I left the hospital before Peter. My injuries, indeed, were of so slight a nature that I was confined only a few days, while his were so serious that the physicians despaired of his life, and he was forced to keep to his bed for several months. Following my early discharge, I made daily visits of inquiry to the hospital but it was not until June, 1914, that I was assured that he would recover. With this good news, came a certain sense of relief, and I made plans for another voyage to Europe. The incidents of that voyage—I was in Paris at the beginning of the war—are of sufficient interest so that I may recount them in another place, but they bear no relationship to the present narrative.
Subsequent to his recovery, I have learned since from the physician who attended him during his protracted illness, Peter returned to Toledo with his mother. It is probable that he made further literary experiments. It has even occurred to me that the pivot of his being, the explanation for his whole course of action may have escaped me. Although, from the hour of our first meeting, my interest in and my affection for Peter were deep, assuredly I never imagined that I should be writing down the history of his life. For the greater part of the term of our friendship, indeed, I was a writer only in a very modest sense. I was not on the lookout for the kind of "copy" his affairs and ideas offered, for at this period I was a reporter of music and the drama. Ewen later, when I began to set down my thoughts in what is euphemistically called a more permanent form, the notion of using Peter as a subject never presented itself to me, and if he had asked me to do so during his lifetime, urging me to put aside a pile of unfinished work in his behalf, the request would have astounded me. I made, therefore, no special effort to ferret out his secrets. When it was convenient for both of us we met and, largely by accident, I was a silent witness of three of his literary experiments. How many others he may have made, I do not know. It is possible that at some time or other he may have been inspired by the religious school, the Tolstoy theory of art, or he may have followed the sensuous lead of Gozzoli and Debussy, artists whose work intrigued him enormously, or in another æsthetic avatar, he may have believed that true art is degrading or coldly classic. There is even the possibility, by no means remote, that he may have fallen under the influence of the small-town and psychoanalytic schools. Except in a general way, however, in a conversation which I shall record at the end of this chapter, he never mentioned further experiments. It is possible that others may have evidence bearing on this point. Martha Baker might make a good witness, but she died in 1911. Mrs. Whiffle knew nothing of any importance whatever about her son. Since his death I have interrogated her in vain. She was, indeed, very much astonished at the little I told her and she will read this book, I think, with real amazement. The report of Clara Barnes, too, was negligible. Edith Dale has supplied me with a few facts which I have inserted where they chronologically belong. Most of my other friends, Phillip Moeller, Alfred Knopf, Edna Kenton, Pitts Sanborn, Avery Hopwood, Freddo Sides, Joseph Hergesheimer, even my wife, Fania Marinoff, never met Peter. Louis Sherwin walked up Fifth Avenue with us one day, but Peter was unusually silent and after he had left us at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street, Louis was not sufficiently curious to ask any questions concerning him. I doubt if Louis could even recall the incident today. I have inserted advertisements in the Paris, New York, and Toledo newspapers, begging any one with pertinent facts or letters in his possession to communicate with me, but as yet I have received no replies. I have never seen a photograph of my friend and his mother informs me that she doubts if he ever sat for one.
The record, therefore, of Peter's literary life, at the conclusion of this chapter, will be as complete as I can make it. I have tried to set down the truth as I saw it, leaving out nothing that I remember, even at the danger of becoming unnecessarily garrulous and rambling. I have written down all I know because, after all, I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted, and some one else, with the facts before him, may be better able to reconstruct the picture of this strange life.
Our next meeting occurred in January, 1919, and his first remark was, Thank God, you're not shot up! From that time, until the day of his death, nearly a year later, Peter never mentioned the war to me again, although I saw him frequently enough, nor did he speak of his writing, save once, on an occasion which shall be reported in its proper place.
