“Good heavens, no!” Splendor went on. “I would imagine it’s just simple-minded cruelty. Or perhaps he wants to make a dish of squirrel as a delicacy, ‘like they done make in Jawgia.’” His parody was inferior. For the third time he said “good heavens,” making Reinhart ache to strike him, and explained: “They don’t want for funds. My sister does very well.”
“Loretta?” asked Reinhart. “Where does she work?”
“I’d hate to say,” answered Splendor.
“Well,” said Reinhart, revving the engine, “best of luck to you, Splendor, in whatever you try.”
“I was wondering, Carlo, whether—”
But here Reinhart cut him off, in fear of some dreadful proposition. “Just a moment, you had better know that I’m married now.”
Splendor acknowledged, or disregarded, this news with a tremor of eyelids, and reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
“Also, my wife is pregnant,” Reinhart added, and then perhaps needlessly explained what this meant: “I’m going to be a father.”
His colored friend had found a sheaf of papers within his clothes. “I wonder whether, Carlo, you might read this and let me know if I’ve really said anything.”
His manuscript was of yellow paper, ruled in blue, legal length, and written in pencil. All Reinhart could judge at that point, as Splendor handed it over, was the handwriting, which appeared to be that precise, bland, anonymous style used on example-charts in grammar school. Reinhart had not known that any living person wrote in that fashion, except perhaps fat girls.
“Yes, Carlo,” said Splendor, smiling in self-congratulation. “It’s no mistake. I became a writer while in jail, and this represents my maiden effort. Perhaps it is nothing to be proud of, who knows? That is, you will. But I—well, the creative artist can hardly judge his own work, can he? And I suppose you have studied English literature while in college? And American literature as well?” he asked with his hand apprehensively clutching the door-lever as if a certain kind of answer would send him bolting.
“Only English,” said Reinhart, and added ironically: “I hope that is enough to qualify me.” What would the guy do next? Once again he had something that was more colorful than what Reinhart had, albeit Reinhart was a prospective father. A writer yet! The ex-corporal found a temporary consolation in assuring himself that the story, or essay or whatever, stunk; but he glanced at the first sentences and was frightened by their grace: “I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations, for the last thirty years, has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom, as yet, nothing, that I know of, has ever been written. …”
“Is this fiction or nonfiction?” Reinhart asked, for want of a more articulate response.
Splendor at last wiped the perspiration from his welling forehead, and hung the handkerchief out his window to dry. “Now,” he said with condescension. “Imagination, Carlo, my dear fellow. I am hardly an elderly man.”
“I have read essays in which a writer pretends to be somebody he isn’t really, so as to make a point,” said Reinhart, temperamentally jerking his shoulder; “yet it is not fiction, so to speak.”
“Have you an example?” Splendor asked politely, though his chin was insolent.
“Naturally,” said Reinhart. He lighted a cigarette to gain time and was inconsiderate with the expelled smoke. “Charles Lamb’s ‘Dissertation on Roast Pig.’”
“Of course!” Splendor bared his teeth. “You’re just the man to read my feeble effort. Now, tell me what you think of it. No holds barred. Tear it to pieces. Give it to me but hard. That’s what the beginning author needs, and not the politeness of friends.” He opened the door and swung himself out. “I’ll expect to hear from you at your convenience, Carlo. Remember to be merciless.” He suddenly leaned so far in through the window that, though the car was wide, his eyes were almost crossed on Reinhart’s nose. “I’m sure it’s inconvenient, what with your being married and almost a father, but I have no one else to ask: I wonder whether you might lend me some money? I can gladly pay you back within a week.”
Reinhart thrust the manuscript into the glove compartment and took his wallet from his pocket. “How much?”
Splendor confessed: “I could use a quarter.”
“For God’s sake, don’t be tiresome.”
“If you resent it, don’t do it,” said Splendor, who chose preposterous moments to be proud. Still, he did not withdraw his head and trunk from the car. Anyone walking by would think he was held captive in a sort of modern pillory.
