ANNAN was in a way of being rather pleased with himself. Nobody can remain entirely unshaken by the impact of the sort of flattery hurled in hunks by the Great American Ass.
For with him it is all or nothing, repletion or starvation.
Also, unlike his French and British brothers, he is a disloyal ass. Also a capricious one. There is no respect in him for past performance once lauded. The established favourite grown old in service sooner or later becomes a target for his heels.
This is not heartlessness; it is ignorance of what has been done for him and of those who have done it.
For he really is the most sentimental of asses. Sentiment and temper are the two outlets for the uneducated. They are his. Convince the Great American Ass that his behaviour is callous, capricious, cruel, and he’d asphyxiate his victim in sentimental saliva.
For this secretion foams up from the Centre of Population and oozes in all directions. It is the solvent for the repulsive, the ugly, the sordid, offered in the pill of Art by Modernism.
But what, exactly, this pill is going to do to the Great American Ass is still a social and pathological problem.
Annan was up to his neck in saliva. That great army of slight acquaintances with which the average man is afflicted became old friends over night.
Annan was running the whole gamut from these, and from readers utterly unknown to him. Every mail brought requests for loans, autographs, and for personal assistance of various sorts; and there were endless charitable appeals, offers to lecture, offers of election to clubs, guilds, associations, societies he never heard of; requests for his patronage, his endorsement of saleable articles; requests for criticism upon the myriad efforts of unsuccessful writers; demands that he should “place” their effusions; personal calls from agents, publishers, cranks.
And there was, of course, a great influx of silliness—flirtatious letters, passionate love letters, sentimental requests for signed photographs. And among these, as always, were offensive letters, repulsive letters, sinister and usually anonymous. The entire gamut.
Toward him there was a new and flattering attitude, even in old friends, and no matter how honest and sincere, even in those who disapproved his work, this unconscious attitude toward a publicly successful man was noticeable.
Otherwise, in public, his face and name were becoming sufficiently well known to attract curiosity.
In shops clerks would smirk and inquire, “Mr. Annan, the novelist?” Proprietors and underlings in his accustomed haunts were likely to point him out to other customers. He was becoming accustomed to being stared at.
Now, some of these phenomena are anything but agreeable to the newly successful; but, en masse, these manifestations are not calculated to inculcate steadiness and modesty in anybody.
A thousand times Annan had told himself that no success could ever unbalance him a fraction of one degree. But success is an insidious fever. One walks with it without suspecting the infection. Without knowing that three-quarters of the people who shake one’s hand are carriers of this same and subtle fever.
However, Barry Annan appeared to thrive. All was well with him. All was going “according to plan.”
His newest novel, scarcely begun, promised dazzlingly. He was eager, always, to get at it. That was a most excellent sign. He even preferred writing it to doing anything else. Another good sign.
Otherwise all was well with him, and going well.
His love affairs, always verbal ones, distracted him agreeably and were useful professionally. Easily, as always, he slipped out of one into another with no discomfort to himself and only a brief but deeper pang for the girl.
Few of these mildly amourous episodes resulted in anything except a rather more agreeable and care-free friendship,—as in the cases of Betsy Blythe and Rosalind Shore. Disillusioned they liked him better but in a different way.
Probably Eris would, too, when she returned from the Coast,—if ever she did return.
Thus, without effort, he reassured himself concerning her three unanswered letters. His was the gayest and most optimistic of consciences,—a little gem of altruism. Per se it functioned beautifully. He never meddled. It ran like a watch ticking cheerily.
But it never had had anything serious to deal with. How heavy a weight it might sustain there was no knowing.
In light marching order his conscience had guided him very nicely, so far. How would it steer him when it carried weight?
It was early in June that he encountered Coltfoot by chance. They had not met in months.
Coltfoot did not look shabby nor even wilted, but he wore last year’s summer clothes and straw hat, and his dark, rather grim features seemed thinner.
Annan insisted that they lunch together at the Province Club. They did. Their respective reports revealed their situations since they last had met; Annan had only success to recapitulate,—Coltfoot a cordial and sincerely happy listener.
But it had gone otherwise with Coltfoot. When he resigned from the Planet because his self-respect couldn’t tolerate its policy, the business situation was not such as to make job hunting easy.
“Outside of any salary I’ve income enough to live on rather rottenly,” he remarked, “but I don’t want to.”
“You mean you haven’t a job, Mike?”
“Oh, I’ve got one—one of those stinking magazines which can be bought any day and which always are being ‘revived’ by ‘new blood.’
“I’m supposed to be that fresh and sanguinary reservoir. We may file a petition in bankruptcy or continue. There’s no telling.”