When we came together for the first time, after the long interval—he had just returned to New York from Florida—I was surprised at and even shocked by the purely physical change, which, to be sure, had a psychical significance, for his face had grown more spiritual. He had always been slender, but now he was thin, almost emaciated. To describe his appearance a little later, I might use the word haggard. His coat, which once fitted his figure snugly, rather hung from his shoulders. There were white patches in the blue-black of his hair, deep circles under his eyes, and hollows in his cheeks. But his eyes, themselves, seemed to shine with a new light, seemed to see something which I could not even imagine. He had rid himself of many excrescences and externalities, the purely adscititious qualities, charming though they might be, which masked his personality. He had, indeed, discovered himself, although I never knew how clearly until our last conversation. Peter, without appearing to be particularly aware of it, had become a mystic. His emancipation had come through suffering. He was quieter, less restless, less excitable, still enthusiastic, but with more balance, more—I do not wish to be misunderstood—irony. He had found life very satisfying and very hard, very sweet, with something of a bitter after-taste. He seemed almost holy to me, reminding me at times of those ascetic monks who crawl two thousand miles on their bellies to worship at some shrine, or of those Hindu fakirs who lie in one tortured position for years, their bodies slowly consuming, while their souls gain fire. That he was ill, very ill, I surmised at once, although, like everything else I have noted here, this was an impression. He made no admissions, never spoke of his malady; indeed, for Peter, he talked astonishingly little about himself. He was pathetic and at the same time an object for admiration.
Afterwards, I learned from his mother that he suffered from an incurable disease, the disease that killed him late in 1919. But he never spoke of this to me and he never complained, unless his occasional confession that he was tired might be construed as a complaint.
We had fine times together, of a new kind. The tables, in a sense, were turned. I had become the writer, however humble, and his ambition had not been realized. His sympathy with my work, with what I was trying to do, which he saw almost immediately, saw, indeed, in the beginning, more clearly than I saw it myself, was complete. He was never weary of talking about it, at any rate he never showed me that he was weary, and naturally this drew us very closely together, for an author is fondest of those men who talk the most about his work. But this is not the place to publish his opinions of me, although some of them were so curious and faro seeing—they were not all flattering by any means—that I shall undoubtedly recur to them in my autobiography. Fortunately for me, his sympathy grew as my work progressed, and it seemed amazing to me later, looking over the book after a period of years, that he had found anything pleasant to report of Music After the Great War. He had, indeed, seen something in it, and when I recalled what he had said it was impossible to feel that he had overstated the case in the interests of friendship. He had seen the germ, the root of what was to come; he had seen a suggestion of a style, undeveloped ideas, which he felt would later be developed, as indeed, to a limited extent, they were. His plea, to put it concisely, had been for a more personal expression. He was always asking me, after this or that remark or anecdote in conversation, why I did not write it, just as I had said it or told it, and it was a great pleasure for him to perceive in The Merry-Go-Round and In the Garret (of which he read the proofs just before his death) some signs of growth in this direction.
You are becoming freer, he would say. You are loosening your tongue; your heart is beating faster. In time you may liberate those subconscious ideas which are entangled in your very being. It is only your conscious self that prevents you from becoming a really interesting writer. Let that once be as free as the air and the other will be free too. You must walk boldly and proudly and without fear. You must search the heart; the mind is negligible in literature as in all other forms of art. Try to write just as you feel and you will discover that your feeling is greater than your knowledge of it. The words that appear on the paper will at first seem strange to you, almost like hermetic symbols, 'and it is possible that in the course of time you will be able to say so much that you yourself will not understand what you are writing. Do not be afraid of that. Let the current flow freely when you feel that it is the true current that is flowing.
That is the lesson, he continued, that the creative or critical artist can learn from the interpreter, the lesson of the uses of personality. The great interpreters, Rachel, Ristori, Mrs. Siddons, Duse, Bernhardt, Réjane, Ysaye, Paderewski, and Mary Garden are all big, vibrant personalities, that the deeper thing, call it God, call it IT, flows through and permeates. You may not believe this now, but I know it is true, and you will know it yourself some day. And if you cannot release your personality, what you write, though it be engraved in letters an inch deep on stones weighing many tons, will lie like snow in the street to be melted away by the first rain.