“I mean,” said Reinhart. “A quarter!”
“All right, make it a dime.”
Now Reinhart did an unforgivable thing. He took a ten-dollar bill from his wallet, crushed it into a ball, and threw it onto the seat below Splendor’s forequarters rather than hand it to him; and hardly had the Negro picked it up when Reinhart pointed the indicator at “Drive” and … almost blasted off with Splendor still retained; threatened to but didn’t. It was unforgivable because the ten-spot was all his folding money: his, his wife’s, and his unborn child’s.
“So long, Splendor,” he said not unkindly, stopping his foot a half inch above the accelerator.
“Thanks for everything, Carlo. I can pay back your loan when my story is purchased by the Saturday Evening Post.”
Reinhart answered “Sure,” and watched him cross the yard and mount the rickety porch. He always walked as if mounted on springs and the back of his head was a perfect brown egg.
By about one o’clock the next morning, Reinhart had an altered image of Splendor Mainwaring. Whatever the Negro’s failings, as an author he was positively great. Quite likely his foibles were a necessary condition of his talent; creative artists were famous for being weaklings in life. But Splendor’s weaknesses, God knows, had been established; his magnificent gift awaited recognition.
This remarkable story of his, which Reinhart had begun in a type of melancholic apathy and then was so subtly ensnared by that he stayed up far beyond his bedtime; this story, which curiously had no title, was about a man who worked in Wall Street as a law-copyist. Splendor somewhere had learned the jargon of that trade, or perhaps made it up; anyway, the narrative was set back some distance in the past, so that factual relevance to current conditions was hardly an issue. Obviously, with the invention of the typewriter the copying of legal documents by hand had died. So much for that.
Now, the story was about the copyist, but was told by his lawyer-boss, an individual in whom good will, naïveté, and guilt combined to make your commonplace man of decency. This was the “rather elderly man” of the opening sentence, read by Reinhart in the car. Why Splendor should pick such a narrator was not immediately apparent; Reinhart eventually decided that having for literary purposes decided to pose as a Caucasian, his friend determined to go the whole hog and simulate elderliness as well, anything to get as far as he could from actuality, which was presumably the idea in writing anything fictional.
The remarkable person, however, was the copyist, whom Splendor named, simply, Arthur. When the story opens, he has just been hired by the attorney, who describes him as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn,” and gives him a desk by a little window looking onto an airshaft. Arthur at first does excellently, copying every document handed him. But from a certain arbitrary point on, he refuses to do a lick of work. Now this would perhaps be unnoteworthy except for the character of his employer. That is, you first were struck by the singularities of Arthur: Why should a needy man take a job and then refuse to work at it? What motivates his nihilism? But these questions were soon replaced by one far more to the point: Why does the boss tolerate his defiance?
And not only this. One Sunday morning the lawyer, being in the neighborhood, drops by the office and finds Arthur living there. The poor fellow has no home; on the other hand, his using the office as domicile, without permission or even announcement, is
clearly outrageous. The attorney benevolently orders him to leave, gives him a sum of money. The moral confusions of the story were marvelous: the employer habitually expresses his grievances against Arthur by rewarding him materially. Arthur, in return, is defiant with a fantastic gentleness; he never says no, but rather “I prefer not to.” Astonishing. The most bitter combat is fought under the conventions of a high civilization; and indeed, as to the boss, of Christianity specifically: whenever he feels impelled to take Arthur by the collar and pitch him out of the office, he recalls the “divine injunction: ‘a new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.’”
