Vance signed that he saw: somehow he liked that definition of poetry, even at the cost of having to sacrifice his own to it.
“How about prose; never written any?”
The unexpectedness of the question jerked Vance out of the clouds. “I—I’m writing a novel.”
“Hullo—are you? What about.”
“About life in New York.”
“I thought so,” said Frenside grimly. There was another silence. “Never tried an article or a short story?”
“Never anything—good enough.” Vance got wearily to his feet. “I guess I’ll take these things and burn ’em,” he said, putting out his hands for the poems.
“No, don’t do that. Keep ’em, and reread ’em in a couple of years. That requires more courage, and courage is about the most useful thing in an artist’s outfit.” Vance was beginning to think it must be.
“Well,” Frenside continued, “if ever you try a short essay, or a story, bring them along. Don’t forget.” He smiled a little, as if to bind up the wounds he had inflicted. “You never can tell,” he concluded cryptically.
He held out his hand. The interview was over.
The interview was over; but when Vance reached the foot of the stairs he perceived its repercussions were only just beginning. He wandered on through a street or two, found himself in Union Square, and sat down under the meagre shade of its starved trees. The other people on the bench with him, listless sodden-looking men, collarless and perspiring, seemed like companions in misery who had preceded him a flight or two down the steep stairs of failure. Perhaps they too—or at least one among them—had tried for the impossible, as he was doing. He shivered a little at the sense of such kinship.
But gradually a luminous point emerged out of the enveloping fog. “Newspapers won’t help you,” Frenside had said; and Vance was suddenly aware that the dictum chimed with his own deep inward conviction. It had always seemed to him that newspapers, as he knew them, were totally unrelated to literature as he had always dreamed of it, and as he now knew that it existed. Yet was Frenside right—was he himself right? Everyone always said: “Nothing like newspaper work as a training if a fellow wants to write. Teaches you not to waste time, to go straight to the point, to put things in a bright snappy way that won’t bore people. …” Ugh, how he hated all the qualities thus commended! What a newspaper man like Bunty Hayes, for instance, would have called wasting time seemed to Vance one of the fundamental needs of the creative process. He could not imagine putting down on paper anything that had not risen slowly to the verge of his consciousness, that had not to be fished for and hauled up with infinite precautions from some secret pool of being as to which he knew nothing as yet but the occasional leap, deep down in it, of something alive but invisible. … And this Frenside, whom he did not like, whose manner offended him, whose views awoke his instinctive antagonism, had yet, in that one phrase, summed up his own obscure feeling. “Buckle down and write”; yes—he had always felt that to be the only way. But to do it a fellow must be quiet, must have enough to eat, must be fairly free from material anxieties; and how was he to accomplish that? He didn’t know—but he was so grateful for the key word furnished by Frenside that nothing else seemed much to matter; not the disparagement of his poems, the shrug at his novel, or the assumption that his aspirations were bound to be exactly like those of any other young fool who presented himself to an editor with a first bundle of manuscript. He walked slowly back to his rooming house, uncertain what to do next, but feeling that at least the darkness was not total.
His first impulse was to go through all his accumulated papers, to resee them in this new faint ray. He skimmed over the pages of his novel, found it shapeless, helpless—more so even than he had feared—and remembered another tonic phrase of Frenside’s: the curt “I thought so,” in reply to Vance’s confession that he was attempting a novel, and then the injunction: “If ever you try a short story send it along.” What a pity he hadn’t tried one, instead of this impossible unwieldy novel! And then, as he sat there, fumbling with fragments of dead prose, his hand lit on a dozen typed pages, clipped together, and a little frayed at the edges. He’d forgotten he had that with him. … “One Day”—the thing he’d written in a kind of frenzy, after his fever, when he couldn’t find his father’s revolver. How long ago all that seemed! There had been weeks when he couldn’t have looked at those pages, could barely have touched them; and now he was turning on them an eye almost as objective as George Frenside’s. …
You couldn’t call it a short story, he supposed. It was just the headlong outpouring of what he had felt and suffered during those few hours—like a fellow who’d been knocked down and run over trying to tell you what it felt like. That was all. But somehow the sentences moved, the words seemed alive—if he’d had to do it again he didn’t know that he’d have done it very differently. It didn’t amount to much, but still he felt as if it was his own, not the work of two or three other fellows, like the novel. A sudden impulse seized him: he wrapped up the manuscript, addressed it to Frenside, put his own name and address below, and carried the packet back to the office of The Hour. He hadn’t the courage to go in with it, but slipped it into the letter box and walked away.
Three days afterward—the last but two of his week—he came in one afternoon and found that a letter had been pushed under his door. On the corner of