“What an outrage! A man of your calibre——”
“Don’t worry. Somewhere in dusty perspective the job I’m destined to nab is lumbering along the highway of life. I’ll hold it up when it tries to pass by me.”
“You know, Mike, that if ever you’re short——”
“Thanks.... No fear. What sort of fodder do you next hand out to your famishing public?”
“I’m preparing it.... You won’t like it, Mike.”
“Same graft?”
“What do you mean, graft——”
“You poor fish, are you touchy already?”
Annan reddened very slightly, then laughed:
“Kick my pants hard if ever I’m that, Mike. May the Lord defend me from solemnity and smugness!... Mike, I wish we could see more of each other.... Things worry me a lot sometimes. A fellow has got to believe in himself, yet complacency is destruction.... All this—you know what I mean—disconcerts a man.... I admit it. It’s come to a point where actually I don’t know whether my stuff is worth immortality, or a tinker’s dam, or zero.
“Yet I feel I can deliver the hootch.”
“It’s hootch all right.”
“Well—God knows.... Like the Mad Hatter—or was it the Rabbit?—I’ve used the best ingredient.”
“There were crumbs in it,” said Coltfoot. “Besides, wood-alcohol isn’t a lubricant.”
Thus from simile to allegory, to inference via insinuation—discourse in terms possible only between old friends of different species born in the same culture among fellow bacilli of their period.
“Hang it all,” insisted Annan, “the world isn’t swimming in syrup!”
“Nor in vinegar, Barry.”
“I can’t see the sugar-candy aspect of a story,” said Annan. “All that lovey-lovey-sweetie-sweetie goo is as dead as Cleopatra.”
“There was a Cleopatra. And she loved. There was beauty, brilliancy, ardour, wit, gaiety, pleasure——”
“—And the asp!”
“Yes, but why star the asp? It bit only once. Why devote the whole story to ominous apprehension, the relentless approach of horror from beyond vast horizons? There were long intervals of sunlight and song in Cleopatra’s day. Why make of your book a monograph on poisons? Why turn it into a history of the asp? Why minutely construct a treatise on serpents?
“Good Lord, Barry, when you’ve a good dinner served you at home, why slink to the nearest ash-can and rummage for putrid bones?”
“After all, there are a few million garbage cans in the world.”
“Their contents are not nourishing. Why not leave such scraps to the degenerates so well known to the medical gentlemen who specialize in them?—to the Gauguins, Cezannes, Matisses among professors and students in that ghastly clinic where subject, operator and onlooker are scarcely distinguishable to the normal eye?”
“Good heavens, what bitterness!”
“Good God, what insanity!”
“I must hew out my own way——” insisted Annan hotly.
“Hew on! But follow the standard! Don’t lose sight of the standard——”
“Standards change——”
“Not The Cross!”
There was a silence; then Barry said: “Is it the function of art to make people better by lying to them?”
“It is not its function to make them worse by offering distorted truths.”
“Does it hurt people to know the truer and less pleasant side of life?”
“No; but it hurts them to dwell on it. That’s what modernism makes them do.”
“Life is nine-tenths unpleasant.”
“Then say so in a line. And in the rest of your story try to help people to endure those nine-tenths by forgetting them while they read about the other tenth.”
“I’m not going to mutilate truth,” retorted Annan.
“You do mutilate it. The school that influences you mutilates truth as was mutilated the body of Osiris! The school that stains you with its shadow is a school of mutilators. I’m not squeamish, Barry. I’m for plain writing. The truths leered at or slurred over or ignored by convention can be decently presented in proportion to their importance in any story.
“But satyrism in art, the satanism that worships ugliness, the perversion that twists, distorts, mutilates the human body, the human mind, nature, the only flawless masterpiece,—no, I’m not for these. I tell you that the entire modernist movement is but a celebration of The Black Mass. Crazy and sane, that is what the leaders in this school are doing. Their god is Anti-Christ; their ritual destruction. And I do not believe that Christ, all merciful, will ever say to the least guilty among these—‘Absolvo te.’”
There was a long silence. Finally Annan said: “On your side you are more savage than I on mine. I am no missionary——”
“I am. The human being who is not is negligible. I tell you that beauty is good and right. It is salvation. It is the goal. And I tell you that the use of evil is to throw beauty in brighter, more perfect relief. That is its only use in art.
“And it never should be the theme, nor bask in the spotlight, nor centre the composition. All its arrows point inward to that one divine and ultimate spot—the touch of highest value in Rembrandt’s canvasses—the supreme pinpoint of clarity and glory—Beauty—symmetrical, flawless, eternal.”
As they left the club together: “Almost thou persuadest me,” said Annan lightly.
Parting, they shook hands: “No, not I,” said Coltfoot. “Some sorrow will do that.... Or some woman.”
Annan turned down Fifth Avenue much amused.