We had decided to spend the evening at the beach. I was afraid it would be too cool for her in that light dress but she said she never felt the cold. We were so frightfully happy that the words just babbled out of our mouths. We had crowded together in the motorman's compartment, our faces almost touching and glowing with the fiery rays of the setting sun. How different this ride over the roof-tops from the lonely anxious one that Sunday morning when I set out for her home! Was it possible that in such a short span of time the world could take on such a different hue?
That fiery sun going down in the West—what a symbol of joy and warmth! It fired our hearts, illumined our thoughts, magnetized our souls. Its warmth would last far into the night, would flow back from below the curved horizon in defiance of the night. In this fiery blaze I handed her the manuscript to read. I couldn't have chosen a more favorable moment or a more favorable critic. It had been conceived in darkness and it was being baptized in light. As I watched her expression I had such a strong feeling of exaltation that I felt as if I had handed her a message from the Creator himself. I didn't need to know her opinion, I could read it on her face. For years I cherished this souvenir, reviving it in those dark moments when I had broken with every one, walking back and forth in a lonely attic in a foreign city, reading the freshly written pages and struggling to visualize on the faces of all my coming readers this expression of unreserved love and admiration. When people ask me if I have a definite audience in mind when I sit down to write I tell them no, I have no one in mind but, the truth is that I have before me the image of a great crowd, an anonymous crowd, in which perhaps I recognize here and there a friendly face: in that crowd I see accumulating the slow, burning warmth which was once a single image: I see it spread, take fire, rise into a great conflagration. (The only time a writer receives his due reward is when some one comes to him burning with this flame which he fanned in a moment of solitude. Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.)
When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat—at least that is my experience. Then they either fail you utterly or they surpass themselves. Sorrow is the great link—sorrow and misfortune. But when you are testing your powers, when you are trying to do something new, the best friend is apt to prove a traitor. The very way he wishes you luck, when you broach your chimerical ideas, is enough to dishearten you. He believes in you only in so far as he knows you; the possibility that you are greater than you seem is disturbing, for friendship is founded on mutuality. It is almost a law that when a man embarks on a great adventure he must cut all ties. He must take himself off to the wilderness, and when he has wrestled it out with himself, he must return and choose a disciple. It doesn't matter how poor in quality the disciple may be: it matters only that he believe implicitly. For a germ to sprout, some other person, some one individual out of the crowd, has to show faith. Artists, like great religious leaders, show amazing perspicacity in this respect. They never pick the likely one for their purpose, but always some obscure, frequently ridiculous person.
What aborted me in my beginnings, what almost proved to be a tragedy, was that I could find no one who believed in me implicitly, either as a person or as a writer. There was Mara, it is true, but Mara was not a friend, hardly even another person, so closely did we unite. I needed some one outside the vicious circle of false admirers and envious denigrators. I needed a man from the blue.
Ulric did his best to understand what had come over me, but he hadn't it in him then to perceive what I was destined to become. How can I forget the way he received the news about Mara? It was the day after we had gone to the beach. I had gone to the office as usual in the morning, but by noon I was so feverishly inspired that I took a trolley and rode out into the country. Ideas were pouring into my head. As fast as I jotted them down others came crowding in. At last I reached that point where you abandon all hope of remembering your brilliant ideas and you simply surrender to the luxury of writing a book in your head. You know that you'll never be able to recapture these ideas, not a single line of all the tumultuous and marvellously dove-tailed sentences which sift through your mind like sawdust spilling through a hole. On such days you have for company the best companion you will ever have—the modest, defeated, plodding workaday self which has a name and which can be identified in public registers in case of accident or death. But the real self, the one who has taken over the reins, is almost a stranger. He is the one who is filled with ideas; he is the one who is writing in the air; he is the one who, if you become too fascinated with his exploits, will finally expropriate the old, worn-out self, taking over your name, your address, your wife, your past, your future. Naturally, when you walk in on an old friend in this euphoric state he doesn't wish to concede immediately that you have another life, a life apart in which he has no share. He says quite naively—«Feeling rather high to-day, eh?» And you nod your head almost shamefacedly.
«Look, Ulric,» I said, bursting in on him in the midst of a Campbell's Soup design, «I've got to tell you something, I'm bursting with it.»
«Sure, fire away,» he said, dipping his water color brush in the big pot on the stool beside him. «You don't mind if I go on with this bloody thing, do you? I've got to finish it by tonight.»
I pretended I didn't mind but I was disconcerted. I pitched my voice lower in order not to disturb him too much. «You remember the girl I was telling you about—the girl I met at the dance hall? Well I met her again. We went to the beach together last night...»
«How was it... good going?»
I could see from the way he slid his tongue over his lips that he was priming himself for a juicy yarn.
«Listen, Ulric, do you know what it is to be in love?»
He didn't even deign to look up in answer to this. As he deftly mixed his colors in the tin tray he mumbled something about being possessed with normal instincts.
I went on unabashed. «Do you think you might meet a woman some day who would change your whole life?»
«I've met one or two who've tried—not with entire success, as you can see,» he responded.
«Shit! Drop that stuff a moment, will you? I want to tell you something... I want to tell you that I'm in love, madly in love. I know it sounds silly, but this is different—I've never been like this before. You wonder if she's a good piece of tail. Yes, magnificent. But I don't give a shit about that...»
«Oh, you don't? Well, that's something new.»
«Do you know what I did to-day?»
«You went to the Houston Street Burlesk maybe.»
«I went to the country. I was walking around like a madman....»