  the visions of the future, the outspread view of Society, or hearing the

  wings of the various moralities that Hollowell had sent aloft.

  “Philip would be a fool to sell.”

  As Garda said it, the visions of the future and of society rolled up and

  the large gray wings of the various moralities ceased to beat. It was Gar-

  da’s contribution to the joke to make her manner as tough as if she were

  at what she imagined a haggle of big-business must be like. “But if he

  does sell it to you, he ought to charge you a pretty penny for the spirit and

  value he’s put into that place. Taking that run-down, ramshackle seedy