Of Time and the River (91 page)

This theme—which, in its general form and implications, was probably influenced a good deal by The Cherry Orchard of Chekhov— was written in a somewhat mixed mood of romantic sentiment, Byronic irony, and sardonic realism. The hero was a rather Byronic character, a fellow who concealed his dark and tender poetry under the mask of a sardonic humour; the love story was coloured by defeat and error and departure, and the hero’s final return “years later,” a lonely and nameless wanderer, battered by the world and the wreckage of his life, to the old ruined house in which already the rasping note of the wrecker’s crew was audible, was tempered by the romantic gallantry of Cyrano. The final meeting with the girl— the woman that he loved—their ultimate gallant resignation to fate and age and destiny—was wholly Cyranoic; and the final scene, in which the gigantic faithful negro slave—now an old man, almost blind, but with the savage loyalty and majesty of a race of African kings from whom he is descended—wraps his great arms around the rotting central column of the old ruined house, snaps it in two with a last convulsion of his dying strength, and brings the whole ruined temple thundering down to bury his beloved master, his hated “poor white” enemy the new owner, and himself, beneath its ruins— was obviously a product of the Samson legend.

In spite of this, there was good stuff in the play, dramatic conflict, moving pageantry. The character of the hard, grasping but immensely able materialist of “the lower class,” the newer South, was well realized—and had been derived from the character of the youth’s own uncle, William Pentland. The scenes between the hero and his father—the leonine and magnificently heroic “General”—were also good; as were those between the hero and Porter, the poor-white capitalist. Even in these romantic, grandly-mannered scenes he had already begun to use some of the powerful and inimitable materials of life itself and of his own experience: the speech of Porter was the plain, rich, pungent, earthly, strongly coloured speech of his mother, of his uncle William Pentland, and of the Pentland tribe.

But the scenes between the hero and the girl were less successful: the character of the girl was shadowy and uncertain—a kind of phantasmal combination of the characters of Roxane in Cyrano, and Ophelia—and her sweet romantic loveliness, the yearning tenderness of her pure love, did not provide a convincing foil and balance for the sardonic humour, the bad and almost brutal volume of wit, with which the hero marked his pain and love and bitterness and repulsed her advances. (This scene, by the way, was undoubtedly influenced a great deal by the Hamlet and Ophelia situation.)

Likewise—in various and interesting ways, what he had read and seen and actually experienced had shaped the tone and temper of his play: the character of the pompous and banal old “Major”—the “General’s” contemporary and friend and the father of the heroine— and his conversations with the hero, in which his conventional and pompous character is made the butt for the biting and sardonic gibes of the latter, were also evidently strongly coloured with the influence of Polonius and Hamlet. But there was good stuff in these scenes as well; considerable originality and naturalness were shown in the characterization of the old “Major”: he was, for example, trying to support the tottering fortune of a small military school which his family had established several generations before, and whose gigantic futility, amid this decline of a ruined order and a vanquished system was, in the years after the war, ironically apparent. There was, in fact, much telling satire in this situation, and on the whole it was well managed. Moreover, its “modern” implications were evident: it suggested, for example, the Southerner’s pitiable devotion to a gaudy uniform and military trappings, the profusion of ugly, trivial, cheap and brutal little “military schools” that cover the whole South, even to the present day, like an ugly rash, and whose “You furnish the boy—we send back the man” philosophy is nauseous in its hypocrisy, dishonesty, and cheap pretence.

There was much more that was good and pungent and original in these scenes between the “Major” and the hero: a great deal of the falseness, hypocrisy and sentimentality of the South was polished off in these episodes, and “the war”—the Civil War—was used effectively as a stalking-horse to satirize the great World War of modern times. There was, for example, a good, and original—on the whole, a very true—variation of the Youth-and-Age, Old Man-Young Man conflict that was evident at that period, and that provided the material of so many books and plays and poems of the time.

In these scenes, it was very forcefully and amusingly shown that the conflict between youth and age had in it an element of mutual hypocrisy, a kind of mutual acceptance of a literary game about youth and age which both young and old knew in their hearts was false, but which both played.

