Seeing I was going to be quite a success at this camp, I suppose, or because I was, for him, an exotic type, or because I already had a reputation as a sex-type (I can’t say which), Amos came up to me, and after we had danced together a whole evening, he asked me why I shouldn’t spend the summer with him. He and I would live outside the camp in town (he had the right to do that and so had I if I wished), in some cabins or boarding houses affiliated with the camp, or which sold chickens, eggs, and such things to the camp. I agreed at once. I knew him; he suddenly resembled Clays strongly. I liked him; and I was flattered that, with all his experience, he picked me out of the whole camp. I knew he had met his wives at camp. I must admit, to my shame, that for the time being I forgot Clays and thought, “Perhaps that was just a flash in the pan and this is the real thing; for there is no romance about this man, he is willing to live with me at once, this looks like sincerity and the lightning flash.”
To tell the truth, I can hardly remember the arguments I thought up in one night to persuade myself to live with the man. He knew his way about and the very next day had fixed it all up, so that we moved that day into a kind of cottage, which he had occupied in previous summers on the outskirts of the township. Here, we were not conspicuous, and needed not have callers; and here we were accepted as a respectable part of the camp. He would present me, he said, as his future wife to the local people. It was well known by this time that he was getting a divorce from his other wife. He told the neighbors it was on account of religion, since there had been a dispute about religion before he married the other girl.
I said to him, timidly, “What about the girl who is waiting to marry you?”
“Don’t put your trust in rumors, Letty! Who told you that rumor? And look, let’s not look ahead, eh? We’ll see what we shall see. Aren’t you game, baby?”
“I’m game.”
He smiled at me and we went to town to get our supplies. This, all before we had so much as been alone together, except, so to speak, on the dance floor, on the boat landing, and in the garage. Of course that night we were alone together and I became to all intents and purposes really his wife. I got an unwarranted sense of permanence and a feeling of union from this circumstance, and went about fooling myself into a great passion.
I did not write home for a long time, about two weeks, and then, after some anxious letters from my mother, I wrote to my father, just to get it off my chest.
O PROGENITOR (NO. ONE), OR, DEAR SOLANDER!
The delay in my writing to you was not due to my natural laziness, habitual Foxian sloth, customary Morganian languor, occasional slowness, etc. No, no, I just couldn’t remember your new address, and it seemed too difficult to write to you without one; and then the title of the farm which you grace with your dual presence? Kronstadt? It cannot be. You call me a lousy pseudo-intellectual red, and look at you; called after a movie! You say that I should quit riding perpetually after the hounds of culture (it is really to hounds, you know) and you leash them up and make them pull your carriage. I can think of a lot more high-class jokes but this is all phony. I have given up culture for hard work; believe me and don’t come anywhere near this alleged holiday camp.
Here I am an ardent red, being whipped into a lather every day because I don’t work enough, me, can you believe it! The devotion to the party and good old K. M. out here is just wearing me out—everyone lives it, breathes it, does it, agitates it—the Russian specter, the Bolshie menace, you know what I mean—only we reds know what it is. For the others, it’s just parlor tricks, magic lantern. I have been put into harness and am forced to the sad position of being forced to read—carefully, for I have classes—Value Price and Profit, Wage-Labor and Capital, the Dialectics of Nature, and reports of congresses. I have just read a book by a naïve socialist, the first ever, Upton Sinclair, World ’s End; he does think pretty straight, but not well.
I am stalling for time; I think my style shows it. Of course you (and I guess someone else, who is a quick figurer, as I have noticed—shadow-boxing again) must have figured out for yourself that there is something beyond the charm of the scenery holding me here. I won’t claym (interesting typographical error, Freudian slip, the kind that always shows—I meant to lay claim) to being celibate—I’m not. In fact, … dots … well, I’m living with a man. Isn’t it awful? Or don’t you think so? I remember all your speeches, and I’m still doing it, and knowing what I’m doing at that; well, of course I know. But this is, Papa, and dear Solander and Progenitor, no light little inamorato—I don’t seem to know this word—of two kids in their teens. This bozo is over thirty, has been married twice, and is a professor at a small college in a neighboring state, in the city of Khardump, in the province of Leftova, you know. And—this is the rub, this is where he hails from, this city of K. in the province of L., and where he likes to be. We are spending a very pleasant summer, but I will be back in the fall.
