“Now, no more of that! For God’s sake, George, pull yourself together! If a lot of damn fools read your book and didn’t understand it, that’s not Libya Hill, that’s the whole world. People there are no different from people anywhere. They thought you wrote about them—and the truth is, you did. So they got mad at you. You hurt their feelings, and you touched their pride. And, to be blunt about it, you opened up a lot of old wounds. There were places where you rubbed salt in. In saying this, I’m not like those others you complain about: you know damn wel! I understand what you did and why you had to do it. But just the same, there were some things that you did not have to do—and you’d have had a better book if you hadn’t done them. So don’t whine about it now. And don’t think you’re a martyr.”
But he had got himself primed into a mood of martyrdom. As Randy looked at him sitting there, one hand gripping his knee, his face sullen, his head brooding down between his hulking shoulders, he could see how this mood had grown upon him. To begin with, he had been naive not to realise how people would feel about some of the things he had written. Then, when the first accusing letters came, he had been overwhelmed and filled with shame and humility and guilt over the pain he had caused. But as time went on and the accusations became more vicious and envenomed, he had wanted to strike back and defend himself. When he saw there was no way to do that—when people answered his explanatory letters only with new threats and insults—he had grown bitter. And finally, after taking it all so hard and torturing himself through the whole gamut of emotions, he had sunk into this morass of self-pity.
George began to talk now about “the artist”, spouting all the intellectual and aesthetic small change of the period. The artist, it seemed, was a kind of fabulous, rare, and special creature who lived on “beauty” and “truth” and had thoughts so subtle that the average man could comprehend them no more than a mongrel could understand the moon he bayed at. The artist, therefore, could achieve his “art” only through a constant state of flight into some magic wood, some province of enchantment.
The phrases were so spurious that Randy felt like shaking him. And what annoyed him most was the knowledge that George was really so much better than this. He must know how cheap and false what he was saying really was. At last Randy said to him quietly:
“George, of all the people I have ever known, you are the least qualified to play the wounded faun.”
But he was so immersed in his fantasy that he paid no attention. He just said: “Huh?”—and then was off again. Anybody who was “a real artist,” he said, was doomed to be an outcast from society. His inevitable fate was to be “driven out by the tribe.”
It was all so wrong that Randy lost patience with him:
“For Christ’s sake, George, what’s the matter with you? You’re talking like a fool!” he said. “You haven’t been driven out of anywhere! You’ve only got yourself in a little hot water at home! Here you’ve been ranting your head off about ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’! God! Why in hell, then, don’t you stop lying to yourself? Can’t you see? The truth is that for the first time in your life you’ve managed to get a foothold in the thing you want to do. Your book got some good notices and has had a fair sale. You’re in the right spot now to go on. So where have you been driven? No doubt all those threatening letters have made you feel like an exile from home, but hell, man!—you’ve been an exile for years. And of your own accord, too! You know you’ve had no intention of ever going back there to live. But just as soon as they started yelling for your scalp, you fooled yourself into believing you’d been driven out by force! And, as for this idea of yours that a man achieves ‘beauty’ by escaping somewhere from the life he knows, isn’t the truth just the opposite? Haven’t you written me the same thing yourself a dozen times?”
“How do you mean?” he said sullenly.
“I mean, taking your own book as an example, isn’t it true that every good thing in it came, not because you withdrew from life, but because you got into it—because you managed to understand and use the life you knew?”
He was silent now. His face, which had been screwed up into a morose scowl, gradually began to relax and soften, and at last he looked up with a little crooked smile.
“I don’t know what comes over me sometimes,” he said. He shook his head and looked ashamed of himself and laughed. “You’re right, of course,” he went on seriously. “What you say is true. And that’s the way it has to be, too. A man must use what he knows—he can’t use what he doesn’t know…And that’s why some of the critics make me mad,” he added bluntly.
“How’s that?” asked Randy, glad to hear him talking sense at last. “Oh, you know,” he said, “you’ve seen the reviews. Some of them said the book was ‘too autobiographical’.”
This was surprising. And Randy, with the outraged howls of Libya Hill still ringing in his ears, and with George’s outlandish rantings in answer to those howls still echoing in the room, could hardly believe he had heard him aright. He could only say in frank astonishment: