Another Aiken Paper

How, in the Sound of an After Dinner Song, the Novelist Found the Significance of His Art

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

FOR the difficult purpose of expressing, exactly, the spirit of an art -no occasion could have been more perfectly designed. Everything was miraculously as it should be: the background, at once rare and inevitable, the individuals concerned, the art itself. There was, even, the necessary observer, the consciousness present to give a more or less assembled meaning to what might otherwise have been lost. For all this I was specially glad, since it contained the essence, the right reply, to a question apt to assume a tone arrogant if not actually insulting. The question—to dispose of that at once—often put to me, was a challenge to define the value of a creative art, the art of the novelist, admittedly not moral in its direction. What good are your pages, the demand ran, if they are not, in their first intention, improving?

Their first intention, I was in the habit of insisting, was to give pleasure. However, there was something obviously incomplete in the undoubted correctness of that assertion. It ignored the measures of truth, of courage, of final importance, inevitable to my lofty conviction. I classed not myself but—the substance under discussion—my endeavour with merrygo-rounds and Bacardi rum. Yes, all that I had tried to say had been ineffectual, only partly grasped, until I heard a very sun-browned man singing what could not be described as grave songs in an Aiken drawing-room.

To be frank, I had expected little; I always did in such circumstances. I had heard that a voice had come up from Palm Beach; but this, confused with the echoes of an indiscriminate and mad gaiety, hadn't been impressive. The man himself should have reassured me, for his bronze, while it meant no more than the impotence of a winter beach, lay over a face ruggedly and wholly masculine. Or if I lacked the discrimination to read him correctly there, his heavy hands should have better instructed me. But there was still another phase of him, loudly and complacently heralded, which assisted my preliminary mistake: while it was admitted that he could sing, the strength of his auction bridge was positively declaimed. That, really, was the base of the interest, the excitement, the admiration, with which he was regarded. And, in this connection, one of my defects was an almost total lack of absorption in games; as a relaxation, a relief, for certain types of minds, they were comprehensible to me; aside from that they resembled entertainments formally arranged for people who were poor not so much in spirit as in imagination. Games, it seemed to me, advanced as conversation, wit, personality, retreated; at best, carried to a high degree of skill, they were a misapplication of ability. To play bridge beautifully meant long hours at the little unsteady tables; for older men, for a great many women —yes. But here was a man at the top of his power, long and hard and dangerous, who—it was said—could sing, waited for by an entire colony largely because he could perform some minor mental agilities with trays of hearts and knaves.

What, on the whole, I looked forward to, was a pleasant barytone delivering, neither better nor . worse than common, the notes and sentiments of the prevailing musical comedies. But it was some consolation to reflect that even this would be preferable to what I'd be required to survive in slightly different surroundings: there was comparatively little danger of a syrup of Shubert; and I should not have to listen again to the inaccurate lament that many brave hearts were asleep in the deep. There, at least, I was safe; the house at which I was to have dinner was not like that, the people were not like that, the man himself—who was so dependable through the perils of a cross-ruff—was different. It was all possible enough.

WHEN, after the silver trays of cocktails— in the past I should have described them as pale yellow tulips on crystal stems—dinner began, I realized that I was very fortunate to have been asked. It was not, even for that special part of Aiken, an ordinary ceremony; I had often seen dishes equally well conceived and served; but the dinner as a whole, everything considered together with everything else, was a rare accomplishment. There was literally no one place where improvement was conceivable: the quail, round and black, a fowl crisply brown and tender white, the asparagus in aspic, the wine and creme de menthe floated with brandy, blended in a lyrical succession of flavours, flavours delicate and illusive or arresting, as happy as any string of grace notes.

A measure of conversation was all that, in return for so much, was expected of me; and I supplied it with willingness, my thoughts constantly straying back to my shifted plates. I wanted to eat and to look, but in place of that I talked . . . about, of course, books, my own and others. A short story I had written called Read Them and Weep came up for discussion, a story as serious as any of my always serious efforts, and it was lightly dismissed, on my right, as an amusing trifle. This momentarily silenced me, for I recalled the fact that the story's subject was the sacrifice of a man's painfully acquired peace for an abstraction of veiled and doubtful truth. If this were a trifle, then all I had done was sawdust. However, refreshed from a goblet, I returned to the discharge of my obvious small duty, and explained how I'had become acquainted with the process of permanently waving women's hair.

