The Wrong Twin

by Harry Leon Wilson

Wilbur Cowen had hesitated in the matter of war. He wanted to be in a battle—had glowed at the thought of fighting—but if the war was going to be stopped in its beginning, what would be the use of starting? And he was assured and more than half believed that it would be stopped. Merle Whipple was his informant —Merle had found himself. The war was to be stopped by the New Dawn, a magazine of which Merle had been associate editor since shortly after his release from college.

Merle, on that afternoon of golf with Wilbur, had accurately forecast his own future. Confessing then that he meant to become a great writer, he was now not only a great writer but a thinker, in the true sense of the word. He had taken up literature—"not muck like poetry, but serious literature"—and Whipple money had lavishly provided a smart little craft in which to embark. The money had not come without some bewildered questioning on the part of those supplying it. As old Sharon said, the Whipple chicken coop had hatched a gosling that wanted to swim in strange waters; but it was eventually decided that goslings were meant to swim and would one way or another find a pond. Indeed, Harvey Whipple was prouder of his son by adoption than he cared to have known, and listened to him with secret respect, covered with perfunctory business hints. He felt that Merle was above and beyond him. The youth, indeed, made him feel that he was a mere country banker.

In the city of New York, after his graduation, Merle had come into his own, forming a staunch alliance with a small circle of intellectuals—intelligentzia, Merle said—consecrated to the cause of American culture. He had brought to Newbern and to the amazed Harvey Whipple the strange news that America had no native culture; that it was raw, spiritually impoverished, without national self-consciousness; with but the faintest traces of art in any true sense of the word. Harvey Whipple would have been less shocked by this disclosure, momentous though it was, had not Merle betrayed a conviction that his life work would now be to uphold the wavering touch of civilization.

This brought the thing home to Harvey D. Merle, heading his valiant little band of thinkers, would light a pure white flame to flush America's spiritual darkness. He would be a vital influence, teaching men and women to cultivate life for its own sake. For the cheap and tawdry extravagance of our national boasting he would substitute a chastening knowledge of our spiritual inferiority to the older nations. America was uncreative; he would release and nurse its raw creative intelligence till it should be free to function, breaking new intellectual paths, setting up lofty ideals, enriching our common life with a new, self-conscious art. Much of this puzzled Harvey D. and his father, old Gideon. It was new talk in their world. But it impressed them. Their boy was earnest, with a fine intelligence; he left them stirred.

Sharon Whipple was a silent, uneasy listener at many of these talks. He declared, later and to others, for Merle was not his son, that the young man was highly languageous and highly crazy; that his talk was the crackling of thorns under a pot; that he was a vain canter—"forever canting," said Sharon—"a buffle-headed fellow, talking, bragging." He was equally intolerant of certain of Merle's little band of forward-looking intellectuals who came to stay week-ends at the Whipple New Place. There was Emmanuel Schilsky, who talked more pithily than Merle and who would be the editor-in-chief of the projected New Dawn. Emmanuel, too, had come from his far-off home to flush America's spiritual darkness with a new light. He had written much about our shortage of genuine spiritual values; about "the continual frustrations and aridities of American life." He was a member of various groups—the Imagist group, the Egoist group, the Sphericists, other groups piquantly named; versed in the new psychology, playing upon the word "pragmatism" as upon a violin.

Sharon Whipple, the Philistine, never quite knew whether pragmatism was approved or condemned by Schilsky, and once he asked the dark-faced young man what it meant. He was told that pragmatism was a method, and felt obliged to pretend that this enlightened him. He felt a reluctant respect for Schilsky, who could make him feel uncomfortable.

And there was the colourful, youngish widow, Mrs. Truesdale, who wrote free verse about the larger intimacies of life, and dressed noticeably. She would be a contributing editor of the New Dawn, having as her special department the release of woman from her age-long slavery to certain restraints that now made her talked unpleasantly about if she dared give her soul free rein. This lady caused Sharon to wonder about the departed Truesdale.

"Was he carried away by sorrowing friends," asked Sharon, "or did he get tired one day and move off under his own power?" No one ever enlightened him.

Others of the younger intelligentzia came under his biased notice. He spoke of them as "a rabble rout," who lived in a mad world—"and God bless us out of it."

But Sharon timed his criticism discreetly, and the New Dawn lit its pure white flame—a magazine to refresh the elect. Placed superbly beyond the need of catering to advertisers, it would adhere to rigorous standards of the true, the beautiful. It would tell the truth as no other magazine founded on gross commercialism would dare to do. It said so in well-arranged words. The commercial magazines full well knew the hideous truth, but stifled it for hire. The New Dawn would be honest.