Thus when the old “Major” would heave a melancholy sigh, and shaking his beard with a doleful and hypocritical regret would say:

“Ah yes, my boy! . . . We old men have made a sad mess of this world. . . . We have betrayed our trust, and shown ourselves unworthy of the confidence you young men have reposed in us. . . . We were given the opportunity of making the world a better place in which to live and we have left nothing but ruin, poverty, and misery wherever we went—we have left the world in ashes. . . . Now it is for you young men of the world—for youth—glorious, brave and noble-hearted youth—”

“Ah, youth, youth,” the hero would murmur at this point with a sardonic humour that of course went unnoticed by the pompous old fool to whom it was uttered—and the Major would nod his head in agreement and go on—

“Yes, youth—brave, generous and devoted youth—it remains for youth to repair the damage that we old men have done, to bind up the nation’s broken wounds, to see to it that the world be made into a fit place for their children to live in, to see that—”

“Government of the people, by the people and for the people,” the hero would sardonically supply.

“Yes,” the old Major would agree, “—and that the children of the coming generation may not look at you, as you can look at us, and say—‘What have you done, old men, with your inheritance? What kind of world are you leaving behind you for us YOUNG men to inherit? How can you look us in the eyes, old men, when you know that you have been unworthy of your sacred trust—that the young men of the world have been foully tricked, betrayed, dishonoured by you old men’—”

“Why, Major!” the hero would now cry, in mock astonishment, as he ironically applauded. “—This is eloquence! Hear hear! . . . And you are right! Major, you are right! The young men of the world have been betrayed and tricked! Not only tricked—but tr-r-ricked! . . . And by whom?” he would inquire with sardonic rhetoric. “Why, by these false, lying, greedy, hypocritical old men who have had the whole world in their keeping and who have reduced it to a shambles for our inheritance! . . . Major, who made the war? Who SENT us forth to war? . . . Why, these old, false, lying, greedy men, of course! . . . And who fought the war? . . . Why, these brave, gallant, devoted, noble-spirited young men, of course! . . . And why did you old men send us forth to war, Major? . . . Why, to further your own rapacity, to protect your own ill-gotten wealth, to conquer, ravage, and invade for your own enrichment. . . . And how did we go to war, Major? Why, with faith and trust and the purity of a high conviction. . . . And how did we come back from war? With hell in our eyes. . . . We young men always go to war with faith and trust and the purity of a high conviction. . . . And we always come back with hell in our eyes! Why, Major? . . . Why, because you false, lying, greedy, selfish, and hypocritical old men of the world have lied to us. . . . You always lie to us. And how, Major, in what way do you lie to us? . . . Why, Major,” he said solemnly, “you tell us that war is beautiful, ideal, and heroic—that we are going forth to fight for pure ideals, noble faith. . . . And what do we find, Major? Why,” he said, as his voice sank to an ironically solemn whisper—“we find that war is really UGLY—is really cruel—horrible—base. . . . Why, Major, do you know what we young men find when we go to war? We find that men in war actually KILL one another. . . . Yes, sir,” he would whisper solemnly, “. . . they SHOOT one another—they blow one another’s brains out—THAT’S what they do—why, it’s murder, Major— sheer cold-blooded murder—it’s not what you said it was at all— and all of it because you old greedy, lying, selfish men who make the wars have lied to us and tr-r-ricked us all along!”

“Ah, my boy,” the old “Major” would answer sorrowfully—“it is a grievous charge you make against us—but I fear—I fear,” here his voice would sink to a dejected whisper—“I fear that it is just.”

In this way, a telling and satiric irony was derived from this scene, which was well handled and might have been effective on the stage.

But the most effective scene of all, perhaps, was in the prologue of this play: here the scene was really splendid, thrilling in its dramatic pageantry, and undoubtedly would have been a very good and moving one upon a stage. The scene was on a hill and showed the building of the great white house—really the founding of a whole society. Before the unfinished house, a gun held cocked and ready in his hands, was standing the stern and silent figure of its founder. And before him, up and down the hill, and in and out of the unfinished house, and past its great unfinished columns, were moving two silent and unceasing files of slaves, powerful black men stripped naked to the waist, bearing upon their heads the heavy burdens of material that would go into the house. And from the house there comes a sound of constant hammering, and night comes, there are the flares of watchfires and the swift and cat-like passing of the great black forms. A moment’s flare of insurrection, the spring of a great negro at the stern and lonely figure of the man, the flash of a knife, and the rebel falls, knocked senseless by a blow from the stock of the master’s gun.

