At the end of the banquet, all the helpers, except the regulars like myself, were again dismissed with pay. They were not even needed to wash up the dishes, for the hotel had the latest, most modern dishwashing machines and these could easily take care of even the enormous number of dishes used in a hotel banquet. It always paid the hotel to invest in the best mechanical devices for decreasing hands. Perhaps in another fifty years the New Hotel can give even choicer banquets—delicacies brought from the North Pole and the South Sea Isles—and by that time there will be some machine, some endless caterpillar thing that will make the connection between tables and garbage pails complete without human intermediaries. There will be no more back-door banquets then.
At about eleven o’clock on nights that were not banquet nights, I was relieved from my slavery in the world of food, and could return to the utopian realm of pure thought. But going back to my little unheated room in the attic on Trowbridge Street, I faced again the physical weakness of man. I drew out my books and tried to get back to the mind’s exhilarating world, but ocean winds outside my unguarded window panes buffetted my lonely perch, and a numbing cold, hostile to life, soon overpowered me. There was nothing for me to do then but go to sleep, spreading my overcoat and clothes over the bed, for that room became as cold as if I had been camping outside exposed to the Boston elements.
I partially solved the problem of a place to study by fleeing to the big public libraries, living there all my free waking hours. But the public libraries closed at ten o’clock. Later on, I thought of the station waiting rooms, and next I lingered in there, sometimes until two and three in the morning, fingering my books chaotically, always catching glimpses, meager glimpses, and a million suggestions I never had the time to follow up. My efforts at study were like those of a student the night before examination, slipping over some book of 500 pages in half an hour, turning to another required book, another and another, and so on through the long, hectic night . . . a vast impossible feeding without digestion! . . .
When I say Boston cold, I recall one of the Siamese—not Vidol but Mahidia—because he shivered so. Mahidia was the nicest of the Siamese group, the most sensitive and the most intelligent. Mahidia was not his real name, for that had innumerable syllables and nobody could pronounce them, but everybody, including professors, called him for short Mahidia. He was very shy. His locker was next to mine in the student cloak room; for a long time we met there without speaking. Then one day he pulled out two long, expensive cigars and offered me one. I refused, but said I would walk with him while he smoked.
“It’s too cold to walk,” said Mahidia shivering. And he invited me to his room. He roomed, I found, with the Siamese prince, the very good-looking, short little fellow with a handsome sport coupe. Mahidia would never accept invitations from Westerners. Charles told me that, and I noticed it was the case. He would accept invitations from me because I was an Oriental, and we often went to Chinatown together, to eat Chinese food.
I have wondered sometimes if Mahidia’s shrinking to cold was not partly psychological. Boston cold is not the same as New York cold. It is a cold not only physical but spiritual. I am not referring to the University world, which is a hothouse, a world of theory, and good will, and internationalism. I refer to the feeling that emanates from a common Boston crowd. Often I thought, as I walked among them, going to and from my place of work, “Is it because the mayflower is so sensitive to the fierce frost that the people of the mayflower country, too, are critical and hostile?” And so I believe the sensitive Mahidia sensed alienness and a temper vastly foreign to the Asian. The Asian, too, is self-controlled, repressed, but not with that profound unshakable distrust of Nature inherited by these people from the time of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Mahidia was a brilliant and conscientious student. His professor was Doctor Burton, who considered him one of the best in his class. It was Mahidia’s genius for physics that had brought him to this land of ice and snow and tortuous thought—him who was soft and lazy in gesture, in manner, in look, with his slow, slender catlike walk and his quiet, slow habits of speaking. One of Nature’s satin people, Emily Dickinson would have said. All that dark appearance and suave sveltness proclaimed the tropics. So he was like some South Indian monkey transported to a cold northern zoo. He told me privately that he would not live in New England for $100,000. The only thing that kept him alive was the thought of home to go back to—Siam, beautiful Siam, with its monsoon climate. Oh, how he went around shivering, under his heavy fur coat! Even in his steam-heated apartment, shared by a prince, he shivered perpetually. And I think that unconsciously he shivered in the New England coldness of temperament just as he feared and shivered in the biting climate.
