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I believe Rupert Hughes tries to give a real, comprehensive picture of American life, but his style and perspective are barbarous.
I think of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in this explosion about Americaqn writers: “What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry.”
And Amory did read Dorian Gray.
Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.”
Amory did not entirely agree with Tom’s sweeping damnation of American novelists and poets. He enjoyed both Vachel Lindsay and Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious, if slender, artistry of Edgar Lee Masters.
“And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it’s crooked business.
Sometimes I think that with both of us the secret of success, when we find it, is the
mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman.
in Maryland he met Eleanor.
Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.
they could see the devil in each other.
curtain of wind and rain.
Rain always seems to frame high moments in Amory's world.
As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be “on a subject”
led them each to a parallel idea,
Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching light and he saw Eleanor,
She was a witch, of perhaps nineteen, he judged,
I’m one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these.
I haven’t the patience to write books; and I never met a man I’d marry. However, I’m only eighteen.”
I’m a romantic little materialist.”
she was a feast and a folly
His paganism soared that night
The Ramillys were two: old Mr. Ramilly and his granddaughter, Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Amory imagined to have been very like his own, on whose death she had come to America,
the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees.
that sudden absurd instinct for paternity that Rosalind had stirred; the half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn with Eleanor.
the scrap-book of his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses.
“The despairing, dying autumn and our love—how well they harmonize!” said Eleanor sadly one day as they lay dripping by the water.
“The Indian summer of our hearts—” he ceased.
This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor.
but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun.
ATLANTIC CITY. AMORY PACED THE BOARD WALK AT DAY’S END, LULLED BY the everlasting surge of changing waves, smelling the half-mournful odor of the salt breeze. The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land.
UNDER THE GLASS PORTCULLIS OF A THEATRE AMORY STOOD, WATCHING the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk.
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment,
procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway—
It was not so bad where there were only men or else only women; it was when they were vilely herded that it all seemed so rotten.
It was dirtier than any battle-field he had seen,
Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world. It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.”
Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people. He thought cynically how completely he was lacking in all human sympathy. O. Henry had found in these people romance, pathos, love, hate—Amory saw only coarseness, physical filth,
I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
Alec had a coarse taste in women. Own taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all-American.
IN THE DROOPING HOURS
While the rain drizzled on Amory looked futilely back at the stream of his life, all its glitterings and dirty shallows. To begin with, he was still afraid—not physically afraid any more, but afraid of people and prejudice and misery and monotony.
He fancied a possible future comment of his own. “Yes—I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself.”
There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly: Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the South Seas—all lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where lust could be a mode and expression of life, where the shades of night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the colors of lips and poppies.
He was where Goethe was when he began “Faust”; he was where Conrad was when he wrote “Almayer’s Folly.”
Progress was a labyrinth . . . people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back,
Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.
beware the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit—the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine——”
“Modern life,” began Amory again, “changes no longer century by century, but year by
year, ten times faster than it ever has before—populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and—we’re dawdling along. My idea is that we’ve got to go very much faster.”
I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.
“I sent my son to Princeton.” “Did you?”