We talked of other writers. Peter drew my attention, for instance, to the work of Cunninghame Graham, that strange Scotch mystic who turned his back on civilization to write of the pampas, the arid plains of Africa, India, and Spain, only to find irony everywhere in every work of man. But, observed Peter, he could not hate civilization so intensely had he not lived in it. It is all very well to kick over the ladder after you have climbed it and set foot on the balcony. Like all lovers of the simple life, he is very complex. And we discussed James Branch Cabell, who, Peter told me, was originally a "romantic." He wrote of knights and ladyes and palfreys with sympathetic picturesqueness. Of late, however, continued Peter, he, too, seems to have turned over in bed. Romanticism still appears in his work but it is undermined by a biting and disturbing irony. He asks: Are any of the manifestations of modern civilization worthy of admiration? and like Graham, he seems to answer, No. It is possible that the public disregard for his earlier and simpler manner may have produced this metamorphosis. Many a man has become bitter with less reason. Then he spoke of the attributed influence of Maurice Hewlett and Anatole France on the work of Cabell. Bernard Shaw, said Peter, once lost all patience with those critics who insisted that he was a son of Ibsen and Nietzsche and asserted that it was their ignorance that prevented them from realizing the debt he owed to Samuel Butler. Cabell might, with justice, voice a similar complaint, for if he ever had a literary father it was Arthur Machen. In that author'z The Chronicle of Clemendy, issued in 1888, may be discovered the same confusion of irony and romance that is to be traced in the work of Cabell. Moreover, like The Soul of Melicent, the book purports to be a translation from an old chronicle. I might further speak of the relationship between Hieroglyphics and Beyond Life, The Hill of Dreams and The Cream of the Jest, although in each case the treatment and the style are entirely dissimilar. Machen even preceded Cabell in his use of unfavourable reviews (Vide the advertising pages of Beyond Life) in his preface to the 1916 edition of The Great God Pan. Perhaps, added Peter, Cabell has also read Herman Melville's Mardi to some advantage. But he is no plagiarist; I am speaking from the point of view of literary genealogy. Peter, at my instigation, read a novel or two of Joseph Hergesheimer's. Linda Condon, he reported, is as evanescent as the spirit of God. Only those who have encountered Lady Beauty among the juniper trees in the early dawn will feel this book, and only those who feel will understand. For Hergesheimer has worked a miracle; he has brought marble to life, created a vibrant chastity. He has described ice in words of flame!
One night, quite accidentally, we saw the name of Clara Barnes on a poster in front of the Metropolitan Opera House. She was singing the rele of the Priestess in Aida. We purchased two general admission tickets and slipped in to hear her. The Priestess, those who have heard Aida will remem' ber, officiates in the temple scene of the first act but, like the impersonator of the Bird in Siegfried, she is invisible. Clara's voice sounded tired and worn, as indeed, it should sound after those long years of study.
We must go back to see her, Peter urged.
We found a changed and broken Clara. She was dressing alone, but on the third floor, and the odour of Cœur de Jeannette persisted. She burst into tears when she saw us.
I can't do it, she moaned. Why did you ever come? I can't doit. I can only sing with my music in front of me. I shall never be able to sing a part which appears and there are so few rôles in opera, which permit you to sing back of the scenery! I can't remember. Now she was wailing. As fast as I learn one part I forget another.
As we walked away on Fortieth Street, Peter began to relate an incident he had once read in Plutarch: There was a certain magpie, belonging to a barber at Rome, which could imitate any word he heard. One day, a company of passing soldiers blew their trumpets before the shop and for the next forty-eight hours the magpie was not only mute but also pensive and melancholy. It was generally believed that the sound of the trumpets had stunned the bird and deprived it of both voice and hearing. It appeared, however, that this was not the case for, says Plutarch, the bird had all the time been occupied in profound meditation, studying how to imitate the sound of the trumpets, and when at last master of the trick, he astonished his friends by a perfect imitation of the flourish on those instruments it had heard, observing with the greatest exactness all the repetitions, stops, and changes. This lesson, however, had apparently been learned at the cost of the whole of its intelligence, for it made it forget everything it had learned before.