7
One day in late spring, near the end of the college term, I was lingering before the New Hotel, reluctant to go in, even five or ten minutes before my time. Just then a familiar figure sauntered out the front door where guests alone issued. It was To Wan Kim, fastidiously dressed as usual in clothes made in London, and with that characteristic air about him of an aloof and gloomy wanderer among men.
“Hey there! Pyun-an-hasimnika?” I called excitedly in Korean, a greeting which ironically enough means, “Have you Peace!”
I was very glad to see him. He seemed pleased, too. He told me he had intended looking me up. Whether this was the case, I do not know. I did not know at this time why he ever made trips to Boston. It was his general restlessness, I supposed.
We went for a walk on the Boston Common, and I ignored my call to duty at the New Hotel.
“And how is college?” he questioned. “Do you like your studies?”
“I have not been able to find out,” I said bitterly. “Oh, if only I had the time to read some of those books they talk about in class! Or even to review my notes of the professors’ lectures!”
Kim laughed. “Of course that’s just what they want you to do. And I believe all the best students do. But it is a wonder to me how I could have eaten up all those dogmatic statements once. I must have, since I got good marks. But I learned very little, nothing that really counts.”
“Making a living and going to school are absolutely useless!” I bemoaned.
“Well, you need never accuse yourself—you are just loafing. In this way you will have a saner viewpoint.” Kim seemed to be speaking in earnest. But I felt these cold and unsympathetic words.
“I often think people are not sincere in saying as you say. You cannot know. You never had my difficulties.”
“I sometimes wish I had,” Kim answered somberly. “I could hardly know less about life than now I do. . . . But don’t be so despairing,” Kim argued more gently. “A college education isn’t only in the textbooks. Most of life anyway, is in absorbing various viewpoints. I would not worry, even if I learned nothing. Many, you know, don’t.”
“It has often seemed to me I could do more if I didn’t attend any lectures.”
“It may be a good thing to attend those lectures. I would keep on.”
“Yes, since I am already in debt to the college fifty dollars and cannot pay, I may as well keep on.”
“That’s my advice. . . . I do not know how it is, Chungpa—I expect you to get something out of the West, something that I have missed.”
It was spoken suavely and lightly but with the lofty significance that often clung to his simplest words. I, too, had this faith in myself. And suddenly I felt I loved him very much, though I knew so little of this man’s life and he of mine. How much more intimate George and I were on an everyday plane! And that charming and frank and close-thinking Yankee, Charles . . . he and I could philosophize and joke like boys of the same age. But with Kim all was serious, warped by the subjective view . . . he was both arrogant and secretive. Yet his words plumbed deep. When I was with him the universe stretched out unfathomably wide. We seemed to inhabit worlds of somewhat the same dimensions. At least the echoes that p
assed were unique in kind.
We returned to Kim’s room in the New Hotel and he ordered some ice and two glasses of fresh limeade. For his own drink he took out a small silver flask from his suitcase. When a boy came up with ice, I knew the boy and I knew where that ice came from. It was from where I worked, and it was just the kind that I sent out of the ice room for other people. I knew all the steps by which that ice left the refrigerator, all other times to serve other people, this time to serve me. I did not much like ice, but purposely I took a piece and put it in my glass and watched it melt. Strange! Kim wouldn’t appreciate how many hands that ice passed through on its round-about journey—I broke off my reflections, remembering that I was long overdue down there. I left Kim suddenly. I went down by the elevator and walked out of the hotel like a gentleman. I went around to the servants’ entrance and punched the clock and put on my white coat. Belcher had harsh words for me, since I was late.
