The Naked and the Dead (51 page)

            All right.

            And as for being a doctor, well, that's okay, we got lots of friends here, we can set you up in a decent practice, buy into some old quack who's ready to retire.

            I want to do research.

            Research. Listen, Bobbo, there isn't a man you know, not one of our acquaintances who can't buy and sell a carload of research men, that's just some damn fool idea you picked up somewhere, and you're gonna change your mind, I can tell you that right now. The way I really look at it, your mother and me, is that you'll end up in the business, which is where you belong anyway.

            No.

            Well, I ain't gonna argue with you, you're just a damn fool kid anyway, you'll change your mind.

            He flounders through the first weeks of freshman year, walks in bewilderment through the Yard. Everyone knows so much more than he does here -- there is an instinctive resistance to them -- the left-handed remnant of the humus around the mushroom stem -- everyone talks flippantly of things he had thought about in the privacy of his own room, his own head.

            His roommate cozens him, product of another midwestern city, another Country Day school. You know when Ralph Chestley comes around, isn't he a swell fellow, you ought to get to meet him, Delphic, which is pretty damn good, better than we'll ever get I can tell you, but of course we've got that thing against us, if I knew then what I know now, I would have come east to Exeter or Andover, although they're not nearly good enough that's what I've been learning, but if we can get to meet the right fellows, we ought to make Speakers anyway, that's not so hard, and we can certainly make Hasty Pudding, but to get into a Final Club that's the trick, although I've heard they're getting more democratic lately.

            I haven't thought about it.

            Well, you ought to, you've got to go at it carefully.

            His first self-assertion. To hell with it.

            Well, now look, Hearn, we get along pretty well, so don't cream it for me, I mean a fellow's chances can be hurt by his roommate, so don't do anything excessive, you know what I mean.

            For the first year Hearn has little chance to do anything excessive. The skids are not greased that smoothly. He bogs down, sees his roommate seldom, spends nearly all his afternoons in lab and his nights studying. He makes himself a schedule which charts everything down to the fifteen minutes he can allow himself to read the comic pages on Sunday morning, and the movie he can see on Saturday night. He drifts through the long afternoons, copying the changes on the thermometer in his flask, and marking beside it the variations in the hydrometer. There is a nerve in the head of the frog which he is always severing. On the fourth attempt he nibbles successfully with his scalpel at the desiccated preserved flesh of the frog head until the nerve glistens thinly, freed like a tenuous wire of spittle. In his triumph, he feels depressed. Do I really want to do this?

            In the lecture rooms, despite himself, he drowses through class. The voice of the assistant professor with the steel-rimmed glasses and the bony scientist's face laps fuzzily at his ear. His eyes close.

            Gentlemen, I would like you to consider the phenomenon of the kelp. Nereocystis lütkeana, macrocystis pyrifera, pelagophycus porra, he writes on the blackboard. They are a very distinctive form of marine life, consider this: they have no roots, no leaves, they receive no light from the sun. Under the water the giant kelp form veritable jungles of plant life where they live without movement, absorbing their nutrition from the ocean medium.

            The bourgeois of the plant species, the student next to him murmurs, and Hearn is awake, startled by the chord of recognition, of excitement. He has almost phrased it himself.

            It is only in storms, the professor says, that they are washed ashore; normally we must think of them as living in the dense tangle of marine jungles, stationary, absorbed in their own nutriment. These species had to remain behind when other aquatic plants moved onto land. Their brown color, which is an advantage in the murky under-seas jungles, would be fatal in the intense illumination of land. The professor holds up a withered brown frond with a ropelike stalk. Pass it around, men.

            A student holds up his hand. Sir, what is their main use?

            Oh, they have been used many ways. Essentially they are fertilizer. Potash deposits can be extracted.

            But the moments like that come too seldom. He is empty and hungering for knowledge, the vessel that must be filled.

