“Come again, boy! I’m always glad to see you!...I got stuff in here—photygraphs an’ books, an’ such as that about the war—that you ain’t seen yet. No, nor no one else!” he cackled. “For no one else has got ‘em!...Just let me know when you’re comin’ an’ I’ll be here.”
Slowly the years crept by and George lived alone in Brooklyn. They were hard years, desperate years, lonely years, years of interminable writing and experimentation, years of exploration and discovery, years of grey timelessness, weariness, exhaustion, and self-doubt. He had reached the wilderness period of his life and was hacking his way through the jungles of experience. He had stripped himself down to the brutal facts of self and work. These were all he had.
He saw himself more clearly now than he had ever done before, and, in spite of living thus alone, he no longer thought of himself as a rare and special person who was doomed to isolation, but as a man who worked and who, like other men, was a part of life. He was concerned passionately with reality. He wanted to see things whole, to find out everything he could, and then to create out of what he knew the fruit of his own vision.
One criticism that had been made of his first book still rankled in his mind. An unsuccessful scribbler turned critic had simply dismissed the whole book as a “barbaric yawp”, accusing Webber of getting at things with his emotions rather than with his brains, and of being hostile towards the processes of the intellect and “the intellectual point of view.” These charges, if they had any truth in them, seemed to George to be the kind of lifeless half-truth that was worse than no truth at all. The trouble with the so-called “intellectuals” was that they were not intellectual enough, and their point of view more often than not had no point, but was disparate, arbitrary, sporadic, and confused.
To be an “intellectual” was, it seemed, a vastly different thing from being intelligent. A dog’s nose would usually lead him towards what he wished to find, or away from what he wished to avoid: this was intelligent. That is, the dog had the sense of reality in his nose. But the “intellectual” usually had no nose, and was lacking in the sense of reality. The most striking difference between Webber’s mind and the mind of the average “intellectual” was that Webber absorbed experience like a sponge, and made use of everything that he absorbed. He really learned constantly from experience. But the “intellectuals” of his acquaintance seemed to learn nothing. They had no capacity for rumination and digestion. They could not reflect.
He thought over a few of them that he had known:
There was Haythorpe, who when George first knew him was an esthete of the late baroque in painting, writing all the arts, author of one-act costume plays—“Gesmonder! Thy hands pale chalices of hot desire!” Later he became an esthete of the primitives—the Greek, Italian, and the German; then esthete of the nigger cults—the wood sculptures, coon songs, hymnals, dances, and the rest; still later, esthete of the comics—of cartoons, Chaplin, and the Brothers Marx; then of Expressionism; then of the Mass; then of Russia and the Revolution; at length, esthete of homo-sexuality; and finally, death’s esthete—suicide in a graveyard in Connecticut.