Prose

On Being Alone

Perhaps there are ghosts at school, or wicked wolves in hiding on the ridge, or evil spirits that dwell in the depths of the furnace room and grope their sinister way up through the pipes and into our rooms. But we have never seen them. We have lived for two seasons untouched by the slightest hint of the supernatural; there are no haunted houses in the immediate vicinity, and no neglected grave yards — scarcely even a blighted tree, in this spring term, or a barren field to hold before us a symbol of terror and death. Why is it then, when there is nothing to fear, and we have surely outgrown the bogies of our younger days, that so many of us seem to dread being alone? We say to each other, “I hate Sundays; there are so many quiet hours,” or “It must be wonderful to have a roommate, someone to talk to in study hour.” All this is rather strange. Why does being alone, when we have a hundred companions most of the time, present such a great trial, or why should we wish to keep the conversation going so endlessly? The fear of a “quiet hour” alone is greater than the fear of all those innumerable quiet hours alone that are ahead of all of us.

There is a peculiar quality about being alone, an atmosphere that no sounds or persons can ever give. It is as if being with people were the Earth of the mind, the land with its hills and valleys, scent and music: but in being alone, the mind finds its Sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds. But it appears that we are frightened by the first breaking of its waves at our feet, and now we will never go on voyages of discovery, never feel the free winds that have blown over water, and never find the islands of the Imagination, where live who knows what curious beasts and strange peoples? Being alone can be fun; alone the mind can do what it wants to without even the velvet leash of sleep. But we can never understand this while we stand on the shore with our backs to the water and cry after our companions. Perhaps we shall never know the companion in ourselves who is with us all our lives, the nearness of our minds at all times to the rare person whose heart quickens when a bird climbs high and alone in the clear air.

1929

A Mouse and Mice

About a week ago there came a certain evening with a particularly long and quiet twilight — a dove-colored twilight, filled with shadow and the smoke of burning leaves. It was the kind of weather to make you forget a great many of the important things such as dates and the winds of last March and the snows of next February. You seemed at home, more or less, in the interior of a large and mist-grey pearl, and knew no more than that. Little things might seem of greatest importance if you lived inside a pearl, and so they were that evening of strange moment in the obscurities of half-light and quietness. The leaves hung asleep upon the trees dreaming themselves through death; the clouds lay low on the hill-tops, even on the roof-tops; color had fled beyond the sky forever with the smoke of the leaves’ scarlet burning. All the world said softly yet without speech,

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages.…

Where a treetop touched the sky I saw a bat flutter out and downwards in a darkly diabolic circle over my head, and a little network of icy chills spread down my back. I felt myself a foreigner in a strange land, whose people I had never seen and whose language was too delicate for my human ears. It was the expectant moment before something happens, and just then in the dead, brown leaves at my feet, there was a movement and a rustle. It was a little mouse, small and long-tailed as a fairy mouse, on his way home from what tiny errand with the cornstacks and fallen apples? He was dressed completely in modest grey and his ears were quite large and petal-shaped. I walked behind him through the leaves while he ran nervously on ahead, occasionally looking at me over his shoulder with shining little black eyes. He was so small and yet so artistically perfect, so absorbed in his minute autumn world and its traffic with him. I followed him until he disappeared under the side of a building, and then I walked off, thinking of mice and their unknown ways. I pictured them en famille — eating supper in one of their narrow dining rooms between our own, from a red check tablecloth; and father mouse in a tasseled nightcap pulling off his cat-skin boots with a faint sigh and calling it a Day.…

There is something about such creatures both amusing and strangely touching. In a certain mood, represented in its atmosphere by that clouded autumn evening, they can seem to be significant and even ominous. A cold, bony finger has been laid for a second at our lips — we look over our shoulders and think we may have laughed because we did not know. Perhaps the mouse’s eyes, holding two almost invisible candle flames, can see more than we can. Perhaps they see the bat overhead and the mystery he traces in the dusk, the dead leaves decaying to the earth under our feet, and more that we can not see on the clearest of summer mornings. We become for the moment apprehensive of ourself and mice and our evanescent journeys to and fro.

“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.”

Well, such little things may take the place of punctuation marks in the world. The bat may stand for no more than a dot over an i, or an apostrophe on the wing ’ And here is a whole family of mice,,,,,,,,,

1929

The Thumb

Stanley first took me to see Sabrina one afternoon for tea. She had one of those silk-hung apartments, with sunlight coming in at the windows through pale lime-colored curtains, and clear fragrant tea running out of a silver teapot all day long, more or less. By some chance, perhaps because it was an unnaturally hot day for May, we were the only people there. I could see at once that she was beautiful, and I could feel at once, too, that she had another gift besides beauty. A sort of magnetism, I suppose. Anyway, it was a gift that made people willing to sit and drink tea all of a May afternoon, just for the sake of being near her. I’d known people like that before — some of them not beautiful, either — who had the trick of making the atmosphere of a room faintly exciting — charged with a bit of lightning, waiting for a sudden electric storm. Sabrina always had it with her — that was the trouble — it was there even when you didn’t want it to be. Well—

She was quite a small woman, very little and light. “Small bones,” you would say; or “Light as a feather.” In the first moment I realized vaguely that her face was extraordinarily beautiful, and that she wore a dress colored like dim gold — gold under water, maybe. Then, because it’s a sort of game I play with new people, I began to look at her very slowly, bit by bit, saving her face till the last. It took me quite a while to manage the tea-drinking and to look slowly enough so as not to appear rude, but Stanley saved me from having to talk much, and I kept quiet. Her feet were small and slender and her legs, and the line of her thigh was thin, too. She was pleasing to watch as she talked to Stanley — full of little motions and quick, almost nervous, gestures. Her left hand lay along her knee, her fingers pressed against the soft gold cloth. The hand was palely gold-colored, too, with a narrow wrist and delicate fingers. A civilized hand, you would call it, interesting to watch or touch. After a while I began to study her face, and I found in it the same color and fineness I had seen in her hand — a rather sophisticated face, gay yet quiet. If you could think of a Madonna whose face was thinner about the cheek and chin, with a look of humor and something subtly emotional about it — well, that would be Sabrina. Her eyebrows were straight across and black, her eyes were grey, and so was her hair — really I suppose it was brown — dove-brown, if there is any such color.

I began to enjoy the afternoon immensely. It was a delightful room and I felt slightly exhilarated, as if I were intoxicated on tea. Stanley had promised me that Sabrina could do a lot for me if I became friendly with her, and I seemed to be succeeding pretty well. She knew just about everyone, and though fortunately unliterary herself she really had quite a little influence — friends among all sorts of artists and writers. I began to be dangerously elated and I talked and laughed and brought out all my best conversational tricks. I pictured many more such afternoons to myself, maybe just Sabrina and me alone. She was beautiful enough, certainly.

Just as I had reached this pitch Sabrina turned to face me moving her body and placed her right hand on the left arm of her chair. I was watching her face and for a minute I was just conscious of the pale shape of her hand extending below the gold cloth. Then she suddenly lifted her fingers with one of her quick movements, and I quite involuntarily looked down at her hand. I had already noticed her left one — this appeared just the same hand, small and fine. Why did I keep on looking? There was something queer about that hand — I couldn’t tell right away what it was. There was no mark, no deformity. Good God! — the woman had a man’s thumb! No, not a man’s, — a brute’s — a heavy, coarse thumb with a rough nail, square at the end, crooked and broken. The knuckle was large. It was a horrible thumb, a prize fighter’s thumb, the thumb of some beast, some obscene creature knowing only filth and brutality.…

Well, I looked away very quickly and attempted to think of something light, something joking to say. But I was horrified. In the midst of that charming, sunny room, that friendly atmosphere, I was frightened. Something mysterious and loathsome had crept out of the night and seized me as I sat there drinking tea. Lord! and there I’d been — all ready to fall in love with the woman. I might even now; I still looked at her face and admired, although I could feel the perspiration of fear on my forehead. I tried not to look again, but I couldn’t keep my eyes turned away from her hand, as it lay there innocently enough on the chair arm. Was it my imagination? I looked — and saw on the back of the thumb, where it lay in the sunlight, there was a growth of coarse, black hairs.…

Finally Stanley said that it was time for us to leave. I stood up and my knees felt as if I had been sick and in bed for a week. Sabrina was smiling and I knew I could not keep myself from smiling back, from responding to her beauty. For a second there seemed to me something corrupt about that beauty. What was that phrase? “Flowers of Evil”—yes. And yet when I looked into her eyes I found my sinister thoughts denied and made ridiculous. “Will she shake hands?” I thought. “She didn’t when we came, maybe she won’t now. I simply can’t.” But Sabrina smiled and held out to Stanley her left hand, as a French woman does. It must have been her custom because he took it naturally enough and I did as he had done, bowed over her left hand, while her right hung at her side. She asked us to come again and Stanley accepted for us while I stood with my eyes fixed on her face, or Stanley’s face, anywhere except down at her right side, frantically longing to be gone.

