You Can't Go Home Again (94 page)

One of the most memorable events-of my college career occurred one day at noon when I was walking up a campus path and encountered, coming towards me, one of my classmates whose name was D. T. Jones. D. T.—sometimes known more familiarly as Delirium Tremens—was also a philosopher. And the moment I saw him approaching I knew that D. T. was in the throes. He came from a family of Primitive Baptists, and he was red-haired, gaunt, and angular, and now as he came towards me everything about him—hair, eyebrows, eyelids, eyes, freckles, even his large and bony hands—shone forth in the sunlight with an excessive and almost terrifying redness.

He was coming up from a noble wood in which we held initiations and took our Sunday strolls. It was also the sacred grove to which we resorted, alone, when we were struggling with the problems of philosophy. It was where we went when we were going through what was known as “the wilderness experience”, and it was the place from which, when “the wilderness experience” was done, we triumphantly emerged.

D. T. was emerging now. He had been there, he told me later, all night long. His “wilderness experience” had been a good one. He came bounding towards me like a kangaroo, leaping into the air at intervals, and the only words he said were:

“I’ve had a Concept!”

Then, leaving me stunned and leaning for support against an ancient tree, he passed on down the path, high-bounding every step or two, to carry the great news to the whole brotherhood.

And still I do not laugh at it. We took philosophy seriously in those days, and each of us had his own. And, together, we had our own “Philosopher”. He was a venerable and noble-hearted man—one of those great figures which almost every college had some years ago, and which I hope they still have. For half a century he had been a dominant figure in the life of the entire state. In his teaching he was a Hegelian. The process of his scholastic reasoning was intricate: it came up out of ancient Greece and followed through the whole series of “developments” down to Hegel. After Hegel—well, he did not supply the answer. But it didn’t matter, for
after
Hegel we had
him
—he was our own Old Man.

Our Philosopher’s “philosophy”, as I look back upon it, does not seem important now. It seems to have been, at best, a tortuous and patched-up scheme of other men’s ideas. But what
was
important was the man himself. He was a great teacher, and what he did for us, and for others before us for fifty years, was not to give us his “philosophy”—but to communicate to us his own alertness, his originality, his power to think. He was a vital force because he supplied to many of us, for the first time in our lives, the inspiration of a questioning intelligence. He taught us not to be afraid to think, to question; he taught us to examine critically the most sacrosanct of our native prejudices and superstitions. So of course, throughout the state, the bigots hated him; but his own students worshipped him to idolatry. And the seed he planted grew—long after Hegel, “concepts”, “moments of negation”, and all the rest of it had vanished into the limbo of forgotten things.

It was at about this time that I began to write. I was editor of the college newspaper, and I wrote stories and poems for our literary magazine,
The Burr
, of which I was also a member of the editorial staff. The war was going on then. I was too young to be in service, but my first literary attempts may be traced to the patriotic inspiration of the war. I remember one poem (my first, I believe) which was aimed directly at the luckless head of Kaiser Bill. It was called, defiantly: “The Gauntlet”, and was written in the style and meter of “The Present Crisis”, by James Russell Lowell. I remember, too, that it took a high note from the very beginning. The poet, it is said, is the prophet and the bard—the awakened tongue of all his folk. I was all of that. In the name of embattled democracy I let the Kaiser have the works. And I remember two lines in particular that seemed to me to ring out with the very voice of outraged Freedom:

“Thou hast given us the challenge— Pay, thou dog, the cost, and go!”

I remember these lines because they were the occasion of an editorial argument. The more conservative members of the magazine’s staff felt that the epithet, “thou dog”, was too strong—not that the Kaiser didn’t deserve it, but that it jarred rudely upon the high moral elevation of the poem and upon the literary quality of
The Burr
. Over my vigorous protest, and without regard for the meter of the line, the two words were deleted.