We visited 'many out-of-the-way places together, Peter and I, the Negro dance-halls near 135th Street, and the Italian and the Yiddish Theatres. Peter once remarked that he enjoyed plays more in a foreign language with which he was unfamiliar. What he could imagine of plot and dialogue far transcended the actuality. We often dined at a comfortable Italian restaurant on Spring Street, on the walls of which birds fluttered through frescoed arbours, trailing with fruits and flowers, and where the spaghetti was too good to be eaten without prayer. In an uptown café, we had a strange adventure with a Frenchwoman, La Tigresse, which I have related elsewhere.[1] Peter refused, in these last months, to go to concerts, especially in Carnegie Hall, the atmosphere of which, he said, made it impossible to listen to music. The bare walls, the bright lights, the sweating conductors, and the silly, gaping crowd oppressed his spirit. He envied Ludwig of Bavaria who could listen to music in a darkened hall in which he was the only auditor. Conditions were more favourable in the moving picture theatres. The bands, perhaps, did not play so well but the auditoriums were more subtly lighted, so that the figures of the audience did not intrude.
Peter was more of a recluse than ever. It had been impossible to persuade him to meet anybody since the Edith Dale days (Edith herself was now living in New Mexico and, owing to a slight misunderstanding, I had not seen or heard from her in five years). He was even sensitive and morbid on the subject. He made me promise, as a matter of fact, after the Louis Sherwin episode, that in case we encountered any of my friends in a restaurant or at a theatre, I would not introduce him. There was, I assured myself, a good reason for this. In these last days, Peter faded out in a crowd. He lost a good deal of his personality even in the presence of a third person. I begged him to go with me to Florine Stettheimer's studio to see her pictures, which I was sure would please him, but he refused. He liked to stroll around with me in odd places and he read and played the piano a good deal, but he seemed to have few other interests. He was absolutely ignorant of such matters as politics and government. He never voted and I have heard him refer to the president, and not in jest, as Abraham Wilson. Sports did not amuse him either, but occasionally we went together to see the wrestlers at Madison Square Garden, especially when Stanislaus Zbyszko was announced to appear.
He never went to Europe again although, shortly before he died, he talked of a voyage to Spain. He visited his mother at Toledo several times and he had planned a trip to Florida, the climate of which he found particularly soothing to his malady, in January, 1920. Occasionally he just disappeared, returning again, somewhat mysteriously, without any explanation, without, indeed, any admission that he had been away. I knew him too well to ask questions and, to say truth, there was something very sweet about these little mystifications. Privacy was so dear a privilege to him that even with his nearest friends, of which, assuredly, I was one, perhaps the nearest in this last year, it was essential to his happiness that he should maintain a certain restraint, a certain reserve, I had almost said, a certain mystery, but, curiously, there was nothing theatrical about Peter, even in his most theatrical performances. Just as by the fineness of his taste, Rembrandt softened the hideousness of a lurid subject in his Anatomy Lesson, so the exquisite charm of Peter's personality overcame any possible repugnance to anything he might choose to do.
During this last year in New York, he lived in an old house on Beekman Place, that splendid row, just two blocks long, of mellow brown-stone dwellings, with flights of steps, which back upon the East River at Fiftieth Street. We often sat on the balcony, looking over towards the span of the Queensboro Bridge, Blackwell's Island, with its turreted and battlemented castles so like the Mysteries of Udolpho, watching the gulls sweep over the surface of the water, the smoke wreathe from the factory chimneys, and the craft on the river, with cargoes "of Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, fire-wood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays," of the city, but seemingly away from it, with our backs to it, literally, indeed, while life ebbed by. And, at my side, too, I saw it slowly ebbing.