8
As I contemplated the year just past, it seemed to me I had not grown at all—no—not any part of me. Yet mind and body were tired and cramped from work. What had I to show for it? Nothing but pages and pages of notes, for I had not missed many lectures. These notes were curious in shape. Nobody could read them except me. They were in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Much could be said for the Chinese as an excellent system of shorthand. Man, perpendicular, one straight line, then a curve, takes less time than the writing of the English A. Or mountain: that is a long word in English. How simple in Chinese—like the roman numeral III. And yet I would not recommend the complicated signs for dragon or tortoise or soul. Tortoise for instance is a complex and mystical picture requiring twenty-six strokes. There is nothing so simple in any language as the English sign for “I.” Outside of these notes, which, having a good memory, I knew almost by heart, I had learned almost nothing. I had had no time. The poor marks I made in some of my courses were probably more than I deserved, yet they humiliated me. And confronted with masses of material which I had no time to read, I wondered sometimes if it would have helped me to lose myself in there, even with more time. Each professor saw his own field as a feast, and an end in itself. They all had the bookworm’s point of view. I felt I was not interested in muddling around with first one thing and then another, just for the joy contained in the doing. And caught between my two worlds, I felt a like revulsion for the kingdom of bookworms as for the kingdom of food.
I resented particularly the professor in Roman culture. I wanted to say, “You are the professor of Latin, and I believe you can conjugate Latin, nominatives and accusatives, very well. But I am here challenging you. How much Catullus have you in your blood?” Of course, these Greek and Latin courses in English weren’t so bad, not so bad as taking Latin and Greek. But how little I came out with! Just as from the dean’s lecture on Life—which was no life—no more than that bombastic lecture to tourists on a bus . . . saying Arlington, Buckley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford, and so on all the way to Massachusetts Avenue; then coming back to rhyme up “ton” with “don”—Boylston, Clinton, etc.—Boston on a bus, which certainly gave the tourist not much of Boston.
My bewilderment and rebellion before American education were enhanced by looking back to Chinese models. Confucian education never required the study of anything but poetry, and it approached that mostly by being a poet. All scholars were poets. There was no division between the critical and the creative. None but the poets were scholars and none but poets attempted to write on poetry. It did not make for Aristotelian analysis, but it vitalized the whole field of knowledge to the creatively minded. This was the way I wanted to approach Western knowledge. And found it would not work, for there was no tradition like that in American education. I was distressed at the lack of unifying principles. I could build no bridge from one classroom to another, just as I could build no bridge from the New Hotel into the mental Utopia. I wanted to relive imaginatively, emotionally, Greek, Roman, Judaic cultures . . . but only briefly like a kind of gestational recapitulation . . . thence to pass onward to the Renaissance—first on the continent, then in England, and from there to America . . . America, the child of the Renaissance, wrested from the Redskins by this new spirit of rebellion, inquiry, science, and individualism. The Renaissance, that was the period that thrilled me most. Here I saw the eternal workings of some natural law and yet a miracle like Aaron’s dry and sapless rod blossoming. I was never too tired to speculate on why the continent of Asia had fallen behind, while the West went on to triumphant rebirth again. Asia’s backwardness seemed the demonstration that Nature abhors separateness and inviolability. How much had Kubla Khan, the invasion of the Huns, the Moors, the Crusades and its Arab wars contributed to Western development? I absorbed, too, at this time the views of Doctor Campbell, who believed firmly in the merging of cultures.
“Why was Hearn so great and vital?” he was fond of saying, “Because he had four distinct races and their heritage in his blood.”
(Hearn was one of his enthusiasms. He called him the man most misunderstood, and he was never tired of praising Hearn’s attempt to marry another culture.)
More and more I intellectualized my instinctive purpose in coming to the West. On my own cultural heritage, I wanted to ingraft the already ancient tree of the Renaissance, to make from that something different, something new . . . my own rebirth. Thus, in approaching the West I was eager to feel its life in an unbroken stream pass through my heart-blood. . . . Homer, Æschylus, Plato, Christ, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare . . . lives that were born and that died and yet were linked in continuous process of ever-revivified life with its vast onward momentum and exalted, unknown function. Seen in this way, history becomes not history, but poetry and creative life in process, its background the life that lived and decayed, yet itself is not subject to the common laws of mortality. . . . In short, I wanted the whole Western hemisphere in one block. And there was no course of study in college so general, so comprehensive as to give it to me.
