Diary of a Yuppie (17 page)

His religious faith, unlike any that I had observed at home, was ardent. How far it went was revealed in a discussion that he and I and Lindsay had one Saturday night about Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Wreck of the
Deutschland
." Mr. Hawkins read aloud the stanzas in which the tall nun, facing imminent death as the tumultuous sea pounded over the deck of the stranded vessel, calls out, "O Christ, O Christ, come quickly!" He read this with a passion that almost choked him, and then broke off to explain his belief that there had been an actual appearance of Christ in that stormy sky.

"You mean that he really appeared, or that Hopkins is inventing it?" I asked.

"Both, perhaps."

"Then why didn't the other people see him?"

"How do you know they didn't?"

"The survivors would have told, wouldn't they?"

"Maybe he appeared only to the tall nun," Lindsay suggested. "Wasn't that common with visitations?"

"Or maybe only the pure in heart could see him," I added.

"I don't know," Mr. Hawkins responded gravely. "It seems to me that he must have been visible to all who looked. What an ineffable experience!"

"A rather cold and damp one."

"Not to say fatal," Lindsay added.

"But that is not the way Hopkins saw it," Mr. Hawkins protested. "He believed that God sends terrible deaths to those he most loves. He held that suffering was an honor, and martyrdom the greatest of all. The early Christians seem to have felt that way, too. There is evidence that they marched into the arena joyfully."

"And Hitler's holocaust, was that a blessing?" I demanded.

"You could argue it," Mr. Hawkins replied sturdily. "For its victims anyway. The diary of Anne Frank has elements of sainthood in it."

"Can a Jew be a saint?" Lindsay asked.

"Why not? God is not an Episcopalian. Nor even a Catholic."

"But if persecution is a blessing," I pursued, "must not the persecutors be benefactors?"

"'It must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!'"

"So the Nazis will go to hell?"

"If you believe there is such a place, Bob. If ever I am tempted to become a Catholic, it will be because they have learned to face the vilest in human nature. It doesn't shock them, and it shouldn't shock them. It's simply truth. God's truth."

"But surely the Nazis were worse?"

"Than whom? Us? Which life would you choose, Bob? A Berlin physician, brilliant and recognized, who is gassed with his wife and children at Auschwitz, aged thirty-five, or a black in our old South who dies in peace, illiterate, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, at eighty?"

"The doctor, of course."

"I thought so. What thinking man would not prefer death to enforced darkness? Where cruelty is concerned, there's not much to choose between humans."

It is difficult for me to describe the peculiar excitement that Mr. Hawkins's thinking gave me. And yet I was not, oddly enough, even much attracted by his faith. I did not imagine that the God in whom he believed with such passion would preserve his throbbing soul after death any more than he would Adolf Hitler's. But it thrilled me to be in contact with a man so devoid of sham who believed, in perfect simplicity, that a hideous and cruel death might be a blessing, not even in disguise. It was as if Mr. Hawkins had somehow got the better of a coldly mechanical universe; he was a hot, bright little coal lying on a desert of rock, doomed to go out but shining bravely while it could.

As the year progressed, Lindsay became more extreme in all his attitudes. With those who talked smut he was smuttier; with snobs he was snobbier, and he continued to be sharp and critical with me when we were in the company of other boys. Yet he would seek my company for solitary weekend walks to the river, never apologizing for his earlier treatment. He was one of those who could divide his life into unconnecting departments. If he wanted to be an aristocrat on Monday, or a jokester on Tuesday, he saw no reason why that should keep him from being a poet or philosopher on Saturday.

I particularly remember a talk that we had one Sunday in April. Lindsay now tired very easily, so instead of taking our usual walk we had climbed to the top of the chapel tower and stood looking out on the panorama of the countryside and the diminished school.

"I suppose Mr. Hawkins would think that now we're closer to heaven."

"I think he finds heaven everywhere," I responded.

"He is fortunate."

"A fortunate fool?"

"If that's what a believer is."