The interior, one of those fine old New York interiors, with high ceilings, bordered with plaster guilloches, white carved marble fire-places, sliding doors, and huge crystal chandeliers, whose pendants jingled when some one walked on the floor above, it had been his happy fancy to decorate in the early Victorian manner. The furniture, to be sure, was mostly Chippendale, Sheraton, and Heppelwhite, but there were also heavy carved walnut chairs, upholstered in lovely figured glazed chintzes. The mirrors were framed in four inches of purple and red engraved glass. The highboys were littered with ornaments, Staffordshire china dogs and shepherdesses, splendid feather and shell flowers, and ormolu clocks stood under glass bells on the mantelshelves. He had found a couple of rather worn, but still handsome, Aubusson carpets, with garlands of huge roses of a pale blush colour. One of these was in the drawing-room, the other in the library. An old sampler screen framed the fire-place in the latter room. The books were curious. Peter was now interested in byways of literature. I remember such volumes as Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig, Paterne Berrichon's Life of Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, with music by Claude Terrasse, Jean Lorrain's La Maison Philibert, Richard Garnett's The Twilight of the Gods, the Comte de Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, Leolinus Siluriensis's The Anatomy of Tobacco, Binet-Valmer's Lucien, Haldane MacFall's The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer, James Morier's Hajji Baba of Ispahan, Robert Hugh Benson's The Necromancers. André Gide's L'Immoraliste, and various volumes by Guillaume Apollinaire. The walls of the drawing-room were hung with a French eighteenth century, rose cotton print, the design of which showed, on one side, Cupid rowing lustily, while listless old Time sat in the bow of the boat, with the motto: l'Amour fait passer le Temps; and, on the other side, Time propelling the boat, while a saddened Cupid, his face buried in his hands, was the downcast passenger, with the motto: Le Temps fait passer l'Amour. In the centre, beside a charming Greek temple, a nymph toyed with a spaniel, and the motto read: l'Amitié ne craint pas le Temps! There were, therefore, no pictures on these walls, but, elsewhere, where the walls were white, or where they were hung with rich crimson Roman damask, as in the library, there were a few steel engravings and mezzotints and an early nineteenth century lithograph or two. Over his night-table, at the side of his bed, he had pinned a photograph of a detail of Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in the Palazzo Riccardi, the detail of the three youths, and there was also a large framed photograph of Cranach's naïve Venus in this room. The piano stood in the drawing-room, near one of the windows, looking over the river. It was always open and the rack was littered with modern music: John Ireland's London Pieces, Béla Bartok's Three Burlesques, Gerald Tyrwhitt's Three Little Funeral Marches, music by Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Zoltan Kodaly. I remember one day he asked me to look at Theodor Streiche's Spriiche and Gedichte, with words by Richard Dehmel, the second of which he averred was the shortest song ever composed, consisting of but four bars.
It was a lovely house to lie about in, to talk in, to dream, in. It was restful and quaint, offering a pleasing contrast to the eccentric modernity of the other humes I visited at this period. There was no electricity. The chandeliers burned gas but the favourite illumination was afforded by lamps with round glass globes of various colours, through which the soft light filtered.
On an afternoon in December, 1919, we were lounging in the drawing-room. Peter had curled himself into a sort of knot on a broad sofa with three carved walnut curves at the back. He had spread a knitted coverlet over his feet, for it was a little chilly, in spite of the fact that a wood fire was smouldering in the grate. On the table before him there was a highball glass, half-full of the proper ingredients, and sprawling beside him on the sofa, a magnificent blue Persian cat, which he called Chalcedony. George Moore and George Sand had long since perished of old age and Lou Matagot had been a victim of the laboratory explosion. There was a certain melancholy implicit in their absence. Nothing reminds us so irresistibly of the passing of time as the short age allotted on this earth to our dear cats. The pinchbottle and several bottles of soda, a bowl of cracked ice and a bowl of Fatima cigarettes, which both of us had grown to prefer, reposed conveniently on the table between us. I remember the increasing silence as the twilight fell and, how, at last, Peter began to talk.
I wanted to do so much, he began, and for a long time, during these past four years, it seemed to me that I had done so little. I remembered Zola's phrase: Mon œuvre, alors, c'était l'Arche, l'Arche immense! Helas! ce que l'on rêve, et puis, après, ce que l'on exécute! At the beginning of the war, I was so very miserable, so unhappy, so alone. It seemed to me that I had been a complete failure, that I had accomplished nothing. . . .
