Where we fail, where we would starve, he makes money. This Indian is very intelligent, however. He values me. I represent European organization. I come now from organizing recruitment of the natives. This takes time. It is impressive. I have been away from my family for three months. The organization is organized. You do it in a week as easily, but it is not so impressive.’
‘And your wife?’ asked mine.
‘She waits at my house, the house of the manager, with my daughter.’
‘Does she love you very much?’ my wife asked.
‘She must, or she would be gone long ago.’
‘How old is the daughter?’
‘She is thirteen now.’
‘It must be very nice to have a daughter.’
‘You cannot know how nice it is. It is like a second wife. My wife knows now all I think, all I say, all I believe, all I can do, all that I cannot do and cannot be. I know also about my wife—completely. But now there is always someone you do not know, who does not know you, who loves you in ignorance and is strange to you both. Some one very attractive that is yours and not yours and that makes the conversation more—how shall I say? Yes, it is like—what do you call—having here with you—with the two of you—yes there—it is the Heinz Tomato Ketchup on the daily food.’
‘That’s very good,’ I said.
‘We have books,’ he said. ‘I cannot buy new books now but we can always talk. Ideas and conversation are very interesting. We discuss all things. Everything. We have a very interesting mental life. Formerly, with the shamba, we had the Querschnitt. That gave you a feeling of belonging, of being made a part of, to a very brilliant group of people. The people one would see if one saw whom one wished to see. You know all of those people? You must know them.’
‘Some of them.’ I said. ‘Some in Paris. Some in Berlin.’
I did not wish to destroy anything this man had, and so I did not go into those brilliant people in detail.
‘They’re marvellous,’ I said, lying.
‘I envy you to know them,’ he said. ‘And tell me, who is the greatest writer in America?’
‘My husband,’ said my wife.
‘No. I do not mean for you to speak from family pride. I mean who really? Certainly not Upton Sinclair. Certainly not Sinclair Lewis. Who is your Thomas Mann? Who is your Valéry?’
‘We do not have great writers,’ I said. ‘Something happens to our good writers at a certain age. I can explain but it is quite long and may bore you.’
‘Please explain,’ he said. ‘This is what I enjoy. This is the best part of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu.’
‘You haven’t heard it yet,’ I said.
‘Ah, but I can see it coming. You must take more beer to loosen your tongue.’
‘It’s loose,’ I told him. ‘It’s always too loose. But you don’t drink anything.’
‘No, I never drink. It is not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But tell me. Please tell me.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘we have had, in America, skilful writers. Poe is a skilful writer. It is skilful, marvellously constructed, and it is dead. We have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things, can be, whales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone, unwrapped in pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it, praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in which is not there.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see. But it is the mind working, its ability to work, which makes the rhetoric. Rhetoric is the blue sparks from the dynamo.’
‘Sometimes. And sometimes it is only blue sparks, and what is the dynamo driving?’
‘So. Go on.’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid.’
‘Did you ever get up before daylight ...’
‘Every morning,’ he said. ‘Go on.’
‘All right. There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making. Very good men with the small, dried, and excellent wisdom of Unitarians; men of letters; Quakers with a sense of humour.’
‘Who were these?’
‘Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive from or resemble a previous classic. Also all these men were gentlemen, or wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language. Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice, dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that you ask for it.’
‘Go on.’
‘There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau. I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her that makes the rest unimportant.’
‘But what about Thoreau?’
‘You’ll have to read him. Maybe I’ll be able to later. I can do nearly everything later.’
‘Better have some more beer, Papa.’
‘All right.’
‘What about the good writers?’
‘The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That’s not the order they’re good in. There is no order for good writers.’
‘Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.’
‘All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.’
‘What about the others?’
‘Crane wrote two fine stories. The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel. The last one is the better.’
‘And what happened to him?’
‘He died. That’s simple. He was dying from the start.’
‘But the other two?’
‘They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they got older. I don’t know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers into something very strange.’
‘I