I don’t intend to start settling down seriously now, and I don’t want you to worry about too much permanence. You must think it queer, about Clays, but this is the truth about that affair—Clays and I did not ever actually get together, it’s too crazy, the whole story, you never would believe it. I felt like a dog with his tail between his legs, what kind of expressions am I using, my style is pure Freud, and you simply don’t know what I went through. I do want to marry Clays, but things went altogether haywire. I guess it happens to other girls too, because everything seems to happen; but somehow it doesn’t seem possible.
About the man; I suppose we will both have pangs at the end of the summer, but I am coming to realize more and more that, unfortunately, the life for me is either an activating big-city life or an organized rural life (and I think the latter’s just romance, I couldn’t stand it), like the Pamples, way back in the South of France there. Mayhap, you know, if I could get to Clays somehow and we could travel, but forever—well, that would be different from anything else. But I can’t think of Clays now; he has gone right out of my head; I’m most ashamed of it, and yet not unwilling.
I’m happy in a way. Only one thing grates, and that is I’m no small-town gal, and although I’m peaceful and content now, I could not live my whole life with someone who has nothing of the cosmopolite in him—anyway his third wife won’t divorce him, or is making so much trouble it gives you a headache. And where have you heard that before?
I hope this hasn’t shocked you too much, maybe not at all because you thought it was all over and done with; I’m suffering from rather belated thrills, I admit. As for me, I’m glad it occurred here and now, at a time when my whole introduction to life with males and real (as distinguished from nominal and relative) relations with them can occur without any necessity for concealment, or one-hour rendezvous or indecisive tete-à-tetes—“Well, you must make up your own mind, Letty.” Oh, the Lochinvars!
I’m going to feel restrained at home, in the fall. But with all this, I have a certain longing to be home. It has proven to me how nice it is—and the oddest thing of all is I miss you. I’ll be there in September, but not before, because I’ll delay the return. Mamma and I will take up our petty way, and fight about what Jacky’s glooms mean and whether Andrea is precocious. Oh, gosh! Aren’t we all precocious? But Mamma has a wonderful faculty for forgetting each one as she grows up; and that’s how eventually you get to be a grandma I suppose. (Mamma doesn’t, mustn’t know.)
Well, answer me soon. Much love,
LETTY-MARMALADE.
P.S. I had two letters which threw me, both, in different ways. Clays at last wrote to me from Madrid! What excitement. And I couldn’t show it to anyone! I am sending it to you because you like Clays; and he is the only man I ever met who is worthy not so much of me as of my destiny, if I ever do anything that isn’t absolute trash. The other letter is from poor Jacky, who just proves she is my sister—to sum up in one word, Jacky-Jam. More anon. She isn’t like me,thank goodness. She couldn’t take it, I know. She believes in love, but like Paolo and Francesca.
L.F.
P.P.S. The only thing that would make me marry Amos would be to find out what it’s all about, I mean marriage and all that wife stuff, so that I could make up my mind about everything. I’m awfully young and could make even a big mistake and repent it. The worst is—I know he isn’t as good as Clays. But where is Clays?
This was a long time ago and it seems queer to me that July nights, the thick rustling black of wayside windbreaks with the stars above, and young people singing folk songs in lighted lodges, the tunes of “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight,” and “East Texas Red,” and “Long John,” the lovely youngsters in their floppy outfits, and all of it, the sounds of my real honeymoon, should be connected with this Amos. Yet if he’d been free, I would have married him.
30
Jacky was bound to fall in love with a professor. She was a girl who wanted to achieve something. She was mad to go to Europe and thought she would be a great painter. She hated to walk alone along the streets, because she was by this (when she was nearly seventeen) a very pretty girl, and the boys whistled after her. She thought she was far above them and never answered them. She thought of marrying someone noble, a genius; and it wasn’t marriage so much as the genius, the kindred spirit.
