Gargoyles

by Ben Hecht

But Aubrey had gone ahead and remained an author. He had written, at the beginning, rather biting if sophomoric things, inspired by the malice he sensed toward his profession. But the inspiration had not been sufficiently strong to handicap him. When success had come and his name was emerging, the people who knew him and who had talked maliciously about his trying to be an author, were the first to acclaim him. This thing had confused Aubrey. He had felt that the public was a curious institution and he had for a few months wondered about it.

People sneered at struggling writers and referred with withering humor to art as "all bunk" and indignantly denounced its immorality. Then when one put oneself over despite their sneers they turned around and congratulated one as if one had done something of which they heartily approved. It was as if they tried to make up for their previous attitude, and for a few months Aubrey cherished a cynical image of the public. It was a great bully that spat and snarled at genius, refusing to recognize it and making it a laughing stock wherever it could. But as soon as genius came through, this same bully of a public turned around and prostrated itself and worshipped blindly at its feet.

Then Aubrey had spent the few months wondering why this was so. But he had become too busy to do much thinking. His publishers were demanding more work—so he let other matters drop. His curiosity had carried him to the brink of an idea and he had somewhat impatiently turned his back on it. He had felt that to think as he was thinking about people who were praising him and buying his books, was to play the part of an ungrateful cad.

The idea that had come dangerously close to Aubrey's consciousness was the curious notion that people resented acclaiming anybody like themselves. The lucky ones who secured their hurrah became in their eyes no longer normal humans but super-persons about whom they were prepared to believe all manner of mythical grandeurs. The more remarkable and more superior people could make out their heroes to be, the less humility they felt in worshipping them. And since their heroes were creatures in whom they recognized a glorification of their own virtues, the more self-flattering it was to increase this glorification. They were able to worship themselves with abandon in the splendors they attributed to their chosen superiors.

Thus when they started they went the limit, heaping honors and honors upon a man until he became a glittering God-like person. The country at the time of Aubrey's ascent was full of such glittering God-like creatures whose names were continually in people's mouths and in their newspapers. The instinct of inferiority demanding, as always, an outlet in the invention of gods, had found a tireless medium for this hocus-pocus in the press. Great reputations were continually springing up—the newspapers like the half-cynical, half-superstitious priests of the totem era busying themselves with creating towering effigies in clay and smearing them with vermillion paints. These gods whom people busily erected and before whom they busily prostrated themselves were, as always, the awesome deities created in their own image.

There had been a crisis in Aubrey's life when he was caught between a desire to be himself and the desire to be a great clay figure with mysterious totems splashed over it. To be himself he had only to write as he vaguely thought he wanted to write. And to be one of the great figures he had merely to write what he definitely knew would win him the respect of others.

The decision, however, had been taken out of his hands. Aubrey's talent had not been of the sort that has for its parents a hatred of society and a derision of its surfaces. He had, indeed, fancied himself for a short time as desiring to adventure among the doubts and iconoclasms which distinguished the literature he had encountered during his college days. But the fancy had proved no more than an egoistic perversion of the true impulse in him. This, it soon developed, was a desire to impress himself upon people as their superior, not their antithesis.

As a result he fell to writing books which carefully avoided the revolt which the dubious spectacle of manners and morality had stirred in him. He concentrated upon crystalizing his day dreams. He turned out tales of deftly virtuous Cinderellas who provokingly withheld their kisses for three hundred pages; of débonnaire Galahads with hearts of gold who, utilizing the current platitudes as an armor and a weapon, emerged in grandiose triumphs with the stubborn virgins thawing deliriously around their necks. Aubrey's tales were popular at once. They were the technically arranged versions of the rigmarole of secret make-believes that went on in his own as well as other people's heads. People read them and quivered with delight. They were tales which like their own daydreams served as an antidote for the puny, unimpressive realities of their lives. Also they were moral, high-minded tales and thus they served as a vindication of the codes, fears, taboos which contributed the puniness to the realities of their lives.

Aubrey's success increased rapidly as he abandoned altogether the pretence of plumbing souls and gave himself whole-heartedly to the creative pleasantries of plumbing the soap-bubble worlds in whose irridescence people found their compensations. At twenty-nine Aubrey was becoming one of the glittering God-like personages in whose worship the public finds outlet for its inferiority mania and simultaneous concealment therefrom.

He had realized this in time and without conscious effort adjusted himself toward the perfections demanded of a personage worthy of receiving the masochistic and self-ennobling salute of the mob. These perfections were simply and easily achieved. One had only to acquiesce, to accept the acclaim of outsiders as a part of one's self and to live one's inner life in a roseate contemplation of this acclaim. One had only to "remember one's public" as he put it himself, and not to disappoint them or antagonize them.