However, I went back again, like a fool, led on by that woman’s unimaginable beauty and personality — and the thumb, too, for all I know, though I certainly tried to forget it. I felt that I had been wrong if I thought there was anything unnatural about Sabrina. Surely she was no more than she seemed — a charming, intelligent woman who had the misfortune of one ugly thumb. We talked so well together; we were, or might have been, so much at our ease. “Damn that thumb,” I thought, “I’m going to see as much of her as I can and maybe I’ll forget it.”

But it wouldn’t work. Every time I saw her I felt more and more a peculiar shivering fascination that made me look down at her hand, to those lovely fragile fingers and that horrible misshapen thing that was one of them. Yet I couldn’t blame her. She was the most natural thing in the world — the trouble must be with myself. Some morbid streak in my imagination, I supposed, something that took the slightest suggestion of horror and magnified it until my whole mind was filled with awful thoughts and dark shadows. “Now this time see that you don’t get theatrical,” I would say. Then I would sit beside Sabrina, just she and I alone, and I would begin again that struggle against the insidious spirit that seemed to overcome me when I was with her. I thought of dreadful things — if she should be in an accident, if something should happen so that her thumb would have to be taken off. I might have fallen in love with her — I surely would have, had not all my emotions been so bewildered and fevered with horror. I had never touched her in any way except always, at leaving, that slight pressure of her left hand. My mind dwelt upon what it would be like to touch her — to take that hideous hand and hide it in my own. I realized that all this was bound to lead me into something wrong, but I couldn’t seem to escape it. I kept on going to see her, knowing every time that sooner or later I would yield to my curious desire and touch that thumb — and I hardly cared what might happen when I did.

She asked me to see her more and more often and at last I realized that whatever was the meaning of my tangled emotions about her, she was in love with me. I couldn’t talk to her so easily after that and there used to be long silent places in our conversations. She would sometimes look at me with a sad, almost frightened look, and then I would swear at myself and wonder why in Heaven’s name I didn’t leave her as gracefully as I could and never come back. But there I would sit and brood, as if bound fast in some black prison, my eyes half turned away from her right hand which lay in the folds of her dress.

One afternoon in September I went to see Sabrina for the last time. She was in the same room where I had first seen her — the room hung with silk and lime-colored curtains, with a pale, soft sunshine coming in at the windows. She had on the same golden dress, and I’d truly never seen anyone look so beautiful as she did. She sat there, quiet and somehow arranged, with her hands in her lap. I was making desperate efforts to keep hold of myself, but every second I could feel a dark, choking rush of something — rage — madness — I don’t know what, rushing up from those unholy wells I guessed were in my heart. I sat quite near her. I longed to ask her to forgive my silence, to explain the thing — I thought that then I might have sat beside her calmly and have forgotten the old fear. I had just about decided to, when she moved so that her right hand was in the light, right under my eyes. I felt myself staring, but I couldn’t stop. Her thumb, that heavy, horrible thumb — it was a monstrosity. I put out my hand slowly and laid my fingers across the back of her hand. It was cool and soft — and then I felt that rough, swollen knuckle, those stiff, coarse hairs against my palm. I looked at Sabrina quickly and I found that she was looking at me with a peculiar tender look in her eyes and what I could only describe as a simper across her mouth. I have never felt the disgust, the profound fear and rage of that moment. She thought — well — she thought I was going to tell her I loved her.

I suppose that anyone except a fool, that is except myself, would have escaped forever from the dread and disgust of that moment. I suppose that anyone else who had seen that look in Sabrina’s eyes and that emotion so unconcealed upon her face would have been — delighted. I don’t know. I can’t even find the right words for my own feelings or an apology for my actions. Perhaps it was because I suddenly felt tired, sick to death of the whole affair. I’ve argued it out over and over again and pictured the whole thing, but I can’t make the ending any different. “Ridiculous,” you say, “morbid.” Anyway, I got up and left her without a word and I never went back.

1930

Then Came the Poor

Giving a glance around the room, father visibly and carefully braced himself with his left hand on the table, trembled his right hand holding the telephone, and thrust his face forward courageously. He would have paled if he could, but that was out of the question and he just grew a shade more self-consciously red.

Mother was torn between a desire to whimper and an admiration for and desire to imitate father’s manly attitude.

“Keep quiet, Lil,” he said over his shoulder in a whisper, “it’s Jim.”

I could hear my Uncle Jim’s voice, roaring and excited, apparently saying the same thing over and over. My two brothers were each smoking a pipe and eyeing each other appraisingly. George, the eldest, carried it off better; he leaned against the mantle with the air of one who is about to say “Yes, sir, it’s a very serious proposition…” My two sisters were being nonchalant and earnest in turn, Myrtle all dressed up in embroidered Chinese pajamas, the pinkness of her ankles showing that she’d just had a bath; and Alison in evening clothes, with her fur coat still around her. It was almost one o’clock — this would be the last message we’d get tonight. There’d been a telegram about an hour ago; I held it in my hand and read it over and over.

REDS WIN DAY SULLIVAN AND KROWSKI SHOT THREE THOUSAND HEADED EAST VACATE OR OFFER NO RESISTANCE ELIOT MAY HOLD YET GENERAL MACLAUGHLIN.

I wondered how the Western Union happened to be still working. The telephone company had stopped running two days ago and Uncle Jim was talking over our private wire from his house down at the Neck, about twelve miles away. Among the throaty telephone sounds there was one with a hiss to it, which I recognized as—Nerissa, the name of Uncle Jim’s yacht.

“Yes, Jim, yes — we can make it. We’ll be there. You’ve saved our lives.… I say, you’ve saved our lives.” Father hung up dramatically. I shut my eyes, knowing the My God that was coming. It would be such a poor substitute for the expression father needed, a wooden doll in the garments of Lady Macbeth. “Now I bet he wishes he’d saved it,” I thought.

“My God,” said father. (Better than I expected.) “It’s all up. MacLaughlin got stabbed, Jim says; one of his own men and half of them gone Red. They’re turning every minute. We’ve all got to get out, Lil. Clear out and get up to Canada if we can. Jim’s got the Nerissa ready and we’ve got to get down there before it gets light. Let’s see, that gives us about four and a half hours.

“My God, (father put his arm around mother) Jim says the Slaters are all murdered, Lil. They set fire to their house. Thank God we have the Nerissa.”

My family all stood awkwardly, looking around as if for the best thing to carry off first, and with a shade of satisfaction because we had the Nerissa. I remembered that the crew had all deserted a couple of weeks ago, when the servants left, but then Uncle Jim was a fair navigator.

Mother shook off father’s arm. “New England Ancestry” was suddenly written all over her. She made straight for the dining-room and the spoons. Myrtle began to cry but father stopped that. “You girls go and get dressed warmly,” he said, “good substantial clothing. George and James, go down to the garage and drive the cars around front. I’ll drive the Packard, you take the little Buick with the silverware, and you take the beach wagon. A lot of things will go in that.”

The famous MacLaughlin couldn’t have arranged better.

Father began piling things in the front hall. I’d often wondered what rescuing things from a fire would be like and now I was finding out in a much cooler, probably more leisurely way. I looked around for something to save and remembered the old banjo clock in the dining-room. Mother was tying up the green felt rolls of silver in a set, mechanical way, and didn’t even look at me. I climbed up on a chair, lifted the clock off its hooks and carried it out to the hall to add it to father’s mounting pile. Just as I got there it slipped and fell with an awful crash onto the marble floor. The case cracked, the glass broke, there were several snaps and whirrs from the inside, and it stopped going.