She wrote to me in the summer vacation. She wrote to me from the camp at which she was counselor. She imagined I was bound, spiritually and physically, to Clays, and that I was going to be a figure in the world, with his help. She wanted my advice. She wrote in French (for we had kept up this habit since France):
I’m going to tell you my love-troubles because I think now you won’t laugh at me. I am most unhappy. I volunteered to be Counselor; I needn’t have done so. It was an effort to get out in the world. You reproach me with being a nose-in-the-air, with “not hating myself.” But I am cruelly unhappy. They are dull, insane, with their way of living; they only think of sex and there is a lot of it, underhand. It isn’t that I don’t understand it; but I don’t like that kind. They seem to think they have a right to tear up everything because they are young; they pretend a ferocious happiness, a madness; and pretend to hate and despise everyone, old and young, except just their own little gang. I am pretty as you know, and have a genre of my own; and I am approached every day. They expect me to sleep with them, quite simply, without any love, or even decency, just to prove I’m one of the gang. It’s like an underworld. It’s unimaginably tough. But these are supposed to be nice people, young middle-class girls and boys. What a terrible outlook! Getting married to someone with money, getting some girl to lay and all that kind of thing; jokes one doesn’t hear anywhere else. If anyone says one word about the mind or love or such things, it’s a horselaugh; they think you’re mad.
They’re beginning to think there’s something the matter with me; and the crudest of them just put it down to virginity. I’m crazy because I want to study, because I want to be a great woman. I despise them and hate them and I am surprised at my weakmindedness in coming away like this to “know life.” What a stupid idea …
More than that, of course, I am suffering from love. I am madly in love with that professor you always call Peter “Varnish.” A boy I met somewhere writes to me, says he longs for me, and all the time I long for Peter “Varnish.” If the letter were from him! If I could see him even; if I knew what he’s doing this moment; if he thought about me; if he could love me! But I remember his attitude to me. Now that I know, when I have my wits about me, that he does not reciprocate, my pride (and I have a great deal) produces a kind of tearing inside me. I hate myself because I don’t sleep, because I think about him; for reading nervously all day; for nursing my mad ambitions; for not wanting to see anyone, and for hating everyone. And I hate the world in general, or rather I have thoughts of this color; not always hate, but not pleasant, because I know I am not ugly and not stupid; beyond all that, I am capable of loving with all my strength; and I have the pride to say that I have the right to think that someone, some day or other, will see it.
And must I wait till he sees? This makes me feel like death. I will tell you something I did this year, long ago, in spring. I went out with a man a lot older than I am, someone we both know, fascinating, a ladykiller. L.A. are his initials. It was night. We stopped under a lamp, near the El in Seventeenth Street. He passed his arm across his body and drew me to him and our arms formed a loveknot, a pretzel. It was rapid but timed, a practiced, practiced gesture. He kissed me. I can’t describe to you what it was like. Perhaps all love-kisses are like that, but I have an idea he is unusual. I did not love him, but at that moment fell passionately in love and went on walking with him.
One night when Mother was ill I left Mother, everything, and ran out in the streets with him. Mother never said anything about it. She just thought it was the spring and that I was a crazy young girl. She forgave me!
That night I said to him, “My heart is full of love for you, L.”
He said, “I don’t know what’s in my heart, Jacky.”
I said, “Last night, I wrote a poem to you,” and he just said, with his troubled troubling laugh, “Do you know, with all the women I’ve known and loved, Jacky, I’ve never written a love poem and I’ve never written a word of love, nor a love letter.”
I said to him, “But I don’t care; I’ve got to tell you what I feel,” and I told him, “Thou art chief among ten thousand.”
After a moment, he laughed again, as if even more troubled (but he was not, I saw his face), and he said, “Now don’t you think you’re exaggerating, Jacky?”
