Kid nodded. “That’s a good idea.” He tilted another picture to catch, in sudden silverpoint, burning buildings, people gaping, and one child, in the foreground, leering into the camera. “Oh, yeah!” he laughed, and looked through the others.
“Have you any idea when you’ll be able to look over the proofs? The Times is notorious for typos. Your book was set on the same machinery.”
“I could do it now.” Kid put down the pictures and picked up the galleys. “How many pages did you say it was?”
“Thirty-six. I went over it once myself against your notebook—we’d rather hoped for a typescript; and when you pushed that into my hands, that evening, I was a bit worried. But your fair copies are very neat. You know, you have at least four completely distinct handwritings?”
“It’s never been too good.”
“But your printing’s perfectly legible.” Newboy pawed in the case. “Here…” He gave Kid the notebook.
It fell open in Kid’s hands:
Poetry, fiction, drama—I am only interested in…
Kid turned back the book to the page with his poem (a middle draft of “Elegy”), then picked up the galleys. Moving ribbon from ribbon on his lap, saw, printed, ELEGY go by, and caught his breath. The letters were so much sharper and more serene than ink on notebook paper.
He let a random line of print tug his eyes across. Words detonated memories intense enough to blot the fact that they were not his—or, at least, this wasn’t…or…Behind his lips the teeth hung open; now his lips pulled apart. He took a silent breath. My poem, he thought, terribly excited, terribly happy.
“I couldn’t help reading some of your notes. I’ve always found it amusing, writers pouring out pages and pages of analysis on why they can not write—lord knows I’ve done it myself.”
“Huh?”
“There were many, many places where I found your aesthetic analysis let me into some of the more difficult things you were trying to do in the actual work.” Mr. Newboy picked up his coffee cup. “You have a fascinating critical mind, and quite a bit of insight into the problems of the poem. It made me feel closer to you. And of course, the most important thing is that the poems themselves deepen considerably in the light of your—”
Kid’s head was shaking. “Oh…” He closed his mouth again, opened it, with a moment’s urge, luminous in its strength, to allow misconception to become deception.
Newboy paused.
Blinking through the after urge, the pause indicating he was already found out (he pawed his fragmented memory for some previous intent to deceive, to support him in what he wished to reveal), said: “All that other stuff—hey, I didn’t write that.”
Newboy’s grey head went a bit to the side.
“I just found the notebook.” The desperation of embarrassment subsided, his heart was left hammering heavily and slowly. “It was all filled up with writing, but just on one side of the page. So I used the other sides for…my stuff.” A final pulse of heat behind his eyes.
“Oh,” Newboy said trying to retain his smile, “this is embarrassing. You didn’t write those journal sections?”
“No, sir. Only the poems.”
“Oh, I…well, I guess…oh, really, I am sorry.” Newboy let the smile become laughter. “Well, I really feel that, once more, I’ve made myself look quite silly.”
“You? No,” Kid said, and discovered himself angry. “I should have said something. I just didn’t think of it when I gave it to you that evening. Really.”
“Of course,” Mr. Newboy said. “No, I simply mean your poems are your poems. They exist of themselves. In the same way nothing I could say about them is going to change what they are, nothing you could say—or anything I mistakenly thought you said—is going to change that either.”
“You think that’s true?”
Newboy pursed his lips. “Actually, I don’t know whether it’s true or not. But truly I don’t see how any poet can write who doesn’t think so.”
“Why are you going away, Mr. Newboy?” Kid had begun the question to make a connection: But now it seemed equally apt for severing one, and Newboy’s embarrassment and his own confusion seemed better left. “Can’t you work here very well? Bellona doesn’t stimulate you?”
