There was Collingswood, who, fresh out of Harvard, was not so much the esthete of the arts as of the mind. First, a Bolshevik from Beacon Hill, practitioner of promiscuous, communal love as the necessary answer to “bourgeois morality”; then back to Cambridge for post-graduate study at the feet of Irving Babbitt—Collingswood is now a Humanist, the bitter enemy of Rousseau, Romanticism, and of Russia (which is, he now thinks, Rousseau in modern form); the playwright, next—New Jersey, Beacon Hill, or Central Park seen in the classic unities of the Greek drama; at length, disgusted realist—“all that’s good in modern art or letters is to be found in advertisements”; then a job as a scenario writer and two years in Hollywood—all now is the moving picture, with easy money, easy love affairs, and drunkenness; and finally, back to Russia, but with his first love lacking—no sex triflings now, my comrades—we who serve the Cause and wait upon the day lead lives of Spartan abstinence—what was the free life, free love, enlightened pleasure of the proletariat ten years ago is now despised as the contemptible debauchery of “bourgeois decadence”.
There was Spurgeon from the teaching days at the School for Utility Cultures—good Spurgeon—Chester Spurgeon of the Ph.D.—Spurgeon of “the great tradition”—thin-lipped Spurgeon, ex-student of Professor Stuart Sherman, and bearer-onwards of the Master’s Torch. Noble-hearted Spurgeon, who wrote honeyed flatteries of Thornton Wilder and his Bridge—“The tradition of the Bridge is Love, just as the tradition of America and of Democracy is Love. Hence”—Spurgeon hences—Love grows Wilder as the years Bridge on across America. Oh, where now, good Spurgeon, “intellectual” Spurgeon—Spurgeon whose thin lips and narrowed eyes were always so glacial prim on Definitions? Where now, brave intellect, by passion uninflamed? Spurgeon of the flashing mind, by emotion unimpulsed, is now a devoted leader of the intellectual Communists (See Spurgeon’s article entitled: “Mr. Wilder’s Piffle”, in the New Masses).—So, Comrade Spurgeon, hail! Hail, Comrade Spurgeon—and most heartily, my bright-eyed Intellectual, farewell!
Whatever George Webber was, he knew he was not an “intellectual”. He was just an American who was looking hard at the life round him, and sorting carefully through all the life he had ever seen and known, and trying to extract some essential truth out of this welter of his whole experience. But, as he said to his friend and editor, Fox Edwards:
“What is truth? No wonder jesting Pilate turned away. The truth, it has a thousand faces—show only one of them, and the whole truth flies away! But how to show the whole? That’s the question…
“Discovery in itself is not enough. It’s not enough to find out what things are. You’ve also got to find out where they come from, where each brick fits in the wall.”
He always came back to the wall.
“I think it’s like this,” he said. “You see a wall, you look at it so much and so hard that one day you see clear through it. Then, of course, it’s not just one wall any longer. It’s every wall that ever was.”
He was still spiritually fighting out the battle of his first book, and all the problems it had raised. He was still searching for a way. At times he felt that his first book had taught him nothing—not even confidence. His feelings of hollow desperation and self-doubt seemed to grow worse instead of better, for he had now torn himself free from almost every personal tie which had ever bound him, and which formerly had sustained him in some degree with encouragement and faith. He was left, therefore, to rely almost completely on his own resources.
There was also the insistent, gnawing consciousness of work itself, the necessity of turning towards the future and the completion of a new book. He was feeling, now as never before, the inexorable pressure of time. In writing his first book, he had been unknown And obscure, and there had been a certain fortifying strength in that, for no one had expected anything of him. But now the spotlight of publication had been turned upon him, and he felt it beating down with merciless intensity. He was pinned beneath the light—he could not crawl out of it. Though he had not won fame, still he was known now. He had been examined, probed, and talked about. He felt that the world was looking at him with a critic eye.
It had been easy in his dreams to envision a long and fluent sequence of big books, but now he was finding it a different matter to accomplish them. His first book had been more an act of utterance than an act of labour. It was an impassioned expletive of youth—something that had been pent up in him, something felt and seen and imagined and put down at white-hot heat. The writing of it had been a process of spiritual and emotional evacuation. But that was behind him now, and he knew he should never try to repeat it. Henceforth his writing would have to come from unending labour and preparation.