"Would you like to be one?"

"And a fool? Why not? But sometimes I think heaven is only for older people. That they've had time to earn it. That it couldn't be for someone our age. Does it seem likely that a baby could have an afterlife?"

The subject was spooky to me; I changed it. "Why do you only like me when we're just the two of us together, Lindsay?"

He laughed. "What makes you think I do then?"

"Because you act so differently. Sometimes, in a gang, you seem ashamed of me."

"I'm not. It's just that I find it easier to say the things people expect. Just as it's easier to wear the things they wear. None of it means anything. But with Mr. Hawkins—and with you at times, when you're not showing off about something you've read—I can almost think. Or kid myself that I'm thinking."

I was divided between pique and pleasure. Did I really show off? And then I felt a sudden shock of pity. Lindsay seemed remote as he stared at the hills to the west. He looked older and puffier.

"What do you want to think about?" I asked.

"Oh, anything!"

I felt constrained. I had no idea what he needed. I racked my brain for a subject. "Do you think Hopkins would have been a better poet if he hadn't been a Jesuit?"

"I don't know and care less," he snapped, turning on me impatiently. "The trouble with you, Service, is that you're an atheist who's trying to create a deity. You should beware of graven images. You want to throw away Hopkins's God and deify his poetry. You're like all those tourists in Europe squinnying at stained glass windows and holy statues and religious paintings and yacking about 'tactile values' or 'significant form,' as if God had had nothing to do with all that art. Well, maybe he hadn't. But what's the point of it all if he didn't? God, if God there be, must despise people like you!"

"And what about people like you?"

"Oh, I'm out of it. Or will be soon."

Poor boy, he was. He had a bad attack the very next week and had to be taken out of school. He did not write, but his parents informed the headmaster that he was going to Arizona for a better climate and would not be coming back to Haverstock.

Mr. Hawkins seemed much upset by Lindsay's departure; he had had no previous suspicion of a grave illness. I suppose he asked himself if he should not have given more time to the unfortunate lad, and he made himself freely available to me, perhaps to ensure that he should at least have done his duty by me should I too come down with a complaint of angina. That may sound silly, but it was the kind of man Mr. Hawkins was. I took full advantage of his kindness, realizing that this was a greater academic opportunity than any other offered by the school.

One Saturday afternoon we hiked many miles across the meadows, climbed a little hill and paused on the summit to recline and take in the exquisite sylvan scene. Mr. Hawkins seemed unusually exhilarated, and he intoned solemnly the great lines from
Tintern Abbey:

"And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man."

"Do you think Wordsworth would have felt that here?" I asked.

"Of course. Don't you?"

"Well, I was wondering to what extent his emotion had been activated by a particular landscape. You think any landscape would have done the trick?"

"Any beautiful one, yes."

"But what about his 'Poor Susan'? She was standing inhaling the vapors of Cheapside, and it's an equally beautiful poem."

Mr. Hawkins looked perplexed. "But it's not a poem about the direct impact of nature. Susan is
remembering
the delights of the countryside that she has lost."

"So that's it. It's all in the mind, in memory, is it? Wordsworth could have had his elevated thoughts anywhere, so long as he'd seen one landscape. Or did he really need one? Couldn't he imagine it?"

Mr. Hawkins frowned; he wanted to enjoy the panorama before him. "I suppose so," he murmured.

"It would be a good subject for an essay, wouldn't it? Do you think it would do for my end-of-term paper?"

He reached over at this to give me a friendly admonitory pat. "Must you always be thinking of what you're going to write about something, Bob? Can't you just give yourself to an experience like this? Can't you simply enjoy it?"

"But isn't that enjoying it?"

"Not really. Do you know, Bob, it sometimes occurs to me—now don't be offended—that you are 'putting on' literature, as if it were some kind of tool or weapon that would be useful to you in the battle of life."

"And it isn't?"

"Well, it might be, I suppose. But its real use is subjective. It's for your private edification."

