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VII.

Thus Corcoran repeats with Hepzibah the journey he made with Laverne. Oh what a difference! All now is parody, desecration, wicked laughter. Which must be suffered. To the high types of Martyrdom the twentieth century has added the farcical martyr. This, you see, is the artist. By wishing to play a great role in the fate of mankind he becomes a bum and a joke. A double punishment is inflicted on him as the would-be representative of meaning and beauty. When the artist-agonist has learned to be sunk and shipwrecked, to embrace defeat and assert nothing, to subdue his will and accept his assignment to the hell of modern truth perhaps his Orphic powers will be restored, the stones will dance again when he plays. Then heaven and earth will be reunited. After long divorce. With what joy on both sides, Charlie! What joy!

But this has no place in our picture. In the picture, Corcoran and his wife are bathing in a pool covered with hibiscus. She adores it. He fights his depression and prays for strength to play his role. Meantime, Bigoulis goes ahead staging each event, bribing chieftains, and hiring musicians and dancers. In this Island he sees also, on his own score, the investment opportunity of a lifetime. He is already planning to build the world’s greatest resort here. At night he sits in his tent with a map, laying out a pleasure dome. The natives will become waiters, cooks, porters, and caddies on his golf course.

VIII.

The terrible trip over, Corcoran comes back to New York and publishes his book. It is a great success. His wife leaves him and sues for divorce. She knows she is not the heroine of those tender scenes. Laverne is outraged when she discovers that he repeated the same trip, sacred to her, with Hepzibah. She can never, she says, love a man capable of such a betrayal. To make love with another woman among those flowers, by moonlight! She knew he was a married man. That, she was willing to tolerate. But not this, not the breaking of the faith. She never wants to see him again.

He is therefore alone with his success, and his success is enormous. You know what that means....

“Charles, here is my gift to you. It is worth a hundred times more than the check I put through. A picture like this should gross millions and fill Third Avenue with queues for a year. Insist on a box-office percentage.

“You will make a good script of this outline if you will remember me as I kept remembering you in plotting this out. You took my personality and exploited it in writing your Trench. I have borrowed from you to create this Corcoran. Don’t allow the caricatures to get out of hand. Let me call your attention to the opinion of Blake on this subject. ‘Fun I love,’ he says, ‘but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than Fun, & Happiness is better than Mirth. I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination &: Vision. . . . The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions.” “

Humboldt added a few sentences more. “I have explained why I wrote such a Treatment. I wasn’t really strong enough to bear the great burdens. I haven’t made it here, Charlie. Not to be guilty of a final failure of taste, I will avoid the heavy declaration. Let’s say I have a leg already over the last stile and I look back and see you far back laboring still in fields of ridicule.

“Help my Uncle Waldemar all you can. Be sure that if there is a hereafter I will be pulling for you. Before you sit down to work at this scenario play a few sides of The Magic Flute on the phonograph, or read The Tempest. Or E. T. A. Hoffmann. You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Don’t get frenzied about money. Overcome your greed.