I must have raised a protesting hand, for he interjected, No, don't interrupt me. I am not complaining or asking for sympathy. I am explaining how I felt, not how I feel. I never spoke of it, of course, while I felt that way. I am only talking about it now because I have gone beyond, because, in a sense, at least, I understand. I am happier now, happier, perhaps, than I have ever been before, for in the past four years I have left behind my restlessness and achieved something like peace. I no longer feel that I have failed. Of course, I have failed, but that was because I was attempting to do something that I had no right to attempt. My cats should have taught me that. It is necessary to do only what one must, what one is forced by nature to do. Samuel Butler has said, and how truly. Nothing is worth doing or well done which is not done fairly easily, and some little deficiency of effort is more pardonable than any perceptible ex, cess, for virtue has ever erred rather on the side of self-indulgence than of asceticism. . . . And so, in the end, and after all I am still young, I have learned that I cannot write. Is a little experience too much to pay for learning to know oneself? I think not, and that is why, now, I feel more like a success than a failure, because, finally, I do know myself, and because I have left no bad work. I can say with Macaulay: There are no lees in my wine. It is all the cream of the bottle. . . .
I have tried to do too much and that is why, perhaps, I have done nothing. I wanted to write a new Comédie Humaine. Instead, I have lived it. And now, I have come to the conclusion that that was all there was for me to do, just to live, as fully as possible. Sympathy and enthusiasm are something, after all. I must have communicated at least a shadow of these to the ideas and objects and people on whom I have bestowed them. Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes—now, don't laugh at what I am going to say, because it is true when you understand it—are just so much more precious because I have loved them. They will give more people pleasure because I have given them my affection. This is something; indeed, next to the creation of the frescoes, perhaps it is everything.
There are two ways of becoming a writer: one, the cheaper, is to discover a formula: that is black magic; the other is to have the urge: that is white magic. I have never been able to discover a new formula; I have worked with the formule of other artists, only to see the cryptogram blot and blur under my hands. My manipulation of the mystic figures and the cabalistic secrets has never raised the right demons. . . .
What is there anyway? All expression lifts us further away from simplicity and causes unhappiness. . . . Material, scientific expression: flyingmachines, moving pictures, and telegraphy are simply disturbing. They add nothing valuable to human life. Any novelist who invokes the aid of science dies a swift death. Zola's novels are stuffed with theories of heredity but ideas about heredity change every day. The current craze is for psychoanalytic novels, which are not half so psychoanalytic as the books of Jane Austen, as posterity will find out for itself. . . . Art in this epoch is too self-conscious. Everybody is striving to do something new, instead of writing or painting or composing what is natural. . . . Even the disturbing irony and pessimism of Anatole France and Thomas Hardy add nothing to life. We shall be happier if we go back to the beginning. . . .
The great secret is the cat's secret, to do what one has to do. Let IT do it, let IT, whatever IT is, low through you. The writer should say, with Sancho Panza, De mis viñas vengo, no sé nada. Labanne, in Le Chat Maigre, cries: Art declines in the degree that thought develops. In Greece, in the time of Aristotle, there were only sculptors. Artists are inferior beings. They resemble pregnant women; they give birth without knowing why. And again, to quote my beloved Samuel Butler, No one understands how anything is done unless he can do it himself; and even then he probably does not know how he has done it. I might add that very often he does not know what he has done. Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy to ridicule his personal enemies. Dickens began Pickwick to give the artist, Seymour, an opportunity to draw Cockney sportsmen and he concluded it in high moral fervour, with the ambition to wipe out bribery and corruption at elections, unscrupulous attorneys, and Fleet Prison. To Cervantes, Don Quixote was a burlesque of the high-flown romantic literature of his period. To the world, it is one of the great romances of all time. . . .
You see, I am beginning to understand why I haven't written, why I cannot write. . . . That is why I am unhappy no longer, why I am more peaceful, why I do not suffer. But, and now a strange, quavering note sounded in his voice, if I had found a new formula, who knows what I might have done?
He turned his face away from me towards the back of the sofa. The cat was purring heavily, almost like the croupy breathing of a child. It was quite dark outside, and there was no light in the room save for the flicker that came from the dying embers. There was a long silence. In trying afterwards to reckon its length, I judged it must have been fully half an hour before I spoke. It was a noise that broke the charm of the stillness. The dead end of the log split over the andirons and fell into the grate.
Peter, I began.
He did not move.
Peter. . . . I rose and bent over him. The clock struck six. The cat stirred uneasily, rose, stretched his enormous length; then gave a faint but alarmingly portentous mew and leaped from the couch.
Peter!
He did not answer me.
April 29, 1921
New York.
The end