Whereon the visitor mentioned the infernal regions, with an outbreak of rolling, oleaginous, wholly unreticent laughter. And he said exultantly: "But I'm forty-seven! And sixteen books are done the way I god-damn wanted them done! They can begin on me, now, when They are ready."
The host, however, looked disapproving. "I wish you would be a little more tactful about Them. This is my library, you know. I really, you know, would rather not have anything said here to attract Their particular attention to the place. You see, only next month I am all of forty-nine, and there are one or two other books I want to do here."
Both of these aging romantics seemed quite in earnest....
§ 54
They were talking, I reflected, the most incomprehensible of nonsense. A whit later, though, I believe, I understood these not unpompous and, from some aspects, not utterly underisible nor unpathetic fiction-mongers. For, as I now construe it, they talked of that formidable three with whom the artist plays and makes his troubled sport. They talked,—they also, I believe,—of common-sense and piety and death. And so to these oldsters some slight periphrases seemed called for, since, in their own romanticizing eyes (as I interpret it), they went as rebels under the fitful surveillance of powers that do not deal tenderly with rebels.
They felt themselves to have escaped quite unaccountably, thus far. Besides, at best, you went to each day's typing a bit precariously, having only the stiffening fingers of this undependable middle-aged body to work with, nowadays, in a world wherein, according to the morning paper, your juniors were every day evincing such inconsideration for your natural feelings, by dropping down with apoplexies and heart seizures.... Well, by and by would come the unavoidable, with its concomitant indecent exposure of the partially done book on which you would then be typing. And people, viewing it, would perforce decide that your mind had preceded you in your departure, for people would not comprehend that only in the last revisions could you knit together the loose ends with verbal love-knots. Meanwhile you went about the one thing you, nowadays, knew how to do, typing, always typing, in a continuous tête-à-tête with this indeterminate tapped-out tattoo of ticktocking types and tinklings. For you were intent upon getting a fair copy of what might yet be finished, intent to get down what might yet be permanently phrased, if only They did not strike in time for to-morrow's paper....
Yes, I, upon reflection, seemed to understand those aging romantics' odd air of furtiveness—and the blustering, too.
§ 55
For the aim of art is, to the one side, an illegal economy and a thievish sortie upon oncoming times' remembrance.... This, to be sure, is the less important of the artist's bifold endeavors. "Fame" and "immortality" rank in all moderately clear eyes (for reasons to which I shall recur) as but the stakes that, with favoring luck, may be won at this game which the clear-eyed play in chief for diversion. The artist, even so, does undeniably strive for these stakes; sometimes indeed he (foolishly enough) thinks his "immortality" a really important hazard: and his art becomes a form of freebooting rebellion, in a world whose polity foredooms all men to perish utterly as far as go their earthly relics.... Yet none the less does the literary artist mutinously attempt to avoid the appointed customs of obliteration; and he tacks with a harried and piratical shiftiness about the quiet haven wherein his betters—the far-seeing statesmen and the Federal judges, the bankers and the writers of book reviews and the big-sleeved bishops and the best known of moving-picture actors,—all enter every day and law-abidingly cast anchor, among the wharfs of Lethe. For his despairing, futile aim is to economize and—herewith to remit that perhaps over-colored buccaneerish simile, in favor of a more cadaverous figure,—to embalm as lastingly as may be, where time flows like a cool and steady wind and all else is vapor, his personal notions. Yet, somewhere, may be watching him, as to the mazed artist is whispered by what seems a nameless and troubled instinct, somewhere may be incuriously observing his rebellion, a power which that instinct fears as the calm foe of human presumption. Somewhere may exist supernally an all-overbrooding common-sense aware that the upshot of any man's life is a matter most profitably forgotten. And this high common-sense (endowed perhaps with plenary executive duties) may well be one of Them....
§ 56