            Slowly he gets around, meets a few people, starts going to places. In the spring of his freshman year he goes out of curiosity to a meeting of the Harvard Dramatic Club. The president is ambitious and the discussion of plans is elaborate.

            It's completely absurd when you stop to think of it. It's absolutely ridiculous having us bat out these silly musical jangles, we've got to broaden our scope.

            I know a Radcliffe girl who's studied Stanislavsky, someone drawls. If we had a decent program we could get her in, and have some decent training in the method. Oh, lovely, let's do Chekhov.

            A slim youth with horn-rimmed glasses is on his feet, demanding to be heard. If we're going to shed the chrysalis, then I demand, I just demand that we do
The Ascent of F-6.
It's just kicking around, and it's not even being put on. I mean it's ridiculous when you stop to think of it, what a barrel of kudos it'll mean to us.

            I can't agree with you about Auden and Isherwood, Ted, someone answers.

            A dark-haired student, heavy set, with a deep important voice, is talking. I think we ought to do Odets, he's the only playwright in America who's doing anything serious, at least he has his feet in the frustrations and aspirations of the common people.

            Boooooh, someone yells.

            O'Neill or Eliot are the only ones.

            Eliot doesn't belong in the same bed with O'Neill. (Laughter)

            They argue for an hour and Hearn listens to the names. A few are familiar to him, Ibsen and Shaw and Galsworthy, but he has never heard of Strindberg, Hauptmann, Marlowe, Lope De Vega, Webster, Pirandello. The names go on, and he tells himself desperately that he must read.

            He makes a start in the late spring of his first year, rediscovers the volume of Housman that nourished him in prep school, but to it he adds poets like Rilke and Blake and Stephen Spender. By the time he goes home for the summer he has switched his major to English, and he deserts the beach many afternoons, the Sally Tendeckers and her replacements, spends the nights writing short stories.

            They are poor enough, but there is a temporary focus of excitement, a qualified success. When he returns to Harvard, he makes one of the literary magazines in the fall competitions, glares drunkenly into the spotlight at the initiation, and comes off without making too big a fool of himself.

            The changes come slowly at first, then quickly. He reads everything, spends a lot of time at Fogg, goes to the symphony on Friday afternoons, absorbs the pleasant connotative smell of old furniture and old prints and the malty odor of empty beer cans in the aged rooms of the magazine. In the spring he wanders through the burgeoning streets of Cambridge, strolls along the Charles, or stands talking outside his house entry while the evening comes, and there is all the magic of freedom.

            Several times he goes out on drunks to Scollay Square with a friend or two. It is a self-conscious business with old clothing, an undeviating tour of all the bars and dives.

            Practice for finding the sawdust saloons on Third Avenue.

            If there is puke on the floor, they are delighted; they are fraternity men dancing with movie stars. But the moods all change. After they become drunk, there is the pleasurable sadness of late spring evenings, the cognition of all hope and longing arrayed against the casual ugly attrition of time. A good mood.

            God, look at these people, Hearn says, talk of your animal existences.

            What do you expect, his friend says, they're the by-product of an acquisitive society, refuse, that's all, the fester in Spengler's world-city.

            Jansen, you're a phony, what do you know about an acquisitive society, there's things I could tell you, it's different, you're a phony, that's all.

            So are you, we're all phonies. Parasites. Hothouse flowers. The thing is to get out and join the movement.

            What's the matter, Hearn asks, you going political on me?

            I'm not political, that's bullshit, everything's bullshit. He waves his arm sweepingly.

            Hearn, cupping his chin in his hand. You know when nothing else is left I'm going to become a fairy, not a goddam little nance, you understand, but a nice upright pillar of the community, live on green lawns. Bisexual. Never a dull moment, man or woman, it's all the same to you, exciting.

            Jansen's head lolls. Join the Navy.

            No, thanks. None of your machine-made copulations for me. You know the trouble with Americans is they don't know how to screw, there's no art in our lives, every intellectual has a Babbitt in the closet. Oh, I like that one, I like it. Can it for me, will you, Jansen?