“Please be careful, dear,” Mother’s voice said the familiar phrase unconsciously, while the rapid laying out of silver never stopped. I checked an hysterical laugh, gave up all thought of doing anything to aid the exodus and walked in to the small Louis Quinze parlor off the hall.

It was very dark in there, just a long rectangle of light from the doorway to the wall on the other side, one gilt chair standing in it, the corner of a gilt table, the final flounce of a brocaded shining curtain. I stepped across this alleyway of glitter into the dark and sat down on a small satin sofa over in the corner. I heard two cars drive up and stop; I heard mother shout to father.

“George! the wall-safe in my room! My jewel box and papa’s watch and Lizzie’s miniature. Oh, and the children’s pictures—”

“I’ve already got them, Lil. What about the chandelier? D’you suppose we could manage it? In the beach wagon…”

“What are you going to wear, Alison?” my sister shouted. “What about a ski-suit?”

My whole family might have been getting ready for some wonderful picnic or party. And yet they were scared. I wasn’t scared, as I might have been about a picnic or party, but as I usually did, I decided to stay at home. I’d be damned if I’d go with them and the cousins on the old Nerissa. I wouldn’t be brave and martyred and a gentleman till the last. Surely there was some place around the estate to hide out in; and anyway I wanted to see what they’d do to the place, the three thousand who were coming.

Well, I sat there for a long time and finally I had to go out because my brother George suddenly started walking around the house shouting my name. I went out into the hall grabbing a pair of little gilt statues, Adam and Eve, off a table as I went to serve as some sort of excuse for my disappearance. All the family was out there. Most of the pile of stuff had been stowed away in the cars except for some stray objects that were of an awkward size, or had been broken, or had turned out to be not very valuable after all. Mother’s favorite white alabaster lamp lay broken in three pieces; two chairs stood in attitudes almost social and conversational, there was an awful mess of tramped-on table-linen, and strangest of all a dish of small red roses, tipped over, with the water spilling out in a long thin stream towards the broken lamp, and the green leaves lying flat to the floor as if exhausted.

We all looked at each other like a group of thieves or house-breakers. Father said “Are you all set, Lil?” and mother answered “Yes, let’s get away, George. I’m getting nervous,” and she began to cry.

I stared around at my brothers and sisters. Myrtle had actually put on the ski-suit — a bright red one. “Aren’t you being a little ironic?” I asked her, and she glanced down at herself and frowned slightly, looking worried. Alison was draped in black, and wore a large black hat, that she rather fancied as making her look glamorous, I knew. George wore, yes actually, khaki shorts and heavy wool socks. “Good Lord,” I thought, “nothing will persuade me to go with this party of sentimentalists.”

“What about getting all the old port up?” asked father.

“Oh come on, father, the Nerissa isn’t the Ark. Let’s get going,” George growled at him.

I found myself saying, as if in a dream, “I think I’ll stay here.”

My family’s mouths fell open with one gesture, as automatic as so many steam-shovels. Then they all began to shout at me, and to tell each other that the fear and strain had gone to my head. I’d be shot, stabbed, crucified.… I should have been dragged along willy-nilly, another wealthy refugee, only just then, far off to the west came a tremendous explosion. The house shook. My family made for the door, George helping mother politely by the elbow. I noticed that father, who was wearing a golfing cap, picked up a derby from the table near the door and carried it off with him. It was still dark out, but the cars’ lights were off. Father and mother and Myrtle piled into the already loaded Packard; James and Alison got into the Buick, (a large globe of the heavens and the handle of a vacuum cleaner stuck out of the rumble seat) and poor George drove off by himself in the beach wagon looking very Boy-Scoutish. I suppose each thought I was in another car.

I wandered around the house, turning on all the lights and putting up all the window-shades in each of the thirty-nine rooms. “Pardon me if my preparations are rather hasty,” I addressed the approaching three thousand. In the drawing room, father had apparently tried to get the beautiful crystal chandelier off the ceiling. It lay all sprawled out on the floor like a monstrous frozen polyp and the whole surface of the floor glittered with iridescent particles. At the foot of the kitchen stairs I came upon grandpa’s watch and Aunt Lizzie’s miniature, both smashed. In the library a lot of books had been taken off their shelves and piled about on the floor. “A good chance to try out those ‘Books I’d take to a desert island’ lists” I thought. It was about four o’clock. I took a package of cigarettes and some matches out of a box in the library and went out, leaving the front door open.

Down in the meadows it gradually got to be daylight. I kept my back to the west and tried to concentrate on watching the sun come up. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but at least I was glad I’d stayed behind. All those things.… If they did get to Canada what on earth would they do with them? I felt helpless, but not much afraid. The house looked strange up there, all the lights in the top story shining out in the morning twilight. It looked not as if it were separate rooms, separately lighted, but just a sort of perforated shell, enclosing a star or a sun. It was off the highway — maybe the three thousand wouldn’t get to it. But then father was well known, a Big Man, and they would probably want to ransack it — and kill me if they caught me? The sun came up and it got a little warmer. Finally I fell sound asleep.

When I woke up it must have been ten o’clock. Faint cheerings and shoutings were coming from the house. I peered up cautiously and to my surprise there were actually three men standing on the roof of our house, shouting a song for all they were worth. One of their army songs, I suppose; anyway it sounded like the crazy ending of a comic opera. All I could see was the roof tops, but I could hear an uproar of shouts and yells and singing with an occasional crash or thud. No shots, however.

I made my way around and up the hill to the stables without being seen and slipped in. I hunted around and sure enough there were some old pairs of overalls left by the stable-boys; a lot of old clothes in fact. I threw away my coat and pants and put on a pair — I looked messy enough, anyway, after sleeping in the grass down there.

“Well, they’ve found father’s cellar, all right,” I thought, listening.

A wild, magnificent lawn-party was going on. There seemed to be about fifty people: men, women, and children, all rushing around calling to each other, and engaged in preparing a kind of grand breakfast. They’d put all our tables together in a big horse-shoe under the trees, and covered them with our table-linen (stamped here and there with black footprints). There was a great fire of coals, and four men were cooking over it, coffee and bacon and eggs. Apparently they mistrusted our electric range. Women were running in and out of the house with bread, fruit, glasses, boxes of cigars, everything they could find that might be of use to a banquet. Corks were popping out of bottles, peaceful little explosions right and left, and a few men were already lying around drunk. I went up to the men who were doing the cooking.

“Some place, ain’t it, buddy?” one of them said to me. “Been in the house yet?”

I said I hadn’t, but I thought I’d take a look, and strolled in the front door. In the hall two women were fighting over the remains of a roasted chicken, both pulling. The marble floor was greasy and muddy; the red roses were ground to a pulp by now. People were coming and going in excited groups, pointing and grabbing and exclaiming, some of them dressed in fantastic costumes put together from the wardrobes of my departed family. It was an hilarious affair. I felt like the host of a house party whose guests had gone mad, which was, nevertheless, a great success.

From father’s large bathroom came loud laughter, splashings and slappings. I looked in and discovered two naked men jumping in and out of the shower and bath, throwing powder and bathsalts at each other, spitting shining spouts of water out the window into the sunlight and onto their amused friends below.

In the drawing room there was an old lady sitting on the floor in a ring of dirty petticoats. She was carefully unhooking the cut glass pendants from the chandelier. One by one she held them up to the sunlight and admired the rainbows they made on the wall, then hung them on some part of her clothes or person. She was bedecked and a’dazzle from top to toe.

In mother’s French bed, canopied with lime colored satin, someone had put two filthy babies to sleep.…

I went out again to join the breakfast party, toasting each other madly and throwing bottles over trees and chimneys. “What’ll you have, kid?” they yelled at me. I saw a bottle of champagne. “Champagne,” I said, pointing.

“Aw, champagne? That stuff’s no good. Just like pop.… Have some real stuff, buddy. Have a man’s drink. Have some whiskey.”

