But by early March of the new year the flow of damning mail was past its flood and was thinning to a trickle, and one day Randy received from George the letter that he feared would have to come:
“I have spent most of my time this past week,” George wrote “reading and re-reading all the letters that my erstwhile friends and neighbours have written me since the book came out. And now that the balloting is almost over and most of the vote is in, the result is startling and a little confusing. I have been variously compared to Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Caesar’s Brutus. I have been likened to the bird that fouls its own nest, to a viper that an innocent populace had long nurtured in its bosom, to a carrion crow preying upon the blood and bones of his relatives and friends, and to an unnatural ghoul to whom nothing is sacred, not even the tombs of the honoured dead. I have been called a vulture, a skunk, a hog, deliberately and lustfully wallowing in the mire, a defiler of pure womanhood, a rattlesnake, a jackass, an alley-cat, and a baboon. Although my imagination has been strained trying to conceive of a creature who combined in himself all of these interesting traits—it would be worth any novelist’s time to meet such a chap!—there have been moments when I have felt that maybe my accusers are right…”
Behind this semblance of facetiousness, Randy could see that he was sincerely disturbed, and, knowing the capacity of George’s soul for self-torture, he could pretty well imagine how deep and sore the extent of his full suffering might be. He revealed it almost immediately:
“Great God! What is it I have done? Sometimes I am overwhelmed by a sense of horrible and irrevocable guilt! Never before have I realised as I have this past week how terrible and great may be the distance between the Artist and the Man.
“As the artist, I can survey my work with a clear conscience. I have the regrets and dissatisfactions that every writer ought to have: the book should have been better, it failed to measure up to what I wanted for it. But I am not ashamed of it. I feel that I wrote it as I did because of an inner necessity, that I had to do it, and that by doing it I was loyal to the only thing in me which is worth anything.
“So speaks Man-Creating. Then, instantly, it all changes, and from Man-Creating I become simply Man-Alive—a member of society, a friend and neighbour, a son and brother of the human race. And when I look at what I have done from this point of view, suddenly I feel lower than a dog. I see all the pain and anguish I have caused to people that I know, and I wonder how I could have done it, and how there could possibly be any justification for it—yes, even if what I wrote had been as great as Lear, as eloquent as Hamlet.
“Believe me—incredible as it may sound—when I tell you that during these weeks I have even derived a kind of grotesque and horrible pleasure from reading those letters which simply abused, cursed, or threatened me. There is, I found, a bitter relief in having someone curse me with every foul name he can think of or invent, or tell me he will put a bullet through my brain if I ever set foot in the streets of Libya Hill again. At any rate, I feel that the poor devil got some satisfaction out of writing it.
“But the letters that drive the blade into my heart and twist it round are those which neither curse nor threaten—the letters written by stunned and stricken people who never did me any wrong, whose whole feeling towards me was one of kindly good will and belief, who did not know me as I am, and who write me now straight out of the suffering heart of man, with their spirits quivering, stripped, whipped by naked shame, to ask me over and over again in their bewilderment that terrible and insistent question: ‘Why did you do it? Why? Why? Why?’
“And as I read their letters I no longer know why. I can’t answer them. As Man-Creating, I thought I knew, and thought, too, that the answer was all-sufficient. I wrote about them with blunt directness, trying to put in every relevant detail and circumstance, and I did it because I thought it would be cowardly not to write that way, false to withhold or modify. I thought that the Thing Itself was its own and valid reason for being.
“But now that it is done, I am no longer sure of anything. I am troubled by the most maddening doubts and impossible regrets. I have moments when I feel that I would give my life if I could un-write my book, un-print its pages. For what has it accomplished, apparently, except to ruin my relatives, my friends, and everyone in town whose life was ever linked with mine? And what is there for me to salvage out of all this wreckage?