“What is there to say? It has come, it is here, it has happened—and now I can only say, as that good woman who brought you up and now lies dead and buried on the hill would have said: ‘0 God! If I had only known!’ For weeks I have waited for nothing else except the moment when your book should come and I should have it in my hands. Well, it has come now. And what is there to say?
“You have crucified your family in a way that would make the agony of Christ upon the Cross seem light in the comparison. You have laid waste the lives of your kinsmen, and of dozens of your friends, and to us who loved you like our own you have driven a dagger to the heart, and twisted it, and left it fixed there where it must always stay.”
From a sly and hearty fellow who thought he understood:
“...if I had known you were going to write this kind of book, I could have told you lots of things. Why didn’t you come to me? I know dirt about the people in this town you never dreamed of.”
Letters like this last one hurt him worst of all. They were the ones that made him most doubt his purpose and accomplishment. What did such people think he had been trying to write—nothing but an encyclopaedia of pornography, a kind of prurient excavation of every buried skeleton in town? He saw that his book had unreefed whole shoals of unsuspected bitterness and malice in the town and set evil tongues to wagging. The people he had drawn upon to make the characters in his book writhed like hooked fish on a line, and the others licked their lips to see them squirm.
Those who were the victims of all this unleashed malice now struck back, almost to a man, at the hapless author—at him whom they considered to be the sole cause of their woe. Day after day their letters came, and with a perverse satisfaction in his own suffering, a desire to take upon himself now all the searing shame that he had so naively and so unwittingly brought to others, he read and re-read every bitter word of every bitter letter, and his senses and his heart were numb.
They said at first that he was a monster against life, that he had fouled his own nest. Then they said he had turned against the South, his mother, and spat upon her and defiled her. Then they levelled against him the most withering charge they could think of, and said he was “not Southern”. Some of them even began to say that he was “not American”. This was really rather hard on him, George thought with a wry, grim humour, for if he was not American, he was not anything at all.
And during those nightmarish first weeks following the publication of his book, only two rays of warmth and comforting assurance came to him from anyone he knew.
One was a letter from Randy Shepperton. As a boy, and later as a student at college, Randy had possessed a spirit that always burned with the quick, pure flame of a Mercutio. And now, in spite of what life had done to him—the evidence of which George had seen in his troubled eyes and deeply furrowed face—his letter showed that he was still essentially the same old Randy. What he wrote was full of understanding about the book; he saw its purpose clearly, and he gave, George thought, a shrewd appraisal of its accomplishment and its weaknesses; and he ended with a generous burst of pride and honest pleasure in the thing itself. Not a word about personalities, not a breath of all the gossip in the town, not even a hint that he had recognised himself among the portraits George had drawn.
The other ray of comfort was of quite another kind. One day the telephone rang, and it was Nebraska Crane howling his friendship over the wire:
“Hi, there, Monkus! That you? How you makin’ out, boy?”
“Oh, all right, I guess,” George answered, in a tone of resignation which he could not conceal even in the pleasure that he felt at hearing the hearty ring of the familiar voice.
“You sound sorta down in the mouth,” said Nebraska, full of immediate concern. “What’s the matter? Ain’t nothin’ wrong with you, is there?”
“Oh, no. No. It’s nothing. Forget it.” Then, shaking off the mood that had been with him for days, he began to respond with something of the warmth he felt for his old friend. “God, I’m glad to hear from you, Bras! I can’t tell you how glad I am! How are you, Bras?”
“Oh, cain’t complain,” he shouted lustily. “I think maybe they’re gonna give me a contrack for one more year. Looks like it, anyways. If they do, we’ll be all set.”
“That’s swell, Bras! That’s wonderful!...And how is Myrtle?”
“Fine! Fine!...Say”—he howled—“she’s here now! She’s the one put me up to callin’ you. I never woulda thought of it. You know me!...We been readin’ all about you—about that book you wrote. Myrtle’s been tellin’ me about it. She’s cut out all the pieces from the papers…That sure went over big, didn’t it?”
“It’s doing pretty well, I suppose,” said George without enthusiasm. “It seems to be selling all right, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well, now, I knowed it!” said Nebraska. “Me an’ Myrtle bought a copy…I ain’t read it yet,” he added apologetically.
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m goin’ to, I’m goin’ to,” he howled vigorously. “Just as soon as I git time.”