After a while they began to make preparations for some sort of lot drawing. I couldn’t make out quite what it was all about. Everyone wrote his or her name on a slip of paper and dropped it in our large silver coffee urn. Then one of them, a leader, got up, closed his eyes elaborately and drew some of the slips.

“William Brinker!”

A fat, tow-headed man, about forty, got up and essayed a bow, grinning. Everyone cheered, clapped him on the back, offered him a drink. He made his wife and four tow-headed children stand up, too, all smiling and bowing in a row.

“Minna Schlauss!”

Minna was young but enormous. So stormy was her black, wiry hair and general determinedly uncouth appearance that I thought at once of Beethoven. She had two ancient men in charge, her father and his brother they must have been, and her mother was the old lady whom I’d found decorating herself with crystals from the chandelier.

“Jacob Kaffir!”

And then an amazing little man stood up. He was exactly the color of a well used penny and he wore a small moustache and, of all things, a fez. He received his applause shyly, but with delight, and made a timid, sweeping bow.

Somebody remarked, “But he ain’t got any children.” …

Somebody else said, “What’ll he do with all them rooms?”

It dawned on me what this mysterious drawing of lots meant. They were portioning out our house, and three families, probably more, were to live in it. (For half a second I imagined father and mother and my four brothers and sisters returning, with a sigh, from Canada and being met by William, Minna, and Jacob.…)

“Get somebody else, Jakie,” they were saying, “A couple more single guys like you. That’ll even it up all right.”

I caught Jacob’s eye and smiled as hard as I could, raising my forefinger like a man saying “One, next the wall,” in a restaurant.

“Him!” Jacob shouted. “He live with me. O. K. to you?”

“You bet,” I said. “Well it may be sort of fun for a while,” I thought.

Apparently Jacob had the same idea. “We’ll have fun, huh?” he said, waving an empty bottle at me, and he gave me a wink I could almost hear. “Seems like home already, don’t it.”

1933

From “Time’s Andromedas”

One afternoon last fall I was studying very hard, bending over my book with my back to the light of the high double windows. Concentration was so difficult that I had dug myself a sort of little black cave into the subject I was reading, and there I burrowed and scratched, like the Count of Monte Cristo, expecting Heaven knows what sudden revelation. My own thoughts, conflicting with those of the book, were making such a wordy racket that I heard and saw nothing — until the page before my eyes blushed pink. I was startled, then realized that there must be a sunset at my back, and waited a minute trying to guess the color of it from the color of the little reflection. As I waited I heard a multitude of small sounds, and knew simultaneously that I had been hearing them all along, — sounds high in the air, of a faintly rhythmic irregularity, yet resembling the retreat of innumerable small waves, lake-waves, rustling on sand.

Of course it was the birds going South. They were very high up, a fairly large sort of bird, I couldn’t tell what, but almost speck-like, paying no attention to even the highest trees or steeples. They spread across a wide swath of sky, each rather alone, and at first their wings seemed all to be beating perfectly together. But by watching one bird, then another, I saw that some flew a little slower than others, some were trying to get ahead and some flew at an individual rubato; each seemed a variation, and yet altogether my eyes were deceived into thinking them perfectly precise and regular. I watched closely the spaces between the birds. It was as if there were an invisible thread joining all the outside birds and within this fragile net-work they possessed the sky; it was down among them, of a paler color, moving with them. The interspaces moved in pulsation too, catching up and continuing the motion of the wings in wakes, carrying it on, as the rest in music does — not a blankness but a space as musical as all the sound.

The birds came in groups, each taking four or five minutes to fly over; then a pause of two or three minutes and the next group appeared. I must have watched them for almost an hour before I realized that the same relationships of birds and spaces I had noticed in the small groups were true of the whole migration at once. The next morning when I got up and went to the window they were still going over, and all that day and part of the next whenever I remembered to listen or look up they were still there.

It came to me that the flying birds were setting up, far over my head, a sort of time-pattern, or rather patterns, all closely related, all minutely varied, and yet all together forming the migration, which probably in the date of its flight and its actual flying time was as mathematically regular as the planets. There was the individual rate of each bird, its rate in relation to all the other birds, the speed of the various groups, and then that mysterious swath they made through the sky, leaving it somehow emptied and stilled, slowly assuming its usual coloring and far-away look. Yet all this motion with its effect of precision, of passing the time along, as the clock passes it along from minute to minute, was to result in the end in a thing so inevitable, so absolute, as to mean nothing connected with the passage of time at all — a static fact of the world, the birds here or there, always; a fact that may hurry the seasons along for us, but as far as bird migration goes, stands still and infinite.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Notes on Timing in His Poetry

It is perhaps fanciful to apply the expression timing to poetry — race horses, runners, are timed; there is such a thing as the timing of a crew of oarsmen, or a single tennis-stroke — it may be a term only suited to physical motions. But as poetry considered in a very simple way is motion too: the releasing, checking, timing, and repeating of the movement of the mind according to ordered systems, it seems fair enough to admit that in some way its discipline involves a method of timing, even comparable to that used for literal actions. For me at least, an idea of timing in poetry helps to explain many of those aspects of poetry which are so inadequately expressed by most critics: why poets differ so from each other; why using exactly the same meters and approximate vocabularies two poets produce such different effects; why some poetry seems at rest and other poetry in action. Particularly in referring to Father Hopkins, the most intricate of poets technically and most taxing emotionally, does some such simplified method of approach seem necessary.

The most general meaning of timing as applied to any particular physical activity is co-ordination: the correct manipulation of the time, the little duration each phase of the action must take in order that the whole may be perfect. And the time taken for each part of an action is decided both by the time of the whole, and of the parts before and after. (This sounds involved, but can be made quite clear, I think, by picturing for a minute a crew of men rowing a shell, and considering the enormous number of tiny individual motions going to each stroke, to each man, and the whole shell.) The whole series together sets up a rhythm, which in turn enables the series to occur over and over again — possibly with variations once it is established.

Just so in poetry: the syllables, the words, in their actual duration and their duration according to sense-value, set up among themselves a rhythm, which continues to flow over them. And if we find all these things harmonious, if they amalgamate in some strange manner, then the timing has been right. This does not mean that a monotonous, regularly beating meter means good timing — duration of sense and sound each play a part, I believe, nearly equal, and sense is the quality which permits mechanical irregularities while preserving the unique feeling of timeliness in the poem.

I suppose that the most characteristic feature of Hopkins’ poetry is that a great part of it is in “sprung rhythm.” Such a departure from the verse traditions of three hundred years must be indicative of a desire or necessity of expressing different sorts of rhythm, involving different sorts of timing from those we find in other poetry. I cannot go into a full explanation of “sprung rhythm” here — both because it is a complicated subject and because I don’t know enough about it, — but enough must be said so that the importance of its timing and its resultant peculiarities may be illustrated. (For simple explanations of sprung rhythm see Hopkins’ own Preface to his poems, and Chapter VI, The Craftsman, in his biography by G. F. Lahey, S.J.) The most obvious thing about it is that the stress is considered as always falling on the first syllable of the foot, and the foot may be monosyllabic or followed by one, two or three weak syllables — even a greater number for special effect. The rhythm is thus unified, but mixed, and flexible, something in the manner of the Greek “logaoedic.” In ordinary running rhythm we are accustomed to the variation of reversed feet, dactylls, etc., which if repeated gives us the effect of counterpointing — the original rhythm running underneath the superimposed rhythm. In “sprung rhythm” the rhythm felt corresponds to that of the counterpointing in running rhythm — minus the original underlying rhythm. It must be added, too, that all feet are assumed to be of equal length or strength, and the inequalities common to English are naturally made up by pause or stressing, according to the sense, or indication.

From this much I think it is evident that verse based entirely upon sprung rhythm, or sprung and running rhythms mixed, will have a very different quality about its co-ordination — maintaining the rhythmic beat customary to poetry, with an enormous increase in the variations possible for setting it up. Take, for example, the first lines of Hopkins’ well known sonnet “God’s Grandeur,” in ordinary running rhythm:

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?”

and compare it with the last lines, in sprung rhythm, of the amazing “Windhover”:

“No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.”

