BOOKS: MY OWN AND OTHERS

When the harvests are in and all the summertime guests are gone and a crisper, cooler silence begins to blow through this valley, I settle down to a nine months’ stretch of living alone here in the best company to be had. What I mean is that you can lay the book you are reading on the shelf without being obliged to think about what you will serve to the hero and heroine for dinner that evening. But after dinner you can take it up again and resume your companionship with the author and these characters which are frequently more interesting than real people, because they are derived from human nature at large and are the composites of many men and women. Also, there is the country in which they live, which may be on the other side of the world from where you live. So, sitting in your chair before your own fire, you enjoy all the benefits of travel without the inconvenience and confusion.

To read any one of Balzac’s stories is like spending an evening in France, even if you have never been in France and cannot pronounce one single fluted word of that language. And to read Victor Hugo is like spending one half the evening among the sobbing stars and the other half of it amid scenes of the direst poverty made by the meanest minds.

Hugo was the dramatist of human emotions at their highest pitch and lowest ebb. He had the gift of being vicariously sublime in a character like that of the old communist or Jean Valjean, but I doubt if he himself possessed the attributes of any kind of permanent character. I have the feeling that he was an irresponsible person with a histrionic conscience and practically no modesty of morals. Otherwise it is not clear to me how we can account for the serial romances of his own life, or his description of the Battle of Waterloo, or the fact that he took his morning ablutions in a glass bathroom on top of his house. The sun was, indeed, above him, but the populace was also in attendance in the streets below.

As for Balzac, he was a literary comedian who handled the tragedies of the human heart with a wit kin to the irony of fate. He could never have interpreted any other people but the French. He is peculiar to them, a medium through which the France of his day still lives, loves, sins, and suffers with a charm and a talent for indecency which it probably never had in reality. The art of a master is required to lift the squalor of the lowest lives and the grandeur of the noblest lives into imperishable scenes on paper, because in life they do change and fade into forgetfulness.

I recall one of his heroines, a stupid moron who could impart no animation to her immorality. He finds her reclining on a couch and spends ten thousand words describing her figure. I can spend a fascinating hour under that splendid spray of language, reading the mind and nature of the author. There is something idiotic in French genius of the first water like the artless simplicity of a defective person going about with his clothing disarranged.

Before he has done making images of this woman she has ceased to exist except as a feminine mollusk of beauty. Then I am invariably moved to mirth by his efforts to get her off the couch and induce her to say something or do something bad enough or sufficiently entrancing to justify his description. Only an author who has struggled with a stubborn or stupid character in a story can appreciate his dilemma, and the fiasco when she finally sits up and sobs, with no visible explanation of the sob. The reader is left in suspense until the next chapter reveals the cause of her grief, which is not grief at all, but the French hysteria of passion. It is clear to the envious like me that he cannot bear to sacrifice one sentence of the marvelous description he has written of her and that she can never measure up to it in actual performance.

I remember having a similar experience years ago with one of my own heroines who turned out to be another kind of fool. Nothing was further from my expectations when I introduced her with a few complimentary sentences. I must have got the idea from an old valentine card. Anyway, she was standing beautifully gowned beside a tall fluted column on the veranda of a magnificent old Southern mansion. I managed to give the reader the impression that she was rich, handsome, thirty, not married and vaguely unhappy.

She stood regarding the gently rolling landscape with this expression, which was as far as my talents as a struggling literary genius could carry her. I knew what would happen to her next day, but by no flight of my imagination could I fathom the thoughts that should be passing through her sad spinster mind at that moment. Neither could I move her from her gracefully leaning pose against the column. She became cataleptic. I labored with her frantically through three blistering hot summer days without ever persuading her to so much as turn her head.

Finally, in desperation, I sent her an anonymous note by a messenger couched in the language of a bold lover, saying that he would see her presently and settle a few old scores. She had run through with many lovers in her earlier youth, and could only perceive that the chirography of this note was vaguely familiar. It was a disgraceful thing to do, but the effect was electrical. From that time to the end of the story I have never had a more elastic heroine. Every author must have similar experiences, but very few of us would dare Balzac’s insolence to the reader’s intelligence and get by with the performance.

Certain books are more interesting to read than others in a place like this. There is nothing in the sublime propriety of these trees, the wide skies above and this earth so innocently green below to finance the erotic in fiction. It gives the impression of decadence artificially conceived in circumstances so old and decent.

Scott’s novels go like a singing charm. So do Stevenson’s stories. And it is the most pleasant place imaginable to read Addison’s papers. But not Christopher North’s ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’; too much scholarly wit flashing between North and his brilliant companions in these ambrosial nights. My own experience is that, living alone with the stars by night and with the hills by day, the mind of the heavens and the earth overcome you and you cannot think of anything very smart or funny to say to yourself. I have never understood that great man who went off one summer, settled himself like a hermit in the midst of an immense landscape and wrote an essay on the ‘Sense of Humor in Jesus.’ That which always impressed me more about Jesus was his sense of man, who is the tragic figure in all creation.

The one book stimulating beyond all others in a place like this is the Bible. No matter how great a theologian a man may be, I doubt if he could come anywhere near comprehending the wisdom and the majesty of the thirty-eighth chapter of Job unless he has spent years in the wind and weather of a quiet place.

