Part 6 (1/2)

The failure as a painter was serious, but I had never had the least interest in those qualities included in the term a good citizen. I knew nothing about the government of the United States, and made no effort to find out; as an abstraction it had reality for me, but as a reality no substance. The priceless right of vote I neglected for whoever it was in the Republican machine that regularly discharged that responsibility for me. All that interested me, that I deeply cared for, was first the disposal of paint on stretched canvas and then the arrangement of words with a probable meaning and possible beauty.

An extremely bad period, that, when I tried to write without knowledge or support, reaching from twenty until well after thirty, when I managed to sell a sc.r.a.p of prose. From then until forty the time had gone in a flash, a scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that the seven books on a shelf bearing my name had been the result of so brief, so immaterial, a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba, gazing peacefully into the dim expensive s.p.a.ce of a room in the Hotel Inglaterra, congratulating myself on the loss, the positive lapse, of what was called men's most valuable possession.

No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an end, or as the means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and plazas and promenades, its alternating sparkle and languor, like flags whipping in the wind or drooping about their staffs, always conveyed a spirit of holiday and of a whole absence of splenetic censure. At the bottom of this the climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days and nights stirring with a breeze through the galleries, concentrated the mind and body on pleasure.

Night had always been the time for gaiety, when the practical was veiled in shade; and Havana responded with an inimitable grace to the stars.

It was constructed for night, like a lunar park of marble and palms and open flooding radiance; with, against that, streets packed with darkness and doors of mystery to which clung the faint breath of patchouli. The air was instinct with seduction, faintly touched by the pungency of Ron Bacardi and limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful cigars. The clothes, too--the white linens and flannels and silks of the men; the ruffled dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like white carnations, in the automobiles; the wide hats of Paris and the satin slippers tied about the ankles, with preposterous heels; the fluttering fans--all, all were in the key of light sharp emotion, of challenge and invitation and surrender.

Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana, any philosophy in the face of that charm, was unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a farther development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in hand. I was suffered to come and go without notice; no one, much, spoke to me; even those not unaware of the possibility of a book, of San Cristobal de la Habana, in which their city would find praise, were hardly stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana was youth, the moment for masked b.a.l.l.s and infidelity and champagne: its potency for me lay in its investment of memories; I regarded it as a spectacle set in the tropics. I was an onlooker and not a partic.i.p.ant. But I had, as I have shown, no regret; I had become reconciled not only to the fleetness of time, but equally to the fact that my role was necessarily a spectator's. Hour after hour, year after year, I sat writing at the low window which looked out over my green terrace and clipped hedge, to the road, to life, beyond.

Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited--I was familiar with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go back to what I had found rather than discover the new--perhaps ten streets and a handful of houses, parks, and cafes. Too much to get into a score of books. What I had lost, I thought further--if, indeed, I had ever possessed it--was a warm personal contact such as I should have had dancing with a lovely girl. I never danced, but remained outside, philosophically, gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.

At the Inglaterra there were many men older than myself who danced persistently and had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too, wore flowers in their coats, but aggressive and not reminiscent blooms. They formed most of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't much youth among them, but I didn't envy them in the slightest. They were, if possible, more absurd than the women unmindful of thickening waists and dulled eyes. Their ardor was febrile and their power money; and every time they escorted with a quickened step their charmers past young dark men, the charmers glanced back appealingly. It was different with the Cubans, who regarded such things more naturally, and did not, practically, in consequence, get drunk.

The noise from San Rafael Street never slackened, the clamor of the mule-drivers and the emptying cans of refuse took the place of the motor signals; the slats of my lowered shutters showed streaks of dawn. I turned once, it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect sunlight, the hands of my watch were at ten. It was eleven before I was dressed, with the morning cup of black coffee empty on a table; at twelve I had breakfast, and until five I idly read. The evening as well was idle--a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious and active standards. I thought, with no impulse to return, of the house near the a.r.s.enal, which had, in effect, been open for centuries and which, unless life were purified, would never close. The purity I meant was not a limitation of pa.s.sion, but its release from obscene confines. It didn't matter what I meant and, again, I was becoming too serious ... or not serious about the correct things. There was perpetually the danger of being overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early flight, by the influences, the promptings, of my heredity and strong first a.s.sociations. What an amazing climax to my records of chiffon textures and moods of chiffon that would be: shouting the creed of a bitter Scots induration from the informal pulpits of the streets! Or I might publish, to the dismay of every one intimately concerned, a denunciatory sermonizing book. But what the subject was wouldn't matter, as it had not mattered with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with sufficient beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in spite of the accepted contrary belief, were always very highly esteemed.