To show pictorially the versatility of feet in sprung rhythm, here is the scansion of the three lines:

u/—u u u/—/—u/—u/—u/

— u/—u/—u/—u/—/

—/—u u u/—/—u/—u/

The difference in movement between the two quotations is plain to see; and yet I think the reader feels exactly as much unity in the rhythm of the latter, the same wholeness (even intensified) that he gets from the broken iambics of the more conventional sonnet. The action pulls more ways at once; new muscles are touched and twinged, and the interrelations of stressed and slack syllables knit the poem more closely since they refer us not alone to a general meter but to other particular feet. For example, the foot — u u u which occurs in the first and last lines quoted. The lines have said themselves exactly with that poise I label timing, and there has been more action compacted into the lines by reason of the use of sprung rhythm.

One license allowed by sprung rhythm becomes, through Hopkins’ use of it, almost an elucidation of timing and a proof of its existence and excellence. That is the possibility of hangers or outriders: unaccented syllables added to a foot and not counting in the scansion — placed in such a way that the ear recognizes them as such and admits them, so to speak, under the surface of the real meter. An example of this is found in the second line of the above quoted “Windhover.”

“I caught this morning morning’s minion,

kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn-Falcon, in his riding…”

Here the timing and tuning of sense and syllable is so accurate that it is reminiscent of the caprice of a perfectly trained acrobat: falling through the air gracefully to snatch his partner’s ankles he can yet, within the fall, afford an extra turn and flourish, in safety, without spoiling the form of his flight.

Hopkins’ abundant use of alliteration, repetition, and inside rhymes are all characteristics which place firm seals upon his words, joining them, at the same time indicating the sound relationships in the same way that guide lines, or repeated forms might, in a drawing. Excess of these poetic tricks in ordinary meter produces often the rhythmical vulgarity of much of Swinburne; in Hopkins’ their frequent combination with an intricate sprung rhythm keeps them subtle, in various lights and shades of rhythmical importance. Listen to the ending of “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire.”

“In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood,

immortal diamond,”

The first aspect of timing I have been talking about might be defined paradoxically as the accuracy with which poetry keeps up with itself. There is perhaps yet another element helping to bring about this result of co-ordination, an element depending very much on the individual poet and working for the perfecting of the poem generally, not alone in respect to timing. Perhaps I should not attempt to bring it in here, only considering the sustained emotional height of most of Hopkins’ poetry, and the depth of the emotional source from which it arises, I believe it is important to try to express, however inadequately, the connection between them. A poem is begun with a certain volume of emotion, intellectualized or not according to the poet, and as it is written out of this emotion, subtracted from it, the volume is reduced — as water drawn off from the bottom of a measure reduces the level of the water at the top. Now, I think, comes a strange and yet natural filling up of the original volume — with the emotion aroused by the lines or stanzas just completed. The whole process is a continual flowing fullness kept moving by its own weight, the combination of original emotion with the created, crystallized emotion, — described by Mr. T. S. Eliot as “that intense and transitory relief which comes at the moment of completion and is the chief reward of creative work.” Because of this constant fullness each part serves as a check, a guide, and in a way a model, for each following part and the whole is weighed together. (This may explain why last lines in poetry are so often best lines; and why, often too, they seem so concocted and over-drawn for the rest of the poem — those were composed separately, without the natural weight of the creation of the rest of the poem behind them.)

One stanza from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” illustrates this perfectly, with its mounting grandeur and partly self-instigated growth of feeling:

“I admire thee, master of the tides,

Of the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall;

The recurb and the recovery of the gulf’s sides,

The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;

Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;

Ground of being, and granite of it: past all

Grasp God, throned behind

Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides.”

II

So far I have meant by timing some quality within the poem itself; now I wish to take the same expression and use it in a different way, for a different thing. A man stands in a shooting gallery with a gun at his shoulder aiming at a clay pigeon which moves across the backdrop at the end of the gallery. In order to hit it he must shoot not at it directly but a certain distance in front of it. Between his point of aim and the pigeon he must allow the necessary small fraction of space which the pigeon will cross in exactly the same amount of time as it will take the bullet to travel the length of the shooting gallery. If he does this accurately the clay pigeon falls, and his timing has been correct. In the same way the poet is set on bringing down onto the paper his poem, which occurs to him not as a sudden fixed apparition of a poem, but as a moving, changing idea or series of ideas. The poet must decide at what point in its movement he can best stop it, possibly at what point he can manage to stop it; i.e., it is another matter of timing. Perhaps, however, the image of the man in the shooting gallery is incorrect, since the mind of the poet does not stand still and aim at his shifting idea. The cleavage implied in the comparison is quite true, I think — anyone who has even tried to write a single poem because he felt he had one somewhere in his head will recognize its truth. The poem, unique and perfect, seems to be separate from the conscious mind, deliberately avoiding it, while the conscious mind takes difficult steps toward it. The process resembles somewhat the more familiar one of puzzling over a momentarily forgotten name or word which seems to be taking on an elusive brain-life of its own as we try to grasp it. Granted that the poet is capable of grasping his idea, the shooting image must be more complicated; the target is a moving target and the marksman is also moving. His own movement goes on; the target must be stopped at an unknown critical point, whenever his sense of timing dictates. I have heard that dropping shells from an aeroplane onto a speeding battleship below, in an uncertain sea, demands the most perfect and delicate sense of timing imaginable.

Hopkins, I believe, has chosen to stop his poems, set them to paper, at the point in their development where they are still incomplete, still close to the first kernel of truth or apprehension which gave rise to them. It is a common statement that he derives a great deal from the seventeenth century “Metaphysical” poets — his exceeding rapidity of idea, his intuition, and to a lesser degree, his conceits — and I think he has also a very close bond with the prose of the same period. The manner of timing so as to catch and preserve the movement of an idea, the point being to crystallize it early enough so that it still has movement — it is essentially the baroque manner of approach; and in an article on “The Baroque Style in Prose” by M. W. Croll* I have found some striking sentences which I think express the matter equally well as regards Hopkins. Speaking of the writers of baroque prose he says: “Their purpose was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking.… They knew that an idea separated from the act of experiencing it is not the same idea that we experienced. The ardor of its conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth; and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it has changed into some other idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any evidence whatever except a verbal one.… They … deliberately chose as the moment of expression that in which the idea first clearly objectifies itself in the mind, in which, therefore, each of its parts still preserves its own peculiar emphasis and an independent vigor of its own — in brief, the moment in which truth is still imagined.”

I have already mentioned a few of the characteristics of Hopkins’ use of sprung rhythm which give to his lines their special significance, and now I shall take up further characteristics from the point of view of what they contribute to the movement in his poetry, to the depiction of “a mind thinking.” The scansion is again very important; in sprung rhythm, since the stress always falls on the first syllable of a foot and any weak syllables at the beginning of a line are considered part of the last foot of the line before, it is natural that the scansion is continuous, not line by line. This is what Hopkins calls “rove over” lines, and he says “the scanning runs on without break from the beginning, say, of a stanza to the end and all the stanza is one long strain, though written in lines asunder.” In this manner the boundaries of the poem are set free, and the whole thing is loosened up; the motion is kept going without the more or less strong checks customary at the end of lines. Combined with the possibility of outriders that I have already spoken of the poem can be given a fluid, detailed surface, made hesitant, lightened, slurred, weighed or feathered as Hopkins chooses.

Along with the general device of the rove over line Hopkins is very fond of the odd and often irritating rhyme: “am and … diamond, England … mingle and,” etc. These usually “come right” on being read aloud, and contribute in spite of, or because of, their awkwardness, to the general effect of intense, unpremeditated unrevised emotion. He occasionally uses quasi-apocope for the same excited effects:

From No. 41:

“Huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shieked “No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.”

From number 44:

“England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife

To my creating thought, would neither hear

Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I wear-

y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.”

These may be serious faults making for the destruction of the more important rhythmic framework of the poem, but at the same time they do break down the margins of poetry, blur the edges with a kind of vibration and keep the atmosphere fresh and astir. The lines cannot sag for an instant; by these difficult devices his poetry comes up from the pages like sudden storms. A single short stanza can be as full of, aflame with, motion as one of Van Gogh’s cedar trees.