At odd times my gaze and interest strayed to a man sitting in comparative silence at the end of the table—no singer that, a face with a heavy aggressive nose, a closed mouth and hair colourful with a tone of red. How much more engaging, I thought, men were than women; by this, I discovered, I meant that the former were more individual; the women about the table could be predicted in terms of each other, at bottom they were very much alike, but the men were widely different. When, after the conventional feminine exodus, they were gathered more closely over the coffee and liqueurs and cigars, their varied masculinity emerged like a dog at last comfortable by a fire from which had gone a covertly restraining presence. A story then held its audience not through a mechanical pretence but—if it had one—by its point; it was no longer needful for me to speak.

I had had to talk so much in late years that the equable flow of other voices, demanding nothing from me, was a positive luxury; with most that was said I was in ignorance or disagreement; but that was unimportant, the words themselves were as soothing as the superlative aroma of the special Corona cigars. What, privately, occupied me was the question of the validity of my writing—gravity and pleasure were inextricably mixed in it. The man whose hospitality I was so fully enjoying had to do with steel in one of its many indispensable forms; there could be no doubt of his solidity of use. The one at the other end of the table was involved in national politics, fortunate both for himself and the country. Another—but I was intent upon myself; the solitude of years of unrelieved composition had definitely withdrawn me from a nearness to men themselves—there were only two whose deaths could seriously affect me. What was it that justified my opinion of, for example, Turgenev? Damned if I could decide! Yet the fragile pages of Fathers and Sons were more durable than steel; and there were, for my support, the fragments of Sappho's songs, after how many centuries. Into this broke the phrases of a story, an amusing coincidence, laid in Paris; it concluded with an accompaniment of laughter and we trailed into the drawing-room.

THERE, viewing them suddenly as a partly dispersed group, the women impressed me by the perverse loveliness of their dress. It was a society, a moment, when gold and silver brocades, flexible metallic threads, were preferred; and against that predominance cloudy green tulle, an expanse of suave rose satin, were curiously soft and gracious. The gold brocades, scarcely caught at the waists, fell heavily, almost with the severity of the mediaeval ages, an aspect increased by gilt sandals cut away from the arch of the foot and fastened with jewel-like buttons and straps. It was a brilliant show of the sort I particularly enjoyed; for here was a great deal of money put to the sole end of ornament, beauty. Women themselves were seldom beautiful, scarcely ever graceful; but all that had been conquered, dispensed with.

Proportions originally planned for the utilitarian purpose of maternity had—in, as it were, the putting of the cart before the horse— been converted to a purely aesthetic, well—incentive. These women, in the expenditure of their time and thought and wealth, were not addressed to the nursery and pantry. They had discerned the fallacy of the proverb that the way to men's hearts lay through their stomachs; or perhaps the hearts, the fidelity, of men served no longer the ends of feminine ambition. They distinctly gave me the impression that what, it might well be sub-consciously, they were after were the compliments of constantly hew, limited admirations. From these rose the thrills which were becoming increasingly difficult to gather.

That, then, was their affair—-to extract from charms fading with tragic rapidity reanimating and reassuring emotions; not great feeling, which was destructive to th^.turn of a cheek, the fullness of a throat, but gratifying sensations. They had had youth, children, love, but none of these things had notably stayed by them; and now, maybe with a dim sense of their loss, they were grasping artfully at a semblance where once had been reality.

Their wisdom or unwisdom, poverty or richness, brought up nothing more in me than the effort of understanding; any condemnation of their casual loveliness lay outside my need. Rather I was glad of it, since it invested them with meaning, gave them to me for the effects I constantly tried to produce. A thousand dollars for a dress or the thousand dollars for the starving children of Asia in Europe. I am very much afraid that I preferred to have it spent with Doucet. Abstractly, of course; if a parchment-like child with protruding bones had been visible I should have lost my individuality in sentiment at once. But no victim of the Turks was present; and the utmost in the civilization of appearances was; I was happy to participate in it. .A slow mingling of black coats and powdered shoulders followed, a blurring of the air with cigarette smoke, and my gaze fell upon the ubiquitous piano.

