F. Scott Fitzgerald Four Pack

CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers-3

"How clear you can make things!"

So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy and religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. The priest seemed to guess Amory's thoughts before they were clear in his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and groove.

"Why do I make lists?" Amory asked him one night. "Lists of all sorts of things?"

"Because you're a mediaevalist," Monsignor answered. "We both are. It's the passion for classifying and finding a type."

"It's a desire to get something definite."

"It's the nucleus of scholastic philosophy."

"I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here. It was a pose, I guess."

"Don't worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all. Pose—"

"Yes?"

"But do the next thing."

After Amory returned to college he received several letters from Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.

I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable

safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in

your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will

arrive without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have

to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in

confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable

of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being

proud.

Don't let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will

really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself;

and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist

in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning,

at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of

the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do,

the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your

last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful—

so "highbrow" that I picture you living in an intellectual and

emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too

definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth

they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and

by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are

merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at

you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with

the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da

Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present.

You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but

do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to

criticise don't blame yourself too much.

You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in

this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's

the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck,

and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense

by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in

your heart.

Whatever your metier proves to be—religion, architecture,

literature—I'm sure you would be much safer anchored to the

Church, but I won't risk my influence by arguing with you even

though I am secretly sure that the "black chasm of Romanism"

yawns beneath you. Do write me soon.

With affectionate regards, THAYER DARCY.

Even Amory's reading paled during this period; he delved further into the misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonius. One week, through general curiosity, he inspected the private libraries of his classmates and found Sloane's as typical as any: sets of Kipling, O. Henry, John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis; "What Every Middle-Aged Woman Ought to Know," "The Spell of the Yukon"; a "gift" copy of James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered, annotated schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own late discoveries, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.

Together with Tom D'Invilliers, he sought among the lights of Princeton for some one who might found the Great American Poetic Tradition.

The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that year than had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years before. Things had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie. Tanaduke was a sophomore, with tremendous ears and a way of saying, "The earth swirls down through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations!" that made them vaguely wonder why it did not sound quite clear, but never question that it was the utterance of a supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took him. They told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like Shelley's, and featured his ultrafree free verse and prose poetry in the Nassau Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke's genius absorbed the many colors of the age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to their great disappointment. He talked of Greenwich Village now instead of "noon-swirled moons," and met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had regaled their expectant appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better there. Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing for two years and read the complete works of Alexander Pope four times, but on Amory's suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like foot-ease for stomach trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and called it a coin's toss whether this genius was too big or too petty for them.

Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed easy epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups of admirers every night. He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on every subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his opinions took shape in a miniature satire called "In a Lecture-Room," which he persuaded Tom to print in the Nassau Lit.

"Good-morning, Fool...

Three times a week

You hold us helpless while you speak,

Teasing our thirsty souls with the

Sleek 'yeas' of your philosophy...

Well, here we are, your hundred sheep,

Tune up, play on, pour forth... we sleep...

You are a student, so they say;

You hammered out the other day

A syllabus, from what we know

Of some forgotten folio;

You'd sniffled through an era's must,

Filling your nostrils up with dust,

And then, arising from your knees,

Published, in one gigantic sneeze...

But here's a neighbor on my right,

An Eager Ass, considered bright;

Asker of questions.... How he'll stand,

With earnest air and fidgy hand,

After this hour, telling you

He sat all night and burrowed through

Your book.... Oh, you'll be coy and he

Will simulate precosity,

And pedants both, you'll smile and smirk,

And leer, and hasten back to work....

'Twas this day week, sir, you returned

A theme of mine, from which I learned

(Through various comment on the side

Which you had scrawled) that I defied

The highest rules of criticism For cheap and careless witticism....

'Are you quite sure that this could be?'

And

'Shaw is no authority!'

But Eager Ass, with what he's sent,

Plays havoc with your best per cent.

Still—still I meet you here and there...

When Shakespeare's played you hold a chair,

And some defunct, moth-eaten star

Enchants the mental prig you are...

A radical comes down and shocks

The atheistic orthodox?

You're representing Common Sense,

Mouth open, in the audience.

And, sometimes, even chapel lures

That conscious tolerance of yours,

That broad and beaming view of truth

(Including Kant and General Booth...)

And so from shock to shock you live,

A hollow, pale affirmative...

The hour's up... and roused from rest

One hundred children of the blest

Cheat you a word or two with feet

That down the noisy aisle-ways beat...

Forget on narrow-minded earth The Mighty Yawn that gave you birth."

In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to enroll in the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory's envy and admiration of this step was drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in giving an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for three years afterward.

* * *

THE DEVIL

Healy's they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary's. There were Axia Marlowe and Phoebe Column, from the Summer Garden show, Fred Sloane and Amory. The evening was so very young that they felt ridiculous with surplus energy, and burst into the cafe like Dionysian revellers.

"Table for four in the middle of the floor," yelled Phoebe. "Hurry, old dear, tell 'em we're here!"

"Tell 'em to play 'Admiration'!" shouted Sloane. "You two order; Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf," and they sailed off in the muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and watched.

"There's Findle Margotson, from New Haven!" she cried above the uproar. "'Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!"

"Oh, Axia!" he shouted in salutation. "C'mon over to our table." "No!" Amory whispered.

"Can't do it, Findle; I'm with somebody else! Call me up to-morrow about one o'clock!"

Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty's, answered incoherently and turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring to steer around the room.

"There's a natural damn fool," commented Amory.

"Oh, he's all right. Here's the old jitney waiter. If you ask me, I want a double Daiquiri."

"Make it four."

The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from the colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway, and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl. On the whole it was a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. About three-fourths of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o'clock train back to Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the cafe, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.

About one o'clock they moved to Maxim's, and two found them in Deviniere's. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a state of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who usually assisted their New York parties. They were just through dancing and were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware that some one at a near-by table was looking at him. He turned and glanced casually... a middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a little apart at a table by himself and watching their party intently. At Amory's glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to Fred, who was just sitting down.

"Who's that pale fool watching us?" he complained indignantly.

"Where?" cried Sloane. "We'll have him thrown out!" He rose to his feet and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. "Where is he?"

Axia and Phoebe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other across the table, and before Amory realized it they found themselves on their way to the door.

"Where now?"

"Up to the flat," suggested Phoebe. "We've got brandy and fizz—and everything's slow down here to-night."

Amory considered quickly. He hadn't been drinking, and decided that if he took no more, it would be reasonably discreet for him to trot along in the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the thing to do in order to keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a state to do his own thinking. So he took Axia's arm and, piling intimately into a taxicab, they drove out over the hundreds and drew up at a tall, white-stone apartment-house. ... Never would he forget that street.... It was a broad street, lined on both sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted with dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see, flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor. He imagined each one to have an elevator and a colored hall-boy and a key-rack; each one to be eight stories high and full of three and four room suites. He was rather glad to walk into the cheeriness of Phoebe's living-room and sink onto a sofa, while the girls went rummaging for food.