At times the obscurity of his thought, the bulk of his poetic idea seems too heavy to be lifted and dispersed into flying members by his words; the words and the sense quarrel with each other and the stanzas seem to push against the reader, like coiled springs against the hand. It seems impossible to get the material into motion in its chaotic state. But as Mr. Croll says further on “baroque art always displays itself best when it works on heavy masses and resistant materials; and out of the struggle between a fixed pattern and an energetic forward movement arrives at those strong and expressive disproportions in which it delights.” In all his form and detail, and above all in the moment he has selected for the transference of thought to paper, Hopkins is a baroque poet.

1934

The Last Animal

Roger sat looking out the parlor window of his father’s house, at a rather dismal view of a small lawn, two small trees, and a fire hydrant, all trapped together in a heavy spring rain. There was never much to look at out the windows of the house because it was set, not as most houses are on a street where people are going by, a side street at least, but rather at an extra remove from all traffic — within the boundaries of a college campus. His father was the professor of Zoology at Merton College, the only professor of the subject there, and Roger himself held the official position of Class Baby to the present senior class. He was rather old for a class baby, being eight which would have made him four when chosen for the office — and most of the Class Babies were chosen while still infants in arms. But Roger had not been a very handsome baby, in fact he was still a rather unappealing child, and had it not been for the fact that four years ago there had been a sharp decrease in the birth rate among the professors’ families, leaving him as the only available child, it is unlikely he would ever have been singled out at all.

Roger’s uncomfortable position at the college was equalled, perhaps surpassed, by that of his father, Professor Rappaport. The college trustees had been trying, as he well knew, for some years to do away with the chair of Zoology completely and it was only the requirements of a bothersome legacy (which paid Professor Rappaport his meagre salary) that kept him there at all. Zoology, everyone agreed, was a dead science, and Merton aimed to be a college for practical vocational training. Zoology was no longer living, it was only a matter of interest to a few doddering professors or reactionaries (like Professor Rappaport) who could not face the facts of modern life and must win their only happiness by poking around in a passive and dusty past. Argue as he might, that no one could lay claims to a thorough education without a knowledge of Zoology, that no one could properly understand English without a knowledge of Zoological derivations, that Zoology was a wealth of myth and fable — scarcely anyone would listen to him. The ground had been cut from under his feet bit by bit, both by the cruelty of his fellowmen and by the persistence of the objects of his study in vanishing — in dying off one after the other like so many Civil War veterans, and leaving him, so to speak, not an iota of a field. The lab. work had had to be done, for the last three years, on two crayfish only, and this year they had not survived the rashness of the five freshmen, taking Zoology as a “snap” course. He had had to let his lab. assistant go — there were no longer even any Infusoria. The laboratory was now being turned into a bowling alley. The brutal authorities were even threatening the Professor with confiscating the museum room; the Personnel Department would soon need more filing space — and really, they said, those six stuffed creatures of yours are shedding their hair frightfully. Only the buffalo has stood up at all well.

Roger Rappaport was rather old for his age, as children who are left to themselves are apt to be, and so he was thinking somewhat along these lines as he looked out through the pouring rain. He was waiting for his father to come home from the Monday afternoon Faculty Meeting, for although unpopular, Professor Rappaport was very proud of the collegiate tradition and made a great point of never omitting a detail of his professorial life, no matter what it cost him. Poor papa, thought Roger, he has such a bad time. Why it seems only yesterday that there was a fair number of animals around at the various institutions and papa’s work was alive and exciting. And now everyone thinks there’s nothing left of it except a lot of old pictures with names underneath.

He pushed his forehead bitterly against the window until the cold glass gave him a sharp pain between the eyes. Out on the lawn, just below the window, stood a life-size cast-iron deer, with its right hoof forward to tap the grass, and its nose raised proudly into the rain. In front of it was a little wooden block, like those on business men’s desks, which said DEER. Roger could remember when the deer had come to take his stand on their lawn. It had been three years ago: some people excavating around Salem had struck with a pick into the head of this creature, just a foot or so below the surface of the ground. When they had dug out one antler they became tremendously excited, thinking, of course, that they had come across an ossified animal in fine condition, and they sent a long and frantic telegram to Professor Rappaport. He had started off early the next morning, too excited to eat any breakfast, carrying several little black leather instrument bags. It had been a heart-breaking affair when the deer, by undeniable proof, had turned out to be not stone, but iron. The Professor, however, had made the best of a bad bargain, and decided to purchase the deer, anyway, for the honor of his college, and it followed him home on the next freight train.

It had been Professor Rappaport’s idea, too, to paint the deer in natural colors, and Roger had sat on the front steps most of each day for a week, while his father daubed away with brushes of assorted sizes, several reference books opened at the Colored Plate Section, lying around him on the lawn with stones on the pages to hold them down. The deer was done in two inch stripes of yellow and fawn, and the fawn stripes contained many white spots bordered with black rings. The eyes were dark with green spots, the antlers deep brown, and the scut was painted with phosphorescent paint, because according to the best authorities deer had followed each other by means of watching the tail of the deer ahead, which shone in the dark. Of course at the beginning of every college year, the deer was an object of considerable merriment on the part of the incoming Freshmen: they hung their caps on its antlers, and once, indeed, had dressed it in a complete suit of clothes and a pair of spectacles and labelled it: Old Rappy — but by November the novelty usually wore off. Anyway, the deer stood there firmly, as if to advertise the profession of the man who lived in the house behind him.

When Roger had been staring gloomily at the deer and the trees and the rain for some three-quarters of an hour he suddenly realized that in their place he was staring at a man walking by the path to the house. Not the Professor, but an old man, a country man dressed in a cap and dirty blue jeans and carrying a large-sized straw basket on his arm, with some sheets of newspaper stuck through the handle to keep the rain out. Roger was extremely excited, he had never seen the man before, and he had still the childish belief that things coming in baskets were probably presents for him. He rushed to the door and let the man in.

“Is this Mr. Rappaport’s house?” the old man asked Roger, taking off his cap, but still holding on to the basket. Roger shut the front door quickly so that he had the man inside, at least.

“Yes,” he said in his rather unpleasant way, “and I’m Mr. Rappaport’s little boy. What do you want? What’s in your basket?” He led the way into the parlor.

The old man said, “Well, perhaps you’ll do. Your father’s the man who knows about those animals, isn’t he?”

Roger said he was, and that he, Roger, would most certainly do. The old man sat down, holding the basket on his knees.

“Well, I’ll tell you my boy, I’ve got something here for your father. I’ve found, — by golly, I’ve found a animal.”

Roger gave an incredulous gasp. Once or twice when he was younger he had tried this same trick on his father, with poor effect. But the old man was pulling the newspapers away from the basket. “There you are,” he muttered and reached in with both hands and dragged out what certainly did look like some sort of animal. Roger almost fainted away. The old man set the animal down on the floor and Roger made as if to snatch it, but he was pushed back onto his chair.

“Leave it alone. It don’t run much. Now look at that. Ain’t that the damndest thing you ever did see? It’s a real honest-to-goodness animal, living and breathing.”

The animal just sat there on the carpet, breathing, certainly, and rather fast at that. It was perhaps two feet long, rather stumpy and rounded, and all covered with a kind of straw-grey fur, very thick and fine. It had a pointed nose and whiskers and close round ears, and extremely large dark eyes that were full of tears. In fact, anyone who knew anything about animals might have felt it was rather pretty — until he looked closely at the tail, which was short and scaly and had a few long hairs on it. Roger didn’t bother to think whether he really took to the animal: it became an object of divinity to him immediately, and he knelt beside it on the floor. He patted its round back gingerly and the animal shed one tear, which was at once replaced by another.

“Where did you find it? What kind do you suppose it is? Will it die?” Dying was the chief characteristic of all the animals Roger had known.

“Well, I was just starting to do my spring plowing and I ran the plow into a sort of little hole and there sat this thing, snug as you please, looking out at me. Must have been there all winter long. I haven’t heard tell of a animal for a good many years now, so I thought I’d just bring it along to your pa to see what he made of it. Well now, if you’ll just sort of keep your eye on it till your pa comes home, why I’ll be getting along.”

