Of the other Dickens—the greater Dickens—the Dickens who had seen so much sin and poverty and misery and oppression, who had been moved to deep compassion for the suffering and oppressed of life, and who had been roused to powerful indignation at the cruelty and injustice in the life he knew—Gerald knew almost nothing, or, if he did know, he had refused to see it as it was, had closed his heart against it, because it was unpleasant and distasteful to him, and because it did not fit in with his own rosy vision of “the more wholesome and well-rounded view of things.”
The result was chaos. It might be likened, rather, to a few chips of truth swimming around in a sea of molasses. Alsop could grow lyrical in discussing and estimating the prodigious beauties of John Keats, of Shelley, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Kit Marlowe; but he could also grow lyrical and ecstatic in the same way and to the same degree in estimating the prodigious beauties of Winnie the Pooh, Don Marquis, F.P.A., last night’s moving picture show, and the whimsical little Lamb-kins of a man named Morley:
“Sure damn genius—yes, suh!—sheer, damn, elfin, whimsical genius!” Here, he would read some treasured bit, cast his jowled head upward until light shimmered on the glasspoints of his misty eyes, and, with a laugh that was half-sob, and all compact of wonder and the treacle of his own self-appeasement, he would cry: “Lord God! Lord God—it’s sure damn elfin genius!”
Even in these early days of his apprenticeship at college he had begun to accumulate a library. And that library was an astounding picture of his mind and taste, a symbol of his inner chaos all congealed in the soothing and combining solvent of his own syrup:
It contained a large number of good books—books that one liked, others of which one had heard and would like to read, books that had been preserved and saved with the intelligence of a good mind and discriminating taste. Alsop was a voracious reader of novels, and his bookshelves even at that Baptist college showed selective power, and an eager curiosity into the best of the new work that was being produced. It was astonishing in a man so young, and in such a place.
But his library also included a world of trash: towering stacks of newspapers, containing morsels of choice taffy that had appealed to him; great piles of magazines, containing pieces of whimsey or of sentiment that were preserved in the mothering fullness of his bosom; hundreds of newspaper clippings, embalming some sentiment that was particularly dear to him; as well as many other things which were really valuable and good, and showed a welter of bewildering contradictions—a good mind and a keen and penetrating sense of judgment swimming around upon a sea of slop.
Brought down to simple fact, “the more wholesome and well-rounded view of things” resolved itself into an utter acceptance of things as they were, because things as they were, no matter how ugly, wasteful, cruel, or unjust, were “life”—hence, inevitable, once one understood them “in their full perspective” and saw “how essentially fine and sweet” (a phrase that did him valiant service) “life” was.
THUS JERRY ALSOP became the devoted champion of the conventions, the accepted and established scheme of things. If a picture could have been made of his mind during the war and post-war years, it would have revealed the following record of faith and of belief:
The President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was not only “the greatest man since Jesus Christ,” but his career and final martyrdom—for so did Alsop speak of it—were also closely comparable to the career and martyrdom of Christ. The President had been the perfect man, pure in conduct, irreproachable in wisdom, and faultless in his management of affairs. He had been deceived, tricked, and done to death by villains—by unscrupulous and contriving politicians in his own land, jealous of his fame, and by the unprincipled charlatans of diplomacy in others.
“The second greatest man since Jesus Christ” was the president of the college, a tall, pale man with a pure and suffering face, who got up in Chapel and agonized over his boys, making frequent use of such words as “service,” “democracy,” and “ideals of leadership”—all popular evidences of enlightened—nay, inspired!—thought, in the jargon of the time. What it all meant, reduced to concrete terms of conduct, was a little puzzling. “Character,” “education for the good life,” seemed to boil down in practice to a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-gambling, non-card-playing, non-fornicating state of single blessedness, leading up eventually to “the life of service and of leadership for which Pine Rock prepares a man”—namely, the eventual sacrament of matrimony with a spotless female, variously referred to in the lexicon of idealism as “a fine woman,” or “a pure, sweet girl.”
“An intelligent and liberal interest in the affairs of government and politics” seemed to mean supporting the Democratic or Republican tickets and voting for the candidates which the political machines that dominated these two parties put up at election time.