It was easy enough to account for Jeremy Taylor by the vague generalization of beauty, and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of that term and my meaning. The words beauty and love, and a dozen others, like old shoes, had grown so shapeless through long mis-wear that they would stay on no foot. I tried to isolate some quality indisputably recognizable as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on intellectual courage. The thought of an undeviating mental integrity was as exhilarating as the crash of ma.s.sed marching bands. Then, searching for another example, I recalled August nights at Dower House, with the moonlight lying like water between the black shadows of the trees on the lawn. There was a harsh interwoven shrilling of locusts and the echo--almost the feel rather than the sound--of thunder below the horizon. This, too, stirred me profoundly, brought about the glow trans.m.u.table into creative effort.

Another excursion found nothing but a boy and a girl, any boy and any girl, fired by shy uncomplicated pa.s.sion.... A mental, a visual, and a natural incentive, each with the same effect, the identical pinching of the heart and thrust to a common hidden center. What had they each alike? Perhaps it was this: that they were the three great facts of existence, the primary earth, the act of creation, and the crowning dignity, the superiority of men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum of their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no intention of examining that. The fact was, for me, enough.

There was, however, another phase of beauty still, one peculiarly the property of novelists, which had to do not with life at all, but with death, with vain longing and memories and failure. All the novels which seemed to me of the first rank were constructed from these latter qualities; and while painting and music and lyrical poetry were affirmative, the novel was negative, built, where it was great, from great indignations. Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed to include or satisfy me; for there were many pa.s.sages not recognizable as great in the broadest sense, both in literature and life, that filled me with supreme pleasure--there were pages of Turgenev spun out of the fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl with a soul in dusk, far more enthralling than, for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have been that there was the perception of a similitude between Turgenev's figure and myself; certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease of modernity, than to a sheep herder; and there was a possibility, for my own support, that the finest-drawn sensibilities, not regarded as emotions in the grand key, would turn out to be our most highly justified preoccupation.

I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in its fascination, and when I came to write about it there would not be lacking those to say that I had been better occupied with simpler things. Hugh Walpole had warned me of the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion Chinese Chippendale; and I was certain that he would speak to me again in the same tone about idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, celebrating drink and marble touched by the gilder's brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Walpole--and Henry Mencken's keen friendly discernment--was right; but, d.a.m.n it, my experience was deficient in material essentials; I was dangerously ignorant of current reality, and I doubted if my style was a suitable instrument for rugged facts.

What remained for me, an accomplishment s.p.a.cious enough for anyone, was the effort to realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face of imminent destruction. And in that category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, so soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly. The thought of such a woman, the essence, the distillation, of an art of life superimposed on sheer economy, was more moving to me than the most heroic maternity. I couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge.

The setting of a woman in a dress by Cheruit; a part of the bravery of fragile soft paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds that would feed a starving village, on fingers that had done no more than wave a fan; the fan itself, on gold and ivory with ta.s.selled silk--the things to which the longing of men, elevated a degree above hard circ.u.mstances, turned--were of equal weight with the whole; for it was not what the woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter.

This, however wide apart it may seem, was closely bound to my presence in Havana, to my delight and purpose there. It was nothing more than a statement, a development, if not a final vindication, of my instant sense of pleasure and familiarity--a place already alive in my imagination. My special difficulty was the casting of it into a recognizable, adequate medium. There, in the plaiting of cobwebs instead of hemp rope, I particularly invited disaster. It wasn't necessary that I should sustain anyone, but only that I should spread the illusion of the buried a.s.sociations and image of a brain. That, if it were true, I held, would be beauty.

Here, at least, I was serious about the correct things, direct rather than conventional; all that mattered was the spreading of the illusion, the spectacle of what part of Havana I did know interpreted, realized, not in the spirit of an architectural plan, but as sentient with reflected emotions. Otherwise the most weighty charges against me were absolutely justified. If I couldn't make Havana respond in the key of my intrinsic feelings, if I had no authentic feeling with which to invest it, my book, almost all my books, were a weariness and a mistake.