Another poem that I wrote that year was a cheerful one about a peasant in a Flanders field who ploughed up a skull, and then went on quietly about his work while the great guns blasted away and “the grinning skull its grisly secret kept”. I also remember a short story—my first—which was called “A Winchester of Virginia”, and was about the recreant son of an old family who recovered his courage and vindicated his tarnished honour in the charge over the top that took his life. These, so far as I can recall them, were my first creative efforts; it will be seen what an important part the last war played in them.

I mention all this merely to fix the point from which I started. This was the beginning of the road.

In recent years there have been several attempts to explain what has happened to me since that time in terms of something that happened to me in college. I believe, Fox, that I never told you about that episode. Not that I was ashamed of my part in it or was afraid to talk about it. It just never came up; in a way, I had forgotten it. But now, at this moment of our parting, I think I had better speak of it, because it is vitally important to me to make one thing clear: that I am not the victim or the embittered martyr of anything that ever happened in the past. Oh, yes, there was a time, as you well know, when I was full of bitterness. There was a time when I felt that life had betrayed me. But that preciousness is gone now, and with it has gone my bitterness. This is the simple truth.

But to get back to this episode I spoke of:

As you know, Fox, when my first book was published, feeling ran high against me at home. Then it was that an effort was made to explain what was called the “bitterness” of the book in terms of my disfranchisement when I was at college. Now, the Pine Rock case is famous in Old Catawba, but the names of its chief actors had been almost forgotten when the book appeared. Then, because I was one of them, people began to talk about the case again, and the whole horrible tragedy was exhumed.

It was recalled how five of us (and God have mercy on the souls of those others who kept silent at the time) had taken our classmate Bell out to the playing-field one night, blindfolded him, and compelled him to dance upon a barrel. It was recalled how he stumbled and toppled from the barrel, fell on a broken bottle-neck, severed his jugular, and bled to death within five minutes. It was recalled, then, how the five of us—myself and Randy Shepperton, John Brackett, Stowell Anderson, and Dick Carr—were expelled, brought up for trial, released in the custody of our parents or nearest relatives, and deprived of the rights of citizenship by legislative act.

All this was true. But the construction which people put upon it when the book appeared was false. None of us, I think, was “ruined” and “embittered”—and our later records prove that we were not. There is no doubt that the tragic consequences of our act (and of the five who suffered disfranchisement, at least three—I will not say which three—were present only in the group of onlookers) left its dark and terrible imprint on our young lives. But, as Randy whispered to me on that dreadful night, as we stood there white-faced and helpless in the moonlight, watching that poor boy as he bled to death:

“We’re not guilty of anything—except of being plain damned fools!”

That was the way we felt that night—all of us—as we knelt, sick with horror, around the figure of that dying boy. And I know that was the way Bell felt, too, for he saw the terror and remorse in our white faces and, dying though he was, he tried to smile and speak to us. The words would not come, but all of us knew that if he could have spoken he would have said that he was sorry for us—that he knew there was no evil in us—no evil but our own stupidity.

We had killed the boy—our thoughtless folly killed him—but with his dying breath that would have been his only judgment on us. And we broke the heart of Plato Grant, our Old Man, our own Philosopher; but all
he
said to us that night as he turned towards us from poor Bell was, quietly:

“My God, boys, what have you done?”

And that was all. Even Bell’s father said no more to us. And after the first storm had passed, the cry of outrage and indignation that went up throughout the state—that was our punishment: the knowledge of the
Done
inexorable, the merciless insistence in our souls of that fatal and irrevocable “Why?”

Swiftly people came to see and feel this, too. The first outburst of wrath that resulted in our disfranchisement was quickly over. Even out citizenship was quietly restored to us within three years. (As for myself, I was only eighteen when it happened, and cannot even be said to have missed a legal vote because of it.) Each of us was allowed to return to college the next year after our expulsion, and finish the full course. The sentiment of people everywhere not only softened: the verdict quickly became: “They didn’t mean to do it. They were just damned fools.” Later, by the time of our re-enfranchisement, public sentiment actually became liberal in its tone of pardon. “They’ve been punished enough,” people said by then. “They were just kids—and they didn’t mean to do it. Besides”—this became an argument in our favour—“it cost a life, but it killed hazing in the state.”