Newboy accepted the severance, acknowledging his acceptance with another sip. “In a way, I suppose you’re right. Every once in a while something comes along to remind me that I am—though not as often as I would sometimes like—after all, a poet. What is it Mr. Graves says? All poetry is about love, death, or the changing of the seasons. Well, here the seasons do not change. So I’m leaving.” Behind coiled steam, the grey eyes gleamed. “After all. I’m only a visitor. But circumstances seem to have contrived to change that status with a rapidity thoroughly disquieting.” He shook his head. “I’ve met some very pleasant people, seen some fascinating things, had a wealth of rich experiences—just the way the city was represented to me. I certainly haven’t been disappointed.”
“But not all of the things that happened to you were pleasant?”
“Are they ever? No, Roger has arranged to get me as far as Helmsford. There some people can take me to Lakesville. There’s still transportation there. I can get a bus across to the airport at Pittsblain. Then—back to civilization.”
“What was so unpleasant here?”
“Not the least was my initial meeting with you.”
“At Teddy’s?” Kid was surprised.
Newboy frowned. “Outside the wall, in back of Roger’s.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah. That.” He sat back a little on the couch. The projector rolled between his vest flaps. He did not glance down, and felt uncomfortable.
“Inside those walls, I’m afraid,” Newboy pondered, “are all the intrigues and personality clashes that—well, that one might imagine at a place like Roger’s. And they are beginning to bore me.” He sighed. “I suppose such things have driven me from one city to another all my life. No, I can’t say Bellona was misrepresented. But even for me, at my age, not all of its lessons have been kind.”
“Jesus,” Kid said. “What’s been happening at—”
“There are, if I can oversimplify,” Newboy went on (Kid took a long breath and picked up his coffee), “two concepts of the artist. The one gives all to his work, in a very real way; if he does not produce volumes, at least he goes through many, many drafts. He neglects his life, and his life totters and sways and often plummets into chaos. It is presumptuous of us to judge him unhappy: or, when he is obviously unhappy, to judge the source of it. Be thankful for him; he lends art all its romance, its energy, and creates that absolutely necessary appeal to the adolescent mind without which adult maturation is impossible. If he is a writer, he hurls his words into the pools of our thought. Granted the accuracy of the splashes, the waves are tremendous and glitter and flash in the light of our consciousness. You Americans—not to mention the Australians—are extraordinarily fond of him. But there is another concept, a more European concept—one of the few concepts Europe shares with the Orient—that includes Spenser and Chaucer, but excludes Shakespeare, that includes the Cavaliers and the Metaphysicals, but bypasses the Romantics: the artist who gives his all to life, to living within some sort of perfected ideal. Sometime in his past, he has discovered he is…let us say, a poet: that certain situations, certain convergences of situations—usually too complicated for him to understand wholly, as they propitiously juxtapose conscious will with unconscious passion—they something-between-cause-and-allow a poem. He dedicates himself to living, according to his concepts, the civilized life in which poetry exists because it is part of civilization. He risks as much as his cousin. He generally produces fewer works, with greater intervals between them, and constantly must contend with the possibility that he will never write again if his life should so dictate—a good deal of his civilized energies must go toward resigning himself to the insignificance of his art, into the suppression of that theatrical side of his personality of which ambition is only a small part. He stands much closer to the pool. He does not hurl. He drops. Accuracy is again all-important: there are some people who can hit bull’s eye from a quarter of a mile while others cannot touch the target at ten feet. Given it, the patterns and ripples this sort of artist produces can be far more intricate, if they lack the initial appearance of force. He is much more a victim of the civilization in which he lives: his greatest works come from the periods art historians grossly call ‘conducive to aesthetic production.’ I say he stands very close to the pools; indeed, he spends most of his time simply gazing into them. Myself, I rather aspire to be this second type of artist. I came to Bellona to explore. And I find the entire culture here—I cannot be kind—completely parasitic…saprophytic. It infects—even inside Roger’s carefully closed estate. It’s not conducive to my concept of the good life; therefore, if only tertiarily, it damages all my impulses toward art. I would like to be a good person. But it’s too difficult here. I suspect that’s cowardly, but it’s true.”