The old man got up and took his basket and left the room, but Roger, absorbed in the animal, didn’t pay the slightest attention. He patted it and stroked it and spoke in its round ears and the animal lay perfectly quiet and occasionally shed tears on the carpet. It was rather sad to see Roger’s gentleness and discretion with the creature. Born at an earlier day he would probably have made one of those people who cannot mingle comfortably with their own sort, but in the society of animals became at once charming and lovable. However, as things were, Roger, except for this short while, was destined to go through life never appearing at his best and always rather disliked.

Finally the animal’s tears ceased and it even showed faint signs of pleasure in Roger’s company. It arched its short neck to his hand, and switched its tail around on the floor. Roger vaguely remembered that to be the sign of gratitude on the part of some animal, but he could not think which one. He peered into the creature’s eyes. Should he feed it? And what? Could it understand what he was saying? It seemed rather lifeless on the whole, but papa would be extremely pleased anyway. He waited patiently stroking the creature rhythmically, which was the manner, he had decided, it liked best.

Professor Rappaport had never had even a modest success in his life, and now of course, he had a triumph. He sent the old farmer who had brought the animal twenty-five dollars. In the backyard of the Professor’s house were two little houses with wire pens attached to them where several years ago he had kept one or two other animals, and this one was promptly assigned the larger house. All the professors came to see it first, by invitation, then the student body was allowed to troop through the backyard and stare. Professor Rappaport, though not exactly popular, did come to be a campus character of some stature. He even gave a tea, the most important feature of which was a close view of the animal for all the guests, and a brief lecture on it by the Professor.

1934

Dimensions for a Novel

Perhaps to give the above title to a paper is as ridiculous as it would be to make measurements for a suit of clothes and then grow the body to fit them. Bright ideas about how to do a thing are to be mistrusted, and the only bright idea which ever proves its worth is that of the thing itself. The discovery, or invention, whichever it may be, of a new method of doing something old is often made by defining the opposite of an old method, or the opposite of the sum of several old methods and calling it new. And the objective of this research or discovery is rather the new method, the new tool, than the new thing. In the come and go of art movements, movements in music, revolutions in literature, and “experiments” in everything, we often see this illustrated. The modern French composers who devised the ingenious and seemingly pregnant method of using two or three or more keys against each other, where one alone had been used before, are often very disappointing because despite the possibilities suggested by poly-modality and poly-tonality the themes in themselves are meagre and uninteresting.

It is a very common theory, and, I think, a true one that the substance of a piece of writing defines its form. By this I mean more than classification — essay, story, poem, etc. — the actual shape the writing takes within its particular genre. For example, say, The Return of the Native takes place within the limitations of a year and a day and follows a definite scheme of chorus, action, chorus, action, not because Hardy thought that was an interesting new way of writing a book (although he undoubtedly did), but something in the story itself suggested that form, made it the only possible one for the book. I remember reading quite a while ago an essay by Julian Huxley on “The Size of Living Things.” I have forgotten the scientific reasons or speculations underlying it, but I can remember how strangely it struck me for the first time that although the size of living creatures varies from the germ to the elephant and each species shows variations in itself — yet there is really no danger that I shall ever get much beyond six feet, or stop growing at the size of seven. Even the lobster cannot shrink to crayfish size or ever exceed the capacity of the ordinary lobster pot. Whatever this mysterious regulating power may be, there is another power somehow corresponding to it, and as mysterious in its way, which I believe regulates, or should regulate, the forms of writing. Before a genuine change in form takes place, maybe quite a while before, the actual substance, the protoplasmic make-up of the writing must be changed. A novel can be forced into all sorts of forms (built up from manipulating opposites of preceding forms) just as I could, or the lobster, and yet they would improve it little more than I should be improved by being trained in an S, unless this first inner change had made the forms imperative.

I am saying all this because it will appear that I am attempting to be one of the inventors or discoverers, with a bright idea for doing something but no ideas as to the thing itself. It is presumptuous, but I must ask you to believe that at the back of my mind are the changing ideas which make me want to write on the dimensions for a novel as their result, rather than as an exercise in inventiveness.

I

Mr. T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent” speaks in this way of the individual artist’s duty to the past:

The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

Mr. Eliot is of course speaking of the placing of works of art in their place in the line of tradition, but by changing the subject of the paragraph I find it puts into words, exactly, a certain aspect of the novel. Novels as we know them are still fairly linear; they go along, in some sort of army style; I can think of none to which the march figure could not be applied. We may have halts and retreats and flights in disorder — but that we are moving from one point (usually in time) to another is always certain. The author guides us along this line of march, marshals and directs.

This is Sunday. If I try to think of Friday I cannot recreate Friday pure and simple, exactly as it was. It has been changed for me by the intervening Saturday. A certain piece of work that on Friday I planned to have finished on Saturday I did not finish, so that now looking back from Sunday I discover a certain ironic tinge about Friday evening. Someone came to see me Friday afternoon whom I was delighted to see; but since that time many things have come back to mind and it is impossible to look at the visitor with the eyes of Friday. Saturday will always intervene, and Friday and Saturday will come between me and Thursday. A constant process of adjustment is going on about the past — every ingredient dropped into it from the present must affect the whole.

Now what Mr. Eliot says about the sequence of works of art seems to me to be equally true of the sequence of events or even of pages or paragraphs in a novel. I have mentioned what I call the “march” of the novel, implying movement and a linear sequence to the writing; but I know of no novel which deliberately makes use of this constant readjustment among the members of any sequence. (Perhaps characters occasionally think back over their relationships with one another and reinterpret actions or speeches, but I am speaking here of reinterpretation as an integral part of the whole book, not the proper working out of the story.) It seems almost too simple to say that in the existing novel the ending throws back no light on the beginning, but (excepting of course the rough example of the detective story!) I think it is true. Present events run both forwards and backwards, they cannot be contained in one day or one chapter. All the past forms, to use a musical expression, a frame of reference for the future, and the two combine to define and expand each other. “… for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values … toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.”

In preparatory school we used to draw diagrams of the “development” of novels on the blackboard. We took for granted that the affairs of a book should grow out of one another; in fact all events which could be explained only by accident or coincidence were rather apologized for, as if they showed some fault in the author. Our diagrams usually rose and fell like so many waves: one alone, a bent line, or possibly a double wave, or, at their subtlest, two waves pursuing each other. This is simplification with a vengeance, of course, but nevertheless the fact that it could be done and would express for us a certain amount of truth about the novel explains somewhat what I have just been saying. I know of no novel which has ever, say, in giving a life history, managed to blur for the reader the childhood of the hero as it would be when he reaches fifty. Joyce’s “moocow” is blurred, but blurred at the age at which he beheld it; when the reader reaches the end of the book he is still in possession of, as of a hard fact, Stephen’s earliest days.

Some attempt has been made to get around this problem by the kind of novel (Proust’s, for example) that picks one moment of observation and shows the whole past in the terminology of that particular moment when the writing is being done. This method achieves, perhaps, the “conformity between the old and the new,” at least one instance of it, but since the conformity itself must be ever-changing, the truth of it, the thing I should like to get at, is the ever-changing expression for it. In conversation we notice how, often, the other person will repeat some word or phrase of ours, perhaps with quite a different meaning, and we in turn will pick up some adjective or adverb of theirs, or even some pun on their words — all unconsciously. This trick of echoes and re-echoes, references and cross-references produces again a kind of “conformity between the old and the new,” and it illustrates fairly well both the situation possible to reveal in the novel and a method of approaching it. The thoughts and symbols which Mrs. Woolf produces over and over again in The Waves have an amazing sameness about them. A symbol might remain the same for a lifetime, but surely its implications shift from one thing to another, come and go, always within relation to that particular tone of the present which called it forth. We live in great whispering galleries, constantly vibrating and humming, or we walk through salons lined with mirrors where the reflections between the narrow walls are limitless, and each present moment reaches immediately and directly the past moments, changing them both. If I were to draw any more diagrams of the development of novels, the lines, although again greatly oversimplified, I am afraid would look something like a bramble bush.