Then, another white man from the neighbouring town—the minister: the minister’s low persuasive voice urging the man to see the crime of slavery, quoting the Scriptures with a telling aptness, urging him to repent, to join the life of town and church, to “come to God” . . . And the quiet and inflexible answer of the master: “I must build my home.”

And nothing finally but night and dullness; the great figures of the slaves pad past in darkness, as noiseless as cats, and from the mystery of night there rises now the wailing chant of all the jungle, the lamentation of man’s life of toil and grief and bitter labour, the chant of the slave.

This was a fine scene, and should have been beautiful and moving on a stage.

From this description it will be seen how the young man’s play was made up both of good and bad, how strongly it was marked by the varied influence of his reading and idolatry—by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, Rostand, the Bible—and how he had also already begun to use some of the materials of his own life and feeling and experience, how even in this groping and uncertain play, some of the real grandeur, beauty, terror, and unuttered loneliness of America was apparent.

Thus the play, with all its faults and imitations, really did illustrate, as few things else could do, the confused incertitude and the flashes of blind but powerful intuition, which mark the artist’s early life here in America, and for this reason chiefly the play was interesting.

And feeling this incertitude as he sat down to read the play—that feeling mixed of hope, of fear, of quivering apprehension which the artist feels when for the first time he releases his work from the lonely prison of creation and lets it go then, irrevocably, to stand upon its own feet, meet the naked eye of the great world without protection, and stand or fall upon its own merits—feeling this fatality of release, this irrevocable finality of action, he began to read the play in a halting, embarrassed, and almost inaudible tone, full of the proud and desperate hope, the trembling apprehension, the almost truculent hostility towards imaginary detractors which every young man feels at such a time.

He sensed quickly that his fears were groundless. No man ever had a more generous, enthusiastic and devoted following than he had that morning in the presence of these two fine young people—Joel Pierce and his sister Rosalind.

He saw—or rather FELT at once—their rapt and fascinated attentiveness. Joel sat, his gaunt figure hinged forward on his knees, in an attitude of tense, motionless and utterly silent interest: from time to time as the young dramatist glanced up from his great sheaf of written manuscript he could see Joel’s lean gaunt face fixed on him, uplifted, with its strangely pure and radiant eagerness, and Rosalind, her warm and strong young hands clasped quietly, folded in her lap, her warm and lovely face flushed with excitement, her eyes luminous, vague and tender, as if she were really in a theatre seeing the figures in the play pass before her invested in all the magic that the stage could give to them, displayed an interest that was more relaxed and more abstracted than her brother’s, but none the less absorbed.

The sense and sight and assurance of these things acted like a powerful and gloriously intoxicating liquor on his heart and mind and spirit. He felt an overpowering surge of warm affection, proud and tender gratefulness towards Joel and his sister. It seemed to him that they were the finest people he had ever known—the most generous, the truest, highest, and the loyalest—and the knowledge that they liked his play—were in fact conquered and possessed, brought out of themselves and laid under the play’s power and magic—his OWN power and magic—overwhelmed him for a moment with a feeling of the purest, highest, and most glorious happiness that life can yield—the happiness that is at once the most selfish and the most selfless—the happiness of the artist when he sees that his work has been found good, has for itself a place of honour, glory, and proud esteem in the hearts of men, and has wrought upon their lives the spell of its enchantment. At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being—the reward he seeks—the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity. This is the reason that the artist lives and works and has his being: that from life’s clay and his own nature, and from his father’s common earth of toil and sweat and violence and error and bitter anguish, he may distil the beauty of an everlasting form, enslave and conquer man by his enchantment, cast his spell across the generations, beat death down upon his knees, kill death utterly, and fix eternity with the grappling-hooks of his own art. His life is soul- hydroptic with a quenchless thirst for glory, and his spirit tortured by the anguish of possession—the intolerable desire to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of man’s living, a single moment of life’s beauty, passion, and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames and goes, slipping for ever through our fingers with time’s sanded drop, flowing for ever from our desperate grasp even as a river flows and never can be held. This is the artist, then—life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave—and to do these things, to get the reward for which he thirsts, with his own immortality to beat and conquer life, enslave mankind, utterly to possess and capture beauty he will do anything, use anything, destroy anything— be ruthless, murderous and destructive, cold and cruel and merciless as hell to get the thing he wants, achieve the thing he values and must do or die.