Halo, at the farther end of the library, was talking to a short, heavily built young man with a head cropped like a German Bursche, whom she introduced as Gratz Blemer. Blemer was blunt but affable. “I guess we can’t read each other—anyway, you’ll never flounder through a morass like my last book—but I’m glad of the chance of a talk. Writing’s always a mannerism; talk’s the only real thing, isn’t it?” He spoke with a slight German accent, oiled by Jewish gutturals, and Vance, while attracted by his good-nature and simplicity, wondered for the thousandth time why American novels were so seldom written by Americans. He would have liked to go off into a corner with Blemer and put a series of questions about his theory of his art; but other people came up. There was little O’Fallery, whose short story, “Limp Collars,” had taken the Pulsifer Prize on which Tarrant had counted for Vance; Frenside, gruffly benevolent, Rebecca Stram (who was exhibiting Vance’s bust in the clay at a show of “Tomorrowists” got up by that enterprising industry, “Storecraft”), and others, men and women, unknown to Vance, or known only by reputation, but all sounding the same note of admiring interest and intelligent comprehension. …
Comprehension? At the moment it seemed so; yet as the hours passed, and the opportunity came for one after another to capture the new novelist, and start a literary conversation of which he was himself the glowing centre, Vance felt, again and again, how random praise can isolate and discourage. All that made his work worthwhile, all that made the force of his vocation, was apparently invisible or incomprehensible to others. He longed to learn more about this mysterious craft, the instruments of which some passing divinity had carelessly dropped into his hands, leaving him to puzzle out their use; but the intelligent and admiring people to whom he strove to communicate his curiosities seemed unable to follow him. “Oh, you’re too modest,” one cordial critic assured him; and another: “I suppose when you start a story you don’t always know yourself how it’s going to end. …” Not know how it’s going to end! Then these people had never heard that footfall of Destiny which, for Vance, seemed to ring out in the first page of all the great novels, as compelling as the knock of Macbeth’s gates, as secret as the opening measures of the Fifth Symphony? Gratz Blemer, even, whom he managed to corner later in the evening, and whose book gave him so great a sense of easy power—Gratz Blemer, good-natured and evidently ready to be communicative, twisted a cigar between his thick lips, stared at the ceiling, and returned from it to say: “Novel-writing? Why, I don’t know. You have a story you want to tell, and instead of buttonholing a fellow and pouring it out—which is the only natural way—you shut yourself up and reel it off on a Remington, and send it to the publisher, so that more fellows can hear it. That’s the only difference, I guess—that and the cash returns,” he added with a well-fed chuckle.
“Yes, but—” Vance gasped, disheartened.
“Well, what?”
“I mean, how does the thing germinate, spread itself above and below the surface? There’s something so treelike, so preordained. … I came across something in Blake the other day that made me think of it: ‘Man is born like a garden ready planted and sown. This world is too poor to produce one seed.’ That just hints at the mystery … but I can’t make it all out—can you?”
Blemer gave his jovial laugh. “Never tried to,” he said, reaching with a plump hairy hand for a passing cocktail. And after a moment he added good-naturedly: “See here, young man, don’t you go and read the Prophets and get self-conscious about your work, or you’ll take to writing fifty pages about a crack in the ceiling—and then the Coconut Tree’ll grovel before you, but your sales’ll go down with a rush.” No, evidently Blemer did not know how or why he wrote his novels, and could not even conceive the existence of the problems which were Vance’s passion and despair. … The footfall of Destiny would never keep him from his sleep … and yet he had written a good book.
But if Vance was disappointed by his talks with the literary lights, he was stimulated by the atmosphere at the Tarrants’, by the flattering notice of these enviable people who spoke freely and familiarly of so many things he was aching to know about, who took for granted that you had seen the last play at the Yiddish Theatre, had heard the new Stravinsky symphony, had visited the Czechoslovakian painters’ show, and were eager to discuss the Tomorrowists’ coming exhibition, at which they all knew that Vance’s bust by Rebecca Stram was to be shown.
The air was electrical, if not with ideas at least with phrases and allusions which led up to them. To Vance the background of education and travel implied by this quick flashing back and forth of names, anecdotes, references to unseen places, unheard-of people, works of art, books, plays, was intoxicating in its manifold suggestions. Even more so, perhaps, was the sense of the unhampered lives of the people who seemed so easily able to satisfy all their curiosities—people who took as a matter of course even the noble range of books in the Tarrant library, the deep easy chairs, the skilfully disposed lamps and flowers, and the music which, toward the end of the evening, a dreaming hand drew from the Steinway in its shadowy corner. As in every one of his brief contacts with this world, Vance felt a million currents of beauty and vitality pouring
