Although I don’t believe, then, that I was ever part of any Lost Generation anywhere, the fact remains that, as an individual, I was lost. Perhaps that is one reason, Fox, why for so long I needed you so desperately. For I was lost, and was looking for someone older and wiser to show me the way, and I found you, and you took the place of my father who had died. In our nine years together you did help me find the way, though you could hardly have been aware just how you did it, and the road now leads off in a direction contrary to your intent. For the fact is that now I no longer feel lost, and I want to tell you why.
When I returned to Pine Rock and finished my course and graduated—I was only twenty then—I don’t suppose it would have been possible to find a more confused and baffled person than I was. I had been sent to college-to “prepare myself for life”, as the phrase went in those days, and it almost seemed that the total effect of my college training was to produce in me a state of utter unpreparedness. I had come from one of the most conservative parts of America, and from one of the most conservative elements in those parts. All of my antecedents, until a generation before, had been country people whose living had been in one way or another drawn out of the earth.
My father, John Webber, had been all of his life a working man. He had done hard labour with his hands since the time he was twelve years old. As I have often told you, he was a man of great natural ability and intelligence. But, like many other men who have been deprived of the advantages of formal education, he was ambitious for his son: he wanted more than anything else in the world to see me go to college. He died just before I was prepared to enter, but it was on the money he left me that I went. It is only natural that people like my father should endow formal education with a degree of practicality which it does not and should not posssess. College seemed to him a kind of magic door which not only opened to a man all the reserves of learning, but also admitted him to free passage along any high road to material success which he might choose to follow after he had passed through the pleasant academic groves. It was only natural, too, that such a man as my father should believe that this success could be most easily arrived at along one of the more familiar and more generally approved roads.
The road he had chosen for me before his death was a branch of engineering. He stubbornly opposed the Joyner choice, which was the law. The old man had small use for the law as a profession, and very little respect for the lawyer as a man; his usual description of lawyers was “a gang of shysters”. When I went to see him as he lay dying, his last advice to me was:
“Learn to do something, learn to make something—that’s what college should be for.”
His bitterest regret was that the poverty of his early years had prevented him from learning any skill beyond that of a carpenter and a mason. He was a good carpenter, a good mason—in his last days he liked to call himself a builder, which indeed he was—but I think he felt in himself, like a kind of dumb and inarticulate suffering, the unachieved ability to design and shape. Certainly he would have been profoundly disappointed if he could have known what strange forms his own desires for “doing” and for “making” were to achieve in me. I cannot say what extremity—law or writing—would have filled him with the most disgust.
But by the time I left college it was already apparent that whatever talents I might have, they were neither for engineering nor the law. I had not the technical ability for the one, and, in view of what I was to discover for myself in later years, I think I was too honest for the other. But what to do? My academic career, with the crowning disgrace of complicity in the Pine Rock case and temporary expulsion from college, had not been distinguished by any very glittering records in scholarship except that One in Logic. I had failed both my father and the Joyner side of the house in any ambitions they had had for me. My father was dead, and the Joyners were now done with me.