He read “In” on the dingy card under Frenside’s doorbell, and ran upstairs to his door. Frenside, in a haze of pipe smoke, let him in, and Vance found himself in a small shabby room. A green-shaded lamp made a studious circle of light on a big table untidily stacked with books and reviews, and an old steamer chair with a rug on it was drawn up to a smouldering fire. Frenside looked surprised, and then said: “Glad you’ve come,” and signed to Vance to take the seat opposite him. “Well, how are you standing your success?” he enquired, settling down into his deck chair.
“Oh, I don’t think much about what’s done,” Vance answered. “It’s the thing ahead that bothers me.” He paused, and then asked: “Can I talk to you?” and the other pushed out his thorny eyebrows and answered: “Try.”
“Well—it’s this way. I’m not a bit like that fellow in the hymn. One step isn’t enough for me. And I can’t seem to see beyond; I’m in a fog that gets thicker and thicker.”
Frenside leaned back with half-closed lids and seemed to take counsel of his pipe. “Creative or doctrinal?”
Vance smiled. “Oh, chiefly doctrinal, I guess.”
“Well, that’s not mortal. Out with your symptoms.” And Vance began.
It was his first opportunity for a quiet talk with Frenside, and he saw at once that there was nothing to fear if one really had something to say to him. Vance had plenty to say; the difficulty was that he did not quite know where to begin. But before he had done floundering Frenside had taken the words out of his mouth and was formulating his problem for him, clearly, concisely. He did not harangue him, but put a series of questions and helped Vance to answer them, so that even when Frenside was talking Vance seemed to be listening to himself.
“Yes—it’s a bad time for a creator of any sort to be born, in this after-war welter, with its new recipe for immortality every morning. And I suppose, for one thing, you’re torn between the demands of your publishers, who want another Instead, and your own impulse, which is to do something quite different—outside it, beyond it, away from it. And when you add to that all the critics (I believe they call themselves) knocking down their own standards once a day, and building up others to suit their purblind necessities—God, yes, it’s a tough old vocation that will force its way through that yelping crowd, and I don’t wonder a youngster like you is dazed by it.”
Vance listened attentively. “I’m not dazed, though, not exactly. I said I couldn’t see around me and outside of me. But there’s a steady light somewhere inside of me. …”
“Yes, I believe there is,” Frenside nodded. He drew at his pipe, crossed one leg over another, and finally said: “I’d have given a gold mine to have that light, at your age.”
The blood rushed to Vance’s forehead. “Oh, but you—”
“No, not that. But I’m straying from the subject: which is, plainly, what had you better do next?”
“Well, yes, that’s so.”
“And the obvious answer: ‘Follow your impulse,’ is no use when you have a hundred impulses tugging at you from the inside, and all that clatter of contradictory opinion from the outside, eh?” Frenside considered again. “The trouble with you is that you’re suffering from the self-distrust produced by success. Nothing is as disintegrating as success: one blurb on a book jacket can destroy a man’s soul more surely than the Quarterly killed Keats. And to young fellows like you, after you’ve made your first hit, the world is all one vast blurb. Well, you’ve got to stuff cotton in your ears and go ahead. …”
“Ahead, you say? But where? Well, Nature abhors a void, and to fill it she’s wasteful—wildly wasteful. In the abstract, my advice would be: follow her example. Be as wasteful as she is. Her darlings always are. Chase after one impulse and another; try your hand at this and that; let your masterpieces die off by the dozen without seeing the light … But what’s the use of such talk nowadays? Besides, you’ve got to earn your living, haven’t you? Well, that’s not a bad thing either. You don’t want to risk getting lost in the forest of dreams. It happens. And if you once went to sleep under the deadly Tree of Alternatives you might never wake up again. So—” He paused, relit his pipe, and blinked at Vance meditatively.
“As far as I can see, one trouble is this. The thing you’ve just done (yes, I’ve read it; Halo made me) well, it’s a pretty thing, exquisite, in fact, and a surprise, a novelty nowadays, as its popularity has proved. But it’s a thing that leads nowhere. An evocation—an emanation—something you wrought with enchantments, eh? Well, now take hold of life as it lies around you; you remember Goethe: ‘Wherever you take hold of it, it’s interesting’? So it is—but only in proportion as you are. There’s the catch. The artist has got to feed his offspring out of his own tissue. Enrich that, day and night—perpetually. How? … Ah, my dear fellow, that’s the question! What does the tortoise stand on … ?”
Vance sat silent. Perhaps his adviser was right. Perhaps the only really fruitful field for the artist was his own day, his own town or country, a field into which he could plunge both hands and pluck up his subjects with their live roots. Instead had charmed his readers by its difference—charmed them because they