As to the later record of the five—Randy Shepperton is dead now; but John Brackett, Stowell Anderson, and Dick Carr have all enjoyed a more than average measure of success in their communities. When I last saw Stowell Anderson—he is an attorney, and the political leader of his district—he told me quietly that, far from having been damaged in his career by the experience, he thought he had been helped.

“People,” he said, “are willing to forget a past mistake if they see you’re regular. They’re not only willing to forgive—on the whole, I think they’re even glad to give a helping hand.”

“If they see you’re regular!” Without commenting on the meanings of that, I think it sums up the matter in a nutshell. There has not only been no question since about the “regularity” of the other three—Brackett, Anderson, and Carr—but I think any natural tendencies they may have had towards regularity were intensified by their participation in the Pine Rock case. I believe, too, that the denunciations of my “irregularity”, following the publication of my first book, might have been even more virulent and vicious than they were had it not been for the respectable fellowship of Brackett, Anderson, and Carr.

Well, Fox, I have taken the trouble to tell you about this unrecorded incident in my life because I thought you might hear of it some time and might possibly put a strained construction on it. There were those in Libya Hill who thought it offered a reasonable and complete explanation of what had happened to me when I wrote the book. So, too, you might come to believe that it twisted and embittered me and somehow had something to do with what has happened now. With nine-tenths of your mind and heart you understand perfectly why I have to leave you, but with that remaining tenth you are still puzzled, and I can see that you will go on wondering about it. You have, from time to time, tried to reason with me about what you called, half seriously, my “radicalism”. I don’t believe there is any radicalism in me—or, if there is, it is certainly not what the word implies when you use it.

So, believe me, the Pine Rock case has nothing to do with it. It explains nothing. Rather, the natural assumption, for me as for the others who were involved in it, would be that the experience should have established me in a more staunch and regular conformity than I should otherwise have known.

You have a friend, Fox, named Hunt Conroy. You introduced me to him. He is only a few years my senior, but he is very fixed in his assertion of what he calls “The Lost Generation”—a generation of which, as you know, he has been quite vociferously a member, and in which he has tried enthusiastically to include me. Hunt and I used to argue about it.

“You belong to it, too,” he used to say grimly. “You came along at the same time. You can’t get away from it. You’re a part of it whether you want to be or not.”

To which my vulgar response was:

“Don’t you-hoo me!”

If Hunt
wants
to belong to The Lost Generation—and it really is astonishing with what fond eagerness some people hug the ghost of desolation to their breast—that’s
his
affair. But he can’t have me. If I have been elected, it was against my knowledge and my will—and I resign. I do not feel that I belong to a Lost Generation, and I have never felt so. Indeed, I doubt very much the existence of a Lost Generation, except insofar as every generation, groping, must be lost. Recently, however, it has occurred to me that if there is such a thing as a Lost Generation in this country, it is probably made up of those men of advanced middle age who still speak the language that was spoken before 1929, and who know no other. These men indubitably
are
lost. But I am not one of them.

Although I don’t believe, then, that I was ever part of any Lost Generation anywhere, the fact remains that, as an individual, I was lost. Perhaps that is one reason, Fox, why for so long I needed you so desperately. For I was lost, and was looking for someone older and wiser to show me the way, and I found you, and you took the place of my father who had died. In our nine years together you did help me find the way, though you could hardly have been aware just how you did it, and the road now leads off in a direction contrary to your intent. For the fact is that now I no longer feel lost, and I want to tell you why.

When I returned to Pine Rock and finished my course and graduated—I was only twenty then—I don’t suppose it would have been possible to find a more confused and baffled person than I was. I had been sent to college-to “prepare myself for life”, as the phrase went in those days, and it almost seemed that the total effect of my college training was to produce in me a state of utter unpreparedness. I had come from one of the most conservative parts of America, and from one of the most conservative elements in those parts. All of my antecedents, until a generation before, had been country people whose living had been in one way or another drawn out of the earth.