There was a settling on the floor of skirts and silken ankles, a vague premonitory general sigh of anticipation, and the long young man with the brown face and wide hands sat tentatively on the piano stool. A trace of abstraction enveloped him, a preliminary mood I knew well—the room, the people, were dissolving before the unfolding of his inner, subjective feeling. There were various demands for various songs, and he struck a true opening chord . . . it was then that I had my surprise. With a simple accompaniment, in a voice that might or might not .be good, he created for me such an illusion of the war, the rumbling and dash and lurch of the caissons' of the desperate valour of men, that—detesting combat—I was whirled heroically toward a death not worth a moment's fear. The reverse of courageous, I was filled with courage; patriotic in a limited way, I was charged with the self-forgetting virtue of absolute service; rather short of breath, I felt that I could fight for years.

WHEN he had finished with the war, won it in a few lines, I went out to an enclosed veranda, where I was alone, and stared thoughtfully at the flowered chintz hangings. I was, to put it abruptly, annoyed at myself, at the singer and the audience pattering their applause: I should have recognized such a talent before a phrase had sounded; the singer obviously was ignorant of what, in its fullness, he possessed; and the others were far too complacent in their acceptance of what was for them but an added thrill. They had known, he could sing—but, overwhelmingly against that, he was one of the best bridge players in the United States. I heard in imagination his resonant voice counting the odd tricks, I saw him searching them for the aces. And then, suddenly, he was singing again. In itself the song was undistinguished, but the simplicity of its narrative, the story of a man who had gone into the frozen North, there fallen in love with an arctic queen, and who wished never to come home again, offered the voice its perfect opportunity. Except mentally, I was not adventurous, I hated the cold, food out of cans, humanity in its rough aspects depressed me . . . and yet the magic of a wandering spirit; brutal days on snow-shoes moving slowly toward the empty glory of the aurora borealis; a passion, a love primitive and dangerous; a schooner packed against black and icy water, under barren and black cliffs, dragged me out of Aiken, from a softening comfort, and flung me across Alaska.

I WAS more moved than, sophisticated in such processes, I was willing to admit; in its way, in a very fine way, this was an authentic art. The masculinity of tone, vibrant rather than loud, always deep, was a clear medium for the expression of men's longings, for the superiority of what, contrary to the fact, they desired to be. The seated men in fine linen and pearls, forever past their youth and strength, debilitated like myself, spent or spoiled, were, for the moment, being given back their aspirations; they were carried once more, in illusion, in an art, to the old contempt for safety, comfort of the flesh, confining walls; they were, in its first meaning, men.

The women, gazing reflectively at the accumulations of spiritual and visible fat to which they were securely or insecurely tied, must have had a sensation of sharp revolt. For women, high, low and middle, had a fixed preference for slender erect strength, the temperament of Orpheus in the mould of Ajax. Monotonous men were fatal to the romantic instinct which kept so much that was feminine alive. The force of the contrast between what was created for them out of song and what they saw must have been overwhelming. They applauded again, with veiled eyes; and I realized that trouble was in store for the bald, the captious, the complacent and the blind.

This, then, contained the whole scope, the purpose, of an imaginative and creative art— it held for men the memory and force of their most cherished hopes and ideals, it made for women the flawless image of their love. It raised, in its duration, dusty and vain lives to the purity and splendour of a cloudless upper air; it gave again, made perpetual, what had irrevocably gone from the plane of facts. The pages of a novel, like the cadences of a song, whispered with voices, softly stirred with skirts, footfalls in slippers; they rang, as well, with the brazen challenges of trumpets, the falls of rivers, the sweep of the wind in forests; they had a still deeper significance—the communicated reflection of spiritual and solitary pain: this, too, happened on the Volga, they said. Whatever was kindling in men, all possible bravery, the surgery of truth, was recorded for its passing from hand to hand, from life to life, generation to generation.

Then, the singing at the piano over, the cutting for auction bridge partners was impatiently begun.