Arthur refuses the boss’s terminal-leave pay, because he has no intention of leaving. Nor will he do any work. He continues to linger about the office during business hours, while the other employes labor, threatening by his passivity the general structure of reason and right and the amour propre of the lawyer, who can neither endure his presence nor bring direct aggression against him. That is to say, the aim of each, Arthur and the lawyer, is to make the other guy the shit. The lawyer, being a lawyer and thus a captive of all kinds of structure—this united with an idea of himself as a Christian—obviously is the loser. To get rid of Arthur he must move his entire office to another location and hope the clerk’s obduracy is related specifically to the old chambers and that he will stay there. He does, and is inherited by the new tenant—who shortly comes to the attorney with a plea: I can do nothing with him; you left him behind, it is your job to dispose of him. The lawyer washes his hands of the whole mess, but when he hears the new tenant has had Arthur carted off to the city prison as a vagrant—
(At this point Genevieve stirred and muttered in sleep-talk gibberish: “Waaaagotta.” For she slept in the nearby bed while Reinhart read his school assignments, and now Splendor’s tale, in the overstuffed chair on the other side of the hut, the lamp-shine kept from her by a kraft-paper extension clipped to the shade. Reinhart asked: “Are you O.K., darling?” She answered: “Mpff.” He went back to the story.)
The lawyer visits Arthur in prison. The latter implies cryptically that it is the former’s fault he is there. And whatever justice there is in the accusation, the lawyer swallows it though protesting otherwise to his ex-clerk. Arthur then turns his back and says no more. As usual the attorney tries to fix this with money: he leaves a generous sum with the prison equivalent of a PX, in Arthur’s name, so that the poor fellow can at least eat well while incarcerated. But Arthur eats nothing at all, and on another visit the lawyer finds him in the prison yard, curled up on the ground in the comer of the great wall. Dead.
In an afterword the lawyer confesses he knows nothing of Arthur’s previous history save an unconfirmed rumor that he was once a clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington. “On errands of life, these letters speed to death,” writes the lawyer. “Ah, Arthur! Ah, humanity!”
The story moved Reinhart in a way he could not quite understand. Why was he attracted to the account of an absolute No when he himself had at last become, in extremis, a yea-sayer? Why did he admire Arthur rather than the employer? But he had the answer to one question. Why had he changed his attitude towards Splendor? Because the man was a literary genius.
The third of Reinhart’s summer courses, meeting from 10:10 to 11:00 each weekday morning in an unexceptionable room of a characterless building of yellow brick named Coote Hall, was Comparative Literature, which he took to make up the sophomore requirement in English, having run out on such a course three years earlier to go to the war. He had now to make it good or the University would disqualify him for a degree. You needed a degree to be somebody, as everybody said, even the degreeless. Another relevant fact was that he had gone to a different college before the war, a so-called country club where the campus was the feature; and the Municipal University, taking a dim view of this rival claim on the mother lode, would accept in transfer only three-quarters of each credit from the other.
For a B.A. you must have about 120 points; with 1½ years of college, he had something like 13¾. But prewar he had been a callow, lazy, naïve, negligent, dreamy, hopeless, silly, sluggish, fatuous slob. For example, he had had a block against reading the assignments. Ridiculous but true—he would open any book except one on the recommended list. Furthermore, he had been helpless against this destructive quirk; his defiance was not in the least conscious; try as he would to read Chap. 9, “Political and Social Reorganization,” in The Federal Union; A History of the United States to 1865, by Prof. John D. Hicks, his eyes would clamp shut at the second sentence. On the other hand he could read three corny novels in one night. At that time he had an aversion to any piece of writing that professed to tell the truth.
But that was all behind him now. Reinhart the fireball: after but a couple of weeks of summer session he had established his pre-eminence in Beginning French, General Psychology III, and Comp Lit. Most of the returned veterans were diligent students, but Reinhart far surpassed the norm, doing not only the assignment but Additional Readings to the right and left of it, the type of thing that textbook authors list at the end of each chapter with an obvious lack of conviction. For example, in the class to which he hurried the morning after reading Splendor’s short story, they would in eight summer weeks read all the great works of Western literature from Homer to date. Not the entire work in any case, but rather excerpts from each: first book of the Iliad; last scene of Oedipus Rex (where he gets the Complex, as the professor said); fifty lines from the Aeneid; two cantos of Dante; and so on up through the outputs of Rabelais, Cervantes, Balzac, Tolstoy, and the rest, not to mention brief re-encounters with most of the old English poets dimly recalled from high school (“I saw a host of golden daffodils,” “wee timorous cowrin’ beastie,” and so on).