"I don't see the difference. What edifies privately must be of some ultimate practical use."

"Let me put it this way. Suppose yourself marooned on a Pacific island. There is delectable fruit and beautiful native girls—call it a veritable paradise on earth—but there is no chance to satisfy worldly ambition and nobody with whom you can discuss literature. Would you read as eagerly as you do now?"

"I suppose a lot of the point would be gone if I couldn't talk about it."

"Yet Wordsworth would be just as fine."

"Look here, Mr. Hawkins." I extracted from my pocket a paperback copy of
The Prelude.
"Wordsworth doesn't agree with you. In the very beginning of
The Prelude
he says that enjoying nature without writing about it is acting 'like a peasant.'" I opened the book and searched until I found this passage, which I read triumphantly to him. For, of course, I had prepared myself for the encounter.

"I had hopes
Still higher, that with a frame of outward life
I might endue, might fix in a visible home
Some portion of those phantoms of conceit."

Mr. Hawkins chuckled as he conceded my point. "Very good. But that is the poet speaking. Wordsworth felt it his duty to put his thoughts in verse for our edification. But that doesn't mean that you and I have to write. He gives his verse to us out of his bounty. We need simply enjoy it."

"But he gets all the glory!" I exclaimed.

Mr. Hawkins laughed, but did not reply. I loved that hour with him. I felt an openness in his nature that I had never experienced in another human being. I felt that at last I was in the company of a man who would understand me because he understood himself, because he had a sane conception of the value of human character. Had he not said that Catholics accepted the universe?

"And isn't everything we think and do a part of our organized life?" I continued. "Is it really possible to isolate any experience? Would there be a sound in a forest when a tree fell if there was no ear to hear? Suppose that I read a beautiful poem. It enters my mind and imagination. It contributes to my education and culture. An educated and cultivated man makes a greater mark in his community. Doesn't that give the poem a greater role than simply being read on a beach on that Pacific island of yours?"

"Are you really such a utilitarian, Bob? Do you apply your doctrine to everything in life?"

"
I
don't apply it. It's there."

"In everything? At home, in school? In friendship?" He paused, and there was a hint of something more serious in those kindly eyes, perhaps a hope that I would deny his suspicion, or at least a fear that he might be going too far, that he might be on the verge of discovering too much about me. "You've been a very good friend to Lindsay. You never resented his mean remarks. I admired that in you."

"Well, I knew he was sick."

"Did you? Oh, of course, you're both from Keswick, aren't you? I suppose your families knew."

"My family didn't. I found out about it in his doctor's office."

As I related the circumstances of my discovery Mr. Hawkins remained totally still and silent. I should have been warned by this, but I wasn't. I plunged on blindly. At last he interrupted with an interpretation of my tale that he seemed to be almost begging me to accept.

"I see it, Bob. You realized that poor Lindsay was in for a bad time and that he was going to need a patient and sympathetic friend."

"That was part of it. But I was also going to need a friend at Haverstock. It was what biologists call a case of symbiosis."

"Did you ever tell him you knew?"

"Oh, no. He would have rejected pity. I knew what I was doing."

"I see."

And then
I
saw, too. He was appalled. I had been a fool to think I had found a man who could face the truth. Mr. Hawkins, like the rest of them, wanted to live in a world of make-believe.

"You think I'm horrible!"

"I don't think any such thing." He scrambled to his feet. "I think you're a sensible young man with a good head on your shoulders. I think you'll go very far. But I wonder a bit if writing is the career for you. I think I see you in something ... more active. Well, shall we be getting back?"

My vague dreams of being a writer were probably quelled at this point, though they persisted into Columbia. Mr. Hawkins remained on friendly terms with me for my last weeks at school, but we were less intimate now. This was my fault. His Christian heart embraced me even with my disclosed flaw, but I did not care to receive the benefit of his charity. I did not regard what I had disclosed as a flaw. I had learned another lesson in the dangers of self-revelation. Henceforth I would keep my soul to myself.