II

To requote again: “The existing monuments [read moments] form an ideal order among themselves…” and, “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives…”

Almost, it seems to me, one is born with a perfect sense of generalities. At five years one looks around the dinner table at the cumulative family with as great a sense of recognition and understanding as ever comes later on. There is always an absolute pitch, a perfection to the understanding which may shift, branch out suddenly, or retreat, and yet can never be “improved on.” The existing order is complete; every other is absorbed into it. When you see someone for the first time, in the blank moment just before or during a hand-shake, this knowledge of them slips into the mind and no matter what you may learn of them later this is always the first fact about them: a knowledge of recognition which when compared to the things you may learn later is much the more amazing. The connection between this and my idea of the interplay of influence between present and past may seem at first a little obscure, but in reality the latter depends directly upon it. I can think of the existing moments which make up their “ideal order” as existing first of all as these moments of recognition. From a vacant pinpoint of certainty start out these geometrically accurate lines, star-beams, pricking out the past, or present, or casting ahead into the future.

Cross-references, echoes, cycles, take on in their lowest forms the name of “superstitions,” and an author who wrote a novel filled with such might be called either a primitive or, worse still, a mystic. But I have always felt a certain amount of respect for superstitions and coincidences; the fact that a friend’s birthday falls on the same day as my own impresses me; always I am startled when something I have dreamed comes true, or someone I have been thinking of arrives on the scene. I have always looked askance at the theory of irreversibility. The point is: the moments I have spoken of occur so sharply, so minutely that one cannot say whether the recognition comes from the outside or the inside, whether the event or the thought strikes, and spreads its net over past and sometimes future events or thoughts. Over all the novels I can think of the author has waved a little wand of attention, he holds it in one position, whereas within the shiftings produced by the present over the past is this other shifting, rhythmical perhaps, of the moments themselves.

To do justice to one’s sense of characters, events, thoughts, I think that not only should they be presented in such a way as to show perpetually changing integration of what has been written with what is being written, but also the recognition itself of what is being written must be kept fluid. These recognitions are the eyes of the novel, not placed on the face-side looking ahead, but rather as in certain insects, capable of seeing any side, whichever seems real at the moment.

III

A paper I wrote recently ended with these sentences:

Is it possible that there may be a sort of experience-time, or the time pattern in which realities reach us, quite different from the hour after hour, day after day kind? All books still seem bound to this much order, but I have a suspicion that it will go next and writers will discover new beauty in breaking up this most ancient of patterns and rearranging it. If you’ve seen boys dive after pennies you know how the coins sink shimmering to the bottom at unequal rates, and the diving boys sometimes pick them up halfway down, or even get there before the coins do. Why should the days behind me retreat systematically — Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday — and not any other way? why not Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, if they seem that way to me? And why should even Gertrude Stein say, “Now then to begin at the beginning…”?

We have all had the experience of apparently escaping the emotional results of an event, of feeling no joy or sorrow where joy or sorrow was to be expected, and then suddenly having the proper emotion appear several hours or even days later. The experience could not really have been counted chronologically as having taken place, surely, until this emotion belonging to it had been felt. The crises of our lives do not come, I think, accurately dated; they crop up unexpected and out of turn, and somehow or other arrange themselves according to a calendar we cannot control. If, for example, I have a “feeling” that something is going to happen, and it does, then the feeling proper to that experience has come too early — its proper place was afterwards. If I suffer a terrible loss and do not realize it till several years later among different surroundings, then the important fact is not the original loss so much as the circumstance of the new surroundings which succeeded in letting the loss through to my consciousness. It may seem that when a novelist talks about such things he is giving them the credit they deserve, but it seems to me that the fact of experience-time can be made of use possibly in its own order, in order to explain the endless hows and whys of incident and character more precisely than before. Again, I do not believe this in any way contradicts my belief in the expression of the constant re-adjustment of the actions within a novel — rather, it only helps to bear it out. Events arriving out of accepted order are nevertheless arriving in their own order, and the process will be just as true, no matter whether 2:4:: 4:8, or 4:2:: 8:4.

This is very plainly related to my original conviction that each successive part of a novel should somehow illuminate the preceding parts for us, that the whole should grow together. A belated emotion points back, of course, to whatever caused it, which was experienced in two different ways, each way exerting its own influence, the two seeking to eradicate or supplement each other.

IV

I have been speaking more or less of a new form and some reasons for its existence; now I should like to go on and speak of a particular reason why some modern novels seem unsatisfactory to me. One remove behind the truism that the substance of a piece of writing defines its form, comes a second truism: the author’s frame of mind defines the substance. This is a very murky stretch of woods, impossible to get under cultivation in a paper of this length, but there is one small path following naturally from what I have been saying.

A frame of mind is shown in what I think of as “keeping up the front” of a novel — by which I mean not letting the reader see the under side of it. Gertrude Stein keeps up a magnificent front, as terrifying as a crusade of vacant-faced children. Hemingway attempts to do it by putting up a bluff. But some writers, such as Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, James Joyce in certain sections of Ulysses, and often Virginia Woolf, approach one in a series of outriders and sallies with constant returns to headquarters. For example, the chapter in The Magic Mountain called an “Excursus on the Sense of Time” is just such a retreat to headquarters. When the author says, “We have introduced these remarks here only because our young Hans Castorp had something like them in mind when, a few days later…” etc., it is as if he were confessing the problem to be a little too difficult. His ideas on time cannot be injected into the actual story — the two must be presented side by side and the reader must take one as a chaser, so to speak, for the other. In this book, as in The Waves (although it is doing Thomas Mann a great injustice to couple them), it seems often as if we were confronted with sections of a story combined with sections of an essay upon it; the reader must do the work, fuse one with the other. He is let in on the problem either in order that he may realize its difficulties, or as the only way of solving it. The question is still left open. What does Mrs. Woolf’s talking about flux do if her characters remain as rocks? In some parts of Ulysses it seems as if Stephen-Joyce were rather experimenting in thought than expressing the thought through the medium of novel-experiment, although Joyce has probably gone further with this latter work than any other modern author. (Hemingway is so determined to avoid this particular pitfall that he goes to the other extreme. In limiting himself to what he can do in the story and in getting the proper distance between himself and the finished writing he rids himself of problem after problem. He lops them off, refusing to talk about them or to attempt to incorporate them into the substance of his work — until the work reminds us of a hero coming back complacently from the wars in a basket.)

It would seem to me that if a novel is to stand alone all philosophies, theories, etc., pertaining to the author should somehow work themselves out in the actions and the designs within the story. I do not like the habit of asking, “Now where does Mr. So&so tell us what he is trying to do?”—if Mr. So&so has said anything about his intentions after the preface, I think he has been too frank.

V

In a recent little book called Acting, by Richard Bolislavsky, rhythm is defined as “the orderly, measurable changes of all the different elements comprised in a work of art — provided that all those changes progressively stimulate the attention of the spectator and lead invariably to the final aim of the artist.” This definition, plain enough when applied, say, to the music of Mozart may seem rather obscure when applied to the loose form of the novel. But just possibly everything I have been saying could be set down under the heading of rhythm. The “ideal order,” the relation of present to past in the novel, naturally arises from “the orderly, measurable changes of all the different elements comprised.” And my belief in the peculiar cross-hatchings of events and people also amounts to a feeling for rhythm. A superstition or coincidence, even, is “rhythmical” in that it achieves a motion between two things and a balancing of them. And what is “experience-time” but a more careful, exact method of looking at the materials to be used, and perhaps a means of marshalling them more rhythmically.

Possibly now I have staked claims, so to speak, on a novel-site, and laid out certain measurements which seem to me too important to be overlooked. A general idea of the novel constructed according to these measurements would appear to be something like this: First, a very few primary ideas or facts would suffice, and they could be told immediately. The interest would not lie in watching a “march” through a segment of time, but rather the complete absorption of each item, and the constant re-organization, the constantly maintained order of the whole mass. The process perhaps resembles more than anything the way in which a drop of mercury, a drop to begin with, joins smaller ones to it and grows larger, yet keeps its original form and quality. Coupled with this, would be the maintaining of the “front” of the novel, a stricter feeling that it is a detached form of art, not a conveyor of ideas except in its own structure. By this method, helped possibly by cross-references, re-iterations, and a device built on the idea of experience-time, perhaps the novel could show at work that “perfection of generalities” in its highest sense, a clearer sense of things and people.

1934