            We're all neurotic.

            Sure.

            For a little while it is all quite glorious. They are wise and aware and sick and the world outside is corrupt and they are the only ones who know it. Weltschmertzen, mahogany melancholies, and Weltanschauungen are the only currency.

            But it does not always work. I'm a phony, Hearn says, and there are times when it goes beyond the flippancy, the easy depression, the almost gratifying self-disgust. Sometimes there are things which can be done about it.

            He broods about this through the summer, has a fight with his father.

            I'll tell you, Robert, I don't know where you picked up all this union idea guff, but if you think they ain't a bunch of gangsters, if you think my men weren't better off depending on me, when Jesus Christ I've helped them out of many a scrape, and Christmas bonuses, Why don't you stay out of this, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

            I resent that, but you never could understand what paternalism is.

            Maybe I don't being as it's a big word, but it seems to me it's easy enough to bite the hand that feeds ya.

            Well, you don't have to worry about that any more.

            Now, hold on.

            But after a further series of supplications and quarrels, he goes back to school early, gets a job washing dishes in the Georgian, and keeps it once classes have started. There are movements toward reconciliation; Ina comes out to Boston for the first time in three years, and a grudged truce is achieved. He writes home from time to time, but he will not take any money, and junior year is a grind of selling college subscriptions and pressing and laundering contracts to freshmen, odd jobs on weekends, and waiting on tables in the house as a substitute for dishwashing. He likes none of it particularly, but there are new processes discovered, new sources of strength. He never really debates the idea of taking money from his parents any longer.

            And he feels himself growing older through the year, tougher, wonders at it and picks up no answers. Maybe I have my father's stubbornness. The closest things, the dominant patterns are usually unanswerable. He has lived in a vacuum for eighteen years, cloyed by the representative and unique longings of any youth; he has come into the shattering new world of college and spent two years absorbing, sloughing off shells, putting out feelers. And inside himself a process, never fully understood, had taken place. A casual fight with his father that has expanded into a rebellion, apparently out of proportion, but it is the sum, he knows, of everything, even of things he has forgotten.

            The old friends are still there, still appreciated, but their charm is lessened. In the daily grind of waiting on tables, doing library work, tutoring clubmen, a certain impatience has developed. Words and words, and there are other realities now, a schedule to hold to from necessity. He spends little time at the magazine, frets in some of his classes.

            The number seven has a deep significance to Mann. Hans Castorp spends seven years on the mountain, and if you will remember the first seven days are given great emphasis. Most of the major characters have seven letters in their name, Castorp, Clavdia, Joachim, even Settembrini fulfills it in that the Latin root of his name stands for seven.

            The scribbling of notes, the pious acceptance. Sir, Hearn asks, what's the importance of that? I mean frankly I found the novel a pompous bore, and I think this seven business is a perfect example of German didacticness, expanding a whim into all kinds of critical claptrap, virtuosity perhaps, but it leaves me unmoved.

            His speech causes a minor stir in the class, a polite discussion which the lecturer sums up gently before continuing, but it is a significant impatience for Hearn. He would not have said that the preceding year.

            There is even a political honeymoon for a month. He reads some Marx and Lenin, joins the John Reed Society, and argues stubbornly all the time with the members.

            I don't see how you can say that about the syndicalists, they've done some damn good work in Spain, and if there can't be a greater co-operation of the elements involved. . .

            Hearn, you don't appreciate the issues involved. There is a history of deep political antagonism between the syndicalists and ourselves, and there has never been a time when it was historically more inappropriate to divert the masses with an unattainable and uncoordinated utopia. If you would take the trouble to study the revolution, you would realize that the anarchists have a record of sensuality and political debauch in times of stress, and tend to assume a feudal discipline with terrorist leaders. Why don't you study the career of Batko Makhno in 1919? Do you realize even Kropotkin was so repelled by the anarchist excesses that he took no stand in the revolution?