Novels of indignation or of melancholy, of a longing for the continuity of individual pa.s.sion confronted with the inevitable--it was that, the perishability of all that was desirable, which gave to small things, a flower in the hair, their importance as symbols. The love story, once the exclusive province of fiction, had disappeared; it was now practically impossible for the slightest talent to fill a book in that manner. The romantic figment, like a confection of spun sugar with a sprig of artificial orange blossoms, had been discarded; the beauty of love, it had been discovered, wasn't the possession of a particular heart, but the tenderness, the pity, that came from the realization of its inescapable loss. No man could love a woman, no woman could love a man, who was to live forever; a thousand years would be an insuperable burden. The higher a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more tragic was its breaking by death; the greater knowledge a mind held, the more humiliating was the illimitable ignorance, the profound night pressing in upon every feeble and temporary human lamp.

Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write, were composed, now, not so much from among the bra.s.ses, the tympani, as from the violins. The great majority, like the great books, were dedicated to the primary chords; but my reaching the former had been always hopeless. I didn't mind this, for I told myself that, while the structure of approbation I had gathered was comparatively modest, its stones and masonry were admirable; it was, if not a mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on earth--what was in England called, I believe, a freehold. It was mine, and there was no lease dependent on the good will--or on my subserviency--of any landlord.

Most of this went through my mind as I sat looking at my trunk, open on end in an alcove near the door, for I was gathering my clothes and thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana. One thing only that I wished to see now remained--the danzon at the National Theatre. I kept out a dark suit, one that would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's box; for I had been told that it was desirable to avoid unnecessary attention. There was, briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted--I had heard the same thing so often before without subsequent justification--but I could believe it possible if there was any violent discharge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit of Africa burned remote and pale, but it was still a tropical incomprehensible flame.

A strip of red carpet led from the outer steps, across a large promenade, to the circular wall of the theatre; and though it was past eleven, the ball hadn't yet a.s.sumed an appearance of life. But just within the entrance a negro band began suddenly to play, and in the music alone I immediately found the potent actuality of danger. I was without the knowledge necessary to the disentangling of its elements: there were fiddles and horns and unnatural kettle drums, and an instrument made from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for the sc.r.a.pe of a stick. The music was first a shock, then an exasperation hardly to be borne, but finally it a.s.sumed a rhythm maddening beyond measure.

It was Africa and something else--notes taken from the Moors, splitting quavers of Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that might have been the agonized voice of the first Cubenos; with an unspeakable distortion, a crazy adaptation, of sc.r.a.ps of to-day. There was no pause, no beginning or end, in its form; it went on and on and on, rising and falling, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and then a blasting discord--the savage naked utterance of a naked savage l.u.s.t; it was a music not of pa.s.sion, but of the frenzy of rape. Nothing like it would have been possible in writing, allowed in painting; only music was free to express, to sound, such depths. Nothing but music could have conveyed the inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that flooded the marble s.p.a.ce of the opera house. It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate years, the spring orgies in the clearings of early forests; time had made it hideously menacing, cynical, and corrupt.

At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro woman with a wheedling tainted manner tried to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger and pale, their faces coated with rice powder, went past in dragging satins. They were chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened cheeks and dead-looking mat-like hair, their coffee-colored b.r.e.a.s.t.s and white kid gloves, gave them an extraordinary incongruity; and behind them, as sharp as the whisper of their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered.

Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure, I gazed down over the floored expanse of the auditorium:

The stage was set with the backdrop and wings of a conventional operatic design--a scene that would have served equally Ada or La Favorita: it towered, like a faded dream of pseudo-cla.s.sic Havana, into the theatrical heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and charcoal grey, of loggias and peristyles and fountains; while in close order about its three sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live border of dancers.

They were of every color from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster, to utter blackness. The men, for the most part, were light, some purely Spanish, the negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I could see no indisputably white women. There was a girl in a mantone of bright contrasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her hair, about whom there was a question. However, her partner was one of the few full negroes there; and, as they revolved below my box, it seemed that her skin had a leaden cast.