‘Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

‘Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou have understanding.’

Job makes no reply.

‘Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

‘Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof;

‘When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’

Job remains silent.

‘Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?

‘When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling-band for it,

‘And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors,

‘And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?’

Job hangs his old gray head.

‘Hast thou commanded the morning since thy day; and caused the dayspring to know his place;

‘That it might take hold of the ends of the earth--’

When you consider that these are the unthinkable thoughts of the Almighty which must be delivered by the tongue of a mortal man and that the trace of his emotion and simplicity run through them like a weakness, it is amazing how near he caught the majesty and meaning of what he had to tell. Nothing ever written compares with the last five chapters of the Book of Job and the first five chapters of Genesis, and the authors of these books were the popular writers of their day. Compare their works with the works of modern poets, novelists, or historians. Let any modern scientist answer the questions the Lord put to Job, and observe how reduced in manner and substance his answers are. He gets the stuff out of his mind, but these Scriptures were blown across creation to the minds of the men who recorded them. They have a roll and a rumble mortal intelligence can never impart, and they contain more hints of scientific truth than the wisest among us have found out, though they labor in that direction.

We are still wrinkling our noses and squinting through a telescope at Mars, disputing about that one little bright speck in the heavens. If this planet had been mentioned by a single prophet in the Bible, we should know more about it than the astronomers will ever find out, just as there is more information about creation as applied to this earth in Genesis than has ever been translated into the terms of science.

I have long since accepted the heavens and the earth as a part of my future scriptures and let it all go at that.

But what I am trying to do now is to indicate the way I have passed the time for so many years in this quiet place. One cannot work all the time, and I was never one of those worms that inhabit books written by others. If it is a particularly entrancing tale, I close the book and envy the author. I pace the floor and wring the neck of my spirit in grief because I shall never write anything as good. There are stacks of little ragged notebooks scattered in the dusty corners of this study which carry the record of these idle hours. Rarely ever a diary note in them of my own performances, but they contain studies of men and women.

At that hour of the evening when mother used to pick up her knitting and pass into a peaceful trance of industry, I reach for one of these headless blank books and write characters from memory. Maybe of one dead long since, but I recall her with a comprehension I never had when she was in the flesh. The copy she has left behind her is cleared of the fog which living casts over us. Or it is of one whom I never knew, but I have heard or read a news item concerning him which omits every personal detail. I piece him together as you construct a mastodon from the bones he left behind him. I have some grand portraits of the prophets made this way, intimate and terrible like the Scriptures they left behind them. Sometimes I get the whiff of a man’s reputation, compare it with his deeds and deduce a character which is finer or worse than either the one or the other. After this it is easy to draw the features of his face, the length of his legs, the cut or sag of his eye. Presently I have a hero or a knave put together, respiration as good as Adam’s, who may come in handy for copy.

There is one whom I always wanted to put into a tale, but could never set up a situation sufficiently noble and stupid to contain him. He is old now and coming to his end; but in the days when I knew him he was a great man who had no manner or sensibility about achieving greatness--homely, with what you might call a country-town smile, which is an expression of facial simplicity. He had a splendid figure and wore his clothes as if he hated clothes. He walked as if he were stepping over dead bodies. I do not know why, because he was by nature singularly merciful. He worked indefatigably and rose to the top of his profession without distinction.

This vicious stride he had was an offense his fellow men would not forgive. His unpopularity was cumulative. He did not need to boast to get it; he had only to be seen striding along the street to his office, down the aisle of a church, or even as a pall-bearer at a funeral, to add fury to these flames that never consumed him. He loved music and had no talent for it, but he always kept mute musical instruments in his house, as some people keep a Bible on the center table which they do not read. He loved learning and had no learning, but he had the finest private library in the city; not to show his friends, because he had no friends, but probably by way of brushing shoulders with poets, philosophers, and historians.

The queer thing was that he read these books, as you perform a wearying task. Every evening for twenty years he would sit down in this library, cross his legs, lean back like a tired man and get through as many pages of a volume as he could endure before bedtime. He never referred to this prodigious labor, and no one ever heard him quote an opinion or passage from one of these books. He made his own opinions and maintained them without citing authorities to uphold them.

I seem to have filled a notebook with speculations half touching, half humorous, on the character of this man; but it appears from the record that I could not determine whether he formed this habit of reading as a lonely person sometimes plays solitaire to pass the time, or whether it was a terrific duty he performed toward himself. In any case, I record the sequel. He finally simmered down to silence and fishing. His conscience was clear. He had read every volume in that populous library and now reads no more.

Follows a very good paragraph on the quality of valor peculiar to noble stupidity. It shows up cleaner than the makeshift courage of smarter people. But I must have been by this man as Lundy used to be by the great textbook he would write for teaching Greek. He had the idea, as entrancing as any fiction could be, but he did not write the book. Such a romance of the rudiments of a language was really beyond any man to achieve. Just so, you will not find a trace of this valorous dunce so carefully thought out in any story I have written. Evidently I could not find the deeds to dramatize him.

Many writers probably practice their art in this manner, as those of us who are not writers practice the oral art of gossiping. I have sometimes wondered if an author’s sketchbook might not read better than an artist’s sketchbook looks. But it is unusual to be reduced to talking to yourself with a pen about people whom you have actually known or suspected by way of entertainment.