“It’s a desire to get something definite.”
“It’s the nucleus of scholastic philosophy.”
“I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here.
It was a pose, I guess.”
“Don’t worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all.
Pose——”
“Yes?”
“But do the next thing.”
After Amory returned to college he received several letters from Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive without struggle.
Some nuances of character you will have to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in confessing them to others.
You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud.Don’t let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality, ” as you persist in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones.
Your last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful—so “highbrow” that I picture you living in an intellectual and emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world.
An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present.You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise don’t blame yourself too much.You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this “woman proposition”; but it’s more than that, Amory; it’s the fear that what you begin you can’t stop; you would run amuck, andI know whereof I speak; it’s that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it’s the half-realized fear of God in your heart.Whatever your metier proves to be—religion, architecture, literature —I’m sure you would be much safer anchored to the Church, but I won’t risk my influence by arguing with you even though I am secretly sure that the “black chasm of Romanism” yawns beneath you.
Do write me soon.With affectionate regards,Thayer Darcy.
Even Amory’s reading paled during this period; he delved further into the misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonius.
One week, through general curiosity, he inspected the private libraries of his classmates and found Sloane’s as typical as any: sets of Kipling, O.
Henry, John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis;
“What Every Middle-Aged Woman Ought to Know,”
“The Spell of the Yukon”; a “gift” copy of James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered, annotated schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own late discoveries, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.
Together with Tom D’Invilliers, he sought among the lights of Princeton for some one who might found the Great American Poetic Tradition.
The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that year than had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years before.
Things had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the spontaneous charm of freshman year.
In the old Princeton they would never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie.
Tanaduke was a sophomore, with tremendous ears and a way of saying,
“The earth swirls down through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations!” that made them vaguely wonder why it did not sound quite clear, but never question that it was the utterance of a super-soul.
At least so Tom and Amory took him.
They told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like Shelley’s, and featured his ultra-free free verse and prose poetry in the Nassau Literary Magazine.
But Tanaduke’s genius absorbed the many colors of the age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to their great disappointment.
He talked of Greenwich Village now instead of “noon-swirled moons,” and met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had regaled their expectant appreciation.
So they surrendered Tanaduke to the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better there.
Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing for two years and read the complete works of Alexander Pope four times, but on Amory’s suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like foot-ease for stomach trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and called it a coin’s toss whether this genius was too big or too petty for them.
Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed easy epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups of admirers every night.
He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on every subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his opinions took shape in a miniature satire called
“In a Lecture-Room,” which he persuaded Tom to print in the Nassau Lit.“Good-morning, Fool ... Three times a week You hold us helpless while you speak,
Teasing our thirsty souls with the Sleek ‘yeas’ of your philosophy... Well, here we are, your hundred sheep, Tune up, play on, pour forth... we sleep ... You are a student, so they say; You hammered out the other day A syllabus, from what we know Of some forgotten folio; You’d sniffled through an era’s must, Filling your nostrils up with dust, And then, arising from your knees, Published, in one gigantic sneeze... But here’s a neighbor on my right, An Eager Ass, considered bright; Asker of questions.... How he’ll stand, With earnest air and fidgy hand, After this hour, telling you He sat all night and burrowed through Your book.... Oh, you’ll be coy and he
Will simulate precocity, And pedants both, you’ll smile and smirk, And leer, and hasten back to work....
‘Twas this day week, sir, you returned A theme of mine, from which I learned (Through various comment on the side Which you had scrawled) that I defied The highest rules of criticism For cheap and careless witticism....
Are you quite sure that this could be?’
And
‘Shaw is no authority!’
But Eager Ass, with what he’s sent, Plays havoc with your best per cent. Still—still I meet you here and there ... When Shakespeare’s played you hold a chair, And some defunct, moth-eaten star
Enchants the mental prig you are ... A radical comes down and shocks The atheistic orthodox?— You’re representing Common Sense, Mouth open, in the audience.
And, sometimes, even chapel lures That conscious tolerance of yours, That broad and beaming view of truth (Including Kant and General Booth ...)
And so from shock to shock you live, A hollow, affirmative... The hour’s up ... and roused from rest One hundred children of the blest
Cheat you a word or two with feet That down the noisy aisle-ways beat...
Forget on narrow-minded earth The Mighty Yawn that gave you birth.”
In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to en-roll in the Lafayette Esquadrille.
Amory’s envy and admiration of this step was drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in giving an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for three years afterward.
The Devil
Healy’s they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary’s.