“It’s a kind of childlike faith in the efficacy of words, you see, a — kind of belief that circumstance somehow will invest the veriest platitude with magic. And, darn it, it does happen at times, let it be historically or grammatically incorrect or physically impossible; let it even be trite: there comes a time when it will be invested with a something not of this life, this world, at all. It’s a kind of fire, you know. . ” He fumbled himself among words, staring at them, at the Semitic man’s sad quizzical eyes and Mrs. Wiseman’s averted face.
“Somebody, some drug clerk or something, has shredded the tender — and do you know what I believe? I believe that he’s always writing it for some woman, that he fondly believes he’s stealing a march on some brute bigger or richer or handsomer than he is; I believe that every word a writing man writes is put down with the ultimate intention of impressing some woman that probably don’t care anything at all for literature, as is the nature of women. Well, maybe she ain’t always a flesh and blood creature. She may be only the symbol of a desire. But she is feminine. Fame is only a by-product. . Do you remember, the old boys never even bothered to sign their things. . But, I don’t know. I suppose nobody ever knows a man’s reasons for what he does: you can only generalize from results.”
“He very seldom knows his reasons, himself,” the other said. “And by the time he has recovered from his astonishment at the unforeseen result he got, he has forgotten what reason he once believed he had. . But how can you generalize from a poem? What result does a poem have? You say that substance doesn’t matter, has no proper place in a poem. You have,” the Semitic man continued with curious speculation, “the strangest habit of contradicting yourself, of fumbling around and then turning tail and beating your listener to the refutation. . But God knows, there is plenty of room for speculation in modern verse. Fumbling, too, though the poets themselves do most of this. Don’t you agree, Eva?”
His sister answered, “What?” turning upon him her dark, preoccupied gaze. He repeated the question. Fairchild interrupted in full career:
“The trouble with modern verse is, that to comprehend it you must have recently passed through an emotional experience identical with that through which the poet himself has recently passed. The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose feet are shaped like the cobbler’s feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear—”
“Like overshoes,” the other suggested.
“Like overshoes,” Fairchild agreed. “But, then, I ain’t disparaging. Perhaps the few that the shoes fit can go a lot farther than a whole herd of people shod alike could go.”
“Interesting, anyway,” the Semitic man said, “to reduce the spiritual progress of the race to terms of an emotional migration; esthetic Israelites crossing unwetted a pink sea of dullness and security. What about it, Eva?”
Mrs. Wiseman, thinking of Jenny’s soft body, came out of her dream. “I think you are both not only silly, but dull.” She rose. “I want to bum another cigarette, Dawson.”
He gave her one, and a match, and she left them. Fairchild turned a few pages. “It’s kind of difficult for me to reconcile her with this book,” he said slowly. “Does it strike you that way?”
“Not so much that she wrote this,” the other answered, “but that she wrote anything at all. That anybody should. But there’s no puzzle about the book itself. Not to me, that is. But you, straying trustfully about this park of dark and rootless trees which Dr. Ellis and your Germans have recently thrown open to the public — You’ll always be a babe in that wood, you know. Bewildered, and slightly annoyed; restive, like Ashur-bani-pal’s stallion when his master mounted him.”
“Emotional bisexuality,” Fairchild said.
“Yes. But you are trying to reconcile the book and the author. A book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can’t reconcile them. And with you, when the inevitable clash comes, the author’s actual self is the one that goes down, for you are of those for whom fact and fallacy gain verisimilitude by being in cold print.”
“Perhaps so,” Fairchild said, with detachment, brooding again on a page. “Listen:
“Lips that of thy weary all seem weariest,
Seem wearier for the curled and pallid sly
Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy
Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;
Lay not to heart thy boy’s hand, to protest
That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,
For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled
With secret joy of thine own woman’s breast.
“Weary thy mouth with smiling; canst thou bride
Thyself with thee and thine own kissing slake?
Thy virgin’s waking doth itself deride
With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake,
And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide
For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.
“‘Hermaphroditus,’” he read. “That’s what it’s about. It’s a kind of dark perversion. Like a fire that don’t need any fuel, that lives on its own heat. I mean, all modern verse is a kind of perversion. Like the day for healthy poetry is over and done with, that modern people were not born to write poetry any more. Other things, I grant. But not poetry. Kind of like men nowadays are not masculine and lusty enough to tamper with something that borders so close to the unnatural. A kind of sterile race: women too masculine to conceive, men too feminine to beget. . ”
He closed the book and removed his spectacles slowly. “You and me sitting here, right now, this is one of the most insidious things poetry has to combat. General education has made it too easy for everybody to have an opinion on it. On everything else, too. The only people who should be allowed an opinion on poetry should be poets. But as it is — But then, all artists have to suffer it, though: oblivion and scorn and indignation and, what is worse, the adulation of fools.”
“And,” added the Semitic man, “what is still worse: talk.”
TWELVE O’CLOCK
“You must get rather tired of bothering about it,” Fairchild suggested as they descended toward lunch. (There was an offshore breeze and the saloon was screened. And besides, it was near the galley.) “Why don’t you leave it in your stateroom? Major Ayers is pretty trustworthy, I guess.”
“It’ll be all right,” Pete replied. “I’ve got used to it. I’d miss it, see?”
“Yes,” the other agreed. “New one, eh?”
“I’ve had it a while.” Pete removed it and Fairchild remarked its wanton gay band and the heavy plaiting of the straw.
“I like a panama, myself,” he murmured. “A soft hat. This must have cost five or six dollars, didn’t it?”
“Yeh,” Pete agreed, “but I guess I can look out for it.”
“It’s a nice hat,” the Semitic man said. “Not everybody can wear a stiff straw hat. But it rather suits the shape of Pete’s face, don’t you think?”
“Yes, that’s so,” Fairchild agreed. “Pete has a kind of humorless reckless face that a stiff hat just suits. A man with a humorous face should never wear a stiff straw hat. But then, only a humorless man would dare buy one.”