The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [172]
I can't agree with you about Auden and Isherwood, Ted, someone answers.
A dark-haired student, heavy set, with a deep important voice, is talking. I think we ought to do Odets, he's the only playwright in America who's doing anything serious, at least he has his feet in the frustrations and aspirations of the common people.
Boooooh, someone yells.
O'Neill or Eliot are the only ones.
Eliot doesn't belong in the same bed with O'Neill. (Laughter)
They argue for an hour and Hearn listens to the names. A few are familiar to him, Ibsen and Shaw and Galsworthy, but he has never heard of Strindberg, Hauptmann, Marlowe, Lope De Vega, Webster, Pirandello. The names go on, and he tells himself desperately that he must read.
He makes a start in the late spring of his first year, rediscovers the volume of Housman that nourished him in prep school, but to it he adds poets like Rilke and Blake and Stephen Spender. By the time he goes home for the summer he has switched his major to English, and he deserts the beach many afternoons, the Sally Tendeckers and her replacements, spends the nights writing short stories.
They are poor enough, but there is a temporary focus of excitement, a qualified success. When he returns to Harvard, he makes one of the literary magazines in the fall competitions, glares drunkenly into the spotlight at the initiation, and comes off without making too big a fool of himself.
The changes come slowly at first, then quickly. He reads everything, spends a lot of time at Fogg, goes to the symphony on Friday afternoons, absorbs the pleasant connotative smell of old furniture and old prints and the malty odor of empty beer cans in the aged rooms of the magazine. In the spring he wanders through the burgeoning streets of Cambridge, strolls along the Charles, or stands talking outside his house entry while the evening comes, and there is all the magic of freedom.
Several times he goes out on drunks to Scollay Square with a friend or two. It is a self-conscious business with old clothing, an undeviating tour of all the bars and dives.
Practice for finding the sawdust saloons on Third Avenue.
If there is puke on the floor, they are delighted; they are fraternity men dancing with movie stars. But the moods all change. After they become drunk, there is the pleasurable sadness of late spring evenings, the cognition of all hope and longing arrayed against the casual ugly attrition of time. A good mood.
God, look at these people, Hearn says, talk of your animal existences.
What do you expect, his friend says, they're the by-product of an acquisitive society, refuse, that's all, the fester in Spengler's world-city.
Jansen, you're a phony, what do you know about an acquisitive society, there's things I could tell you, it's different, you're a phony, that's all.
So are you, we're all phonies. Parasites. Hothouse flowers. The thing is to get out and join the movement.
What's the matter, Hearn asks, you going political on me?
I'm not political, that's bullshit, everything's bullshit. He waves his arm sweepingly.
Hearn, cupping his chin in his hand. You know when nothing else is left I'm going to become a fairy, not a goddam little nance, you understand, but a nice upright pillar of the community, live on green lawns. Bisexual. Never a dull moment, man or woman, it's all the same to you, exciting.
Jansen's head lolls. Join the Navy.
No, thanks. None of your machine-made copulations for me. You know the trouble with Americans is they don't know how to screw, there's no art in our lives, every intellectual has a Babbitt in the closet. Oh, I like that one, I like it. Can it for me, will you, Jansen?
We're all neurotic.
Sure.
For a little while it is all quite glorious. They are wise and aware and sick and the world outside is corrupt and they are the only