Pretty comprehensive: the first week they had wound up on the Greeks; today, the end of the second, they would bury the Romans. Reinhart had soon decided that for him there was only one decent mode of action: he would read the whole of each book represented by an excerpt in the text. The resolution sounded more formidable than the performance turned out to be, for the best-kept secret of higher education was that this literature managed much of the time to be fairly interesting. Of course, one expected this of the Iliad, but Ovid’s Metamorphoses were first-rate, too. On the other hand, Horace in translation was a bore, and so was Virgil in the Eclogues, though pretty good in the Aeneid, especially when Aeneas leaves flaming Troy with his dad on his back and leading his son—his wife gets separated from him and is never found again. That moved Reinhart enormously, as of course did the suicide of lovelorn Dido later on. The Romans wrote as well of women as the Greeks of men. He looked forward to fitting Ovid’s Art of Love into his schedule, which he believed in large part concerned screwing.
After all, it amounted to only about two or three books a week, which was no insuperable task for a real-estate man whose technique was to let a client look over the property for himself while he, the agent, sat outside in the Gigantic, reading Agamemnon. Reinhart saw fewer and fewer reasons why you couldn’t be a good businessman and a cultured person at the same time—and for that matter, a husband, father, student, veteran, friend, etc., as well. Why limit yourself to a single state of being? It was at this time that he began to keep his lists: Books Read, Money Incoming, Money Outgoing, Foreign Cities Visited, Physical Workouts, Clients—June, and so on; and he acquired a good many secondhand Modern Library books, old-style with leatherette cover, twenty-five cents apiece, and made for his home a rudimentary bookshelf of stacked bricks and planks, which was sturdy unless you touched it.
Being slightly nearsighted and averse to admitting it to himself, in the Comparative Lit class, as in the others, Reinhart sat in the first row. As he fell into his one-armed chair this morning, two minutes early—the instructor stood in the doorway, droning something to a hairy fellow in a T-shirt showing the University’s animal mascot, a slavering jackal or whatever; this student was somewhere under forty, a Phys. Ed. major, and already flu
nking though summer session had met only ten days and though he was not in the least stupid, as Reinhart discovered upon meeting him over coffee in the Campus Hide-away; it was rather irony that controlled him: “Whoever heard of a coach who was well read?” he asked, with an intelligent smirk—as Reinhart settled in his chair, putting his extra books under it, the pretty, malicious, blonde girl on his left said: “Virgil again today?”
“I’m afraid so.” He smiled, really rather bitterly. As soon as you were married, all the good-looking broads took the initiative. He no longer had the slightest interest in other women, and it was retroactively that he now burned at how she would have sniffed at Reinhart the bachelor. He wore no ring, but they could all tell.
She took more liberties. “Damn,” she said, maneuvering her shallow blue eyes. “Goddamn,” she went on, “there’s a dull old bastard.”
He frowned and asked: “Mr. Pardy or Virgil?”
“Both.” She suddenly crossed her legs in a most awkward fashion for a girl so finely articulated, and he realized that the instructor had come to the lectern directly before them and dropped his briefcase.
“Now, Publius Wirgilius Maro, as he was called on his native heath,” began Mr. Pardy a few moments later; he was a tall, gaunt man, who had he not gone into teaching could have been a cowboy, “as we mentioned yesterday …” He turned several pages in his sheaf of notes and began to read very rapidly: “Been said Aeneid is made up of six books Iliad and six Odyssey. Sixth book obviously modeled on eleventh book Odyssey; description of Aeneas’ shield much like that by Homer in Iliad, but in spite of similarities, differences between Virgil and Homer. Virgil, e.g., worked on epic ten years. Still dissatisfied with it when died and requested it be burned after death. Whereas little is known of Homer the man.” Pardy looked at the class and said: “Or Homer the committee,” and his students dutifully laughed, it still being early in the hour.
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