BOOK SIX
1
MY FRIEND, CHARLES EVANS, told me that he was going that summer to Cape Cod to work on a farm. I envied him. It seemed just the right antidote for a winter in Boston. As it turned out, I, too, did work on a farm, but in that region north of Boston which I was supposed to monopolize as a salesman for Universal Education. In fact, I started out to sell books there. I had rather avoided Mr. Lively during the winter months, and when I looked him up again, I received many reproaches and expressions of disappointment. I had not made good!
“It looks as if you have no stick-to-itiveness, my boy!”
I told him I was ready to begin again, and then he repeated that he still had hopes. All that I needed to begin selling right away was determination and an up-to-date prospectus. I shied away a little from a new prospectus, for I was very short of funds. But Mr. Lively showed beaming generosity coupled with shrewdness.
“I tell you what I will do. I will give you a new one for the old one,” Mr. Lively said, when he saw my hesitation.
Again he took me out with him to his home, where I was welcomed boisterously by Martin and Elsie. The whole family was so nice to me and seemed to be so genuinely affectionate that I was ashamed of myself for my doubts of Mr. Lively’s sincerity in the kind of contract he had once drawn up. He really believed that business and altruism should go hand in hand, I am quite sure. But my, those volumes were very hard to sell, once you had lost faith in the goods.
I had no more names to try on my lists of wealthy patrons. I thought I would go to those little communities farther out in the country where education had not much penetrated. By chance I carried in my address book the name of Farmer Higgins, given me by Mrs. Moody, my kind landlady in Stratford-on-Avon; Mr. Higgins was some relative of hers by marriage. The Higginses received me with the utmost kindness, and though they kept no other boarders at this time, I engaged a nice room with them very cheaply. They thought I
was just there on a vacation.
I kept trying to sell around the neighborhood for over a week. Several copies I sold to farmers’ wives with children, but perhaps the sales talk intoxicated them—farmers as a rule do not talk much. Oh, I did my best with the speech, which I must say came out at times very eloquently. So a few were convinced. I made enough in commissions to pay for my first week’s rent and to eat frugally in the restaurants of near-by towns. There were many small towns like a network in this region and street car fare was cheap. One day in the middle of the second week, after having lunch as Miss Fulton recommended (not too much), I went to a house, a good-looking one on a hill not far from a fair-sized factory town. A woman answered my knock and said she did not need anything. There had been long steps to climb to that front door, and it was hot weather, and having climbed them, I politely insisted on getting in, without mentioning that I was a salesman canvassing.
When I entered, there was a man—a big rough-looking man in shirt sleeves, and he was eating lunch. Of course it was a bad time to call. I realized that now. How I wished he had not been there, so that I could talk to the lady in private, but she said, “Here is my husband.” So I braced myself and thrust out my chest as aggressively as Mr. Lively had taught us to do, and advanced to overcome his sales resistance. I said to the woman’s husband I wanted to have a talk on something educational. It was going to be a hard contest, I knew. All this time he had been looking at me rudely. He said, “Get out or I will kick you out.” But I paid no attention. I knew no American would kick an innocent stranger out that way. He swore . . . and when I insisted on talking, he kicked me out. I rolled down those long steps. I was bruised, but not much hurt. I stood up at once, and called, “My hat—my hat!” For I had left inside my straw hat, for which I had paid sixty-five cents in the Raymond store in Boston. I wanted it at once, in order to run away before I got more kicks, but I couldn’t run away without it because it had cost sixty-five cents. The man picked it up and put his foot in it, and his shoe came out at the top of the hat. Then he kicked hard, as if he were revenging himself on the hat. It dropped in the middle of the steps and I ran up to meet it and lifted it off the steps. But I saw it was no good now. So I got mad too. I finished it up right there and walked away. Loud laughter followed me. Some children and girls were in the yard playing. They had watched the whole business, and they giggled in ecstasy as I walked away fast.
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