You see, I treasure this conversation. I knew it was wrong. I know you shouldn’t tell a man, and must use a kind of calculation; I was too proud not to give everything, and I will not calculate in love. But now I am wiser, I cannot lose “Varnish” with such tactics; and then, unfortunately, I have not even kissed him.
I am only talking about myself. But I do it because now I feel that my state of mind must in part be yours; I feel better if I think we are both love-stupefied at the same time—it’s a good thing, isn’t it? I understand very well your irresolution and troubles about Clays. It is because we wait too long. It’s very painful to have to accumulate these tender sentiments for a long time (and have to pretend to be darling little girls and cute teen-agers), hold them inside you, for what does it end in? You then begin to feel this love for Mr. B. or Mr. C. It’s bad, from any point of view.
I am happy to think of the good-natured way you receive my exaggerated confidences—I only say that in apology, for me they are not exaggeration, they are the truth. The truth! Believe me, I love you, Letty, and all you do; you’re a friend of mine, better than any other. During the years just past we had to disagree; our natures are different. I want you to be happy, and I understand that you have suffered very much and that upsets me.
I have an idiot here, who takes charge of me, is infatuated with me: she is called McGogue (it doesn’t seem possible) and she has an absolutely flat chest. I look carefully even in her swimsuit—nothing, not a shred. The poor creature is all gray, dried up and Anglo-Saxon; what they mean by that word, you know; and I boast of my Welsh blood. Can you lose your figure once you’ve had it, just by staying an old maid? There’s another one here, with a nice figure, pretty, not bad at all—but after all, women, women! Three days ago I became a slave, the slave of Tolstoy, War and Peace. There is, in a nutshell (wrong word), exactly the life I want to lead —I can’t put it down; and this is the tenth time I have read it. Oh, what splendid, passionate, brilliant life, mad with follies, wickedness, etc.; but, at least, life. It’s the passionate sincerity of the book which intoxicates me— one feels the author never writes anything he hasn’t felt. That is my idea of art, too; and then what a conclusion does one draw! One must experience everything? Can a woman stand so much? This is a man with a soul as deep as the sea, and then look how strong he was, rich, owning property, loving women, and think of the age he lived to. But he tyrannized over everyone. He took other people’s lives too. Do you t
hink that is necessary, to be really great? You must read it, Letty. You must understand Natasha, who is the most feminine woman in the world. You must hear young people as they talk in Tolstoy’s book; you’ll stop at every phrase with tears in your eyes—“it is true, profound, it is our life.” He is dead, he knew us; they are living, they see us every day and they don’t know us. And then, written with a powerful rhythm of thought! And all accompanied with a beat in the language that is absolutely magic. I see it all unrolling itself before my eyes—well, I’m boring you.
In spite of the work I have to do for school, I am devouring everything, and it seems to me now that I have never worked with my head at all—can I think? I am reading the biographies of men like Keats and his letters to get to know, How did he feel, who was he? (And also, Am I like that?) and I am reading the books of the first great saints of the church, to know the same thing, What did they mean, what kind of men were they, how did they lift themselves up in those ages of confusion? What is anything? Don’t you feel you haven’t learned anything? And afterwards—I think I see a light, and then I go to sleep with my ideas more mixed up than ever … It’s extraordinary that Mother is so unhappy. She ought to leave town and travel a bit. We could get along all right and there are, God knows, a thousand relatives to take care of us; and you’re to be trusted, practically a married woman; and as for me, I’m Miss Puss-in-the-Clouds. Give Mother all my love if she comes to see you; she won’t come this far to see me. If you don’t care for this kind of confession, I know you, you’ll be kind enough to tell me so and we’ll shake hands over it, exactly as many years ago. Imagine, an idea came back to me from those days—or was it Tolstoy? Or, more frankly, it was an idea I’ve had for some time. What if I should write a book? I tried. Fortunately, I had the sense to see it was all wet, but I kept some passages which were better than the others, and I’m keeping them to show you, my only confidante. When I reread them, I am surprised; they seem very good. But can they be? Impossible.
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